Andy Griffith: Before Mayberry, A Movie Monster

By Bill Barol at 5:03 pm Tuesday, Jul 3

Boing Boing recently presented a series of essays about movies that have had a profound effect on our invited essayists. We are extending the series for several additional days. See all the essays in the Mind Blowing Movies series. -- Mark

Andy Griffith: Before Mayberry, A Movie Monster, by Bill Barol

[Video Link] If for any reason you doubt the power of television, consider the long career of Andy Griffith, who died this week at 86. Griffith had one TV role that was merely successful and one that was almost archetypical. That’s a pretty good run for any actor. But TV didn’t just give to Griffith. It also took away, and it’s here that the medium shows its muscle in a really astounding way. Griffith’s long TV career effectively effaced a film debut that, fifty years later, is so vivid and visceral that it startles with every viewing. The facts that Griffith played a bad guy in his first film role, and that both the performance and the movie, Elia Kazan’s 1957 A Face In The Crowd, are largely overlooked today -- these are testaments to TV’s power to swamp any cultural phenomena that have the poor judgment to get in its way.

Hang on, there’s more. What’s doubly delicious about this is, A Face In The Crowd is a cautionary tale about the power of -- Anyone? Anyone? Yes: Television. Griffith, who came from nightclubs and the stage and had no resume as a dramatic actor in 1957, plays Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter who stumbles into national prominence thanks to the demagogic power of the then-young medium. A grifter and a charmer, Rhodes is sleeping off a hangover in a rural jail when a local radio producer (Patricia Neal, doing that hard-but-vulnerable thing she did so well) sticks a microphone in his face. He has no ambition to be a radio star or anything else, but once he grasps that a guy with a friendly demeanor can wield mass media like a club, and he grasps it very quickly indeed, there’s no stopping him. Rhodes shoots like a star from tiny Pickett, Arkansas to Memphis to New York, from radio to TV, from a singer and storyteller to “a force... a force,” he says with megalomaniac intensity. And from there it’s just a quick hop to politics, with a presidential candidate sucking around for his magic touch, and a madman’s dreams of power behind the throne.

It all unravels, of course, because that’s what happens in cautionary tales. But until it does Rhodes is a villain of Shakespearean scope and depth, and Griffith -- this is TV’s Andy Griffith, remember -- Griffith tears into the part with both hands. When Griffith as Rhodes laughs -- “I put my whole self into everything I do,” he tells the Neal character early on, equal parts seduction and threat -- the sound explodes off the screen like gunfire, and Griffith’s eyes widen and shine, and sweat dots his forehead like stars, and the tendons stand out in his neck. Understand: Rhodes is a monster, all appetite and ambition, and Griffith makes every second of his rise and fall queasily believable. That doesn't just apply to the operatic moments, though. There’s a great scene early on where Rhodes uses the power of his radio pulpit to turn the populace against the local sheriff, and Neal asks him how it feels to “say anything that comes into your head and have it sway people.” At first Rhodes is too busy enjoying the moment to grasp what she’s saying -- “I guess I can,” he says offhandedly, tears of laughter streaming down his face -- but then the weight of the insight settles on him and the laughter stops and his eyes go cool and appraising. “I guess I can,” he says again, and this time it’s all business. You can practically see the connections being mapped in his hustler’s brain. Later, leaving Arkansas to go to Memphis for his first TV job, Kazan has Griffith stand in the steps of a departing train, and as he turns away from the cheering crowds who’ve come to see him off and sets his gaze down the track toward his future, his face is a mask of hunger and calculation.

There are good actors in A Face In The Crowd -- Neal, Walter Matthau as a well-meaning good guy, and the underrated Tony Franciosa as a conniving office boy-turned-theatrical agent. (Franciosa has a hilarious moment when Rhodes improvises a commercial jingle for some prospective national sponsors, and the office boy/agent wings some backing doo wops to help close the deal.) But for all the starpower the film has, and that includes Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg working at the tops of their very considerable games, it’s Griffith’s film to make or break. And in much the same way that Rhodes seized his opportunity when it happened along, Griffith did too. In every frame his Rhodes is violently alive, for good or (much more often) for ill. Griffith never again duplicated the jet-propelled power of that first performance, and within three years he was a TV star, and he stayed one until Tuesday, when he died. Ask any ten people who know him from either of his long-running TV successes if he ever played a heavy and eight of them will look at you like you’re nuts. But the other two? The other two will nod in appreciation of what Griffith did 55 years ago, before a new medium set his nice-guy image in stone and wiped away the memory of Lonesome Rhodes’ grinning, voracious face.

City College of San Francisco on brink of Closure
Accreditation panel's verdict gives the state's largest school 8 months to make its case to avoid shutdown
Nanette Asimov Chronicle Staff
Updated 11:57 p.m., Tuesday, July 3, 2012

City College could be the state's largest to ever be forced to close after losing accreditation.

The poorly run City College of San Francisco has eight months to prove it should stay in business, yet must "make preparations for closure," evaluators ordered Tuesday.

The stunning verdict by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges could result in the closure of California's largest college and a fixture of higher education in one of the nation's wealthiest cities. It has 90,000 students.

Only accredited colleges can receive public funding under state law. But City College's failure to fix serious, long-standing problems of leadership and fiscal planning means that the accrediting commission could vote as early as next June to yank the school's all-important certification, said Barbara Beno, commission president.

That perilous judgment was conveyed Tuesday in a letter to Pamila Fisher, interim chancellor of City College, as the commission released its comprehensive review of the school. The college now has the burden of proof to "show cause" for why it should retain accreditation.

"Since the loss of accreditation would likely cause City College of San Francisco to close, during the 'show cause' period the College must make preparations for closure according to the Commission's Policy on Closing an Institution," Beno wrote Fisher.

In addition to proving why it should stay in business, City College must submit a "Closure Report" by March 15.

Only one California college has shut down in recent years because it lost accreditation, Beno said. Compton College, near Los Angeles, closed in 2005. But City College was warned in 2006 that it had eight major problems that could place its status in jeopardy. Now there are 14, all of which must be addressed by March 15 for the college to remain accredited.

Summary of findings

In her letter, Beno summarized the findings of the 66-page report, citing "leadership weaknesses at all levels," "failure to react to ongoing reduced funding," and spending all but 8 percent of its budget on salaries and benefits. The Chronicle, which had obtained a copy of the report, wrote about the findings on Saturday.

