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- User Name: SacredArrow18
- Member Since: Monday, March 14, 2005, 11:03 PM
- Name: Jenna Hescht
- Studio: AuN Studios
- Location: Ohio, United States
- Homepage: http://www.aunstudios.com/
- Last Login: 2018-11-24 21:31:15
- Forum Info: Profile Posts (466)
- Worthy Banners: 25 worthy banners
- Journal: Last entry made on 2013-07-02 18:54:10
- Usefulness: 341.4 with
139 opinions
[average 119.5 of 231619 opinions; standard deviation 432.3 ]
- Profile: About Myself:
Hi my name is Jenna, I'm 31 almost 32 now. and I am a mother to two beautiful girls Kaitlyn and Hailey.
I've been making anime music videos about 13-15 years or more. Although I haven't been very active at all with all the things we people do in life, but I been trying to get back on the ball with making music videos. I miss making them so been making a few along the way. Since I have no job anymore been trying to keep myself busy with taking care of my daughter, cleaning the house, making flyers for my design/photography business. Been trying to do freelance work, so far it's really slow, but hoping it picks up soon. Anyways I am going to be going to school in the fall to get my bachelors in graphic design, which am hoping will lead me a better job one that I am going to school for.
I also have a twin sister who also makes anime music videos which she also mentions me in her profile as well. Her username is JenCM18 and she is also in AuN Studios so check out her vids too, they are awesome as well.
I am officially joined to AuN Studios and enjoy working with the other editors in the studio. I think we make a very good music video studio.
I LOVE making anime music videos. They are so fun to make when you are really bored and have nothing else to do, but sometimes I get really frustrated making music videos because I get stuck on what scenes to use and having to figure out what effect looks right or not. I am pretty sure everyone gets that way. I try my best though to make music videos because like I said they are fun to make and you can show the emotion and what thought you gave into the music video.
Making music videos is just a hobby of fun, so I pretty much just make them for fun and also with use of my creativeness to make that video as good as possible.
I started up my own business called Jhescht Studios. I am an freelance photographer/graphic designer. Although I mostly work on photography for right now for my business, but do get some design work here and there. I got a few pictures for my photography portfolio, I just need to work on more designs for my design portfolio, so I am hoping I can get some clients here soon for my business so I can start making some extra income to support my family.
Editing Software and Utilities used:
Adobe Premiere CS6 (Finally have the newer version, it's great!)
Adobe Photoshop CS6
Virtual Dub
Here is a NEW list of My favorite music videos I have made in the past year or so.
1.Kimi Ni Todoka - Fallin' For You
2.Puella Magi Madoka Magica - Overboard
3.Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day - Fix You
4.Chrono Crusade - Hurts - Illuminated
5.My Hime - Vanilla Ninja - Battlefield
As for my vids starting with RayearthOVA-EasyRide through Pretear-Inner Universe are my way older vids I had made, so they aren't that really good just letting you know. Don't judge me on my old vids. lol. Those vids have too much overlaying and I have stopped doing that with my newer vids after I had got all the new programs to use. Which I am so thankful for, because I have heightened my experience in amv making. ^_^
My favorite AMV editors (And of course inspired by): Bakadeshi, Silver_Moon, Sierra Lorna, Koopiskeva, SenshiMamoru, Kristyrat, jade_eyed_angel, Niwa-kun, and my sister JenCM18 of course
Music Videos currently working on:
Non-anime music video I had done:
Non-anime: Elektra and Daredevil
Song: "24"
Artist: Jem
Programs Used: Adobe premiere 6.0, Adobe Photoshop 7.0
Effects used:BCC Ray Radience Edges, BCC Edge Lighting, Color Balance, Brightness/Contrast.
Footage: Ripped from the DVDs.
Codec: Xvid [Divx Compatible]
Resolution: 640*352
-Can check this music video out at www.aunstudios.com-
Non-anime: The Hunger Games
Song: "Numb"
Artist: Alanis Morrissette
Programs Used: Adobe premiere 6.0
Effects used: ghosting effect
Footage: Ripped from DVD.
