Notoriously difficult to treat, eating disorders may persist for years, wreaking havoc not just on the patient’s health and personal relationships but often on family finances, as well.

Hospitalizations for problems caused by eating disorders grew 18 percent from 1999 to 2006, with the steepest rise among children under age 12 (up 119 percent), followed by adults ages 45 to 64 (up 48 percent) and men of all ages (up 37 percent), according to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Care for these patients can be expensive. Many must be seen on a weekly basis by a team of specialists, including a psychiatrist, a physician and a nutritionist. A residential program costs $30,000 a month on average. And many patients require three or more months of treatment, often at a facility far from home. Even after leaving a specialized program, patients may need years of follow-up care.

Yet most insurers will not cover long-term treatment, and some routinely deny adequate coverage of eating disorders on the grounds that there is not enough evidence on how best to treat them, said Lynn S. Grefe, chief executive of the National Eating Disorders Association.

“Eating disorders pose a unique treatment challenge in comparison to other psychiatric illnesses,” said Dr. Evelyn Attia, director of the eating disorders research program at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. “They are not always easy to diagnose, and insurers are often not well informed about which treatments work.”

Jeanne P.’s 19-year-old daughter has been battling anorexia for eight years and has tried 10 treatment programs. The family has “great health insurance,” said Ms. P, who asked that her full name not be used to protect her daughter’s privacy. Still, the best doctors are often not in the insurer’s network, she says she has found, and the family’s insurance has not always fully covered residential treatment programs.

The result?

“We have totally exhausted our retirement savings on her care,” said Ms. P.

If you suspect that a family member has an eating disorder or that you may have one, these steps may help you find treatment you can afford.

EARLY DIAGNOSIS No one knows exactly what causes eating disorders, though genetics and environmental triggers play large roles. Anorexia and bulimia tend to run in families, and obsessive dieters, athletes and performers have a higher-than-average risk for developing these conditions.

Whatever the cause, early intervention is critical.

“Eating disorders can become chronic and more difficult to treat over time,” Dr. Attia said.

If you suspect a problem, get a professional evaluation immediately. Call your physician or pediatrician, explain the symptoms and ask for a referral to an eating disorders specialist.

The Academy for Eating Disorders has an online tool that can help you locate doctors and therapists, as well as inpatient and outpatient treatment facilities in your area. Also try the National Eating Disorders Association help line (800-931-2237; 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. P.S.T.) for questions about treatment referrals and support groups and to learn more about eating disorders.

AT-HOME TREATMENT If it is your child who has received a diagnosis of anorexia or bulimia, you may want to consider family-based therapy, also called the Maudsley method.

Costs are minimal for this therapy because families do most of the monitoring themselves. Under the guidance of a trained therapist, the parent takes primary responsibility for helping a child get back to a healthy weight and normal eating habits. One recent study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that family-based therapy was more effective than individual therapy at helping children reach full remission from anorexia.

While this approach may be cost-effective compared to residential treatment, the emotional toll on families can be extreme. During the first phase of treatment, which can last a few months, the child needs supervision around the clock, tracking meals, snacks and exercise.

To learn more about how family-based therapy works and to find a trained therapist, go to the Maudsley Parents Web site at www.maudsleyparents.org. To find out how one family used this therapy to combat their daughter’s anorexia, take a look at Harriet Brown’s book, “Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle With Anorexia.”

INSURANCE COVERAGE If a high level of care is required — at, say, an inpatient treatment center — be prepared to take on your insurer. Learn as much as you can about your health policy and about the roadblocks you may encounter while trying to get coverage for specialized care.

The National Eating Disorders Association’s Web site has useful guidance on insurance issues in the Parent Toolkit section. It includes tips on how to explain to your insurer that the treatment your child requires is medically sound, how to manage an appeal and sample letters to send to reluctant insurers.

If your insurer balks at your requests for coverage, ask to be assigned a case manager, suggested Marcia Herrin, founder of the Dartmouth College Eating Disorders Prevention, Education and Treatment Program.

A case manager can often (though not always) help you get access to additional care. Insurers normally do not cover nutritional counseling, for example, but a case manager authorized six visits to a nutritionist for one of Dr. Herrin’s patients.

If the case manager cannot help you, you will have to take a route familiar to almost anyone who has tangled with an insurer. Get in touch with your employer’s human resources department, and ask them to go to bat on your behalf. If your employer and your insurer will not budge, make a formal appeal to your insurer. If your appeal is denied or not answered, contact your state’s insurance commissioner or even your representative in Congress.

Extreme though that may sound, it has been known to work. Susan M. was able to get her daughter’s lengthy residential treatment covered by enlisting the help of her senator’s office. An aide called the Department of Labor, and after several more steps, the insurer ultimately agreed to cover the treatment.

You might consider contacting a lawyer for advice on your rights and legal precedents in your state, as well.

FREE TREATMENT Some academic hospitals offer free treatment to individuals who meet specific criteria and are willing to participate in a research trial.

Patients who enroll in Dr. Attia’s program at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, for instance, do not pay a dime and can stay at the treatment center as long as they need to, but they must agree to answer surveys and stay in touch with the facility after they check out. All patients receive the best evidence-based treatment, and some may be involved in trials that assess physical activity or different psychotherapy approaches.

To find research programs, go to the Web sites of the National Eating Disorders Association and the Academy for Eating Disorders. Also, try ClinicalTrials.gov, which lists federally and privately supported research trials conducted worldwide.

FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE If you have limited resources, some treatment programs will provide financial assistance. Be sure to ask about it.

A few foundations also offer scholarships. Moonshadow’s Spirit, for instance, offers financial assistance to individuals who are seeking inpatient or partial hospitalization programs. The Kirsten Haglund Foundation and the Manna Scholarship Fund also offer grants to individuals in financial need.

Keep in mind that when aggressive intervention happens early, full recovery is possible. One notable study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 76 percent of anorexic adolescents had fully recovered from the disorder within 10 to 15 years of their initial hospitalizations.
Arizona Cuts Financing for Transplant Patients
By MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — Even physicians with decades of experience telling patients that their lives are nearing an end are having difficulty discussing a potentially fatal condition that has arisen in Arizona: Death by budget cut.

Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them.

“The most difficult discussions are those that involve patients who had been on the donor list for a year or more and now we have to tell them they’re not on the list anymore,” said Dr. Rainer Gruessner, a transplant specialist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. “The frustration is tremendous. It’s more than frustration.”

Organ transplants are already the subject of a web of regulations, which do not guarantee that everyone in need of a life-saving organ will receive one. But Arizona’s transplant specialists are alarmed that patients who were in line to receive transplants one day were, after the state’s budget cuts to its Medicaid program, ruled ineligible the next — unless they raised the money themselves.

Francisco Felix, 32, a father of four who has hepatitis C and is in need of a liver, received news a few weeks ago that a family friend was dying and wanted to donate her liver to him. But the budget cuts meant he no longer qualified for a state-financed transplant.

He was prepared anyway at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center as his relatives scrambled to raise the needed $200,000. When the money did not come through, the liver went to someone else on the transplant list.

“I know times are tight and cuts are needed, but you can’t cut human lives,” said Mr. Felix’s wife, Flor. “You just can’t do that.”

Such high drama is unfolding regularly here as more and more of the roughly 100 people affected by the cuts are becoming known: the father of six who died before receiving a bone marrow transplant, the plumber in need of a new heart and the high school basketball coach who struggles to breathe during games at high altitudes as she awaits a lung transplant.

“I appreciate the need for budget restraints,” said Dr. Andrew M. Yeager, a University of Arizona professor who is director of the Blood and Marrow Transplantation Program at the Arizona Cancer Center. “But when one looks at a potentially lifesaving treatment, admittedly expensive, and we have data to support efficacy, cuts like this are shortsighted and sad.”

State Medicaid officials said they recommended discontinuing some transplants only after assessing the success rates for previous patients. Among the discontinued procedures are lung transplants, liver transplants for hepatitis C patients and some bone marrow and pancreas transplants, which altogether would save the state about $4.5 million a year.

“As an agency, we understand there have been difficult cuts and there will have to be more difficult cuts looking forward,” said Jennifer Carusetta, chief legislative liaison at the state Medicaid agency.

The issue has led to a fierce political battle, with Democrats condemning the reductions as “Brewercare,” after Gov. Jan Brewer.

“We made it very clear at the time of the vote that this was a death sentence,” said State Senator Leah Landrum Taylor, a Democrat. “This is not a luxury item. We’re not talking about cosmetic surgery.”

The Republican governor has in turn blamed “Obamacare,” meaning the federal health care overhaul, for the transplant cuts even though the Arizona vote came in March, before President Obama signed that bill into law.

But a top Republican, State Representative John Kavanagh, has already pledged to reconsider at least some of the state’s cuts for transplants when the Legislature reconvenes in January. Mr. Kavanagh, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said he does not believe lawmakers had the full picture of the effect of the cuts on patients when they voted.

“It’s difficult to be linked to a situation where people’s lives are jeopardized and turned upside down,” he said in an interview. “Thankfully no one has died as a result of this, and I believe we have time to rectify this.”

Across the country, states have restricted benefits to their Medicaid programs, according to a 50-state survey published in September by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. But none have gone as far as Arizona in eliminating some transplants, which are considered optional services under federal law.

Before the Legislature acted, Arizona’s Medicaid agency had provided an analysis to lawmakers of the transplants that were cut, which many health experts now say was seriously flawed. For instance, the state said that 13 of 14 patients under the state’s health system who received bone marrow transplants from nonrelatives over a two-year period died within six months.

But outside specialists said the success rates were considerably higher, particularly for leukemia patients in their first remission.

“Something needs to be done,” said Dr. Emmanuel Katsanis, a bone marrow transplant expert at the University of Arizona. “There’s no doubt that people aren’t going to make it because of this decision. What do you tell someone? You need a transplant but you have to raise the money?”

Just before the Oct. 1 deadline, Mark Price, a father of six who was fighting leukemia, learned he needed a bone marrow transplant. But his doctor, Jeffrey R. Schriber, found donor matches for his transplant the very day the new rules went into effect, and Mr. Price no longer qualified for coverage by the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the formal name for the state’s Medicaid program.

What happened next was at once inspirational and heart-rending.

Out of the blue, an anonymous financial donor quickly stepped forward and agreed to cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed for Mr. Price’s surgery. But Mr. Price died last weekend, after his cancer returned before the operation could be done. He was buried on Thursday, next to his grandfather.

“It’s not correct to say that he died as a result of the cuts,” said Dr. Schriber, who is active in lobbying for the financing to be restored. “Did it prey on his mind? Did it make his last days more difficult? No doubt.”

Elsewhere, the fund-raising is already under way.

Mr. Felix and others are now trying to raise enough for new organs through NTAF, a nonprofit organization based in Pennsylvania formerly known as the National Transplant Assistance Fund that helps transplant patients pay for their medical costs. National coverage of their plight has already led to more than $100,000 in donations for some of the patients affected by the budget cuts. The Felix family is also planning a yard sale this weekend so he does not lose the chance to get another liver.

There has been a flurry of lobbying to persuade the state to reverse the decision. Dr. Gruessner said he and others met with state health officials recently to propose other cuts associated with transplants, like eliminating tests typically conducted before surgery.

If the Legislature does decide to reconsider the cuts, one of the affected people, a plumber and father of three named Randy Shepherd, 36, who has an ailing heart and needs a transplant, plans to attend the debate.

“I’m trying not to take it personally,” he said of being cut out of the program. “None of the politicians had heard of me when they made their decision. They didn’t say, ‘Let’s kill this guy.’ ”
Congress Approves Child Nutrition Bill
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — Congress gave final approval on Thursday to a child nutrition bill that expands the school lunch program and sets new standards to improve the quality of school meals, with more fruits and vegetables.

Michelle Obama lobbied for the bill as a way to combat obesity and hunger. About half of the $4.5 billion cost is financed by a cut in food stamps starting in several years.

Mrs. Obama said she was thrilled by passage of what she described as a groundbreaking piece of legislation.

By a vote of 264 to 157, the House on Thursday passed the bill, which was approved in the Senate by unanimous consent in August. It goes now to President Obama, who intends to sign it.

On the final roll call, 247 Democrats and 17 Republicans voted for the bill. Four Democrats and 153 Republicans voted no.

Some liberal House Democrats and advocates for the poor railed against the bill in September, saying it was wrong to pay for the expansion of child nutrition programs by cutting money for food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Democrats put aside their disagreements on Thursday, after concluding that it was better to take what they could get than to gamble on their chances in the next Congress when Republicans will control the House. Mr. Obama tamped down concern by telling Democrats he would work with them to find other ways to pay for the bill, before the cuts in food stamps take effect.

“The president will do everything he can to restore these unconscionable cuts,” said Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Democrats and a few Republicans praised Mrs. Obama. “She has been an incredible champion for our children, particularly in the areas of nutrition and obesity,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Mr. McGovern, who is co-chairman of the House Hunger Caucus, said: “Hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin. Highly processed, empty-calorie foods are less expensive than fresh nutritious foods.”

School meal programs have a major impact on the nation’s health, and supporters of the bill said it could reduce the prevalence of obesity among children. The lunch program feeds more than 31 million children a day.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said, “The bill sets national nutrition standards that will finally get all of the junk food infiltrating our classrooms and our cafeterias out the door.”

But Representative Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia and a physician, said: “This bill is not about child nutrition. It’s not about healthy kids. It’s about an expansion of the federal government, more and more control from Washington, borrowing more money and putting our children in greater debt. The federal government has no business setting nutritional standards and telling families what they should and should not eat.”

The bill gives the secretary of agriculture authority to establish nutrition standards for foods sold in schools during the school day, including items in vending machines. The standards would require schools to serve more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products.

And for the first time in more than three decades, the bill would increase federal reimbursement for school lunches beyond inflation — to help cover the cost of higher-quality meals. It would also allow more than 100,000 children on Medicaid to qualify automatically for free school meals.

One of the most contentious provisions of the bill regulates prices for lunches served to children with family incomes over 185 percent of the poverty level (more than $40,793 a year for a family of four).

“This provision would require some schools to raise their lunch prices,” the Congressional Budget Office said.

Representative John Kline, Republican of Minnesota, said this provision was tantamount to a tax increase on middle-class families. The National Governors Association and local school officials objected to it as a new federal mandate.

But Margo G. Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a research and advocacy group, said: “The price of paid lunches needs to go up. Schools are not charging enough to cover the cost. As a result, money intended to provide healthy food to low-income kids is being diverted to subsidize food for higher-income children.”

School districts that comply with the new standards can receive an additional federal payment of 6 cents for each lunch served. The National School Boards Association, representing local board members, said “the actual increased cost of compliance” was at least twice that amount.

The bill was written mainly by Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas and chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who lost her bid for re-election.

The bill rounds out the tenure of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. When she took the gavel in January 2007, she was surrounded by the children of House members, and she called the House to order in the name of “all America’s children.”
Turkey and Mizuna Salad
By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

This dish has bright, mildly spicy Asian flavors and lots of crunch. Mizuna is a Japanese mustard green that’s high in folic acid, vitamin A, carotenoids and vitamin C. If you can’t find it, substitute arugula.

For the salad:

2 cups mizuna or arugula

3 cups shredded or diced cooked turkey

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1 serrano chili, seeded if desired and chopped (optional)

1 bunch scallions, white part and green, thinly sliced

1 small cucumber, seeded, diced and peeled if waxy; or 1/2 long European cucumber, diced

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1 small red bell pepper, cut in thin strips

2 tablespoons coarsely chopped walnuts

2 broccoli crowns, cut or broken into small florets, steamed four to five minutes, refreshed with cold water and drained on paper towels (optional)

For the dressing:

2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

1 tablespoon seasoned rice wine vinegar

1 garlic clove, minced or put through a press

2 teaspoons finely minced fresh ginger

1 tablespoon soy sauce

2 tablespoons dark Chinese sesame oil or walnut oil

2 tablespoons canola or peanut oil

1/3 cup low-fat buttermilk or plain nonfat yogurt

1 tablespoon turkey stock or water, for thinning out if using yogurt

1. Line a platter or large bowl with the mizuna or arugula.

2. Season the turkey with salt and pepper, and combine in a large bowl with the chili, scallions, cucumber, cilantro, red pepper and walnuts

3. Combine the ingredients for the dressing, and mix well. Toss with the turkey mixture. Arrange on top of the mizuna or arugula and serve.

Yield: Serves six.

Advance preparation: You can prepare and combine the salad ingredients several hours before tossing with the dressing. Keep in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per serving: 293 calories; 17 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 54 milligrams cholesterol; 10 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 242 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 24 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”
Microbe Finds Arsenic Tasty; Redefines Life
By DENNIS OVERBYE

Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus — one of six elements considered essential for life — opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about.

The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.

Scientists said the results, if confirmed, would expand the notion of what life could be and where it could be. “There is basic mystery, when you look at life,” said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute on the origins of life there, who was not involved in the work. “Nature only uses a restrictive set of molecules and chemical reactions out of many thousands available. This is our first glimmer that maybe there are other options.”

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology fellow at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., who led the experiment, said, “This is a microbe that has solved the problem of how to live in a different way.”

This story is not about Mono Lake or arsenic, she said, but about “cracking open the door and finding that what we think are fixed constants of life are not.”

Dr. Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues publish their findings Friday in Science.

Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University who was not part of the research, said he was amazed. “It’s like if you or I morphed into fully functioning cyborgs after being thrown into a room of electronic scrap with nothing to eat,” he said.

Gerald Joyce, a chemist and molecular biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., said the work “shows in principle that you could have a different form of life,” but noted that even these bacteria are affixed to the same tree of life as the rest of us, like the extremophiles that exist in ocean vents.

“It’s a really nice story about adaptability of our life form,” he said. “It gives food for thought about what might be possible in another world.”

The results could have a major impact on space missions to Mars and elsewhere looking for life. The experiments on such missions are designed to ferret out the handful of chemical elements and reactions that have been known to characterize life on Earth. The Viking landers that failed to find life on Mars in 1976, Dr. Wolfe-Simon pointed out, were designed before the discovery of tube worms and other weird life in undersea vents and the dry valleys of Antarctica revolutionized ideas about the evolution of life on Earth.

Dr. Sasselov said, “I would like to know, when designing experiments and instruments to look for life, whether I should be looking for same stuff as here on Earth, or whether there are other options.

“Are we going to look for same molecules we love and know here, or broaden our search?”

Phosphorus is one of six chemical elements that have long been thought to be essential for all Life As We Know It. The others are carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and sulfur.

While nature has been able to engineer substitutes for some of the other elements that exist in trace amounts for specialized purposes — like iron to carry oxygen — until now there has been no substitute for the basic six elements. Now, scientists say, these results will stimulate a lot of work on what other chemical replacements might be possible. The most fabled, much loved by science fiction authors but not ever established, is the substitution of silicon for carbon.

Phosphorus chains form the backbone of DNA and its chemical bonds, particularly in a molecule known as adenosine triphosphate, the principal means by which biological creatures store energy. “It’s like a little battery that carries chemical energy within cells,” said Dr. Scharf. So important are these “batteries,” Dr. Scharf said, that the temperature at which they break down, about 160 Celsius (320 Fahrenheit), is considered the high-temperature limit for life.

Arsenic sits right beneath phosphorus in the periodic table of the elements and shares many of its chemical properties. Indeed, that chemical closeness is what makes it toxic, Dr. Wolfe-Simon said, allowing it to slip easily into a cell’s machinery where it then gums things up, like bad oil in a car engine.

At a conference at Arizona State about alien life in 2006, however, Dr. Wolfe-Simon suggested that an organism that could cope with arsenic might actually have incorporated arsenic instead of phosphorus into its lifestyle. In a subsequent paper in The International Journal of Astrobiology, she and Ariel Anbar and Paul Davies, both of Arizona State University, predicted the existence of arsenic-loving life forms.

“Then Felisa found them!” said Dr. Davies, who has long championed the idea of searching for “weird life” on Earth as well as in space and is a co-author on the new paper.

Reasoning that such organisms were more likely to be found in environments already rich in arsenic, Dr. Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues scooped up a test tube full of mud from Mono Lake, which is salty, alkaline and already heavy in arsenic, and gradually fed them more and more.

Despite her prediction that such arsenic-eating organisms existed, Dr. Wolfe-Simon said that she held her breath every day that she went to the lab, expecting to hear that the microbes had died, but they did not. “As a biochemist, this stuff doesn’t make sense,” she recalled thinking.

A bacterium known as strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria, proved to grow the best of the microbes from the lake, although not without changes from their normal development. The cells grown in the arsenic came out about 60 percent larger than cells grown with phosphorus, but with large, empty internal spaces.