Beno said Tuesday that the reduced funding at City College isn't the reason for its precarious position. Other colleges have also lost millions of dollars in state funding, she said. Yet only two of California's 112 community colleges - College of the Redwoods in Eureka and Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo - are, like City College, on the brink. "It's choices," Beno said. "Regardless of how much money they have, safeguards apparently weren't put in place. The situation is very grave."

Leadership lacking

It is unclear how small the vast City College would have to become to live within its reduced means. It has nine campuses and from 100 to 200 "instructional sites." More than 90,000 students are enrolled, intending to transfer to a four-year university, learn a vocation or just take an interesting course. Nearly 2,700 people work at City College, including just 39 administrators - a level considered far too low by the accrediting commission.

In her two-page response to the commission, Interim Chancellor Fisher did not promise to keep City College's doors open. Nor did she make such a promise in response to questions from The Chronicle, saying only: "City College is fully aware of the seriousness of the situation."

But Fisher acknowledged in her letter that "clear, difficult choices must be made, immediately, and at a number of levels."

"The ultimate responsibility rests with the trustees, administration, faculty and staff to reinvent City College so that it can continue to achieve its important mission, but in a more cost-effective and efficient way."

Fisher became chancellor May 1 when Chancellor Don Griffin resigned to undergo surgery for a brain tumor.

Since then, she said, the college has approved a $187 million budget for 2012-13 that is $8 million less than the previous budget. It includes savings from union givebacks, furloughs, a freeze on purchasing and the elimination of 700 classes for fall and spring.

$79 parcel tax

The trustees also voted to place a $79 per parcel tax on the November ballot to benefit the college, and will bring in the state's Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team to help create a multiyear financial plan.

Next week, Fisher said, she will appoint an accreditation response team to develop "an immediate plan of action" to address the 14 major problems the college must solve to stay in business.

Action plan deadline

The first deadline, Oct. 15, is when City College must submit its action plan to the accrediting commission. Commission representatives will then visit the school to monitor progress.

City College Trustee Steve Ngo said he was taken aback by the severity of the commission's action.

"City College must survive," he said. "We will work our way out of this."

At the same time, he urged everyone who loves City College to recognize the value of the institution that churns out thousands of educated students and licensed professionals each year.

"I think they're in danger of losing a treasured institution," he said. "The work we do has to do with the strength of the city."

English instructor Alisa Messer, president of the American Federation of Teachers local that represents the college's faculty, agreed.

"The last thing anyone wants is for the college to close," she said. "We'll all work very hard to make sure it doesn't. Closure would be unthinkable."

‌

Read the report

To see the accreditation report, go to: sfg.ly/O2FVAa

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco staff writer. E-mail: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov.

Macaulay Culkin’s Life After Fame

The Daily Beast 

The ‘Home Alone’ star has all but vanished, except for a monthly party that he DJs in Manhattan. Ramin Setoodeh went and found a roomful of adults in Jurassic Park costumes.

by Ramin Setoodeh  | June 19, 2012    

It’s one of those early June nights typical for a New York summer—the air feels breezy, but it’s not cold. Two pretty girls cling to their spot on the sidewalk in front of the velvet rope of a club downtown.

One has a black pixie haircut that must have been labored over for hours in a salon, or it could be a wig. She resembles Zooey Deschanel. The other is a statuesque blonde, who whispers to me that they traveled all the way from Rhode Island to visit this West Village dive bar. They are college-age, possibly over 21.

“Are you here to see Mac?” Pixie asks me suspiciously. I nod, and the two girls relax. They don’t know him, but they read online about the flamboyant parties that he throws. Pixie seems to have a crush on him. She looks hurt when the bouncer says Mac dislikes brunettes, until it dawns on her that he’s only joking, and a small smile flashes across her face.

A few minutes later, the bouncer hands me a paper hat featuring an orange T-Rex about to swallow a smaller blue dinosaur. I put it on, with the understanding that I’m about to attend a birthday party. Nobody will tell me whose. We descend a flight of stairs, and scan the underground bar for our host.

Mac is short for Macaulay, as in Macaulay Culkin, who at the age of 10 landed the starring role in Home Alone, the most successful movie of 1990. He was so cuddly that he became the biggest child actor Hollywood had ever seen, receiving up to $8 million per film. Some of his follow-up performances weren’t as memorable, unless you were close to his age, like I was, and obsessed with My Girl, Getting Even With Dad, Richie Rich, and The Good Son (which I couldn’t see, because it was rated R). Then puberty hit and Culkin came crashing back to Earth, as most child actors do. His parents bickered over the control of his estate in a nasty, public divorce. In 2004, Culkin, virtually unrecognizable, was arrested for possession of marijuana and various pills while driving through Oklahoma with his friend, Brett Tabisel.

 

Take a look back at Culkin's star-making role in 'Home Alone.'

Culkin tried to return to acting as an adult, including the independent film Party Monster and a guest appearance on Will & Grace. His last feature was 2007’s straight-to-video Sex and Breakfast, which IMDb describes as “young couples experiment with anonymous group sex.” Since then, Culkin’s main job has been staying out of the public’s eye. Last year, he quietly started a new job as a New York DJ at Le Poisson Rouge, a club managed by Tabisel, also a former child actor.

A publicist for the event said that I could attend, but that I couldn’t interview or photograph Culkin under any circumstances. Tabisel and all of Culkin’s friends also declined my request for an interview.

blog.lepoissonrouge.com

The 20-somethings at the bar told me each of Culkin’s parties come with its own theme, usually tangentially related to adolescence. He had a prom where he crowned his own king and queen. After the paparazzi snapped a shot of him in February, looking scraggly and gaunt on a New York street, he hosted a canned- food drive to mock the tabloids that wondered whether he had been starving himself. Tonight’s dinosaur birthday party is like a piece of performance art: a former child actor’s reinterpretation of childhood. Its actual meaning is harder to understand.

There are dinosaurs everywhere: dinosaur posters, dinosaur toys, dinosaur balloons and whistles. I stuff a green dinosaur bookmark into my pocket. Some of the guests actually arrive in full dress, including a man wearing a teetering cardboard dino head. Natalie Suarez, 25, fashioned her green hoodie to look like a Dilophosaurus, the poison-spitting dinosaur from Jurassic Park. Two TV screens play Jurassic Park 3, the campy sequel that wasn’t directed by Steven Spielberg. At the bar, you can order $5 ptero-daiquiri shots—a sign advertises them with a cartoon pterodactyl and a “Rawwr!!!”

