Chaos at the Line Where Performer and Audience Blur
Ben Ratliff
A show by the reunited Stooges deals with the boundaries of the self; it’s about private-made-public and public-made-private. It airs ideas (and parts of the body) that usually aren’t laid open, and turns the hey-ho communal experience of rock into an inner monologue.
Over tribal drum rhythms and monstrous guitar riffs, it’s also a choreographed re-enactment of chaos, rude and simple and immaculate. It represents a total thesis on rock ’n’ roll — not by any means the only possible one but a great one. And the Stooges’ show at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights on Monday night was an argument, too: for the re-uniting of old bands without shame or second thought, once they figure out what, philosophically, they were all about in the first place.
Iggy Pop, now 59, is the captain of these inside-outside actions. Try to take your eyes off him. How he re-enacts fear, rage, sex, abject boredom, universal love and lethal cynicism, while dancing with originality, remembering lyrics and maintaining the delicate middle-state between having pants on and not having pants on, is why he is he, and you are merely you.
On Monday, he sang in girlish screams or hypermasculine croons from the center of his psyche, then pushed outward, imposing himself on the music and the audience. “I took a trip down to the mind room,” he sang during an interlude with ringing guitar harmonics and cymbal crashes, “to see what I could find.” At another point, during an improvised free-rock section — the kind of thing the Stooges did routinely when they first started in 1967, before they wrote actual songs — he went inward again. “I’m sick!” he screamed. “I’m in pain!” He shoved the microphone into his mouth and bellowed, then rolled on the floor, then butted his torso against a stack of amplifiers. And once standing again, he started a freakish benediction, intoning “I am you.” It was all id-language, if blocked and rehearsed; this Stooges show followed the contours of other recent ones.
Iggy repeatedly asked for the house lights to be turned on: more boundary-ruptures. At one point, lights fully on, the band started “Real Cool Time,” and Iggy brought the audience into his world, or so it seemed. “Invade the stage!” he begged. “Fly!” About a hundred did, many of them dancing, many trying hungrily to kiss him or pile on him. The road crew suddenly had to protect the band, the backline of amplifiers and Iggy himself, who nonchalantly reached for the arm of a roadie at critical moments. (The mob stayed onstage for “No Fun” as Iggy dodged feet and hands while singing “no fun to be around/walking by myself/no fun to be alone ...”) Iggy Pop is all right with physical danger and leapt into the crowd several times to prove it. One of those times, memorably, was a dead-man dive: he just tipped over into the front rows, face-first.
Most of the set, rendered fast and loud, came from the first two Stooges albums: “The Stooges,” from 1969, and “Fun House,” from 1970. (They don’t play anything from “Raw Power,” their third album.) But the rest of the show — about a third of it — was recent Stooges, since their reunion in 2003, either from the band’s brand-new record “The Weirdness,” or from Iggy Pop’s last solo record, “Skull Ring.” The group seems to have forsworn slow tempos and those wrinkles on the Bo Diddley drum pattern in favor of a fast and generic four-four, which could be an act of abnegation, a necessary anti-nostalgia exercise or both.
The bad news is that the new songs lack grace and sensuality. The good news is that they sound much better live. The band threw its weight behind these grooves: Scott Asheton slammed the downbeats on the snare drum; his brother, the guitarist Ron Asheton, made the songs cohere with the drone of his open E string; the tenor saxophonist Steve Mackay blew serrated, trashy R&B riffs, sometimes run through waves of digital echo. And the bassist Mike Watt — the only nonoriginal member, replacing the deceased Dave Alexander — followed Iggy’s physical cues with half-crazed concentration, like a fisherman refusing to let go of a dangerous catch.
One of the show’s best moments came with no music at all. It was at the end of the new song “I’m Fried.” The band snapped it shut, but Iggy Pop kept dancing: grotesque and pretty, whirling, contorting and pivoting. Either by accident or design, he did what he was trying to do: he got outside himself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/ar...ic/11stoo.html
The Loft Where Time Stood Still
Gabriel Rotello
I RECENTLY sat in Los Angeles, staring at an article describing plans to build a residential tower on 10th Avenue on the Far West Side of Manhattan. Nothing new there. Except that the developer doesn’t realize that his tower is destined to obliterate a strange and unexpected thing: my time capsule. Or, as some people used to call it, my mausoleum.
New York has never been kind to struggling young musicians who have to scrape together money to rent rehearsal space. So when I was a struggling young musician back in 1979, I dreamed of living in an isolated loft where I could rehearse for free.
Hard to find even then. But one day I stumbled onto the spacious second floor of a dilapidated two-story building on 10th Avenue and West 38th Street. The loft, which sat above an old Irish pub, had Midtown views and a door leading to a tar “patio” in the back. Its tin ceiling was rusty from leaks, its floors sagged, the wind whistled through cracked windows. No kitchen, no real bathroom. Not a fixer-upper, but rather a disaster area.
I told the pub’s owner, Hugh, that I had to think about it, but I didn’t think long. That evening, I saw a vision of my entire future life unfolding in that loft, a vision so vivid that I couldn’t sleep. The next morning I raced over with my deposit. Then the first of several odd things happened.
Hugh told me that a young woman had just put down a deposit. That, I insisted, was impossible. I “knew” that my destiny was to live and work in that loft. Hugh looked at me as if I were nuts. But my vision was so striking that I returned every day with my check. Two weeks later, Hugh told me that the woman had just come in, weeping, asking for her deposit back. The loft was mine.
My dad drove into the city from Connecticut to help me fix it up, and I adopted a cat to chase out the rats dancing above the tin ceiling. Then the second strange thing happened. My life unfolded in that loft almost exactly like my “vision” that first night.
Having free rehearsal space changed everything. The loft became home to a succession of projects, from my first band, Brenda and the Realtones, to gigs with legendary figures like Ronnie Spector, Darlene Love, Rufus Thomas and Solomon Burke. Dozens of projects sprang to life primarily because I had free rehearsal space.
By the mid-1980s I was producing the “Downtown Divas” revues at Limelight and the Palladium. A critic wrote that these revues were helping to revive the local music scene, but if anything it was the loft that was doing that. David Johansen, leader of the New York Dolls, described the place as “Gabriel’s basement in the sky.”
Finally, in 1987, I was forced out because a developer planned to demolish the building and replace it with a residential tower. And that’s when the really strange thing happened.
Now prosperous, and headed for an apartment in Chelsea, I decided to leave my funky furniture, carpets, equipment and pretty much everything else behind. I told friends that I’d buy new, start fresh. There was no reason to clean things out, since the next tenant would be a wrecking ball. When I left that last day, the place looked as if I were going for a walk instead of departing forever.
A month later, the crash of 1987 put plans to demolish the building on indefinite hold. The next time I passed, the street-side entrance had been bricked up. According to Hugh, the new owners feared that crack addicts might break in.
Through the windows, you could see my old posters on the walls, my curtains and lamps, even my dishes on the shelves. And there it sat. A time capsule. Or, as some friends began to call it, “Gabriel’s mausoleum in the sky.”
Over the next few years, I left music, became an AIDS activist, founded OutWeek magazine, became a columnist for New York Newsday. Jam sessions and gigs faded into ancient history. But my past life was perfectly preserved in the loft, jarring me every time I whizzed by in a cab.
The situation felt so weird that I began having recurrent dreams. In these dreams, I would break into the building and creep up the stairs, past fading posters for CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, to reclaim my rock ’n’ roll life. I would live in the loft surreptitiously, tiptoeing so people didn’t hear me. But the dreams always ended in cold sweat. Police officers would come storming in. Or I’d remember that I had left my cat in Chelsea.
Then the final strange thing happened. On a warm Sunday in 1993, riding my bike up 10th Avenue to Central Park, I looked up and noticed something odd: a window in my old loft was open. As I stood there mystified, Hugh popped his head out.
“Gabriel, we just opened it up yesterday,” he called down. “You’ve got to come up and see this. It’s like you never left.”
FADED posters greeted me as I walked up the stairs, just as in my dreams: “New Year’s Eve 1980 at Max’s Kansas City, featuring Brenda and the Realtones!” “Gabriel Rotello Presents the Mamas and the Papas at the Palladium!”
Inside the loft, under six years of dust, my former life sat silent, entombed.
I needed to touch everything. Ratty old microphones and amps. My bed with its comforter that reminded me of a dead lover. An old bass drum, weighted down with a brick inside. I could almost see Ronnie Spector rehearsing “Be My Baby,” right on that rug, Solomon Burke crooning “Cry to Me,” right in that chair.
I thought of dead friends for whom this little world had been their final world. It seemed as if I could make a few phone calls and pull together a rehearsal and no time would have passed at all, except that in the world outside, no one would have answered the phone.
I briefly considered renting a van to take out the important stuff. But in a way everything was important, and nothing was. It was only through the whim of the real estate gods that all this had survived so eerily intact. Everything had been meant to disappear when I left the loft the first time. Leaving, I chose one souvenir. Hours later, somebody swiped it in Central Park.
Years later the building was turned into a restaurant, and a friend suggested a reunion dinner there when I came in from Los Angeles. A few months later, some middle-aged musicians gathered there with me to reminisce. But now the loft was no longer a time capsule, just another New York renovation. We hardly noticed the setting. We were simply glad to see each other.
And now, sometime in the next few months, the interrupted wrecker’s ball will finally knock down my loft. That’s fine. I love my house in Los Angeles, which has a real garden in back, not a tar patio. But the past is hard to shake. On my visits to New York, I still can’t get used to the absence of the World Trade Center. Now there will be another void.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/ny...ml?ref=thecity
Milestones
Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84
Dinitia Smith
Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.
Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.
Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”
Not all Mr. Vonnegut’s themes were metaphysical. With a blend of vernacular writing, science fiction, jokes and philosophy, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, for example, or the destruction of the environment.
His novels — 14 in all — were alternate universes, filled with topsy-turvy images and populated by races of his own creation, like the Tralfamadorians and the Mercurian Harmoniums. He invented phenomena like chrono-synclastic infundibula (places in the universe where all truths fit neatly together) as well as religions, like the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism (based on the books of a black British Episcopalian from Tobago “filled with bittersweet lies,” a narrator says).
The defining moment of Mr. Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces in 1945, an event he witnessed firsthand as a young prisoner of war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the raids, many of them burned to death or asphyxiated. “The firebombing of Dresden,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote, “was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
His experience in Dresden was the basis of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which was published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval. The novel, wrote the critic Jerome Klinkowitz, “so perfectly caught America’s transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age.”
To Mr. Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” summed up his philosophy:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”
Mr. Vonnegut eschewed traditional structure and punctuation. His books were a mixture of fiction and autobiography, prone to one-sentence paragraphs, exclamation points and italics. Graham Greene called him “one of the most able of living American writers.” Some critics said he had invented a new literary type, infusing the science-fiction form with humor and moral relevance and elevating it to serious literature.
He was also accused of repeating himself, of recycling themes and characters. Some readers found his work incoherent. His harshest critics called him no more than a comic book philosopher, a purveyor of empty aphorisms.
With his curly hair askew, deep pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he often looked like an out-of-work philosophy professor, typically chain smoking, his conversation punctuated with coughs and wheezes. But he also maintained a certain celebrity, as a regular on panels and at literary parties in Manhattan and on the East End of Long Island, where he lived near his friend and fellow war veteran Joseph Heller, another darkly comic literary hero of the age.
Mr. Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922, the youngest of three children. His father, Kurt Sr., was an architect. His mother, Edith, came from a wealthy brewery family. Mr. Vonnegut’s brother, Bernard, who died in 1997, was a physicist and an expert on thunderstorms.
During the Depression, the elder Vonnegut went for long stretches without work, and Mrs. Vonnegut suffered from episodes of mental illness. “When my mother went off her rocker late at night, the hatred and contempt she sprayed on my father, as gentle and innocent a man as ever lived, was without limit and pure, untainted by ideas or information,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote. She committed suicide, an act that haunted her son for the rest of his life.
He had, he said, a lifelong difficulty with women. He remembered an aunt once telling him, “All Vonnegut men are scared to death of women.”
“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside,” he wrote.
Mr. Vonnegut went east to attend Cornell University, but he enlisted in the Army before he could get a degree. The Army initially sent him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.
In 1944 he was shipped to Europe with the 106th Infantry Division and shortly saw combat in the Battle of the Bulge. With his unit nearly destroyed, he wandered behind enemy lines for several days until he was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden, the architectural jewel of Germany.
Assigned by his captors to make vitamin supplements, he was working with other prisoners in an underground meat locker when British and American warplanes started carpet bombing the city, creating a firestorm above him. The work detail saved his life.
Afterward, he and his fellow prisoners were assigned to remove the dead.
“The corpses, most of them in ordinary cellars, were so numerous and represented such a health hazard that they were cremated on huge funeral pyres, or by flamethrowers whose nozzles were thrust into the cellars, without being counted or identified,” he wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death.” When the war ended, Mr. Vonnegut returned to the United States and married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox. They settled in Chicago in 1945. The couple had three children, Mark, Edith and Nanette. In 1958, Mr. Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, and her husband died within a day of each other, she of cancer and he in a train crash. The Vonneguts took custody of their children, Tiger, Jim and Steven.
In Chicago, Mr. Vonnegut worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau. He also studied for a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, writing a thesis on “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” It was rejected unanimously by the faculty. (The university finally awarded him a degree almost a quarter of a century later, allowing him to use his novel “Cat’s Cradle” as his thesis.)
In 1947, he moved to Schenectady, N.Y., and took a job in public relations for the General Electric Company. Three years later he sold his first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” to Collier’s magazine and decided to move his family to Cape Cod, Mass., where he wrote fiction for magazines like Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. To bolster his income, he taught emotionally disturbed children, worked at an advertising agency and at one point started a Saab auto dealership.
His first novel was “Player Piano,” published in 1952. A satire on corporate life — the meetings, the pep talks, the cultivation of bosses — it also carries echoes of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It concerns an engineer, Paul Proteus, who is employed by the Ilium Works, a company similar to General Electric. Proteus becomes the leader of a band of revolutionaries who destroy machines that they think are taking over the world.
“Player Piano” was followed in 1959 by “The Sirens of Titan,” a science-fiction novel featuring the Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. In 1961 he published “Mother Night,” involving an American writer awaiting trial in Israel on charges of war crimes in Nazi Germany. Like Mr. Vonnegut’s other early novels, they were published as paperback originals. And like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, “Mother Night” was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.
In 1963, Mr. Vonnegut published “Cat’s Cradle.” Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes. The novel, which takes its title from an Eskimo game in which children try to snare the sun with string, is an autobiographical work about a family named Hoenikker. The narrator, an adherent of the religion Bokononism, is writing a book about the bombing of Hiroshima and comes to witness the destruction of the world by something called Ice-Nine, which, on contact, causes all water to freeze at room temperature.
Mr. Vonnegut shed the label of science-fiction writer with “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, an infantry scout (as Mr. Vonnegut was), who discovers the horror of war. “You know — we’ve had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves,” an English colonel says in the book. “We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. My God, my God — I said to myself, ‘It’s the Children’s Crusade.’ ”
As Mr. Vonnegut was, Billy is captured and assigned to manufacture vitamin supplements in an underground meat locker, where the prisoners take refuge from Allied bombing.
In “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Mr. Vonnegut introduced the recurring character of Kilgore Trout, his fictional alter ego. The novel also featured a signature Vonnegut phrase.
“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote at the end of the book, “was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
“Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.”
One of many Zenlike words and phrases that run through Mr. Vonnegut’s books, “so it goes” became a catchphrase for opponents of the Vietnam war.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” reached No.1 on best-seller lists, making Mr. Vonnegut a cult hero. Some schools and libraries have banned it because of its sexual content, rough language and scenes of violence.
After the book was published, Mr. Vonnegut went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation, he wrote. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol.
“The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem,” he wrote. His son Mark also suffered a breakdown, in the 1970s, from which he recovered, writing about it in a book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity.”
Forsaking novels, Mr. Vonnegut decided to become a playwright. His first effort, “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” opened Off Broadway in 1970 to mixed reviews. Around this time he separated from his wife and moved to New York. (She remarried and died in 1986.)
In 1970, Mr. Vonnegut moved in with the author and photographer Jill Krementz, whom he married in 1979. They had a daughter, Lily. They survive him, as do all his other children.
Mr. Vonnegut returned to novels with “Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday” (1973), calling it a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” This time his alter ego is Philboyd Sludge, who is writing a book about Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy auto dealer. Hoover has a breakdown after reading a novel written by Kilgore Trout, who reappears in this book, and begins to believe that everyone around him is a robot.
In 1997, Mr. Vonnegut published “Timequake,” a tale of the millennium in which a wrinkle in space-time compels the world to relive the 1990s. The book, based on an earlier failed novel of his, was, in his own words, “a stew” of plot summaries and autobiographical writings. Once again, Kilgore Trout is a character. “If I’d wasted my time creating characters,” Mr. Vonnegut said in defense of his “recycling,” “I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”
Though it was a best seller, it also met with mixed reviews. “Having a novelist’s free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride,” R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time. But the novelist Valerie Sayers, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut’s transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir.”
Mr. Vonnegut said in the prologue to “Timequake” that it would be his last novel. And so it was.
His last book, in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.” It, too, was a best seller.
In concludes with a poem written by Mr. Vonnegut called “Requiem,” which has these closing lines:
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/bo...nnegut.html?hp
Works by Kurt Vonnegut. All are books unless otherwise noted:
''Player Piano,'' 1951
''The Sirens of Titan,'' 1959
''Canary in a Cat House,'' 1961 (short works)
''Mother Night,'' 1961
''Cat's Cradle,'' 1963
''God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,'' 1965
''Welcome to the Monkey House,'' 1968 (short works)
''Slaughterhouse-Five,'' 1969
''Happy Birthday, Wanda June,'' 1971 (play)
''Between Time and Timbuktu,'' 1972 (TV script)
''Breakfast of Champions,'' 1973
''Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons,'' 1974 (opinions)
''Slapstick,'' 1976
''Jailbird,'' 1979
''Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage,'' 1981 (essays)
''Deadeye Dick,'' 1982
''Galapagos,'' 1985
''Bluebeard,'' 1987
''Hocus Pocus,'' 1990
''Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s,'' 1991 (essays)
''Timequake,'' 1997
Award-Winning Cartoonist Johnny Hart, Creator of 'B.C.' and 'Wizard of Id,' Dies at 76
Mary Esch
Cartoonist Johnny Hart, whose award-winning "B.C." comic strip appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers worldwide, died Saturday while working at his home in Endicott. He was 76.
"He had a stroke," Hart's wife, Bobby, said Sunday. "He died at his storyboard."
"B.C.," populated by prehistoric cavemen and dinosaurs, was launched in 1958 and eventually appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers with an audience of 100 million, according to Creators Syndicate Inc., which distributes it.
"He was generally regarded as one of the best cartoonists we've ever had," Hart's friend Mell Lazarus, creator of the "Momma" and "Miss Peach" comic strips, said from his California home. "He was totally original. 'B.C' broke ground and led the way for a number of imitators, none of which ever came close."
After he graduated from Union-Endicott High School, Hart met Brant Parker, a young cartoonist who became a prime influence and co-creator with Hart of the "Wizard of Id" comic strip.
Hart enlisted in the Air Force and began producing cartoons for Pacific Stars and Stripes. He sold his first freelance cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post after his discharge from the military in 1954.
He has won numerous awards for his work, including the National Cartoonist Society's prestigious Reuben Award twice for Cartoonist of the Year.
Later in his career, some of Hart's cartoons had religious themes, a reflection of his own Christian faith. That sometimes led to controversy.
A strip published on Easter Sunday in 2001 drew protests from Jewish groups and led several newspapers to drop the strip. The cartoon depicted a menorah transforming into a cross, with accompanying text quoting some of Jesus Christ's dying words. Critics said it implied that Christianity supersedes Judaism.
Hart said he intended the strip as a tribute to both faiths.
"He had such an emphasis on kindness, generosity, and patience," said Richard Newcombe, founder and president of Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles.
Newcombe said Hart was the first cartoonist to sign on when the syndicate was created 20 years ago. "Traditionally, comic strips were owned by syndicates," Newcombe said. "We were different because we allowed cartoonists to own their own work. It was because of Johnny's commitment to this idea that made us a success."
Newcombe credits Hart with the fact that most cartoonists today own their own work. "I don't think the young cartoonists realize that they have Johnny Hart to thank for that," he said.
Newcombe said both "B.C." and "Wizard of Id" will continue. Family members have been helping produce the strips for many years, he said, and they have an extensive computer archive of Hart's drawings to work with.
"After Charles Schultz (creator of "Peanuts") died, Johnny and I had a long conversation and he said he definitely wanted his strip to continue after he was gone," Newcombe said.
Besides his wife, Hart is survived by two daughters, Patti and Perri. He was a native of Endicott, about 135 miles northwest of New York City, and drew his comic strip at a studio in his home there until the day he died.
Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at the Nineveh Presbyterian Church. Calling hours are Wednesday and Thursday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Osterhoudt-Madden Funeral Home in Harpursville.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...EAST&TEMPLATE=
Blaxploitation Actor Dies
‘70s Film Actor Calvin Lockhart, Sidney Poitier’s ‘Heir Apparent,’ Buried in the Bahamas
Monica Lewis
Calvin Lockhart, the Bahamian-born actor who appeared in a number of 1970s black movie mega hits, was Denzel Washington before there was a Denzel Washington.
Known for his good looks and imposing onscreen presence, Lockhart’s persona was even an inspiration for one of the best hip-hop aliases of all time.
Lockhart, who played inner-city hustler Biggie Smalls in the 1975 comedy “Let’s Do It Again,” died March 29 in Nassau from complications of a stroke. He was 72.
Lockhart, born Bert Cooper, was a “virile male figure who epitomized the perseverance of blacks in Hollywood and the everyday citizens who flocked to the theaters to watch them in the blaxpoitation era," said William Jelani Cobb, an assistant professor of history at Spelman College.
“In that era, you had actors playing people who were strong, who were showing vitality and a refusal to surrender," Cobb told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “They were usually doing so as they were pitted against white bureaucratic figures. There was a certain sort of self-determination that you don’t see in the theaters now.”
The strength and determination Lockhart portrayed onscreen was surely developed early on. The youngest of eight children, Lockhart moved to New York as a teenager to study engineering but soon found his calling in the theater. He made ends meet by operating a carpentry business in Queens and driving a taxi.
He had a short run on Broadway, playing opposite Angela Lansbury, before relocating to Italy where he formed his own theater company. His acting pursuits would take him to Germany and England, where he frequently appeared on British television.
Lockhart eventually found success on the big screen, garnering the lead male role in the 1967 film, “Joanna,” which tackled interracial dating, an extremely taboo subject in those days.
Sidney Poitier, who directed Lockhart in “Let’s Do It Again” and “Uptown Saturday Night,” said Lockhart’s performance in “Joanna” was a role that "marked him as a very gifted young man." Mark Anthony Neal, assistant professor of black popular culture at Duke University, agreed, calling Lockhart Poitier’s “heir apparent.”
“He didn’t have the range in terms of his acting, but he had a certain kind of ability to do drama and comedy,” Neal told BlackAmericaWeb.com, adding that Lockhart’s ability to play the urban gangsters may have altered the course of his career.
“He was limited by the blaxpoitation movies,” Neal said of Lockhart, who played a disc jockey-turned sleuth in the 1972 film, “Melinda,” and hustler Silky Slim in “Uptown Saturday Night.”
“In a lot of ways,” Neal said, “he was better than the films he was in. He was typecast and never got the opportunities to pursue other types of roles.”
Lockhart played in more than a dozen movies, including the Ossie Davis-directed “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” in which he played the immoral preacher, Rev. Deke O’Malley. In the 1980s, he had a recurring role on the primetime soap opera “Dynasty” playing a love interest of Diahann Carroll’s character, Dominique Deveraux. One of his last big-studio movies was 1988’s “Coming to America,” where he had a supporting role of Colonel Izzi.
But it is Lockhart’s “Let’s Do It Again” character that may have played a role in a younger generation of fans giving him his props. The gangster nemesis of Poitier and Bill Cosby’s do-good characters, Lockhart’s Biggie Smalls was the new-school mobster moving in on John Amos’ old school Kansas City Mack. The ultra-cool Biggie Smalls character became a model that many followed, from everyday inner-city hustlers to an internationally-known hip-hop artist.
While Amos’ Kansas City Mack was just as conniving as Lockhart’s Biggie Smalls, it was the Smalls character -- and Lockhart’s portrayal -- that articulated the new, more refined gangster, Neal said, a significant reason why Christopher Wallace, also known as Notorious B.I.G., chose to take the moniker.
“Biggie actually got the name from someone in Harlem who had the name,” Neal told BlackAmericaWeb.com.
“Part of what made (Lockhart’s) character appealing was the tension between he and Kansas City Mack. Biggie represented the next generation of gangsters, doing things different than how they were done in previous ways,” said Neal, whose 2002 book, “Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic," explored how the 1970s films like “Let’s Do It Again” and “A Piece of the Action” depicted the black middle class’ exodus out of the ‘hood.
Bahamian Prime Minister Perry Christie Friday expressed sadness at the death of Lockhart, who was buried in Nassau over the weekend.
"Although his acting career was of relatively short duration, Calvin's cinematic charisma and talents won him high praise from critics and audiences alike all around the world," Christie told the Nassau Guardian newspaper.
In 1979, Lockhart met Jennifer L. Miles in New York. Two years later, the couple had a son, Julien, yet didn’t marry until 25 years later. Lockhart filmed his last movie, “Rain,” in the Bahamas earlier this year. The movie has yet to be released.
Lockhart is survived by his mother, Minerva Cooper; his wife, Jennifer Miles-Lockhart; sons Michael Lockhart and Julien Lockhart Miles; brothers Carney, Eric and Phillip Cooper; sisters, Melba and Delores.
http://www.blackamericaweb.com/site....ws/lockhart409
Fire Destroys Johnny Cash's Former Home
House revered by stars and fans now just ashes
Peter Cooper
"Camelot."
That's what June Carter liked to call the Hendersonville home she shared with her husband, Johnny Cash.
"She thought of it as her and dad's private kingdom," wrote the couple's son, John Carter Cash, in his Anchored In Love: The Life and Legacy of June Carter Cash, a book slated for June release.
The Cashes' Camelot is in ruins, the victim of a Tuesday afternoon fire that destroyed the more than 13,000-square-foot property. Its new owner, Barry Gibb of Bee Gees fame, bought the house for $2.5 million in early 2006, and he and wife Linda were renovating it for use as a summer home.
Built in the late 1960s, the home had 18 rooms, including a signature round living room and a bedroom that overlooked Old Hickory Lake. It was important for reasons that had nothing to do with size, architecture and design. Like the Cashes' Virginia home — the one that used to belong to June's mother, legendary guitarist Maybelle Carter — this was a house of music.
