dispatches SLATE
Where Russia Meets China
"China is the destiny of Siberia."

By Joshua Kucera
IRKUTSK, Russia—When you're the leader of a fringe political group, a cafe called "I'm Waiting for a UFO" may not be the best place to take a visiting journalist. But it's possible that alien abduction is more likely than what Mikheil Kulekhov is working for: Siberian independence.
Kulekhov was the head of the Siberian Liberation Army until officers from the FSB (the successor to the KGB) contacted him. "They asked me: 'Why are you calling yourselves an army? Are you going to take up arms?' " Assured that wasn't the case, the officers asked Kulekhov to change the organization's name. He did, and it is now the National Alternative of Siberia. (The two names share the same acronym in Russian, OAS, he points out.)
That Russian security let these would-be secessionists off with nothing more than a gentle scolding is probably a reflection of the group's modest size: Kulekhov counts about 30 members in the OAS. So, Siberia is not Chechnya.
Siberian independence is unlikely. But this region's long-term political and economic future is uncertain. Much of the oil and natural gas that has fueled Russia's booming economy over the last decade is found in eastern Siberia, and the area is also rich in timber, minerals, and other natural resources. But it doesn't have very many people. This was the last part of Russia to be settled, and the Russian history of much of eastern Siberia stretches back barely 100 years.
Contrary to Siberia's reputation, most of the cities I visited were pleasant—Irkutsk, in particular, has gracious architecture and a bookish college-town feel. Siberians boast that they tend to be smarter and better-looking than their compatriots, because so much of Russia's elite was shipped out here when Siberia was used as a penal colony. But life here has always been difficult; it's remote and, in the winter, bitterly cold. The Soviets encouraged Russians to settle here, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people started heading west: The population of Russia east of Irkutsk decreased from 8 million to 6 million between 1998 and 2002 (the date of the last census). What would this mass exodus mean for Russia? Perhaps Russia's greatest claim to being a great power is its immense size, and a shrinking population in its farthest reaches could call its claim on Siberia—and by extension its authority on the world stage—into question. I was traveling through this region, heading east from Irkutsk, to see how Russia is holding on to its Far East.
Kulekhov bases his argument for independence on three pillars: the geographic, economic, and cultural uniqueness of Siberia. Irkutsk, he notes, is farther from Moscow than New York is from London, and Russian involvement in Siberia is analogous to the British colonization of the New World. "We're so far away, it's easy to see that we're a different country," he said. Economically, he argues, Siberia has more trade with Asia than it does with the European part of Russia, and too much of the income from this region's vast natural resources ends up in Moscow.
What's more, Siberians have unique "national characteristics. We are very skeptical, don't trust anyone, we're difficult to negotiate with, and we do things the way we want them to be done. We're individualists." While ethnic Russians everywhere are Orthodox Christian, in Siberia they have a syncretic bent, incorporating some elements of the Buddhist and shamanistic traditions of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. (The green-and-white OAS logo nods to that ecumenism, incorporating a cross as well as a circular form that refers to Buddhist chakras.)
The OAS is claiming its place in the long history of Siberian political independence movements, from 19th-century intellectuals who first posited the existence of a Siberian identity distinct from Russianness to a short-lived anti-Bolshevik Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia in the chaotic days after the Russian Civil War. Every year, OAS members make a pilgrimage to the grave of one of the early heroes of Siberian independence, and during my visit, the group's newspaper ran a front-page feature on the police force of the post-civil war autonomous government.
Kulekhov claims solidarity with other secessionist movements, which, he says, are everywhere in Russia. But at least for now, Russia is heading in the opposite direction. Regional governors used to be elected by local voters, but in 2004, then-President Vladimir Putin changed the law and decided to appoint the governors directly, greatly increasing the Kremlin's authority over Russia's far-flung regions. This would become a running theme throughout my trip: how distant Moscow rules Siberia imperiously, with little regard for the wishes of the people here. The word colony came up again and again in conversation.
Mikhail Rozhansky, a political analyst in Irkutsk, said there is no hope for Siberian independence. But its appeal is obvious. "It's understandable why people here have this dream—they don't want to feel like they're on the edge of the world," he said.
"Everything is centralized; everything is a colony of Moscow. Even regions close to Moscow still feel like they're living on the edge of Russia," Rozhansky said. Although that centralization creates resentment, it also makes it hard for strong regionalism to develop: "Ties between Irkutsk and Moscow are closer than the ties between Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk," another Siberian city.
A key component of the Siberian character is rootlessness, Rozhansky added. The first Russian settlers came here not because it was a pleasant place to live but because they were chasing the valuable natural resources of the time: furs. And that hasn't changed, even if today the goal is work in the timber or petroleum industries.
"Even if people came four centuries ago, they feel like life here is temporary," he said. "People have always come here because of the natural resources, not because they wanted to. And there's no tradition of compromise—people will just leave, find a new place to live."
From: Joshua Kucera

Subject: Don't Call Them Twin Cities
BLAGOVESHCHENSK, Russia—Across the Amur River, which forms the border between Russia and China, the city of Heihe gleams. The brand-new Yuan Dun shopping center juts into the water, its name written in Cyrillic letters large enough to be seen the half-mile across the river. At night, the Vegas-like lights of Heihe's downtown reflect in the river, and a spotlight makes circles in the sky, like a car dealership trying to draw customers.
Among Russians in Blagoveshchensk, a two-day train ride east of Irkutsk, the sight of Heihe across the water is a source of both admiration and defensiveness. During my time here I was told over and over that although Heihe looks impressive from a distance, up close the city can be dirty and chaotic. Others mentioned that that the central government in Beijing lavishes extra attention on Heihe—other cities of its size don't have those bright lights—because it's on the border. Russians have seen this sort of thing before: "It's a Potemkin village," said Mikhail Kukharenko, the Russian head of the Chinese-government-run Confucius Institute in Blagoveshchensk.
At the same time, Russians love Heihe. Several ferries a day carry over tourists and shoppers looking for cheap Chinese electronics and clothes, and so many people made their livelihood in the "suitcase trade"—buying cheap things in China to sell for a profit in Russia—that Blagoveshchensk's downtown has a monument to the traders, complete with an inscription that reads, "For the hard work and optimism of the entrepreneurs of the Amur," referring to the region that includes Blagoveshchensk.
For most of the last century, this border was closed. In 1969, the Soviet Union and China even fought a battle over a disputed island farther downstream. Hundreds of soldiers died.
But it reopened in 1989, and the fact that ordinary Russians and Chinese could cross the border freely added a new wrinkle to the already complex relationship between the two powers. In particular, Russians were forced to confront an uncomfortable demographic fact: This part of their country was strategically important, badly underpopulated, and right next to a China bursting at the seams.
The Russian Far East, the eastern edge of Siberia that borders China and the Pacific Ocean, has only 6 million people, and that number is dropping fast. Just across the border, though, the three provinces of northeastern China have about 110 million people. Meanwhile, the Russian Far East has substantial reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal, which China needs to run its supercharged economy.
All that has led many Russians to fear that China will eventually exert control over the region. "[I]f we do not step up the level of activity of our work [in the Russian Far East], then in the final analysis we can lose everything," Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said last year. Kukharenko of the Confucius Institute spelled it out for me: "It's a law of physics, a vacuum has to be filled," he said. "If there are no Russian people here, there will be Chinese people."
That's why Russia has serious misgivings about its neighbors to the south, as a trip along the border makes plain. While Beijing has moved aggressively to court Russian visitors and business, Russia's central government has largely neglected the areas that act as the gateway to China. The few new buildings in Blagoveshchensk—some shopping centers and a high-rise hotel—were built by a Chinese company.
While Blagoveshchensk is relatively prosperous, at least by the standards of Russian cities of its size, Heihe has positively boomed. It was just a village in 1989, and now it has 200,000 people, about the same as Blagoveshchensk. And in contrast to Heihe's glitzy, welcoming facade, Blagoveshchensk's barely lighted waterfront promenade features a Soviet-era World War II memorial that consists of a gunship with its barrels aimed across the river, toward China.
In one telling episode, in 2007, in an apparent attempt to play up its Russian connection and appeal to tourists, Heihe placed garbage cans that were designed to look like Russian matryoshka dolls around the city. Some excessively sensitive Russians saw this as an insult—Russian culture was trash. The mini-scandal made national TV news in Russia, and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested. So Heihe's government painted the trash cans over. (I later saw panda-shaped trash cans in another Chinese city, which suggests that the matryoshkas were, in fact, a friendly gesture.) In Blagoveshchensk, meanwhile, a new government-run cultural center was originally named Albazin, after the fort built by early Russian settlers to defend the territory from China, until local historians petitioned the government to change it, saying the name was unnecessarily provocative.
In several small ways, the Russian government has made it difficult for Russians and Chinese to interact. Heihe has street signs in Russian, but there is almost no Chinese to be seen in Blagoveshchensk. While Russians can cross into Heihe visa-free for a short visit, Chinese can't do the same to Blagoveshchensk. The local government gave the license to operate ferries that cross the river to a politically connected local monopoly, which charges more than $40 for the 10-minute ride. (Chinese visiting Russia use a different company, which charges much less.) China has offered to pay for a bridge between the two cities, but the Russian side has dragged its feet for years, said Yevgeny Kuzmin, a local journalist. "It's always the Chinese side that takes the initiative," he said.
The Russian government recently made the suitcase trade much more difficult by reducing the amount of clothes, electronics, and other consumer goods that Russians can bring back into the country duty-free and the frequency with which they can take such trips. One city official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, said that while Heihe's government is promoting the idea of Heihe and Blagoveshchensk as "twin cities," Blagoveshchensk's government is balking. "Heihe is always pushing this relationship more," she said. "They get a lot of money from the central government, so they have lots of proposals and ideas for programs, but we don't have the money for that."