After ordering a drink, I move in the same direction as most of the other patrons, toward a foldout table with an empty chair. I sit down, in front of small jars of paint, manned by a shy 20-something. Toby describes himself as an artist who usually doesn’t paint faces, but Mac asked him to. “What kind of dinosaur do you want?” he asks me. I ask him what kinds of dinosaurs he draws. I ponder the selection (pterodactyl, triceratops, etc) before settling on a T-Rex. He dips his brush into the green paint and giggles, saying that my stubble makes this harder. When he’s done, he looks frustrated. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You might need to wash it off.”

My search for the DJ booth leads nowhere. That’s because there is no DJ. One of the Rhode Island girls explains that Culkin doesn’t really DJ at these parties. “He plays his iPod—it’s an iPod party,” she says. The music sounds like generic 90s grunge, with an occasional Madonna, Aerosmith, or Beastie Boys song thrown in.

Hovering near the unmanned iPod resting on the side bar, stands a short, pallid blond man. Here is our Gatsby, except he is more like Willy Wonka. Even in a crowded, packed room, Culkin is impossible to miss. In the dim light, he sometimes looks like an adolescent and sometimes like an old man. But never, from any distance or light, does he look his real age of 31.

Most of his friends are stationed at a giant table in the back of the bar, a cross between the Last Supper and a toddler’s birthday party. There’s a paper tablecloth and dinosaur action figures scattered around two delicious birthday cakes. Culkin’s younger brother Kieran, who played a rebellious teenager in Igby Goes Down, is there, as is his other brother, Shane, who is not an actor.

When Culkin finally speaks at around midnight, his voice is high-pitched and androgynous. “Hi everybody, welcome to the dinosaur party! Thank you for all coming, it’s been a blast.” He awards a girl named Carolyn with a ribbon for her stegosaurus bodysuit. He plays with a pair of chattering teeth and then reveals that it’s actually Shane’s birthday. The crowd roars. He thanks everyone for coming “from the bottom of my heart.”

Macaulay Culkin pictured in April 2010 (PatrickMcMullan.com / Sipa)

Corey Michaels, one of his guests, spent the afternoon before the party at Toys ’R Us, where he bought 20 plastic dinosaurs that he glued onto his T-shirt. When Culkin sees the shirt at the bar, their eyes lock. “He said, ‘I love it, I give it an A plus’” Michaels, a 26-year-old singer from Miami, remembers. He believes Culkin’s voice might have been part of the performance. “I think he went into a party-monster space in his head. I think that’s the whole point.”

“He’s always warm,” says Suarez, who has attended several of his parties and says Culkin often makes small talk with the guests. “I wouldn’t say in a flirtatious way, just in a receptive way. He’s always asking people how they found out about the party.”

If Culkin seems a little distant in person, it’s may be because his life hasn’t been easy, despite the millions that he earned before he got a driver’s license. After he became famous, his father, Kit, divorced his mother, Patricia, and tried to claim ownership over Culkin’s multimillion-dollar fortune. The case went to the Manhattan Supreme Court, and Culkin became estranged from his father. In 1998, his mother’s house burned down in a fire. Ten years after that, his sister Dakota was killed in a L.A. pedestrian accident. But despite all this tragedy, most of us still remember Culkin as the cute kid from Home Alone.

Culkin never self-destructed before our eyes, but what’s unclear is his current state of mind. I couldn’t tell whether his dinosaur party was ironic. Since we’ve all trapped him as a child, perhaps he wants his guests to be there with him. If playing the DVD of Jurassic Park 3 was meant as a playful wink to Hollywood for not casting him in the third Home Alone movie, then good for him—if not, then I would tell him the first movie is definitely the best one. I couldn’t tell whether he is bitter and angry, or whether he needs some friends and this is the safest way for him to hang out in public.

Throughout the night, a small group of people kept accompanying Culkin into a back room and they’d return reeking of pot smoke. I tried to follow them, but the bouncer wouldn’t let me. Some of the guests insisted that Culkin had an entire apartment upstairs, though no one actually saw it. When I finally snuck by, I ended up in an empty space, a fully stocked, abandoned second bar, like an alternate universe. It was dead silent. I couldn’t even hear Culkin’s iPod music. Where did everybody go? Standing in the dark, I felt lost, like the time I wandered off by myself on a second-grade field trip to the history museum. Maybe it was all the alcohol or the dinosaurs, but I had the sudden urge to call my mother.

Another bouncer found me crouched in a corner and escorted me back to the bar. Culkin was long gone. The party was over, with a room full of exhausted Mac fans, their faces smudged in paint.

The next day, I called the club to ask them about the event. Dustin Nelson, the marketing director for Le Poisson Rouge, said that he’d been getting emails all day about the party. It wasn’t Shane’s birthday, he tells me. “It was no one’s birthday,” he said. “It was a birthday party for dinosaurs. It’s totally nonsensical.”

 

©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

The Light of Reason

Andrew Sullivan on President Obama's support for Gay Marriage:

Obama Lets Go Of Fear

9 May 2012 05:06 PM

I do not know how orchestrated this was; and I do not know how calculated it is. What I know is that, absorbing the news, I was uncharacteristically at a loss for words for a while, didn't know what to write, and, like many Dish readers, there are tears in my eyes.

So let me simply say: I think of all the gay kids out there who now know they have their president on their side. I think of Maurice Sendak, who just died, whose decades-long relationship was never given the respect it deserved. I think of the centuries and decades in which gay people found it impossible to believe that marriage and inclusion in their own families was possible for them, so crushed were they by the weight of social and religious pressure. I think of all those in the plague years shut out of hospital rooms, thrown out of apartments, written out of wills, treated like human garbage because they loved another human being. I think of Frank Kameny. I think of the gay parents who now feel their president is behind their sacrifices and their love for their children.

The interview changes no laws; it has no tangible effect. But it reaffirms for me the integrity of this man we are immensely lucky to have in the White House. Obama's journey on this has been like that of many other Americans, when faced with the actual reality of gay lives and gay relationships. Yes, there was politics in a lot of it. But not all of it. I was in the room long before the 2008 primaries when Obama spoke to the mother of a gay son about marriage equality. He said he was for equality, but not marriage. Five years later, he sees - as we all see - that you cannot have one without the other. Bu even then, you knew he saw that woman's son as his equal as a citizen. It was a moment - way off the record at the time - that clinched my support for him.