By labeling the arsenic with radioactivity, the researchers were able to conclude that arsenic atoms had taken up position in the microbe’s DNA as well as in other molecules within it. Dr. Joyce, however, said that the experimenters had yet to provide a “smoking gun” that there was arsenic in the backbone of working DNA.

Despite this taste for arsenic, the authors also reported, the GFAJ-1 strain grew considerably better when provided with phosphorus, so in some ways they still prefer a phosphorus diet. Dr. Joyce, from his reading of the paper, concurred, pointing out that there was still some phosphorus in the bacterium even after all its force-feeding with arsenic. He described it as “clinging to every last phosphate molecule, and really living on the edge.”

Dr. Joyce added, “I was feeling sorry for the bugs.”
Obesity Surgery May Become Option for Many More
By ANDREW POLLACK

Weight-loss surgery, once a last resort for extremely overweight people, may soon become an option for those who are less heavy.

An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration will consider on Friday a request by Allergan, the pharmaceutical company, to significantly lower how obese someone must be to qualify for surgery using the company’s Lap-Band device, which restricts intake to the stomach.

On Wednesday, the F.D.A. acknowledged that a new study by the company showed that people in the proposed range of obesity who had the band experienced “statistically significant decreases in all measures of weight loss.”

If the agency approves the change, the number of Americans eligible for the Lap-Band operation could easily double, ensuring more sales for Allergan and probably more insurance coverage for such operations. But the proposed change, sought at a time when the obesity epidemic in the United States seems intractable, still leaves some people uneasy, in part because of side effects and failure rates. In addition, long-term weight reduction is hard to maintain.

“You’re talking about millions and millions of people who would meet these criteria,” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School. “Let’s make sure by the most rigorous research that this is safe and effective.”

A new generation of diet pills has failed to gain federal approval, limiting options for overweight Americans, and Allergan and other companies are betting that surgery will become more of a frontline option rather than a last resort.

“It would be kind of ironic if people have access to surgery and not medical therapies, where they can go from Weight Watchers to surgery and have nothing in-between,” said Dr. Louis J. Aronne, an obesity expert at Weill Cornell Medical College. “But it appears it may be the way it will be in the near future.”

Doctors have already started to operate on extremely heavy teenagers, not just adults. And some experts are recasting weight-loss procedures, known as bariatric surgery, as metabolic surgery, saying that it might be justified to treat diabetes, even in people who are barely obese or not obese. Gastric banding involves placing an inflatable silicone ring around the upper part of the stomach, which limits food consumption and makes one feel full faster.

Current guidelines say weight loss surgery is appropriate for people who have failed to lose weight through diet and exercise and have a body mass index, or B.M.I., of 40 and above, or 35 and above if a person has at least one serious health problem, like diabetes or high blood pressure, that is tied to obesity. Allergan wants to lower the threshold for the Lap-Band to a B.M.I. of 35 with no associated health problems and to 30 with such problems.

For instance, a person who is 5 feet 6 inches and has diabetes would have to weigh 216 pounds to qualify now. Under the proposed lower threshold, that person could weigh 30 pounds less, or 186 pounds.

Federal statistics suggest that nearly 20 percent of the adult population has a B.M.I. between 30 and 35, more than double the population above 35. Probably half or more of the people between 30 and 35 have some associated health condition.

Bariatric surgeons and some obesity experts say that surgery has proven to be the only way many people can lose a lot of weight and keep it off, and some cite a Swedish study suggesting that it prolonged lives. And, they say, the operations have become safer since the obesity thresholds were first set in 1991 in a meeting organized by the National Institutes of Health.

“The whole risk-benefit ratio is completely different than it was back then,” said Dr. Marc Bessler, chief of the division of minimally invasive and bariatric surgery at Columbia.

Banding is a less radical operation than the main alternative, the gastric bypass. It is also reversible and costs less — from $12,000 to more than $20,000, compared with $20,000 to more than $30,000 for a bypass. But banding also leads to a weight loss of about 20 percent on average, less than that of bypass.

Bypass has been the preferred operation in the United States, though Allergan executives said on a recent call with investors that banding now has about 50 percent market share. Within the banding market, Allergan’s Lap-Band has about 70 percent market share, according to the company, with the rest belonging to the Realize Band sold by Ethicon Endo-Surgery, a division of Johnson & Johnson. Allergan’s band was approved in 2001.

To win approval of the lower threshold, Allergan sponsored a study in which 149 of these less obese people had the band implanted. About 80 percent of the participants achieved the goal of losing at least 30 percent of their excess weight, meaning the amount by which they were overweight, after one year. About 70 percent of patients experienced a side effect, like vomiting or pain. The F.D.A. indicated on Wednesday that it had questions about how meaningful the weight loss was and whether the results of the study would be applicable to people other than the white women who made up a large portion of the participants.

Some doctors are dropping the band, in part because some older studies suggest that up to a third of patients eventually have the band removed because of side effects or ineffective weight loss. While about one in 1,000 patients die within 30 days of surgery, a survey of members of the bariatric surgery society suggested that deaths occurring later are under-reported.

“Before they start putting the Lap-Band on patients who are 50 pounds overweight, the public has to be made aware of how dangerous this is,” said Stephanie Quatinetz, a New York lawyer whose daughter, Rebecca, died at age 27 in August 2009, two months after getting Lap-Band surgery.

One factor that is moving some experts to advocate surgery for lower body mass index levels is its effectiveness in resolving diabetes, hypertension and some other ills associated with obesity.

“There are dramatic metabolic effects that in many cases go well beyond the weight loss effects,” said Dr. Lee M. Kaplan, director of the weight center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

He said that while it was once thought that surgery worked mainly by mechanically restricting how much one can eat, it is becoming clear that gastric bypass, at least, has effects on hormones.

Some experts say body mass index does not adequately measure risk of health problems. For instance, Asians tend to get diabetes at a lower B.M.I. than whites.

“The B.M.I. limitation of 35/40, set in the period when the major objective of the operations was weight control, is no longer the primary appropriate guideline for the selection of candidates for bariatric surgery,” Dr. Walter J. Pories, a surgeon, and colleagues wrote in the journal Obesity earlier this year. Dr. Pories will be a member of the F.D.A. advisory committee on Friday.

Allergan, known mostly for its Botox product, which is approved for cosmetic and medical ailments like chronic migraines, wants to reverse slowing sales of the Lap-Band that the company attributes to the weak economy. In the first nine months of this year, sales of its obesity products, mostly Lap-Band, fell 4 percent, to $182.4 million.

Even if Allergan’s application is approved, perhaps a small fraction of the new candidates are likely to opt for surgery because many people avoid operations. “I don’t think it’s enough to overwhelm the health care system,” said Dr. Bruce Wolfe, president of American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, whose executive council unanimously endorsed Allergan’s proposal. “That’s not happening with the people who are heavier and need it even more.”

The society says that 220,000 bariatric surgeries of all kinds were performed in the United States last year. That is more than twice as many as in 2003, but represents a small fraction of the potential pool.

Still, some less obese patients do want the surgery. Some online discussion boards tell of people who purposely gained weight to qualify, and some messages give advice to others on wearing hidden weights.

Rashida Brown says she wants surgery to help control her diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension. But her insurer has refused to pay twice in the last few years. At the time, Ms. Brown, who is 5 feet 7 inches, weighed 195 to 220 pounds, putting her index below 35.

“I am willing to bet there are quite a few people in the same category as myself — just waiting,” said Ms. Brown, 53, a clinical social worker from Boston.

She may still have to wait, now that she weighs 175 pounds — putting her below even the proposed lower threshold.
F.D.A. Panel Rejects Expanded Use of Prostate Drug
By GINA KOLATA

The question before the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee on Tuesday was path-breaking: Would it recommend that the labels of two drugs be changed to say that they can reduce a man’s risk of getting prostate cancer?

If the drugs were approved for that purpose, they would be only the second class of cancer-prevention drugs on the market — the first being drugs like tamoxifen that block estrogen and reduce the risk of breast cancer.

But the answer was a resounding no. There was too much uncertainty about long-term consequences, the committee said, especially if the drugs would be used by hundreds of thousands of healthy people.

The drugs are dutasteride, made by GlaxoSmithKline and sold as Avodart, and finasteride, a generic made by Merck and sold as Proscar. Both are already on the market to shrink the prostate, alleviating a harmless but uncomfortable condition that results in frequent urination in older men.

GlaxoSmithKline was seeking permission to add cancer risk reduction to its drug’s label, and to market dutasteride as a drug to reduce prostate cancer risk. Merck was not seeking a cancer risk reduction indication but attended the meeting at the request of the F.D.A.

The data before the committee included results from two large studies of the drugs. GlaxoSmithKline’s study involved 8,000 men at risk for prostate cancer because their PSA tests had found elevations of that blood protein. The men also had had prostate biopsies, but at the start of the study none had received a diagnosis of prostate cancer.

The finasteride study, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, included 18,800 healthy men over age 55 who were randomly assigned to take the drug or a placebo.

Both studies found the drugs reduced the overall prostate cancer risk by about 25 percent.

But both studies also found small increases in the incidence of higher-grade, riskier cancers, in men taking the drugs as compared with placebos.

The companies and independent researchers had explanations for that. They said that the drugs reduced the size of a man’s prostate, making it easier to find lethal cancers on biopsies.

“You take something the size of an apricot and shrink it to the size of an almond,” Dr. Anne Phillips, a Glaxo SmithKline vice president, said in an interview before the F.D.A. meeting.

If a man’s prostate is smaller, a doctor who randomly sticks a needle into the prostate is more likely to strike a tumor if it is present. So, the analysis went, instead of increasing a man’s risk of getting a dangerous tumor, the drugs increased the chances that such tumors, if they were present, would be found.

Finasteride investigators published detailed analyses also reaching that conclusion.

“I think there is no question that this drug enhances the detection of high-grade disease,” Dr. Howard Parnes of the National Cancer Institute said about finasteride in an interview before the meeting.

But committee members were not convinced. Was it really safe for men to take the drugs for decades?

“I wouldn’t do it,” said Dr. Patrick J. Loehrer, a committee member from Indiana University, explaining his no vote on finasteride.

And they were worried that the drugs might be misused or misunderstood in the general population, with direct-to-consumer advertising and general practitioners who might not fully appreciate how to use them.

Dr. Richard Pazdur, head of oncology at the F.D.A., told the committee that what they were being asked to decide was very different from their usual charge. Ordinarily, the committee votes on whether cancer drugs should be approved for sick patients who have few alternatives.

In this case, Dr. Pazdur said, the drugs were already approved for a different indication. The question was what would happen if they were marketed to reduce prostate cancer risk.

“Hundreds of thousands of people will be exposed to these drugs,” Dr. Pazdur said. “This is not an oncology drug that is going to be prescribed by a select group of medical oncologists.”

Dr. Ian Thompson, a urologist at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, who led the cancer institute’s study of finasteride, was deeply disappointed in the decision.

“The bar is so high I am not sure we will see chemoprevention in my lifetime,” Dr. Thompson said.

Yet the need is great, he said. One in six men will receive a diagnosis of prostate cancer, Dr. Thompson noted.

“It was somehow felt that that was O.K.,” he said. “I personally feel that that is not acceptable. A man at risk of prostate cancer may at least be informed that he could reduce his risk.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 3, 2010

An article on Thursday about the Food and Drug Administration’s decision not to approve two prostate drugs for use in reducing cancer risk misstated the academic affiliation of Dr. Ian Thompson, a urologist who led a study of one of the drugs, finasteride. He is with the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, not the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Opponents Take Aim at Limited Health Plans
By REED ABELSON

Maybe something isn’t always better than nothing.

Or so went the argument offered by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, in a hearing on Wednesday about a controversial kind of health plan that seems destined to remain on the market for the next several years.

More than a million Americans enrolled in these plans think they have health insurance to protect them from financial catastrophe if they become seriously ill or hurt, Mr. Rockefeller said. “In fact, they don’t,” he said.

“It’s worse than nothing because of the false expectations and the false hope,” Mr. Rockefeller said.

He and other proponents of the new health care law are voicing concerns about the Obama administration’s recent decision to allow these plans, known as limited benefit or mini-med policies, to escape some of the legislation’s early requirements.

Taking the opposite view of Mr. Rockefeller, administration officials contended that coverage provided by these policies was better than nothing at all, and promised that more comprehensive plans would be available through state exchanges in 2014, when all plans will have to comply with the law.

Companies like McDonald’s, which was one of the first to seek a waiver from the new rules so it could continue offering plans that offer as little as $2,000 a year in benefits, say these plans are often the only affordable alternative for many of its part-time or low-income workers.

Critics, including Mr. Rockefeller, say people buying these policies often have no idea of how limited the coverage is. They say the employers and insurers, which include major companies like Aetna and Cigna, do not always make it clear to a worker that these policies will not protect them if they develop an expensive medical condition.

What is more, many of these plans are designed in such a way to pay less than the amount they say they will cover. While a policy might promise coverage up to $50,000 a year, for example, the fine print may actually limit what it will pay toward doctors’ visits at just $2,000 or a hospital stay at $250 a day. People who become seriously ill or hurt can end up with tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid medical bills.

“The language in these policies can be very confusing and lead people to believe they have insurance coverage or security if they experience illness or injury,” said Mark Rukavina, the director of the Access Project, a not-for-profit group in Boston that helps people who accumulate large sums of medical debt.

At the hearing, for example, Eugene Melville, a retail worker in California who bought a limited-benefit policy from Aetna, testified about his experience after learning he had oral cancer. While he said he understood that the policy was capped at $20,000 a year, he discovered that it paid only $2,000 for doctors’ visits and care provided outside a hospital.

Others claim to have been similarly surprised. “In no way did I expect the bill that arrived,” said Jessica Lynn Carroll, 30, a resident of San Jose, Calif., who also bought an Aetna policy. When she had to go to the emergency room because she lost feeling in one of her arms, she found her Aetna policy paid only $500 toward the bill. She ended up owing more than $16,000. “If I had known the insurance I had in the first place was absurd, I wouldn’t have purchased it,” said Ms. Carroll, who said the hospital has agreed to significantly reduce her bills.

At the hearing, McDonald’s insisted that its workers knew what they were paying for. “McDonald’s works hard to make sure that its employees understand the coverage limitations as well as the benefits provided by these plans,” testified Rich Floersch, an executive vice president at the company, who said about 90 percent of those enrolled never reached the limits.

Employees pay $11 a week, nearly $600 a year, for coverage that is capped at $2,000, Mr. Floersch said, and they can pay more for plans that limit benefits at $5,000 or $10,000 a year. McDonald’s also says it offers a more comprehensive — and more expensive — plan.

Aetna says its materials are clear. “We want people to know what they’re buying. We recognize that health insurance is complex and we have continually improved our member materials to make them clear so they are not surprised by the limited benefits in these plans,” the company said in a statement.

Cigna also defended the plans, saying they are a choice for people who cannot afford more comprehensive coverage. The company “is committed to helping our customers understand benefits plans before they purchase them,” Cigna said in a statement. “We work to educate our customers about how to best use their benefits after they enroll.”

But insurers also emphasize that customers should be sure to understand what they are buying. “Any consumer should know exactly what benefits their coverage provides before purchasing a policy,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade association. Even policies that provide as much as $1 million in coverage may limit the amount they will pay for specific services.

The federal waivers are only good for a year, and regulators say they plan to ask the plans for more information so they can decide how to handle these policies. Administration officials also say they plan to make sure the insurers are clear that the policies do not meet the requirements of the federal law

“We are working to bring unprecedented transparency to the insurance market, and improve the quality of health insurance, while helping to ensure that people can keep the coverage they have,” said Steve Larsen, director of the Office of Oversight in the Health and Human Services’ Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. “As part of this effort, we will be requiring insurance companies that offer mini-med plans to tell consumers in plain language that their plan has limited coverage.”

Still, some consumer advocates say individuals may sometimes be better off if they have no insurance at all. If they are uninsured, they may qualify for deeply discounted or even free charity care from the hospital, which they might not get if they had some kind of coverage. “For some people, frankly, they may be better off with no coverage if this is the alternative,” Mr. Rukavina said.
Tests for H.I.V. Reach a Record
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

The number of American adults tested for H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, reached a record high in 2009, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

Nonetheless, about 55 percent of all adults — and about 28 percent of all people who are at higher risk for getting infected — have still never been tested.

Starting in 2006, the disease centers began urging doctors to order H.I.V. tests as part of routine blood work for all patients. Success has been modest; the percentage of all adults who have ever had a test rose only to 45 percent after years of holding steady at 40 percent.

Almost one-third of people who learn they are infected find out only when they fall seriously ill, the disease centers said, meaning they have presumably infected others during that time and have also missed the opportunity to get treatment.
Scans Could Aid Diagnosis of Brain Trauma in Living
By ALAN SCHWARZ

In a finding that could eventually lead to ways to identify and perhaps treat athletes who have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, Boston-based researchers announced on Wednesday that a new imaging technique found chemical changes in the brains of living athletes with a history of head trauma.

C.T.E., whose diagnosis in more than a dozen deceased N.F.L. players and one collegian has helped lift the dangers of sports concussions to national prominence, can be confirmed only through a specialized examination of brain tissue after death. As such, the question of whether a particular living athlete who is showing symptoms of the disease — anger control, memory loss and more — has C.T.E. has remained only gnawing speculation.

At the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting in Chicago, Dr. Alexander Lin of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston described how magnetic resonance spectroscopy scans identified biomarkers in five athletes showing signs of C.T.E. The subjects were three retired N.F.L. players, one boxer and one wrestler; their scans were compared with those of nonathletes of the same age and relative lifestyle.

“We measured the brain chemistry of men with a broad history of brain trauma and found these changes that indicate something biochemically abnormal,” Lin said. “We don’t know whether they have C.T.E. We don’t know at this point if these living changes are related.”

One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Robert Stern of the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, expressed similar caution that these preliminary results not be over-interpreted, particularly given the public’s growing understanding of C.T.E. and its effects.

It remains unknown whether brain trauma caused the chemical changes, Stern said, something that further studies could help determine. Stern said that potential treatments would be best pursued through the identification of living people with the disease.

“This is a first step in a long process,” Stern said. “This is an initial study with a very small sample that shows us that the technology may be of use in C.T.E. diagnosis. It does not, however, suggest that we are close to being able to use the technology in the near future.”

Any proven method to diagnose C.T.E. in a living person could have major economic effects on the N.F.L. Retired players with cognitive problems still cannot prove their condition was caused by football, which has limited their ability to obtain benefits either through the league’s disability plan, state worker’s compensation or lawsuits.

Given California’s unique worker’s compensation system, which allow players who played one game in the state to file claims years after their retirement, proof that cognitive decline was related to their N.F.L. career could lead to teams’ owing millions of dollars for medical treatment (including institutional care) for each retiree.

A witchy brew of madness and cunning, “Black Swan” tells the story of a ballerina who aches, with battered feet and an increasingly crowded head, to break out of the corps. Played by Natalie Portman in a smashing, bruising, wholly committed performance, the young dancer, Nina, looks more like a child than a woman, her flesh as undernourished as her mind. When she goes to bed at night, a nearby jewelry box tinkling “Swan Lake,” a crowd of stuffed animals watches over her, longtime companions that — as Nina and this dementedly entertaining film grow more unhinged — begin to look more like jailers than friends.

Crammed with twins — lookalikes, mirrored images, doppelgängers — the story follows that of the “Swan Lake” ballet in broad, gradually warped strokes. It opens with the artistic director of a fictional New York ballet company, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), announcing that the new season will begin with a “visceral and real” version of that old favorite. To that end he dumps his prima ballerina, Beth (Winona Ryder), and picks Nina to dance the dual role of the swan queen (an enchanted woman in bird form) and her villainous black twin. But as the pressure builds, things fall apart, or Nina does. She stumbles out of a spin and begins scratching at her skin. One day she strips a piece from her finger as lightly as if she were peeling a banana.

Part tortured-artist drama, “Black Swan” looks like a tony art-house entertainment. (Hey, there’s Lincoln Center!) But what gives it a jolt is its giddy, sometimes sleazy exploitation-cinema savvy. The director Darren Aronofsky is a well-schooled cinéaste, and in “Black Swan” he riffs on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet masterpiece, “The Red Shoes,” and the pair’s “Black Narcissus,” among other influences. But it’s also likely that Mr. Aronofsky, who was born in 1969 and grew up in Brooklyn, frequented Times Square when it was known as the deuce and lined with movie palaces playing the best and worst in trash cinema. I bet he also caught a few episodes of the “Red Shoe Diaries” on cable.