The central government has given Blagoveshchensk funds for one thing, though: a new waterfront. Moscow has committed about $200 million for a five-year program to create a completely new waterfront facade for the city, a spokeswoman for the city told me. The plan will entail dumping sand into the river to add nearly 100 acres of prime riverfront real estate and then building brand-new high-rises along the new shore.
I asked if the new plan called for lights as impressive as Heihe's. "We'll do our best," she said with a smile. But the World War II memorial, with the gun pointed at China? It's staying.
Click here to view a slide show about where Russia meets China.
From: Joshua Kucera

Why Are Siberian Russians Drawn to China?

BLAGOVESHCHENSK, Russia—I originally came to the Russian Far East with the idea that the Russian-Chinese border was roughly analogous to the U.S.-Mexican border: poor, darker-skinned people sneaking north across a river for better job opportunities, freaking out the white people.
Poor Chinese do cross over, and they do work for less than Russians. And some of the overheated immigration rhetoric you hear in the United States exists in Russia, too, about the "zheltaya ugroza," or "yellow peril." That paranoia is much more prevalent in Moscow than in the Russian Far East, however. Here, everyone seems to have their favorite example of how other Russians exaggerate the Chinese presence. There are reports in the Moscow press that half the population of Blagoveshchensk is Chinese or that there are dozens of Chinese villages in Russia that don't appear on any map. "I've heard that the streets in Blagoveshchensk are named after Chinese generals or that there are Chinese people on the city council here," Mikhail Kukharenko, the head of the Chinese-government-run Confucius Institute, told me.
In part because the government has placed tight restriction on Chinese visitors to Russia, there is little visible Chinese presence in Blagoveshchensk—and there's more here than anywhere else in Russia. There are a couple of so-called "Chinese markets," where Chinese vendors sell cheap clothes and electronics, but you can find these all over Russia and the former Eastern bloc. There are also a good number of Chinese restaurants catering to Russian tastes: It was here that I had stir-fried potatoes for the first time.
But you see very few Chinese people on the streets, other than a few tourists snapping photos of the statue of Lenin or of the reconstructed arch originally built for Czarevich Nicholas' visit through the Far East in 1891.
What is remarkable here, though, is the enthusiasm that Russian people—in contrast to the Russian government—display about China. While some poor Chinese citizens come to Russia for work, educated, middle-class Russians are increasingly going in the other direction. Among the group of young, English-speaking Russians I fell in with in Blagoveshchensk, nearly all of them worked in some capacity with China. Many of them had lived there. One, Sergey, was home from his job in Shanghai, and he raved about how much friendlier, more open, and optimistic Chinese people were compared with Russians.
One feature of the Russian-Chinese relationship seemed especially telling: Cross-border marriages are overwhelmingly between Chinese men and Russian women. Much of this has to do with demographics—Russia has a surplus of women, while China has too many men. But as one Russian woman told me, "Chinese men are kinder and more attentive to their wives. And they usually have more money."
In the international relations department of Amur State University in Blagoveshchensk, the number of students studying Chinese increases every year, and more Russian students now learn Chinese as their first foreign language than English. The department is closing its European studies track and shutting down German and French. Soon, it will offer only Chinese and English.
"China is the destiny of Siberia, our present and future depends in every respect on what happens in China," Victor Dyatlov, a professor at Irkutsk State University and a top authority on Russian-Chinese relations, told me. "The only direction we can move in is integration and cooperation between Russia and China. But we don't know what form that integration will take."
But this local integration with China doesn't mean much to the larger picture, Dyatlov said. "The future of Siberia and its people is defined not by the people here but in Moscow," he said. "What people in Siberia think isn't that important. Siberia is the national treasure, and the people here are just meant to help the government exploit these resources."
Indeed, many people complain that Moscow treats the Russian Far East like a cash cow to be exploited for export income to China and cares little about how people here live. In February 2009, Russia and China signed a 20-year, $25 billion oil deal, and by the end of that term China could be getting one-quarter of its imported oil from Russia and Central Asia. Most of that oil will come from eastern Siberia, through a pipeline whose original route veered dangerously close to famously pristine Lake Baikal, prompting protests from Siberians. Russia also recently started selling electricity to China from the Bureya Dam, on a tributary of the Amur, at a price cheaper than Russians pay for electricity in Blagoveshchensk. "We don't like it," said Svetlana Kosikhina, the dean of the international relations department at Amur State. "Electricity is expensive here, and if we sell it to China, it's going to be even more expensive."
Even locals admit to a significant amount of skepticism about China's intentions toward the Russian Far East. Kukhalenko—as director of the Confucius Institute here, he's an employee of the Chinese government—said he assumes that "a lot" of the Chinese students in Blagoveshchensk are spies, "especially the ones who are older and who speak good Russian already." There are also rumors of a secret museum in Heihe—shown only to Chinese tourists—that displays maps showing Chinese control over the Russian Far East.
"We're not afraid, but we're wary. We just don't understand what they're going to do. It's a system that could rise up at any moment and attack us," Kosikhina said. "We have a saying here: 'Pessimists study Chinese.' "
Click here to view a slide show about where Russia meets China.Joshua Kucera is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

The Sunday London Times
Top scientists share their future predictions
From virtual brains and Matrix-like thought connections to disease-making bacteria, what the next decade could bring
Bryan Appleyard
Nothing much is going to happen in the next 10 years. Of course, that’s not counting the diesel-excreting bacteria, the sequencing of your entire genome for $1,000, massive banks of frozen human eggs, space tourism, the identification of dark matter, widespread sterilisation of young adults, telepathy, supercomputer models of our brains, the discovery of life’s origins, maybe the disappearance of Bangladesh and certainly the loss of 247m acres of tropical forest.
As I said, just another decade really.
These days, “just another decade” always means 10 years of future shock. Science, technology and the contemporary mania for change combine to stun the imagination. It is the way we live now, in a condition of permanent technological revolution.
In 2000 — remember? — the internet all but died when the dotcom stock market bubble burst. You could stand on top of the World Trade Center. And mobile phones were just, er, phones. Today, you still get up and eat breakfast, but, outside, it’s a different world.
Next? Well, as Woody Allen said, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans for the future. But, taking a punt, I reckon the brain is the one to watch. Science has been zeroing in on the 2lb 14oz of grey and white custard-like stuff between your ears for some time now. It’s not been easy. In spite of the evidence of The X Factor, the human brain is very complex custard indeed. But some people are getting very excited.
“By 2020, genetics and brain simulation will be giving us personalised prescriptions for marriage, lifestyle and healthcare.” This is Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project in Switzerland, an attempt to reverse engineer the brain by building one from the ground up inside a supercomputer.
“We won’t need a psychologist to tell us why we feel unhappy. All we’ll need to do is log into a simulation of our own brain, navigate around in this virtual copy and find out the origins of our quirks ... Computers will look at a virtual copy of our brains and work out exactly what we need to stop our headaches, quiet the voices talking in our heads and climb out of the valley of depression to a world of colour and beauty.”
Gosh. But isn’t there still that pesky problem of other people and their brains? It’s their quirks that tend to get in the way of my happiness. No problem, we can climb inside each other’s brains.
“The big thing for me is being able to link two brains together for communication.” This is Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics scientist at Reading University. “This could have great implications for teaching. Sometimes, no matter how you explain something, it takes forever for the penny to drop.
It would also help to avoid misunderstandings.”
But, eek, what would it be like?
“Well, just like The Matrix with a plug in the back of the head into the brain, or yes, like a Bluetooth earpiece. It would have to be bidirectional, though, so thoughts could travel from you to someone else and back,” says Warwick, who has already implanted a microchip in his own arm so that he can open doors without needing to use a doorknob.
James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, thinks gene sequencing will be the key to unlock the custard and even stir it. “Disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, unipolar depression, obsessive-compulsive disease, attention deficit disorder and autism will finally have their genetic guts open for all to see.”
Some of the most impenetrable and harrowing mental illnesses known to man will, Watson believes, be understandable and maybe even curable.
“The exact location and biological function of the DNA variants causing many depressive disease and related disorders cannot be revealed too soon,” he says.
Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at Warwick and Oxford, agrees that brain diseases are the really big nasties. “Some leave sufferers horribly aware as they lose the ability to walk, to talk, to swallow. Others corrupt and destroy the mind, leaving an empty body. Some, such as CJD, are very rare, others frighteningly common. About 700,000 people in the UK have dementia.”
We are seeing more of these diseases because death rates from cancer and heart disease are falling so people are living long enough to develop them. Hope for cures is coming from stem-cell research, genetic and molecular analysis.
“There will be a breakthrough. My hunch is that research on motor neurone disease will provide crucial clues and by 2020 we will know why cells die in some, perhaps many, of these diseases. It could be another decade before we see the impact on health, but by 2020, we must be on the way to this ultimate goal of modern medical science,” says Blakemore.
Meanwhile, sex — you knew it was coming — will be even more recreational than it is now. The pill will continue to be the primary contraceptive device, says its inventor, Carl Djerassi, but sterilisation will be catching up.
“At present, people tend to have children and then are sterilised later on in life. In the future, sterilisation will happen earlier on in a person’s life, with gametes, male and female, extracted and stored in a reproductive bank account... Already we know that male sperm can be frozen for decades, but it is far more difficult to freeze women’s eggs. The problem is not yet solved — this is where research should be directed.”
Baroness Deech, a lawyer and bioethicist, agrees about the freezing thing. Women, she says, will have children later. “Late child-bearing will be assisted by advances in reproductive technology, enabling young women to freeze their eggs in their twenties and postpone child-bearing until it is convenient.”
The other breakthrough that Deech would like to see is “a return to stable two-parent families”. “It should be as acceptable to criticise a man who leaves his family as it is to criticise a smoker,” she says. “We have a great deal of law to protect children from potential abusers, but at the moment we say and do nothing when the greatest harm occurs to children, namely the break-up of their families. In 10 years’ time Britain will no longer be at the bottom of international tables of children’s happiness; marriage rates will rise and divorce fall.”