Codec: Xvid [Divx Compatible], MP4
Resolution: 848*420
-Can check this music video out at www.aunstudios.com-
I hope everyone enjoys my videos and to please leave opinions after seeing them. Feedback is very much appreciated.
Last Updated November, 24th, 2018


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Please provide comments to the issue below as part of the 2012 WCB cost model virtual workshop for inclusion in the record. Comments are moderated for conformity to the workshop's guidelines.
Hybrid Cost Proxy Model: The HCPM is built for a narrow-band network. Network sizing in the HCPM is a matter of ensuring sufficient capacity to handle voice calls and provide appropriate levels of call blocking (e.g., using an Erlang model, which is used in telephony as a measure of offered load or carried load on service-providing elements such as telephone circuits or telephone switching equipment).
CQBAT: The CQBAT model sizes the network according to the digital throughput required at the time of peak usage based on a busy-hour offered load. This method is basically the same approach that was taken in the National Broadband Plan modeling.
Questions for Comment
- The general approach to network sizing taken by the CQBAT model appears to be reasonable (deferring the discussion about what value or values are appropriate until later). Is there any reason to deviate from CQBAT's approach? Are there other ways to properly dimension a network that the Connect America Phase II model should use instead?
- Federal Communications Commission, The Broadband Availability Gap, Omnibus Broadband Initiative Technical Paper No. 1, 109-114 (2010), http://www.broadband.gov/plan/broadband-working-reports-technical-papers.html (OBI Technical Paper No. 1).

subset: commoncrawl


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Malcolm wrote:deepbluehum wrote:I realize this thread is about Triyik Yeshe Lama, but the Bonpo Dzogchen practitioner might be interested to know that the Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen text translated as "Heartdrops of the Dharmakaya" is a very useful instruction that covers all the same topics covered in Yeshe Lama, but has the nice feature of not being wordy and being very down to earth. Of course there are those who will disagree, but I feel the description of the view in the section on Trekcho is very good. I have had the transmissions of many Dzogchen texts and I find myself coming back to "Heartdrops" more and more, especially as my practice develops, I find its simplicity to be easy to read when you need a short glance and don't want to get too heady into information.
Many years ago, in 1992, ChNN advised us not to look at thogal texts prior to receiving total instructions. So people in the DC should not read that or any other togal text just because they feel like it. They should wait until ChNN or some other qualified master can bestow the teaching on them in a proper way.
My point about availability is a little different, however. I feel the text classical texts should be available, since to a large extent they are self-secret. But this does not mean people should just go ahead and read them without having had the instruction from a qualified teacher. If they do, there is a good chance they will create obstacles for their practice. So people should be mature.
Tashi delek,
In addition to Deepbluehum's contribution of Heart drops of Dharmakaya by Shardza Tashi Rinpoche and translated by Lopon Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, here the reason why Lopon Lak did publish that text:
Od gsal rdzogs pa chen po'i lam gyi rim pa khrid yig kun tu bzang po'i snying tig shes bya ba zhugs
1. The Bonpo Dzogchen Guardians have ordered the Masters to teach it openly
2. Dzogchen Teachings are an open secret i.e. if one has no capacity then one will not be able to understand them and will not be interested in reading
3. For those who have the capacity and connection, it may bring great benefit by providing a link to the text and Master which they can then follow if they wish to enter the way of dzogchen
4. It is clearly stated in the text that if one wishes to put these Teachings into practice then just reading the book is not enough. One must find and follow an authentic Master.
So reading is different than doing the practice. i guess it is always good to have some knowledge before one gets started.
Mutsog marro


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Hamptons Overdrive
holden steinberg
While much of America worries about foreclosure, John Paulson, who made $3.7 billion shorting subprime mortgages, has plunked down $41.3 million for a Southampton estate. Another just went (to Tiger Woods?) for $60 million. And Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman is building a vast compound in Water Mill. But, amid whispers about which Wall Street casualties will lose their summer spreads, the market for properties below $10 million is grim. Michael Shnayerson checks the real-estate temperature of the country's most celebrated summer retreat to see if its mere mega-millionaires are about to take a cold dip.