That isn’t a knock. One of the pleasures of “Black Swan” is its lack of reverence toward the rarefied world of ballet, which to outsiders can look as lively as a crypt. Mr. Aronofsky makes this world (or his version of it) exciting partly by pulling back the velvet curtains and showing you the sacrifices and crushingly hard work that goes into creating beautiful dances. Nina doesn’t just pirouette prettily, she also cracks her damaged toes (the sound design picking up every crackle and crunch) and sticks her fingers down her throat to vomit up her food. Mostly, though, she trains hard, hammering her toe shoes into floor much as Jake La Motta pounded his fists into flesh. She’s a contender, but also a martyr to her art.

Mr. Aronofsky is happy to see her bleed. A filmmaker who likes to play around with genre while mixing the highbrow with the lowdown and dirty, he has built a small, vivid catalog by exploring human extremes with wildly uneven degrees of visual wow, sensitivity and intelligence. He trawled the lower depths in “Requiem for a Dream” and struggled to scale the metaphysical heights with “The Fountain,” a fable about eternal (as in, when will it end?) love. For his previous movie, “The Wrestler,” he proved his commercial smarts by taking Mickey Rourke out of deep freeze and dusting off a comeback story that was old when Wallace Beery wiped Jackie Cooper’s runny nose with the script for “The Champ.”

“Black Swan,” by contrast, surprises despite its lusty or rather sluttish predilection for clichés, which include the requisitely demanding impresario (Mr. Cassel makes a model cock of the walk) and Nina’s ballerina rival, Lily (Mila Kunis, as a succulent, borderline rancid peach). But, oh, what Mr. Aronofsky does with those clichés, which he embraces, exploits and, by a squeak, finally transcends.

Such is his faith in his ability to surmount the obvious (and the lethally blunt) that he turns Nina’s mother, Erica (a terrific Barbara Hershey), into a smother-mother who out-crazies Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford in the mommy dearest department. You don’t know whether to laugh or shriek (both are reasonable responses), and it is this uncertainty and at times delicious unease that proves to be Mr. Aronofsky’s sweet spot.

It’s easy to read “Black Swan” as a gloss on the artistic pursuit of the ideal. But take another look, and you see that Mr. Aronofsky is simultaneously telling that story straight, playing with the suffering-artist stereotype and having his nasty way with Nina, burdening her with trippy psychodrama and letting her run wild in a sexcapade that will soon be in heavy rotation on the Web. The screenplay, by Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, invites pop-psychological interpretations about women who self-mutilate while striving for their perfect selves, a description that seems to fit Nina. But such a reading only flattens a film that from scene to scene is deadly serious, downright goofy and by turns shocking, funny and touching.

With “Black Swan” Mr. Aronofsky has found a surprisingly accommodating vehicle for his preoccupations, including bodies in pain, and his ever more refined technique. Here, working with his usual cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, and largely shooting hand-held in both super-16-millimeter film and digital, Mr. Aronofsky opts for grit over gloss, an ideal strategy for a story with a harsh underbelly. Hand-held cinematography can be lazy shorthand for “reality” (as if life happens in shaky-cam), but here the hand-held visuals work because of their intimacy. The influence of the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne can be seen in the close, tag-along shots of Nina’s head as she hurries off, a point of view that brings you within breathing, at times panting, distance of a character whose behavior can be off-putting.

Though it had its moments, “The Wrestler” felt like the work of a director who, after proving his street bona fides and bombing at the box office, decided to try some pandering. It worked: Mr. Rourke was rediscovered, and Mr. Aronofsky’s future was salvaged, in part because he had closed the distance between the fallen star played by Mr. Rourke and the one he himself had become. Ms. Portman’s performance in “Black Swan” is more art than autobiography, and as a consequence more honest, but because it’s so demandingly physical the lines that usually divide actresses from their characters are also blurred. This is, after all, Ms. Portman’s own thin body on display, her jutting chest bones as sharply defined as a picket fence.

Although Mr. Aronofsky focuses on her head, shoulders and arms, mostly avoiding long shots that might betray a lack of technique, Ms. Portman does most of her own dancing (and plausibly, at least to this ballet naïf). The vision of Ms. Portman’s own body straining with so much tremulous, tremendous effort, her pale arms fluttering in desperation, grounds the story in the real, as do the totemic Lincoln Center buildings, the clattering subway and the grubby, claustrophobic apartment Nina shares with her mother. Together they create the solid foundation of truth that makes the slow-creeping hallucinatory flights of fantasy all the more jolting and powerful. Much like the new version of “Swan Lake” that Thomas creates, “Black Swan” is visceral and real even while it’s one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.

“Black Swan” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bedroom gymnastics and graphic violence.

BLACK SWAN

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky; written by Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, based on a story by Mr. Heinz; director of photography, Matthew Libatique; edited by Andrew Weisblum; music by Clint Mansell; ballet choreography by Benjamin Millepied; production design by Thérèse DePrez; costumes by Amy Westcott, ballet costumes by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte; produced by Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

WITH: Natalie Portman (Nina Sayers/the Swan Queen), Vincent Cassel (Thomas Leroy/the Gentleman), Mila Kunis (Lily/the Black Swan), Barbara Hershey (Erica Sayers/the Queen) and Winona Ryder (Beth Macintyre/the Dying Swan).
Star Tenor Starts a Tour, Minus the Muppets
By STEVE SMITH

Champagne flowed at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, poured into plastic stemware at tables lining the hallways and tipped by well-dressed patrons. Taking in the festive bustle, you could imagine that you were at a gala opening, were it not for a dull stale-beer aroma that never entirely goes away. Still, for the latest appearance of the superstar Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, the Garden put on airs.

The occasion was the start of Mr. Bocelli’s latest American tour, “My Christmas,” a six-stop excursion celebrating his best-selling 2009 CD of sacred and secular Christmas fare. But inside the arena, you noticed wide patches of empty seats among the thousands of eager fans present.

Has Mr. Bocelli’s star dipped? Unlikely. “My Christmas” has sold more than two million copies in the United States. Is the economy too soft to support a tour with prime seats priced at nearly $380? Possibly. Before the show started, I thumbed through Twitter to gauge the buzz. There was plenty, most of it about Mr. Bocelli’s new PBS television special, also called “My Christmas,” which was showing in a rerun at that very minute.

Mr. Bocelli, you were reminded, is ubiquitous.

Home viewers were treated to the sight of Mr. Bocelli singing with Mary J. Blige and the Muppets. Alas, those guests were missing here; instead, Mr. Bocelli was joined by a large, unnamed orchestra and chorus, efficiently conducted by Eugene Kohn.

The first half of Mr. Bocelli’s program was devoted to straightforward classical and opera selections. As Mr. Bocelli sang “Where’er You Walk” from Handel’s “Semele,” on a huge screen overhead he rode a horse across a grassy plain, and walked hand in hand with his wife down a tree-lined path.

Mr. Bocelli was in his element: his voice comfortably upholstered with amplification, his audience made up of devotees. Yet curiously, his set lurched in fits and starts, each rousing Verdi or Puccini aria dispatched with evident concentration and sincerity, followed by awkward inertia until the next selection commenced.

Repeatedly he ceded the stage to guests, who were met with polite applause. Anna Tifu, a Sardinian violinist, made fleet, scrappy work of a fantasy on themes from Bizet’s “Carmen.” Alexia Voulgaridou, a commendable Greek soprano, sang the “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s “Faust” expressively and played a touching foil to Mr. Bocelli in an extended sequence from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” (with snippets from a staged “Butterfly,” starring Mr. Bocelli, projected overhead).

Mr. Bocelli seemed to relax during the second set, singing with greater ease and expressiveness in sentimental Neapolitan songs and selections from “My Christmas.” Guests fared better as well. Heather Headley’s megawatt smile warmed and lubricated her pliant tone in a duet version of “Blue Christmas.” And student singers from the Adderley School of the Performing Arts in Santa Barbara, Calif., were irresistible in “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

Santa failed to appear, but no matter: Mr. Bocelli had roused his admirers to a fever pitch by the end of his show, and he sustained that momentum through three standard encores: “My Prayer,” with Ms. Headley; “Time to Say Goodbye,” with Ms. Voulgaridou and Ms. Tifu; and a heartfelt “Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”

Andrea Bocelli performs on Saturday at the Prudential Center in Newark; (800) 745-3000, prucenter.com.
Last Supper’ for the Laptop Generation
By RANDY KENNEDY

IF you had tied on a blindfold, suspended disbelief and allowed yourself to be carried last week to a particular location just off Park Avenue near 66th Street, your reopened eyes would have had trouble telling that they were not inside the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan, looking at a sight everyone knows and few have actually seen: a magisterial painting of 13 enrobed men seated oddly on one side of a long dinner table.

Even many experts would not have been able to distinguish the wall mural in front of them from the real one, Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” that “most beautiful and marvelous work,” as Vasari described it, doomed to crumble almost from the minute its tempera dried.

But a quick walk around this painting would have revealed a few anachronisms. On the back side the painting’s cracked, ancient-seeming plaster was mounted not on quattrocento brick but on Alucore, the kind of aluminum sheeting used for floors in jetliners. In front a ruler-straight seam was running through the head of St. James, a problem that a man high in the basket of a hydraulic cherry picker was trying to correct with a small paintbrush. That he and many of the workers with him spoke Italian — “Bene! Bene!” one called out from below — lent a little verisimilitude. But the view around them was not of a church from Milan’s gilded age. It was a view bequeathed by another gilded age, the 19th century one that gave rise to the Park Avenue Armory, in whose vast drill hall all this art-historical re-enacting was taking place. In other words, the traveling Peter Greenaway painting-cinema-lecture-installation-whatever-it-might-be extravaganza had finally come to town.

Beginning Friday and continuing through Jan. 6 Mr. Greenaway, the provocative British filmmaker, along with an international crew of theatrical producers, video experts and art makers will present, for the first time in America, the kind of splashy multimedia art exhibition he has shown to huge, appreciative audiences — and not a few irritated art scholars — around the world for three years now. The show inaugurates the first full season of programming by the Park Avenue Armory since it began reinventing itself as an unconventional arts center three years ago.

Mr. Greenaway’s exhibition, born of his desire to revive a visual literacy he believes modern eyes have lost when looking at paintings, enlists props, lights, advanced digital projectors, towering screens, recorded music, voice-overs, precise copies of paintings (though sometimes the real ones) and practically every other theatrical aid besides smoke machines and interpretive dancers in the cause of trying to bring masterpieces of Western art to life.

The exhibitions began in 2006 as an experiment, with projections onto the canvas of the real “Night Watch,” Rembrandt’s masterpiece at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Mr. Greenaway, 68, lives and is revered enough to have received permission to experiment with such a Dutch national treasure. (He was yelled at nonetheless by some viewers when the show opened. “To them, I suppose I was trying to put a fifth leg on a four-legged cat,” he recalled in an interview.)

The idea took off, and since then has involved the real “Last Supper,” onto which Mr. Greenway superimposed projections for one night in 2008; an exhibition with a replica of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana” last year in Venice; and two more “Last Supper” shows, in Milan and Melbourne, using the replica of the “Last Supper” that was recently shipped from Spain to New York in six panels.

A week ago inside the armory drill hall workers from Change Performing Arts, a Milanese theatrical production company, began building a life-size re-creation — its proportions exact to within millimeters — of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where “The Last Supper” was completed by Leonardo in 1498 after several years of work.

The copy of the painting for the Greenaway show was made 510 years later in far less time, about five weeks, by a company called Factum Arte, based in Madrid and London, a pioneer in the use of high-resolution photography and three-dimensional scanning to recreate paintings and sculpture so precisely that it is now working, at the request of scholars and conservators, on projects involving paintings by Caravaggio and several tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The “Last Supper” replica — which the company prefers to call a clone, though it was made with borrowed photographic data less precise than the company generally uses — was “painted” by an inkjet printer that slowly covered panels of plaster, much like the kind Leonardo worked on, with paint that mimics the original but is designed to last much longer. (Leonardo used an experimental tempera mixture on dry plaster that proved disastrously fragile.)

By Thanksgiving the only major element of the production inside the drill hall that had not yet arrived was Mr. Greenaway himself. There were last-minute visa problems, caused partly by an overstuffed passport. But by Saturday morning he had made it and, dressed in what seems to be an unvarying uniform — dark pinstriped suit, dark shirt and dark knotted scarf — he was in constant motion in a swirl of consulting producers and workers, looking a little like the harried director Guido Anselmi in “8 ½” by Fellini, one of Mr. Greenaway’s heroes.

“It looks bigger than I thought it would, but that’s a pleasant surprise,” he said, craning his neck to take in the replica of the refectory, which looked like a kind of Renaissance spacecraft under repair beneath the hangarlike armory roof, with lots of room to spare (even with the addition of a huge second structure evoking an Italian piazza, where another part of the half-hour production projects images of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana,” recreating the 2009 exhibition in Venice).

Over a cup of untouched tomato soup several hours later Mr. Greenaway talked about how his interest in creating these shows grew not only out of his own early training as a painter and his desire to use film for primarily painterly purposes. He has often described “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” from 1989, probably his best-known movie and one that shocked audiences at the time, as being much more about color than about its ostensible themes of sex, death and cannibalism.

The motivation grew even more out of his waning interest in cinema, whose death he has been proclaiming loudly for more than a decade, even as he continued to make movies. In his view the motion picture, around for little more than a century, has exhausted its possibilities as an evolving art form and lost its hold on the imaginations of a Web-connected populace. What began to obsess him was the idea of seeing what advanced 21st-century movie technology (“The tools of cinema are now wasted on cinema,” he said) could do if harnessed to a few thousand years of its two-dimensional forefather, Western painting.

“On a basic level, if it itches, you have to scratch it,” he said. “So if I complain that cinema is bad, then I’ve got to try to put something back in its place.”

Of the paintings he has volunteered for this mission so far, and those on his wish list — among them, “Guernica” by Picasso; a major Jackson Pollock drip painting at the Museum of Modern Art; the Sistine ceiling as perhaps a grand final act — he said: “We don’t turn them into films. They’re not animated works of art. They’re not cartoons. But we can change the color, and we can change the contrast, and we can change the chiaroscuro, and by inference we can make these paintings cinematic in a curious way.”

A few days later, pacing pensively during a run-through of the production — a raised table evoking the “Last Supper” dinner table glowed ominously red and then blindingly white; Mr. Greenaway’s own basso profundo boomed forth like the voice of God. Projections of painting details wheeled vertiginously around a few onlookers — he said he was a little worried that the whole thing was dragging a bit, like a slow episode of “Masterpiece Classic.”

“It’s also my responsibility here to introduce notions of legitimate entertainment,” he said.

But Adam Lowe, the founder of Factum Arte and the creator of the “Last Supper” replica, stood by smiling, saying that he cared only about the theoretical approval of one viewer: a restless artist himself, who ultimately loved experimenting more than painting. “And if he were here today,” he said, “I think Leonardo would be the happiest man in the world.”
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December 2, 2010
Cracking Open a Holiday Classic

STROLL down Fifth Avenue this month, or along an aisle at Target, or through any other shopping establishment for that matter, and you will inevitably hear Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker.” The music is so ingrained in the Christmas routine that it can be hard to hear it amid the holiday hubbub. But that is what Mark Morris wants audiences to do with his creation, “The Hard Nut.”

For the first time in eight years Mr. Morris’s production, which had its premiere in 1991, is returning to the company’s home borough with performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, beginning next Friday. Mr. Morris’s version, based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s dark tale, plays with traditional gender roles and skips the hordes of adorable children onstage in favor of a chamber-size troupe that puts the focus on the dancing and the score.

In his brightly decorated office in the dance center named after him in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Mr. Morris spoke this week with Julie Bloom about reclaiming Tchaikovsky’s music, his own role onstage and why “The Nutcracker” is such an American staple. (It’s not what you think.) A condensed version of the conversation follows.

Q. What about the music first attracted you to “The Nutcracker?”

A. I heard the score through complete for the first time when I was probably 15 or 16 — because most versions mess with the music in some way — you know, everybody cuts something. So my point was to do the beautiful, gorgeous score through, beginning to end, with as much as the metronome markings by Tchaikovsky as I could. And to really appreciate the incredible music of Act I, which people usually sleep through. It’s amazing.

My point also was to get over my prejudice against the music from growing up as a dancer. You hear it as a Christmas shopper; every commercial has the “Sugar Plum”; it’s terrible. So if you grow up as a dancer, it’s terrifying, it’s numbing. It’s a sedative. And it’s not. It’s gorgeous, gorgeous music.

Q. What are some of your favorite sections of the score?

A. The party scene, which is extremely, in our production, active and rigorous and complicated. But the music is through composed, it keeps interrupting itself, new ideas keep entering and cutting things short. It’s not in discrete pieces like the second act is, with all the national dances. The first one has so many tones and modes in it emotionally that it never seemed to me that it should be about how children should behave in an ideal world of the late 19th century. The music is very much darker, and stranger and a little bit hostile. Drosselmeier is not everybody’s friend. Read the Hoffmann.

And then something like the Arabian number is way too slow in most productions, and so is the Tarantella, or it’s deleted, or the coda of the Sugar Plum. The coda of that music, which I love, that’s shocking, weird music.

Q. What did you like about the Hoffmann story?

A. The story within, that’s why it’s called “The Hard Nut,” it’s not a joke title. It’s the name of the story that Drosselmeier tells her [Marie, the heroine]. To me that makes way more sense, to go around the world and find the nut that cures her ugliness. It’s an actual story instead of Act I being, ‘Aren’t children adorable?’ and Act II being, ‘Here, let’s do some dances for you,’ even though you’re 9, and it won’t be that interesting for you, and you’re watching from the back anyway.’ Also, I did it with around 35 people instead of 135 people, so it’s a different thing.

Let me just tell you, kids love it. This piece being around so long, 20 years, it means that in Berkeley, where we’ve done it a lot, people are now bringing their children. That’s the first “Nutcracker” they saw.

Q. Have you discovered anything new in the music over the years?

A. I had a couple of sessions of looking at conducting it myself, with the help of some colleagues at Tanglewood. I had a string quartet and a pianist and my wonderful coach, Stefan Asbury. And we had a couple of sessions of that, we went all the way through the score, with me conducting, and it’s hard. There are some things that you learn. Something like the battle scene, it just turns into a melee, and it’s all noisy and funny and laughy, but the music is astonishingly advanced. There are so many ideas, there are different perceived rhythms and keys, and there are reminders and there’s foreboding, prefiguring stuff that is going to come later.

Q. Would you want to conduct it one day?

A. I’ve been thinking about it. Not this year. I hope some day that I may be qualified to conduct it.

Q. Are you looking forward to performing?

A. Some people had no idea I was in it, and I’ve been in, like, every single performance. Sorry if you missed me; that means I was a good actor. This year I got a promotion. I’m Dr. Stahlbaum. I’m not the inebriated party guest. I’m just learning that. It’s a new part for me.

Q. Can you talk a little about the “Waltz of the Flowers”?

A. I choreographed a lot of it while I was at Jacob’s Pillow with whoever in my company wasn’t teaching that day and I made up a new “Waltz of the Flowers” every day. I generated waltz material based on vegetation and flowers and the National Geographic Channel, which didn’t exist yet. It’s a bunch of different things. It’s predatory and it’s delicate and it’s sort of baroque. And it’s a corsage and it’s rotting fruit, and I love that. And it’s not all women, because flowers aren’t like that.

Q. There’s a lot of humor. Were you trying to subvert some of the elements of a classic “Nutcracker”?

A. Mine is fully classical; it’s more classical structurally and compositionally than a lot of classical ballets. I love a good “Nutcracker” that I didn’t make up better than anyone else, I love this stuff. It’s not a sendup. It’s a perfectly legitimate version with virtuosic dancing, and of course there’s funny stuff, and scary stuff and sexy stuff and, it’s sad.

Q. Why do you think “The Nutcracker” is such an American staple?

A. I think it’s an industry, so if you can pay the bills for the rest of the year from a few weeks of “Nutcracker,” congratulations. If, sadly, that’s the only thing that draws customers, then you have to relook at everything that you do the rest of the year. Our “Nutcracker” does not pay for the rest of the year. It’s an expensive production. We use a children’s choir instead of a synthesizer. You might as well use robot dancers and save money all the way around.

Q. Are there particular recordings that you’re fond of?

A. There’s a great Gergiev performance recently that’s beautiful, gigantic and super Russian crazy. But the Michael Tilson Thomas one is my favorite. That one from years ago has great mystery to it, and he uses toy instruments in the battle scene, and it’s very beautiful and haunting. But my favorite “Nutcracker” that’s not mine is the “Nutcracker Suite” from “Fantasia.” Whether Balanchine had something to do with it or not, we don’t know, but it’s exquisite, it’s the greatest. If it can be as magic as that, then hooray.

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Where Alcoholism Drinks in the Laughs
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Television has a drinking problem.