All very nice but, remember, humans may not be around long enough to enjoy all this. The environment is definitely going to get worse.
“I would love to be able to predict that all tropical deforestation would be halted by 2020,” says George McGavin at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, “but as humans can’t agree on the colour of shite, it is unlikely. My prediction is that the world will lose at least another 100m hectares [247m acres] of tropical forest.”
James Lovelock, our greatest and gloomiest deep green, doesn’t think humans can do much about global warming. It’s just the planet saying that we’ve outstayed our welcome. Nobody knows exactly how bad it will be and how quickly it will happen. But the possibilities are clear.
“As everyone is aware, one of the most threatened of places in the world is Bangladesh, which is in danger of flooding as the sea level rises — and the sea level really is rising. And once Bangladesh floods, there is almost nowhere else for people there to go but India, and it’s difficult to see how things like that could take place peacefully. And it’s things like that, I think, which will be drivers for trouble up ahead.”
Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum and professor of climate science at University College London, says we cannot cut emissions fast enough, so we need to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, perhaps using artificial trees that eat it.
“If it can be achieved, it will allow us to exploit the substantial reserves of oil, gas and coal to sustain society through the inevitably long and hard transition to a low-carbon world, without causing dangerous climate change. If ever there were a technical project that humanity should invest in, this is it.”
Craig Venter, the genetic maverick who first sequenced the human genome, may have one solution. He’s working on making bacteria that excrete diesel, leaving the Saudis wondering what to do with all that oil. “The debate on fuels and energy is blown out of proportion. We are very close to solving the energy needs in a way that will make our children enjoy cheaper and more efficient energy than what we see today,” he says.
We may all be in the same warming, flooded gutter but some of us are looking at the stars. Lord Rees, the astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society, is excited by the fact that we have discovered that most stars seem to have planets, and planets mean life. Possibly.
“Efforts to detect a signal from ‘ET’ are being pursued,” he says. “A new telescope in California, privately funded by the ex-Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, will allow much more sensitive searches than hitherto. I’m enthusiastic about these searches. It would fascinate all of us to detect a signal from space that’s clearly artificial.” Then he adds: “But I’m not holding my breath.”
Sir Richard Branson, the Virgin tycoon, is even more enthusiastic about activity in space in 2020. “Space tourism will have taken off,” he says, Nasa will have a “clear plan to get to Mars with a manned mission” and there will be a space station built on the moon.
“Oh, and before I forget, in 2020 I will be an astronaut along with thousands of others,” he adds.
It’s just another decade of future shock. So it goes. Of course, the real shock will be what actually happens, which is never the same as what people say will happen. But, anyway, the shocking Noughties are over, happy new ... good grief, we haven’t even predicted a name for it!
bryanappleyard.com

NY TIMES
The Body Electric
By WILLIAM SALETAN
THE DEPARTMENT OF MAD SCIENTISTS
How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, From the Internet to Artificial Limbs
By Michael Belfiore
295 pp. Smithsonian Books/Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99
Two years ago, in his book “Rocketeers,” Michael Belfiore celebrated the pioneers of the budding private space industry. Now he has returned to explore a frontier closer to home. The heroes of his new book, “The Department of Mad Scientists,” work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, a secretive arm of the United States government. And the revolution they’re leading is a merger of humans with machines.
The revolution is happening before our eyes, but we don’t recognize it, because it’s incremental. It starts with driving. Cruise control transfers regulation of your car’s speed to a computer. In some models, you can upgrade to adaptive cruise control, which monitors the surrounding traffic by radar and adjusts your speed accordingly. If you drift out of your lane, an option called lane keeping assistance gently steers you back. For extra safety, you can get extended brake assistance, which monitors traffic ahead of you, alerts you to collision threats and applies as much braking pressure as necessary.
With each delegation of power, we become more comfortable with computers driving our cars. Soon we’ll want more. An insurance analyst tells Belfiore that aging baby boomers will lead the way, enlisting robotic drivers to help them get around. For younger drivers, the problem is multi­tasking. Why put down your cellphone when you can let go of the wheel instead? Reading, texting, talking and eating in the car aren’t distractions. Driving is the distraction. Let the car do it.
That’s where Darpa comes in. Belfiore traces the agency’s origins and exploits from the 1957 Sputnik launching (which shocked the United States government into technological action) to the 1969 birth of the original Internet, known as Arpanet, to Total Information Awareness, the controversial 2002 project that was supposed to scan telecommunications data for signs of terrorism. His tone is reverential and at times breathless, but he captures the agency’s essential virtues: boldness, creativity, agility, practicality and speed.
The Army needs vehicles that can move cargo without exposing human operators to bombs or enemy fire. To encourage development of such vehicles, Darpa sponsored a 2007 contest in which cars designed by 35 teams navigated a simulated urban war zone. The cars used systems like those already in consumer vehicles: GPS, lane guidance, calibrated braking. But instead of routing their information and advice through human drivers, the cars simply acted on it.
Belfiore recounts several low-impact crashes caused by the limited ability of current software to understand complex traffic situations. But with each successive contest since Darpa’s first robot-car race, the Grand Challenge, in 2004, performance has improved. In some respects, the robot cars already surpass us. Their reaction speed is better. They can see at night, thanks to laser range-­finders. They have no blind spots. And when networked, they can read one another’s intentions.
So maybe we’ll let robots drive our cars. But would you let a robot cut you open? That’s Darpa’s next project. In minimally invasive surgery, doctors insert very thin instruments through keyhole-size incisions. This minimizes pain, blood loss, infection risk and recovery time, but it’s hard. Surgeons have to manipulate their instruments indirectly and watch them on a video monitor. They might as well use a machine. It could execute their commands, give better video feedback and hold the instruments more steadily.
More than 850 hospitals already use such operating machines. Surgeons sit across the room from patients, connected to their instruments by game-style controls and three-dimensional video binoculars. When the machines meet resistance, the surgeons feel it. The goal is to engage the doctors’ senses as fully as if the mechanical eyes and hands were theirs. In fact, they are theirs. The surgeons’ minds map, orchestrate and experience the machine like an infant taking possession of its own body.
But if sensory feedback can extend a surgeon’s body across a room, why stop there? A new version of the machine adds Ethernet, freeing the doctor to inhabit a mechanical body anywhere with a good cable or wireless connection. By digitizing surgical commands, we’ve already created transitional moments in which maneuvers have been described but not executed. Why not extend this transition, playing out the surgery in virtual reality and then editing out any errors? That’s the next step: surgery with a word processor, so to speak, instead of a typewriter.
Unfortunately, the military doesn’t have these luxuries. Soldiers get wounded in faraway places without broadband or doctors, and they need help fast. That’s why Darpa wants mobile machines that can do surgery without human guidance. Such robots are in the works, according to Bel­fiore. Their initial repertory will be limited, but that’s O.K. They just have to keep the wounded alive for the hour it takes to reach a hospital. And with every life they save, they’ll begin to earn our trust.
So maybe you’ll let a robot fix your body. But would you let one join your body? In fact, the coupling is well under way. As troops come home from Iraq and Afghanistan with limbs blown off, they get computerized arms that read the body’s electrical signals. They’re cyborgs.
The next step is mutual adaptation. Amputees have always had to learn how to operate their new limbs. Now the limbs are returning the favor. Their software studies each user’s electrical signals, gradually becoming more accurate at interpreting commands. And though the user’s brain remains in charge, his body has become negotiable. Amputees are getting surgeries to make their motor signals more readable by myoelectric arms. The human is being reconfigured for the machine.
The eventual payoff isn’t just parity with unreconstructed humans. It’s superiority. Some mechanical arms now exceed the reach of human arms. Last year, a disabled sprinter was forbidden to run in Olympic-level track meets on his carbon-fiber legs because they were deemed too fast. And computerized limbs can be networked. Belfiore recalls a recent conversation with an Iraq war amputee about whether his new hand could manipulate a mouse. “Why do I need a mouse?” he asked. “Why can’t I plug my arm right into a USB port?”
For that matter, who needs a USB port? Limb designers have devised injectable sensors that can transmit motor commands to artificial arms through wireless signals. Once you can operate an arm wirelessly, you don’t need it attached to your body. You can control it from anywhere.
But your arm can also be hacked. And that raises an unsettling question: If humans marry machines, who will control the marriage? In its 2007 car contest, Darpa took elaborate measures to stop robots from going rogue. Each vehicle was outfitted with multiple shutdown devices and trailed by a human driver with a kill switch. The penalty for the slightest disobedience was immediate disqualification. But at least one team, according to Belfiore, liked to run simulations with its car’s “software aggression level cranked up into what they jokingly called Rambo mode.”
Imagine your arm in Rambo mode. Something like that has already been reported: Michael Weisskopf, a journalist who lost his right hand in Iraq, was making a turn in rush-hour traffic sometime later when, as Belfiore describes it, Weiss­kopf’s new hand “clenched the wheel of his car in a death grip and refused to let go.” It was just a misunderstanding. But electronic limbs are being programmed to make more and more decisions. After all, it isn’t just your body anymore. It’s theirs, too.
William Saletan writes the Human Nature column for Slate and is the author of “Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.”

From The London Times
Why the music cassette has never died
Central to the lingering affection that people still have for tapes is the fact that you can compile them yourself
Pete Paphides
Richard Goldsmith, of the upscale hi-fi geeksters’ paradise Audio Gold, dismisses the notion of a a dying format. “I’m not sure there’s any such thing,” he says. Cast your eye around his North London shop, and you can see why he might say such a thing. Walking past turntables and transistors that look like exhibits from a design museum, he shows me a cassette player priced at a bracing £450. It’s made by Nakamichi, who prided themselves on divining hitherto unimagined clarity from the humble C90. The best thing about it, though, is the way it changes tape sides. Through the Perspex window, you can see a mechanism, tantamount to a small robot hand, physically turn the tape around to start playing it. Goldsmith says he would be surprised if the machine is still here by the end of the week. They are, apparently, popular with middle-aged reggae fans.