Today Obama did more than make a logical step. He let go of fear. He is clearly prepared to let the political chips fall as they may. That's why we elected him. That's the change we believed in. The contrast with a candidate who wants to abolish all rights for gay couples by amending the federal constitution, and who has donated to organizations that seek to "cure" gays, who bowed to pressure from bigots who demanded the head of a spokesman on foreign policy solely because he was gay: how much starker can it get?

My view politically is that this will help Obama. He will be looking to the future generations as his opponent panders to the past. The clearer the choice this year the likelier his victory. And after the darkness of last night, this feels like a widening dawn.

Is This The Most Boring Election Ever?

Is This the Most Boring Election Ever?


Mitt Romney and Barack Obama
Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)
I was channel-surfing the other day, looking for something genuinely interesting on television, like maybe a repeat of the Big Ten Network's Diamond Report or video of a wrecked Nazi tugboat, when my fingers got stuck on a news channel. There, lighting up an NBC broadcast with her smile, was New Hampshire's Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte, talking about her Vice Presidential qualifications ...

Who? That was my first question, but then my second obstacle was the sudden recollection that we were in an election year. I'd actually forgotten this was the case. Four years ago at this time, that would never have happened – we were in the middle of one of the most witheringly nasty primary fights ever, with people very nearly coming to blows depending on where you stood in the Hillary-Barack battle.

Back then there was great nervousness in the country even beyond the Democratic Party's intramural mess, as the specter of the first black presidency was hanging over everything: People as diverse as Geraldine Ferraro and Jeremiah Wright were dragged into racial controversies, while whispers about Obama's birthplace and "Muslim" heritage spread across the country like wildfire.

This year? It's been eerily quiet. The apathy factor in American presidential politics has seemingly never been higher.

As if to combat this, we're getting stories now about how this election is closer than you'd think, how Obama is in for a "tight race" or a "fierce fight" with Romney, and how the Republican challenger is "closing in" to a "statistical dead heat."

They're going to say this, and they may even have numbers to back it up, like this week's Gallup poll showing Obama with just a two-point lead. But I think it's a mirage.

The people who work for the wire services and the news networks are physically incapable of writing sentences like, "This election is even more over than the Knicks-Heat series." They are required, if not by law then by neurological reflex, to describe every presidential campaign as "fierce" and "drawn-out" and "hotly-contested."

But this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it'll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It's just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. Even the news reporters who are paid to drum up dramatic undertones are having a hard time selling Romney as half of a titanic title bout.

Anyone who wants to claim that Romney has a chance in this election needs only to watch candidate Romney's attempt to connect with black voters via his rendition of "Who Let the Dogs Out?" to be disabused of his illusions:

The Republican base is angrier and more determined than it ever has been, yet Republican voters picked as their nominee the one candidate in their slate of primary challengers who depresses them. This is exactly the John Kerry scenario. Kerry was never going to win, either, and everyone pretty much knew that, too. But at least in the Kerry-Bush race there was a tremendous national debate over the Iraq war, which many people (incorrectly, probably) thought might end more quickly if a Democrat was elected.

This year, it's not like that. Obviously Republican voters do hate Obama and genuinely believe he's created a brutally repressive socialist paradigm with his health care law, among other things. But Romney was a pioneer of health care laws, and there will be dampened enthusiasm on the Republican side for putting him in office.

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they'd been done by Bush.

In other words, Obama versus McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House. George Bush's reign highlighted the enormous power of the individual president to drive policy, which made the elections involving him compelling contests; Obama's first term has highlighted the timeless power of the intractable bureaucracy underneath the president, which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it.

Then there's one more thing – Obama versus Romney is the worst reality show on TV since the Tila Tequila days. The characters are terrible, there's no suspense, and the biggest thing is, it lacks both spontaneity and a gross-out factor. In Reality TV, if you don't have really sexy half-naked young people scheming against each other over campfires in the Cook Islands, you need to have grown men eating millipedes or chicks in bikinis drinking donkey semen. And if you don't have that, you really need Sarah Palin.

This race has none of that. Biden is the best character in the series, but for exactly that reason the Obama administration would be wise to bury crazy Joe in a salt mine until the election is over. (The networks have skillfully teased the Frasier-style future spinoff show from this election – the inevitable Hillary-Biden race in 2016 – but they're keeping most of that action under wraps for now). Romney will no doubt stoop to some truly appalling attacks before the election season is over, but he'll do so out of sheer, boring calculation. He's not insane, which is a tremendous insult to a Republican politician.

Anyway, you can expect the media efforts to drum up interest in the election to really heat up in the next few weeks. The Republican race is over now and the networks need to fill those hours. The presidential race is always a great illusion, designed to distract people from the more hardcore politics in this country, the minutiae of trade and tax and monetary policy that's too boring to cover. When the presidential race is a bad show, people might not have any choice but to pay attention to those other things. And this year's version is the worst show in memory. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

p.s. sorry about the typo, I did mean Obama-McCain.

Brilliance in the making

Young Obama and His Girlfriends: A Biographer Gets the Story

Posted by John Cassidy


Vanity Fair’s new extract from David Maraniss’s forthcoming biography of Obama is all over the Web, not necessarily for the right reasons. The flap over Maraniss’s “revelation” that Obama, in his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” confected a composite girlfriend from his years in New York during the early eighties, and described at least one event that didn’t take place there, has diverted attention from some of fascinating material Maraniss obtained from actual women who dated the future President. (In the introduction to his book, Obama said that some of his characters were composite and that he had played with the chronology.)

After leaving Occidental College in 1981 and transferring to Columbia, where he majored in political science, Obama went through a period of soul-searching, during which he struggled to assimilate the various elements of his cosmopolitan heritage. His memoir, which is still well worth reading, begins with a phone call he received, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, informing him of his father’s death in Kenya. In his own telling, he emerges as a conflicted and sensitive, but also intellectually confident and rather self-absorbed, young man, who is seeking his path. What Maraniss has done, thanks to some meticulous reporting, is complement this picture with a more objective view of Obama from two women, young at the time, who knew him intimately.