Cash wrote here, of course. He placed acoustic guitars in most rooms, so that he could pluck out chords and melodies as inspiration struck. In the 1970s, he and June often opened the house for guitar pulls that included luminaries such as Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Newbury. They'd also often invite up-and-coming writers that Cash respected and encouraged, including Vince Matthews and Larry Gatlin.
When the house wasn't open to visitors, it was seemingly impenetrable. As an aspiring songwriter, a down-and-out Kristofferson wanted to hand a tape of his music to the by-then-legendary Cash, but he figured he wouldn't be able to get past guards. He landed a helicopter in the yard, and Cash ended up recording "Sunday Morning Coming Down" and other Kristofferson songs.
House was a sanctuary
June Carter Cash also worked on her music at the house, and she played a private concert on the grounds to celebrate the release of her Press On album in 1999.
For the most part, Johnny and June did not record at the home, though beginning in the late 1990s they recorded many tracks at Cash's small cabin studio located across the street and down a winding, unpaved road.
Johnny Cash recorded some vocal tracks in the house, after June died in 2003. He was grief-stricken, and in such poor health that it was difficult for him to make it to the cabin studio. Sessions were arranged in his round bedroom.
"It was a sanctuary and a fortress for him," singer Marty Stuart said of the house. Stuart lives next door to the Cash estate in Hendersonville, and he was married to Johnny Cash's daughter, Cindy, in the 1980s. "So many prominent things and prominent people in American history took place in that house," Stuart said, name-checking Dylan and evangelist Billy Graham as two of the most notable.
When Cash first bought the house, he used it as a place of healing. His body ravaged by drug abuse, he retreated to that round bedroom to rid his system of toxic substances. He and June were not yet married, but she and her parents were a near-constant presence.
"June and her mother and father formed a circle of faith around me caring for me and insulating me from the outside world, particularly the people, some of them close friends, who'd been doing drugs with me," Cash wrote in Cash: The Autobiography.
Home reflected June
After Johnny and June married in 1968, June — a shopper and a collector of art and furniture — lavishly furnished the interior. The result could be seen in the video for Cash's 2002 release "Hurt," some of which was filmed in the house.
"I found photos of the lake house from late 1967, before dad and mom married," wrote John Carter Cash, who was born in 1970. "They showed wide open rooms with very little furniture, and only a few scattered mementos. I have a few of those items still. … These things remind me of how my father changed to bring my mother into his life."
After June's death, Johnny Cash sought to remove many of the items his wife had collected because the reminders saddened and depressed him.
After Cash's death in September 2003, it was left to relatives to sift through the belongings. Many of their paintings, clothes and musical instruments were sold at a Sotheby's auction in 2004. The family hung onto the home until 2006, when it was sold to the Gibbs. John Carter Cash kept the cabin studio, where he regularly records (including a tribute album to June Carter Cash that will be released in June).
Album detailed the loss
Johnny Cash's daughter, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, wrote about the painful process of parting with the home on her 2006 Black Cadillac album.
"There's nothing left to take," she sang in "House on the Lake." "There's nothing left to take/ But love and years are not for sale/ In our old house on the lake."
Barbara Orbison, a neighbor of the Cashes for many years and the widow of Roy Orbison, spent many days at the house on the lake.
"Every inch of the house was something June bought or put there," she said. "If you thought about Johnny and June, you thought about that house. That was their house. I guess it will forever be their house."
http://www.ashlandcitytimes.com/apps...NT06/704110441
Maestro of Los Angeles Philharmonic to Pass the Baton to a Wunderkind
Daniel J. Wakin
Esa-Pekka Salonen, the onetime wunderkind from Finland who has led the Los Angeles Philharmonic as music director for 15 seasons, has decided to leave the orchestra when his term ends in 2009. His successor? A wunderkind from Venezuela named Gustavo Dudamel, one of the hottest — and youngest — conducting properties around.
Mr. Dudamel, 26, is a product of his country’s extraordinary youth orchestra system, founded three decades ago to help disadvantaged youngsters. It has grown into a network of scores of ensembles, training hundreds of thousands of musicians. He is music director of its capstone, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, which he joined as a violinist at 11.
In the last few years Mr. Dudamel, who becomes principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony of Sweden next season, has had the world’s major orchestras in hot pursuit. He has had, or is scheduled to have, guest appearances at the Berlin, New York and Vienna Philharmonics, the London Philharmonia and the Boston and Chicago Symphonies. He also records for Deutsche Grammophon. His United States debut came with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the Hollywood Bowl, in 2005.
His influential mentors include the conductors Simon Rattle, Daniel Barenboim and Claudio Abbado.
When he takes over as music director in Los Angeles in September 2009, Mr. Dudamel will be all of 28, three years younger than Mr. Salonen was when he won the job.
Mr. Salonen, now 48 and also the product of a country that places great weight on musical education, said he wanted to devote more time to composition. Under his leadership the orchestra has won acclaim for its playing and inventive programming.
The change was reported yesterday in The Los Angeles Times.
Other major American orchestras are in the throes of a conductor search, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the choice of Mr. Dudamel may put pressure on them to come up with daring and youthful choices of their own.
Mr. Dudamel’s contract is for five years. He begins in September 2009. In his first season he will conduct for 10 weeks and increase to 14 weeks after that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/ar...ic/09orch.html
"Fifth Beatle" Aspinall Quits Top Job
Dean Goodman
The reclusive, hard-nosed businessman who oversaw the Beatles' complex financial interests has left their organization after more than 40 years, the group said on Tuesday.
Neil Aspinall, 64, a Liverpool native who started out as the band's driver, will be replaced as head of Apple Corps. Ltd. by Jeff Jones, an American music industry executive who specializes in deluxe reissues of classic albums.
Jones, who will take the title of CEO -- Aspinall disdained formal titles -- will relocate to London, where Apple runs a small headquarters.
Aspinall was so closely identified with the Fab Four that he was often called "the fifth Beatle" -- an accolade also given to the likes of manager Brian Epstein, session musician Billy Preston and producer Sir George Martin.
"He was there since the inception of the band in Liverpool and has meant so much to the Beatles' family for all these years and still does," said a statement released by Apple in London. "However, he has decided to move on. "
Aspinall's departure surprised Beatle fans, but people with knowledge of the handover said it had been in the works for a while, and that it was amicable.
Jones, 51, the executive vice president of Sony BMG Music Entertainment's Legacy Recordings division, said in a statement that the job was a "dream come true ... The multiple opportunities to reach music lovers, both new and old, with the Beatles' spectacular body of work makes this position incredibly challenging and exciting."
A combative, media-shy executive fiercely protective of the Beatles' legacy and Apple Corps Ltd., Aspinall kept busy in recent years waging a legal battle against computer company Apple Inc. over their similar logos.
A bigger issue was the Beatles' noted refusal to license tunes to online retailers, such as the technology firm's iTunes store.
Keeping The Peace
With a settlement announced in February -- Apple Inc. gets all the trademarks related to Apple but licenses certain trademarks back to the band -- hopes were raised that the Beatles would enter cyberspace. But no announcements have been forthcoming, and Aspinall's departure was unlikely to speed things along, said people close to the situation.
Indeed, Aspinall's job over the years was to second-guess and keep the peace among his four bosses: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and George Harrison's widow Olivia Harrison.
His slow-and-sensible approach to the band's affairs paid off in the 1980s when compact discs were introduced. He refused to join the rush, and held out for a higher royalty rate. The band's crowning moment, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band," finally came out on CD in 1987, amid a worldwide publicity blitz marking the album's 20th anniversary.
Aspinall was also the main reason why Beatles tracks are not heard on multi-artist compilation CDs, because he said they cheapened the band's image.
He spent his entire adult life in the service of the Fab Four. A trainee accountant, he became the band's driver and first road manager in 1961 at the behest of his friend Pete Best, the band's original drummer. He wisely stayed with the Beatles after Best was replaced by Ringo Starr.
When the Beatles launched Apple Corps. in 1968, Aspinall was put in charge. He managed to survive the company's chaotic beginnings, when millions of dollars of waste almost drove the group to bankruptcy.
http://www.reuters.com/article/enter...41291820070411
Review: Apple Appalls Where Xbox Excels
Peter Svensson
Apple Inc. has graced the public with another smooth, white, exquisitely designed gadget, this time aiming at making it easier to play iTunes movies and songs on the living-room TV set.
Too bad, then, that where looks really matter - in the quality of the video on the TV screen - the $299 Apple TV comes up very short. It's as if Apple had launched an iPod that sounded like a cassette player.
When I tell people about the Apple TV, they usually judge it by its name and assume that it's an actual TV set. So to clear up any confusion, let me say right now that it's not. It's a square device the size of a hardback book that goes in your entertainment center. You connect it to your TV set via cables (not included). It also connects to your Mac or Windows computer, wirelessly or via cable.
Once set up, the Apple TV can play the contents of the computer's iTunes library on the TV set, whether it's music, podcasts, videos, TV shows or movies. It can also show your photos. XP is the only Windows flavor officially supported by Apple, but I connected the unit to a PC running Vista, and had no problems.
There's a 40-gigabyte hard drive in the Apple TV. It will automatically copy over as much as it can from the iTunes library, so you can access your media when the computer is off. The hard drive doesn't make the Apple TV a TiVo: it doesn't record live TV.
The unit is controlled by a teensy infrared remote that looks a lot like a baby iPod. If hunting for the remote is a frequent activity in your couch, this one will be a nightmare. At least it's so small that you could tape it to one of your other remotes.
On the TV screen, the Apple TV projects a very iPod-like interface, commendably clear and easy to use. It also looks great, especially on a high-definition TV. It uses your own pictures as an animated screensaver.
Speaking of HDTV, you more or less need one of those sets for the Apple TV. It's not designed to connect via the older single-lead RCA video cable. You need a TV that takes either the three-lead component cable (the jacks are usually colored red, green and blue) or the all-digital HDMI cable. Newer standard-definition sets may have component inputs, but most TVs out there don't.
It's surprising, then, that videos from Apple's online iTunes store look horrible on an HDTV set. The movies and TV shows have the same nominal resolution as DVDs, but look much blurrier, approaching the look of standard-definition broadcast TV.
To make it worse, these barely watchable movies aren't cheap. "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" costs $15 on iTunes, almost as much as the DVD. TV episodes are more reasonably priced, at $2 each.
It's possible to convert home footage shot with high-definition video cameras to play on the Apple TV, but not in their native resolution, known as 1080i, so some quality is lost even there.
I compared the Apple TV to Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 game console, which can more or less do the same things, acting like a bridge between a Windows computer and an HDTV set.
After having my eyes gently caressed by the Apple TV's menus, the Xbox interface is like a slap in the face. It's garish and confusing, and you have to press more buttons to get where you want to go.
But the Xbox does your HDTV justice. Microsoft's Xbox Live marketplace has some movies in HD, and these look absolutely stunning - better than most broadcast HD, and almost indistinguishable from HD DVD or Blu-ray discs, which provide the best video quality available to consumers right now.
Even the standard-definition fare on Xbox Live looks much better than iTunes movies, despite nominally being the same resolution. They look almost as good as DVDs.
Xbox Live has two other advantages: the movies are downloaded straight to your Xbox hard drive, with no need to go through the computer, and you rent the movies for around $3, which is a lot cheaper than buying.
This is not to say that you should rush out and buy a $400 Xbox for use as a movie player. It doesn't connect wirelessly to your computer, nor does it include a video-style remote. Both these omissions can be remedied with some extra purchases, but they'll push the cost closer to $500.
The Xbox hard drive is half as large as the Apple TV's, though that's less of an issue when you rent movies than buying them. (There's a $480 Xbox on the way with a 120-gig drive.) The movies can be watched only on the Xbox, while Apple's movies can be viewed on a computer or iPod screen as well. You only get 24 hours to watch an Xbox movie, which seems unnecessarily harsh.
The Xbox is also a bit of a brute compared to the Apple TV. It's noisy, and its power adapter really deserves being called a "brick" - it's as large as the whole Apple TV, which doesn't have a brick of its own.
So neither solution is perfect, but I far preferred the Xbox. I didn't spend thousands of dollars on an HDTV to play substandard video on it, and I'm sure any new HDTV owner will sympathize.
Of course, Apple will at some point start selling HD video through iTunes. It has to. Will that play on the current Apple TV? Probably, but I'm wary of the result.
According to the company's specifications, the Apple TV can play HD video with a resolution of 1,280 by 720 pixels, but it doesn't actually seem that well suited to it. The hard drive is small, and the low power consumption speaks of weak processors inside. And since Apple's standard-definition video looks so bad, I'm not confident the HD video will look good either.
My advice: if you don't want the Xbox 360, wait for upgrades to both iTunes and Apple TV that take HD seriously.
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.d.../APF/704063839
Sony Report Reveals First Look at Absolute Blu-ray and HD DVD Disc Sales Figures
Thanks to a new research report from Sony, industry watchers are getting their best look yet at hard high-def disc sales numbers from Nielsen VideoScan, including per-title sales figures for high-def discs released on both next-gen formats.
Focusing on sales data for the week ending March 18 (the same week that Sony's 'Casino Royale' smashed high-def records by shipping 100,00 units to retail), it should come as no surprise that the VideoScan numbers released by Sony are favorable to the studio, with five of its releases ranking among the top-selling next-gen discs that week.
The numbers that week were equally as impressive for Blu-ray, which outsold HD DVD by a ratio of 9:2, and dominated the list of top-selling next-gen discs -- the HD DVD edition of 'The Departed' was the only HD DVD disc to appear among the top ten best selling high-def discs.
But while abstract ratios and percentages like these have been bandied about for several months now, the Sony report goes one step further, providing the first public release of hard sales figures for HD DVD and Blu-ray discs from Nielsen VideoScan, the home entertainment industry's leading source for competitive sales data.
Among the numbers revealed: as of March 18, VideoScan put the cumulative number of Blu-ray titles sold since the format's inception at 844,000 units, versus HD DVD at 708,600.
But perhaps most interesting are the per-title sales numbers for the top ten selling discs across both formats, which are provided both in the form of a weekly tally (again for the week ending March 18), and as year-to-date totals.
While these charts confirm the previously reported strong showings for such A-list titles as 'The Departed' 'Batman Begins' and 'Superman Returns' (with each clocking per-format sales totals since-inception of at least 28,000 units sold), they also demonstrate a very steep drop-off for titles outside of that top rung, with even discs among the top-ten best sellers that week moving fewer than 1000 units apiece:
While we should note that the VideoScan numbers are not all-inclusive (for example, they don't include discs sold at Wal-Mart or some online merchants), the lower sales numbers at the bottom end of weekly list and on display elsewhere in the report (where some titles are listed as selling fewer than 200 units since inception) are certainly still a sobering reminder that both formats still have a long way to go in their shared quest to supplant standard-def DVD.
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/564
Review: Top Four External Drives
Richard Ericson
Broadband connections, peer-to-peer networks and larger media files coupled with new regulations that require diligence in backing up files have clearly affected the external hard drive market as drive capacities expand to 1TB and beyond. Meanwhile, the prices of those drives continue to drop, making them ever more attractive, particularly with the ease of deployment -- literally a two-minute installation, and you're ready to go.
We put four of the leading external hard drives to the test. Our criteria were simple: The drives had to have multiple connection technologies (USB 2.0 plus FireWire 400 or FireWire 800 or both), include backup software and have a capacity of at least 500GB.
We ran four performance tests using four different PCs running Windows XP SP2. For starters, we ran HD Tach (Simpli Software's benchmark suite) on each drive with each interface we connected. HD Tach tests the random read speed across several locations on the disk and averages the times (see accompanying chart). HD Tach's burst read speed isolates the speed of the interface the device is attached to and measures the maximum speed at which data can be transferred from a device's internal cache memory to the CPU. (The more devices you have connected to the interface, the more important burst speed is.) HD Tach's final test reads each track, from the inside to the outside of the disk, averaging the results. Since read speeds are faster on the inside tracks, a full-disk test is more accurate to judge overall speed.
We also created a testbed of files, which consisted of a combination of large multimedia files (JPEG, MPG and AVI), large audio files, executables, Word and Excel documents, and several compressed Windows installation files. We copied them from our system to the external drive. This test is useful for comparing relative speeds of the drives, includes the overhead of the interface tested and most closely simulates the "real world" use of backing up files from your hard drive to the external drive. We clocked the elapsed time to the nearest second.
The drives share several features in common. For example, they were all easy to install -- just plug in the power cord, make the connection, and wait for Windows to recognize the drive. Each manufacturer noted that only one connection -- USB or FireWire -- can be made at a time.
All but the LaCie drive were preformatted to the stated capacity, all are quiet enough to not be distracting, and all include the cables needed to use the drive with the USB and FireWire interfaces each supported.
The drives are reviewed here alphabetically by manufacturer name.
Iomega Desktop Hard Drive
Model tested: MDHD750-1, 750GB ($449.95)
Also available: 500GB ($239.95), 320GB ($189.95)
Iomega Corp.'s slim and attractive Desktop Hard Drive is simplicity itself. It's also the only unit to sport a plain vanilla on/off power switch on the back of the drive. Supporting all three interfaces (and including a pass-through FireWire 800 port for connecting an additional device), the connections are clearly marked with icons and descriptions on the back of the drive. The unit has no fancy lights -- just a single blue power light on the front, which is all you really need. A stand is provided for vertical operation, though it can also operate horizontally.
Iomega includes a minimal Quick Start Guide (in 17 languages), with a more comprehensive user guide (including directions for formatting or partitioning the drive, for example) on the accompanying CD. Unfortunately, the CD contains user manuals for several drive models, and ours didn't exactly match the picture of the drive with USB and FireWire support, which was a bit confusing.
No files for the backup or user guide are preinstalled on the drive, which is a smart move, we think, because you might accidentally erase them when you reformat the drive. Another plus: Operation was smooth and faultless. The drive performed exactly as expected using all three interfaces. Windows recognized the drive, the backup software worked as expected, and we didn't have to worry about whether the drive's automatic startup/shutdown feature would work -- it doesn't have one.
Though in our benchmark tests the Iomega turned in the slowest results in both the copy test and HD Tach tests, it wasn't far behind the Western Digital Corp. My Book. For example, the copy test took 7:50 with the FireWire 400 interface, while the Western Digital completed the job in 7:46, an insignificant difference.
Like the Western Digital My Book, backup and restore duties are handled by EMC's Retrospect Express 7.5. It's a full-featured utility, though its user interface isn't easy for novices and occasional users to understand.
LaCie d2 Quadra
Model tested: 500GB ($259.99)
Also available: 320GB ($189.99)
The LaCie d2 Quadra comes with the best set of performance benchmarks, especially the copy test. Unfortunately, it also came with the most headaches and nonfunctioning features of any of these four drives.
First, the good news. The drive's HD Tach and copy benchmarks gave the best numbers of the group -- copying with the FireWire 800 connection, which has a second pass-through port, sliced more than 40% off the time of than its closest competitor -- 3:10 versus 5:21 for the Western Digital MyBook. At list prices, it has the lowest per-gigabyte cost, and the Kensington security slot is a nice safety feature.
In addition to the USB and two FireWire connections (one acts as a pass-through), the d2 Quadra has a fourth connection (hence its name) -- eSATA (though no cable is provided). A removable stand lets you operate the drive vertically; it fits into a groove on the side of the drive. It's also the only drive of the four capable of being rack-mounted.
The drive's FireWire connections worked fine with all four of our test machines, but the USB 2.0 refused to be recognized in one of them. The warning message that the drive was malfunctioning was our first experience with the drive, leading us to be wary. It turned out that was just the beginning of our disappointment.
The drive comes with two backup programs. LaCie 1-Click backup does little more than copy files to or from the drive (it has no scheduler, for example), so you'll want to use the EMC Retrospect Express HD backup software, which lets you select files and establish a regular backup schedule. It should not be confused with Retrospect Express 7.5 used in the Western Digital and Iomega drives; this version uses a wizard to help you specify which files are backed up, but only one backup job can be defined and scheduled. Express 7.5 is more flexible.
Also on the d2 Quadra's installation CD is a "shortcut button" utility that allows you to launch the backup program or any other program of your choice when you push a lit button on the drive, but it failed to work.
Unlike the other drives in this roundup, the d2 Quadra came unformatted, requiring an hour before we could put it to work. We followed the manufacturer's instructions and formatted it as an NTFS drive for our tests.
Seagate FreeAgent Pro
Model tested: ST307504FPA1E3-RK, 750GB ($419.99)
Also available: 320GB ($199.99), 500GB ($299.99)
There are several distinguishing features on the latest Seagate, the FreeAgent Pro -- but most have little to do with the drive itself. Let's start with the packaging, which tried to add a level of "hipness" to a product that, let's be honest, just isn't very sexy. Case in point: The drive's retail box includes a slogan near the box's handle that says, "If only this handle helped you move data like FreeAgent Pro," and the label with the disk size on the front of the box reads "750 Glorious Gigabytes." The bright orange stripe up the side and along the top of the drive adds another note of distinction, though we couldn't get the light to flicker (to indicate activity) despite several attempts with the setup utility.
The FreeAgent Pro is designed to operate vertically, and its base contains the power connector, an eSATA connector and the USB 2.0 connector. To use the FireWire 400 interface -- FireWire 800 isn't supported -- you must unscrew part of the base with a coin (the slot in the attachment screw is concave, making an ordinary screwdriver less efficient) and swap the USB connection with the FireWire 400 module. If you plan to share the drive among systems that may use either USB or FireWire, this isn't the drive for you.
The installation guide provides a four-step illustrated setup procedure, including estimated time to complete each task -- you should be done in an hour and 51 minutes, it notes. The guide also explains that when you start the drive, you'll see a pop-up window with further directions. That option, familiar to Windows users when you plug in a new drive, offers to install utility software, which works only on Windows systems and is preinstalled on the drive. (Be sure to back it up to a CD or DVD, or you'll lose it when you reformat the drive.)
The preinstalled utilities include a diagnostic program (the only statistic reported was that the drive was operating normally) as well as a button to establish a system restore point or revert to the last point, which does nothing more than execute the corresponding Windows commands. You can also set the sleep interval; choices range from three minutes to five hours, plus "never."
Seagate Technology LLC boasts that this drive can do more than ordinary external backup drives. In fact, though the drive comes with the aforementioned utilities, it's the backup software called AutoBackup (a rebranding of Memeo's similarly named product) that gives the drive the distinguishing features Seagate touts on the box, from synchronizing your project to a flash drive to uploading your photos to a Shutterfly account. Though you could do most of the operations using an ordinary file manager, the backup software does offer some useful scheduling, letting you synchronize between, say, your iPod and your FreeAgent Pro drive. It's flexible and far easier to use than Retrospect Express, making it a point in this drive's favor.
The FreeAgent Pro's power on/off switch at the base has no tactile feel whatsoever; a one-second push turns the drive on, but a five-second push is required to turn the drive off manually. The auto on/off (to stay in sync with the system's power) did not properly shut down the drive.
The Seagate bested both the Western Digital and Iomega drives in the copy tests for both USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 tests. It was sluggish in the random read and sequential read tests but held its own in the burst read tests.
Western Digital My Book Pro
Model tested: 500GB ($279.99)
Also available: 250GB ($179.99)
Western Digital's My Book is so named because it's about the size of a large paperback book. The drive, which can be operated horizontally or vertically, has a distinctive pair of lighted concentric rings on the front of the unit. The outer ring indicates power (solid blue) and disk activity (the light moves around the ring when the drive is reading or writing). A faster flashing shows the drive is transitioning to system standby, whereas slower flashes means the drive is in standby. The inner ring is divided into six sections. Each illuminates clockwise to indicate used space, and each lit section represents about 17% of capacity in use).
The drive smartly turned on when we powered up our system and turned off when we turned system power off. In addition, you can press a button in the center of the lighted rings and up pops a dialog box asking if you want to safely shut down the drive. If you answer yes, the drive is shut down only after all data in the queue has been written. (You can also use the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in your System Tray.) The button can also be used to power up the drive manually.
Installation is simple, though you must first connect the drive using the USB cable so you can install the FireWire drivers if you want to use that interface. When you plug in the drive for the first time, utilities are installed automatically. The software utilities are also on the drive, which makes it easy to install on any other machine with which you share the My Book Pro.
Included in the box are three cables (one per interface), a quick install guide and a CD with EMC's Retrospect Express 7.5 software. For extra security, the My Book Pro Edition is equipped with a Kensington Security Slot for use with a Kensington cable.
Like the Iomega drive, the Western Digital drive includes a copy of Retrospect Express 7.5, robust backup and recovery software that isn't user-friendly for novices and occasional users.
The Western Digital My Book's performance was a mixed bag. In HD Tach tests with the USB 2.0 interface, the My Book was on a par with the other three drives, while FireWire tests were mixed (see chart). The drive's copy speed with USB 2.0 was similar to the Iomega's but trailed the Seagate (2:21 slower) and LaCie (3:59 slower) drives. It was the same story for the FireWire 400 copy test (3:08 behind the Seagate and 3:19 slower than the LaCie). In FireWire 800 tests, it was squarely in the middle between the Iomega and LaCie.
Recommendations
In the end, we find that our favorite drive wins over the runner-up based on price and a couple of nice-to-have but by no means critical features.
LaCie's d2 Quadra has excellent copy performance and good HD Tach results, but those aren't enough to make up for its quirks and features that don't work as advertised.
If, and only if, you'll always connect the drive to systems with the same interface (either all USB or all FireWire 400), the Seagate FreeAgent Pro is a good choice, despite its lousy power switch. The AutoBackup software is the best of the group, the drive's copy speed is quite good, and its cost per gigabyte (at list prices) ties for second place with the Western Digital My Book.
The Iomega Desktop Hard Drive and the Western Digital My Book Pro are very close in overall performance, and while not as impressive as the LaCie drive, both behaved exactly as expected -- with plug-and-play ease that had us up and running in just a couple of minutes. There's a lot to be said of this "no surprises" out-of-the-box experience. Furthermore, unlike the Seagate drive, both the Iomega and Western Digital drives offer all three (well-marked) interfaces, and both include the same strong-on-features, weak-on-user-interface Retrospect Express 7.5 backup software. We found no flaws in the performance of either drive; everything we tested worked exactly as expected.
In the end, we were surprised that the Iomega's FireWire 800 copy test didn't run shorter. The lack of an automatic on/off feature may also be a deciding factor.
From the automatic power up/down to the visual display of the drive's capacity, the Western Digital's nice extras, plus its lower cost per gigabyte (at list prices), tipped the scale in its favor.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...tsrc =hm_list
Defragment 10X Faster
Albert
The never-ending two-step defragmenting process of Vista can soon become a thing of the past. With certain tools, we were able to cut defragmentation time of 25 GBs of files with Vista Ultimate from 82 minutes to 6 minutes!!! That is defragmenting 10X faster than the built-in Vista defragmenter! The tutorial also works with Windows 2000 and XP.