Tempting as it is to herald the return of the cassette, it appears that the format introduced by Philips as a dictation aid in 1963 never quite went away. This week Island Records announced that sales of the 4,000 cassettes they decided to produce of Words for You had exceeded all expectations. HMV and the leading supermarkets have long since stopped selling tapes, but the album, on which celebrities such Joanna Lumley and Martin Shaw read poetry while classical music trills prettily along in the background, still managed to sell out on Amazon. By contrast, only 746 of the 200,000 copies of Words for You sold have been downloads. Thousands more cassettes are being manufactured in time for Christmas. “What’s exciting,” says an Island spokesman, Ian Brown, “is that we don’t know how big the market is because no one realised there was a demand.”
You can’t help feeling that this has been a howling great oversight. Having worked out that old people are one of the few age groups that will pay for music, Decca threw its weight behind We’ll Meet Again: The Very Best of Vera Lynn and saw their efforts repaid with a No 1 record. How many more might they have sold if they had also put it out on tape? It’s tempting to smile indulgently at your silver-haired elders as they persist with their old Val Doonican cassettes. It may just be, however, that older people are privy to specialised knowledge that comes only with the passing of the decades. There are some environments in which the tape wins over all other formats.
As the iconically hip, left-of-leftfield guitarist of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore may be an unlikely bedfellow for the sort of septuagenarians who think Mpegs are what you hang your Mcoats on. But even during the CD’s early supremacy, Moore’s devotion to the cassette never wavered. Four years ago he published Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, a love letter to what he calls “the most personal of all formats”. Occasionally he produces limited-edition cassette runs of releases on his Ecstatic Peace label. “The cassette offers one of the great listening experiences,” he says. “That friction of the tape against the head is unbeatable. Then you’ve got the aesthetic difference. You find a mixtape that someone has made for you, and there is no mistaking the amount of care and affection that has gone into it.”
By any criteria, Moore’s obsession is extreme. He has thousands of meticulously filed CDs released on cottage-industry imprints with such names as Chocolate Monk and Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers — labels that equate the cassettes’ affordability and apparent obsolescence with their underground credentials. He is not alone. In Camden Market, the must-have accessory of 2009 was the bag designed to look like a cassette.
It’s all very well, but does this sort of loyalty have its basis in anything other than nostalgia? Not if a furious essay that appeared two weeks ago on the American music site Popmatters is anything to go by. Despite left-field releases by the likes of Dirty Projectors and Crystal Castles that sold out their cassette runs, Calum Marsh, author of Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture, insists that “at best, the cassette revival is merely a vacuous fad of no genuine value . . . at worst, a confused, cultural misstep more dangerous than most would care to admit”.
Might it not be that tapes offer something that subsequent technologies have failed to provide? Moore maintains that the CD is a vulnerable format that is designed to be re-bought. Anyone who has tried to keep CDs in a car — you might as well attack them with a cheese knife — must surely concur. On CDs the information is exposed. On cassettes it is protected by a plastic shell. The price of cassettes at my local charity shop — a can’t-give-them-away 20p a throw — suggests that, in the neophilia of the 21st century, these are considerations we may have simply forgotten about.
Since I started relieving Oxfam of their surplus, I have filled my car with albums by the Supremes, Van Morrison, James Brown and Talk Talk. Surprisingly, the cassette era even extends to relatively recent gems such as Radiohead’s Kid A. Better still, the foetal bass and padded cell production of that album’s highlights — Everything in its Right Place, Morning Bell — is perfectly suited to the warm, cocooned ambience of magnetic tape.
Of course, central to the lingering affection that people have for tapes is the fact that you could compile them yourself. “Home taping is killing music,” warned the skull and crossbones on the back of several major label releases in the early 1980s. I still have the first cassette of songs I ever recorded from the radio. Thirty years after I removed it from its case, my red ferric BASF C90 features excerpts from that Sunday night staple Star Choice, in which a celebrity of the day got to be DJ for a couple of hours. Separated only by inter-song banter from the Birmingham City star striker Trevor Francis are such hits as Chicago’s If You Leave Me and ELO’s Living Thing.
Victoria Hesketh, of Little Boots fame, is 16 years younger than me, but even she remembers sourcing her music by a similar means. “Oh, absolutely. You would sit by the tape recorder with your finger poised on the pause button because you’d want to catch it before the DJ started talking.” Take away the technologies of the era and such behaviour was no different from that of ten-year-olds illegally downloading the latest N-Dubz and Chipmunk hits to their computers. So why did it somehow not feel as wrong?
Moore thinks that the moral differential lies in the aesthetic merits of the two formats: “File sharing is utterly unsexy,” he says. “It takes no time at all to knock up a playlist from your iTunes folder and give it to someone.”
He surely has a point, and one that’s reflected in the monetary decline in the value of music. Everything to do with consuming music has become easier. In the past when you compiled a tape for someone, the time spent making it was central to its perceived value. You would also have a fairly good idea that each track followed on smoothly from the last one because the compilation would have been made in real time.
Moore compares DIY compilations to scrimshaws — pieces of whalebone on which voyaging sailors would make ornate carvings. “Sometimes I go to yard sales to buy cassettes compiled by people who are complete strangers to me. You see something that has ‘Marty’s Mix’ scrawled on it in ballpoint pen. You take it home and you don’t know if it’s going to be US post-punk hardcore or Kenny Rogers. Whatever it is, though, I know I’m getting a slice of someone’s life. Cassettes are the only format that can give you that.”

A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic

By MANOHLA DARGIS NY TIMES
With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life — our moviegoing life included — as we know it. Several decades in the dreaming and more than four years in the actual making, the movie is a song to the natural world that was largely produced with software, an Emersonian exploration of the invisible world of the spirit filled with Cameronian rock ’em, sock ’em pulpy action. Created to conquer hearts, minds, history books and box-office records, the movie — one of the most expensive in history, the jungle drums thump — is glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
The story behind the story, including a production budget estimated to top $230 million, and Mr. Cameron’s future-shock ambitions for the medium have already begun to settle into myth (a process partly driven by the publicity, certainly). Every filmmaker is something of a visionary, just by virtue of the medium. But Mr. Cameron, who directed the megamelodrama “Titanic” and, more notably, several of the most influential science-fiction films of the past few decades (“The Terminator,” “Aliens” and “The Abyss”), is a filmmaker whose ambitions transcend a single movie or mere stories to embrace cinema as an art, as a social experience and a shamanistic ritual, one still capable of producing the big WOW.
The scale of his new movie, which brings you into a meticulous and brilliantly colored alien world for a fast 2 hours 46 minutes, factors into that wow. Its scope is evident in an early scene on a spaceship (the year is 2154), where the passengers, including a paraplegic ex-Marine, Jake (Sam Worthington, a gruffly sensitive heartthrob), are being roused from a yearslong sleep before landing on a distant inhabited moon, Pandora. Jake is woken by an attendant floating in zero gravity, one of many such aides. As Jake himself glides through the bright cavernous space, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore, as someone soon quips (a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Cameron’s favorite film). You also know you’re not in the gloom of “The Matrix.”
Though it’s easy to pigeonhole Mr. Cameron as a gear head who’s more interested in cool tools (which here include 3-D), he is, with “Avatar,” also making a credible attempt to create a paradigm shift in science-fiction cinema. Since it was first released in 1999, “The Matrix,” which owes a large debt to Mr. Cameron’s own science-fiction films as well as the literary subgenre of cyberpunk, has hung heavily over both SF and action filmmaking. Most films that crib from “The Matrix” tend to borrow only its slo-mo death waltzes and leather fetishism, keeping its nihilism while ditching the intellectual inquiries. Although “Avatar” delivers a late kick to the gut that might be seen as nihilistic (and how!), it is strangely utopian.
It doesn’t take Jake long to feel the good vibes. Like Neo, the savior-hero of the “Matrix” series played by Keanu Reeves, Jake is himself an avatar because he’s both a special being and an embodiment of an idea, namely that of the hero’s journey. What initially makes Jake unusual is that he has been tapped to inhabit a part-alien, part-human body that he controls, like a puppeteer, from its head to its prehensile tail. Like the rest of the human visitors who’ve made camp on Pandora, he has signed on with a corporation that’s intent on extracting a valuable if mysterious substance from the moon called unobtainium, a great whatsit that is an emblem of humanity’s greed and folly. With his avatar, Jake will look just like one of the natives, the Na’vi, a new identity that gives the movie its plot turns and politics.
The first part of Jake’s voyage — for this is, above all, a boy’s rocking adventure, if one populated by the usual tough Cameron chicks — takes him from a wheelchair into a 10-foot, blue-skinned Na’vi body. At once familiar and pleasingly exotic, the humanoid Na’vi come with supermodel dimensions (slender hips, a miniature-apple rear); long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and twitchy ears of a cat. (The gently curved stripes that line their blue skin, the color of twilight, bring to mind the markings on mackerel tabby cats.) For Jake his avatar, which he hooks into through sensors while lying in a remote pod in a semiconscious state, is at first a giddy novelty and then a means to liberation.
Plugging into the avatar gives Jake an instant high, allowing him to run, leap and sift dirt through his toes, and freeing him from the constraints of his body. Although physically emancipated, he remains bound, contractually and existentially, to the base camp, where he works for the corporation’s top scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver, amused and amusing), even while taking orders from its head of security, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), a military man turned warrior for hire. A cartoon of masculinity, Quaritch strides around barking orders like some intransigent representation of American military might (or a bossy movie director). It’s a favorite Cameron type, and Mr. Lang, who until this year had long been grievously underemployed, tears into the role like a starved man gorging on steak.