One of them was Genevieve Cook, a well-bred and somewhat rebellious New Yorker, who smoked non-filter Camels and drank Baileys Irish Cream from the bottle. When she met Obama at party in the East Village, in late 1983, she was a twenty-five-year-old assistant teacher at Brooklyn Friends, a private school in downtown Brooklyn. After Obama, who was three years younger, cooked her dinner and invited her to stay the night, they became an item. In her personal journal, which she shared with Maraniss, Cook recorded many details of the relationship, down to the odors that pervaded Obama’s room in the rent-controlled three bedroom apartment he shared on West 114th Street: “running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing.”

As the entries proceed, the Obama that Cook knew comes across very clearly. She found him intriguing and smart, warm sometimes, but also guarded and self-protective.

Thursday, January 26
How is he so old already, at the age of 22? I have to recognize (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening…. Distance, distance, distance, and wariness.

Sunday, February 19
Despite Barack’s having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more—he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.

Saturday, February 25
The sexual warmth is definitely there—but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all…His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.

As the months went on, Cook’s doubts about Obama grew:

Friday, March 9, 1984
It’s not a question of my wanting to probe ancient pools of emotional trauma … but more a sense of you [Barack] biding your time and drawing others’ cards out of their hands for careful inspection—without giving too much of your own away—played with a good poker face…I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart—legitimate, admirable, really—a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there’s something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness … but I’m still left with this feeling of … a bit of a wall—the veil.

Thursday, March 22
Barack—still intrigues me, but so much going on beneath the surface, out of reach. Guarded, controlled.

Saturday, May 26
Dreamt last night for what I’m sure was an hour of waiting to meet him at midnight, with a ticket in my hand. Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life—she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat. Made me see that he may fear his own dependency on me, but also mine on him, whereas I only fear mine on him.

In late 1984, Cook and Obama moved in together, but it didn’t work out. Obama’s elusiveness continued to frustrate Cook, and, in the spring of 1985, they split up:

Thursday, May 23, 1985
Barack leaving my life—at least as far as being lovers goes… I read back over the past year in my journals, and see and feel several themes in it all … how from the beginning what I have been most concerned with has been my sense of Barack’s withholding the kind of emotional involvement I was seeking. I guess I hoped time would change things and he’d let go and “fall in love” with me. Now, at this point, I’m left wondering if Barack’s reserve, etc. is not just the time in his life, but, after all, emotional scarring that will make it difficult for him to get involved even after he’s sorted his life through with age and experience. Hard to say, as obviously I was not the person that brought infatuation. (That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!)

While it is obviously dangerous to project forward thirty years to the Obama of today, it is hard not to speculate about how much or little of his young self remains. In an Oval Office interview with Maraniss, he acknowledged that during his time in New York he was “deep inside my own head … in a way that in retrospect I don’t think was real healthy.” During much of this time, Maraniss informs us, Obama carried around with him a dogeared copy of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man,” which is written from the perspective of an unnamed African-American who feels isolated from and ignored by the rest of society. The young Obama also had broader literary interests, and he dreamed of becoming a writer. Another of his girlfriends was Alex McNear, whom he knew from Occidental College, where she edited a literary magazine. In the summer of 1982, McNear spent the summer in New York, and she and Obama started dating. After she went back to California, Obama sent her a series of letters, one of which concerned an essay she was writing on “The Waste Land,” by T. S. Eliot:

Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this…. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.

Perhaps Obama was just trying to impress the lady. Clearly, though, this was no ordinary twenty-two-year-old. In another letter to McNear, he revealed his ambitions as a prose stylist:

I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

What are we to make off all this? Setting aside campaign politics and the brouhaha over how exactly Obama put together his memoir, Maraniss has done something larger. He has shed new light on what is a remarkable American story. At one point during Obama’s relationship with Cook, Maraniss reminds us, he visited her family’s country estate in leafy Norfolk, Connecticut. Standing in the library, Obama recalled in his memoir, “I realized that our two worlds, my friend’s and mine, were as distant from each other as KenÂya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers. After all, I’d been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider.” Ultimately, of course, Obama didn’t remain an outsider for very long. He moved to Chicago, climbed the political ladder, and became, at the age of forty-seven, the President. “The ironic thing,” Cook told Maraniss, “is he moved through the corridors of power in a far more comfortable way than I ever would have.”



From the New Yorker 3/may/2012

Romney Stumbles, again.

From the New York Times.
It was the biggest moment yet for Mitt Romney’s foreign policy team: a conference call last Thursday, dialed into by dozens of news outlets from around the globe, to dissect and denounce President’s Obama record on national security.

But Richard Grenell, the political strategist who helped organize the call and was specifically hired to oversee such communications, was conspicuously absent, or so everyone thought.

It turned out he was at home in Los Angeles, listening in, but stone silent and seething. A few minutes earlier, a senior Romney aide had delivered an unexpected directive, according to several people involved in the call.

“Ric,” said Alex Wong, a policy aide, “the campaign has requested that you not speak on this call.” Mr. Wong added, “It’s best to lay low for now.”

For Mr. Grenell, the message was clear: he had become radioactive.

It was the climax of an unexpectedly messy and public dispute over the role and reputation of Mr. Grenell, a foreign policy expert who is gay and known for his support of same-sex marriage, his testy relationship with the news media and his acerbic Twitter postings on everything from Rachel Maddow’s femininity to how Callista Gingrich “snaps on” her hair.

From Mr. Grenell’s hiring three weeks ago, which prompted an outcry from some Christian conservatives, it became clear that the appointment of the former Bush administration official with pristine Republican credentials had become entangled in the unforgiving churn of election-year politics, leading to his resignation on Tuesday and the Republican candidate’s first public misstep since effectively clinching the nomination.

On one level, Mr. Grenell’s short-lived and rocky tenure as Mr. Romney’s foreign policy spokesman is the story of how halting attempts by the campaign to manage its relationship with the most conservative quarter of the Republican Party left an aide feeling badly marginalized and ostracized.

But according to interviews with more than a dozen aides and advisers, it is also about how a fast-growing campaign, operating under the sharp glare of a general election, failed to spot the potential hazards of a high-profile appointment.

Aides to Mr. Romney insist they did everything they could to keep Mr. Grenell from resigning, sending the campaign’s highest-level officials to try to persuade him that they valued his expertise and that the matter would soon die down. In the end, they said, he chafed at the limitations of a disciplined presidential campaign.

But those close to Mr. Grenell, known as Ric, insist that when he had sought forceful support from those who had entrusted him with a major role, the campaign seemed to be focused, instead, on quieting a political storm that could detract from Mr. Romney’s message and his appeal to a crucial constituency.