And not only because David Hasselhoff’s new reality series on A&E, “The Hasselhoffs,” breezes over his alcoholism as if it were just another quirky passage in a colorful Hollywood career. On the premiere episode on Sunday Mr. Hasselhoff, the former star of “Knight Rider” and “Baywatch,” says that the infamous 2007 YouTube video that showed him lying blind drunk, trying to eat a Wendy’s meal off the floor, was a wake-up call that “led me to quit drinking.” He adds waggishly, “But I’m still addicted to cheeseburgers.”

This reality show isn’t about a reformed alcoholic struggling to stay sober; it’s another goofy Kardashian-ish showcase for an unreformed show-business addict who is willing to put everything, including his two daughters, on display. The blithe way Mr. Hasselhoff finesses his image problem might have been a problem in the past, but nowadays jokes about serious drinking aren’t taboo, they are de rigueur.

People booze it up more wantonly on television than ever before, but there is an element of denial in even the most extreme depictions. In real life drinking is fun until it’s not. Most television shows can’t deal with that kind of contradiction. Alcohol is depicted as either fun, as in the red wine fests on the ABC sitcom “Cougar Town,” or it’s a life-destroying scourge that requires drastic measures, as on “Intervention” on A&E or “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” which returned last week on VH1 for a fourth season. Basically, television presents a conflicted, all-or-nothing portrait that isn’t realistic so much as it is a reflection of the American love-hate relationship with liquor — all or Prohibition.

Naturally, the few series that have a more sober take on drinking aren’t reality shows. “Jersey Shore” celebrates fall-down drunkenness; the puking and fighting that ensue are all part of the scene. (Arrests of cast members mostly seem to happen between seasons.) The same is true of “Bad Girls Club” and “The Real Housewives” franchise.

Inebriation on network television is a little like masturbation: a once-taboo topic that is now joked about so much that it’s almost a cliché.

“Mad Men” on AMC began by romanticizing the free-flowing martinis and manhattans of the early 1960s and then last season upended the drinks cart with a searing “Lost Weekend” look at the less savory long-term effects. “Mad Men” is to the cocktail hour what the History channel is to D-Day, but it’s also one of the few series that looks at both the pleasures and perils of drinking, without making it all end in A.A. or on the coroner’s slab. And it’s the obvious exception.

A more surprising one is “Two and a Half Men” on CBS. It’s a conventional sitcom that stars Charlie Sheen as an only slightly fictionalized version of himself: Charlie Harper, a dissipated playboy with a Malibu beach house. It’s a show that makes light of heavy drinking, but with a less lyrical tone than most.

When the show began in 2003, Charlie was more of a roué than a lush. Perhaps partly because of the star’s well-publicized record of arrests, substance abuse and rehab, the show’s writers have steadily painted his character’s drinking in harsher colors; he was a peacock, now he is mostly pathetic.

In a recent episode Charlie was flailing on the far side of Dean Martin drunk, staggering so much his brother put a biking helmet on his head. When told the new maid was given detailed instructions, Charlie says with a slur, “Did you tell her to roll me over on my stomach, so I don’t choke on my own vomit?” Later the new maid wonders if she should have made his bed with plastic sheets.

Other sitcoms mine the comedy of drinking without worrying too much about the morning after. Happy hour never ends on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” an FX comedy set in a bar that pushes the extremes of political incorrectness, and among other things references drinking games, blackouts and blackout sex. But so do network shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Cougar Town.”

Comedy wasn’t always so buzzed. The characters on “Friends” met at a coffee shop; on “Seinfeld” it was in a diner. Even on “Cheers,” a sitcom which began in 1982 and was set in a Boston bar, few of the characters did much drinking. The bar owner, Sam (Ted Danson), was a recovering alcoholic; with the exception of Norm, Sam’s friends showed up for the company, not the beer.

“Sex and the City” put the cosmopolitan on the menu and guzzling girlfriends on the map. “Will & Grace” brought to the mix Karen (Megan Mullally), the pill-popping, vodka-swilling sidekick.

Nowadays it’s the heroines, not just the sidekicks, who swim in an endless sea of chardonnay and pinot noir. Jules (Courteney Cox) and her friends in “Cougar Town” tipple almost around the clock. (It helps that her boyfriend owns a bar.) In a recent episode Jules held a memorial service for her favorite (but now broken) oversized wine glass, Joe, which, as she puts it, “was always here when I needed him.”

Jules and her friends are a little like the champers-guzzling heroines of the British sitcom “Absolutely Fabulous.” But unlike those middle-aged women who wore their debauchery on their faces, Jules and her friends are slender, taut jawed and dewily wrinkle free: boozy suburban sybarites who look like vegan yoga babes at a spa getaway.

It could be that the vanity of American performers — or the tyranny of Hollywood standards — prevents actresses from looking the part.

But a disconnect between cause and effect is inevitable in a culture that wallows in fantasy and favors reality television over realism. Or, as Mr. Hasselhoff tells his eldest daughter in the premiere, “You gotta love a good rehab joke.”
Visual Culture Out of Africa
By ROBERTA SMITH

Africa is everywhere, so pervasive in our lives that we barely see it. Since it is in all likelihood the continent where human evolution began, it is literally in the bloodstream of everyone. DNA aside, huge portions of everyday life and cultural achievement are unthinkable without Africa.

What would Modern art be like if Matisse had never gone to Morocco or if he, Picasso and the German Expressionists had never set eyes on the sculptural innovations of sub-Saharan Africa? Very hard to say. And popular music? Around the world, it incorporates sounds and rhythms that originated in Africa. More locally, jazz — not Abstract Expressionism — was the first American art form of international stature.

“The Global Africa Project” at the Museum of Arts & Design tries to survey this pervasiveness, in terms of contemporary visual endeavors of all kinds: jewelry, fashion, architecture, basketry, ceramics, painting, utilitarian design. This sprawling cornucopia has been wrested into existence by Lowery Stokes Sims, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and, since 2007, international curator at the Museum of Arts & Design; and Leslie King-Hammond, former dean of graduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art and, since 2006, founding director of the institute’s Center for Race and Culture.

This show presents 200 works by nearly 120 people, teams and collectives. It represents artists, designers, artisans, D.I.Y. improvisers and people engaged in various combinations of those already fuzzy job descriptions, toiling in ways that blur aesthetics, sociology and philosophy.

Astoundingly ambitious for a relatively small institution, “Global Africa” aims, in the words of its news release, to explore the “impact of African visual culture on contemporary art, craft and design around the world.” Unsurprisingly, the exhibition does not fully meet that tall order. It suffers from an excess of high-end luxury items and a shortage of genuine quality-of-life-changing design solutions. And unfortunately, it almost completely ignores Africa north of the Sahara. It is also plagued by too much ersatz stuff in all categories.

But ultimately this show’s strengths surpass its weaknesses, or maybe merge with them. If it lacks coherence, that is because there is none to be revealed. While there are individual references to distinctly African traditions and formal vocabularies, no single look or style emerges, and that’s the point. The show’s massing of information and accomplishment is often incredibly moving.

As you make your way through the crowded displays, you can almost hear the seams of the building creak under the strain. Though that sound may sometimes be simply your brain, boggled by the inundation of insights and attitudes, or even the fresh juxtaposition of familiar entities.

I loved seeing the work of Joyce Scott, the Baltimore bead sculptor extraordinaire, in the same vitrine as the beaded and sequined voudon flags, or drapos, of the Haitian artist George Valris. Likewise, the nearby grouping of J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’s photographs of the ostentatiously sculptural headdresses and hairdos of African women, with the majestic hats of Evetta Perry, owner of Harlem’s Heaven Hat Boutique, and the softer, nonetheless crownlike, crocheted hats of the artist Xenobia Bailey.

Most but not all of the participants are of African descent. One exception is the Italian photographer Daniele Tamagni, who is represented by photographs of proudly stylish Congolese dandies — mostly men — known as the Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance. His images are among the exhibition’s several photographic high points — along with the irreverent, cultural polyglot self-portraits of the Nigerian-born Iké Udé, and the real-life style mixings captured in Nontsikelelo Veleko’s street photographs of imaginatively dressed South Africans.

And most but not all of the participants work in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean or Africa. The exceptions are Ramijabi Madarsahib and Kairumbi Karimsahib, members of the Siddi Women’s Quilting Cooperative in Karnataka, India, descended from East Africans who started coming to India as early as the seventh century as sailors, slaves, servants and merchants. Each woman is represented by a small, bright, gemlike quilt made from discarded saris. The loose geometric patterns are a result of a process of all-over stitching (back and front) that is different from traditional American piecework.

Call them art, crafts or textiles, these quilts are among the most extraordinary aesthetic objects to be seen in any New York museum right now. If everything else here measured up to them, this show would be great beyond belief.

Despite its ups and downs, the exhibition delivers overreaching insights with inarguable immediacy. One of these is that categorical neatness is an exaggerated curatorial value. All museums should periodically assemble shows that ignore the distinctions among contemporary art, design and craft. The resulting friction between nonfunctional and functional, spiritual and practical, handmade and machine-made, and professional and self-taught is music to the eyes. What’s more, it is closer to the way visual culture really happens.

Other insights relate more directly to life. Foremost is the do-it-yourself ethic. Nothing happens if you do nothing. Taking action is a way to take responsibility, but also a way to inspire others to act. And often something can be made out of almost nothing.

Equally important is the role of well-made and/or beautiful things, functional and not, as life-sustaining nourishment. The visual vitality of objects foments human vitality.

One example argues both points: Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, documented here in photographs and a video. It began one day in the late 1980s when Mr. Guyton, with help from his family, began to clean out an abandoned house on their drug-dealer-infested block in Detroit. Mr. Guyton arranged the gathered debris in colorful assemblages and reliefs in vacant lots and went on to clean out and decorate other houses and lots in the neighborhood. Heart-warming, yes, and it also began a process that helped rid the neighborhood of drugs.

Another pertinent concept at large in the show is recycling trash and, related, the repurposing of existing materials. This occurs in the cosmopolitan dresses made from several patterned fabrics by the Nigerian-born fashion designer Duro Olowu, who lives in London; a sturdy cabinet made from recycled metal oil drums by the Senegalese furniture designer Ousmane M’Baye; and a marvelously evocative columnar sculpture, “Tchin-Tchin, BP!,” that Romuald Hazoumé, born in Benin, fashioned from plastic oil canisters. Inspired by the BP oil spill this year, it transcends the artist’s description of it as a kind of “ironic” Champagne flute to merge suggestions of human, tree and anthill.

Recycling is also apparent in the industrial design team of Birsel & Seck’s low, curving stools, made in Dakar from one of the country’s most plentiful byproducts: discarded plastic bottles and bags. Wahala Temi’s “Afrikea” chair — made from Ikea stools — puts a conceptual spin on it.

There are seemingly stark contrasts of intention and effect. Among the more opulent inclusions are the handsome hammered silver vessels of Ndidi Ekubia, a British-born daughter of African immigrants, and the BMW hand-painted with geometric patterns by the South African muralist Esther Mahlangu (surely the best result of the company’s self-serving art-car campaign).

Among the least opulent displays is a book set in a Plexiglas sleeve on the wall. “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope” tells the inspiring story of William Kamkwamba of the landlocked Republic of Malawi. Forced to forgo school as a teenager to help his family survive, Mr. Kamkwamba scavenged materials to build a windmill that took electricity and clean water to his village for the first time.

But again and again, simplistic oppositions don’t hold up. It helps to see each item on display as a marker for a larger story, like Mr. Kamkwamba’s book, to be extracted from labels or the show’s catalog. The glass-bead necklaces of Nomoda Ebenezer Djaba, also known as Mr. Cedi, have an attractive luminosity. The label reveals that they are made of recycled bottles, a process, the catalog elaborates, that has helped Mr. Cedi make his craft, handed down through several generations, more viable. This exhibition is full of such local success stories, in which craft traditions, recycling and human ingenuity coalesce, and lives are changed and even saved.

“The Global Africa Project” has a brilliant, concept-compressing name. The glowing alloy of its first two words — “Global Africa” — invokes a large continent and its worldwide influence, while “Project” paradoxically signals open-endedness: work in progress, loose ends, an interim report rather than a finished exhibition.

It is the kind of show that had to be done, that deserves to be done better and that may take a few attempts to get right. The Museum of Arts & Design should consider making it a recurring, truly continuing project, like the Whitney Museum’s biennial or the New Museum’s triennial. Every four or five years, take a trans-medium look at Africa and its global legacy; they will never become less important.

“The Global Africa Project” continues through May 15 at the Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle; (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org.
A Big Box for an Overlooked R&B Career
By BEN SISARIO

FOUR years ago Syl Johnson, a Chicago soul singer beloved by R&B purists but otherwise not well known today, was approached by the Numero Group, a small record label that wanted to reissue some of his music from the 1960s and ’70s. Mr. Johnson said bluntly that he was not interested.

“I don’t like record companies,” he recalled this week. To drive the point home he raised his voice to a near-bark: “I hate ’em!”

Given his own frustrated history with the music industry, Mr. Johnson’s suspicion was not surprising. In a string of hits in the late 1960s — “Come On Sock It to Me,” “Different Strokes,” “Is It Because I’m Black” — he established himself as a powerhouse of bluesy, gritty soul, with a voice that could whoop like James Brown’s or caress like Al Green’s. But the big success that Mr. Johnson hoped for never arrived, and his career slowed; eventually he became embroiled in litigation with one of his old labels over the rights to his work.

But the Numero Group, which specializes in almost absurdly well researched collections of forgotten music, didn’t give up so easily, and after a long courtship — and the resolution of Mr. Johnson’s lawsuit — it made a deal and began sifting through decades of musical cobwebs.

The result is “Complete Mythology,” a four-CD, six-LP monolith of a boxed set, released in October. It solidifies a career narrative for Mr. Johnson — stretching from the blues scene of 1950s Chicago through socially conscious songs in the late 1960s into the Memphis of the ’70s — and has connected this 74-year-old singer with a new audience. On Friday he plays at Southpaw in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and on Saturday he plays with the indie-rock mainstays Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J.

“The album shows you I was the real deal when I was young,” Mr. Johnson said in a telephone interview from his home in Chicago. “And I’m still cooking.”

“Complete Mythology” is exhaustive, even a bit excessive. The biggest and, at $75, most expensive product in the Numero Group’s six-year history, it has 52 pages of densely written liner notes and 81 songs recorded from 1959 to 1977.

Yet in a nod to the fetishism of all overserious collectors, it duplicates all 81 songs on both CD and vinyl. Ken Shipley, one of the three record obsessives who run Numero, said it would have been too expensive to make two versions of the boxes, and the LPs — which reproduce the artwork of Mr. Johnson’s original albums — add to the product’s overall aesthetic appeal, a key point in the Numero mission.

“We want to make things that people will want to own and display forever,” Mr. Shipley said. On Wednesday the label was nominated for its first Grammy Award: best boxed set for “Light: On the South Side,” an album and book of photographs of Chicago in the ’70s.

(In one sense the Johnson collection is not complete at all: it omits Mr. Johnson’s time in the 1970s at Hi Records in Memphis, Mr. Green’s label. Mr. Shipley noted that a serviceable two-CD set already exists. But like any true fan, he also has his bias: Mr. Johnson’s earlier stuff is just better, he said.)

The box tells a broad story about American music. Born Sylvester Thompson in Mississippi in 1936, Mr. Johnson moved to Chicago with his family at 14. His brothers, Jimmy and Mack Thompson, became prominent blues players, and Syl started out playing guitar with blues stars like Junior Wells and Jimmy Reed before embarking on a solo career. (A record executive chose his showbiz name for him.)

His earliest songs show traces of the sweet post-doo-wop style also heard in that era from the Impressions and Major Lance, and the box continues through big-beat soul in the vein of James Brown, many of the songs written and produced by Mr. Johnson himself. The late 1960s bring more somber, socially conscious material, and by the end of the box Mr. Johnson is in deep funk.

In conversation, Mr. Johnson is as tricky to follow as the twists in his career. Alternately shouting and cooing into the phone, he made bold declarations like “I am a multifaceted genius” and told long stories about the old record business that ended with his victimization at the hands of ineffective promo men. He sang snippets from his songs and blew bluesy harmonica melodies.

If Mr. Johnson’s songs have never become major hits, pieces of his music have nonetheless reached huge numbers of people as hip-hop samples. One of his songs, “Different Strokes,” from 1967, has been sampled no fewer than 50 times, by Ice Cube, the Wu-Tang Clan, the Beastie Boys, Kid Rock, Public Enemy, even Michael Jackson.

Not all of those who sampled him properly paid for the expropriation, particularly in the Wild West early days of hip-hop, and Mr. Johnson has been pursuing nonpaying labels since the beginning. His daughter Syleecia Thompson, who teaches at several business colleges, said that her father first learned that his songs were being used in the early 1990s and immediately began enlisting help.

“He would tell people in the neighborhood, ‘If you find any rapper who has sampled my music, I will pay you,’ ” Ms. Thompson said. “And so all the kids, we would go buy cassettes and listen to see if we could hear his ‘wow!’ and his ‘aw!’ ”

Collecting payments from sampling, sometimes through litigation, has given Mr. Johnson a lucrative side career. “I’m sitting in the house that Wu-Tang built with their money,” he said with a big laugh.

In the 1980s Mr. Johnson opened a chain of seafood restaurants and invested (very successfully, he says) in real estate. But he has never fully given up on music, and the comeback conditions have never been as good as they are now, with “Complete Mythology” making a strong claim for his historical importance and a young audience primed for vintage soul music by Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Eli (Paperboy) Reed and others. Mr. Johnson is already mixing with his musical descendants: he has been recording with the Dap-Kings, and they plan to make an album together.

The boxed set, too, is doing well: Mr. Shipley said it was on track to sell more than 5,000 copies by year’s end, a healthy number for an expensive, esoteric project like this. But Mr. Johnson says he doesn’t need the money: he just wants to show that he’s still here.

“Back in the day I didn’t get the proper chance, like a lot of people; I didn’t get the chance that I’m getting now,” he said. “But I didn’t drop out of my dreams, and now these people went back and picked it up and said, ‘This is gold right here, man, you missed the gold.’ And I think that once you check it out, you’ll like it.”
Frank W. Lewis, Master of the Cryptic Crossword, Dies at 98
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

For more than six decades, Frank W. Lewis mesmerized, mystified and miffed a circle of obsessed people by writing a devilishly quirky cryptic crossword puzzle for The Nation. But there were some bridges even he would not cross.

If the clue “BEFORE FALL” led to the answer “PRIDE,” for example, drawing from the Bible, he conceded that it would be “carrying things a trifle too far,” as he wrote in an essay, to use the clue “SUMMER.”

Cryptic puzzles are in a universe by themselves, but even there Mr. Lewis was famed for the freewheeling, idiosyncratic approach he took in the pages of The Nation, where for years his mind-twisters leavened the magazine’s weekly helpings of politically liberal reporting and commentary.

A cryptic puzzle usually gives two clues: one a definition, the other a play on words or letters, say an anagram. Mr. Lewis thought nothing of giving three clues. Or one. And, fueled by a huge vocabulary, his penchant for puns was puckish.

Mr. Lewis, whose day job for many years was to help spies solve top-secret codes at the National Security Agency, died of heart failure on Nov. 18 in Plymouth, Mass., his family said. He was 98 and had continued to create puzzles until a year ago.

After his death, even those who had yanked at their hair while attacking his puzzles praised his ingenuity.

“While we often cursed him, we never got tired of his puzzles,” said Henri Picciotto, a math teacher and puzzle constructor who huddled with friends in Berkeley, Calif., every week to swing at the best that Mr. Lewis could heave.

Another respected puzzle maker, Richard Maltby Jr., the Broadway director, said, “Misleading the solver is the name of the game in cryptic puzzles, and Mr. Lewis misled delightfully.”

Mr. Lewis got the job at The Nation after the man who had started the magazine’s cryptic puzzle in 1943, Jack Barrett, died in a boating accident. (Will Shortz, puzzle editor of The New York Times, said The Nation’s puzzle was “the first regularly published cryptic in America” and by far the oldest.) Readers chose Mr. Lewis to succeed Mr. Barrett in a contest, and he published his first puzzle on Oct. 18, 1947.

He went on to please his masochistic loyalists by dishing out odd and excruciating challenges for decades, winning fans like Kurt Vonnegut and Leonard Bernstein — not to mention conservative Republicans who held their noses as they bought The Nation.

At first Mr. Lewis was paid $25 a week. After almost 40 years, he timidly asked his editor at the magazine, Judith Long, if she might intercede with “the brass” about a raise. Didn’t a puzzle master who once gave a single letter as a clue — the clue, a capital “S”; the answer, “LARGESS” — deserve a raise?

He got the raise, to $100.

His profile was lowered a bit in 2008, when The Nation announced that his puzzle would begin appearing every other week. Readers were outraged. Psychology Today warned that the change meant “the end of Western civilization,” or at least signaled “a decline in our standard of living.”