Mr. Cameron lays out the fundamentals of the narrative efficiently, grabbing you at once with one eye-popping detail after another and on occasion almost losing you with some of the comically broad dialogue. He’s a masterly storyteller if a rather less nimble prose writer. (He has sole script credit: this is personal filmmaking on an industrial scale.) Some of the clunkier lines (“Yeah, who’s bad,” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature he encounters) seem to have been written to placate those members of the Michael Bay demographic who might find themselves squirming at the story’s touchier, feelier elements, its ardent environmentalism and sincere love story, all of which kick in once Jake meets Neytiri, a female Na’vi (Zoë Saldana, seen only in slinky Na’vi form).
Mr. Cameron has said that he started thinking about the alien universe that became Pandora and its galactic environs in “Avatar” back in the 1970s. He wrote a treatment in 1996, but the technologies he needed to turn his ideas into images didn’t exist until recently. New digital technologies gave him the necessary tools, including performance capture, which translates an actor’s physical movements into a computer-generated image (CGI). Until now, by far the most plausible character created in this manner has been slithery Gollum from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” cycle. The exotic creatures in “Avatar,” which include an astonishment of undulating, flying, twitching and galloping organisms, don’t just crawl through the underbrush; they thunder and shriek, yip and hiss, pointy teeth gleaming.
The most important of these are the Na’vi, and while their movements can bring to mind old-fashioned stop-motion animation, their faces are a triumph of tech innovation, with tremors and twitches that make them immediately appealing and empathetic. By the time Neytiri ushers Jake into her world of wonders — a lush dreamscape filled with kaleidoscopic and bioluminescent flora and fauna, with pink jellyfishlike creatures that hang in the air and pleated orange flowers that snap shut like parasols — you are deep in the Na’vi-land. It’s a world that looks as if it had been created by someone who’s watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau television or, like Mr. Cameron, done a lot of diving. It’s also familiar because, like John Smith in “The New World,” Terrence Malick’s retelling of the Pocahontas story, Jake has discovered Eden.
An Eden in three dimensions, that is. In keeping with his maximalist tendencies, Mr. Cameron has shot “Avatar” in 3-D (because many theaters are not equipped to show 3-D, the movie will also be shown in the usual 2), an experiment that serves his material beautifully. This isn’t the 3-D of the 1950s or even contemporary films, those flicks that try to give you a virtual poke in the eye with flying spears. Rather Mr. Cameron uses 3-D to amplify the immersive experience of spectacle cinema. Instead of bringing you into the movie with the customary tricks, with a widescreen or even Imax image filled with sweeping landscapes and big action, he uses 3-D seemingly to close the space between the audience and the screen. He brings the movie to you.
After a few minutes the novelty of people and objects hovering above the row in front of you wears off, and you tend not to notice the 3-D, which speaks to the subtlety of its use and potential future applications. Mr. Cameron might like to play with high-tech gadgets, but he’s an old-fashioned filmmaker at heart, and he wants us to get as lost in his fictional paradise as Jake eventually does. On the face of it there might seem something absurd about a movie that asks you to thrill to a natural world made almost entirely out of zeroes and ones (and that feeds you an anticorporate line in a corporately financed entertainment). But one of the pleasures of the movies is that they transport us, as Neytiri does with Jake, into imaginary realms, into Eden and over the rainbow to Oz.
If the story of a paradise found and potentially lost feels resonant, it’s because “Avatar” is as much about our Earth as the universe that Mr. Cameron has invented. But the movie’s truer meaning is in the audacity of its filmmaking.
Few films return us to the lost world of our first cinematic experiences, to that magical moment when movies really were bigger than life (instead of iPhone size), if only because we were children. Movies rarely carry us away, few even try. They entertain and instruct and sometimes enlighten. Some attempt to overwhelm us, but their efforts are usually a matter of volume. What’s often missing is awe, something Mr. Cameron has, after an absence from Hollywood, returned to the screen with a vengeance. He hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder.
AVATAR
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by James Cameron;

'Road Out of Hell' a chilling true-crime tale
By Mae Anderson Associated Press
The Road Out of Hell: Sanford Clark and the True Story of the Wineville MurdersBy Anthony Flacco, with Jerry Clark.Union Square Press. 304 pp. $24.95.
This is a darkly disturbing true account of a 13-year-old boy, Sanford Clark, sent to live with his uncle on an isolated chicken farm in California in 1926.
Clark is quickly subjected to all manner of abuse by his uncle, Gordon Stewart Northcott, a psychopath and sadist who lures young boys to the farm to sexually assault, torture and kill them, to Clark's slowly dawning horror.
Northcott forces Clark to help with his grisly deeds, rendering the boy so guilty and terrified that even when he escapes once, he's afraid of how he might be received and slinks back to the farm.
Flacco depicts Clark's life with the aid of court transcripts, newspaper articles and interviews with Clark's son, yet he chooses to tell the story mostly from Clark's perspective.
There are many scenes between the uncle and Clark only, so it's impossible to know how much is verbatim from accounts and how much is influenced by Flacco, a screenwriter and author of historical novels and true-crime books. Still, the effect is visceral and haunting, simply by suggesting the exchanges that might have occurred between Northcott and Clark.
One of the boys reported missing and killed by Northcott, Walter Collins, became part of a notorious case involving the LAPD (depicted in the movie The Changeling), when police tried to send a boy who was not Walter home with his mother.
However, that case is barely mentioned in the book because Flacco keeps the narrative tightly focused on Clark and what happened on the farm. That approach sacrifices some background and perspective but creates an intensely unsettling, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. Clark's guilt and shame at what he is forced to do and bear is palpable, and when he finally manages to escape from Northcott after two years, with the help of his sister Jessie, he not surprisingly has difficulty getting past what he has gone through.
Flacco, with the help of Clark's son Jerry, paints a vivid portrait in the latter part of the book of a man who went on to marry, raise two sons and serve in World War II.
It is ostensibly a tale of redemption, but the book also makes it clear how disturbed Clark was for the rest of his life. It was a time when counseling and therapy weren't common, so Clark simply bore the pain, rarely discussing his past and suffering from flashbacks and periods of deep depression for the rest of his life.
The Road Out of Hell is a chilling look at a chapter in America's criminal annals.

NYPD tracks gun in deadly Times Square shooting
By COLLEEN LONG (AP)
NEW YORK — Authorities on Friday said a machine pistol used by a street hustler shot dead in a Times Square gunfight was purchased at a Virginia gun shop whose business card was found in the aspiring rapper's pocket, and they were looking for the woman who bought the gun.
Raymond Martinez, who wrote songs about staring down cops in Times Square and hawked CDs to tourists, was carrying a pocketful of business cards from Virginia gun dealers and a stolen Mac-10 pistol when he was killed by a plainclothes officer near the Marriott Marquis hotel. The handgun, which held 30 rounds, jammed after Martinez got off three shots.
Jordan Kelsey-Stewart, 25, bought the weapon from Dale's Guns in Powhatan, Va., chief NYPD police spokesman Paul Browne said. Officials with Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are trying to find her and are investigating whether she had any connection with Martinez; a telephone listing for her could not immediately be found on Friday.
Police said Kelsey-Stewart reported the gun stolen from her car Oct. 28 in Richmond, Va. It was unclear how Martinez obtained it, and there was some evidence he owned it for only a brief period of time — weeks at most and perhaps just days.
Investigators also were trying to determine whether Martinez had other weapons. They said they found a .22-caliber handgun during a police search of Martinez's home on Friday.
"We're actively investigating whether he was involved in purchasing firearms," Browne said.
Dale Blankenship, who owns Dale's Guns, said he provided the information about who bought the gun to the ATF earlier Friday. He said Kelsey-Stewart was from the Richmond area, had all the proper identification and passed a background check when she purchased the weapon.
Blankenship said she bought the gun by herself. He didn't know what happened to the gun after he sold it.
"I have no idea," he told The Associated Press. "I really don't know what happened. I don't know how the gun was stolen."
Martinez, 25, went by the rap name "Ready" and regularly sold CDs for his group, Square Free, in Times Square. He was part of a freelance collection of hawkers who sell self-produced wares on the street.
Police said Martinez ran a scam in which he would autograph a CD or put a passerby's name on it, and then demand payment of $10. He had been arrested June 19 at 1515 Broadway, the exact same location where Thursday's confrontation started, for not having a tax stamp, which allows hawkers to sell their self-produced wares.
Vendors selling their own work are protected by the First Amendment and fall outside the stricter regulation of vendors selling retail goods.
The sheer number of vendors in Times Square and their aggressiveness lead to frequent confrontations with authorities trying to catch counterfeiters and protect tourists from scams.
Martinez and his brother are well known to regular Times Square denizens and videos of them rapping and getting hassled by police are posted on YouTube. In one shaky video, Martinez shouts, "They ain't taking me nowhere!" and "I'm ready to lay some down!" as officers, their hands in their pockets, escort him from the area. His lyrics talk of hawking CDs and staring down cops.
Sgt. Christopher Newsom usually works in uniform on a task force that tracks aggressive peddling. He was in plainclothes when he stopped Martinez on Thursday and asked him for his tax stamp, setting off the chase and shootout.
Josiah Deandrea, who was distributing fliers Friday to a comedy act a block from the shooting scene, said he had seen Martinez in the area in the past.
"Nobody had any idea he had a gun," Deandrea said.
Daniel O'Phalen, 24, who passes out fliers in Times Square for the musical "White Christmas," said Martinez was part of a regular crew of CD salesmen. Sometimes, he said, the group would order him off a corner, saying he was on their territory.
"They're pushy. They're not nice guys," he said.