“It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” one Republican adviser said. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.” Like many interviewed, this adviser insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Mr. Grenell, a 45-year-old with a sharp wit, had joined the Romney campaign in April with sterling recommendations from Bush-era foreign policy figures, and an impressive résumé. He had served as a United States spokesman at the United Nations under four ambassadors during the Bush administration.

Rich Williamson, a senior diplomat under several Republican presidents, and John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, had both urged his appointment.

In mid-April, Mr. Grenell sailed through an interview with Eric Fehrnstrom, Mr. Romney’s senior adviser, and Gail Gitcho, his communications director.

But before he left the Romney headquarters in Boston, he felt compelled to say that he is gay. “It could be an issue,” he volunteered.

“It’s not an issue for us,” Mr. Fehrnstrom replied firmly.

Aides called around to Mr. Grenell’s colleagues, seeking references, but as the warm reviews flowed in, a campaign known for its no-stone-unturned meticulousness overlooked his electronic footprints: namely, dozens of cutting Twitter postings. One swipe at Newt Gingrich’s weight, for example, went like this: “I wonder if newt has investments in Lipitor.”

Mr. Grenell trumpeted his new position in a message to friends on April 19. He signed the note, “My next adventure.” He made preparations to move from Los Angeles.

Within days, stories about Mr. Grenell’s Twitter feed surfaced, prompting him to delete more than 800 posts. Mr. Grenell apologized for what he called “hurtful” comments, but the campaign privately dismissed the issue.

At the same time another, more troubling, protest that was harder to ignore was taking shape among some Christian conservatives: Mr. Romney, who opposes same-sex marriage, had betrayed them by hiring a gay man and an outspoken supporter of the cause.

The day after Mr. Grenell was hired, Bryan Fischer, a Romney critic with the American Family Association, told nearly 1,400 followers on Twitter: “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.” The next day, the conservative Daily Caller published an online column that summed up the anger of the Christian right, linking Mr. Grenell’s hiring to the appointment of gay judges to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

As the critiques from conservatives intensified, Mr. Grenell pressed senior aides to allow him to speak about national security issues, arguing that the best way to soothe the ire over his appointment would be to let him do his job: defend his boss and take swipes at President Obama.

But Mr. Romney’s advisers balked at the idea of his taking a public role, saying that the best way to get beyond the controversy was for Mr. Grenell to lower his profile until it blew over. A big worry: that reporters would ask Mr. Grenell about his Twitter feed or sexuality, turning him rather than Mr. Romney’s foreign policy into the story.

And with Mr. Grenell not scheduled to start work officially until May 1, the advisers argued that there was no rush to push him into the spotlight.

Andrea Saul, a campaign spokeswoman, issued a statement of support for Mr. Grenell on April 24. But it made no mention of the attacks on his sexuality: “We hired Ric Grenell because he was the best qualified person for the job and has extensive experience representing the U.S. Mission to the U.N.”

Yet foreign policy debates, the kind that Mr. Grenell was eager to wade into, kept sprouting up on the campaign trail, and he kept pressing for a chance to jump in. Each time, he was rebuffed. He was, friends said, a spokesman with no voice.

Romney advisers attribute at least some of Mr. Grenell’s frustration to the inevitable complications of starting a new job within a large, competitive and rigid organization filled with big egos.

But the final straw, for Mr. Grenell, was the conference call on April 26. After being told not to speak, he felt deeply undermined, worrying it would erode his credibility with journalists who had expected to hear from him, friends said. One, R. Clarke Cooper, the executive director of Log Cabin Republicans, called it a missed opportunity.

“If one wanted to look at how it could have been done differently, they could have gotten Ric off the bench and onto the field,” he said. “There’s been a lot going on this week on foreign policy, with Syria, Hillary Clinton in China, Obama in Afghanistan. There’s a lot happening where Ric could have been present.”

The day after the call, complaints from the religious right picked up steam. In the National Review on April 27, Matthew J. Franck wrote: “Whatever fine record he compiled in the Bush administration, Grenell is more passionate about same-sex marriage than anything else.”

“So here’s a thought experiment,” he continued. “Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?”

Over the past weekend, Mr. Grenell sent word to Mr. Williamson and Mr. Fehrnstrom that his position was untenable. He planned to resign.

At least six top aides and advisers called Mr. Grenell, asking him to reconsider, among them Mr. Fehrnstrom, Mr. Bolton, Mr. Williamson and the campaign’s manager, Matt Rhoades.

Several of them said they were baffled. They felt the storm had largely passed. “We were shocked,” one caller said. “We could not persuade him to stay.”

Several gay leaders said the campaign failed to grasp the message it had sent when it told him to lie low. “Clearly, the Romney campaign thought if they could put him in a box for a while it would go away,” said Christopher Barron, a founder of GOProud, a gay Republican group in Washington. “It is an unforced error on their part.”

He added, “It doesn’t bode well for the Romney campaign going forward if they couldn’t stand up to the most outrageous attacks about him being gay.”

Ms. Gitcho, of the campaign, disputed that characterization. Mr. Romney, she said, “has condemned voices of intolerance within the party. We tried to persuade Mr. Grenell to stay on, and we were disappointed that he chose to resign.”

Jim Talent, a former senator from Missouri who is a campaign adviser, called the episode a loss for the Romney campaign.

“People with the kind of expertise that Ric has don’t grow on tree,” he said. “It’s a real setback for us, I think.”

Jeff Zeleny and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Washington.

Bullying the Nuns By Garry Wills.

Bullying the Nuns

Garry Wills

Adrian Dominican Sisters
A group of Adrian Dominican Associates

The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops’ thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don’t. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility.

There was a vogue, just after the Second Vatican Council, for some Catholics to demonstrate their liberation from Catholic schooling by making fun of nuns, as strict disciplinarians or prissy moralists. I wrote at the time that this was untrue of the many nuns I have known, beginning with the Dominican Sisters of Adrian, Michigan, who taught me for five of my grade school years. They taught me the Latin of the old liturgy; Father Sullivan, our pastor, just got angry at words mispronounced or forgotten. The Dominicans never physically punished anyone that I saw or heard of.

They were more supportive of talent than were most of the lay teachers I met in a brief experience of public school. I had no artistic inclinations, but classmates who did were encouraged. The nuns’ genuine interest in their pupils can be seen in the fact that my seventh grade teacher kept in touch with me for all the years until her death in 1996. She was Sister John Joseph when I met her, but she recovered her real name after the Council, and as Anne O’Connor congratulated me on anything I wrote. (I would no more have kept up with Father Sullivan than with cholera.)