Right now, many things are probably whirling around in your head:
- Is this true? Yes, it is.
- Does it work? Yes. We will show you charts on hard drive fragments before and after defragmentation.
- This has got to cost money. Absolutely free.
These “certain tools” we will be using are called contig.exe and PowerDefragmenter.
When we used these two programs, the results were as follows:
(Skip to the tutorial.)
Hard drive before defragmenting:
b4dfg1.jpg
8 minutes later:
afterdfg3.jpg
However, using the Windows Vista Defragmentation tool took longer… much longer. To further exaggerate the comparison, we ran the Vista Defragmentation Tool AFTER we had already defragmented that same drive with Contig and PowerDefragmenter. It took 8 minutes alone to analyze the drive. By now, contig.exe and powerdefragmenter would have already finished defragmenting a drive. On top of that, it took Windows Vista 75 more minutes to defragment the hard-drive. As you can easily see, the new tools we will introduce to you will greatly cut your defragmentation time.
Please note a different tool was used to display the charts above. The charts did not come from the programs used in the tutorial.
Tutorial:
The two programs that we have talked about work together to defrag your computer.
Click on the following programs to download them:
contig.exe (scroll to the very bottom of the page)
Power Defragmenter
Once you have finished downloading these files, make sure they are both in the same directory or folder.
samedir.jpg
No installation is required. The next step is to run Power Defragmenter. Click next, and you will arrive at the screen below:
pwrdefgwdw.jpg
You may then select from the following options:
Defragment File(s): Allows you to defragment up to 4 files
Defragment Folder(s): Allows you to defragment up to 4 folders
Defragment Disk: Allows you to defragment a disk
PowerMode(TM) Disk Defragmentation: Defragments at a power equivalent to two consecutive defragmentations. Time does not necessarily double.
After you click next, just choose the desired drive, and you’re good to go.
When you are finished, the command prompt window will read “Windows Disk Defragmenter…”
Update: This is the only down-side to contig. It does not really tell you how well the fragmentation process went but as you could see from the visuals above, it is quite effective. If you wait 3-5 minutes before closing the window after the process is finished, the following statistics will be displayed:
- Hard Drive Space
- Free Space
- Largest free space extent
- Percent File Fragmentation
finish.jpg
Follow-up:
Many are saying that Microsoft said it is unnecessary to defragment NTFS. While that may be true, many are noticing an increase in performance once they defrag their system, including myself. This article is a tutorial on how to speed up the defragmentation process, not one that is asking you to defragment your drive if you don’t think you need to. To defragment or not to defragment is entirely up to you. Sorry for all those confused.
http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/15/defragment/
Media Convert
WebBlurb
100% Free online file conversion - no installation, no virus and spywares - Fast realtime processing
Media-Convert is 100% free. No software is needed, and you don't have to register. You only need your favorite Internet browser. Your files are ready 7/7 days 24/24 hours.
How to convert a file?
To convert a file located on your computer: Check File mode, click Browse and choose the file, select input format (if autodetection fails) and output format, submit the form.
To convert a file located on a webserver: Check URL mode, enter the file URL, select input and output format.
You can also convert directly from Youtube and Google Video and adapt quality and size settings to your needs.
To make a screenshot of any website (convert it into an image) : Check URL mode, enter the website URL and select an image output format.
http://media-convert.com/
Epson Wins Preliminary Ruling Against Aftermarket Cartridge Manufacturers
Jacqui Cheng
Epson is one step closer to closing the books on a case against third-party ink cartridge manufacturers that make and sell products to work with Epson printers. The company has won a preliminary ruling saying that 24 aftermarket print cartridge manufacturers do indeed infringe on Epson's patents, and they face orders that would bar them from selling the infringing products in the US.
Epson had filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission in February of 2006 accusing the companies of manufacturing and selling ink cartridges that came too close to Epson's own cartridge designs. The company had begun to file federal lawsuits against the companies, and many of them decided to settle with Epson rather than fight the case.
During the trial conducted in January of this year, Judge Paul Luckern found that over 750 cartridges from various companies infringed on at least one of 11 patents owned by Epson. Upon issuing the preliminary ruling on March 30, Judge Luckern recommended that Epson file a General Exclusion Order and Cease and Desist Orders against the 24 companies listed in Epson's complaint. The companies accused of infringing on Epson's patents are located in the US, Germany, Korea, and China, and the orders would prevent those companies from importing and selling their products in the US.
"We are gratified that Judge Luckern upheld the validity and enforceability of Epson’s ink cartridge patents," said Epson's director of consumer supplies Elizabeth Leung in a statement. "These lawsuits were filed as part of Epson's worldwide efforts to protect the company from unfair competition. We urge manufacturers, distributors and retailers of ink cartridges to recognize this further validation of Epson’s patent rights and act accordingly. Resellers should be mindful that, in addition to the import restrictions that can be ordered by the ITC, patent infringements can result in very substantial compensatory damages in District Court actions. We will continue taking whatever action is necessary to protect Epson’s invaluable intellectual property rights."
If the ITC approves Judge Luckern's preliminary ruling, then Epson printer users will no longer be able to purchase low-priced alternative cartridges for their printers in the US. The ITC is scheduled to issue a final determination on the case on June 30, 2007.
A sign of things to come?
The prevailing business model in the printer manufacturing business has long been hinged on ink and toner sales, but manufacturers have seen their profits shrink as third parties move in to sell ink and toner products closer to their own manufacturing costs. In a rather high-profile case, Lexmark battled North Carolina-based Static Control Components (SCC) over the manufacture of printing components meant to lock-out third party providers. In that case, Lexmark had tried to use the DMCA to argue that SCC had infringed on Lexmark's intellectual property, but that approach failed.
Epson's approach has focused on patents and patent law, and so far it has been successful. In the federal court case, Epson accused its competitors of patent infringement primarily based on two patents: 7,008,053 and 7,011,397. Both patents cover minor technical innovations in the production of inkjet printer cartridges, and Epson has since piled on additional patents in an attempt to ensnare all of the companies manufacturing ink replacement products for its most recent printers. We suspect that this isn't the last time we'll see this tactic used, given its success.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...facturers.html
H.P. Tries to Create Printers That Love the Web
Damon Darlin
Vyomesh I. Joshi, the senior vice president in charge of Hewlett-Packard’s printing division, bounded up to the stage to congratulate his employees on their performance. He was ebullient, and with good reason: revenue, profit, margins and market share were all up, he told them at a quarterly “coffee talk” in late February.
He followed that up with a less-heartening tale. He said one of his daughters, a college student, had told him, “I don’t need a printer.” Like many people of her generation, she lives online and finds it unnecessary or too difficult to put bits onto paper.
“The intent of this is not to scare you, though I am scared,” Mr. Joshi said.
The Internet era has been good to makers of printers so far. H.P.’s numbers show that half the printing done in homes is material from the Internet, like e-mail and Web pages, while software like Microsoft Word accounts for just under 20 percent of printouts.
But looking ahead, Mr. Joshi is concerned that if people find printing Web pages too hard and start printing less, he will have fewer coffee talks where he crows about record revenue, profit, margins and market share.
So Mr. Joshi is beginning to introduce a strategy that could be as important as his previous strategic shifts. Those led the company to sell copiers and commercial printers, along with photo prints via the online service Snapfish.com and blue photo-printing kiosks in stores. Now he wants H.P. to figure out a way to get people to print more Web pages.
“It’s an indication of a broader strategy to leverage the Internet,” said Charlie Corr, group director of InfoTrends, a market consulting firm. Mr. Joshi sees Internet material, in particular blogs and personal photo galleries, as a driver of demand for printing, Mr. Corr said. “He has a vision that transforms how and when things are printed.”
Worrying about a trend that has yet to materialize may seem odd for someone running a unit that last year brought in 30 percent of H.P.’s $91.7 billion in revenue and more than half its operating profit.
Through good times and bad, H.P. has counted on the imaging and printing group and its version of the classic razor-and-blade business model: sell inexpensive printers and make the money on the ink.
The company fiddles with that model as if it were tuning a perpetual motion machine. If H.P. wants to see higher profit in several months to compensate for slower growth in another area, Mr. Joshi’s unit will cut printer prices. More printers are sold, and new customers are soon buying high-margin replacement ink or toner cartridges.
The company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is dominant in printers — half the printers sold in the world carry the H.P. logo. New entrants to the market like Dell, Samsung and more recently Kodak pose little threat. Mr. Joshi’s concern is a shifting market.
He spotted a change in consumer habits from printing digital photos at home to printing them at stores, so he pushed the photo kiosk strategy. He keeps looking for ways to spur faster growth and stave off complacency. “Companies don’t transform at the top, they transform when they are at the bottom,” Mr. Joshi said.
Which brings Mr. Joshi back to his concern about his daughter. It isn’t her fault that she finds printing annoying. It is difficult to print the content on many Web sites, whether they are blogs, MySpace pages, lists from comparison shopping sites or even directions from Google Maps. Printouts often look haphazard, with large bands of white space or images chopped in two.
Last month, in a small step toward making sure that home printers keep churning, H.P. bought a small company, Tabblo, a privately held developer of Web-based software in Cambridge, Mass.
Tabblo’s software creates templates that reorganize the photos and text blocks on a Web page to fit standard sizes of paper. H.P. wants to make the software a standard by making it ubiquitous, like Adobe’s Flash and Reader or Sun Microsystems’ Java.
“We’d make printing as much a nonevent in the online world as it is in the desktop world,” said Pradeep Jotwani, the unit’s senior vice president in charge of the supplies business.
If it creates the printing engine of the Web, H.P. will help all printer companies — but as the industry leader, it will benefit more than its rivals. It is only the first step, analysts said, as the company tries to stay at the center of a system of consumers and businesses generating and printing Internet content, whether it is for homemade books or custom marketing materials.
A director of Yahoo since 2005, Mr. Joshi is well aware of how a new technology can shake up well-established companies. He is just as fascinated by how companies transform, reading several books a week on the subject when he is not reading novels or watching movies. That interest might seem unusual for an executive who has spent his career with one company.
After graduating from engineering school in India, where he grew up, Mr. Joshi went to Ohio Stateon a scholarship and received his master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1980. H.P. hired him as an inkjet printer engineer. For his first six months on the job, he walked from his apartment up a long hill to the company’s factory and research center near San Diego.
“I didn’t have any money,” he said. Though company filings show that he made $12.2 million last year in salary, bonuses and stock awards, he lives in a home that is modest by local standards and is located less than a mile from the same factory.
One of Mr. Joshi’s first assignments was to increase the reliability of the inkjet printer heads that shoot bubbles of ink onto the page. Cartridges were failing after firing only 600,000 drops. He figured out a way to make them fire 45 million drops. That meant a cartridge would run out of ink long before failing, which, he jokes, opened the door for the cartridge refilling industry, the bane of H.P.’s business model.
Mr. Joshi was given the top job at the unit in 2002 by Carleton S. Fiorina, then the chief executive. After she was forced to resign in 2005, he was briefly mentioned in news reports as a possible candidate to replace her. His interest in transforming companies is shared by Mark V. Hurd, who won the chief executive job.
Mr. Hurd recognized Mr. Joshi’s ability to expand the business, and the two worked out an arrangement so that the imaging and printing group got to keep a greater percentage of its profits to invest in its own growth.
Mr. Joshi’s goal is growth of at least 6 percent a year, which means adding $1.6 billion to as much as $2 billion in revenue annually. The company is looking for more things to print, from museum-quality art to the advertisements wrapped around buses.
On the imaging side, the company has digitized 10,000 movies owned by Sony and signed an agreement with Warner Brothers to do the same with its archives, creating “digital vaults” of films that can then be distributed online.
H.P. signed up Wal-Mart Stores as the first customer for the digital vault. That was a coup because the chain sells 40 percent of all DVDs, putting it in a good position to promote movie downloads. “It’s hard to make bold moves with the studios without their very biggest customer,” said Willem de Zoete, vice president and general manager of the digital entertainment services business at H.P.
About eight months ago, Mr. Joshi began sharing his thoughts about his latest strategy with members of the staff. “He’s not afraid of sharing half-baked stuff,” said Hatem Mostafa, senior vice president of the inkjet business. “It wasn’t smooth. It was bits and pieces. But it’s an effective way for us to own it before we set off on it,” he said.
“He trawls the halls at 6 o’clock looking for people to talk to, and he’s been doing that for 20 years,” said Francis McMahon, North American marketing director for the company’s commercial printing efforts.
One of Mr. Joshi’s favorite tactics is to think in opposites: for instance, to lose weight one should think about how one gains it. Mr. Joshi has been pushing the idea that the focus on printers has meant that the company was looking at the means and not the ends. In fact, he said, H.P. may not really be in the printing business. “We are in the content consumption business,” he said.
The hardest part for Mr. Joshi? “Reluctantly, I am doing blogs,” he told the employees at the companywide coffee talk. He said he needed to understand how they work. “Otherwise, we will be irrelevant.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/te...y/09print.html
Giant Machine Designed to Print Houses
Tracy Staedter
Hammering, sawing, drilling and bricklaying could one day be replaced with printing. A room-size machine currently being built by researchers in the U.K. will use rapid prototyping techniques to print walls, complete with brick, plaster, windows, insulation and conduits for wires and pipes.
The technique could make walls stronger and more functional, while at the same time reducing construction waste, minimizing the amount of labor needed and liberating the building's form.
"Maybe straight is not always the best shape. You can build a flat or curvy place and there is no more expense involved," said Richard Buswell, lecturer for civil and building engineering at Loughborough University in U.K.
Buswell and his team are embarking on a four-year project to build the 13- by 16.4-foot-sized printer, which will borrow techniques from rapid prototyping processes currently used to produce items made of ceramics, polymers and metals.
In rapid prototyping, products are drawn and developed using three-dimensional computer-aided design software. The 3-D shapes are sliced into cross sections and a machine fabricates each layer — usually with a material made in sheets or out of liquid, powder or paste — one on top of the other to build the product from the bottom up. The layers are then bonded together, sometimes with a laser, to produce the final shape.
The process often involves using plastic-based materials. But in the case of constructing walls, Buswell and his team will be using mineral-based materials such as cement, gypsum, clay or lime.
The machine will either squeeze out the moist material like toothpaste from a tube or it work like a large ink-jet printer head to place drops of the material in the precise location. The material will be designed to harden in the air and will not require a laser to fuse the layers together.
Such precision will allow designers to incorporate elements into walls that would otherwise have to be built in separately. For example, the walls could have holes to accommodate doors and windows. They could be built with a honeycomb structure for insulation. Or they could contain hollow sections that serve as conduits for piping or electrical wires.
The system is innovative because it could potentially save time and cost of labor, said Terry Wohlers, president of rapid-prototyping consulting firm Wohlers Associates in Fort Collins, Colo.
But that might not be enough to convince the construction industry.
"The construction industry is established and traditional. The situation has to be dramatically better or companies won't take the risk. They will do it the way they have always done it," he said.
At the end of four years, Buswell and his team will have the printer and a wall to prove the concept.
"Doing that wall will get us beyond some of the hurdles and obstacles that are in our way and once we do that we're only limited by our own imagination," said Buswell.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/0...house_tec.html
Computers vs. Old-Fashioned Teaching: Which Is Better?
Department of Education Study Says Computer Software in Schools Doesn't Raise Test Scores
Almost every school district in the country has bought computer software that's supposed to help kids do better in math or reading.
But as a parent, it's helpful to know whether it's really effective to sit your kids down in front of a computer. Do they learn better with these expensive computer programs?
Not necessarily, according to a new Department of Education study.
The study found that "test scores were not significantly higher in classrooms using selected reading and mathematics software products" than in classrooms without those fancy tools.
But kids love computer games, even if the game is teaching them something.
"I like the computer class because it's entertaining and you can learn lots of things you never knew," said one boy in a Los Angeles classroom. "You can learn stuff about presidents, soccer, you can learn math problems and all that."
Millions Spent on Software
Schools across the country have spent millions on learning software, and this study has some parents asking if it was money well spent.
"When I hear this I don't think it's worth it," said parent Moira Hayes. "It makes you think that the good old-fashioned way of interacting with the teacher really works better for the kids."
Some districts have already bailed out on using pricey software. Los Angeles schools spent $50 million on software for a reading program that's no longer in every classroom after students' test scores showed no improvements.
Is the Study Reliable?
The software industry says this national study has flaws; it looked at results over just one year and only at certain schools.
"To extrapolate from one study and say that tech has no place in our schools in terms of achievement is a misinterpretation of the facts," said Mark Schneiderman, a software industry representative.
And there are examples of success. At Delano High School in Minnesota, for example, they'll tell you the software has worked wonders. The number of kids failing has dropped 19 percent.
"I worry less and less about the research and more and more about what's happening in my school," said Delano principal Bruce Locklear
Several kids said they couldn't imagine school without computers, and other experts agree with them.
"Throwing out the technology would be a big mistake, because we understand that is the future of teaching and learning. We just need more time to find out how we can better utilize and harness that technology for learning," said Watson Scott Swail, the president of the Educational Policy Institute.
Experts offered some suggestions for parents who are wondering what the study means for their kids.
First, make sure your school board knows about the new study. Find out how much is being spent on software, and ask a lot of questions about whether that money could be better spent some other way.
And speak up if you don't think your child is learning with a computer program that's being used at school.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3014960&page=1
Students Protecting Intellectual Work
Lauren La Rose
Graduate students heading to Ottawa's Carleton University this fall are slated to receive an education of a different sort - learning their rights when it comes to protecting ideas and work from possible theft.
The Carleton Graduate Students' Association is spearheading an initiative to educate some 3,300 grad students on how to safeguard their intellectual property while ensuring they're being properly recognized for their work.
"If (intellectual property theft) has been a problem, we don't really know about it, which is one of the reasons we wanted to do it," said association president Oren Howlett.
"A lot of the times, this stuff does happen to students but they have no real way of being able to cite it or try to figure out how to go about bringing the issue to light."
The initiative will include workshops and a handbook outlining what would constitute an infraction of students' intellectual property rights, Howlett said.
Examples include a student not receiving authorship on written work, or having a professor take credit for their work.
"This isn't an indictment of profs at all," said Howlett. "It's just to ensure that students' rights are protected in the case that it does happen."
Experts say while it's next to impossible to put a number to cases involving intellectual property theft at Canadian universities, some say the push towards commercializing research may be a factor.
A Statistics Canada survey of intellectual property commercialization in the higher education sector found that researchers reported 1,475 inventions to Canadian universities and research hospitals in 2005, up three per cent from the previous year.
Patent applications filed by the institutions surged 13 per cent during the same period, and were the beneficiaries of $55 million in income from intellectual property commercialization.
The idea of knowledge as property was once an alien concept to universities, where the emphasis was on creating and sharing knowledge for its own sake, said Paul Jones of the Canadian Association of University Teachers.
Funding cutbacks and a more commercialized culture have seen government, the private sector and university administrators gravitating to the notion of knowledge and creativity as saleable products, Jones said.
"What typically happens is that a team will come together to work on a project, perhaps with the best intentions, and with some naivete about this commercialized model," he said. "As things move forward, it may dawn on someone, 'Hey, there's some money to be made here.' "
Jones said his association is working on developing a best practices guide with the Canadian Federation of Students to alert individuals to the issue of intellectual property theft, and to suggest ways it can be avoided.
Howlett said the initiative was prompted in part by recent high-profile cases at universities involving copyright infringement.
In one case, Chris Radziminski, a former University of Toronto graduate student, alleged his former supervisors at U of T and Indiana University plagiarized his drinking water research in two journal articles and manipulated research results.
Radziminski was threatened with a defamation suit by the University of Toronto when he attempted to contact the journals to correct the record.
An inquiry launched by Indiana University in the spring of 2006 confirmed Radziminski's allegations of misconduct. Formal apology letters were written to him and other students cited as authors on the articles.
Radziminski said in an e-mail that universities need to institute a policy to deal not just with intellectual property "but research integrity in general - including protection for whistleblowers, especially vulnerable groups such as students."
The Canadian Federation of Students wants whistleblower legislation put on the books to protect university researchers from any backlash they may experience if they call out researcher misconduct.
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2...953293-cp.html
Canceled by Principal, Student Play Heads to Off Broadway
Alison Leigh Cowan
Students at a Connecticut high school whose principal canceled a play they were preparing on the Iraq war are now planning to perform the work in June in New York, at the Public Theater, a venerable Off Broadway institution, and at the Culture Project, which is known for staging politically provocative work. A third show at a Connecticut theater is also being discussed.
“We are so honored and thrilled, there’s no words to describe how excited we are,” Bonnie Dickinson, the teacher whose advanced theater class at Wilton High School put the play together, said yesterday.
After barring the scheduled performance of the play, a series of monologues mainly from soldiers titled “Voices in Conflict,” school officials have cleared the way for an off-campus production. In a letter Tuesday, Thomas B. Mooney, a lawyer for Wilton’s board of education, wrote that the district and its superintendent, Gary Richards “have no objection to students privately producing and presenting the play on their own.”
While defending the school’s initial decision to halt production pending “concerns about balance, content and copyright,” Mr. Mooney wrote that “school officials have no interest in interfering with the private activities of students.” The letter goes on to say that the teacher of the advanced theater class that initiated the project, Ms. Dickinson, could also participate in an independent production “as long as she makes clear that she is acting as an individual and that the play is not sponsored in any way by the Wilton Public Schools.”
In canceling the play last month, the school principal, Timothy H. Canty, cited concerns about political balance, sourcing, and the possibility of hurting Wilton residents “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving.”
But administrators have said in recent days that they might yet allow the play to be performed on school grounds in some modified form, but probably not this spring, when about half the 15 cast members are scheduled to graduate.
The Public Theater, which is tentatively scheduled to stage the show June 15, and the Culture Project, where it is slotted for the prior weekend, were among scores of off-campus venues, including church basements and college auditoriums, that offered the students a platform after the play’s cancellation.
“We started in the school, but we don’t have to finish in the school,” Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member, said yesterday. “Wherever we do the play, I think we will all be happy and grateful that that venue has allowed us to do so.”
The students were also awarded a “Courage in Theater” award last month for their “non-performance” from Music Theater International, a New York agency that licenses many high school productions. And last week, theater greats including Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, John Weidman, Marsha Norman, Doug Wright, John Guare and John Patrick Shanley, under the auspices of the Dramatists Guild of America, joined the National Coalition Against Censorship in calling for the school district to allow the play to go on.
Martin Garbus, a First Amendment lawyer who has been working pro bono with Ms. Dickinson and several parents of cast members said yesterday that schools are allowed to regulate speech that has the potential to disrupt learning. But canceling the initial production only increased the likelihood that its eventual performance on school grounds might stir up trouble, he said. “Had the school not done any of this stuff, it would have just gone through uneventfully,” Mr. Garbus said.
Ms. Dickinson said the script was a work in progress, and that students would now be rushing to polish it and rehearse amid other spring concerns, like the prom.
“We’re looking forward to finishing writing the play or putting it together, as it were, and coming up with some kind of ending that feels right with the kids and then rehearsing it,” said Ms. Dickinson, adding that the show may be performed on-book, with the cast reading from scripts, to relieve anxiety about memorizing lines before their Off Broadway debut.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/nyregion/12play.html
Students Hear Anti-Gay Talk
High school allows speaker after threat of lawsuit
Eileen FitzGerald
Seven students attended an after-school club meeting at Danbury High School on Thursday afternoon to hear an anti-gay preacher who was allowed to speak only after the school was threatened with a lawsuit.
The controversy started when High School Principal Catherine Richard initially objected to a student's request on Tuesday for the speaker, North Carolina pastor Valerie Pinnex, because Pinnex planned to proselytize about the need for gays to change what she considers sinful behavior. Richard felt that message was the wrong one to give students.
But when Danbury High junior Rosemary Shakro heard that Pinnex could not speak at the school, she and her parents contacted the national conservative group, the Alliance Defense Fund, to complain.
"We didn't mean to hurt anyone. The Day of Truth is to show love and compassion and another point of view if they are willing to change,'' Shakro said.
Shakro is a member of the Youth Alive Club, which is a Danbury High School Bible study group, which invited Pinnex to speak for the national Day of Truth event at the school. The Alliance Defense Fund created the day to "ensure the free speech rights of Christian students to present an alternative viewpoint to those organizations that promote homosexual behaviors."
It stands in contrast to the 10-year-old national Day of Silence, celebrated Wednesday, which promotes a safe and welcoming environment for students who may be gay or lesbian or struggling with their sexual identity.
The alliance e-mailed Danbury High School on Wednesday and threatened that if the school did not allow Pinnex to speak at the Youth Alive Club meeting, they would take legal action.
Superintendent Salvatore Pascarella said Thursday that the schools' attorney advised him that the student's First Amendment rights would be curtailed if the high school did not allow Pinnex to speak.
So the event went on as planned.
But Richard had a problem with the talk.
"We promote respecting each other, taking pride in each other, and having an environment where every student, of every sexual preference, every race and creed, can feel valued and wanted and that they will be listened to,'' Richard said.
"I have an issue with putting down one group of students. We are a public school. I want us working together, and I don't want talk that's going to promote intolerance or lack of respect for another group."
Pastor Valerie, as Pinnex is called, told the students she was gay in high school and became a successful police officer with security detail for presidents Bush and Clinton before finding Jesus and learning she was on the wrong path.
Wearing a Day of Truth T-shirt, she acknowledged the dispute that led up to her visit.
"We had a tremendous victory for Jesus. They wanted to ban us, but Jesus was going to be heard," said Pinnex, 53, who is a born-again Christian.
"You're looking at a lady who used to live a homosexual lifestyle. I didn't know the truth,'' she said. "What changed me? I got to know Jesus."
With the students at the session was Debbie Stence, a Danbury High teacher and Youth Alive adviser, who said there was no intent to create turmoil.
But teacher Cindy NeJame, who helped organize the Day of Silence as part of Peace Week, a weeklong event to encourage kindness and acceptance, was also at the talk and was outraged by the message.
"I'm working as an educator. The Day of Silence represents support for anyone who is different. I work at one of the most diverse high schools in the state and it is my job to represent all students," she said.
"Peace Week was to allow for everyone. So we have this speaker come in representing a group that specifically targets gay members of our society," NeJame continued.
"These are Christians? Maybe I don't understand what that is supposed to represent. I wanted Peace Week to represent all children."
The Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, or GLSEN, didn't have a problem with Day of Truth except with its message that gays can and must change their sexual orientation.
"'The Day of Silence and Day of Truth are very different. They are apples and oranges,'' said Eliza Byard, deputy executive director of GLSEN.
The Day of Silence supports a safe school environment, and is against anti-lesbian and anti-gay bullying and harassment that stands in the way of a child getting an education. That's something people of all faiths should be able to come together around, she said.