Still, it's rare that police encounters with peddlers escalate to gunfire.
"These are usually quality-of-life violations, and they typically do not escalate, they don't involve violators being armed," Browne said.
If Martinez had recently gone looking for a gun, it wouldn't have been unusual for him to look out of state.
Because buying a firearm is so difficult in New York, people barred from owning pistols here often travel south to shop at gun shows where there are no required background checks for people buying secondhand weapons. Martinez didn't have a license to own a firearm.
There is also a steady supply of guns purchased at southern gun shops and smuggled north.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been a fierce critic of gun stores with a record of selling weapons that later wound up in the hands of criminals, suing several of them in recent years for reckless conduct and driving several out of business.
There are "too many guns on the streets," the mayor said Friday. "This is one of the great public health threats. And our police officers are clearly in danger."
The machine pistol like the type used Thursday are rare in the city: only 26 have been recovered so far this year, compared with 5,427 other guns. In 2008, there were 46 recovered, and 5,959 other guns.
Associated Press writers Cristian Salazar, David B. Caruso, Adam Goldman, Ula Ilnytzky and Sara Kugler in New York and Dena Potter in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The Sunday London Times
Colton Harris-Moore, the barefoot boy bandit, outfoxes sheriffs
In the forests and remote islands around Seattle, police are setting traps for a barefoot teenage outlaw who has eluded them for nearly two years.
Police say 18-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, whose escapades are turning him into a folk legend, is a one-man crime wave, responsible for 50 burglaries as well as stealing light aircraft, which he taught himself to fly from video games, and several speedboats.
He lives in the woods, shuns shoes and catches his own food. His only technological aid is a pair of thermal-imaging goggles to hunt at night and his weakness is pizzas, which he asks to be delivered at the edge of the woods.
For some Harris-Moore is a modern Butch Cassidy: a surprisingly agile 6ft 5in cat burglar who thanks his victims by leaving them notes and cheeky photographs of himself, which have sold for £300 on eBay.
Thousands subscribe to his Facebook page and his image appears on T-shirts with the logo “Fly, Colton, Fly!”. Local rock groups have penned songs about him.
Hollywood producers have lodged lucrative film deals with his family and offered to pay for lawyers if he gives himself up.
Raised in a caravan on Camano Island, an isolated community in the Puget Sound, Harris-Moore started living wild at the age of seven. He would break into holiday homes, steal blankets and food and vanish into the woods for days.
In April 2008, after being sent to a juvenile detention centre, he complained that the beds were too short for his lanky frame and went on the run.
Police believe he fled to Canada and then, a few weeks ago, came back across the border to Idaho where he stole a Cessna 182 and flew to Seattle. He crash-landed in a forest clearing and walked away with cuts and bruises.
Since then he has been accused of stealing other planes for hops around the islands in the Puget Sound, including another Cessna belonging to a disc jockey who vented his frustration on radio, saying: “He still doesn’t know how to land a plane in one piece.”
He evaded a police pursuit by crashing a Mercedes-Benz into a roadside gas storage tank, using the explosion as a diversion to escape back into the woods where, he says, he feels like a Native American.
This was followed by the largest manhunt in recent memory. Three dozen sheriffs, aided by specialist armed units and an FBI helicopter, fanned out across Camano Island but failed to capture him. “We saw him, we think, but it’s like he disappeared in front of our eyes,” said one sheriff.
His luck may be about to run out. During a recent sweep a rifle shot was fired at police, raising his status to “armed and dangerous”. His mother, Pamela Kohler, now fears that even if he did not fire the shot he will be held responsible.
Kohler said she was proud her son had stolen the aircraft because he had never had a flying lesson in his life. “I was going to send him to flight school, but I guess I don’t have to,” she said. “I’d tell him the next time he took a plane: wear a parachute and practise your landing.
“If he shot that gun, it was really stupid. I don’t expect him to come out of the woods alive.”

From The London Times
How Dubai's burst bubble has left behind the last days of Rome
Hugh Tomlinson and James McLean in Dubai
The engine of the black Corvette revved to a gasket-popping roar. Its driver leant out of his window. He was dressed in traditional Arab robes but wore a rubber wizard’s mask. He held an aerosol aloft and directed a jet of party foam into the air. Four-wheel drives plastered in pictures of Dubai’s Royal Family roared their engines back in approval. The cacophony was deafening.
On the opposite carriageway smoke billowed from the spinning back wheels of a new Land Cruiser as the driver pressed the brakes and floored the accelerator. This was the favourite way for many of the fervently patriotic and car crazy Emiratis to mark National Day in Dubai this week, the 38th anniversary of the founding of the United Arab Emirates, and one of the biggest celebrations of the year.
A mile away at the new Marina Yacht Club, Western expats were also working their way into a party mood. Deferential Filipino staff served a foamy lobster broth as an amuse bouche between courses. Beer and cocktails loosened tongues and a knot of dancers formed in front of the band. Tens of millions of pounds worth of powerboats bobbed at their moorings beneath the revelry on the terrace. Behind the boats a dozen skyscrapers framed the view, a few of the lights in their thousands of flats were on. “It’s so beautiful here,” said a pretty young Anglo-Indian woman clutching a large glass of chilled white wine and taking in the scene.
Welcome to the modern equivalent of the last days of Rome. The failure of Dubai World, one of the Emirate’s flagship companies, to honour a debt due last month has rocked this city state to its foundations. By any conventional logic Dubai is now a busted flush.
Superficially there has been no change to life here in the days since the failure to pay up triggered financial carnage but nowhere does superficial as convincingly as Dubai.
The Emirate has been struggling for many months, and if you scratch the surface the pain in this new and gaudy metropolis is palpable. Ross, who asked not to be identified, is one of countless expatriates who have been caught out by the collapse in Dubai’s once-booming property market.
Like many he bought a flat off-plan in what was a red-hot property market. Today he is trapped, his passport confiscated until he repays bank loans he used to invest in a property that may never exist. If his work dries up before he can clear his debts he will go to jail.
We met at a coffee shop in Dubai’s vast Mall of the Emirates. Around us were some of Britain’s most familiar high street names — Next, Debenhams, Virgin, Costa Coffee and Harvey Nichols. For now trade is still brisk. “I’m struggling to know what to do really,” he said.
Borrowing from family to supplement his savings, Ross, in his early thirties, moved with his family to Dubai from South London in late 2006, put down a £60,000 deposit and arranged a £30,000 loan to help to cover the initial instalments on a £350,000 two-bedroom apartment in the Dubai Sports City development.
“The plan was to let the place out to cover the loan and mortgage but it was scheduled for completion by the end of 2008 and they haven’t finished the ground floor yet,” he said. Without the apartment to boost the family’s income, the high cost of living forced them back to Britain. The debts became overwhelming in a city where non-payment is a criminal offence. Ross returned for some contract work but he was held on arrival at the airport by the police.
The Sports City developer, Middle East Development, told him that work on his property will restart before the end of the year but will take at least 18 months to complete without any further delays. Even if it were to meet this schedule it will be three years late.
Ross’s options are stark. He must keep working to pay off the bank, borrow from his family, leave Dubai illegally and lose the apartment or go to jail. “The worst-case scenario is that I have to lean on friends or family to get the money together. It’s that or jail — it’s a no-brainer really.” For now he is looking no further than Christmas, trying to decide whether to fly his wife and three children out to Dubai for the holiday.
He is far from alone. The handful of cars dumped by expatriates at the airport each week bear testament to that, and talk of a speculative property market gone sour.
The scale of overbuilding in Dubai, paid for by a phenomenal debt binge facilitated by British and international banks, is hard to conceive until you see it. The world’s tallest building, the 2,600ft Burj Tower, is due to open next month. Its spectral presence looms over the city, its pointed top a needle to the bubble.
On the road tunnel into Palm Jumeirah, the famous tree-shaped property development reclaimed from the sea, is a mural. It depicts Palm Jumeirah itself, the bigger Palm Jebel Ali and the gargantuan Palm Deira, as well as the other massive sea reclamation development The World. All are the responsibility of Dubai World’s real estate arm, Nakheel. Only one, Palm Jumeirah, on which houses were given to British footballers to help to lure ordinary investors, is all but complete.
A year ago Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, began a fireworks display here so vast that it could be seen from space. This week one resident said that she had just knocked the annual rent on her Palm villa down by two thirds to a little more than £1,000 a month.
The other Palm projects and The World, despite the computer-generated images in the tourist brochures and websites showing green trees and completed houses, are a collection of imported rock and dredged sand on which building work has stopped.
Even more fanciful plans — for a massive seawater canal to be dug around the city to enable waterside properties in the desert hinterland, and another vast offshore island complex called The Universe, are no longer mentioned.
Work on dozens of new skyscrapers continues but building has slowed to a crawl on others. More than 40 per cent of newly built offices are already untenanted, and the available space is expected to double by 2011.
Thousands of the migrant labourers who were bussed in from their desert camps to build Dubai have left as the construction boom faltered. The investment bank UBS thinks that the population of Dubai is shrinking.
The borrowed money has not just gone on property. A state-of-the-art metro train system, operated by Serco, opened amid much fanfare in September at a cost of $7.6 billion. At 9.30am on a Thursday the station at Dubai airport’s cavernous Terminal 3 is empty. The train into the city, capable of carrying more than 640 people, has 21 on board.
Western expats who have been here for a decade or more are still well ahead on their investments even if, as some forecasts predict, house prices dip by 70 per cent from their peaks.

music box SLATE
Vanishing Act
In search of Eva Tanguay, the first rock star.

By Jody RosenTo begin, a few facts. The singer, actress, and vaudeville star Eva Tanguay was born in 1878 in Marbleton, a small town in Quebec, Canada; grew up in Holyoke, Mass.; and died on Jan. 11, 1947, in Los Angeles, where she lived her last years in a style that some suggest was the model for Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard—in a Hollywood bungalow festooned with yellowing newspaper clippings and memorabilia from her heyday.