One week not long ago, a strange transferal of property occurred in one of the Hamptons' choicest enclaves. The country's most celebrated summer retreat, where two-bedroom cottages near the Atlantic go for $5 million and up, and weekenders driving from Manhattan on the Long Island Expressway in their Porsche 911 Carreras are poor compared with the ones flying out overhead, might seem impervious to the U.S. real-estate woes so deeply felt everywhere else. But no. Even in the high-hedged estate section of Southampton—the old-society Hampton—a little turbulence could be felt in what happened to Old Trees.
Old Trees is a gated estate of 10.4 acres—a private park, really—with a 15,000-square-foot 1911 Georgian mansion, guesthouse, barn, pool, and tennis court overlooking Lake Agawam, in the heart of Southampton Village. Last fall, after it had languished some months on the market at $48 million, Rodney Propp, a 43-year-old Manhattan-based real-estate investor, offered $39.2 million and, on November 20, 2007, signed a contract of sale.
Propp had done well—very well—in part by buying up residential buildings in Harlem during the last decade and presiding over the area's gentrification. But as the stock market's autumn swoon deepened, and the subprime-mortgage crisis metastasized, Propp's plans for Old Trees seemed to founder. He had gone into the deal thinking he'd keep the main house for his family but possibly sell off two lots of the compound—one with the guesthouse, tennis court, and pool; the other with the barn—together totaling 2.8 acres. "He wanted $15 million for the two lots," says a developer who was approached to buy one. "But everyone felt he'd take $12 million." Even then, Propp would end up with a princely Southampton domain of seven-plus acres for under $30 million. In the Southampton estate section, that's not bad.
But no one stepped up to buy the shavings from Old Trees—at any price. By mid-March, when Bear Stearns imploded, not one bid had yet come in, and the world looked very different than it had in November.
Propp could not be reached for comment, but family considerations, a source close to him says, came into play: Propp has three pre-school-age children, and a wife who was finishing law school, and the prospect of taking on Old Trees' staff of four, not to mention furnishing its 22 bedrooms, suddenly seemed daunting. Whatever the incentive, Propp wanted out. To his relief, the greatest Wall Street winner of 2007 wanted in.
John "J.P." Paulson, 52, had just made $3.7 billion shorting the subprime-mortgage market: betting tens of millions of dollars it would go bust. His was thought to be the highest annual compensation on Wall Street—ever. Happily for Propp, he took a liking to Old Trees.
Thus, on the last day of March 2008, Rodney Propp became the owner of Old Trees for $39.2 million, only to sell it four days later to Paulson for almost the same sum plus transfer tax—in all, a reported $41.3 million. Paulson, a shy, smooth-faced family man and father of two young daughters, was taking possession of his house as millions of Americans were losing theirs. The Harlem developer was off the hook on a $4 million down payment, with a little change in his pocket to boot. Now, like so many other Hamptons buyers and sellers, he could watch and wait for the market to bottom out.
But when would that happen? And how low would that bottom be?
"Stuck in the Mud"
In hindsight, which is the only sight there is in real estate, the giddy Hamptons market hit its peak three years ago this month. That was when any fool who'd paid $2 million for a house a few years before was doubling or tripling his money. Every carpenter and electrician was a spec-house builder, and all their wives were brokers, and the similarity to shoeshine boys trading stock tips in 1929 was lost on all. As sales flattened through 2006 and 2007 for houses in the $1-million-to-$9-million range—which is to say, for 90 percent of the market in this privileged preserve—the story was obscured, not merely by brokers eager to keep the party going, but also by the headline-grabbing sales of houses at the high end. That changed last March. "Once Bear Stearns happened," says one real-estate broker, "the high end came to a screeching halt." (See Bryan Burrough's story beginning on page 106, "Bringing Down Bear Stearns," about the fall of the famed investment bank.)