"The other (Day of Truth) is talking about a specific Christian belief (opposition to homosexuality), and talking about an intervention that all medical experts have said is unnecessary and potentially harmful to young people," Byard said.
"No one contends that students should be prohibited from taking part in the Day of Truth, but they must be respectful of other students' rights and must draw the line at the ex-gay message."
Danbury High School senior David Garcia, 17, belonged to Youth Alive for a short time last year. It has between five and 15 student members now. Garcia said the intention of the club was that everyone was welcome, but he felt the Day of Truth contradicts that message.
"This program is not accepting of homosexual behavior,'' Garcia said, "and I feel it targets a group in a public setting and that's not appropriate."
http://www.newstimeslive.com/news/story.php?id=1043266
Judge: School's Gay Rights Club Can Meet
A high school club that promotes tolerance of gays must be allowed to meet while a lawsuit is pending, a federal judge ruled.
U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore ruled Friday that Okeechobee High School must grant the same privileges to the Gay Straight Alliance that it grants other clubs, as mandated by the federal Equal Access Act.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Okeechobee school board in November on behalf of the high school's Gay-Straight Alliance after school officials said the group was a "sex-based" organization that would violate its abstinence-only education policy.
In his 12-page ruling, Moore wrote that the group and its founder, high school senior Yasmin Gonzalez, have "demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success" on their claim that the school violated federal law when it prohibited the club from meeting.
ACLU attorney Robert Rosenwald called Friday's order a "strong indication of what will happen in the end."
In his ruling, the judge said the school showed no evidence to back its concern that the group would encourage students to share "obscene or sexual explicit material," and that the school had made that assumption based on the group's name.
David Gibbs, the lawyer for the school board, said Friday he had not spoken to the school board about whether it would press forward for trial. He said he believes the judge's decision honors the school's desire that the club steer clear of discussions related to sex.
"The kids are getting the name they wanted," he said, "But we're pleased that the students are limited to discussing discrimination issues."
Gonzalez said she was happy with the decision and issued a statement saying she hoped future students "will benefit from a more open environment and not have to endure the same treatment from our school."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...n/4695510.html
MySpace Prank Gone Bad Leads to Misuse of School Resources, Multiple Lawsuits
Nate Anderson
The problems started in December 2005, when several students from Pennsylvania's Hickory High School posted fake MySpace profiles about their principal, Eric Trosch. All of the posts were mean-spirited; they accused Trosch of using steroids, marijuana, and alcohol; suggested that he had sex with students; and said that his interests included "Transgender, Appreciators of Alcoholic Beverages." In the year and a half since the four separate profiles were posted, the community has experienced the upheaval of multiple lawsuits, the most recent coming this week as Trosch sued the students involved.
The entire story is sordid and a bit ridiculous. In court filings seen by Ars Technica (and that predate the current case), Trosch says that his daughter became aware of the fake profiles on December 11, 2005, and came crying to her father. One can imagine that this would be traumatic for the daughter, who was also a student at a high school in the district at that time. Trosch and the school's IT person attempted to block MySpace, but students were "backdooring a fire wall and getting into" it anyway.
On December 15, Trosch became aware that there was not just a single profile, but several fake profiles, all of which were "mean-spirited, obscene, profane, libelous, and insulting." On December 16, Trosch spoke to teachers at his school about the profiles but was "overcome with emotion and could not continue." Meanwhile, back at home, Trosch's wife was apparently refreshing the profiles and looking at the names of those who left comments. She sent these names to Trosch, who then confirmed that the students were in fact in school that day, all in an attempt to prove that the profiles were being accessed from school.
With this information in hand, Trosch and the IT person discussed shutting down all the computers in the school—perhaps a hint that paranoia had set in over something that no one would ever consider true. The IT person spent an estimated 25 percent of his work time dealing with this issue, and the district as a whole was "required to invest money and a significant amount of time."
Note the word "required" used in the court filing; though this was obviously not required, Trosch kept at it, even taking measures that led to the "cancellation of computer programming classes as well as usage of computers for research for class projects." Now the basic educational mission of the school was being compromised in order to keep students from visiting these profiles during school hours (students were still free to look at the profiles from home, of course). Priorities were being reshuffled, and controlling the "disruption" appeared to move to the top of the list.
When Trosch identified one of the students responsible in late December, and the student confessed, Trosch suspended him for 10 days and said that he would be placed in an "Alternative Education Program" when he returned to school. This student, Justin Layshock, then filed suit against the school district. He admitted that what he'd done was wrong and stupid but argued that the profile had been created from home and that the school had no right to jeopardize his academic future by placing him in an alternative program for something he'd done after hours.
The Pennsylvania ACLU came to Layshock's defense (see his parents' statement about the case as well as a copy of the profile in question [PDFs]), but a judge ruled in favor of the school in January 2006. But the case wasn't over; the family then sued the school in federal court for civil rights violations. That case is still ongoing.
Now Trosch, who has since moved schools within the district, is suing the students involved in the 2005 caper, arguing that his reputation was damaged and his earning potential was affected.
It's a sad story in many ways—a stupid prank has now had real consequences in several lives—but it's worth asking if the school response actually created the bigger problem. Calling the students in and asking them to apologize could have been the end of it, but because of the school response and subsequent lawsuits, all parties have been put beneath the hot glow of media spotlights for more than a year. School resources were expended, and administrators spent many hours "dealing" with the issue at an admittedly busy time for the school. Computer classes were shut down and computer access curtailed.
This isn't the first time that the issue has arisen; we reported late last year on a case in Texas where a school administrator sued students who created a fake MySpace profile. It's strange to imagine a day in which US courts will have accumulated case law dealing specifically with fake MySpace profiles, but such a day may not be far off any longer.
The bigger—and more important—issue is where a principal's authority ends, and recent cyberbullying cases raise the same questions about free speech and educational disruption. The Supreme Court has yet to issue an important ruling in this area in relation to the Internet, but with cases like these arising with increasing frequency, the court may need to address the issue soon.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-lawsuits.html
First Amendment Extends to MySpace, Court Says
AP
A judge violated a juvenile's free-speech rights when he placed her on probation for posting an expletive-laden entry on MySpace criticizing a school principal, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled.
The three-judge panel on Monday ordered the Putnam Circuit Court to set aside its penalty against the girl, referred to only as A.B. in court records.
"While we have little regard for A.B.'s use of vulgar epithets, we conclude that her overall message constitutes political speech," Judge Patricia Riley wrote in the 10-page opinion.
In February 2006, Greencastle Middle School Principal Shawn Gobert discovered a Web page on MySpace purportedly created by him. A.B., who did not create the page, made derogatory postings on it concerning the school's policy on body piercings.
The state filed a delinquency petition in March alleging that A.B.'s acts would have been harassment, identity deception and identity theft if committed by an adult. The juvenile court dropped most of the charges but in June found A.B. to be a delinquent child and placed her on nine months of probation. The judge ruled the comments were obscene.
A.B. appealed, arguing that her comments were protected political speech under both the state and federal constitutions because they dealt with school policy.
The Court of Appeals found that the comments were protected and that the juvenile court had unconstitutionally restricted her right of free expression.
There was no number for Shawn Gobert in publishing phone listings. The Associated Press left a message seeking comment Monday at Greencastle Middle School.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/int...space.free.ap/
Man Sentenced to 10 Years for Assaulting Girl he Met on MySpace
AP
A federal judge sentenced a Pennsylvania man to 10 years in prison Monday for molesting a 14-year-old Connecticut girl he met through the social networking Internet site MySpace.com.
U.S. District Judge Stefan R. Underhill imposed the sentence on Stephen Letavec, 41, of Elrama, Pa. After the prison time, Letavec must serve 10 years of supervised release.
Letavec, a volunteer firefighter, was charged last year in one of the first federal sex cases involving the popular Web site. He pleaded guilty in January to one count of using the Internet to persuade a minor to engage in sexual activity and one count of traveling in interstate commerce for the purpose of attempting to have and having illicit sexual conduct with a minor.
He met the Oxford girl on MySpace.com in about March 2005 and communicated with her nearly every day through February 2006, according to court documents and statements made in court. Letavec traveled from Pennsylvania to Connecticut three times to meet the girl, and the two engaged in illicit sexual conduct at least two of those times, prosecutors said.
"I showed you what love is and how it feels," Letavec wrote in an e-mail found in the girl's school locker, according to an FBI report. "I want to show you how making love feels too, not just sex because there is a difference."
The girl signed onto MySpace as an 18-year-old, but told Letavec she was 14 before he visited, the FBI said.
"This sentence should send a very strong message to anyone who intends to use the Internet to prey on children," U.S. Attorney Kevin OConnor said Monday.
Parents, school administrators and law-enforcement authorities have been increasingly warning of online predators at sites like MySpace, whose youth-oriented visitors are encouraged to expand their circles of friends through messaging tools and personal profile pages. It has more than 100 million registered users.
The site has responded by expanding educational efforts and partnerships with law enforcement. It also adopted new restrictions on how adults may contact the site's younger users and has helped design tools for identifying profiles created by convicted sex offenders.
MySpace's current policy bars children under 14 from setting up profiles. Users who are 14 or 15 can display their full profiles - containing hobbies, schools and any other personal details - only to people already on the teen's list of friends. Others see only the bare-bones profile, listing username, gender, age and location.
But MySpace, a division of News Corp., relies on users to specify their age.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...04-09-20-55-10
'Girls Gone Wild' Founder Surrenders in Fla.
AP
The founder of the Girls Gone Wild video empire surrendered to federal marshals early Tuesday to face a contempt of court citation after initially defying a federal judge.
Joe Francis was booked into the Bay County Jail, said Ruth Sasser, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office. "His attorneys continue to work toward a settlement," Kevin Mercuri, a spokesman for Francis, said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.
Francis, 34, makes an estimated $29 million a year from videos of young women baring their breasts and in other sexually provocative situations.
He drew the contempt citation during negotiations in a civil lawsuit brought by seven women who were underage when they were filmed by his company on Panama City Beach during spring break in 2003.
Lawyers for the women told U.S. District Judge Richard Smoak that Francis became enraged during the settlement talks, shouting obscenities at the lawyers and threatening to "bury them." Smoak ordered Francis to settle the case or go to jail for his behavior.
Negotiations continued with the help of a mediator, but broke down Thursday, and Smoak issued a contempt of court warrant.
Francis initially refused to surrender and called Smoak "a judge gone wild."
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta refused to let him remain free pending an appeal.
Francis had said Thursday he would settle the case to avoid jail time. "I'll give up a billion dollars, but it will be under duress," he said, arguing that any money given would be voided in an appeal.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/...arrested_N.htm
Radio Host Is Suspended Over Racial Remarks
Bill Carter
The radio talk show host Don Imus was suspended for two weeks yesterday after the outcry over his racially disparaging remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.
The suspension will begin Monday.
NBC News, which does a simulcast broadcast of Mr. Imus’s radio program on its cable news channel MSNBC, was the first to act, suspending Mr. Imus and calling his comments “racist and abhorrent.”
A short time later, CBS Radio, which is his chief employer, followed, saying it, too, would take Mr. Imus, 66, off the air for two weeks.
NBC also served notice yesterday that it would not tolerate insensitive remarks in the future. Mr. Imus had promised to change the tenor of the show, NBC said in a statement, and had agreed that the suspension was appropriate.
“Our future relationship with Imus is contingent on his ability to live up to his word,” NBC said. CBS made no statement other than that it was suspending Mr. Imus, who has been the host of “Imus in the Morning” for more than 30 years.
MSNBC will replace Mr. Imus’s program with news coverage. CBS was undecided about how it would fill the time.
The actions came at the end of a day of intensifying pressure on Mr. Imus from black leaders, who expressed outrage at his description last Wednesday of the Rutgers team as “nappy-headed ho’s.”
Mr. Imus tried to stave off calls for his resignation by appearing yesterday on a syndicated radio program that has the Rev. Al Sharpton as its host and making a more complete apology for what he said were “repugnant, repulsive, and horrible” comments.
He said he was also trying to reach out to the team, its coach and players’ parents to issue an apology.
Mr. Imus said he wanted to try to “see if they’ll forgive me and if there is something that can be established here that I can do to begin to build something positive out of this — and then who knows?”
But his job still appeared to be in jeopardy, with Mr. Sharpton and other black leaders calling for Mr. Imus to be fired, threatening to initiate a boycott of sponsors and demanding that the Federal Communications Commission take action against him and radio stations that carry his program.
It is unclear whether members of the Rutgers team will agree to meet with Mr. Imus. The Rutgers athletic director, Robert E. Mulcahy III, said in a statement yesterday, “I have relayed the message of Don Imus and his offer to apologize in person to the students and asked them to let me know how they wished to respond if at all.”
It is also still unclear how much support Mr. Imus can expect from the roster of politicians, authors and media figures who make up his daily guest list. Some of his regular guests, like the author Tom Oliphant and the editor at large of Newsweek, Evan Thomas, have already appeared with him and offered support. But Mr. Sharpton said yesterday that he would be asking “all the candidates running for president if they plan to appear on the show.”
Some of those candidates, like Senator John McCain and Senator Joseph R. Biden, are regular guests. Mr. McCain said in an interview in Phoenix yesterday that he was a “believer in redemption” and hoped that Mr. Imus could satisfy his critics with his apology.
Mr. Imus also found support in the publishing industry where he is highly valued by authors and publishers. The publisher of Simon & Schuster, David Rosenthal, said it would be a shame if Mr. Imus lost his job.
“I think he has been a fantastic forum for authors and for people with interesting ideas,” Mr. Rosenthal said..
The “Imus in the Morning” program is popular in New York, where it reaches about a half million listeners on the radio station WFAN. Mr. Imus is an employee of CBS, but WFAN is the only CBS station to carry the program. It is, however, syndicated on Westwood One, a company that is managed by CBS. Executives from Westwood One declined to comment.
The program has become particularly important for MSNBC, serving as that network’s regular morning program. “Imus in the Morning” has been building its audience steadily on MSNBC, threatening to overtake CNN in that time slot.
At NBC, the decision to suspend Mr. Imus was made by the management of NBC News, in consultation with the company’s corporate management, headed by Jeff Zucker.
The suspension will not begin until Monday because Mr. Imus had scheduled a telethon to benefit research into a cure for sudden infant death syndrome and neither outlet wanted to hurt that cause.
In his appearance with Mr. Sharpton, Mr. Imus offered no real defense for his statement, other than to say it was an attempt at humor that had failed miserably. “I understand there’s no excuse for it,” he told Mr. Sharpton. “I’m not pretending that there is. I wish I hadn’t said it.”
His critics say Mr. Imus has shown a pattern of racially charged remarks over the years. Some of these he tried to defend on Mr. Sharpton’s program, saying they had been misinterpreted or were satirical.
Mr. Sharpton asked if the newspaper columnist Clarence Page had once gotten Mr. Imus to pledge not to do any more racial humor. Mr. Imus said he had.
“Do you repent once a decade?” Mr. Sharpton asked.
Mr. Imus argued that he was not at heart a racist: “I think what makes a difference in this context, and you can still call for me to be fired, that’s fine, but I think what makes a difference, a crucial difference is: What was my intent?”
Though he said he did not want people to think he was trying to excuse himself, Mr. Imus did point to charitable work he has done with children with cancer — many of them black — on his ranch in New Mexico, as well as his effort to raise money to find a cure for sickle-cell anemia.
Mr. Sharpton said intent could not be considered when actions were “over the line.” He also said that no matter how good or decent Mr. Imus might be at heart, his actions in this case had “set a precedent” that would invite other commentators to make similar comments.
He promised he would push the issue with sponsors and the F.C.C. It was not known last night how advertisers, which have included Bigelow Tea, Chrysler and the New York Stock Exchange, would respond.
The F.C.C. may not have a direct means to address the issue. It was under a mandate from Congress to act against what was deemed indecency, but there is not a similar mandate against other types of speech by a broadcaster.
Several media executives said a bigger problem for Mr. Imus may be advertisers’ response to calls for a boycott. Most such boycotts usually prove to be ineffective but Mr. Sharpton and other black leaders promised to make this one work. Mr. Sharpton also said he wanted to make sure Mr. Imus did not come out of this experience unscathed.
“I’m scathed,” Mr. Imus said. “Are you crazy? How am I unscathed by this? Don’t you think I’m humiliated?”
Mr. Sharpton replied, “You’re not as humiliated as young black women are.”
Motoko Rich and Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/bu...ia/10imus.html
Sponsors Flee From Don Imus
Stone Martindale
The threat of suspension isn't enough of a punishment for radio shock jock Don Imus for some. Forbes is reporting that corporations Staples and Procter & Gamble have announced that they are pulling their advertising from Imus' radio show following the racially insulting comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team, the Scarlett Knights.
"Because of the recent comments that were made on the program it did prompt us to take a look at our decision to advertise on the program and we have decided to stop advertising," said Staples spokesman Paul Capelli said to Forbes.
Privately held company Bigelow Tea said in a press statement that the remarks have "put our future sponsorship in jeopardy."
Troubled started for Imus when he referred to the Rutgers team as "nappy-headed hos," and compared the teams as "jigaboos and wannabes." He said he was trying to be funny."I'm not a bad person. I'm a good person, but I said a bad thing," he said. "But these young women deserve to know it was not said with malice."
Imus' morning radio talk show was suspended from CBS Radio and MSNBC, which televises it, for two weeks.
Rev. Al Sharpton would like to see Imus fired. The Rev. Jesse Jackson is also active in the push for Imus' canning. Jackson is planning a protest in Chicago outside the local offices of NBC, which owns MSNBC, the cable broadcaster of Imus' television show.
Forbes speculates that despite the maelstrom of bad publicity, the Miller Tabak equity analyst David Joyce claims in the Forbes.com article the Imus issue will have a minor impact on CBS, Imus' boss and owner of his New York radio home, WFAN.
http://people.monstersandcritics.com..._from_Don_Imus
NBC News Drops Imus Show Over Racial Remark
Bill Carter and Louise Story
NBC News dropped Don Imus yesterday, canceling his talk show on its MSNBC cable news channel a week after he made a racially disparaging remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.
The move came after several days of widening calls for Mr. Imus to lose his show both on MSNBC, which simulcasts the “Imus in the Morning” show, and CBS Radio, which originates the show.
CBS Radio, which is the main employer of Mr. Imus, said in a statement last night that it would stick by the two-week suspension of the show that it and NBC News announced earlier; the suspension begins Monday.
But CBS said it would, in the interim, “continue to speak with all concerned parties and monitor the situation closely.”
The demands that Mr. Imus’s show be canceled have grown in intensity every day since last Wednesday when he made the comments, in which he labeled the women “nappy-headed hos.”
Numerous advertisers said yesterday that they would refuse to sponsor the show in the future. Among the advertisers were General Motors, American Express, Sprint Nextel, GlaxoSmithKline, TD Ameritrade and Ditech.com.
NBC said the cancellation was effective immediately. Mr. Imus was scheduled to be the host of a telethon today and tomorrow on radio station WFAN and simulcast on MSNBC to benefit three children’s charities. The network will instead program three hours of news coverage.
Mr. Imus did not respond to telephone messages last night. But Bo Dietl, a security expert who is a frequent guest on Mr. Imus’s show, said last night that he had just talked by telephone with the host, and that his mood was “very down, very upset about what occurred with MSNBC.”
“I said to him that they didn’t even give him time to talk to the victims,” Mr. Dietl said. “He agreed with me.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who has been among the leaders of the movement to force Mr. Imus off the air, said in a telephone interview that “we have been halfway successful so far” and that he and others would continue to press CBS to join NBC in cutting ties to Mr. Imus.
Mr. Sharpton said he was organizing a rally to take place today outside CBS’s corporate headquarters on West 52nd Street in Manhattan.
“This has never been about Don Imus,” Mr. Sharpton said. “I have no idea whether he is a good man or not. This is about the use of public airwaves for bigoted, racist speech.”
Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat who is running for president, called on MSNBC and CBS Radio to disassociate themselves from Mr. Imus, and said that he would never go on the show again. He said he had appeared once, more than two years ago.
“He didn’t just cross the line,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with ABC News. “He fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two young daughters are having to deal with today in America.”
In its statement, NBC News said the decision “comes as a result of an ongoing review process, which initially included the announcement of a suspension.”
“It also takes into account many conversations with our own employees.”
The statement went on: “What matters to us most is that the men and women of NBC Universal have confidence in the values we have set for this company. This is the only decision that makes that possible.”
NBC also apologized again to the Rutgers team for “the pain this incident has caused.”
NBC executives said last night that the decision had been made jointly by the NBC Universal president, Jeff Zucker, and the president of NBC News, Steve Capus.
Several NBC employees said that discussions about Mr. Imus had been going on throughout the company over the last few days and that the sentiment among the employees turned out to be a critical factor in the decision to cancel his show.
In one example of that sentiment, Al Roker, the popular weatherman for the “Today” show, wrote a commentary on that show’s Web site calling for the Imus show to be canceled.
Mr. Zucker made the point in an e-mail message he sent to NBC employees last night that conversations with employees had been a driving factor. “Over the past several days, we have had to grapple with an incredibly difficult and sensitive issue,” Mr. Zucker said in the e-mail message.
“After our announcement of the suspension of Don Imus, we have had ongoing discussions with a number of employees and employee groups within our business. The result of these discussions has been very clear. NBC Universal has a strong reputation for integrity and our employees value that integrity tremendously.
“Those conversations have led to the decision Steve Capus and I made today.”
Mr. Capus in an interview on MSNBC last night said that in his view, the comment Mr. Imus made was racist. He added that it was far from the first time Mr. Imus had made insensitive or offensive comments on his show.
“There have been any number of other comments that have been enormously hurtful to far too many people,” Mr. Capus said. “And my feeling is that there should not be a place for that on MSNBC.”
MSNBC paid a fee to CBS to simulcast the show, about $4 million a year. It was spending about $500,000 a year to produce the show for television. For that investment, it earned what it labeled a modest profit.
But the show, which has been seen on MSNBC since 1996, was helpful to NBC in other ways. It provided a forum and promotional platform for many NBC News personalities.
The show is of far more value to CBS Radio, and its flagship station, WFAN, which, in addition to the rights fees from NBC, get nearly $20 million in advertising and syndication revenue; the show’s individual radio affiliates, collectively, earn another $20 million in revenue, according to people apprised of the show’s finances. The show is also widely syndicated by Westwood One, which is managed by CBS.
But NBC executives, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters, said that the program had only minimal impact on MSNBC’s budget.
In an interview on MSNBC last night, Mr. Capus said advertising money was not a determining factor.
“What price do you put on your reputation?” Mr. Capus said. “And the reputation of the news division means more to me than advertising dollars. Because if you lose your reputation, you lose everything.”
CBS executives, including the chairman, Leslie Moonves, continued to hold meetings yesterday with groups protesting Mr. Imus’s remark. Among these was the National Association of Black Journalists, which was one of the first groups to demand the cancellation of his show.
Mr. Imus also held a meeting with CBS executives yesterday, according to one executive who was informed of the meeting. CBS put off any further action beyond the suspension, the executive said, in part because Mr. Imus had asked for time to meet with members of the Rutgers team. He was tentatively scheduled to hold that meeting some time today.
At an afternoon rally on the Rutgers campus, students chanted anti-Imus slogans and waved protest signs. State Senator Nia H. Gill of New Jersey, who earned a law degree from Rutgers, called on the college to boycott companies that advertise on the show and said she would introduce a measure in the Legislature calling for New Jersey to stop buying products from companies that advertise with him.
The controversy helped push the ratings of “Imus in the Morning” on MSNBC to their highest level in months. On Tuesday, 624,000 people tuned in, a 50 percent increase from a week ago, according to estimates from Nielsen Media Research. An additional 1.6 million people typically listen to the program on the radio, according to Arbitron.
Starting this week, large advertisers began telling MSNBC and CBS not to broadcast their ads during “Imus in the Morning.” The companies, like Procter & Gamble and Staples, said they were dismayed that their brands had been associated with Mr. Imus’s offensive remark.
“Those comments, they’re just not consistent with our values, and we’re not going to be a part of it,” said Stephen Dupont, a spokesman for Ditech.com, a home loan company, which asked MSNBC on Monday to remove its ads from the show.
Although advertisers have been aware that the program often veered into politically incorrect territory and beyond, “this kind of woke a lot of people to the dark side of Imus,” said Fran Kelly, chief executive of Arnold Worldwide, an advertising agency. “He’s got every right to be on the air and say what he wants to say, but advertisers have every right to vote with their dollars.”
Jacques Steinberg contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/bu...ismiss.html?hp
This Time, the Shock Jock’s Sidekick Couldn’t Shield the Boss
Jacques Steinberg
Just before Don Imus infamously referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team on his radio show on April 4 as “nappy-headed hos,” another voice could be heard describing them as “some hard-core hos.”
That voice belonged to Bernard McGuirk, the producer and booker on “Imus in the Morning” for more than two decades, who does double duty on the air as one of a half-dozen supporting cast members. Their task — and Mr. McGuirk’s charge in particular — is often to give their boss some illusion of deniability or distance. Only then can they express what he might want to say about blacks, Jews, gays or women but perhaps feels he can’t, given his stature as an interviewer of the famous and important.
Among the many striking aspects of this particular instance is that it represented a rare, though hardly unprecedented, occasion in which Mr. Imus took Mr. McGuirk’s bait and allowed himself to wade into deep trouble alongside his producer, instead of watching safely from the shoreline. Last night, the lingering outrage over Mr. Imus’s comment resulted in Mr. Imus’s losing his television outlet; MSNBC, which simulcasts his program, announced that it was dropping it. CBS Radio, his primary employer, has yet to announce any plans to follow suit.
“Sometimes when you’re trying to be funny in the way we’re trying to be funny, you go too far,” Larry Kenney, whose spot-on imitations of the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, among others, have been an “Imus” staple for more than three decades, said earlier yesterday, before the MSNBC announcement. “I’m not saying Imus did that this time. I’m saying overall that’s what happens when you do this kind of humor,” Mr. Kenney said.
Mr. McGuirk, for example, periodically fashions an oversize FedEx envelope into a cone on his head to do a profane caricature of Cardinal Edward M. Egan of New York. Using a high-pitched Irish brogue (the same voice Mr. McGuirk long used to lampoon Cardinal John O’Connor, before his death), the producer-as-cardinal said on the March 16 installment of the show that “the only thing Hillary Clinton has in common with the late great President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, God rest his soul, is that they both enjoyed extramarital affairs with women.”
A former altar boy who is the son of Irish immigrants, Mr. McGuirk, who is in his mid-40s and writes his own material, also had his Cardinal Egan make homosexual slurs about Anderson Cooper and describe Mr. Imus’s wife as having multiple sexual partners in her husband’s absence. Mr. Imus, watching from alongside Mr. McGuirk onstage in Boston, where the show was being broadcast live, could be seen laughing but said nothing in response.