Tanguay made just one recording, a version of her anthem, "I Don't Care," released on a 78 rpm disc in 1922 by the Los Angeles label Nordskog. By rights, this song should be as familiar as "Over the Rainbow" or "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Rapper's Delight." And here we arrive at the crucial fact: For roughly two decades, from 1904 until the early 1920s, Eva Tanguay was the biggest rock star in the United States.
To call Tanguay a "rock star" is anachronistic but appropriate. She was not just the pre-eminent song-and-dance woman of the vaudeville era. (One of her many nicknames was "The Girl Who Made Vaudeville Famous.") She was the first American popular musician to achieve mass-media celebrity, with a cadre of publicists trumpeting her on- and offstage successes and outrages, and an oeuvre best summed up by the slogan that appeared frequently on theatrical marquees: "Eva Tanguay, performing songs about herself." She was the first singer to mount nationwide solo headlining tours, drawing record-breaking crowds and shattering box-office tallies from Broadway to Butte. Newspaper accounts describe scenes of fan frenzy that foreshadowed Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theatre and Beatlemania. At the height of her stardom, Tanguay commanded an unheard of salary, $3,500 per week, out-earning the likes of Al Jolson, Harry Houdini, and Enrico Caruso.
If you read the press and popular literature of the first quarter of the 20th century, Tanguay is inescapable. Edward Bernays, the celebrated "father of public relations," called Tanguay "our first symbol of emergence from the Victorian age." The journalist and playwright George Ade dubbed Theodore Roosevelt "the Eva Tanguay of politics." One of her hits was titled "They'll Remember Me a Hundred Years From Now." To Tanguay's contemporaries, it must have seemed less like a boast than a foregone conclusion.A century later, though, Tanguay is forgotten—vanished from the pages of pop music history. No one has written an Eva Tanguay biography, although biographies exist for many of her vaudeville contemporaries, all of them lesser stars. Tanguay herself claimed at various points to be working on her memoirs—in 1910 she told a reporter that she was writing an autobiography entitled A Hundred Loves—but she left behind no manuscript. A clunky Hollywood biopic, The I Don't Care Girl (1953), erased more than it commemorated, presenting an unrecognizably toned-down version of Tanguay's radical stage act and ignoring the facts of her raucous love life, including her rumored romance with black vaudeville star George Walker. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music has a 288-word Tanguay entry, and she gets a passing mention in Russell and David Sanjeks' American Popular Music and Its Business. But in the standard pop music histories, Tanguay's name does not appear.
Just about the only person to find a place in the canon for Tanguay is Ralph Bakshi, who included "I Don't Care" in his 1981 animated film American Pop, alongside the likes of "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Pretty Vacant." It took the director of Fritz the Cat and other X-rated cartoons to draw a line across the decades connecting Eva Tanguay and Johnny Rotten. Indeed, the self-proclaimed "I Don't Care Girl" and the self-proclaimed antichrist have quite a bit in common—the main difference being that Tanguay was considerably more punk rock.
Little is known about Tanguay's childhood. Her family moved from Canada to Massachusetts in the 1880s, and by the age of eight, Eva was playing child leads in summer-stock theater companies. She arrived in New York at age 19 and found work on the variety stage. That same year, her name surfaced in the newspapers: She was appearing in a production called Hoodoo, and when a fellow chorus girl accused her of hot-dogging onstage, Tanguay turned and choked her cast mate until the girl's face turned blue and she passed out. It was Tanguay's first taste of notoriety and her first big backstage altercation. There would be more of both in her future.
Tanguay's breakthrough came in 1904, in the musical comedy The Sambo Girl. Playing the lead "brownface" role, she stole the show with a new song, a lurching mid-tempo ballad by songwriters Jean Lennox and Harry O. Sutton. The tune was not written expressly for Tanguay, but it may as well have been. For the rest of her career, she merely enlarged on the character-sketch in "I Don't Care": a madcap woman on the verge, trampling the conventions of demure femininity, polite society, and musical theater. "They say I'm crazy and got no sense/ But I don't care," Tanguay sang. "They may or may not mean offense/ I care less."
The song was broadly comic but shocking nonetheless in 1904, when Victorian notions of female propriety prevailed. Blasting out "I Don't Care," Tanguay gave voice to an anarchic feminism that claimed the old stigma of female "hysteria" as a badge of honor—the Victorian neurasthenic recast as a liberated, libidinous 20th-century wild-woman:
I don't care, I don't careWhat they may think of meI'm happy go luckyMen say that I'm pluckyI'm happy and carefreeI don't care, I don't careIf I should get the mean and stony stareAnd no one can faze meBy calling me crazy'Cause I don't care
The effect was heightened by Tanguay's outré appearance and performance style. She had a pudgy face and reddish-blond hair that stretched upward in a snarled pile. (She sometimes dumped bottles of champagne over her head onstage.) She was of average height and a bit lumpy, but athletic; she squeezed herself into gaudy costumes that flaunted her buxom figure and powerfully muscled legs. She delivered her songs while executing dervishlike dances, complete with limb-flailing, leg kicks, breast-shaking, and violent tosses of the head; often, she seemed to be simulating orgasm. Tanguay suffered severe cramps from her performances—backstage, she instructed prop directors to unknot her calves by beating them with barrel staves. She told reporters that her goal was "to move so fast and whirl so madly that no one would be able to see my bare legs."
Then there was Tanguay's voice. She sang in a slurred screech punctuated by yaps and cackles, ricocheting seemingly at random between her upper and lower registers. Beneath the hiss of the 87-year-old "I Don't Care" recording, you can hear the maniac's grin that Tanguay wore when she sang.
insertAudioPlayer("http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/media.slate.com/media/slate/Podcasts/091125_MB_Tanguay.mp3","true")
"I Don't Care" was a sensation. Tanguay soon moved onto her first headlining stint, at Hammerstein's Victoria, a theater famous for featuring freak-show performers—a good fit for the singer's musical P.T. Barnum routine. She was a star now. Her act caught the imagination of fans from across the class spectrum and drew bombastic praise from critics, for whom she seemed to sum up the exuberance and vulgarity of the young century. (Her nicknames told the story: "The Evangelist of Joy," "The Electric Hoyden," "The Queen of Perpetual Motion," "The Modern Mystery," "Miss Tabasco.") Critics marveled at the brazenness of songs like "Go As Far As You Like, Kid" (1909) and "I Want Someone To Go Wild With Me" (1912). They raved about her "cyclonic" energy, her "animalistic" abandon, and her hair, which seemed "so charged with electric vigor that no amount of combing or brushing could alter its assertive unruliness." (One of her hits, "Tanguay Tangle," winked at the disorderly coiffure.) To Aleister Crowley, Tanguay was "exactly and scientifically … the Soul of America at its most desperate eagle-flight." Tanguay, Crowley wrote in 1912,
is like the hashish dream of a hermit who is possessed of the devil. She cannot sing, as others sing; or dance, as others dance. She simply keeps on vibrating, both limbs and vocal chords without rhythm, tone, melody, or purpose. … I feel as if I were poisoned by strychnine, so far as my body goes; I jerk, I writhe, I twist, I find no ease. … She is perpetual irritation without possibility of satisfaction, an Avatar of sex-insomnia. Solitude of the Soul, the Worm that dieth not; ah, me! She is the Vulture of Prometheus, and she is the Music of Mitylene. … I could kill myself at this moment for the wild love of her.
The Vulture of Prometheus may have been pushing it—but Crowley was right about the singer's distinctive Americanness. In Tanguay, old-fashioned Yankee individualism joined hands with the nascent 20th-century religion of showbiz and star power. "Personality, personality," she sang in one of her signature numbers, "That's the thing that always makes a hit/ Your nationality or your rationality/ Doesn't help or hinder you one bit."
With the help of her publicists, Tanguay writ her personality large, and in boldface. She concocted publicity stunts ("Eva Tanguay, the Only Actress in the World Who Ever Made a Balloon Ascension"); threatened to retire before making splashy "comebacks"; contrived tell-all confessional interviews for magazines; and struck an ironic attitude toward these machinations, confessing her lust for attention in songs like "I'd Like To Be an Animal in the Zoo" (1911). Like Madonna a century later, Tanguay was businesswoman-provocateur—an indefatigable plotter of new looks and fresh succès de scandales. A 1910 editorial cartoon in the New York Review, titled "A Tanguay Resting," showed the star scribbling with a giant pencil, surrounded by a growing mountain of notes for new schemes: "Bright Thoughts," "Original Ideas," "New Song," "New Act," "Manuscripts," "Offer," "Contract."
She was a clothes horse, famous for her lavish wardrobe budget, whose details she leaked to the press. Her performances were fashion shows as much as concerts; in the course of a 30-minute vaudeville appearance, she would change outfits 10 times. The costumes, which Tanaguy claimed to have designed herself, were avant-garde and architectural: hats that rose several feet above her head, constructed from ribbons, bells, leaves, ostrich plumes; gowns made of feathers, beads, dollar bills, seashells, coral. A particular cause célèbre was Tanguay's "$40 dress"—a garment fashioned from 4,000 pennies. (It weighed 45 pounds.) When "Salome-mania" swept vaudeville in 1908, Tanguay made sure that her Dance of the Seven Veils was the raciest, her dress the skimpiest. "I can fit the entire costume in my closed fist," she told reporters.