Frank Waring Lewis was born on Aug. 25, 1912, in Salt Lake City. His father had emigrated from England with the family cattle, and after working as a cowboy was a postman.

The younger Mr. Lewis attended secretarial school and the University of Utah (later earning a degree in absentia) and passed the federal government’s civil service test. He then headed for Washington, where he earned a master’s degree in music from the Catholic University of America and took government secretarial jobs.

Col. William Friedman, who ran the Army’s cryptography operations, was looking for very smart people on the eve of World War II. He heard about Mr. Lewis, who was bored “to tears” in the civil service’s death benefits section.

Colonel Friedman hired him as a civilian employee, and Mr. Lewis went on to help break the code used to coordinate Japanese ships. He became addicted to British puzzles while posted in England at the Bletchley Park decryption station at the end of the war. He then followed Colonel Friedman to the National Security Agency, where he won plaudits for his service, started the N.S.A. Glee Club and created English-style puzzles for an N.S.A. magazine.

Mr. Lewis’s 2,962 puzzles for The Nation were proofread by his wife of 74 years, the former Sylvia Shosteck. She survives him, along with his sons, Larry and Frank; his daughters, Elaine Ryan and Wendy Lewis; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

Mr. Lewis published his last puzzle in the Dec. 21-28, 2009, issue of The Nation, which has since reprinted his old ones. It plans to hire a new puzzle maestro next year, but Ms. Long readily admits that there will never be another Frank Lewis — or, as he once referred to himself in a cryptic clue, Swank Filer.
A Spitfire Onstage, Singing of Young Love and Achy Hearts
By JON CARAMANICA

A little over two years ago Lykke Li played a show at Le Poisson Rouge to celebrate the release of her debut album, “Youth Novels.” Wednesday night she was back on the circular stage there, introducing songs from her coming second album, “Wounded Rhymes.” Certain things hadn’t changed.

As before, this Swedish moppet was a spitfire, stomping and slithering around the stage. As before, she was dressed in black, in billowy fabrics that gave her movements added sinuousness. As before, there was the drumstick, held in a death grip, that she used to punctuate many of her best songs, lending them an air of incipient violence that her sweet voice just can’t.

But wait, where was that sweet voice? It was the hallmark of “Youth Novels” (LL/Atlantic), full of naïve-sounding songs that radiated intelligence. That album was charming and light, with a real pulse behind it. But on the affecting “Wounded Rhymes,” Lykke Li has found new moods, desperate and sometimes angry. And the album is less concerned with the dance floor, instead bursting with echoes of ’50s girl groups and gothic country.

Lykke Li’s move from sweet to bittersweet is a pleasant sign of growth. Previously her onstage mania felt disproportionate to her songs, which were chipper even when expressing hurt. But now all the madness of her stage show has finally seeped into the songs. On “Jerome” she punched the air with glee, and on “Youth Knows No Pain” and “I Follow Rivers,” she and the members of her band coiled and uncoiled.

“Don’t make demands/I don’t take none,” she barked on “Get Some,” which closed her main set and recalled golden-age James Bond movie soundtracks.

But just as often the toughness of the new songs is in the words, not the music, an inconvenience her sharp band couldn’t get around during this show. Many of the new songs felt sparse and aerated, especially with older, propulsive ones like “Little Bit” and “Dance, Dance, Dance” sprinkled among them.

“Sadness Is a Blessing” was beautiful, but skeletal, barely staying afloat. “Unrequited Love” was equal parts dry California country and Nordic folk. On record it aches palpably; here, it was distant, relying heavily on Lykke Li’s singing, which is tougher and more leathery than before, and more emotive. That song came at the end of the encore, just after the slow march “Possibility,” from the “Twilight Saga: New Moon” soundtrack. Conceivably that song could have been Lykke Li’s breakthrough moment, but she treated it perversely, preferring to capture the empty ambiguity of young love rather than the thrilling rush.

Such restraint is new, and still a bit uncharacteristic for her. During the show she appeared more at home with her old songs, which were more lived in and could bear the heft of her natural flamboyance. She sang the howling “Breaking It Up” partly through a megaphone. And on “Dance, Dance, Dance” she took a break from walloping her drum to blow on a kazoo: a new touch that was utterly superfluous, but winning.
The Flesh and Blood Behind the AK-47
By PATRICK HENNESSEY

THE GUN

By C. J. Chivers

Illustrated. 481 pages. Simon & Schuster. $28.

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

The AK-47 was revolutionary because it was the first weapon to combine the portability of machine pistols that had proved popular in World War II with the accuracy of less portable, sharpshooting weapons and the firepower of the heavier, more traditional machine guns. It was also and remains beguilingly easy to use and maintain and unerringly reliable.

Mr. Chivers is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and a former Marine with, one suspects, more than a nodding acquaintance with his subject. He writes both with technical precision and the humanity that comes with understanding the invariably unhappy and all too often horrific consequences of the weapon’s effects.

All this makes for a delicate and at times fascinating balancing act, as Mr. Chivers the enthusiast and expert shares the page with Mr. Chivers the historian and journalist — the expert dealing well with the detailed mechanics of his subject, the journalist at other times brilliantly illuminating the book with highly effective vignettes of human courage, ingenuity and, mostly, suffering.

There are as many inherent dangers as advantages in writing object history. The recent deserved success in Britain of “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” a collaboration between BBC radio and the British Museum, has shown how informative history can be when told from the perspective of a single object, but such histories can be selective.

Mr. Chivers succeeds in bringing his own disparate strands together into a mostly coherent narrative, but the history is necessarily a subjective one. He moves from topic to topic at a healthy pace. Certainly the reader doesn’t tire as we roam from Kremlin politics to the Tet offensive via diversions like the Hungarian uprising and the Munich Olympics.

Sometimes, however, he dwells, perhaps indulgently, on a particular theme or episode. We are for example more than a third of the way through before we encounter the sometimes pathetic, sometimes tragic figure of Mikhail Kalashnikov and his eponymous rifle.

Mr. Chivers’s account of the general development of automatic weapons and the men who pioneered them is impressive. The portraits of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s forerunners, Richard J. Gatling and Hiram Maxim (whose entertaining character comes across bizarrely at odds with the devastation his machine wrought on the fields of Flanders) stand in effective contrast to Kalashnikov, the curiously unsympathetic Russian sergeant, and lend the book depth.

From horse-drawn, hand-cranked cannons that subdued the enemies of the British Empire, Mr. Chivers traces the development of automatic weapons in the early 20th century and the often costly failings of conservative military leaders to understand their potential and effect. He deconstructs the Soviet mythology behind the AK-47’s development before charting its proliferation and rise to ubiquity. The book sometimes struggles to keep up with the various tactical and strategic changes occasioned by the development and distribution of the rifle, but this may be an accurate reflection of how the wider world has struggled to comprehend and cope with the spread of this powerful gun.

His broad reach allows Mr. Chivers to touch on diversions that he and many readers may well find interesting — a considerable discussion of the ill-fated introduction of the M-16 rifle to United States Marines in Vietnam is one example — but means that we are sometimes caught in a limbo between a necessarily limited canter through big events and a dense excursus on the gun itself. The book’s discussion of the difficulties of penetrating layers of secrecy and Soviet myth in deconstructing the historiography of the AK-47 will be fascinating to many historians, less so to casual enthusiasts.

Other elements of “The Gun” are perhaps unwittingly illuminating. Mr. Chivers skates over the murky distinction between romantic freedom fighters who wield their AK-47s against the brutal Soviet regime and the current terrorists who do so against its armies. While much of the detail on the development of the gun and the treatment of the man whose name it bears serves as a salutary reminder of the awfulness of life in Soviet Russia, Mr. Chivers can’t resist taking a few easy shots at the Soviets.

For an essentially international book about an international symbol, “The Gun” never quite escapes an essentially Western perspective. While our own shortcomings are often addressed with clarity and precision, it is hard to escape the feeling that the ill-use the rifles have been put to by our enemies gets more attention than when the butt has been on the other shoulder.

But these are minor quibbles that fall away when Mr. Chivers provides in harrowing detail a sense of the human cost of this sometimes too abstract symbol.

“Karzan Mahmoud toppled and fell, landing in a puddle of cold standing water,” he writes of the shooting of a young Kurd. “There he lay, on his back, blinking up into raindrops peppering his face. He had no idea how many times he had been hit. His body was broken; his mind, for the moment, was strangely detached. His blood stained the puddle red. He thought he heard thunder.”

Mr. Chivers adds: “Technical studies did not sketch this: what it looked and felt like when military rifle bullets smacked human life, when incapacitation meant not just preventing action but summoning death, when rifles and gunfights were stripped of engineering, politics, romance or any whiff of fable.”

He is right to address the “fable” of the AK-47. As someone who has been shot at and shot back with this weapon, I can testify to its enduring appeal. But for all that, “The Gun” is a history of 10 pounds of wood and steel. Its strength is that it can’t but be a human history: the history of the men who designed and built, did or didn’t purchase, correctly or incorrectly deployed, and triumphed or perished by an inanimate object.

Patrick Hennessey is the author of “The Junior Officer’s Reading Club,” a memoir of five years in the British Army during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Movie Review | ‘Barney’s Version’
Maybe a Dinosaur, Just Not Purple
By A. O. SCOTT

Barney Panofsky, a Montreal policeman’s son, meets his third wife at his second wedding, a gilded gala that he stumbles into halfway between his wayward bohemian youth and his distempered dotage. Barney, played with shambling energy and vulgar elegance by Paul Giamatti, catches a sudden, breathtaking glimpse of Miriam (Rosamund Pike) and pretty much forgets about the unnamed ninny he has just married (even though she is played by the lovely Minnie Driver).

The initial source of Barney’s attraction is obvious enough and is only affirmed by the melodious FM-radio timbre of Miriam’s voice. You might, however, be tempted to wonder what she sees in him. In addition to being freshly married, he is short, tubby, badly groomed and drunk, brandishing a stubbed-out Montecristo cigar along with his hackneyed pickup lines.

The answer to this riddle comes obliquely later that same evening, when Barney chases Miriam down aboard a train about to leave Montreal for New York, where she lives. In her hands is a paperback copy of Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” possession of which surely signals, at the very least, a high tolerance for vain, verbose and vulgar Jewish men.

Barney — the picaresque antihero of “Barney’s Version” — is, in more ways than one, a cousin of Bellow’s Moses Herzog. He is the last surviving fictional brainchild and alter ego of Mordecai Richler, a novelist who, like Bellow, was born in Quebec but who, unlike him, stayed there, turning Anglophone Jewish Montreal into a northern sister city of Augie March’s Chicago.

The volume that the future (and eventually former) Miriam Panofsky carries is one of many signs that the director, Richard J. Lewis, and the writer, Michael Konyves, of “Barney’s Version,” have done their homework. In winnowing Richler’s 1997 novel into a workable screen story they have preserved important details and added some new ones consistent with their version’s altered chronology. (Paris in the 1950s, when both Richler and the novel’s Barney sowed their oats and drank their wine, becomes Rome in the ’70s).

But the filmmakers have been, if anything, too dutiful, too careful, and the movie that results from their conscientious, devoted labor illustrates the terrible, paradoxical trap into which well-intentioned literary adaptations so often fall. Mr. Lewis (an executive producer and director for the television series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”), Mr. Konyves and the producer, Robert Lantos, display admirable patriotism as well as devotion to their source material.

“Barney’s Version” is explicitly dedicated to Richler’s memory, and also, by implication, to some of the cultural touchstones of his native land. It pays tribute to the Montreal Canadiens and also to a handful of Northern cinematic titans who traipse across the set in obliging cameo. Yes, that was David Cronenberg playing the hack director of a soap opera about a Mountie named O’Malley. And if you are likely to crack up at the sight of Denys Arcand (“The Decline of the American Empire”) playing a headwaiter — I confess I did — then “Barney’s Version” will not be a total loss.

The cast is beyond reproach. Selecting Dustin Hoffman to play Mr. Giamatti’s father is a stroke of genius, since it throws into relief the blend of intense seriousness and wry self-mockery that they have in common as screen performers. Scott Speedman twitches persuasively as Boogie, Barney’s gifted, drug-addicted best friend, and Rachelle Lefevre has some seductive moments as Barney’s first wife, Clara, whom he marries and loses in Rome. Bruce Greenwood, foreshadowed early, arrives late as the canoe-paddling vegan radio producer whom Miriam will marry after leaving Barney. (This spoils nothing, by the way. Most of the story is told in flashback, so that the denouement of Barney’s story is fairly clear at the start.)

It all sounds like the stuff of a pretty good movie: a crowd of interesting characters; a plot involving adultery, divorce, a grab bag of vices and even the possibility of murder; art, sex, religion, hockey. But the film plays more or less like a recitation of that list.

A few extended scenes, in which Mr. Lewis stops fussing to put every detail in place and stands back to let Mr. Giamatti spar one on one with another actor, have a vivid, unpredictable rhythm. Unfortunately they serve only to highlight just how inert the rest of the movie is, as if it were not Barney’s version of the story at all, but rather the wedding planner’s.

In spite of Mr. Giamatti’s ferociously energetic performance “Barney’s Version” never figures out just who Barney is. In Richler’s pages he is above all a voice — profane, sophisticated, tender, mean and funny — and the filmmakers prove unable to compensate for its absence. But their failure is more than just technical; in attempting to honor the spirit of the book, they extinguish it. It is a wild, unruly novel of character, in which the character himself is at once incorrigible and irresistible. The film tames and sentimentalizes him, and in showing respect for Barney’s author turns his creation into something unforgivably respectable.

“Barney’s Version” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sex and sin, without feeling especially sexy or sinful.

Barney’s Version

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Richard J. Lewis; written by Michael Konyves, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler; director of photography, Guy Dufaux; edited by Susan Shipton; music by Pasquale Catalano; production design by Claude Paré; costumes by Nicoletta Massone; produced by Robert Lantos; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.

WITH: Paul Giamatti (Barney), Dustin Hoffman (Izzy), Rosamund Pike (Miriam), Minnie Driver (second Mrs. P.), Rachelle Lefevre (Clara), Scott Speedman (Boogie), Bruce Greenwood (Blair), Macha Grenon (Solange), Denys Arcand (a head waiter) and David Cronenberg (a director).

STAMFORD, Conn. — Brian Cashman’s workday began at 5:30 a.m. on Friday, when he arrived at the Landmark Building here wearing a skull-and-crossbones bandanna and a wig of spiky blond hair.

“It’s just my alter ego,” Cashman said. “It helps me get into the mode. There’s a side of me that likes to have fun.” That side of him persuaded Cashman, the general manager of the New York Yankees, to indulge his inner adrenaline junkie in a daredevil descent.

Rehearsing for his role in the annual Heights and Lights holiday event on Sunday afternoon, when he will don an elf costume and accompany Santa Claus, Cashman suppressed his rampant fear of heights and rappelled 21 stories — about 350 feet — down the exterior of the second-tallest building in town. His maiden voyage took about 15 minutes, and when he landed on terra firma at around 7:10, he looked like a man who was joyful to no longer be parallel to the ground.

“I’m not sure what it was going to be like, to be honest,” said Cashman, who wore a full safety harness but was unaware of the absence of protective netting. “But I’m glad I at least made it. I’m excited, I’m happy. They say we’re going to do a whole bunch of runs. I’m not sure if I want to do a whole bunch of runs, but I’m excited just to be able to feel like I’ve done something that most of the people in the world have never done, so that’s kind of cool.”

Cashman admitted to being scared and nervous, and said he did not get much of a night’s sleep. He was up late Thursday night negotiating a new contract for the Yankees’ indomitable closer, Mariano Rivera. The skeleton of the deal — two years, $30 million — is complete, but Cashman would not confirm it publicly.

“There’s a lot of steps in the process, from agreeing to something in principle to getting the physical done, and so from the club’s perspective, until all those things are covered, I’m not in a position to say,” Cashman said; he also declined to comment on the continuing negotiations with Derek Jeter.

For more than 15 years, people — mostly firefighters and skilled climbers — have rappelled for Heights and Lights, but Cashman is the first celebrity participant. He explained that last year he happened to be eating at a restaurant across the street during the event, saw what was going on and told his children, “That looks awesome — I’d do that.”

When asked to take part, Cashman said he would — but only if he received some training. So last weekend, he went to a 37-foot rock climbing wall at the Reebok Sports Club at 67th Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan.

“It’s hard to go from 37 feet in the city on a rock wall to go to — what’s this, 300 feet?” Cashman said. “You’d think there would be a little bit of another step in the ladder before this ladder, but c’est la vie.”

It was pitch-black and 25 degrees outside when Cashman arrived Friday morning. As he was whisked inside around 5:45 a.m. to begin preparing, he laughed and told a reporter, “Light a candle for me, dude.”

About a half-hour later, three ropes were lowered to the plaza level of the building from the roof, about 300 feet above. At 6:55 a.m., Cashman and Brian van Orsdel, an experienced climber who has rappelled the Landmark Building several times before and is portraying Santa Claus this year, climbed over the ledge. For the first few minutes, Cashman gripped the side of the building, promising himself not to look over. About halfway down, he said he started feeling a little more comfortable with the cable — but not enough to remove his hands.

“They’re saying, ‘Go ahead and let go, you’re harnessed,’ ” Cashman said afterward. “But mentally, you don’t want to trust that. Reality doesn’t want to fit what your mind’s telling you.”

At around 8:20, Cashman embarked on a second descent, this time wearing reindeer antlers; he called it just as nerve-racking as the first. He also changed another piece of his wardrobe, putting on a black hooded sweatshirt with “Stamford Downtown Rappel Team” stitched on the back. Is he considering a career change? “If I can’t do my job properly,” Cashman said, “then I’ll be looking for new work.”
Rivera and Yanks Near Two-Year Deal
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

The Yankees and Mariano Rivera are close to agreeing to a two-year contract for about $30 million that will keep him with the only major league team for which he has played.

A person in baseball with knowledge of the talks between Rivera and the Yankees said that General Manager Brian Cashman and Rivera’s agent, Fern Cuza, had negotiated for several hours on Thursday night and had agreed to the framework of a deal, although Cuza is still attempting to add more money. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the deal was not likely to be completed for several more days.

The Daily News first reported that a deal was close.

Although the 41-year-old Rivera is a free agent, like his longtime teammate Derek Jeter, little attention has been paid to the status of his contract talks because it has been widely assumed that he and the Yankees would eventually agree on a one- or two-year deal without having to first endure any sort of standoff, as has been the case in recent weeks with Jeter.

Nevertheless, the person said the tentative deal with Rivera was reached even as several other teams, including the rival Boston Red Sox, had made offers to Rivera in a long-shot attempt to lure him out of the Bronx. The person said the Red Sox offered Rivera a two-year deal and that least one other team offered three years.

It is possible that the Red Sox knew they had no real chance of signing Rivera but offered him two years simply as a tactic to force Cashman to do the same and thus spend more money on Rivera than the Yankees really wanted to. Cashman might have been hoping to sign Rivera to one year plus an option, or even just a flat one-year deal, but the Boston offer of two years probably made that harder to do.

In many ways, offering a 41-year-old reliever anything more than a one-year deal seems reckless. But Rivera, widely considered the best reliever in the history of baseball, has broken all the rules, remaining impossibly hard to hit season after season even as the years and the innings pitched continued to mount.

In 2010, his workload did decrease slightly but he still had a sterling 1.80 earned run average along with 33 saves. For his career, he has 559 saves and a 2.23 earned run average. But most remarkable are the numbers he has compiled in his long run of postseason games. In that category, Rivera has pitched 139 2/3 innings with a 0.71 E.R.A., allowing just 11 earned runs and 2 home runs. He has an 8-1 record in October (and November) as well as 42 saves.

The tentative $30 million deal means he should be on the mound, throwing his devastating cutter, for at least two more seasons.

Even as the Yankees were negotiating with Rivera and improving their offer to Jeter and getting ready to make a multiyear bid to the free-agent pitcher Cliff Lee, they were also talking trade with the Los Angeles Dodgers. According to a second person in baseball, the two teams came close to agreeing to a trade that would have sent catcher Russell Martin to the Yankees for the catcher Francisco Cervelli. The teams even exchanged the medical records of the two players, but ultimately a deal was not completed. The Dodgers then decided not to tender the arbitration-eligible Martin a contract and he has become a free agent.

The second person said Martin represented an attractive option for the Yankees because he would have given them a veteran backup of more stature than Cervelli as the Yankees continue to phase out Jorge Posada as the team’s catcher and begin to phase in 21-year-old Jesus Montero. The 27-year-old Martin is a two-time All-Star although his offensive numbers declined the last two seasons.
After the Decision, the Drubbing
By HOWARD BECK

CLEVELAND — Six months after the jerseys burned and the fury raged, after “The Decision” and the betrayal, LeBron James returned home and indulged the hatred.