As he always does, Mr. McGuirk’s cardinal ended his homily: “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,” he said, “it is Imus on life support we want the most.” The other players, including Charles McCord, Mr. Imus’s news reader, responded in unison, “Lord, hear our prayer.”
Similarly Rob Bartlett, another impressionist who often appears on the show (and who has appeared on Broadway) visited on Dec. 4 to do one of his regular characters: Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, only reimagined as a belligerent illiterate evocative of Jose Jimenez, the Spanish-accented simpleton from the old “Steve Allen Show.”
On Dec. 4 Mr. Bartlett as Mr. Gonzalez lamented the intransigence of President Bush, whom he addressed as “el jefe,” on a host of issues, saying, “He don’t listen to nothing from nobody,” before adding, “I’m talking Helen Keller time here.”
Neither CBS Radio nor MSNBC has singled out anyone else for his role in the back-and-forth about Rutgers, for which Mr. Imus has apologized repeatedly in recent days. Whether Mr. McGuirk or any other Imus employee is to be punished has yet to be determined. That said, the entire cast will effectively be serving a two-week suspension on radio alongside the host, beginning Monday. Some people have continued to say that the penalty is not severe enough. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois told ABC News yesterday that Mr. Imus should be fired.
CBS Radio said late yesterday afternoon that Mr. Imus, who earns an estimated $10 million annually, will not be paid during his suspension. Still unresolved, at least as of late afternoon yesterday, was whether anyone else on the Imus staff would lose his pay or what would replace the show in its absence.
For the most part the Imus supporting cast is a group of middle-aged white men, all of whom do some comedy writing or performing on the show. Sometimes their fingerprints are little seen. For example Mr. McCord, who has served as Mr. Imus’s straight man (and often straitjacket) for more than three decades, ghost-writes Mr. Kenney’s outrageous monologues as Mr. Falwell and Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Kenney said.
On Feb. 26, for example, the fake Mr. Falwell said of the N.B.A. All-Star weekend, “Congratulations to Commissioner David Stern for staging a, well, basically a race riot — 403 arrests, brother Don, over half for prostitution. Whores, Brother Imus. Scarlet sisters.”
But if anyone is to make a racial crack, or an unflattering reference to Jews, it is often Mr. McGuirk, sometimes in the guise of C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, who is black, or often in his own voice. He has, for example, been known to refer to the New York Knicks as chest-bumping pimps.
Mr. McGuirk did not respond to a message left yesterday with his assistant in the Imus office. But in an interview with The New York Times in May 2000 he defended the breadth of the show’s humor, even if some blacks in particular might be offended in the process.
“It’s meant to be descriptive, not pejorative,” he said . “If the N.B.A. were peopled by a bunch of Romanians, we’d be making fun of Romanians. To not satirize someone just because of their race, I think that would be patronizing and racist in itself.”
“The bottom line is, I’m not a bigot,” he said in 2000, before adding that he had “lived amongst blacks all my life,” having grown up in the James Monroe Houses in the South Bronx. Mr. McGuirk also said that the co-op in Long Beach, N.Y., where he later lived had a directory in the lobby that “read like Schindler’s list, for crying out loud.”
“Yes, I arrive at the studio at 5 a.m. each day, but before I do, on my way out I shine my lawn jockeys, and then I stop at the cemetery and knock over Jewish tombstones,” he said. “Oh please.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/arts/12imus.html
CBS Drops Imus Radio Show Over Racial Remark
Bill Carter and Jacques Steinberg
CBS brought the tumultuous weeklong crisis over racially insensitive remarks by the radio host Don Imus to an end late this afternoon when it canceled the “Imus in the Morning” program, effective immediately.
The move came one day after MSNBC, which has simulcast Mr. Imus’s radio program for the past 10 years, removed the show from the cable network’s morning lineup. The two moves together mean that Mr. Imus, who has been broadcasting his program for more than 30 years, no longer has a home on either national radio or television.
Mr. Imus received the news in a telephone call to his home. Many of his listeners learned of it during the afternoon radio show “Mike and the Mad Dog,” which announced it on WFAN, the same New York station owned by CBS that carried Mr. Imus’s program.
The CBS chairman, Leslie Moonves, held a meeting this afternoon with the Rev. Al Sharpton, one of the leaders in what became a national movement to have Mr. Imus removed from the air in the wake of comments in which he disparaged members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. On his program of April 4, Mr. Imus referred to the women on the team as “nappy-headed hos.”
Both CBS and MSNBC had been under pressure from black leaders, women’s groups and advertisers, many of which said they intended to pull their commercials from Mr. Imus’s program.
In a statement, Mr. Moonves said, “Those who have spoken with us the last few days represent people of goodwill from all segments of our society — all races, economic groups, men and women alike. In our meetings with concerned groups, there has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their way in this society.”
He added, “That consideration has weighed most heavily on our minds as we made our decision, as have the many e-mails, phone calls and personal discussions we have had with our colleagues across the CBS Corporation and our many other constituencies.”
The CBS decision came on the same day that Mr. Imus was scheduled to journey to New Brunswick, N.J., to meet with the Rutgers team to apologize in person for his remarks, which he had acknowledged in a number of public apologies were inexcusable.
But whatever the outcome of that meeting, it would have no bearing on Mr. Imus’s fate in the end. Neither of his employers was willing to wait to see if the meeting produced anything like a rapprochement.
Both CBS and NBC originally announced a two-week suspension for Mr. Imus that was to have commenced Monday, but the protests against the host had only increased as the week went on. These were spurred first by a news conference by the Rutgers team and then by revelations of previous episodes when Mr. Imus and his supporting cast had engaged in racially charged language.
NBC executives said the discomfort of its staff members and concerns about its reputation had driven the decision to cut ties with Mr. Imus. But that network was only paying a license fee to carry the show. CBS Radio and its flagship station WFAN produced the show and contracted with Mr. Imus to be the star.
CBS also manages Westwood One, the syndicator that has sold the Imus show to other stations around the country. Mr. Imus, who is 66, was among the most recognizable voices on radio and commanded a salary estimated at $10 million a year
The firing of Mr. Imus came on a surreal day, one that served as a reminder not only of the millions of dollars he has raised for children’s charities over nearly two decades, but of the millions of dollars in future donations that may been lost as a result of his ill-considered remarks.
For four and a half hours this morning, he turned his radio program into a live fund-raiser for three charities — two benefiting children with cancer, and the other for families that have lost babies to sudden infant death syndrome — an endeavor he has undertaken each of the last 18 years.
Among the guests were children and parents who had been the beneficiaries of his efforts — particularly the Imus Cattle Ranch for Kids with Cancer, a program that the host founded on his New Mexico ranch along with his wife, Deirdre.
“It was an honor to be at your son’s funeral,” he said to one woman, whose cancer-stricken son had been a guest at what is essentially a Western-themed camp for sick children.
Throughout the broadcast, though, Mr. Imus continually referred to the perilous predicament he was in, which had already forced the decision announced by MSNBC the previous evening to cancel its simulcast of his radio program, effective immediately.
He strongly suggested, for example, that he believed his long career on terrestrial radio, at least, was drawing to a close, which gave the broadcast something of a funereal atmosphere.
“This may or not be our final radiothon,” he said, just before 6 a.m. “There’s no way to know, anything. But let’s say for sake of being safe that it is.”
“Ordinarily, we’d like to raise, say, around $3 million,” he said. “But today our goal is around $100 million.”
At several points, he lashed out at the “hypocrisy” of the news coverage of the fallout from his remarks and “the lack of support from people like Harold Ford,” the former Tennessee congressman who is black and whom the talk show host had touted repeatedly throughout his recent, failed bid for a Senate seat.
He also expressed bitterness that MSNBC had “pulled the plug” on televising his program less than 12 hours before the fund-raiser was to begin. “They got their pound of flesh and made their decision,” he said.
And yet, Mr. Imus also emphasized that, ultimately, he alone was to blame for his predicament.
“I said a stupid, idiotic thing that hurt these kids,” he said of the Rutgers players. “If I hadn’t have said it, we wouldn’t be here. So let’s stop whining about it.”
With Mr. Imus now officially gone from their lineup CBS Radio and WFAN are under pressure to find someone to replace him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/bu...hp&oref=slogin
Trash Talk Radio
Gwen Ifill
LET’S say a word about the girls. The young women with the musical names. Kia and Epiphanny and Matee and Essence. Katie and Dee Dee and Rashidat and Myia and Brittany and Heather.
The Scarlet Knights of Rutgers University had an improbable season, dropping four of their first seven games, yet ending up in the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball championship game. None of them were seniors. Five were freshmen.
In the end, they were stopped only by Tennessee’s Lady Vols, who clinched their seventh national championship by ending Rutgers’ Cinderella run last week, 59-46. That’s the kind of story we love, right? A bunch of teenagers from Newark, Cincinnati, Brooklyn and, yes, Ogden, Utah, defying expectations. It’s what explodes so many March Madness office pools.
But not, apparently, for the girls. For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded “nappy-headed ho’s” — a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The “joke” — as delivered and later recanted — by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.
The serial apologies of Mr. Imus, who was suspended yesterday by both NBC News and CBS Radio for his remarks, have failed another test. The sincerity seems forced and suspect because he’s done some version of this several times before.
I know, because he apparently did it to me.
I was covering the White House for this newspaper in 1993, when Mr. Imus’s producer began calling to invite me on his radio program. I didn’t return his calls. I had my hands plenty full covering Bill Clinton.
Soon enough, the phone calls stopped. Then quizzical colleagues began asking me why Don Imus seemed to have a problem with me. I had no idea what they were talking about because I never listened to the program.
It was not until five years later, when Mr. Imus and I were both working under the NBC News umbrella — his show was being simulcast on MSNBC; I was a Capitol Hill correspondent for the network — that I discovered why people were asking those questions. It took Lars-Erik Nelson, a columnist for The New York Daily News, to finally explain what no one else had wanted to repeat.
“Isn’t The Times wonderful,” Mr. Nelson quoted Mr. Imus as saying on the radio. “It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House.”
I was taken aback but not outraged. I’d certainly been called worse and indeed jumped at the chance to use the old insult to explain to my NBC bosses why I did not want to appear on the Imus show.
I haven’t talked about this much. I’m a big girl. I have a platform. I have a voice. I’ve been working in journalism long enough that there is little danger that a radio D.J.’s juvenile slap will define or scar me. Yesterday, he began telling people he never actually called me a cleaning lady. Whatever. This is not about me.
It is about the Rutgers Scarlet Knights. That game had to be the biggest moment of their lives, and the outcome the biggest disappointment. They are not old enough, or established enough, to have built up the sort of carapace many women I know — black women in particular — develop to guard themselves against casual insult.
Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus’s program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don’t know any black journalists who will. To his credit, Mr. Imus told the Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday he realizes that, this time, he went way too far.
Yes, he did. Every time a young black girl shyly approaches me for an autograph or writes or calls or stops me on the street to ask how she can become a journalist, I feel an enormous responsibility. It’s more than simply being a role model. I know I have to be a voice for them as well.
So here’s what this voice has to say for people who cannot grasp the notion of picking on people their own size: This country will only flourish once we consistently learn to applaud and encourage the young people who have to work harder just to achieve balance on the unequal playing field.
Let’s see if we can manage to build them up and reward them, rather than opting for the cheapest, easiest, most despicable shots.
Gwen Ifill is a senior correspondent for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” and the moderator of “Washington Week.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/opinion/10ifill.html
On breathing tube and facing long recovery
N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine Crashed On Way To Don Imus, Rutgers Team Meeting
The duration and distance were short, but in those dizzying seconds and feet, Gov. Jon Corzine suffered injuries serious enough to land him in intensive care with a breathing tube down his throat and a doctor declaring him lucky to be alive.
The 60-year-old governor underwent about two hours of surgery last night to repair multiple broken bones, including 12 ribs and a femur that protruded through the skin of his thigh, following a car accident on the Garden State Parkway in Galloway Township.
State Police this morning said they are still seeking the driver of a red pickup truck believed to have caused the accident.
With two of his adult children by his bedside, Corzine, sedated and on intravenous painkillers, remains in intensive care in Cooper University Hospital in Camden. He required seven pints of blood, officials said, and is using a breathing tube to ease his respiration with the broken ribs, and a broken breastbone.
The governor also suffered a broken collarbone and lower back bone and a flap-like cut on his skull, which a plastic surgeon stitched back together.
Corzine spokesman Anthony Coley said the governor did not appear to have suffered brain or spinal cord damage.
Robert Ostrum, chief of orthopedic trauma surgery at the hospital, said the governor will need more surgeries, probably tomorrow and Monday, because of the femur fracture that pushed the bone through the skin of his leg.
Doctors inserted a metal rod in Corzine's bone and fastened it in place with screws. But they did not put a cast on his leg or close the wound. For now the leg is wrapped in a bandage because the doctors will have to surgically cleanse the wound to prevent infection from setting in.
"He has responded well, but he does have significant injuries," Ostrum said last night, also describing the governor's ailments as "multi-system injuries." The doctor said Corzine faces months of physical therapy.
Responding to a reporter who asked whether the governor was fortunate to be alive, the doctor was terse and certain.
"Yes," he said.
Corzine aides said two of the governor's children, Jennifer and Jeffrey, both of New York, were with him. A third child, Joshua, lives in California, and his arrangements were not immediately known.
The aides would not confirm whether Corzine's girlfriend Sharon Elghanayan had arrived at the hospital.
In a scant moment of levity during a press conference last evening, Ostrum said the rod, or "nail," placed in Corzine's leg comes in three lengths, but even the largest was not long enough for the governor's limb.
"I found out Governor Corzine has very long legs," the doctor joked. "I used the longest nail I had, and it ran the length of the thighbone, and we placed screws above and below."
Aides to the governor said they are planning another news conference at the hospital later this morning.
The governor was injured yesterday when the SUV carrying him from Atlantic City to the governor's mansion swerved and bounced off another vehicle on the Garden State Parkway and then slammed into a guardrail, officials said.
The state trooper driving the governor and a Corzine aide also were injured in the accident, which occurred shortly after 6 p.m. in Galloway Township.
A police helicopter flew Corzine from the crash scene to the hospital. After his surgery, the governor was transferred just before midnight to the intensive care unit in critical but stable condition, hospital officials said.
Ostrum predicted the governor will need at least two more surgeries, plus three to six months of rehabilitation.
"He won't lose his leg; he will need extensive physical therapy," he said.
Senate President Richard Codey (D-Essex) assumed the duties of acting governor last night.
The crash occurred as Corzine's two-car motorcade was heading north to Princeton after a long day of travel that included appearances in Pennsylvania, Bergen County and South Jersey.
Corzine was sitting in the front passenger seat of the black Chevy Tahoe, alongside his driver, Trooper Robert Rasinski, according to New Jersey State Police Superintendent Rick Fuentes. In the back sat Samantha Gordon, an aide who typically accompanies Corzine when he travels beyond the Statehouse.
It was not immediately clear if the governor or the others were wearing seat belts.
"The State Police will be addressing that in their investigation," Coley said.
The motorcade was headed north in the left lane just past mile marker 44 when a red pickup truck entered the road from the shoulder and crossed into the path of a white Dodge Ram truck, police said.
The Dodge then swerved in front of the governor's SUV, colliding with the Tahoe and sending it careening onto the highway median and into the metal guardrail, police said.
Jim Freund, a second lieutenant with the Great Bay Regional Volunteer EMS, arrived to see the governor's SUV teetering on the twisted guardrail and medical technicians removing Corzine on a backboard.
"He was conscious, but he was moaning," Freund said.
Rescue personnel then loaded Corzine into an ambulance that shuttled him about 100 yards north on the roadway to where two State Police helicopters were waiting.
Neither Rasinski, 34, nor Gordon, 25, was seriously injured, but they were taken to Cooper University Hospital for evaluation, officials said. Fuentes said the trooper had minor injuries and was resting comfortably but would remain in the hospital overnight.
The driver of the white Dodge stopped, but the pickup that police said caused the crash fled, officials said. No charges were immediately filed in the case, but troopers were reviewing Parkway cameras last night in an attempt to identify the vehicle.
"If an individual was operating a red pickup truck in that area, we hope they contact the New Jersey State Police," Capt. Al Della Fave said.
Fuentes said investigators didn't believe speed played a role in the crash.
"From our preliminary investigation, it looks as if the trooper did a tremendous job in maintaining what control he could over that vehicle, given the fact that the other vehicle swerved into his path," he said.
Corzine became the third New Jersey governor in eight years to suffer a broken leg. Christie Whitman fractured a leg skiing in the Alps in 1999. Three years later, her successor, James E. McGreevey, suffered a broken femur after falling during a jog on a Cape May beach.
Corzine, an Illinois native and Democrat who made millions on Wall Street before winning a U.S. Senate seat in 2000, became the state's 54th governor last year. Since taking office he has worked out daily, though he frequently complains he'd like to exercise even more.
On days when his schedule requires him to be in several areas of the state, Corzine typically relies on a State Police helicopter. But bad weather yesterday forced him to travel by car, aides said.
At the time of the accident, it was not raining and the pavement was dry, officials said.
The motorcade left the governor's mansion, Drumthwacket, in the morning for Pottstown, Pa., where Corzine attended services for FBI Special Agent Barry Lee Bush, a New Jersey-based agent who died during an attempted bank robbery in Readington Township last week.
The governor then returned to northern New Jersey, joining Bergen County Democratic Organization chairman Joseph Ferriero for a news conference in Hackensack. The afternoon was spent in Atlantic City, where Corzine participated in a forum on property tax rebates for renters and spoke to the New Jersey Conference of Mayors at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort.
He made his last appearance of the day just after 5 p.m. on the Pinky Kravitz show on WOND 1400 AM radio.
The accident slowed traffic as troopers closed one lane of the northbound Parkway for about four miles.
"I saw tons of smoke coming from the bottom of the vehicle," said Mark Fishman of Rockaway, who with his wife was driving home from Atlantic City around 6 p.m. "It had to have happened 15 to 20 seconds before we got there."
Corzine had been en route to Drumthwacket to moderate a meeting between radio shock jock Don Imus and members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Deputy chief of staff Jeannine LaRue took his place instead.
He was scheduled to leave tomorrow on an official trade mission to Israel, a trip that now seems unlikely.
As Corzine underwent surgery, Codey, the acting governor, said: "On behalf of the citizens of New Jersey, I want to wish him a speedy recovery."
http://www.amny.com/news/local/wire/...siness-utility
A Photo Trove, a Mounting Challenge
Katie Hafner
In some sense, the iconic photograph of Rosa Parks recreating her quiet act of rebellion on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., belongs to every American. But as a practical matter, it belongs to Bill Gates.
Anyone wanting to use that image in a book or on a Web site must first license it from Corbis, a corporation founded and owned by Mr. Gates, who is better known for starting Microsoft. The photo is among the 11 million prints and negatives in the legendary Bettmann archive, which Corbis bought in 1995.
Since that first purchase, Corbis has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring image collections and other companies, hired more than 1,000 people and set up two dozen offices worldwide. Although Corbis says it brings in some $250 million a year in sales, it has yet to turn a profit.
Now the company is shuffling its top executives as it takes on new challenges, building up a business in rights management and plotting its response to the rise of low-cost online photo services that threaten to undermine its lucrative stock photo sales.
The company plans to announce Tuesday that Gary Shenk, the president, is being made chief executive as well. Mr. Shenk, 36, is an expert in rights licensing who has risen rapidly through the Corbis ranks since he was hired in 2003 from Universal Studios, where he started a small licensing unit.
Steve Davis, 49, the departing chief executive, will continue as a senior adviser after 10 years of running the company.
The move into rights clearance, which involves sorting out the questions of who owns what material and how much they should be paid for its use, is a departure from the original vision for the company.
Mr. Gates started Corbis in 1989 with the idea that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork — interspersing, say, Cecil Stoughton’s shot of John F. Kennedy Jr. playing under the desk in the Oval Office with photos of their own families at play.
That is not how things have worked out. But meanwhile Corbis has built up a formidable stash of historical photos, including those in the Bettmann Archive. In 1999, Corbis acquired the licensing rights to the Sygma collection in France, and two years ago it did the same with a German stock image company called Zefa. It licenses those images for an average of about $250 apiece.
Corbis also owns digital reproduction rights for art from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London.
In all, Corbis represents or owns the rights to more than 100 million images, including some of the most famous photographs ever — Arthur Sasse’s photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out and Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate. And Corbis handles the licensing of millions of other images on behalf of thousands of photographers.
The archival photos bring in about half of Corbis’s sales, but the company also has a stable of professional photographers who generate stock photos for advertising and media clients — images of children on playgrounds, people sitting in business meetings and men in khakis swinging golf clubs.
Over the past few years, Corbis has moved beyond newspaper and magazine clients to pursue advertising and graphic design agencies, as well as corporate marketing departments, which are turning increasingly to high-quality stock photography rather than doing their own expensive photo shoots.
Those customers are also buying from Corbis’s growing library of 30,000 short video clips — mostly generic scenes of, say, people shopping or running down the beach.
What Corbis did not foresee was the rise of so-called microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. These sites take advantage of the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, or turning to the online masses for free or low-cost submissions. Thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers armed with high-quality digital cameras and a copy of Photoshop contribute photographs to microstock sites, which often charge $1 to $5 an image.
Although the microstock business still represents a small fraction of the $2 billion market for stock photos, analysts say it is possible that low micropayment prices could take business away from the higher-priced images Corbis relies on for the bulk of its revenues.
“Think about how visual the world is,” said Barbara Coffey, a senior research analyst at Kaufman Brothers in New York who follows the stock photography market. “We have pictures on our cellphones. If I can get a reasonably clear picture and the rights are cleared and I pay $2 for it, then why would I pay Corbis $200?”
The rise of the microstock companies has been of particular concern to Corbis. For all its new lines of business, the company still gets some 88 percent of its revenues from image licenses, yet commands only about 11 percent of that market. Getty Images dominates the market with a 40 percent share.
Getty, which has grown quickly since its start in 1995 with the backing of its wealthy co-founder, Mark Getty, has a foothold in microstock thanks to iStockPhoto, which it bought last year for $50 million.
Mr. Shenk said Corbis would announce its plans for the microstock business sometime this quarter. As for the question of how a high-end company enters that business without cannibalizing its more expensive products, Mr. Shenk said the idea was to find a new kind of customer, people who would never envision buying pictures from a Corbis or Getty.
In that vein, Mr. Shenk said Corbis would make its service as easy to use as the iTunes store of Apple and hinted that Corbis would also be following the crowdsourcing model.
“More interesting and innovative things are happening on the pages of Flickr these days than on Corbis and Getty,” said Mr. Shenk, referring to the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo. “If we can use this type of opportunity to find the next great group of Corbis photographers, that also makes it a great opportunity for us.”
Corbis is also betting heavily on its Creative Resources division, which includes rights services and recorded 44 percent growth in revenue last year, to $30.1 million.
Mr. Shenk, who will take over from Mr. Davis at the end of June, is most likely the biggest reason for that growth. When Mr. Shenk left Universal for Corbis in 2003, he took five people and an impressive Rolodex with him. Now nearly 30 Corbis employees work in rights clearance, in offices in Los Angeles, New York, Europe and Asia.
Mr. Shenk, a Hollywood veteran who is an expert in what he calls “new ways to sell media,” said he believed Corbis was offering something unique in building a worldwide network of rights experts. The business of rights clearance, he said, is often a matter of knowing whom to call, and the idea is to make Corbis the first place that comes to mind when, say, an advertising agency is trying to clear the rights to use an image, video clip, or song.
Such was the case when the band U2 made its most recent video, for “Window in the Skies,” which braided together some 100 clips of old stars like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, synched to the new song’s music and lyrics. Corbis helped the band’s production company negotiate a thicket of publicity rights.
Roughly one-third of Corbis’s 1,100 employees are in downtown Seattle, in an old bank building well suited to the company’s hip self-image. The vast, open, two-story space has retained several enormous vaults that once held gold bars and now serve as photocopy and office supply rooms. Conference rooms are named after famous photographers, and copies of their work cover many of the walls.
The Corbis photographs themselves are not stored in Seattle, except digitally on the computers there. And those digital images constitute only a small fraction of Corbis’s holdings. Of the 50 million items in the Sygma collection, just 800,000 have been digitized.
The prints and negatives from Otto L. Bettmann’s archive, as well as those from a few smaller collections, are kept 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania. In February, Corbis announced that it would be storing the Sygma collection in a preservation facility near Paris.
As ventures go, Corbis represents a small investment for Mr. Gates. He pays for large expenditures, and the company uses its revenues to cover smaller projects within the firm.
Mr. Gates’s involvement in the company is minimal. He spends only two to three hours each month meeting with Corbis management. Yet it is clear that he makes the big decisions. He has no interest, for example, in treating the undigitized portions of the image collections like one of his charities by, say, donating them to a public entity.
Despite the hands-off approach, Mr. Gates is apparently never far from the minds of Corbis employees. Mr. Shenk is in the process of relocating to Seattle from Los Angeles, and his sparsely decorated office in Seattle is evidence of the commuter life he has been leading. The only work of art in evidence one recent afternoon was on Mr. Shenk’s whiteboard, where a colleague had drawn the unmistakable likeness of Mr. Gates, peering out from behind his glasses.
“Keep up the good work, Shenk,” Mr. Gates says. “Or I’ll kill you.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/bu.../10corbis.html
Judge Gives Intel More Time to Find Missing e-Mail
Ben Ames
A court has granted Intel Corp. seven extra days to explain to a judge why it lost e-mail records that could provide proof that the chip maker used anticompetitive practices as alleged by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).
Intel has until April 17 to give the court an accounting of its document preservation problems and to propose a better solution for archiving future records, according to an order from Vincent Poppiti, the special master hearing negotiations of the case in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware.
A judge agreed in December to enforce AMD's request to prepare for an April 2009 trial by seeing Intel records that could determine whether Intel used its overwhelming market share in the semiconductor industry to force PC vendors to use only its processors.
That process hit a snag when Intel said in March it had accidentally deleted many of those records, including e-mail written by its Chairman Craig Barrett and CEO Paul Ottelini. The problem happened because the company failed to instruct certain employees to keep records of their own e-mail, other employees assumed the IT department would do that task for them, and meanwhile the company's IT system was automatically deleting most e-mail after a certain amount of time, Intel told a judge.
Intel and AMD had originally agreed to a deadline of April 10 to see a full assessment of the lost data and discuss ways to restore some of it, according to a transcript of a March 7 hearing before Poppiti. But the court took so much time to issue its formal demand that part of the month had already passed, Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said in an e-mail statement on Monday.
"It took more than a week to draft the order from the special master so the deadline is now April 17th," he said. The delay occurred because AMD and Intel were working on the order.
Despite the extension, the basic facts of the case remain the same, with AMD continuing its search for evidence that Intel broke antitrust laws, said AMD spokesman Michael Silverman in an e-mail. That challenge will be much more formidable without access to Intel's records.