Anne O’Connor was just the kind of nun the Vatican is now intent on punishing. She had been a social worker before she became a nun, work that she loved and went back to several times as a Dominican. She was quick to shed the old habit (which was designed to disguise the fact that there was a woman somewhere in that voluminous disguising of hair, breasts, and hips), and quick to take back her own name. After she took on several high offices in her order, she became the mother provincial of the California branch of the Dominican order during the 1960s, coping with the changes of that volatile era on her college campuses.

Now the Vatican says that nuns are too interested in “the social Gospel” (which is the Gospel), when they should be more interested in Gospel teachings about abortion and contraception (which do not exist). Nuns were quick to respond to the AIDS crisis, and to the spiritual needs of gay people—which earned them an earlier rebuke from Rome. They were active in the civil rights movement. They ran soup kitchens.


Adrian Dominican Sisters
Mother Camilla Madden, OP, 1st Provincial and Foundress of the Dominicans in Adrian

I saw their regard for the neglected or despised when our grade school had an influx of Mexican immigrants during World War II. The jobs left open when men went into the army were filled by Mexicans coming into the country to fill them. These families were not welcomed by some in the community, but the nuns insisted that their children, our classmates, must be treated as brothers and sisters.

Last week, following an assessment by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle has taken control of the Conference, writing new laws for it, supplanting its leadership, and banning “political” activity (which is what Rome calls social work). Women are not capable, in the Vatican’s mind, of governing others or even themselves. Is it any wonder so many nuns have left the orders or avoided joining them? Who wants to be bullied?

It is typical of the pope’s sense of priorities that, at the very time when he is quashing an independent spirit in the church’s women, he is negotiating a welcome back to priests who left the church in protest at the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. These men, with their own dissident bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, formed the Society of Saint Pius X—the Pius whose Secretariat of State had a monsignor (Umberto Benigni) who promoted the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. Pope Benedict has already lifted the excommunication of four bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X, including that of Richard Williamson, who is a holocaust denier. Now a return of the whole body is being negotiated.

None of the anti-Semitic ties of the Pius X crew matter to Rome, since that crew holds to the hard line against women priests, gay marriage, and contraception. They have also retained the Latin Mass, which Rome has been inching back toward. All these things, you see, are the work solely of male hierarchs, distrustful of the People of God—who are the church, as defined by the Second Vatican Council. Those Lefebvre defiers of the Council are all the things the nuns are not, and all the things Rome wants to restore. The real Gospel must be quashed in the name of the pseudo-Gospel of papal monarchs. Poor Anne O’Connor—she thought caring for the poor was what Jesus wanted. She did not live to see that what Rome wants is all that matters.

A Gentle Life

David Esposito passed away on 24 April 2012 at San Francisco. A child of New Hampshire he came west in the 1960s seeking a life free of bigotry and a place in a city known for eccentrics. For thirty years David was a night clerk at one of several respected hotels and he was beloved by friends guests and fellow employees.
In the last year his most recent employment came to a close as he sought retirement and grew weary from changing times.
Despite best efforts David was not ready for idleness and depression stalked him and after months of indecision and dread he faded away .

Those of us who knew him. A small circle of friends did everything to motivate David but his heart wasn't in it. Now he is gone, a good dinner companion and steady friend.

All the best David...

What Hath Bell Labs Wrought? The Future

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI NEW YORK TIMES

THE IDEA FACTORY

Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

By Jon Gertner

In today’s world of Apple, Google and Facebook, the name may not ring any bells for most readers, but for decades — from the 1920s through the 1980s — Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T, was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. As Jon Gertner argues in his riveting new book, “The Idea Factory,” it was where the future was invented.

Indeed, Bell Labs was behind many of the innovations that have come to define modern life, including the transistor (the building block of all digital products), the laser, the silicon solar cell and the computer operating system called Unix (which would serve as the basis for a host of other computer languages). Bell Labs developed the first communications satellites, the first cellular telephone systems and the first fiber-optic cable systems.

The Bell Labs scientist Claude Elwood Shannon effectively founded the field of information theory, which would revolutionize thinking about communications; other Bell Labs researchers helped push the boundaries of physics, chemistry and mathematics, while defining new industrial processes like quality control.

In “The Idea Factory,” Mr. Gertner — an editor at Fast Company magazine and a writer for The New York Times Magazine — not only gives us spirited portraits of the scientists behind Bell Labs’ phenomenal success, but he also looks at the reasons that research organization became such a fount of innovation, laying the groundwork for the networked world we now live in.

It’s clear from this volume that the visionary leadership of the researcher turned executive Mervin Kelly played a large role in Bell Labs’ sense of mission and its ability to institutionalize the process of innovation so effectively. Kelly believed that an “institute of creative technology” needed a critical mass of talented scientists — whom he housed in a single building, where physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers were encouraged to exchange ideas — and he gave his researchers the time to pursue their own investigations “sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.”

That freedom, of course, was predicated on the steady stream of revenue provided (in the years before the AT&T monopoly was broken up in the early 1980s) by the monthly bills paid by telephone subscribers, which allowed Bell Labs to function “much like a national laboratory.” Unlike, say, many Silicon Valley companies today, which need to keep an eye on quarterly reports, Bell Labs in its heyday could patiently search out what Mr. Gertner calls “new and fundamental ideas,” while using its immense engineering staff to “develop and perfect those ideas” — creating new products, then making them cheaper, more efficient and more durable.

Given the evolution of the digital world we inhabit today, Kelly’s prescience is stunning in retrospect. “He had predicted grand vistas for the postwar electronics industry even before the transistor,” Mr. Gertner writes. “He had also insisted that basic scientific research could translate into astounding computer and military applications, as well as miracles within the communications systems — ‘a telephone system of the future,’ as he had said in 1951, ‘much more like the biological systems of man’s brain and nervous system.’ ”

Mr. Gertner’s portraits of Kelly and the cadre of talented scientists who worked at Bell Labs are animated by a journalistic ability to make their discoveries and inventions utterly comprehensible — indeed, thrilling — to the lay reader. And they showcase, too, his novelistic sense of character and intuitive understanding of the odd ways in which clashing or compatible personalities can combine to foster intensely creative collaborations.