For diva notoriety, her only equal was Sarah Bernhardt, and like Bernhardt, she knew that her performance didn't end once she'd left the stage. She kept newspapers busy with tales of her marriages, divorces, and affairs. She brought lawsuits against vaudeville circuit bosses and astrologers. She turned up for theatrical engagements and refused to play when she discovered that rival performers were on the bill. In 1905, Tanguay was fined $100 by an Evansville, Ind., theater manager for sleeping through a matinee. That evening, Tanguay took her revenge, shredding the stage curtain with a dagger. A 1909 performance in Louisville, Ky., ended with a backstage melee when a young stagehand, Clarence Hess, mistakenly stepped in front of Tanguay as she hurried to her dressing room. Tanguay produced a hatpin, and stabbed the youth in his abdomen three times. The star was arrested and taken to the police station, where, according to the New York Times, "Miss Tanguay produced a roll of bills and cried: 'Take it all and let me go, for it is now my dinner time.' "
Even when Tanguay kept her hatpins sheathed, she thrived on "beef." She staged high-profile feuds with Ethel Barrymore and vaudeville star Gertrude Hoffman. In 1918, the drama critic for the New York Tribune, Heywood Broun, slammed Tanguay for performing "La Marseillese" in a skimpy dress made entirely from French tricoleur flags. She took out a full page ad in Variety, and responded in verse: "Now you who have slandered, you are dirt beneath my feet/ For I have beaten you at your game, and it's a hard game to beat."
Tanguay had many imitators. Decades before the first Elvis impersonator slicked up his pompadour, vaudeville was chockablock with performers donning Tanguay's outfits and belting out her songs. She took on the copycats in "Give an Imitation of Me" (1910):
If you are broke without a souAnd really don't know what to doJust take my tip, go on the stageAnd you can be the season's rageWatch me while I'm on the billThen jump into vaudevilleAnd give an imitation of meRush around the stage and fuzzle up your hairGet a pair of tights and holler "I don't care."
American audiences had never encountered such bluster. (As one journalist noted, Tanguay's "whole performance is of herself, for herself, and by herself. She is motive, cue, subject and sub-subject.") But Tanguay's shtick was based on self-deprecation as much as self-aggrandizement. In the press and in song, she belittled her talent, framing her act as an elaborate spoof of virtuosity and professionalism. Critics called her singing "unlistenable," "awful," "a hairshirt to the nerves"—and she professed to agree with them. "I can't sing, I don't how to dance. I am not even graceful," she declared. She elaborated on the point in "I Don't Care":
My voice is what you'd call a freakBut I don't mind it …If teachers rates I could affordOr I had studied hard abroadI'd now be working for my boardAnd that's why I don't careI don't care, I don't careIf I'm not Queen of SongAnd while I am shouting You may all be doubtingAnd hoping it won't last long …My voice may sound funnyBut it's getting me the moneySo I don't care
Tanguay's voice did sound funny. But does that mean she couldn't sing? On the contrary: She sang very well, in a style that burlesqued the practice of "normal" singing. Which is something Tanguay knew how to do. She had played straight roles in musicals, both as a child actor and in her early years on the New York stage; at the height of her fame, in 1915, she had a huge hit with an unironic tear-jerker, "M-O-T-H-E-R, a Word That Means the World to Me." What we hear in "I Don't Care" is not a Progressive Era William Hung but a vocal stylist in command of her instrument, deliberately deploying comic effects: drawling, squeaking, and mixing straight-ahead singing with a kind of proto-rap patter. In "I Don't Care," Tanguay bragged about this technique: "Some lines I sing, some lines I don't sing/ I don't care."
It was a sound of and for its time. The public's fancy was turning from old-fashioned music—sentimental parlor ballads and Viennese light opera—to the buoyant melodies and jagged syncopations of ragtime. And now Tanguay was waging her own revolt against 19th-century musical values and hoity-toity high culture. In concert, she interspersed songs with poetic recitations that parodied flowery Victorian verse. (An example can be heard at the end of the "I Don't Care" record.) In 1911, when she appeared on the same vaudeville bill with the Danish ballet star Adeline Genée, Tanguay brought down the house with a slapstick sendup of prima-ballerina dance moves. She kept the bit in her act for years, belting out "When Pavlova Sees Me Put It Over" while staggering through pliés and arabesques.
Tanguay's vocal style, meanwhile, mocked the Europhile emphasis on formal training, clear diction, pure intonation, and squarely hit notes. Think of her boast in "I Don't Care": "If teacher's rates I could afford/ Or I had studied hard abroad/ I'd now be working for my board." In other words: Roll over, Beethoven. (Or maybe it was: Step aside, Victor Herbert.) Vernacular pop culture was winning the day, and paying handsomely. In a country being remade by modernity—by new machines and new immigrants, by rising skylines and rising hemlines—Tanguay's madcap screech was audibly, if not scientifically, the soul of America.
This is where the received history of popular music begins to crack open. The standard pop music narrative regards vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley as quaintly pre-historic—the sepia-tone showbiz that was swept aside by "gritty" roots music and the triumphal rise of jazz and rock 'n' roll. But how do we account for Eva Tanguay, whose spectacular performances anticipated so much 20th century pop, and predated nearly all of it? If Tanguay tells us anything, it's that turn-of-the-century variety stage, where popular song first was transformed into mass entertainment, was rowdy and transgressive—as "rock 'n' roll" as rock itself. How did such a big star, such a heady period, slip from our view, and slide out of the history books?
In part, it's an issue of semantics. In the first decades of the century, when Tin Pan Alley songwriters counted on vaudevillians to break their new tunes, theatrical comedy and popular music were one and the same. The term "pop singer" had not yet been coined, and the period's top hit makers, like Tanguay, were referred to as actresses and comediennes. To the extent that Tanguay has been studied, it's been by historians of the stage and investigators of "the theatrical roots of modern feminism." These theater specialists fail to connect Tanguay and her vaudeville fellow travelers to the broader story of American popular music; most music scholars, meanwhile, remain indifferent to the pop pioneers who lurk on variety theater bills and in sheet music cover photographs.
The methodological mess is exacerbated by a dearth of the usual primary sources. In Tanguay's glory days, the recording industry was in its infancy. The period's wax cylinders and 78 discs were primitive and rackety, and the musical aesthetics—the broad comedic gestures and booming voices, raised to reach the theater rafters—were ill-suited to a medium that would come into its own with the invention of the microphone and the rise of dulcet crooners. Some big name stars, like Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker, left behind a decent body of recordings, but many others made just a few records, or none at all. Why bother with the rinky-dink record business, when the big money and the big glory waited on the vaudeville proscenium? Tanguay didn't bother stepping into a recording studio until the very tail end of her run. We can be thankful that she did—imagine how doubly obscure she would be without that "I Don't Care" 78.
Once Tanguay does come into focus, you can't unsee her. Her impact is, in certain cases, a matter of historical record. Mae West began her career as a Tanguay impersonator. Sophie Tucker cited her as an influence; so, surprisingly, did Ethel Waters. It's difficult to hear much Eva in Ethel, the blues queen famous for her queenly diction. But perhaps Waters transmuted her lessons from Tanguay to her own most famous fan, Billie Holiday? Can we detect in "Billie's Blues," the song that the Holiday swiped from Waters in 1936, a trace of the slurry sound pioneered three decades earlier by a vaudeville heroine? That may be a stretch, but consider some other names: Betty Boop, Lena Lovich, Cyndi Lauper, Gwen Stefani, Björk—a lineage of screwball songstresses that descends directly from Tanguay.
Today's pop feels more than ever like one big reiteration of Tanguay's career. The braggarts and battle-rhymers of hip-hop—who can doubt that Tanguay got there first in "Eva Tanguay's Love Song" (1904), "Tanguay Rag" (1910), "Egotistical Eva" (1910), "If I Only Had a Regiment of Tanguays" (1917), and other haughty "songs about herself"? The divas that dominate the pop charts and tabloids, with their shape-shifting makeovers, extravagant song-and-dance routines, and multiple costume changes? Lady Gaga's wild headgear? In 2009, Tanguay is nowhere and everywhere. She's forgotten, but not gone.
For a star of Tanguay's stature, though, forgotten is worse than gone. Her decline was precipitous. As late as 1922, the year she recorded "I Don't Care," Tanguay's weeklong stand at Loew's New York State Theater raked in record box-office grosses. But tastes were changing, along with technology; radio and Hollywood talkies dealt a deathblow to big-time vaudeville, and Tanguay's bookings dried up. She lost her fortune in the 1929 stock-market crash, a few years after she had definitively lost her stranglehold on the zeitgeist to the sirens of the jazz age. By the mid-1930s, she was living in Los Angeles, crippled by arthritis, half-blind with cataracts, and nearly destitute. In 1934, she wrote a letter to Henry Ford, begging him to give her an automobile.
This letter is from Eva Tanguay (of the stage). I hope you remember me, once you were in the audience when I played Detroit—and anyone who has seen me before the footlights is interested in me. … I was thinking in the generosity of your heart could give me a car. … I have always had a car having owned eleven, but now have nothing. I live off a sort of an alley in a small house which is set in back of a big one, there is no view other than the backyards of other houses. … It is very sad to have had so much and be cut down to poverty, but my illness prevents me from doing any work. Although I could sing on radio if the programme was without the audience viewing the entertainer, I have earned thirty-five hundred a week, three thousand and most always twenty-five hundred, so you may know I'm no tramp, having lived the very best, my home consisted of gold glasses silver plates and everything that meant refinement, now I'm alone and cut off entirely from my world I so loved. If I had a car I could go out afternoons and might connect some way with managers, agents—and find something to do.
This sob story failed to move Ford, whose secretary wrote to Tanguay expressing regret that her request could not be met. In her final years, Tanguay scraped by on her meager savings, and by selling her old stage costumes out of a storefront on Hollywood Blvd. Her name would turn up in the press occasionally, when reporters pilgrimaged to her home for a "Where are they now?" interview. In a Life magazine profile published shortly before her death, she complained bitterly that her legacy and—her word—"artistry" had been ignored. It seems Eva Tanguay did care, after all. Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at slatemusic@gmail.com.
Copyright 2009 Washingtonpost.Newsweek