"Although Intel has agreed to restore all data captured in the thousands of backup tapes it made and preserved, no one can say with any degree of confidence that this will put Humpty-Dumpty back together again," AMD said in a March 5 court statement.
http://www.itworld.com/Man/2699/070409judgeintel/
A.M.D. Plans to Cut Back on Spending and Hiring
Damon Darlin
Advanced Micro Devices, which makes computer processors, said yesterday that a sharp decline in revenue was prompting it to make cutbacks in hiring and spending in order to reduce operating costs.
A.M.D. surprised Wall Street analysts yesterday by announcing that it expected to report revenue in the first quarter of $1.23 billion, far below what analysts had forecast. In making the revision, A.M.D. cited lower selling prices for its computer processors and “significantly lower unit sales.”
The announcement raised questions of whether the slowdown was a result of A.M.D.’s battles for market share with the industry leader, Intel, or whether it was an early signal of a slowdown of sales of PCs and servers for corporate data centers.
A.M.D. had said in January that it expected to report revenue of about $1.67 billion in the first quarter, but in March it warned analysts that revenue would be lower. The consensus among Wall Street analysts was $1.53 billion. The company’s latest projection is 20 percent below that.
“It’s a big drop,” an analyst with A. G. Edwards, David Wong, said, “But I don’t think it necessarily reflects on the end market.”
Other analysts also saw no unexpected slowdown in consumer PCs sales, although sales of computer equipment to corporations have continued to be weak.
It might suggest, Mr. Wong said, that A.M.D. was losing market share to Intel.
A.M.D. had gained market share last year, garnering as much as 25 percent at the end of 2006. But as it was doing so, its average selling price fell to $75 at the end of the year from $99 at the beginning. Intel’s average selling price fell, but at a far lower rate, to $130 from $137.
Intel revamped its product line in 2006 and sold more of its higher-priced chips to makers of servers. Intel has not cut its list prices, analysts said, while A.M.D. has cut its list prices several times in the last 12 months.
Dean McCarron, who tracks the PC semiconductor market for Mercury Research of Cave Creek, Ariz., said that A.M.D.’s problem might stem from the way it shifted much of its production to large PC makers like Dell in 2006. Demand slowed from the big makers, he said, and as A.M.D. tried to move the excess inventory to other smaller makers, it discovered those customers were buying from Intel.
“Demand that existed at the beginning of the first quarter didn’t exist at the end,” Mr. McCarron said. The shift in consumer preference to notebook PCs from desktop models may have also played a role — A.M.D. is not as strong in products made for notebooks.
A.M.D.’s plans to reduce its costs suggested to analysts that the company was acknowledging that the sharp decline in prices was going to continue. A.M.D. said it would reduce 2007 capital spending by about $500 million from $2.5 billion. It said the cutback would not affect its production plans for 2007.
News of the overhaul sent A.M.D. stock up 49 cents, or 3.8 percent, to $13.35. Intel shares rose 52 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $20.10.
The revenue shortfall also had Wall Street analysts adjusting their estimates of the company’s first-quarter loss.
Mr. Wong, for example, said that the company would report a loss of about $400 million, or 77 cents a share, including an adjustment for a merger-related charge.
The company plans to announce its first-quarter financial results on April 19. Intel will announce its results next Tuesday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/te...gy/10chip.html
Content in Lockdown
An unbreakable link between media and its delivery end point is near
Tom Yager
I’m increasingly aghast at the erosion of the traditional freedom we’ve enjoyed to do whatever we please with our personal computers -- but intrigued by the science behind it.
My latest revelation came during a recent visit to AMD for a day of briefings, mostly about the Barcelona quad-core Opteron and the Torrenza direct-connect coprocessor interface. During that visit, I got the briefest of updates on ATI’s new GPU (graphics processing unit) technology. It will ship with software that plays movies on Blu-ray discs. The AMD rep spelled it out in words that would have been undiplomatic coming from me: He said that the new chips will “block unauthorized access to the frame buffer.” In short, that means an unauthorized party can’t save the contents of the display to a file on disk unless the content owner approves it.
There is a short list of parties who will be unauthorized to access your frame buffer: You. There is a long list of parties who are authorized to access your frame buffer, and that list includes Microsoft, Apple, AMD, Intel, ATI, NVidia, Sony Pictures, Paramount, HBO, CBS, Macrovision, and all other content owners and enablers that want your machine to themselves whenever you’re watching, listening to, reading, or shooting monsters with their products.
Video, audio, and software will all drive a similar road, that being a single, unmodifiable path from the original encoded, licensed source to rendering, and on to delivery (display, headphones, portable device, printer, or memory for execution of software). This bit of progress seems to have little relevance to IT until you expand the meaning of the word “content” to encompass that which you create that is consumed by human eyes and ears.
As people working the IT side of business, academia, and government, we know all too well that personal and customer information, trade secrets, and other varieties of confidential data can be intercepted using tricks similar to those that are used to swipe movies and music. IT content needs that direct path from source media to delivery, too, so that possession of encoded media -- say, a Blu-ray disc -- is critical to viewing, listening, or executing.
For example, right now there is no unbreakable way to arrange that a PDF or other sort of viewable document can’t be copied or at least stored as a snapshot of the display. The audio portion of a classified presentation can be recorded as easily as hooking an analog or digital recorder into the headphone output. HTML would be a much more viable means of rendering rich content if it could be protected. Rich document and multimedia rendering engines would know if they were talking to delivery devices that were specifically matched with physically secure equipment. If a renderer couldn’t verify that a display or headset that it trusts was the sole source of delivery, nothing would appear or be heard.
It’s easy to write off entertainment content owners and distributors as a money-grubbing cartel; for the most part, they are. But the technical work they do to protect what they own matters, even that work which we find distasteful given needless extremes of use such as pay-per-single-view. They’ve got the money to drive the science of data and content protection. If they perfect that unbreakable link between the media and the delivery end point, if there’s never another DVD image splattered all over the Internet, then IT will be able to make a promise that, to date, it couldn’t: Nobody can view or copy your data without authorization.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/...OPcurve_1.html
IBM Develops Chip - Stacking Technique
IBM said on Wednesday it will be able to make microchips faster and more energy efficient by stacking components on top of each other, a breakthrough that cuts the distance an electrical signal needs to travel.
The technique works by drilling tiny holes through a wafer of silicon and filling them with metal. Components such as memory can then be stacked on top of the main part of the chip, eliminating the need for wires stretching out to the sides.
IBM likened the method to replacing a sprawling airport parking lot with a multi-storied garage right next to the terminal. Like people walking from the garage to the terminal, electrical signals do not have to travel as far in a chip with stacked components.
``It opens up a range of applications and neat things we can do,'' said Lisa Su, head of semiconductor research at IBM.
IBM will use the method to make power management chips for wireless devices later this year, allowing them to use 40 percent less power than previous versions, Su said in an interview.
Eventually, IBM plans to incorporate the technique into full-blown processors, she said.
It is the latest achievement by International Business Machine Corp.'s semiconductor researchers, who have in recent months hit upon several breakthroughs in materials science and chip design.
``We have been working on techniques like this for the past 10 years and you never know when they are going to come to market,'' Su said. ``The scope of innovation you have to deal with is much larger. It's not just materials and atoms, but systems and how you put components together.''
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...-ibm-chip.html
Web Sites and TV Talk Shows Puncture Holes in the Cloak of Invisibility
Caryn James
Celebrity culture so hates a vacuum that reclusive geniuses have created some ideal opportunities for cons.
John Malkovich, as the real-life, perfectly named Alan Conway in the sly film “Color Me Kubrick,” brazenly insists, “I am not a recluse,” while masquerading as the secluded Stanley Kubrick in the 1990s.
A magazine headline calls Howard Hughes “Invisible Billionaire” in “The Hoax,” about how Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) convinced publishers he was collaborating on Hughes’s autobiography in the 1970s.
Beneath their gleeful frauds, though, these films reveal a serious cultural shift. Those cons probably couldn’t happen today; in a time when no public record or paparazzi snap is likely to stay hidden from snoopy Web sites, the cult of the invisible celebrity has become all but obsolete.
The best evidence of that change comes with Oprah Winfrey’s recent announcement that the brilliant, press-shy novelist Cormac McCarthy will do his first television interview on her show (sometime this spring). Telling viewers that his post-apocalyptic novel, “The Road,” would be her latest book club choice, Ms. Winfrey took a mild jab at a 2005 Vanity Fair interview with Mr. McCarthy (itself a rarity), which ran under the heading, “He doesn’t do blurbs, book tours or even Oprah.” She added, “Until now.”
Mr. McCarthy has been akin to Kubrick: not personally reclusive, yet all but hidden from public view. His “Oprah” gambit makes authors like J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, who have cultivated an aura of privacy as a trademark, seem like dinosaurs in a changing culture.
That shift is happening so fast that even a movie about fame set in the ’90s seems like a period piece. In “Color Me Kubrick” Conway craftily assumes the identity of a director whose name is better known than his face and who can open doors to show business.
The idea that people will do anything to break into movies is hardly original, but this film depicts silly, star-struck behavior with such exuberance that the observation seems fresh. (This small movie’s release in theaters two weeks ago was strategically followed by the DVD days later.) The humor comes partly from Mr. Malkovich’s daffy yet controlled performance as a flamboyant gay man who, the slightest research might have revealed, was nothing like the buttoned-down, heterosexual Kubrick. Conway is an improbable figure with red nail polish, a wardrobe of bandanas and plaid jackets, and an accent that veers from vaguely British to exaggerated flat American.
But his victims are the targets of the film’s satire, because they are so starved for fame that they ignore all the signs of deception. A man who wants to be a costume designer sleeps with the fake Kubrick; a comedian who wants his help breaking into Las Vegas nightclubs (Kubrick and Las Vegas?) treats him to a seaside vacation. Willingly gullible, they deserve the bilking they get.
The ultimate victim, Stanley Kubrick, is never seen here. But the film’s tone of harmless fun is fostered by the knowledge that “Color Me Kubrick” was made by two of his longtime associates: the director, Brian W. Cook, was his assistant director, and the screenwriter, Anthony Frewin, his personal assistant.
We do see black-and-white film of a younger Howard Hughes in “The Hoax” (which opened on Friday). By the ’70s, Hughes had become so eccentrically isolated that the Irving character says, “He’s a lunatic hermit and I am the spokesman for the lunatic hermit, so the more outrageous I sound the more convincing I am.” That strategy wouldn’t go far today. (Keith Richards’s tale of snorting his father’s ashes lasted less than 24 hours before his damage-controlling denial kicked in; entire sections of Web sites are devoted to refuting falsely reported celebrity deaths, like the comedian Sinbad’s.) Yet Mr. Irving’s publishers give him a lucrative book deal on the basis of his word, some sham telegrams and a dubious handwriting analysis. Like Mr. Conway’s victims, they want to believe.
Although “The Hoax” is a larger film than “Color Me Kubrick” and Mr. Irving a more complicated figure than Mr. Conway, it is less successful because the director, Lasse Hallstrom, allows the tone to veer. Satiric at first, the movie becomes earnest about Irving’s downward spiral, and he is a thoroughly unlikable character who callously draws his betrayed wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and his loyal best friend (Alfred Molina, terrific comic relief) into his scheme.
For Irving, fame is a means to money and power. Too bad the film allows him to announce heavy-handedly how much he wants power and to let his girlfriend, Nina Van Pallandt (Julie Delpy), state the obvious when she tells him: “My greatest desire is to be an American movie star. How shallow is that?”
The desire for fame is not always so simple, as Irving’s panicked fear of failure suggests. And as the culture of celebrity evolves, the trade-offs that private people make grow more intriguing. Ms. Winfrey’s interview with Mr. McCarthy will not bring him before a studio audience, but will take place at the Santa Fe Institute, the research center in New Mexico where he has been a fellow for years. Still, his decision is a startling turn.
Mr. McCarthy has given no interview about the interview, but we know that Ms. Winfrey offers authors great respect for their work, along with a huge new readership. (Vintage Books has printed 950,000 copies of the paperback edition, enormous for a literary novel.) She often challenges her audience to read daring works. “The Road” is fraught with emotion between a father and his young son, but it also asks readers to follow them on a somber journey for survival through a decimated landscape.
And Ms. Winfrey usually makes the phone call about the book club selection to the author herself, a persuasive touch. Whatever she said to Mr. McCarthy, she has the ability to draw private authors out of the shadows, into a whole new glare of fame, into the very center of 21st-century celebrity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/movies/10hoax.html
Hollywood Evidence Raises Questions
David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner
Back in 2001, when the actress Elizabeth Hurley announced that she was pregnant by Steve Bing, a Hollywood producer, only to have him question whether he was the baby’s father, the British tabloids pounced. They branded him “Bing Laden,” and The Daily Mail of London reported that he and his Los Angeles lawyer had hired the private eye Anthony Pellicano to dig up dirt to destroy Ms. Hurley’s reputation.
But after Mr. Bing complained that the newspaper report was false, and his legal team produced a sworn declaration to that effect from Mr. Pellicano, The Daily Mail capitulated in 2003, issuing a retraction and reaching a financial settlement that Mr. Bing’s Los Angeles lawyer, Martin D. Singer, called “substantial.”
Now, however, evidence unearthed by federal investigators here shows Mr. Pellicano repeatedly talking about his work for Mr. Bing in connection with Ms. Hurley. And The Daily Mail may try to recover its costly settlement with Mr. Bing.
Julian Darrall, a lawyer for the owner of The Daily Mail, Associated Newspapers Ltd., said if Mr. Pellicano’s declaration or a sworn statement of case filed on behalf of Mr. Bing and Mr. Singer were shown to be false, the publisher “would reserve the right to take such action as appropriate in relation to the 2003 settlement.”
Mr. Singer on Wednesday insisted that Mr. Pellicano’s declaration had been accurate, that Mr. Pellicano had done no work for Mr. Bing related to Ms. Hurley and that anything he might have told anyone to the contrary had been “an absolute lie.”
Mr. Pellicano, a Hollywood fixture who stands accused of masterminding a long-running wiretapping ring on behalf of many entertainment industry clients, is in jail awaiting trial on Aug. 22. The prospect of new litigation in the English courts shows how widely the ripples of the Pellicano investigation have spread. Already, more than a dozen people (including the actor Keith Carradine) have filed lawsuits after learning from prosecutors or news reports that their telephones were tapped by Mr. Pellicano or that he had otherwise invaded their privacy. Last week a Los Angeles judge delayed proceedings in many of those suits until after the criminal trial.
In his sworn declaration, dated January 2002 but sent to lawyers for The Daily Mail a year later, Mr. Pellicano said he had “never been engaged by Mr. Bing nor his attorney Mr. Martin Singer to investigate anyone on Mr. Bing’s behalf, including Ms. Hurley.” He also denied that he had been contacted by Mr. Bing or Mr. Singer about Ms. Hurley, or that he had ever “discussed anything” about Mr. Bing or Ms. Hurley “with any member of the press including The Daily Mail at any time.”
Largely on the strength of Mr. Pellicano’s declaration, The Daily Mail settled. It published a retraction saying “there was no truth in the allegations,” and a lawyer for the paper apologized before a High Court judge.
But evidence turned up in the Los Angeles wiretapping case shows that Mr. Bing, the heir to a real estate fortune and producer of movies like “The Polar Express” and the forthcoming “Beowulf,” paid Mr. Pellicano thousands of dollars as early as 2000 and continuing at least through August 2002, four months after Ms. Hurley’s son was born. The documents do not show whether any of the money was for work related to Ms. Hurley or even if it was a payment for services.
The evidence, much of it obtained by The New York Times, also includes audio recordings from April and May 2002 in which Mr. Pellicano boasts that he has been “working for,” “consulting for” or speaking for Mr. Bing about Ms. Hurley’s pregnancy with reporters for news outlets like People magazine.
On April 30, 2002, for example, Mr. Pellicano bragged to a client that he was working for Mr. Bing on the Hurley case, “though I haven’t admitted it to anybody,” and confided that he believed he knew the true paternity of Ms. Hurley’s child. (A DNA test seven weeks later proved that Mr. Bing was the father.)
Mr. Pellicano’s lawyer, Steven F. Gruel, had no comment.
Many of the recordings in which Mr. Pellicano speaks about his work for Mr. Bing are of telephone calls between Mr. Pellicano and a lawyer for Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire investor, who was grappling with another paternity dispute: he had been paying child support for a girl who was not his daughter. As it turned out, that girl’s biological father was also Mr. Bing.
Mr. Singer said he knew of no payments by Mr. Bing to Mr. Pellicano, but said if any existed, they had nothing to do with Ms. Hurley. “Mr. Pellicano did nothing for Mr. Bing in the Hurley case,” he said. “Nothing.”
Whatever the reason for Mr. Bing’s checks to Mr. Pellicano, they were sizable. The federal evidence includes checks from Mr. Bing to Mr. Pellicano for $25,000 on June 22, 2000; for $60,000 on June 25, 2002; and for $250,000 on Aug. 5, 2002. That last check was accompanied by a handwritten note, with a one-word message: “Thanks.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/movies/12bing.html
Writers Guild President Starts the Countdown Toward Contract’s End
Michael Cieply
As his wedding neared, some 19 years ago, Patric Verrone, now president of the Writers Guild of America West, joined his bride-to-be in a ritual common to show business types. The couple formed a company, one with a clever name: Calloo Callay.
“It’s what you say when you slay the Jabberwock, which is what we were attempting to do in Hollywood,” said Mr. Verrone, referring to Lewis Carroll’s verse about a mythical monster.
Mr. Verrone will come face to face with the beast in its corporate form this July, as his union and its East Coast counterpart begin what are expected to be exceedingly difficult negotiations with the conglomerates that own the networks and studios. Whether the entertainment business continues to operate as usual over the next year will depend in no small part on how he handles the encounter.
For all their complexity, Hollywood labor talks have often boiled down to issues of leadership. This time around, Mr. Verrone — a retro-styled 47-year-old who has a background in both comedy and the law, and a taste for crisp white shirts that seem more Benchley than Bochco — has helped set a tone of wariness, if not outright anxiety, with his insistence on big solutions.
“He’s an absolute straight-shooter; he’s unafraid,” said Alan Rosenberg, the Screen Actors Guild president, whose own union faces contract talks only months after the writers. “We’re traveling the same path at the same time, and I know there’s a great deal to be afraid of.”
Since assuming the Writers Guild presidency 18 months ago, Mr. Verrone has made clear to the industry that he means to reverse trends that have weakened its traditionally strong union structure. He has replaced key members of his union’s professional staff, allied with fellow guilds and laid groundwork for a series of labor-management talks as the writers’ contract nears an end in October, followed eight months later by the industry’s agreements with the Directors Guild of America and the much larger Actors Guild.
Hollywood’s last extended shutdown occurred in 1988, when the writers began a five-month walkout over residual payments for the foreign sale of television shows, among other issues. The sides now face a potentially deeper dispute. The main areas of contention are the expansion of nonunion work by units of large media conglomerates like Viacom and News Corporation, and the way artists will be compensated for their work for the Web, mobile devices and other technologies still falling into place.
Company executives have argued that it is impossible to devise pay formulas for systems that are still in flux. “What the costs are going to be, what the revenues are going to be, we just don’t know,” said J. Nicholas Counter III, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
But Mr. Verrone is clearly intent on pinning down as much as possible now — and on avoiding the kind of arrangements (like the one regarding home video) that many in Hollywood’s creative world believe deprived them of rightful gains in the past.
“We had a spirit of ‘We’ll talk about these things every three years with the companies; if there’s a bump in the road, we’ll pave it over,’ ” Mr. Verrone said of his own union’s past approach. “But nobody was looking forward to actually going out there and repaving the road ahead.”
Mr. Verrone’s own road to guild activist went through the unlikely combination of The Harvard Lampoon and law school at Boston College. At The Lampoon, Harvard’s humor magazine, he worked alongside peers who would later populate the ranks of television’s comedy establishment. In one group photo of the Lampoon staff, Mr. Verrone occupies the front in a satin jester’s suit. The more soberly attired group behind includes Michael Reiss and Alfred Jean, who both became producers of “The Simpsons” and “The Critic” and eventually hired Mr. Verrone to write for both shows.
(When not writing, Mr. Verrone makes miniature historical figures, which he sometimes sells on eBay; his latest subject is Barack Obama.)
And his law school experience came in handy during the 1990’s on a series of animated shows at Fox, where he was employed without guild representation. Alarmed by the resulting gaps in his health and pension coverage, he helped lead a successful push to organize the Fox writers just as “Futurama,” of which he eventually became a longtime producer, was being developed. A series of guild offices followed before he won a two-year term as president in 2005.
Once he was a guild insider, Mr. Verrone said, he fully realized the union’s eroded position in the industry. In the mid-1980s, by his count, about 95 percent of Hollywood’s writing jobs in both television and major feature films were covered by the guild. That share, he maintains, has dropped to about 55 percent as the entertainment companies use nonguild divisions to produce a plethora of animated, reality and other shows.
Since 2000, Mr. Verrone said, guild-covered writer earnings have risen at less than half the rate of entertainment industry profits. “I think if they could do this business without us, they would,” Mr. Verrone said of what he saw as an increasingly chilly corporate stance toward writers, actors and directors.
A fellow union, the powerful International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, last year handed Mr. Verrone a setback when its members took over work that had been performed by writers who were striking for guild representation on “America’s Next Top Model,” on the CW network. The episode left Mr. Verrone convinced that nonunion writers could best be organized by asking for provisions that would let the guild “reach up to the mother ship” — the parent corporations — to get authority over work for the nonguild units.
But Mr. Verrone has also achieved some unexpected successes. He and his allies reached an accord between their 7,500-member union and the Writers Guild of America East, despite a history of strained relations. The increased solidarity and a new militancy among leaders like Messrs. Verrone and Rosenberg and the East Coast writers guild president Chris Albers may portend rougher tactics in the coming face-off with companies.
Yet Craig Mazin, a former board member of the West Coast guild, pointed out that Hollywood’s experiments with that more contentious approach, as when East Coast members two years ago picketed a Viacom shareholders’ meeting wearing masks in the likeness of one of its top executives, have yielded little.
“The theory behind such tactics is basically to act terroristically against the corporations that employ you,” said Mr. Mazin, who noted that CBS News writers at the center of that action have continued to work without a contract.
Whatever else might happen, Mr. Verrone said things would not become personal in the coming talks. But he remained poised for a fight. “When it comes to collective bargaining,” he said, “it seems to me we’re dealing with some of the biggest corporations in the world.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/movies/11guil.html
Film
An Artist’s Underground Flowering
Matt Zoller Seitz
It’s gratifying when an influential underground artist is profiled in an accessible, entertaining documentary. For that reason alone, Mary Jordan’s film “Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis,” whose subject is an antiestablishment director, is worth seeing — even though Ms. Jordan dices Mr. Smith’s films into snippets that don’t convey their languorous rhythms, and seems content to mythologize rather than dissect.
Mr. Smith, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1989, was a New York-based photographer, filmmaker and performer. His films were infused with stereotypically “exotic” imagery, much of it drawn from his experience as a gay man in postwar America and his childhood infatuation with old Hollywood features, particularly those starring Maria Montez, the basis for one of Mr. Smith’s favorite performers, the transvestite Mario Montez.
The Atlantis in the title refers to a Maria Montez film, “Siren of Atlantis,” which enraptured Mr. Smith and serves as a metaphor for the world he tried to conjure — one where the exotic was commonplace, sexuality was mutable, and people were free to seek happiness.
Mr. Smith influenced generations of avant-garde artists, including the filmmakers John Waters, Nick Zedd and Andy Warhol. Warhol filched key ideas from Mr. Smith’s heavily improvised, experimental films, including the “superstar” (a beautiful-grotesque parody of Hollywood glamour) and the “factory” (a bohemian studio, presided over by a director-guru). You could make a case that Mr. Smith’s omnisexual movie “Flaming Creatures” — banned in many states in the early 1960s for its profanity, nudity and Bacchanalian vibe — was the work that inspired much of Warhol’s film output. (Warhol even lured away Mario Montez to work in the Factory.)
According to the documentary, Mr. Smith thought Warhol was a hustler who reproduced the surface of his films but not their innocent, revolutionary soul. He accused the critic (and later, Anthology Film Archives founder) Jonas Mekas of exploiting “Flaming Creatures” for professional gain, redefining it as a First Amendment cause célèbre and obliterating its utopian intent.
The latter part of Mr. Smith’s career, during which he spontaneously re-edited his movies while they were unspooling, is presented as an attempt to control his art by making it ephemeral.
For all the Technicolor fecundity of Mr. Smith’s photographs, and the still splendid silliness of his movies, Ms. Jordan’s film makes Mr. Smith seem an impassioned cliché — the resentful fringe artist who sabotages his career rather than give up the right to accuse others of selling out.
Surely this was not Ms. Jordan’s intent, but the fawning approach begs for a between-the-lines reading. “Jack Smith” doesn’t merely celebrate Mr. Smith; it presents him as a visionary angel born to a world that didn’t deserve him.
Ms. Jordan lets a few subjects contradict the image of Mr. Smith as martyr, but the overall tone is worshipful verging on reductive. You come away impressed by Smith’s charisma, versatility and integrity, while also wondering if a man so abrasively self-important could have made such playful art.
JACK SMITH AND THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Mary Jordan; directors of photography, Ms. Jordan and Jon Fordham; edited by Alex Márquez; music by Joel A. Diamond, Robert Aaron, Thurston Moore and Devendra Barnhart; produced by Ms. Jordan and Kenneth Wayne Peralta. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 95 minutes. This film is not rated.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/04/1...es/11atla.html
Inside Story of a Hip-Hop Return to Glory
Jeannette Catsoulis
“Rock the Bells” is the story of one man’s labor of love to reunite the original members of the Wu-Tang Clan for a 2004 hip-hop concert in San Bernardino, Calif., and it demands neither familiarity with the music nor a hankering for rhyme. Instead Casey Suchan and Denis Henry Hennelly’s lively documentary grabs hold of the backstage drama and doesn’t let go until the last weary fan has shuffled off home.
The film’s harried hero is Chang Weisberg, an independent-music promoter who refinances his home to realize his dream of a Clan reunion. Against him are an irritable police department, thousands of frustrated fans and his notoriously unreliable headliners. As Mr. Weisberg copes with sound system failures, an overwhelmed security team and performers’ last-minute requests for per diems and “herb,” his mother and aunt wrangle an avalanche of cash in the tiny ticket booth. Meanwhile, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, a founding member of the clan who began life as Russell Jones, is holed up in his hotel room and refusing to perform.
Capturing onstage and off with equal energy — at one point only the inspired freestyling of artists like Redman and MC Supernatural stand between Mr. Weisberg and an all-out riot — “Rock the Bells” is a fascinating glimpse of a dreamer and a music culture that has always depended on dreams.