James jogged, and Cavaliers fans booed. James skipped, and they jeered. Profane chants echoed across the arena. James grinned and strutted and threw his talcum cloud in defiance of it all.

The villain’s role suited him, even in northern Ohio, his birthplace.

The enmity was palpable Thursday at Quicken Loans Arena, but not nearly as powerful as James’s pure athleticism and skill. The louder the taunts, the stronger he looked, carving up his old team for a season-high 38 points and leading the Miami Heat to a shockingly easy 118-90 rout.

It was a vintage performance, more reminiscent of James’s first six seasons here than his curiously weak farewell last spring, when he sputtered in the Cavaliers’ second-round playoff defeat to the Celtics.

While fans derided him with chants of “Scottie Pippen” (in reference to his sidekick status next to Dwyane Wade), “Akron hates you” and many unprintable slogans, James calmly made 15 of 25 field goals and had 8 assists, all in three quarters, with no turnovers.

James rested comfortably on the bench for the fourth, while minor skirmishes broke out in some parts of the arena.

“It’s nothing personal,” he said afterward. “It’s a basketball game. And I had to maintain my focus no matter what’s said or what’s done throughout that game.”

As if humiliating the Cavaliers was not enough, James punctuated the performance by pointing out how much better basketball life is with the Heat. For the postgame news conference, he sat between his fellow All-Stars, Wade and Chris Bosh, the sort of talent that the Cavaliers never had.

“To have two guys like this out on the court also, it makes it a lot easier for myself to just go out and play basketball and not worry about anything else,” James said.

The fans exerted more passion than the Cavaliers (7-11), who repeatedly let James and Wade (22 points) get to the basket and allowed the Heat (12-8) to shoot 59.4 percent through three quarters. James Jones (18 points) helped bury Cleveland with five 3-pointers. Wade nearly had a triple double, with 9 rebounds and 9 assists.

Daniel Gibson led the Cavaliers with 21 points off the bench, but Mo Williams (11 points) was the only starter in double figures. James outscored Cleveland’s starting lineup by 10 points.

James left in infamy on July 8, with a nationally televised show to announce he would sign with Miami. From that moment, every fan in wine and gold anticipated this night — an event that, in the words of The Plain Dealer reporter Mary Schmitt Boyer, had “the potential to be New Year’s Eve, the Super Bowl and the apocalypse all rolled into one.”

Security was at an all-time high, drinks were sold only in cups and everyone it seemed was preaching restraint. The evening was generally calm until the game got out of hand.

There was a fight in one end of the arena, which was quickly broken up by security guards. In a dangerous scene, a Heat fan in the upper deck brazenly waved a James No. 6 jersey over a glass barrier while Cavaliers fans pelted him with drinks before a security guard finally pulled him away from the ledge.

The Cavaliers did their best to frame the evening as Game 18 of a young season, but it was a flimsy facade. There was no equivalent the occasion. Other star players have left their teams and been vilified upon returning, but none who combined James’s supreme skill, celebrity and personal ties to the city. His Akron roots made this homecoming unique.

“This has never happened before,” the veteran Cavaliers guard Mo Williams said earlier in the day. “It’s going down in history.”

James was almost universally criticized for the way he handled his departure, but he remains unrepentant. “I don’t want to apologize,” he told TNT after the game. “I think my intentions weren’t to hurt anyone. My intentions were solely on kids during the whole process.”

Fans had been waiting for months to unleash their anger, to call James a traitor and a backstabber and a fraud at close range.

Offensive signs and T-shirts were supposed to be banned, but many made it through the entrance. Others were tasteful but direct: a sign that called James a sellout; another that read “Quitness” — mocking his “Witness” campaign; and many gold-colored T-shirts that read “The Lyin’ King,” featuring James’ face on a lion’s head.

James was booed every time he touched the ball. Undaunted, he promptly scored 10 points in the first quarter and staked the Heat to an early 11-point lead. James made his first shot (a 17-footer), missed his next (a 3-pointer) and was jeered loudly after J. J. Hickson dunked on him.

Anthony Parker said it was “a great atmosphere, and that’s what hurts so much; the fans showed up for us like that, and we let them down.”

Many of the chants were personal and profane. One of the most creative, and least offensive, was a first-quarter chorus of “Akron hates you!” James literally laughed it off, grinning widely as he calmly made two free throws. He followed with a driving reverse and a 20-foot jumper as part of a 16-0 run.

“I was just trying to keep a clear head about it,” said James, who repeatedly professed appreciation for Cavaliers fans.

“I understand their frustration,” he said. “I understand things could have been a little bit different this summer for both sides. But I’m moving on.”

To prepare for the occasion, The Plain Dealer interviewed the team chaplain, who urged forgiveness; and a local therapist, who invoked Benedict Arnold but preached “positive psychology” and urged a classy response. Few fans got the message.

Normalcy would return by late evening, after the city had exhausted its supply of vengeance. Then it was time for everyone to pack up the angst and their anxiety and save it for another night.

The Heat will be back on March 29, for the biggest 73rd game in N.B.A. history.
French Captain Still Wowed by Cup
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

PARIS — It has been a season of Davis Cup flashbacks for Guy Forget, none brighter than the semifinals in September when he returned to Lyon, where he and his French team celebrated victory to the tune of Yannick Noah’s hit single “Saga Africa” with nearly the same enthusiasm that he and Noah had displayed in the same arena way back in 1991.

Nearly 20 years have passed since Forget — with plenty of emotional support from Captain Noah — defeated the American rookie Pete Sampras in the decisive singles match to end France’s 59-year dry spell in La Coupe Davis.

No tennis historian will ever put Forget on a par with Sampras. A slender Frenchman with a whipping left-handed serve and a tendency to think too deeply under pressure, Forget never got past the quarterfinals in singles in a Grand Slam event. Sampras won 14 of them. But on that final day in Lyon in 1991, with cigarette smoke creating clouds in the rafters and his nation on edge, Forget was the more inspired and effective player.

France will never forget it, which helps explain why Forget, 45, is in his 11th year as France’s Davis Cup captain, helping to define the competition that still defines him and still generates plenty of ink and page views in France.

“I think of the Davis Cup as a fire that burns here, and I just blow on the coals so that the fire continues to burn all the time,” Forget said in an interview in Paris. “I think at one moment or another, if we are not vigilant about keeping it burning, it can be extinguished.”

There is little risk of declining ardor when Forget’s team takes to the court against Serbia for the 2010 final in Belgrade starting Friday. The Serbs have never won the Cup, not when they were part of Yugoslavia and not as an independent nation since the 1990s.

“It’s going to be loud, very loud,” Forget said.

Forget has been part of two other championship teams since 1991. He played doubles when France beat Sweden indoors in 1996 in Malmo, Sweden, and he was captain of the team that sprang a memorable upset on grass against Lleyton Hewitt and the Australians in Melbourne in 2001. He was also the losing captain in the 1999 and 2002 finals.

The chances of another title might have been greater this week if Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the team’s new leader, had not sustained his latest knee injury and been forced to cut short his season. But Forget, thanks to the depth of talent in France, still has fine options in singles with Gaël Monfils, Gilles Simon and the resurgent, net-rushing veteran Michael Llodra, and Forget has often been open to taking chances with his lineups as he has grown into his captain’s role.

It might be a ceremonial post to some of his peers, but not to Forget. In the lead-up to this final, with the speed of the court in Belgrade still uncertain, the only sure pick seemed to be Monfils, who reached the final at the Masters 1000 event indoors in Paris last month.

Forget had a taste for Davis Cup from the start, when he was first picked for the team in 1983.

“I had the impression to at last be part of a closed circle of players who were different, and when I first heard ‘La Marseillaise,’ in my French warm-up jacket standing next to Yannick, I got incredible chills,” he said. “And I realized right away that the Davis Cup was an adventure unlike the others. And when we won it with Yannick in 1991, it was very symbolic, because Yannick was a bit our locomotive. I felt it was not really a coincidence. It was the logical outcome of all he had done for French tennis, and today I continue to try to maintain what Yannick put in place and to transmit that to all these young players.”

To an outsider, Noah and Forget looked an unlikely pair of friends, Noah’s spontaneity and palpable magnetism seemingly too big a contrast with the more buttoned-down Forget. But they are both sensitive and articulate and remain in regular contact even as Noah, the 1983 French Open champion and the last Frenchman to win a major singles title, continues with his successful second career as a recording artist, a career that began in earnest with “Saga Africa” in 1991.

“Yannick is passionate about lots of things but gets passionate for something, then loses a bit of energy and interest and then gets passionate about something else,” Forget said.

Forget, whose father was a teaching professional and whose oldest son plays for the University of California at Santa Barbara, has decided to stick with the world he knows best.

“I am not in the least bit weary of it,” he said. “And I relish Davis Cup because I think the team concept is what we’re missing in our sport. Everyone’s so caught up in their own ATP points, their own money, their own coach, their own schedule. It’s good to say that we together want to do this and that we together will do this, and that we are going to give back to tennis and to the French federation all that they might have given us.”
Curtis Martin Used Football to Find Some Real Work
By GREG BISHOP

Inside Trinity Boxing Club in Lower Manhattan, Curtis Martin looked more like an active running back than a retired one. He pounded the heavy bag with the biceps of a bodybuilder, his body absent fat, still thick, solid, imposing, perhaps more sculptured than when he left professional football after the 2005 season.

His trainer, the boxer Ehinomen Ehikhamenor, summoned Martin, the fourth-leading rusher in N.F.L. history, into the ring. There, Martin implored a reporter with the same conviction that guided him through 11 seasons and more than 14,000 rushing yards that last week made him a semifinalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“Hit me,” Martin said. “Hit me in the face.”

That was vintage Martin, a back who welcomed contact, who played hurt and with an abandon that masked his secret: Martin never loved football, never found passion in pigskin. Instead, he saw the game as the fastest, most influential route toward the platform he now enjoys in his dizzying array of business and philanthropic efforts.

Even when he played, Martin did not want to be a scout or a coach or a broadcaster afterward. He wanted to own part of a team. He befriended Woody Johnson, the Jets’ owner and Martin’s mentor. Three years ago, at Johnson’s 60th birthday party, only three people gave speeches. One was Martin.

The party theme was “Wig out for Woody,” and most of the guests wore wigs, including Donald Trump. “People remembered two things,” Johnson said. “The wigs. And the speech from Curtis.”

That was Martin, too, as comfortable in swanky ballrooms as on muddy football fields. He was different from every other player Johnson met. As the Jets prepared for Monday night’s Martin Bowl — the Jets against the Patriots, Martin’s former teams — Johnson carried into a conference room at his Manhattan offices a list of Martin’s accomplishments and a framed letter with immaculate handwriting.

Martin gave Johnson the letter after he retired. The tone is appreciative and charming. Martin mentioned that Johnson once “offered to carry my equipment,” and he signed off, “I respect and appreciate you, #28.” Johnson calls the letter poetry, and it is the only item in his office given to him by a player.

To Johnson, the handwriting summed up Martin perfectly: “He took the time to write this. It’s distinctive, recognizable. He probably signed less often, but with higher impact. And that was Curtis.”

Martin played with an understated excellence that led him from the streets of Pittsburgh to the University of Pittsburgh to the third round of the 1995 N.F.L. draft. On that day, Bill Parcells called Martin and asked if he wanted to become a Patriot. Sure, Martin responded. But his heart said something else.

He hung up, turned to a friend and said: “I really don’t want to do this. I really don’t have the desire to play football. I don’t want to play football.”

But Martin also understood the platform an exceptional football career provided. If he wanted to feed the homeless and send doctors to poor countries and give life lessons to celebrities, football would provide the launching pad.

Parcells found Martin serious, intelligent, aware even early in his career of exactly what he wanted. Instead of venturing immediately into all his outside interests, Martin dedicated himself to football. With the first $70,000 in his bank account, he hired an assistant and a housekeeper. Each night, he came home to a clean house and a home-cooked meal. Martin was already investing — in himself.

“A player like Curtis Martin inspires you to coach,” Parcells said. “Everything he said he was going to do, he did.”

On the field, Martin was consistent. He remains one of two backs in N.F.L. history to rush for 1,000 yards in each of his first 10 seasons (Barry Sanders was the other). Martin was shifty, powerful and evasive. He moved, Johnson said, “in a way that defied description.” And Martin was vocal. His former teammate Brandon Moore remembered how Martin went one speed in practice: full.

Mostly, Martin impressed with his durability — as important as a player’s ability, according to Parcells. Martin said he played with second- and third-degree ligament tears, with broken fingers and busted shoulders. In the 2000 season opener, at Green Bay, Martin so injured his ligaments it felt as if the top half of his right leg had separated from the bottom. He wore a brace and rushed for 110 yards and scored two touchdowns in the Jets’ win.

That performance was special to Martin because of the way he earned it. “I believed my value to a team was in things like that,” he said.

Martin retired when doctors told him that if he returned from another knee injury, he might require a cane to walk by age 38. In describing how the announcement felt, Martin wiped his hands clean.

All along, Martin had a plan. Like a bride dreaming of her wedding day, Martin said, he dreamt about retiring from football. He donated at least 12 percent of every check to charity. He started the Curtis Martin Job Foundation. He met with Johnson, asked questions, even attended the N.F.L. scouting combine with Jets executives.

Everything Martin is doing now stems from that preparation. He works with single mothers and Surgicorps, an organization that sends doctors to third-world countries to perform operations. He helps fight homelessness in New York City, even once sitting for three hours with a homeless man who went by the name Cowboy. In the winter, in freezing temperatures, Martin said he convinced Cowboy to take temporary residence.

Of his business ventures, Martin remains more private. Shortly after retirement, he served as a life coach to celebrities and others in New York and Los Angeles. He is designing a home fitness center in a partnership with the Jets. Martin said he preferred stable businesses, and as such, he was also buying an insurance company.

Mostly, Martin wants to own an N.F.L. team. He declined to name specific teams, but predicted he would be an owner within the next five years.

“Football has been a great platform to reach people,” Martin said. “Ownership is just an extension, a bigger, better way of doing that.”

Last month was a good month, a perfect month, for Martin. He married his fiancée, Carolina, before roughly 180 guests. He honeymooned in Cabo San Lucas, zip-lining and whale watching and rappelling down mountains. After returning, he received word from the Hall of Fame, and he said even his status as a semifinalist prompted more emotion than he expected.

Martin has good company on the coming ballot. His first year of eligibility coincides with those for Jerome Bettis, Marshall Faulk, Willie Roaf and Deion Sanders. Parcells acknowledged his lack of objectivity, but said Martin should be elected on the first ballot.

Martin said: “When I think of the Hall, what’s most satisfying is this really wasn’t something that I wanted. But I’m proud of that fact. I made the most of that situation. I maximized my opportunity.”

Imagine that. The reluctant running back giving his Hall of Fame speech, on the verge of ownership. Only in the world according to Curtis Martin.
Rangers Hold On Against Islanders
By JEFF Z. KLEIN

UNIONDALE, N.Y. — The rivalry may not be quite what it was a generation ago, and the arena on Long Island may now have its share of empty seats, even for games against the team from Manhattan.

But it was still a Rangers-Islanders game at Nassau Coliseum, and even under reduced circumstances it is an event that produces excitement, passion, some wild hockey — and on Thursday night an unlikely new playmaker in Sean Avery.

Marian Gaborik scored the last three Rangers goals — his last coming with 5 minutes 25 seconds left — and Avery added three assists to give their team an entertaining 6-5 victory over the last-place Islanders.

Gaborik’s final score came only 25 seconds after the Islanders tied the game on a goal by Blake Comeau, who scored 1:41 after his teammate Michael Grabner.

“It was exciting — the perfect game for this kind of rivalry,” said the Rangers’ Erik Christensen, who scored the game’s first goal on a precision snap shot to the top shelf.

Christensen centered a line newly created for this game, when Coach John Tortorella promoted Avery, known as a third-line pest, to a spot alongside the high-scoring Gaborik.

Avery responded by assisting Gaborik twice and Christensen once — all resulting from his fast skating, dogged battling for the puck and quick passing.

“Aves provides so much energy,” Christensen said. “He doesn’t get credit for the skill he has. He controls the puck well down low, uses his body well. And Gabby just has a knack for the net. It was fun.”

Avery said Wednesday that finally being given the responsibility of playing with Gaborik, the team’s best sniper, was a “double-edged sword.” But everything clicked Thursday, and both Avery and Gaborik were plus-3.

“Yeah, it was good,” Avery said.

“I know where he’s going to be or likes to be — I’ve watched him enough and can feel where he is more than anything,” Avery added about playing with Gaborik. “He just gets to the right spot. When he gets open, it’s easy to get him the puck.”

Gaborik, always succinct, said that Avery was good on the forecheck and “made a lot of nice plays in the corner.”

How wild a game was it? Just five seconds after Gaborik’s third goal made it 6-5, Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist had to stop Grabner’s half-breakaway.

The two teams meet again at Madison Square Garden on Friday. The Rangers are an N.H.L.-leading 6-0 this season in the second game of back-to-back sets.

For the Islanders, it was the 15th loss in their last 16 games. They stopped a 14-game losing streak last Saturday with a 2-0 home win over the Devils.

Against the Rangers, Rick DiPietro, the Islanders goalie under contract until the 2021-22 season, stopped just 20 of 26 shots.

Fans of both teams in the crowd of 13,742 had lots to cheer and concoct vulgar chants about. And they did their share of both, as the Rangers built a 2-0 lead, gave up three straight goals then rallied to get two back — all before the end of the second period.

Rangers goalie Martin Biron came into the evening having won 20 of 25 games against the Islanders. His last five games at the Coliseum were as an Islander, and he won all of those. But Matt Moulson and Rob Schremp beat Biron on stoppable shots in the second period, and Biron, who allowed several rebounds, was pulled after stopping 18 of 21 shots in 32:30.

Lundqvist took his place, and the Rangers tied the score 51 seconds later when a DiPietro rebound bounced into the net off Islanders defenseman Andrew MacDonald. Brandon Prust was credited with the goal.

During warm-ups, the Islanders’ 6-foot-3-inch Trevor Gillies conferred with the Rangers’ 6-7 Derek Boogaard in the referees’ crease as they stretched. It seemed as if they were making an appointment.

At 4:24, 15 seconds into Gillies’s first shift and 4 into Boogaard’s, they dropped the gloves for an extended fight.

CANADIENS 5, DEVILS 1 Brian Gionta and Lars Eller scored in the first 1:38 , Carey Price made 27 saves, and visiting Montreal beat the Devils.

Tom Pyatt, Scott Gomez and Benoit Pouliot also scored to help Montreal rebound a night after it blew a two-goal, third-period lead in a 4-3 home ice loss to Edmonton.

Jason Arnott scored for the Devils, winners of three of four going in. The Devils lost for the first time in five games at home. (AP)

OILERS 5, MAPLE LEAFS 0 Nikolai Khabibulin made 33 saves, and Taylor Hall scored twice to help Edmonton beat Toronto, giving the Oilers their third road victory in four nights.

Jordan Eberle, Sam Gagner and Ryan Jones also scored for Edmonton.

(AP)

PENGUINS 3, THRASHERS 2 Sidney Crosby scored all three Pittsburgh goals for the first natural hat trick of his six-season career. He became the first Penguins player in nearly 10 years to score three goals in successive home games. Pittsburgh ran its winning streak to eight games. (AP)

BRUINS 8, LIGHTNING 1 David Krejci had two goals and an assist, and Marc Savard returned to the Boston lineup, helping the Bruins to a win at home over Tampa Bay.

Savard made his season debut after missing 23 games because of postconcussion syndrome, while Bruins goalie Tim Thomas made 37 saves.

(AP)

SHARKS 4, SENATORS 0 Logan Couture scored twice, and Dany Heatley had an assist in his return to Ottawa, leading San Jose over the Senators. Antti Niemi made 28 saves for San Jose. (AP)
Rodriguez Pleads Guilty and Must Undergo Therapy
By MICK MEENAN

Francisco Rodriguez, the Mets’ embattled closer, pleaded guilty Friday in Queens Criminal Court to three counts stemming from an altercation in August with his girlfriend’s father.

In a deal worked out between Scott Kessler, an assistant district attorney, and Christopher Booth, Rodriguez’s lawyer, Rodriguez was ordered to undergo 52 sessions of anger management over the next year for misdemeanor criminal assault of Carlos Pena. Some of those sessions will be conducted in Rodriguez’s native Venezuela and monitored by Kessler.

Rodriguez, who did not make a statement after his court appearance on Friday, also pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal contempt for violating a protection order. He had been ordered to have no contact with Daian Pena, the mother of Rodriguez’s children, or her father, but sent 17 text messages.