Mr. Gertner deftly puts these scientists’ work in the context of what was known at the time (and what would rapidly evolve from their initial discoveries in the decades since), even as he describes in remarkably lucid terms the steps by which one discovery led — sometimes by serendipity, sometimes by dogged work — to another, as well as the process by which ideas were turned by imaginative engineers into inventions and eventually into products that could be mass-produced.

Most notably, there’s the team that would win a Nobel Prize for its work on semiconductors and the transistor: the brilliant, aggressive physicist William Shockley (later to become infamous for his unscientific views on race), who “enjoyed finding a hanging thread so he could unravel a problem with a swift, magical pull”; the soft-spoken John Bardeen, who “was content to yank away steadfastly, tirelessly, pulling on various corners of a problem until the whole thing ripped open”; and Walter Brattain, “a skeptical and talkative experimentalist” who played extrovert to Bardeen’s introvert.

Restlessness and curiosity were traits shared by many of Bell Labs’ most creative staff members. Mr. Gertner describes John Robinson Pierce, father of the communications satellite, as an “instigator” who “had too many interests (airplanes, electronics, acoustics, telephony, psychology, philosophy, computers, music, language, writing, art) to focus on any single pursuit” but possessed a knack for pushing others to do their best work.

As for Shannon, the mathematician and engineer whose information theory laid the groundwork for telecommunications and the computer industry, he burned off excess energy by riding his unicycle up and down the long hallways of Bell Labs (sometimes juggling as he rode) and building whimsical machines like a primitive chess computer and an electronic mouse that could learn to navigate a maze, demonstrating the ability of a machine to remember.

Many Bell Labs scientists, including Brattain, Kelly and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles H. Townes, who helped develop the principles of the laser, grew up on farms or in small towns, which Dr. Townes argued were the perfect “training grounds for experimental physics.” Such childhoods, he contended, taught a person how to “pay attention to the natural world, to work with machinery and to know how to solve practical problems and fix things innovatively, with what is on hand.”

Mr. Gertner nimbly captures the collegial atmosphere of Bell Labs and the mood of intellectual ferment — a blending of entrepreneurial zeal, academic inquiry and passion to achieve things that initially seemed technologically impossible — that suffused its New Jersey campuses.

The very success of Bell Labs, he notes, contained the seeds of its destruction. Not only was it producing too many ideas for a single company to handle, but some of its innovations (like the transistor) also altered the technological landscape so much that its core business would be reduced to a mere part of the ever-expanding field of information and electronic technology — a field increasingly dominated by new rivals, with which a post-monopoly AT&T had difficulty competing.

In addition, as a Bell Labs researcher named Andrew Odlyzko observed, the new business environment meant that “unfettered research” was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company, which, in Mr. Gertner’s words, “could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather than a game-changing discovery or invention.”

AT&T’s original mission — to create and maintain a system of modern communications — has largely been fulfilled. And according to Mr. Gertner, the current Bell Labs president, Jeong Kim, believes that the future of communications may be defined by an industry yet to be created: a business that does not simply deliver or search out information, but also somehow manages and organizes the vast flood of data that threatens to overwhelm our lives.

The larger idea, Mr. Gertner concludes, is that “electronic communication is a miraculous development but it is also, in excess, a dehumanizing force. It proves Kelly’s belief that even as new technology solves one problem, it creates others.”

Recent rains give wildlife chance this spring

Tom Stienstra San Francisco Chronicle

From my hiding spot behind a small hill, I watched a pregnant doe, about 70 yards below in a ravine, feast on fresh-sprouted grass. Water streamed off my hat from a steady rain.

Nearby, in a bare patch along a manzanita thicket, another fat doe buried her nose in the wet soil and burrowed for truffles, mushroom-like fungi that are like deer candy.

Standing water pooled up in every depression for miles across the foothills. In a valley, thousands of frogs chirped away. With a windless rain as backdrop, it had a sweet collective sound, like a frog symphony. Grosbeaks and towhees hopped around on the hardwood forest floor, scratched and pecked for food.

For deer and all wildlife, the spring rains are a savior sweeping through the Bay Area and Northern California.

In the next month, roughly 400,000 fawns will be born in California. They will enter a world where their mothers will be healthy and nourished, and the landscape is filled with food and water. Survival rates of fawns have a chance to be very high compared with many past years.

What many people call "the balance of nature" is what scientists call "carrying capacity of habitat." I ran a private wildlife preserve for 15 years and saw the rises and falls of wildlife populations, year after year, based more on weather than anything.

Carrying capacity is the amount of food, water and protective cover that is available for wildlife in a specific habitat. In years with wet, mild springs, the carrying capacity is high, and wildlife health, breeding success and overall nutrition is also high. In severe winters, either drought or an extended hard freeze, the opposite occurs.

With a drought in December and January, the fear was the lack of rain would continue into spring and that plants, grass and trees could induce artificial hibernation and not emerge with fresh growth in February, March and April.

Like in the winter of '92-93, we were looking at catastrophic habitat conditions and low carrying capacity. With that comes stressed pregnant deer, poor nutrition of all wildlife, and disastrous survival rates of fawns and other newborn animals.

The amount of rain this past week has turned the year around for wildlife. The best examples are in the Bay Area's foothills and parks, and in the foothills spanning the Sierra Nevada. Fresh grass, wildflowers and budding hardwoods are exploding across the range. There is unlimited food and water.

During years with heavy rains, scientists have a saying that goes, "Good time to be a plant." For the next month, it is also: "Good time to be a deer."

Fate of the parks director

In the one year and four months since Gov. Jerry Brown was elected, State Parks Director Ruth Coleman faced a long, cold winter over her future. She has emerged this spring with a string of victories and good reason to be reappointed for the duration of Brown's term.

Coleman, who has worked for both Republican and Democratic governors, had a budget imposed on her that would close 70 parks starting July 1 and allow no vacant ranger positions to be filled.

With no new budget money, she and her staff helped negotiate agreements last week that will keep open Castle Rock State Park on the south Peninsula, Plumas-Eureka in the Sierra Nevada and Jug Handle at Fort Bragg. That makes 12 parks taken off the closure list. Coleman also started a search last week for new concession agreements to keep five others open, and outreach continues across the state.

She won many over this past winter when she said limited access would still be permitted at closed parks, and the department will help volunteers look after the parks, similar to U.S. Forest Service trailheads and many regional, county and city parks where rangers are not present.