ROCK THE BELLS
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Casey Suchan and Denis Henry Hennelly; directors of photography, Jeff Bollman and Leif Johnson; music by J. Force; produced by Kurt Dalton and Henry Lowenfels; released by Seventh Art Releasing. At the Two Boots Pioneer Theater, 155 East Third Street, at Avenue A, East Village. Running time: 103 minutes. This film is not rated.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/04/1...es/11rock.html
Director Robinson Finds Family Roots in Crime Film
Bob Tourtellotte
Even by Hollywood's often wacky standards, filmmaker Todd Robinson's tale of rooting out the story for "Lonely Hearts" is a strange one, circuitously drawn from his family's history.
As Robinson met with a producer to hear ideas for movies about serial killers, he was given for reference a book that highlighted a gruesome murder story involving a man the writer-director knew well -- his own grandfather.
From that meeting sprang the crime drama "Lonely Hearts," which debuts in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, and which can be downloaded two weeks later at ClickStar.com, putting it among a wave of films testing Internet releases.
Robinson said he knew his grandfather, Elmer Robinson, was a New York detective on the case of the 1940s-era Lonely Hearts killers, but he never knew the extent to which the crimes made newspaper headlines or how tracking them affected his family.
"To be honest, I thought we were the only people on the planet who even knew about the story. I had no idea that, at the time, it was a tabloid sensation," Robinson told Reuters.
"Lonely Hearts," starring John Travolta as Elmer Robinson and James Gandolfini as his police partner, revolves around the strange case of a husband and wife (Jared Leto and Salma Hayek) who bilked single women of their money and then murdered them.
But in his movie, the filmmaker chose to focus less on the crimes and the killers than on the impact they had on others, specifically the elder Robinson and his family.
Elmer Robinson became so caught up in the investigation that he neglected his family. His wife committed suicide and he became estranged from his own son.
"As men in this culture, we tend to define ourselves by what we do, and yet what we do often has a collateral effect on the people we care about the most," Robinson said.
"This gave me the opportunity to explore my grandfather's relationship with my father and my dad's reflections on his father," he added.
Fact And Fiction
Robinson calls "Lonely Hearts" a work of fiction because it blends his grandfather's real story with elements of drama. He said much of his family's history went unspoken for years, making it difficult to uncover the truth of the tale.
But he said he tried hard to capture the real issues of loss and love that his grandfather, father and other relatives faced, and he added that no family stories were too sacred -- or secret -- to be kept from the film.
The writer and director said he got much of his insight from his mother who, because she was not directly related to Elmer Robinson, had a more objective view of his family.
"The truth of issues in my family are valid, and they are authentic in the movie," Robinson said.
"Lonely Hearts" is his first feature film, but Robinson has made several documentaries including "Amargosa," which won an Emmy, a top U.S. television award, and "Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick," about film director William Wellman.
While "Lonely Hearts" has big-name stars and top production values, the film was made on a low budget. Like some new independent films, it will be available for Web downloads via ClickStar.com nearly simultaneously with its theater release.
Similar Internet releases have raised the ire of theater owners who fear downloads may cannibalize their business, but Robinson said online releases could be good for movie fans who may not be able to get to a theater.
http://www.reuters.com/article/filmN...41268820070410
New DVDs
Dave Kehr
The Mario Bava Collection, Volume 1
For those of us who received our film education through the art houses and film societies that flourished in the last century, the name Mario Bava may not mean much. But this once-obscure Italian genre filmmaker was one of the first directors to be discovered through the emerging medium of home video, thanks to perceptive video-specific critics like Tim Lucas, who has documented Mr. Bava’s career in the pages of Video Watchdog, his handsomely produced fanzine.
Mr. Lucas is a guiding spirit behind “The Mario Bava Collection, Volume 1,” a box set from Anchor Bay Entertainment that offers five Bava features, including his first and most famous effort, “Black Sunday” (1960). The excellent prints restore Mr. Bava’s original cuts and in several cases the original Italian soundtracks for films that were routinely redubbed and re-edited by American distributors.
Movies that passed well below the critical radar when they were first released in the United States — in urban grindhouses and Southern drive-ins — are now returning in prestige editions, loaded with commentary (by Mr. Lucas) and extra features. For Mr. Bava, a modest man who died in 1980 without ever making any claims for himself or his work, the road from the grindhouse to the art house — or at least, the virtual art house of the DVD player — has turned out to be surprisingly, encouragingly short.
The son of Eugenio Bava, a cinematographer whose credits go back to Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 “Cabiria,” one of the first great epics of Italian cinema, Mario Bava was himself a successful cinematographer, with a reputation for saving troubled international co-productions, when he was invited to direct a project of his own. The result, based on a story by Nikolai Gogol and influenced by the new line of Gothic horror films being produced by Hammer in Britain, was “La Maschera del Demonio,” starring an unknown British actress, Barbara Steele, whose burning black eyes immediately made her one of the very few women to achieve stardom in horror movies. Released in the United States as “Black Sunday” by American International Pictures, it became, Mr. Lucas says in his detailed commentary, the highest grossing film in that company’s tawdry history, and a new career was born for Mr. Bava.
Taking the basic Hammer formula — which consisted of sexing up the classic Universal horror films of the early ’30s — Mr. Bava added a level of compulsive visual refinement. Complex in-depth compositions, full of varying textures and insinuating shadows highlighted by Mr. Bava’s characteristic use of focused baby spotlights, make “Black Sunday” look less like one of the functional Hammer productions than a throwback to the “calligraphic” period of Italian filmmaking. At that time masters like Alessandro Blasetti (“The Iron Crown,” 1941) created visuals of such improbable opulence and baroque styling that they teetered on the brink of mannerist decadence.
There was no teetering with Mr. Bava: his decadence was full bodied and assertive, with explicit elements of sadomasochism. With his first horror film in color, “I Tre Volte della Paura” (“The Three Faces of Fear”), an anthology film recut and retitled “Black Sabbath” by American International Pictures but presented here in its complete Italian language version, Mr. Bava introduced his most singular stylistic trope. He masked his spotlights with colored gelatin filters, projecting pools of hot, electric colors onto his sets — great washes of golden yellow, emerald green, inky blue and sanguinary puce that seem to dissolve any remaining links to reality, plunging the viewer into a claustrophobic dream world entirely of Mr. Bava’s fevered imagination.
Mr. Bava made films in most of the popular Italian genres of the era. In one busy year, 1966, he made a spaghetti western, a spy spoof, a Viking adventure (“Knives of the Avenger,” included in this set and a nice surprise) and what may be his finest supernatural film (the unfortunately titled “Kill, Baby... Kill!,” in this set as well). But he is most venerated by his fans for the series of slasher films he began in 1964 with “Sei Donne per l’Assassino” (called “Blood and Black Lace” in English). Introducing a disturbing element of voyeurism, the so-called “gialli,” or “yellow,” films (after the distinctive covers of the mystery novels published in Italy by Mondadori), present a series of stylish murders of attractive women by faceless assailants, a blunt invitation for misogynist audience identification and probably the source of their enduring appeal to anxious adolescents.
The one crime film in the Anchor Bay set, the 1963 “Ragazza che Sapeva Troppo” (“The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” but released here as “The Evil Eye”), is Mr. Bava’s first step in that direction, though it remains basically a comic thriller about an innocent American (Letícia Román) who discovers that Rome is not quite the tourist’s paradise of “Roman Holiday.” Volume 2 will probably move further into this more disreputable territory; in the meantime, there is plenty for fans to parse and analyze in this elegant little collection. ($49.98, not rated)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/mo...deo/10dvd.html
The Drive-In Without the Drive
Joyce Wadler
FOR video razzle-dazzle, it’s hard to beat the $5 million mansion of the Florida concrete multimillionaire Bill Williams, in Naples. The slickest piece of engineering in the home is most likely the 32-inch Samsung LCD screen in the master bath, which, in a Disneyesque bit of business that a wicked stepmother might appreciate, is embedded in a large mirror. If you feel like watching a movie from the tub, as Mr. Williams, a 51-year-old bachelor, often does, you turn it on; when it’s off, you see only the mirror.
Mr. Williams has a designated indoor home theater, of course, with a Yamaha projector and a 110-inch Vutec fixed screen. His grounds, including an 80-foot pool overlooking the Tiburon golf course, are wired for surround sound. His outdoor bar has a 40-inch Sony LCD screen. If this TV seems large for an outdoor bar, you should know that his is 14 feet long and covered, and is equipped with a refrigerator, freezer and two dishwashers.
For this year’s Super Bowl, Mr. Williams wowed his guests with a 16-foot outdoor inflatable screen set up beyond the pool. Partygoers could float, drink in hand, and watch the game. All wet and good, but you couldn’t have that screen up there all the time or it would ruin the view.
Now Criteria of Naples, the Florida-based firm that designed and installed Mr. Williams’s $270,000 audiovisual system, is overseeing the construction of a permanent large-screen outdoor setup, likely to cost $30,000. The original idea was a screen that could disappear into the ground, but what with concerns about water seepage, Dave Tovissi and Chris Locadia, the president and managing partner of Criteria, decided to go in another direction. Literally.
“Chris came up with the idea to make a backyard arbor, with a screen that will drop down,” Mr. Williams said. “There are speakers in the column. We’ll have bougainvillea over the top.”
“We call it Dive-In Theater,” Mr. Locadia said.
Feeling a little bored in the backyard with your pool, spa, outdoor kitchen, tennis court, fireplace and fire pit? Fear not. Outdoor video has landed. It’s been seen here and there in the last few years — a pop-up TV in the side of the hot tub, a video projection on an inflatable screen — but it’s been an outdoor novelty, the equivalent, perhaps, of Angelenos and their cellphones 15 years ago. But with such advances as weather-resistant television sets impervious to rain; good-quality low-cost video projectors and screens; and widescreen high-definition TV, as well as the general trend to move the indoors out, outdoor theater is gaining ground.
“It’s becoming more and more popular because the products are better and cheaper,” said Jeff Hoover, the president of Audio Advisors in West Palm Beach, Fla. “Instead of having to spend $10,000 or $15,000 for a projector, you can get a nice little $1,500 projector now that will make great 100-inch pictures. And now that there are large-panel TVs that are getting brighter and cheaper, people are starting to put outdoor theaters in patios that are mostly covered.
“I put a 65-inch flat-screen LCD TV in the retaining wall of a man’s pool,” he added. “It’s motorized up and down out of a weatherized enclosure. He’s got a little waterproof remote control, and he can turn on the system in his Jacuzzi or pool.”
Maureen Jenson, the editor of Home Theater magazine, also sees what she calls “a huge trend” in outdoor viewing, particularly in the area of weather-resistant equipment, which is designed to be left outdoors.
And that outdoor equipment is getting bigger. SunBrite, which claims its outdoor TVs can operate in temperatures between minus 24 and 124 degrees, will introduce a 46-inch set in May, with a manufacturer’s suggested price of $5,000. Global Outdoor Concepts, which manufactures MirageVision outdoor sets, has added a 42-inch set to its line and is planning to bring out a 47-inch one. Cal Spas, which introduced a spa with a 15-inch pop-up TV six years ago, just brought out the Cal Spa Outdoor Room. Internet-ready, it has an antiglare, antifog, 65-inch pop-up plasma TV, a fire pit and three padded weatherproof recliners. Suggested retail price: $60,000.
Inflatable screens, which formerly sold for thousands of dollars, can be purchased for much less. Gemmy Industries sells its Airblown Movie Screen for $200. Stewart Filmscreen, which does a good deal of high-end custom work, introduced a glass outdoor screen last fall. The outdoor speaker manufacturer Rockustics, which disguises its speakers as planters and coconuts and rocks (check out the 70-watt Pavarocci model), now find those speakers doing double duty for video.
Which brings up the matter of the whiz kids of the home-theater world — the integrators or, in the term used by the people at the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association, which offers training and certification in the new field, “the fourth contractor.”
Often brought in from the beginning of planning or remodeling a home, they pull together all the electrical systems, including those that control audiovisual, security and climate-control systems, and even the system that opens the drapes of your indoor theater. Then they wrap it up with that technological must-have, the touch-pad panel, perhaps in a system by AMX, perhaps in one by its archrival Crestron.
Speak to the integrators and you see a backyard future in which one might never be forced to sit in a tiresome garden and sniff a rose again: Drop-down motorized screens hidden under the eaves; lots of little speakers all over the property (because multiple speakers on low volume create less spillover noise than two big speakers on loud); tiny speakers that look like lights in the trees; speakers in the pool, so that you need not miss Barry Bonds breaking the home run record when your head dips into the water.
Robi Blumenstein, who runs MRSSI Inc., which is involved in Huntington’s disease research in New York, watches outdoor movies on an inflatable screen he sets up behind his Nantucket summer house. The Sanyo projector, for which he paid $3,150, is on the back patio. He estimates that the whole setup, which included a $5,753 Airscreen he ordered from Outdoor Movies, cost about $10,000.
“The screen is like an AeroBed, but vertical,” he said. “We got a relatively little one, 9 by 16 feet. We just put it out in the field. The thing blows up in less than 10 minutes. It’s not like a permanent home installation — we just lug the thing out, blow it up and take it down in the morning.”
The first movie he showed?
“ ‘Jaws,’ ” Mr. Blumenstein said. “Just a good New England beach movie.”
Outdoor theater setups can be done even less expensively.
Randy Fisk is the administrator of backyardtheater.com, a Web site for backyard video buffs that averaged 6,900 visitors a day last summer and has many do-it-yourselfers among its 400 members. He said that a careful shopper, buying secondhand equipment, could put together a backyard theater for as little as a few hundred dollars. Many of his members take it a step further: They make their own screens.
Kevin Kalkbrenner (screen name: Cinema BBQ), a software salesman in Shakopee, Minn., southwest of Minneapolis, is one such member. He estimates the cost of his backyard theater, which has an impressive 10-by-16-foot screen, at about $2,600. His big-ticket item was an NEC projector, for which he paid $2,000. He recycled old audio speakers for the sound system. Then he tackled the problem of the screen.
“I realized what I was really building was a giant sail,” Mr. Kalkbrenner said. “I got steel pipes from Home Depot — it was maybe $250 invested for that and two sheets of plywood for building the stand around the speakers. For the screen I have a very elastic fabric called Trapeze. I took it to my tailor, who now really hates me.” The cost of the fabric, which came from Dazian, was about $100; the tailor charged $200.
“I’m not that old — I’m in my 40’s — but I wanted to reminisce about outdoor drive-ins and that whole feeling of being outdoors,” Mr. Kalkbrenner said. “I think that’s one of the reasons people are out here, trying to achieve that feeling that you can’t articulate, a memory wrapped in an experience you had. It involves smells and popcorn, slapping a mosquito.
“I’ve got a 70-inch TV I paid $13,000 for seven years ago,” he added. “I would prefer to be outside watching, on my metal pipe screen.”
At the other end of the backyardtheater.com consumer spectrum is Jeff Kunsemiller, who goes by the screen name OrthoFunk. He is not, as his name suggests, a depressed orthodontist, but an orthodontist who plays bass guitar and is into funk music. When Mr. Kunsemiller, who is 38 and married with three young daughters, was planning his $650,000 house in suburban St. Louis, he wanted a system that would allow him to access computers, DVDs, CDs and games from any of the half dozen video screens in the house. The cost of the system, which was designed by Audio Video Concepts in Columbia, Ill., was about $120,000.
Then one day in spring, after the house was complete, he was sitting in his backyard as the trees were beginning to bud, and it occurred to him that it might be nice to have a theater outdoors. Since he already had six weather-resistant speakers around the pool and patio for his outdoor sound system, creating that theater was relatively inexpensive.
Mr. Kunsemiller bought a Sanyo projector for about $3,000. His 8-by-10-foot screen was custom made by Lawrence Fabric Structures, a St. Louis company that does awnings. It is hidden under the eaves at the back of the house when not in use and cost about $3,000. It goes up and down at the touch of a waterproof keypad. (The projector setup is not as high-tech — it’s on a rolling rack that Mr. Kunsemiller hauls back and forth from the basement.)
Should the doorbell ring when he’s out back watching the ballgame, Mr. Kunsemiller can switch to a video image of the person on the doorstep.
“Very 007,” an admiring visitor wrote in a comment left at backyardtheater.com.
There was a little trouble with the neighbors when he first started using the outdoor setup, but Mr. Kunsemiller employed the method used so successfully by other backyardtheater.com members: He invited the neighbors over to watch some movies.
If you want an outdoor theater that doesn’t require dragging the equipment out of the basement to, say, the beach of your multimillion-dollar retreat in Hawaii, you might enjoy a screen that rises up out of the ground. Engineered Environments of Alameda, Calif., created such a design for the Maui vacation home of a retired software executive. The house was built into the side of a hill overlooking the ocean; a lanai is on a lower level and beyond the lanai is a pool and then the beach.
The executive, who would spend about $800,000 for his indoor-and-outdoor audio-video system, wanted an outdoor environment where his guests could sit poolside, have drinks and watch the sunset, and then watch a movie or a football game without having to go inside.
Greg Jensen, Engineered Environment’s director of engineering, designed a setup in which a 20-foot-wide custom Stewart Filmscreen is hidden beneath a 20-foot teak bench that runs along the side of the pool nearest the beach. The bench is watertight, and the screen is further protected from the elements by a four-foot-deep concrete bunker. The projector, a Digital Projections Mercury 5000HD, drops from the roof of the cabana across from the pool. The cost of the screen was $50,000; the projector was $20,000. Total cost of the Dolby Digital 7.1 theater: $175,000.
Of course, you can’t watch it until it gets dark.
But there are always those two 37-inch Sony plasmas in the lanai.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/ga...2theaters.html
1080p and the Acuity of Human Vision
Joseph D. Cornwall
"1080p provides the sharpest, most lifelike picture possible." "1080p combines high resolution with a high frame rate, so you see more detail from second to second." This marketing copy is largely accurate. 1080p can be significantly better that 1080i, 720p, 480p or 480i. But, (there’s always a "but") there are qualifications. The most obvious qualification: Is this performance improvement manifest under real world viewing conditions? After all, one can purchase 200mph speed-rated tires for a Toyota Prius®. Expectations of a real performance improvement based on such an investment will likely go unfulfilled, however! In the consumer electronics world we have to ask a similar question. I can buy 1080p gear, but will I see the difference? The answer to this question is a bit more ambiguous.
Measuring Human Vision
To fully understand the implications of high resolution and high definition we must first explore the limitations of human vision. The Dictionary of Visual Science defines visual acuity as "acuteness or clearness of vision, especially form vision, which is dependent on the sharpness of the retinal focus within the eye, the sensitivity of the nervous elements, and the interpretative faculty of the brain." Simply put, our eyes have a resolution limit. Beyond our ability to see it, increased image resolution is simply an academic exercise. It can have no real part in improving the viewing experience. Unlike hearing, our visual acuity is unambiguous and relatively simple to measure.
Vision is measured using a few different tools. The most familiar is called the Snellen chart. Using this tool an optometrist or physician would ask you, from a standardized distance of twenty feet (six meters in countries that use the metric system), to read the "letters" on the chart. The smallest line that can be read accurately defines the acuity of vision, which is expressed in a quasi-fractional manner. 20/20 means that a subject can read the line that defines average vision from the prescribed twenty feet away. 20/10 means that same subject can read, from a distance of twenty feet, the line that a subject with "normal" vision could only read from ten feet. 20/10 vision is therefore twice as good as 20/20. Similarly, 20/40 is half as good with the subject being able to read at twenty feet what someone with normal vision could read at forty.
The next part of the puzzle is applying this understanding to a video display or other image composed of heterogeneous elements. The human eye’s resolution (acuity) is directly proportional to the size of the elements of the image and inversely proportional to distance from the elements. This relationship is best expressed in degrees.
It's common knowledge that people have a finite field of view, which is normally considered from its upper limit. Technically this is said to be the angular extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment. Roughly put, we can see things that exist within a known angle with the apex being our nose. Staring straight ahead the average person has a stereoscopic field of view (not including peripheral vision which allows nearly a 180 degree field of view) of about 100 degrees. In a similar manner we have a lower limit to our field of view. Scientists express this as an angle as well, but because that angle is less than a degree we have to use the language of engineering and describe this lower limit in minutes of arc.
Everyone knows from their high school geometry classes that a circle is 360 degrees (360°). For angles smaller than 1 degree we use arcminutes and arcseconds as a measurement. An arcminute is equal to one sixtieth (1/60) of one degree. "Normal" visual acuity is considered to be the ability to recognize an optotype (letter on the Snellen chart) when it subtends 5 minutes of arc. We can most certainly see objects below this level, as this describes only our ability to recognize a very specific shape. Taking this a step further, we find that the lower limit of "resolution" of average eyes equates to roughly ½ the limit of acuity. In other words, the average person cannot see more than two spots (pixels if you will) separated by less than 2 arcminutes of angle.
Now let’s relate this to a video display. This isn’t new, by the way. The NTSC standard was established in 1940 by the Federal Communications Commission. Part of that standard accounted for the size of an image as it relates to the eye’s ability to resolve the individual scanning lines of the display. In the past the general rule was, for best perceived picture quality, to have an image with a diagonal measure no more than 1/5 the seating distance. The advantage of HDTV (and EDTV for that matter) is that we can sit closer, thereby enjoying a larger image. A movie theater screen subtends a viewing angle of 30 degrees or more and, with the introduction of HDTV and progressive scan displays, so can home video media!
Using a 50-inch Plasma display as an example the dimensions of the actual image are approximately 44 inches wide by 25 inches tall. This yields the diagonal measurement of 50 inches on a 16:9 display. The pixel size of the average 50 inch plasma set is about 0.8 mm square. This translates to approximately .03 inches. With a .03 inch pixel, a 44 inch wide image requires 1466 discrete pixels. To keep the display consonant with current resolution formats, the typical product will offer a WXGA capability, which translates to 1355 x 768 (or possibly WSXGA at 1440 x 900). The Week in Review is edited and published by Jack Spratts. For a 50-inch set to offer true 1080p resolution (and not 1080p compatibility) it will need a pixel .023 inches in size, or a 25% improvement in pixel density with an attendant increase in manufacturing cost. Now that we’ve determined the size of the individual display elements, the remaining question becomes "How close must we sit to see individual pixels?"
Assume an average-sized living room. We hang the plasma on the wall and position the sofa eight feet away. Now we get to do some math to determine the limits of our ability to see image artifacts based on resolution. Keep in mind this article is written in general terms, so you scientists out there don't need to stand in line to file corrections! Using trigonometry, we find that our 50 inch display subtends a viewing angle of about 28 degrees. We know this because half the image width is (roughly now) 2 feet and the viewing distance is 8 feet. This creates a right triangle and, using the formula cosine x (half the subtended angle) = adjacent side length (8 feet) ÷ hypotenuse length (calculated to be approximately 8.25 feet), we find x=14.04 degrees. Multiplied by 2, we find our total viewing angle.
The resolution of our eyes is 12 vertical lines per arc angle (one line per arcminute for 20/20 acuity) times 2. Now 28 degrees x 12 lines x 2 = 672. This means we really can't see a display component (pixel) smaller than 1/672 x image width. Our minimum resolvable element size is about 0.065", or about twice the size of the pixels of the WXGA image! Put bluntly, from 8 feet away while watching a 50 inch plasma TV, the human eye is generally incapable of reliably distinguishing any detail finer than that shown on a true 720p display!
Of course there are other factors that affect perceived image quality. The way color is handled, the latency of pixel illumination, motion artifacts and the effects of the algorithms that fit the image data to the native resolution of the display (and more importantly the SOURCE) all play a part in a qualitative assessment of the image. It‘s safe to say, however, that increasing resolution and image refresh rate alone are not enough to provide a startlingly better viewing experience in a typical flat panel or rear projection residential installation.
So What's the Big Deal? Size!
Now, does this mean that 1080p is irrelevant in most of today's home theaters? Absolutely not! We've just used a singular example to explain why it may not be such an improvement for users with fixed width screens in a particular viewing arrangement. And in truth, this example likely fits the majority of today's home theater environments.
But what does 1080p offer? Two things: increased screen size and closer viewing distances. In particular, 1080p displays (coupled with true 1080p source content like HD DVD and Blu-ray) allow those using front projection systems to suddenly jump up to screen sizes of 100-inches or more - from that same 8-foot viewing distance. So while that 50-inch plasma may not look much different when playing 720p or 1080p content, your new front projector just allowed you to quadruple the size of your display. Hey, that's not bad! The added bonus is that much of the HDTV content available via airwaves and through cableTV and satellite providers is transmitted in 1080i. 1080i content often looks fantastic on 1080p and allows the display to make good use of the additional resolution.
Special thanks to Joseph D. Cornwall
http://www.audioholics.com/education...f-human-vision
Verizon's Big Bet on Fiber Optics
The phone giant is spending billions of dollars on cutting-edge technology. But any payoff is years away, says Fortune's Stephanie Mehta.
Stephanie N. Mehta
Verizon isn't going to take it anymore. After years of ceding ground in the broadband wars to cable operators Comcast (Charts), Cablevision (Charts) and Time Warner Cable (owned by the parent of Fortune's publisher), the New York City-based telco is making an audacious - and very expensive - bet on a new Internet connection that is faster than anything the U.S. has ever seen.
The technology, called FiOS (for fiber-optic service), will cost consumers from $40 to $200 a month. The pricetag for Verizon to wire 18 million homes - just over half its market - by the end of 2010: a whopping $23 billion.
The fiber-optic play is the most dramatic example of CEO Ivan Seidenberg's efforts to remake Verizon, a vast company with $88 billion in sales last year. Seidenberg is spinning off some rural phone lines and old-line businesses like phone books and investing in boosting the capacity of Verizon's wireless and wireline networks to serve up movies, games, software and even new kinds of search engines.
In thousands of cities and towns in its territory, Verizon has crews tearing out the copper lines - the so-called twisted pair of wires - used to transport phone calls for more than 100 years and replacing them with hair-thin strands of fiber-optic glass that will download data at up to 50 megabits per second and upload files at 10 megabits per second. (According to Verizon, a typical customer with FiOS would be able to download a 90-minute movie in about five minutes, vs. 30 to 60 minutes over a standard cable modem service.)
For Seidenberg, the rollout is a triumph. When he announced the plan in May 2004, some analysts didn't believe he'd actually go through with it: They doubted that conservative, dividend-paying blue-chip Verizon would ever pony up the money for such an ambitious project. Technology types questioned whether a stodgy utility would be capable of offering such a cutting-edge service. Now Seidenberg is delivering on his promise. But the question for investors remains: Will the daring gamble pay off?
How marketers plan to invade your phone
Wall Street remains skeptical. Verizon (Charts) shares have had a nice run-up in the past year, climbing about 20 percent and outpacing the broader market. But AT&T (Charts), another telco facing stiff competition from cable operators, is up almost 40 percent in the same period.