On the assault count, Rodriguez was ordered to pay $14,444.65 in restitution for Pena’s medical bills stemming from the confrontation at Citi Field. There is a two-year order of protection for Carlos Pena and Daian Pena. If Rodriguez violates that order, or fails to comply with the deal, he could face 120 days in jail.
Ron Santo, Stalwart for Cubs, Dies at 70
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Ron Santo, a star third baseman of the Chicago Cubs and their longtime broadcaster who became a revered figure for his exploits on the field and his battle against juvenile diabetes, died Thursday in a hospital in Arizona. He was 70.

The cause was complications of bladder cancer, said WGN Radio, where Santo was a Cubs color commentator.

Playing for the Chicago Cubs from 1960 to 1973, then for a final season with the Chicago White Sox, Santo hit 342 career home runs, won five Gold Glove awards for fielding and was named an All-Star nine times.

He was a key figure on the 1969 Cubs team that was leading the Mets by 13 games in August before collapsing. That team gained a particularly agonizing niche in the star-crossed history of the Cubs, who have not won a pennant since 1945. But Santo endeared himself to the Bleacher Bums in their hard hats at Wrigley Field that summer by clicking his heels with joy after victories.

That Santo was on a major league field, let alone starring alongside the future Hall of Famers Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Ferguson Jenkins, seemed remarkable.

When he took a routine physical in 1959, on the brink of making his Cubs debut, Santo was found to have juvenile diabetes. He began taking insulin within two years, but kept his diabetes a secret from the Cubs until being named to his first All-Star team in 1963, fearing that management’s knowledge of his illness might have damaged his career. He did not allow the public to know of his diabetes until his final years with the Cubs.

After his playing days ended, Santo raised millions of dollars for diabetes research, and for more than two decades he sponsored an annual walk-a-thon to help seek a cure. The disease took a heavy toll on him. He had heart attacks, went through quadruple-bypass surgery, then underwent amputation of his legs, in 2001 and 2002, but continued as a Cubs color commentator with WGN, using prostheses. He also underwent surgery for the bladder cancer.

“I was diagnosed with diabetes at age 18,” Santo told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1990. “I didn’t know what it was, so I went to the library and looked it up. I can still remember the feeling I had when I read the description: Life expectancy of a juvenile insulin-dependent diabetic: 25 years. It also stated that it would cause blindness, kidney failure and hardening of the arteries. At that point, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to fight this thing and beat it.’ That’s how badly I wanted to live and be a big league ballplayer.”

Santo, a native of Seattle, was signed by the Cubs’ organization after high school, and when he first appeared at Wrigley Field, he was transfixed. “I used to watch the ‘Game of the Week’ from Seattle, and every time I saw Wrigley Field, I couldn’t believe it,” he told The Denver Post in 2004. “Then when I walked into Wrigley Field with Ernie Banks … We came out of the clubhouse in left field, and I’m walking down on the grass and I’m looking out to the outfield, and the ivy hadn’t quite blossomed yet, but it was close. It was like walking on air. There was a feeling of electricity that I’ve never had.”

Santo became a regular in 1961, emerging as a smooth fielder and an outstanding right-handed batter with power. He was durable as well, playing in 390 consecutive games before he was hit in the cheekbone by a pitch from the Mets’ Jack Fisher in June 1966.

He had four seasons in which he hit .300 and hit at least 30 home runs every year from 1964 to 1967. He was a mainstay of a superb Cubs infield of the 1960s, with Banks having switched to first base from shortstop, Glenn Beckert at second base and Don Kessinger at short.

Still, it was not enough to hold off the Mets in 1969, and Santo had never made it to a World Series when he retired after 15 seasons with a career batting average of .277, 2,254 hits and 1,331 runs batted in. He gained serious consideration for the Hall of Fame in balloting by the Veterans Committee but fell short in the baseball writers’ recent annual votings.

For Santo, there was much adversity even beyond his medical travails. His father was an alcoholic who left the family when Santo and his sister were youngsters. His mother re-married, and then in 1973, when his mother and stepfather were driving from California to see him at spring training in Arizona, both were killed in an auto accident.

After various business ventures, Santo began working as a Cubs color commentator on WGN in the early 1990s, broadcasting alongside the legendary Harry Caray. As he battled the complications of diabetes as well as cancer, and continued his charitable work, his popularity grew. The Cubs retired his No. 10 at Wrigley Field in September 2003, and he stood and waved from the radio booth to the cheer of the crowd. The following year, his son Jeff made a film on his life, “This Old Cub,” which had its premiere at the Chicago Historical Society.

Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

When the Cubs announced they would retire Santo’s No. 10 and fly it from the left-field foul pole, Santo told The Associated Press: “There’s nothing more important to me in my life than this happening to me. I’m a Cubbie. I’ll always be a Cubbie.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 3, 2010

A photo caption in an earlier version of this article mistakenly said that Ron Santo played for nine seaons with the Chicago White Sox.
Playing Like His Old Self, Woods Grabs the Lead
By KAREN CROUSE

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — Not to suggest expectations were lowered for Tiger Woods on Thursday at the Chevron World Challenge, but when he made his third birdie on the front nine, the standard-bearer for Woods’s group reached for a red 3 and found none.

There was no dearth of red numbers on Woods’s scorecard. He birdied five of his first 10 holes at Sherwood Country Club on his way to a seven-under-par 65. That was good for a one-stroke lead over Rory McIlory and Graeme McDowell in an 18-man event in which all the players are in the world’s top 50.

The only golfers among the top 12 who were not here were No. 1-ranked Lee Westwood, third-ranked Martin Kaymer, who withdrew after winning the European money title in Dubai, and No. 4 Phil Mickelson.

“Not too often do I say I shot 65, and I only made one putt,” Woods said. “It was a good ball-striking day.”

Woods was on his way to his best competitive round since he shot a 62 in September 2009 until he made a bogey on the last hole after a terrible drive. It was one of the few loose shots hit by Woods on a day in which he hit every green in regulation on the front side and struck the ball with a clarity of purpose that was missing most of 2010.

“I was pretty impressed with what he was doing out there,” said Woods’s playing partner, Steve Stricker, who added, “He striped it all day long.”

Woods, 35, is the four-time champion of the event, which benefits his charity, the Tiger Woods Foundation. Although winless on the PGA Tour for the first time since he turned professional in 1996, Woods’s first-round score did not come out of nowhere.

In his previous competitive round, on the final day of last month’s Australian Masters, Woods played the final six holes in six under, for a round of 65.

Woods recently lost his No. 1 ranking, which he had held for 281 consecutive weeks, to Westwood. He can reclaim the top spot with a victory here and a third-place finish or worse by Westwood at a 12-man event this week in South Africa.

The world rankings operate on a two-year points cycle, so Westwood, should he fall from the top spot, would regain it next month. There is much talk that the 2011 season could have a handful of players jockeying for the top spot, as has been the case this year in women’s golf, with four players holding the No. 1 ranking.

“Tiger has dominated for so long,” said sixth-ranked Jim Furyk, who has three victories this year. “There are guys like Mickelson and, you go down the list, the top 10, there’s a bunch of guys that would like to say that.”

The run for No. 1 could end up being the same old conversation if Woods continues to strike the ball as well as he did Thursday, and can make a few more short putts. Two of his four birdies on the front nine came on missed eagle putts.

After the Players Championship in May, Woods’s swing coach, Hank Haney, resigned. Three months later, Woods began working with Sean Foley, whose clients include Sean O’Hair, Hunter Mahan and Justin Rose.

Mahan, who played many practice rounds with Woods — before and after Woods began working with Foley — was not surprised at how well Woods has taken to Foley’s instruction.

“The guy’s No. 1 in the world and he works as hard as anybody, and he couldn’t overcome a wrong theory,” Mahan said, alluding to Woods’s association with Haney.

Under Foley’s tutelage, Woods has changed his swing so that he has less weight shift and more rotation.

“As I played throughout the summer, I kept trying to do the things that I was working on with Hank over the years, and it just wasn’t working anymore,” Woods said. “And it got to the point where I just couldn’t do it.

“It’s kind of hard to try and play tournament-level golf, major championship golf, especially, when at the time I was struggling with which way the ball was going to go. Was it going to go right, or was it going to go left? That’s not fun.”

Woods missed the fairway to the right with his shots off the tee on the first, 10th and 18th holes but otherwise entertained his gallery with his pure ball-striking.

“His shots,” Stricker said, “have that sound back.”
Russia and Qatar Win World Cup Bids
By JERÉ LONGMAN

The world’s biggest sporting event continued its spread to new corners of the globe Thursday as Russia and Qatar were named as hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup soccer tournaments.

The fallout from the announcements in Zurich included a setback in soccer development for the United States, which lost its attempt to host the 2022 World Cup despite having an apparently superior technical bid. That tournament was awarded instead to Qatar, the tiny oil-rich nation in the Persian Gulf, meaning the World Cup will make its inaugural appearance in the Middle East.

“We go to new lands,” Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, told Reuters. “Never has the World Cup been in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Arabic world has been waiting for a long time. So I’m a happy president when we talk about the development of football.”

FIFA is an insular body, frequently criticized for its lack of transparency. Thursday’s votes by FIFA’s executive committee were conducted in secret. It was impossible to discern fully the motives of Blatter and his colleagues.

Some soccer officials believe Blatter is angling for a Nobel Peace Prize, having now orchestrated the awarding of the World Cup to South Africa in 2010, and soon to Russia and the Middle East, even if his chances of winning such an award might seem remote.

Surely, Thursday’s votes reflected in part some murky internal FIFA politics. No doubt, too, Blatter has some sincere interest in taking his sport’s grandest spectacle to all parts of the world.

The votes came amid recent news media accusations of corruption involving 6 of the 24 members of FIFA’s executive committee. Two were barred from voting. Some observers called for a delay in the votes, saying their legitimacy had been compromised by accusations of vote selling.

American soccer officials had hoped to prevail with a bid that promoted the country’s diversity, the potential for record attendance and record profits for FIFA, and the fact that all stadiums and necessary infrastructure were already built.

But perhaps FIFA officials felt they had sufficiently assisted the United States by giving it the 1994 World Cup.

And some observers felt that American bid officials lacked passion in explaining how a second World Cup would expand the game in the United States, which has not fully embraced the sport. FIFA had also expressed some concerns about a lack of federal government guarantees, one apparently having to do with its tax liability in the United States.

Eric Wynalda, a former star American forward and now a television commentator, suggested on Fox Soccer Channel that Qatar had in effect bought the World Cup in a triumph of money over merit. Perhaps he was referring to remarks in October by Michel Zen-Ruffinen, a former secretary general of FIFA, that Qatar was seeking to trade votes with the combined Spain/Portugal bid for 2018 to enhance both candidacies.

Sunil Gulati, president of the United States Soccer Federation, said in a conference call from Zurich: “Obviously, we’re very disappointed with the outcome. We submitted what we think technically is a very good bid.”

He then congratulated Qatar, which has never played in the World Cup, and declined to make accusations of corruption in the bidding process.

Thursday’s votes amounted to an election, Gulati said, adding: “This isn’t only about technical reports. A lot goes into that. In this case, it was a new part of the world.”

Qatar, with 1.7 million people, only 300,000 of whom are citizens, is the smallest nation to host a World Cup. But with one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, it won with a bid that urged FIFA officials to make history as well as money. The success of the 2010 tournament, which was held in Africa for the first time, apparently further emboldened FIFA officials to continue to take its grandest spectacle to yet another part of the world, something that places soccer’s vision far ahead of the Olympics.

“Thank you for believing in change,” Qatar’s emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, told FIFA officials.

Others bidding for 2022 were Australia, Japan and South Korea.

The head of Qatar’s winning bid, Sheik Mohammed bin Hamad al-Thani, suggested Wednesday that the World Cup would help improve the Arab image internationally, while assuaging anti-Islamic feeling that has grown since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The 2022 World Cup will “present a new image of the Middle East — far away from clichés and closer to reality,” bin Hamad al-Thani said.

Qatar’s bid overcame concerns about heat that can reach 120 degrees there in the summer. Officials say they will build air-conditioned stadiums, spending $4 billion to upgrade three arenas and build nine new ones in a compact area connected by a subway system. Qatari officials have also said they will spend $50 billion on transportation and other infrastructure. After the 2022 World Cup, Qatar plans to dismantle its stadiums and give them to poorer countries.

Meanwhile, the defeated United States has now lost successive bids to host a major international sporting event. Chicago lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, which were awarded to Rio de Janeiro. The World Cup bid failed even though it had support from President Obama and from former President Bill Clinton, who was honorary chairman of the bid committee.

When asked about Qatar’s being awarded the 2022 tournament, Obama said, “I think it was the wrong decision,” but he added that he was confident the United States team would acquit itself well wherever it played.

Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s prime minister, did not travel to Zurich before Thursday’s votes, obliquely accusing England, a rival bidder for 2018, of trying to undermine the voting process. This was an apparent reference to news media reports emanating from London that accused some FIFA officials of being willing to sell their votes.

After Russia won the 2018 World Cup, though, Putin said he would travel to Zurich to thank FIFA.

“This decision shows that Russia is trusted,” Putin told reporters as he left Moscow.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who typically enjoys gadgets more than sports, said in a Twitter message: “Hurray! Victory!”

Russia, which will also host the 2014 Winter Olympics, prevailed Thursday over England and joint bids by Spain/Portugal and the Netherlands/Belgium. Russia views the World Cup as a chance to help the country continue to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Concerns about a lack of infrastructure and travel in the far-flung country were apparently ameliorated in the bidding process.

Russia proposed to host the tournament in 13 cities grouped in four clusters. And Putin has said that visitors will not need travel visas. Match tickets will apparently serve as visas, as they did when the 2008 Champions League final was held in Moscow.

“Yes, we don’t have the right infrastructure yet,” said Igor Shuvalov, the Russian first deputy prime minister, who led the delegation. “But we can overcome all difficulties. Let’s create history together.”

Coupled with Russian elation, however, was disappointment from the other candidate countries, particularly in England, which had gained renewed confidence over the last 24 hours that its bid might be successful after Prince William, Prime Minister David Cameron and David Beckham flew to Zurich for some last-minute lobbying.

“What a killer,” said Duncan Townsend, manager of No. 1 Sports Bar in London’s financial district, where crowds had gathered to watch the vote. “I was so looking forward to it. We have the passion and the infrastructure. It’s a real shame.”

In 1994, the United States hosted what is widely considered the most successful World Cup. Some 3.6 million fans attended the matches, still a record number. The 2022 World Cup bid projected that as many as five million tickets would be sold. Gulati also projected that $1 billion in corporate sponsorships might be available in the United States by then, along with $1 billion in television rights fees paid by English- and Spanish-language networks.

Gulati has also said that the cumulative American television audience for the 2022 World Cup could be 200 million, double the viewers who watched the 2010 World Cup from South Africa.

Officials of Major League Soccer, the North American professional league that just completed its 15th season, had hoped to gain enhanced visibility over the next 12 years as the 2022 World Cup approached. Officials in the soccer federation had also hoped to use the tournament to foster youth development in the inner cities.

It is too early to say whether the United States will bid on the 2026 World Cup, Gulati said. Soccer growth in the country will continue, he said, but lost Thursday was an opportunity for “putting a foot on the accelerator and taking a big jump.”

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Moscow and Julia Werdigier from London.

In this youtube video you can hear the father say, “Son, make the evil eye.” The baby responds by furrowing his brow and inclining his head to produce a menacing expression. This expression is recognized universally, perhaps due to an instinctual cue to avoid an angry and potentially dangerous individual. Check out this related article on facial prejudice and instinct from the BBC website. The video is so funny because this archetypal expression appears on the face of a cute baby that’s laughing and eating ice cream.

Stereotype

The jealous old hag is a stereotype often seen in film and literature,
particularly in fairy tales. In the hag’s jealousy of youth and beauty,
she curses the young and beautiful. The myth of the evil eye says that the
covetousness of others can lead to a curse on the person possessing the object
or attribute of jealousy. Old, solitary women were often suspected because it was
believed they were witches and women with a rheumy eye were particularly
vulnerable to the accusation. The image from an old self help book of a hooded
old woman cursing young, nude men creates a powerful juxtaposition.

Cliché

The Turkish nazar is a talisman believed to protect the wearer from
the evil eye. The stylized glass beads are meant to represent the human eye.
Once the amulet was said to protect it’s wearer from being cursed by jealous
eyes. Today, the amulet is considered a one-size-fits-all good luck charm
similar to the horse shoe. People wear the amulets on their clothes, post it
to their doors, and hang them in their cars. And today the phrase “to give
the evil eye” is synonymous with glaring or scowling at someone.

Wilmington’s Mortal Man has the scruffy, bearded look of any number of metal bands. However, the group has decided to steer their sound in a direction that’s miles apart from their shrieking nü-metal contemporaries to create a story and sound that makes the genre accessible to a wider audience.

Mortal Man (from left) Keith McAndrews, Max Sweeney, Mike Desjean, Matt Murray, and Brandon Autry

The Mortal Men

The men, their ages, their instruments, and their beards:

Matt Murray, 26, vocals, 6 inches

Max Sweeney, 27, guitar, 5 inches

Mike Desjean, 27, drums, 1 1/2 inches

Brandon Autry, 28, guitar, an inch even

Keith McAndrews, 20, bass, 0 inches

The mortal beards. Murray (from left), Sweeny and Autry display their tufts.

An Epic Sound

On a Sunday afternoon Wilmington’s Mortal Man blasts their epic sound from Max Sweeney’s shed-cum-studio. The space is littered with beer cans, guitars, various bits of a drum kit, a single maraca, and a copy of Pro Tools for Dummies. Matt Murray, the vocalist, leans into the mic and whispers, “There was a guy and he did some stuff and then he found the scroll…”

This brief, improvised lead-in says much about Mortal Man. It’s a metal band of both lyrical and musical complexity and puerile camaraderie. Some of the members have been friends for years. McAndrews and Desjean played together in Throw It to Lucas and Sweeney and Autry are both Wilmington locals and attended the same high school. The guys spent interludes during Mortal Man’s practice discussing Ralph Wiggum quotes, Davis Cross sketches and genitalia.

Just Metal

Mortal Man is as traditional as a metal band can be. Like Black Sabbath (or even Led Zeppelin) before them, they focus more on lyricality and melody than sonic dissonance and volume. (And that’s not to say they’re not loud…) The vocals are clear, the lyrics decipherable, and the instrumental performances are precise and Wagnerian, articulating as manifestly as the lyrics themselves. It’s a sound that any fan of prog rock could embrace, though the band members themselves roundly agree they are a metal band (with no frills). However, they realize their sound has a wider appeal than just the metal community. “I like that we can b e a metal band that’s not only for metal fans,” Brandon Autry, guitar, noted.

The band cites forerunners Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, AC/DC, and Black Sabbath as influences. Murray draws vocal inspiration from diverse sources such as Metallica; Dio, the band of former Black Sabbath vocalist Ronnie James Dio; and Elvis.

The Plot

Mortal Man’s moniker is the result of a serendipitous find by Autry. While reading The Lord of the Rings, Autry stumbled upon a passage stating death is a gift to mortal man, a theme first explored by Tolkein in The Silmarillion. “Death is their fate,” Tolkein writes, ” the gift of Ilúvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.” The concept sparked Autry’s imagination. However, at first, the discovery merely inspired Mortal Man’s band name. It wasn’t until later that the band created the character of Mortal Man and began to weave the epic tale of his quest into their music.

The story of Mortal Man is a blend of Dr. Who-style science fiction, Tolkeinesque fantasy and myth, Homeric Odyssey and zombie lore. When asked to provide an overview of the plot, the band members exchanged glances and launched a convoluted narrative that included a zombie lord, a time immortal, several mystic relics, and Apocalyptic devastation.

The band seems earnest about their epic hero but also amused by their own gravity. When asked when Mortal Man’s story is set, Sweeney laughed and replied in a movie trailer intonation, “Thousands of years ago in the far distant future.”

Concept Band

Opeth and Mastodon, groups the band cites as contemporary influences, have both released concept albums. However, Mortal Man is quick to explain that the adventure of Mortal Man won’t be limited to a single release. “We’re not a band with a concept album,” Autry clarified. “We’re a concept band.”

The group hopes to expand the story of Mortal Man to create a sort-of band mythology. “Our first album will be the story of the rise and demise of Mortal Man,” Murray explained, “and we’re thinking of retelling the same story from different points of view in future albums.”

The Response

So far the concept seems to be working in Mortal Man’s favor. “We kind of did this as an experiment,” Murray explained. “I took some theater classes in high school and found that I like getting into character. I’m not just bullshitting between the songs, I’m creating part of the narrative. So far, we’ve gotten a great response.”