There are several reasons AT&T is in favor right now, including expected cost savings from its recent acquisition of BellSouth. Its wireless unit may get a boost from Apple's iPhone, due in June. And investors seem to prefer Ma Bell's cheaper approach to selling faster Internet and TV services. Instead of connecting fiber directly to homes, in most cases AT&T is pushing fiber deep into neighborhoods, using its existing copper network to handle the last bit of transport.
There's growing concern among investors that FiOS is going to hurt Verizon's earnings even more than analysts initially anticipated. The company recently told analysts that costs associated with the fiber project will dilute earnings per share in the "mid 30 cents" range, up from previous guidance of about 31 to 32 cents. But some analysts believe Verizon will have to spend still more to market and install FiOS.
"We view this as a multiyear issue," says Citigroup telecom analyst Michael Rollins, who predicts that the pain will carry into 2008. "The market needs to be braced for a longer period of dilution and higher-than-expected costs from this FiOS build." He thinks the impact this year will be about 43 cents a share, and he has a sell rating on the stock.
Verizon's profit tumbles 38%
FiOS is divided into fixed and variable capital expenditures. Verizon has told analysts it expects to spend about $850 per home this year on fixed items such as marketing costs, network gear needed to deliver data and video, and the thick cables of fiber that snake in and around neighborhoods. Then, each time it signs up a customer, the phone company says it will spend an additional $880 on items like pulling fiber directly to the user's house and installing special equipment.
Some analysts believe that Verizon will have trouble keeping those costs down; FiOS is, after all, a new and complex service that can't be switched on remotely the way phone service is: The carrier, for example, tells customers to reserve four to six hours for installation, but the process can take much longer.
Francis McInerney, a business strategist who has done consulting for Verizon, says it took three technicians two days to install his connection. (He was part of a field trial, to be sure.) "FiOS is a good service, better than anything you're going to find in this country today," he says. "But the cost of customer acquisition is very, very high."
A Verizon spokesman says that over time the company's costs will continue to go down, not up, and that FiOS will generate positive cash flow in 2008 and be profitable in 2009. To become a growth story, though, Verizon will have to use FiOS for more than Internet connections. It will have to develop and sell applications for the FiOS network, much the way it made scads of money selling high-margin features like caller ID and call waiting to its traditional phone customers. One such add-on is a $20-a-month service that records shows and then allows them to be viewed on any of a home's TVs.
But Verizon has more limited experience developing and marketing online fare. Its Verizon Central portal for DSL users, for example, is clunky and a bit confusing. And FiOS's awesome speed presents a potential long-term challenge: It may encourage consumers to download movies, TV shows, and other interactive services directly from the Web, bypassing Verizon's video offerings entirely.
For all the risks associated with FiOS, it is clear that Verizon had to do something dramatic to retain and win back customers wooed by the cable guys, who now offer phone service as well as fast Internet and TV.
Though it will take years for Verizon to recoup the cost of deploying FiOS to customers' homes, the alternative would have been even less appealing: "They now get $95 a month from me, up from $60," says Daniel Berninger, a telecommunications analyst with Tier1 Research, who has both FiOS and Comcast broadband in his Annapolis home. "Without FiOS, I would have gone to Comcast exclusively - and Verizon would have gotten zero from me."
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortu...1289/index.htm
Verizon Fiber Optics Expanding into Apartment Buildings
AP
For Tony DiCicco, a 19-year-old in Doylestown, Pa., the future of Internet access is close at hand, yet so far away.
In the single-family homes surrounding the rowhouse community where he lives, fiber-optic Internet service is available from Verizon Communications Inc., which has embarked on a $23 billion project to replace its copper phone lines.
But in DiCicco's community of Westwyk, the backyards are controlled by a homeowner's association that hasn't given Verizon approval to dig, despite DiCicco's lobbying, which started in 2005.
"The problem here is we have a lot of senior citizens who don't care about FiOS," said DiCicco. He's studying for a telecommunications degree and is convinced of the superiority of fiber optics over copper lines and cable.
Verizon is pushing to get FiOS to apartment buildings, rowhouses and other shared dwellings, but for a number of reasons, the going has been much slower than the rollout to single-family homes. In some cases where it is available, the FiOS service an apartment building does get is a technical compromise that could limit future Internet speeds.
At the end of last year, Verizon had rolled out its fiber infrastructure in areas with 6 million homes. A quarter of those homes, or 1.5 million, were in multi-dwelling buildings, according to Eric Cevis, vice president of Verizon Enhanced Communities.
But most of those 1.5 million were not actually able to get the service right away. The company had permission from building owners to sell to FiOS to only 337,000 of those homes.
Verizon stresses that it's not discriminating against apartment buildings and renters, who have lower average incomes than home owners. It's doing a complete overhaul of its infrastructure, and knows it has to tackle apartment buildings to complete it. Apart from Internet service, the fiber allows the company to provide cable TV programming and lowers the cost of maintaining its network.
In areas with single-family homes, Verizon pulls fiber down the street or behind the houses, either on utility poles or below ground. If a homeowner orders FiOS, Verizon installs an Optical Networking Terminal, which is about the size of a large shoe box, on the side of the house, and connects it to the main fiber line. The customer's computer, phone and TV set can then be connected to the ONT.
For multifamily buildings, the procedure is more complicated, for two main reasons.
For one thing, Verizon needs permission from the owner of the building, the co-op board, or whoever else controls the common areas, to wire the building. As DiCicco found, getting people interested in new technology isn't always easy.
It's the job of Verizon Enhanced Communities to market the service to building owners. It got started in 2005, a year and a half after Verizon started connecting single-family homes.
The unit's main message is that fiber increases the value of a property. To get the word out, Cevis "basically attended every housing conference across the country."
This year, he is doubling his staff with the aim of bringing the number of apartments with landlord approval for FiOS to 654,000 by August.
The other hurdle: Verizon's standard Optical Networking Terminal is a large affair, designed with little regard for aesthetics. It may not look incongruous in a garage or at the back of a bungalow, but inside an apartment, it's another matter.
"A lot of the customers did not necessarily like the technology ... because they thought it was too big, it took up too much space," Cevis said.
To get around that obstacle, Verizon and its equipment vendors have developed a terminal that can be mounted in a basement or hallway closet to serve several apartments at once. Internet traffic is carried the last stretch to the apartment over the existing phone line using digital subscriber line technology, or DSL, and the TV signal is sent separately over coaxial cable.
This solution still lets the company offer Internet service at 50 megabits per second, the highest speed available with FiOS right now. That's higher than regular DSL can muster, because the copper wire is too short to pick up much interference, but it's hard to increase the speed from there. With fiber all the way to the apartment, Verizon could easily go up to 100 mbps, and with equipment upgrades, the speeds could be far, far greater.
"We prefer to take fiber all the way to the unit. It's just that in some buildings it's not practical," said Paul Lacouture, Verizon's executive vice president of engineering and technology. Landlords, he said, sometimes don't want to have a fiber cable running down the hallway or in the ceilings, and are afraid of the disruption the installation can cause.
Still, most landlords understand the benefit of drawing fiber all the way to the apartment, and it has been the most popular choice so far. Verizon is also working with its vendors to produce fiber that is more flexible, and thus easier to get around doorways and corners, Lacouture said.
The low-hanging fruit for FiOS are buildings that are being built or gut renovated. The apartments in a 25-story building on New York's Wall Street that is being partially converted from office use each have a strand of Verizon's fiber, ending in what looks like a small electrical closet. There are also two coaxial cables that could accommodate one cable company each.
"I like to be able to offer multiple selling points," said Jack Berman, a partner at the developer of 67 Wall Street, Metro Loft Management.
The apartments rent for between $2,000 and $4,500 a month.
On the other side of the city and its income spectrum, FiOS is coming to Eastchester Heights in the Bronx, a complex of brick buildings with 1,414 apartments that used to be known as Homicide Homes. The last gangs were pushed out just a few years ago, according to James S. Eisenberg, director of operations for landlord UrbanAmerican.
During a recent visit, the only sign of Verizon's activity so far were some metal boxes mounted on the facades in preparation for fiber installation. Many landlords would consider the boxes unsightly, but Eisenberg said the added service would appeal to tenants.
When UrbanAmerican surveyed the property as part of the purchasing process a few years ago, it found that many residents ran small businesses like Web design out of their apartments.
"I don't know if they call it the 'digital divide' anymore, but (FiOS) certainly helps bridge that gap," Eisenberg said.
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?se...ess&id=5141364
Canada Worse Than 3rd World Countries When it Comes to Mobile Data Access
The motto of the CRTC, Canada’s telcom regulator is “Communications in the Public Interest”. Right.
If you live in Canada, write to your MP. The CRTC, as an institution, needs to be taken out and shot.*
This chart charts the best rates available from all carriers. And all levels of government say that “ICT” competitiveness is key factor in Canada’s future economic
prosperity. Ya. Right. I would like to say that Canada is a 3rd world country when it comes to Mobile ICT, except you can clearly see from this chart that even *Rwanda* has orders of magnitude better Mobile Data service than Canada.
As I’ve noted in the chart, 500MB is about 100 minutes of usage at a Canadian Carrier’s maximum (advertised) download speed of 700kB/s (your mileage will vary, International carriers are typically twice or four times faster). 500MB is not a lot of data in the grand scheme of things, a few GB could make a better example but in that case the red bars would be completely off the charts.
If you don’t live in Canada but you or your small business depends on mobile connectivity or net neutrality in general, don’t come here.
If see these numbers makes you mad, then Digg this article and spread the word on your site.
(and leave a comment, what is mobile service like where you live? why do you think mobile data is important?)
Here is the complete data table including data speed and Caps for each of the services listed. You’ll notice Canadian carriers lag substantially in every category.
see also on this blog: Bell to charge you $3600 per hour for Wireless Internet access. (the situation has not changed in a while)
http://www.thomaspurves.com/2007/04/...e-data-access/
Report of Talk to Take Over Bell Canada
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Ian Austen
One of Canada’s largest pension funds is in early talks with other investors to form a consortium to mount a $45 billion takeover bid for the parent company of Bell Canada in what would be the largest buyout in history, according to people briefed on the discussions.
The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which is the largest shareholder of BCE, the telephone company’s parent, has reached out in recent weeks to Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board about pursuing a takeover, these people said. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has also held talks with at least one private equity firm, these people said.
A takeover bid would represent a rare effort by a pension fund, rather than a private equity firm, to lead a buyout of this size. It also illustrates a growing tendency among pension funds to make direct investments themselves, a trend that is becoming particularly popular in Canada.
Gilles des Roberts, a spokesman for the Caisse, which manages the Quebec government’s public pension plan, said that the fund was not involved in any discussions about BCE.
“We deny any involvement in this deal in every way,” he said.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, Ontario Teachers’ rebutted an earlier report in The Globe and Mail that it was in talks with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company about pursuing a deal for BCE, but said it was “closely monitoring developments and is exploring its options.”
K.K.R. had held talks with BCE on its own earlier this year, but was rebuffed, people involved in the discussion said. Separately, Ontario Teachers’ also recently approached BCE, but the discussions were only preliminary and appeared to have been rejected.
On March 29, BCE said “there are no ongoing discussions being held with any private equity investor with respect to any privatization of the company or any similar transaction.”
Yesterday, William J. Fox, BCE’s executive vice president for communications and corporate development, said: “Our statement of March 29th stands. We are not in any current talks with any other parties.”
Still, BCE’s stock has jumped on speculation of a possible deal, and an approach from its largest shareholders, like Ontario Teachers’, could put pressure on it to consider a sale.
Any prospective change of ownership at BCE involves politics as much as regulatory or investment issues. A takeover by K.K.R was considered virtually impossible, according to people involved in the talks, because of the political dimension.
Politics also came into play in October when the company said it planned to reorganize as an income trust, an ownership structure that avoids corporate taxes by paying out most of the profits directly to unit holders, as the trust’s shareholders are known.
While a large number of companies, including BCE’s smaller rival Telus, have made the switch, the idea of such a change at BCE was too much for even the business-friendly Conservative government. It swiftly moved to introduce politically unpopular legislation to kill trust conversions by imposing a new tax. Shortly after, BCE abandoned its conversion scheme.
Canadian law prohibits foreign investors from controlling more than 46.67 percent of a telecommunications company’s voting equity. While some investors in the United States effectively circumvented that limit in the past by taking on Canadian partners for some small telecommunications takeovers, it is unlikely that the government will let a similar arrangement pass without challenge in BCE’s case.
It is the dominant carrier in Ontario and Quebec, the most populous provinces, and is one of Canada’s largest corporations and employers.
On top of that, a series of recent foreign takeovers of major Canadian corporations in unregulated sectors of the economy like mining have led to concerns in Canada about a loss of economic control.
In many respects, BCE is in a stronger position than many of its counterparts in the United States. Unlike AT&T, it has always been allowed to operate a full range of both local and long-distance services. The company was also among Canada’s first mobile phone providers.
While local telephone service is open to cable companies and others, traditional phone companies, including BCE’s Bell Canada unit, controlled about 90 percent of local lines at the end of 2005. Even in the more competitive mobile market, a study released last month by the SeaBoard Group found that the average cellphone user in Canada pays 33 percent more than an American user.
Canada had limited the ability of Bell Canada and other BCE operating units to compete against cable companies and other newcomers by substantially reducing local service prices. Both the regulator and a parliamentary committee were concerned that Bell would eliminate competitors by deeply cutting prices and then, once competitors were eliminated, imposing equally large price increases over time.
Last week, however, the concerns of both the regulator and the parliamentary committee were dismissed by the government when it effectively deregulated most local telephone service through a cabinet order.
BCE’s financial and operating performance has generally lagged that of Telus and other competitors. Dvai Ghose, an analyst with Genuity Capital Markets, estimates that Telus generated free cash flow, before dividends, of 1.6 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.38 billion) last year, an increase from 845 million Canadian dollars in 2003. At BCE, cash flow dropped to 1.9 billion Canadian dollars ($1.65 billion) in 2006, from 2 billion Canadian dollars in 2004.
Even that slippage, however, is an improvement over the situation that Michael J. Sabia inherited when he became BCE’s chief executive five years ago.
His predecessor, Jean Monty, after spinning off BCE’s control of Nortel Networks to shareholders, went on a buying spree. BCE ultimately acquired Canada’s largest private broadcaster, CTV, and The Globe and Mail, a national newspaper based in Toronto.
Critics say the company’s emphasis on acquisitions led it to neglect investment in infrastructure that would have allowed it to sell its customers lucrative services like pay television today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/10deal.html
Tell the European Parliament to Fix IPRED2
Press Release
On April 24th, the European Parliament will vote on IPRED2, the Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive. With one stroke, they risk turning thousands of innocent EU citizens and businesses into copycriminals. Only you can stop them. Sign our petition now!
If IPRED2 passes in its current form, "aiding, abetting, or inciting" copyright infringement on a "commercial scale" in the EU will become a crime.
Penalties for these brand new copycrimes will include permanent bans on doing business, seizure of assets, criminal records, and fines of up to €100,000.
IPRED2's backers say these copycrimes are meant only for professional criminals selling fake merchandise. But Europe already has laws against these fraudsters. With many terms in IPRED2 left unclear or completeley undefined - including "commercial scale" and "incitement" - IPRED2 will expand police authority and make suspects out of legitimate consumers and businesses, slowing innovation and limiting your digital rights.
IPRED2 and Business
The entertainment industry spent millions suing the makers of the first VCRs, MP3 players and digital video recorders, trying to use copyright law to kill those innovative products because they threatened old business models. Fortunately, the industry was unsuccessful.
IPRED2's new crime of "aiding, abetting and inciting" infringement again takes aim at innovators, including open source coders, media-sharing sites like YouTube, and ISPs that refuse to block P2P services.
With the new directive, music labels and Hollywood studios will push for the criminal prosecution of these innovators in Europe, saying their products "incite" piracy - with EU taxpayers covering the costs.
Under IPRED2, these same entertainment companies can work with transnational "joint investigation teams" to advise the authorities on how to investigate and prosecute their rivals!
IPRED2 and Your Digital Freedoms
Criminal law needs to be clear to be fair. While IPRED2 says that only "commercial scale" infringement will be punished, the directive doesn't define "commercial scale" or "incitement." Even IP lawyers can't agree on what are "private" and "personal" uses of copyrighted works. One step over that fuzzy line, however, and anyone could be threatened with punishments intended for professional counterfeiters and organized criminals.
How can ordinary citizens feel safe exercising their rights under copyright and trademark law when serious criminal penalties may be brought against them if they cross the line?
Tell the European Parliament to Fix IPRED2
The excesses of IPRED2 need to be reined back.
Sign our petition now!
http://www.copycrime.eu/
Take-Two’s Mr. Fix-It Inherits a Handful
Jeremy W. Peters
The closest Strauss Zelnick usually gets to playing video games is watching over the shoulders of his two young sons. Mr. Zelnick concedes that his gaming skills are better suited for Pong and Pac-Man than Grand Theft Auto, the smash hit from the company that he is now in charge of turning around.
But when the stock price of Take-Two Interactive Software slipped under $10 last summer as inquiries into its business practices began to mount, Mr. Zelnick, a veteran of the movie and music industries, saw a potential bargain for his investment firm.
He and his partners at ZelnickMedia first weighed taking the company private, but decided that would be too complicated. So instead, Mr. Zelnick started approaching Take-Two’s largest shareholders one by one to sell them on his plan to take over the board.
His efforts culminated two weeks ago at Take-Two’s annual shareholder meeting in New York, when all but two board members were removed. Two hours after the meeting adjourned, the company announced that its new board had elected Mr. Zelnick as chairman and appointed one of his close deputies as chief executive.
“We hit the ground running,” Mr. Zelnick said in an interview yesterday over breakfast in Midtown Manhattan. “We have to clean the company up, and then operate in a pristine manner going forward.”
Mr. Zelnick has taken on risky corporate overhauls in the past, but none have been as complex as the turnaround of Take-Two, which he called “the biggest thing we’ve done.”
Beyond the issue of whether the company can reverse its uneven sales and become more than a one-hit wonder, there are the legal problems, which seem to grow more serious by the day.
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission said it had upgraded its inquiry into the backdating of stock options at Take-Two from an informal probe to a full-fledged investigation. Separately, the Manhattan district attorney and the Internal Revenue Service are conducting their own investigations of the company.
Whether Take-Two is salvageable, technology analysts said, depends on how deep its problems run. Can the company be fixed with fresh management and a new corporate culture? Or are its problems too systemic and ingrained to repair?
“Will it be easy? No,” said Daniel Ernst, an analyst with Soleil Securities in New York. “They’ve got one phenomenally well-known franchise, and a decent position in the market from which to grow that. So I think there’s a decent opportunity here.”
While Take-Two has never had trouble selling its notoriously violent Grand Theft Auto series, which will go on sale in its fourth incarnation in October, other games have not done as well.
That means that a single game in the Grand Theft Auto series has at times made up more than half of the company’s sales, even though it has dozens of titles. For example, for the first three months after the newest Grand Theft Auto game went on sale in 2004, it accounted for 57 percent of Take-Two’s total sales of $502 million for that period, according to Janco Partners, an investment banking firm in Denver.
Shares of Take-Two rose steadily for much of March, after it became known that shareholders were plotting a revolt. The stock peaked at $23.79 before falling back, closing yesterday at $20.38.
So what does a former movie executive turned music executive turned investor know about turning around a video-game business? Some of Mr. Zelnick’s new employees are asking that very question.
In his new role as chairman, Mr. Zelnick has held town hall meetings with Take-Two’s staff. At one of those meetings in the company’s Los Angeles office, an employee asked Mr. Zelnick whether he understood the types of games Take-Two makes.
That kind of candor does not rattle Mr. Zelnick. “There’s no consequence for saying what’s on your mind, negative or positive,” he said. If there are aspects of Take-Two’s business that he does not fully understand, Mr. Zelnick said he is comfortable delegating authority.
“What I do in a situation where I’m uncomfortable because I don’t have knowledge or experience is I find experts quickly,” he said.
After he stepped down as the head of 20th Century Fox in 1993 — a position he had held for four years, starting at the precocious age of 32 — Mr. Zelnick became chief executive of Crystal Dynamics, a video game start-up. But he left after a little more than a year to become president and chief executive of BMG Entertainment’s North American division in 1994.
Part of his success there was in reducing costs. He cut jobs at money-losing labels, and at the company’s faltering record club he doubled profits within a year.
He said he planned to take a similarly active approach to Take-Two. He has already ordered up business plans from all Take-Two division heads. On Monday, the chief financial officer, Karl H. Winters, resigned; he was a holdover from the tenure of Take-Two’s ousted chief executive, Paul Eibeler.
Within 100 days, Mr. Zelnick said he hoped to have a permanent chief executive in place — Benjamin Feder, a ZelnickMedia partner, is currently filling the role — and a cost-cutting plan to present to investors.
Analysts said Take-Two’s problems were not necessarily insurmountable. “They have arguably the best video game in the industry,” said Mike Hickey, an analyst with Janco. “Yet they have an interesting dislocation between incredible product and operating performance.
“When you see that dislocation, normally you’d find that attributable to management. With some fresh eyes, I think they could have a definite benefit.”
Mr. Zelnick formed ZelnickMedia with three partners in 2001 after leaving BMG, in part because he disagreed with its parent company about entering into an agreement with the file-sharing service Napster. There he had success with other corporate overhauls.
One of its first big projects, the publisher Time-Life, was losing money when ZelnickMedia bought the rights to market Time-Life products in 2003. The firm said it paid a “very low” price for the marketing rights. The firm sold a profitable Time-Life to Reader’s Digest last month for $91.8 million.
On the other hand, another ZelnickMedia acquisition, the catalog retailer Lillian Vernon, was still losing money when the firm sold it last year. Of course, Time-Life, known for its commemorative photo albums and music compilations, and Lillian Vernon, a seller of needlepoint pillows and rattan baskets, are quite different from a video-game company that likes to push the boundaries, as Mr. Zelnick acknowledges.
“Take-Two is bigger, and in certain ways more complex,” he said. “On the other hand, Take-Two has no debt. It has a material amount of cash.”
He added, “And the No. 1 franchise in the video-game business.”
Matt Richtel contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/te...gy/11game.html
China Slams US Piracy Complaint
China has criticised the US over its decision to file a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization over copyright piracy and counterfeiting.
The US says that China's failure to enforce copyright laws is costing software, music and book publishers billions of dollars in lost sales.
The US also argues that China makes it hard for legitimate firms to operate.
China "expressed great regret and strong dissatisfaction at the decision", the state news agency said.
Tighter enforcement
The Xinhua news agency quoted Intellectual Property Office commissioner Tian Lipu as saying that it was "not a sensible move for the US government to file such a complaint" at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
"By doing so, the US has ignored the Chinese government's immense efforts and great achievements in strengthening intellectual property rights protection and tightening enforcement of its copyright laws," the commissioner added.
On Monday, the US trade representative Susan Schwab said that piracy and counterfeiting levels in China remained unacceptably high.
The US said that despite China's promises to crackdown on fake software, DVDs, luxury goods, car parts and shoes, many of the goods were still widely available throughout the country.
China is one of the world's largest producers of counterfeit products, ranging from designer clothes, to pirated films and music, to luggage.
Many of the goods find their way into Europe and are knowingly bought as fakes by shoppers at markets and from street vendors. Firms claim that the poor quality copies dent their brand and divert profits and potenital clients.
'Criminal sanction'
The US has been threatening a WTO complaint against China since 2005.
It said on Tuesday that the two cases had been submitted to the WTO.
One case claims that Beijing's poor enforcement of copyright and trademark protections violates WTO rules. The other contends that illegal barriers to hamper sales of US films, music and books.
"Excessively high legal thresholds for launching criminal prosecutions offer a safe harbor for pirates and counterfeiters," the US said.
"Pirates and counterfeiters who structure their operations to fit below those thresholds face no possibility of criminal sanction."
A 60-day consultation period follows for negotiators to try to resolve the disagreements. Should this fail, then a WTO panel would rule on the case.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ss/6540205.stm
Bad vibrations
Beach Boys Lose $60 Mln Lawsuit Over Memorabilia
A federal judge has thrown out a $60 million lawsuit the Beach Boys brought against two men they accused of stealing the band's property from a warehouse and trying to sell the items at auction, a lawyer for one of the men said on Tuesday.
In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Manuel Real ruled that the band had no evidence that memorabilia collector Roy Sciacca and warehouse owner Allen Gaba had stolen the trove of Beach Boys items from a North Hollywood warehouse in 1994, according to court documents.
The items included sound recordings, videotapes, photographs and original lyrics sheets.
A lawyer for the band's corporate entity, Brother Records, which was the plaintiff in the case, could not be reached for comment. Gaba, who was representing himself, could not be located.
Sciacca maintained he bought the items in the 1980s from a warehouse sale held by the band, his attorney William White said on Tuesday.
White said Sciacca decided to sell the Beach Boys collection following the $1.25 million sale in 2005 of former Beatle John Lennon's original handwritten lyric for the 1967 hit song "All You Need Is Love."
"He saw that the John Lennon lyric had sold for a substantial sum of money and thought he could sell his material," White said. "He contacted (London auction house) Cooper Owen, but when Brother Records found out it started this campaign to stop the sale."
Cooper Owen halted the sale of the 28 lots an hour before bidding was scheduled to begin in October of 2005 after the Beach Boys reported the items stolen to law enforcement agencies.
White said Sciacca was pleased by the judge's decision and was now free to sell the items.
http://www.reuters.com/article/music...15461720070411
Fan Seeks Pardon for Deceased Doors Frontman Jim Morrison
CBC Arts
A fan of rock legend Jim Morrison is seeking a posthumous pardon for the charismatic lead singer of The Doors, more than three decades after his death.
Dave Diamond, a cable TV producer and Doors fan, has written a letter to Florida Governor Charlie Crist asking that he issue a pardon for the hard-living singer, lyricist and poet who was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity in 1969 and who died just two years later.
Diamond asked Crist, who attended the same Florida university as Morrison, to consider the singer-songwriter's musical contributions and not his bad-boy antics during his short lifetime.
"It's not about Jim Morrison's image as the Lizard King or The Doors music. It's about a citizen of Florida who was convicted in a case where the law was not applied," Diamond said.
In the days following a Florida concert in 1969, police arrested Morrison and accused him of exposing himself and simulating a sex act — all of which he denied.
In 1971, the 27-year-old Morrison died of heart failure in Paris. He had been in the midst of an appeal of his Miami conviction.
Crist has said he is "certainly willing" to review the case.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2...rs-pardon.html
Until next week,
-
js.
Current Week In Review
Recent WiRs -
April 7th,
March 31st,
March 24th,
March 17th,
March 10th
Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. Questions or comments? Call (617) 939-2340, country code U.S.. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.
"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black