The band believes that the story of Mortal Man makes metal more accessible to audiences who might not be familiar with or even might not like the genre. “People have come up to me and said, ‘I’m not really into metal, but I really got into the story’,” Murray explained. “We’re really excited that people like it,” Autry added. “We were afraid they weren’t going to get it.”

Upcoming Shows and Projects

Mortal Man will be playing at the Soapbox on November 15th with the Black Skies, Rapture Cabaret, and Pride Parade. The cover is five dollars. There are no mp3s available on Mortal Man’s Myspace site as of yet, but the band has plans to start recording within the next couple of months and to begin the design of a Mortal Man comic to be distributed with the CD.

About the Article:

I actually set out to do an article on voter registration and expected turn out. However, neither the Pender, New Hanover, or Brunswick Board of Registration returned my email or phone calls. I also contacted the Obama campaign to speak to a person who had been registering people on the streets but they had trouble finding someone that was cleared to speak to the press. Finally, I contacted the director of Democracy North Carolina, who also didn’t get back to me.

Luckily, I had gotten the information for Mortal Man’s singer when I saw their show because I’ve been thinking of pitching a local music review to Wilmington’s weekly, Encore. The Encore‘s audience is locals, people interested in entertainment in the area. It’s Wilmington’s version of The Independent. So, I called the band and asked if I could sit in on a practice (since they didn’t have any shows scheduled for the week). I then went out to a local bar and interviewed three members of the band. I mostly let them talk while I took notes, but I loosely structured my interview to cover the following topics:

1. Band member names, ages, and instruments
2. Band history, previous projects
3. Influences
4. Self-described genre
5. Origin of the band name
6. Explanation of the band’s concept
7. Plans for recording/distributing
8. Performances so far and audience response
9. Upcoming shows
10. How do you distinguish Mortal Man’s story from Frodo’s quest in LOTR (This question arose spontaneously from discussion of the Mortal Man plot.)

Unfortunately, their practice wasn’t scheduled until Sunday, so I was pressed for time on writing the article. But I liked how it turned out overall. I did a good deal of research on the bands they named that I didn’t recognize so that I could make accurate comparisons. I also looked up the part of the Lord of the Rings they referenced.

If I were to webbify the article I would encourage the band to allow me to provide a free download of one of their songs, a streaming video feature, links to the band’s myspace page and the myspace pages of the other bands playing with them on the 15th. I would also include a sort of fast facts box with band name, genre, influences, and upcoming shows.

About the Revision:

I changed the title of the piece, and then added some introductory information to give a reader an idea of what the article is about, which was actually really tough because everything that I tried sounded fawning. I do like the band, but I hate when band reviews gush. I hope I struck a good balance. I also changed my first subhead to make it a little more explanatory.

If you’ve ever tried your hand at the Harper’s Puzzle then you know that it is a cryptic crossword and that it is super difficult. Or at least it is for me… Perhaps you can polish one off in a matter of minutes, in which case, I hope that I’m more attractive than you.

I first started doing the Harper’s puzzle during a Maine winter. It was tough to crack, but once I learned to love it, I knew I’d love it forever. I hope this liveblog will be both instructive for the newbie and entertaining for the salty dog.

So, on the off chance that anyone is out there playing along, audience participation is appreciated. I will be using the October 2008 puzzle entitled “Playfair Square (‘Just Kidding’).”

Without further ado, I present to you:

Bailey vs. the Harper's Puzzle

P.S. The headband is both to stimulate blood flow to the brain AND to intimidate the puzzle.

Day One

10:21 Read the rules.

Almost every puzzle has some sub-puzzle to solve, so it’s important to read the rules of the puzzle every time.

10:34 I’ve given the puzzle a once over, and I think I’ve spotted the weakest clue in the flock, 32 Across:

The eight in parenthesis behind the clue means that the answer is eight letters long.

10:37 I’ve got it. “DULY” + “SEND” is an anagram for “suddenly,” which means “without notice.” “Off” indicates that the letters should be rearranged. So, 32A is SUDDENLY.

Look for words like turn, play, crazy, broken, and strange to indicate an anagram. Check out the Guardian’s cryptic crossword primer for more tips.

10:48 Now it’s time to get more coffee in celebration of the first clue down. Sometimes I’ll work on the puzzle for hours and only get six or seven, so even small accomplishments are cause for celebration.

10:51 20, 25, 19, 21, and 13 Down all intersect SUDDENLY, the 32 Across answer. However, 20 Down is a Playfair Square clue (see the rules above if you have no idea what I’m talking about) and 13 Down is 10 letters long, which means it’s probably difficult, so I’m going to focus on the other three. The clues are:

25D. By coating finish, you get working supply? (5) _ _ _ D _

19D. In this country, bad loan requires getting down in dumps (7) _ _ _ _ _ D _

21D. Denude abandoned place in Scotland (6) _ _ _ _ E _

11:04 I think that 25D might be BENDY because “By coating finish” could mean that B and Y should be placed on either side of END. “End” is a synonym for “finish.” BY could be seen as “coating finish” if it surrounded END. However, I don’t really see how “bendy” means “working supply.”

I’m going to hold off on entering that one into the puzzle.

11:10 21D solved. “Denude” is an anagram of DUNDEE, a “place in Scotland.” To work on my anagrams I like to put all the letters in a circle like this:

Anagram Circle

11:25 19D solved. (Clue: In this country, bad loan requires getting down in dumps (7) _ _ _ _ _ D _)

“In this country” means the U and S will be the first and last letters of the word. “Bad loan” means that the four letters after U will be an anagram of “loan,” i.e. “loan” written badly.

“Getting down” indicates that a D should be added*. So, the final answer is UNLOADS, which means “dumps.”

*Directions are often written as the first letter of the direction, e.g. D for “down” or L for “left.”

11:32 Now that I have both 19D and 21D, it’s time to start looking at the across clues again. We have two letters for 20, 28, 30, and 33 Across. Here are the clues:

20. One way to get to store: Water Street and Main (9) _ _ _ N D _ _ _ _

28. Returning soldier removed from foreign surroundings, tossed in cooler (5) _ _ _ O N

30. Organs playing right away, holding a note from other organs! (6) _ _ _ A D _

33. Head of government ordered “Eyes right” in spring uprising! (6) _ _ _ S E _

11:46 28D solved. (Clue: Returning soldier removed from foreign surroundings, tossed in cooler (5) _ _ _ O N.)

This one was a doozy. So, “Returning soldier” is IG, G.I. backward.

“Removed from foreign surroundings” indicates that IG should be removed from “foreign” leaving us with the letters FOREN.

“Tossed” tells us that the resulting letters are an anagram, which gives us the final answer FREON, for “cooler.” (“Coolant” would actually be more accurate, but who am I to argue with Richard E. Maltby Jr.)

11:58 I really believe that 30A might be “gonads.” Here’s the clue:

30. Organs playing right away, holding a note from other organs! (6) _ _ _ A D _

It seems a little saucy for Harper’s. Of course, last week’s Sunday New York Times crossword had “Pass the Courvoisier rapper” as a clue. So, who knows?

12:06 Lunch break! See you in a bit.

12:46 Alas, the cupboard was bare! So, I’ve recruited my sister to bring me a sandwich. In the meantime, let’s hope that hunger leads to heightened problem-solving creativity.

12:52 33A solved. (Clue: Head of government ordered “Eyes right” in spring uprising! (6) _ _ _ S E _.)

The “head of government” is G because G is the first letter, the head, of the word.

Next, we add “Eyes right.” “Ordered” signals us to create an anagram with “eyes” and R, for “right.” The result is GEYSER, a “spring uprising.”

12:58 I’m having a hard time with 20A. (Clue: One way to get to store: Water Street and Main (9) _ _ _ N D _ _ _ _.) I’m going to try some of the down clues that intersect it to try and get some more letters.

In addition to 19 and 21, which I’ve already solved, numbers 2, 5, 13, and 22 intersect 20A. The clues are:

2. Using modern communication, member of royal family, we hear, published books (8)

5. In the capacity of a dentist, takes in pure sick animals (10)

13. Bumped into not quite well-heeled friend, in poetic fashion (10) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ L _

22. It’s money due you—speak up (3)

1:30 2D solved. (Clue: Using modern communication, member of royal family, we hear, published books (8))

So far, we’ve mostly been seeing anagram clues in this puzzle. This clue uses another popular trick, homophones.

Using modern communication is to “IM” (you know, like instant message). A “member of the Royal family” is a prince. It could also be queen or king or dauphin or whatever, but I ruled all those out because “we hear” indicates that the answer will be a homophone. “Prince” sounds like “prints”. So, if I add IM to PRINTS, I get the answer, IMPRINTS, for “published books.”

1:46 20A solved. (Clue: One way to get to store: Water Street and Main (9) _ T _ N D _ _ _ _.) I had to consult the dictionary on this one. Given the letters I have so far, I figure the first part is STAND. Then I scratched my head for a minute because I couldn’t come up with any words that begin with stand. So, I looked “stand” up in the dictionary and I found “standpipe.”

According to Webster’s a standpipe is “a high vertical pipe of cylindrical tank for storing water and keeping it at a desired pressure, esp. such a large tank used in a water-supply system for a town, etc.” I don’t really know what Webster’s means by that “etc.,” but I don know that definition seems to work with my clue. Particularly, if you follow the rules and remember that “mental repunctuation of a clue is the key to its solution.”

Think of the clue like this: “One way to get to store: Water.” Then, “Street and Main.”

The first half is our definition. The second half gives us the components of the word. ST is the abbreviation for “street.” AND is added verbatim. And, “main” is a synonym for PIPE. The results is our answer, STANDPIPE.

1:56 With STANDPIPE at 20A that means I have S _ F _ S _ G for the Playfair Square clue at 20D.

I’m not sure what to do with this info just yet, but it’s something to keep in mind.

2:00 Lunch break redux.

2:50 UPDATE:

The board so far.

3:37 It’s been nearly an hour, and there’s little to report. I abandoned strategy after coming to a standstill and have just been randomly trying to solve clues to jumpstart the game. So far my only coup has been 13A:

13A. Smash! Wham! KO! It’s hair-raising! (6)

The answer is an anagram of WHAM and KO, the two words “smashed,” if you will. The result is a “hair raising” MOHAWK.

This answer gives me the first letter of 13D:

13D. Bumped into not quite well-heeled friend, in poetic fashion (10) M _ _ _ I _ _ _ L _

4:30 4D and 12A solved.

(4D Clue: Meals On Wheels city? (5) ). “On Wheels” is an anagram indicator. So, an anagram of “Meals” that is also a city is SALEM.

(12A Clue: Apply time for piano, as is fitting (5)). This one seems like a bit of a stretch, I know, but I’m about 95% sure that it’s correct. I think that you’re supposed to substitute a T for the second P (“time” for “piano”) in “Apply” to get APTLY, “as is fitting.”

4:36 Well, it appears to have stopped raining, so that’s enough puzzling for me for one day.

Until tomorrow,

Bailey

Day Two

The game so far: I’ve seen better, but I’ve certainly seen worse. I think I’ve knocked out the easiest quadrant of the board already. So, I’m looking at a tougher go of it today. I’d like to get at least one of the two long answers that bisect the puzzle. I think that would help me move into new terriotry. These two clues are 5 and 13 down:

5. In the capacity of a dentist, takes in pure sick animals (10)

13. Bumped into not quite well-heeled friend, in poetic fashion (10)

I haven’t yet tried working on the Playfair Square part of the puzzle. Hopefully, I’ll get some more letters and maybe even solve one of the four Playfair Square clues.

1. Detective involved in hustle (6)

34. British zone out after silver (6)

10. Celebrity eating, in one extreme weight-loss program! (6)

20. What’s in the garden? Content of boxes, certainly (6)

2:29 It’s been a slow half hour, but I’ve made a break.

26. A degree in basic currency takes place in Algiers (6)

I was particularly pleased to get this one. I thought the answer would be in French because of “Algiers.” However, the answer is CASBAH, a “place in Algiers.” It’s an anagram of BA, “a degree” and CASH, “basic currency.”

2:45 I’ve relocated to Bella’s, my favorite local coffee shop, for some coffee, fresh air, and a new perspective.

2:55 25D solved.

25. By coating finish, you get working supply? (5)

I finally figured out the clue that I guessed was BENDY. I had been interpreting “supply” as in a supply of goods, but it should actually be read as “supply,” as in supple.

This means that 30A must be GONADS (tee hee).

30. Organs playing right away, holding a note from other organs! (6)

It’s an anagram of “organs” with “right away.” So, organs minus R gives us OGANS. And D is “a note,” so add D, mix it all up, and you get GONADS (tee hee, one more time).

2:35 13D kind of, maybe solved.

13. Bumped into not quite well-heeled friend, in poetic fashion (10)

This is one of the longer clues, and I’m not 100% on it, but I think it’s MET for “bumped into” and ALLY for “friend.” “Not quite well-heeled” has me completely stumped. However, I’m pretty sure the answer is METRICALLY for “in poetic fashion.”

2:37 27D solved.

Acronym potentially seen as fun? (5)

This is a fun one. “As fun” is an anagram for SNAFU, which is an acronym that I believe stands for “situation normal all fucked up.” Or so I’ve heard…

2:39 Bella’s is blasting the adult alternative station into the patio, and it’s ruining the puzzle-solving mood. I’m taking a break to ask them to change the station.

2:42 It was a close call between big band and classic jazz. I think classic jazz was the right choice…. I hate satellite radio.

2:50 29A solved.

Unclear in ad, yet open around the clock, as the sign might say (3-4)

This clue is a little weak. “Unclear” is the signal word for an anagram of “in ad yet.” I believe the answer is DAY NITE for “open around the clock, as the sign might say.”

2:51 22D solved incidentally.

22. It’s money due you—speak up (3)

With the letters from 20A, 26A and 29A we get PAY, “money due you” from “speak” a synonym for YAP backward, signaled by “up.”

3:01 24D solved.

24. I believe Designer’s Square is north of where robbery went down (6)

The bottom right quadrant is really starting to shape up. In 24D, “Designer’s Square” gives us T for “T-square.”

A robbery is a HEIST. T is “north” of “robbery.” So, T is above HEIST, making THEIST for “I believe.”

3:15 I was moving along at a nice clip, but it seems the coffee is starting to fail me. Perhaps it’s time for a refill?

3:20 4D and 16A solved.

4. Meals On Wheels city? (5)

16. Great Ballet Russe star from Long Island, a long way away (5)

So, 4D is wrong! Oops. My bad y’all. I was having trouble making any headway in the upper left, so it occurred to me there might be a mistake in that area. I had a feeling that 16A might be LIFAR for the first letters of “Long Island” plaus FAR for “a long way away.” However, I dismissed it because it didn’t work with SALEM and because I don’t know a lick about ballet. My mom wouldn’t let me take dance as a kid; she said I was too delicate. But desperate times… I Googled LIFAR and found that he is indeed a “Ballet Russe star.”

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Isn’t using the Internet cheating, Bailey?” And my answer is a categorical no. The puzzle isn’t only about brain teasers, it’s also about learning. If I didn’t look up Lifar, then I wouldn’t have anything smart to talk about at cocktail parties if Russian ballet came up. So there.

Now, since LIFAR is right, SALEM must be wrong.

3:23 4D resolved! SELMA not SALEM! Tricky puzzle…

3:25 1D solved.

1. Likely story: making a bee-line inside (6)

A “story” is a LIE. “A bee-line inside” indicates that you should add ABL, creating LIABLE for “likely.”

3:35 5D solved.

5. In the capacity of a dentist, takes in pure sick animals (10)

This is another long one. “Dentist” made me think that DDS would be part of the answer and “sick” indicates that an anagram of “pure” should be included as well.

I guessed that the answer might be QUADRUPEDS for “animals,” but the QUA part of the answer was puzzling, so I looked it up and found that “qua” means in the capacity of. Score! I love it when I learn new words from the puzzle.

3:45 18A solvished?

Advanced University Track returns under boxing-related umbrella (10)

This is a bit of a guess, but frustration is the mother of creative guessing, so I’m going to go with it. I think all we get from “University” is the initial U. Another word fro “track” is “rut,” and if we “return” that we get TUR. The “boxing-related” bit is FIST. So far, if you put those all together, you get FUTURIST, but that’s not enough letters. So, I think the answer is FUTURISTIC for “advanced.”

3:50 Well, I think that’s enough for one day. My palms are in a cold sweat from caffeine overload, and I’m kind of starting to want to throw the puzzle into the river.

Day Three

6:24 6A solved

6. Vicar can absolve keeping secrets (6)

This one uses a word hidden in other words. The answer is in “Vicar can absolve.” The answer is ARCANA for “secrets”

6:30 17D solved.

17. Indication of slashing: Pop Art from $199 to $9 (8) _ I _ A T R _ _

This one’s all about the Roman numerals. CIC for 199 and IX for 9 with an anagram of ART in the middle, for the second foreign word in the puzzle CICATRIX, scar or “indication of slashing.”

6:47 7D solved.

7. You might see him rob criminal figures (6) R _ O _ _ I

“Him rob” criminally makes RHOMBI, plural of rhombus, for “figures.”

6:50 8D solved.

8. Kelly Ripa, e.g., falls short? Something fishy here! (5) C _ H _ _

I finally rememebered who Kelly Ripa is! She’s on that morning show with Regis; ergot she is a cohost. I looked up “cohos” because that would be cohost “falling short” and found that a “coho” is a small salmon native to the N. Pacific. So, the answer is COHOS.

]]> http://spacebailey.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/liveblogging-bailey-vs-the-harpers-puzzle/feed/ 2 spacebailey b-v-h1 dsc000091 50 http://spacebailey.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/fact-checking-content/ http://spacebailey.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/fact-checking-content/#comments Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:45:52 +0000 Bailey http://spacebailey.wordpress.com/?p=39 ]]> Forward Check

Analysis of your inbox

FW: Columbo

Introduction:

1. College records
2. Columbia thesis
3. Selective Service Registration
4. Medical records
5. Law practice client list
6. Birth certificate or Certification of Live Birth
7. Harvard Law Review articles published
8. University of Chicago scholarly articles
9. Record of baptism
10. Illinois State Senate schedule and records

Analysis:

1. College Records:

2. Columbia Thesis:

3. Selective Service Registration:

4. Medical Records:

5. Law Practice Client List:

6. Birth Certificate and Certificate of Live Birth:

7. Harvard Law Review Articles:

8. University of Chicago Scholarly Articles:

9. Record of Baptism:

10. Illinois State Senate Schedule & Records:

The Columbo forward does present some whoppers. However, the forward is mostly guilty of presenting half-truths or making demands for information that is already available (e.g., Obama’s birth certificate) or irrelevant (e.g., the demand for the record of Baptism). The forward is an attempt to create a sense of conspiracy. My verdict is that the Columbo forward should be taken with a grain of salt.

About the Author:

Forward Check is a column proposal created by Bailey Smith for JOMC 711 Writing for Digital Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mrs. Smith is a registered Democrat.

Sources:

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2. FACTBOX: John McCain, Republican presidential candidate. Reuters. 26 September 2008.

3. Obama and the case of the missing ‘thesis’. NBC News: Deep Background. 24 July 2008.

4. Proclamation 4360 – Selective Service Registration. The American Presidency Project. 29 March 1975.

5. Proclamation 4771–Registration Under the Military Selective Service Act. The National Archives. 2 July 1980.

6. E-mail. Janice L. Hughes, Public & Intergovernmental Affairs, Selective Service System. 2 October 2008.

7. Barack Obama’s doctor gives him a clean bill of health. Los Angeles Times: Top of the Ticket Blog. 29 May 2008.

8. FACTBOX – John McCain’s health records. Reuters UK. 23 May 2008.

9. Ethics law reveals too little, group says. Chicago Sun-Times. 29 March 2008. (Available for purchase from the Chicago Sun-Times)

10. Obama, Rezko ties again at issue. Chicago Tribune. 23 January 2008. (Available for purchase from the Chicago Tribune)

11. Barack Obama’s Official Birth Certificate. Obama/Biden: Fight the Smears. 2008.

12. Born in the U.S.A. FactCheck.org. 21 August 2008. Born in the U.S.A. FactCheck.org. 21 August 2008.

13. Obama’s lost law review article. Politico. 22 August 2008.

14. Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart. New York Times. 30 July 2008.

15. The Story of Obama, Written by Obama. New York Times. 18 May 2008.

16. Finding His Faith. Newsweek. 12 July 2008.

17. McCain: I’m Baptist, not Episcopalian. The Christian Post. 17 September 2007.

18. Fact Check: Obama’s State Senate Records Are Publicly Available. Obama/Biden: Know the Facts. 14 November 2007.

19. Transcript for Nov. 11 2007. Meet the Press. 11 November 2007.