True, the odd billionaire such as Paulson kept shopping for a grand estate, impervious to the market's swings. But overall the numbers were dismal. For Southampton Town—a broad area including Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, and Sagaponack—the number of houses sold in the first quarter of 2008 was 225, down from 337 in the first quarter of 2007. In East Hampton Town—the rest of the way east from Wainscott to Montauk—the drop was as precipitous: 100 houses sold in the first quarter of 2008, down from 160 the year before. Worse, the latest figures marked a 50 percent decline from the market's peak. Those houses that did sell in the winter and spring of 2008 went for 20 to 25 percent less than they would have fetched a year before. Thousands more sat unsold. "The market isn't moving," as Molly Ferrer of Sotheby's International Realty puts it. "It's sort of stuck in the mud."
Hamptons mud is some of the richest in America, and so is its real-estate market, isolated to a great extent from the rest of the country's pain. But mud is still mud. "You do have plenty of sellers who don't need to sell, buyers who don't need to buy, and it causes a stalemate," says Pam Liebman, C.E.O. of the Corcoran Group, the largest of the Hamptons brokerages. "A lot of sellers will put their houses on the market at an overreaching price, and buyers won't touch them."
"What I see is an enormous amount of cash on the sidelines, a lot of people watching," says Scott Strough, whose homegrown Hamptons brokerage vies with Corcoran for Wall Street buyers. "I heard from one guy the other day, 'My portfolio is down 38 percent,' and when you're sitting on $150 million—you do the math. That guy is not talking about buying a house for $15 million right now.
"I've had another kind of reluctant buyer," Strough adds, "the guy who's the head of a large Wall Street firm. He says, 'How can I spend $40 million on a house when I'm about to lay off 2,500 people?' "
Certainly the layoffs at many Wall Street firms—and fears of more to come—made a cold spring in the Hamptons seem even chillier. "I've just gotten my first Bear Stearns listing," one broker confided in a whisper to a colleague not long after the firm collapsed. If 20,000 people had lost their jobs on Wall Street, another broker, Town & Country's Judi Desiderio, speculated, and even 10 percent of them owned homes in the Hamptons, that would be 2,000 people. "Let's say only 10 percent of those owned houses on the high end—that's 200 people. Let's say just 20 percent of those owned houses south of the highway between Bridgehampton and Sagaponack and Water Mill and they all bought their houses for between $3 million and $5 million. That would be 40 houses now put on the market at $10 to $15 million."
"I did lose a lot of money," sighs one former Bear Stearns director with a house in Sagaponack south of the highway. But, he adds, "I just turned 60. I've been working since I was 13. I don't necessarily need to work. From my personal point of view, this means I might not fly on a private jet, but I'll still fly first-class. I'm not cutting back on my personal trainer or housekeeper." And, he says, he's not selling his house. "Maybe my kids might have to work more in the long run," he muses, "but it's not going to change my lifestyle."
Real-estate connoisseur Rodney Propp considered whittling down his $39.2 million outlay on Old Trees by selling the guesthouse and barn for $15 million. Instead, four days after buying it, he sold the entire Southampton estate to subprime shorter John "J.P." Paulson.
A younger Bear Stearns alum with a place in Sagaponack says he too will get by without selling his house: "I have a mortgage, but not a major one. It doesn't keep me up nights." He did have a high-profile wedding not long ago, and he doesn't know what his next job move will be—after more than 20 years at Bear Stearns, he doesn't see a "compatible role" for himself, as he puts it dryly, at J. P. Morgan Chase, the firm that acquired Bear Stearns for pennies on the dollar. But if anything, his Hamptons house is a plus in the picture. "Anyone who took stock out of Bear Stearns to buy real estate is better for having done that," he says. "At least the money wasn't sitting there going down to nothing."
Not all of his colleagues are so sanguine. "I do have clients who worked at Bear Stearns—husband and wife both worked there," says Lynda Ireland of Prudential Douglas Elliman. "They'd finally found a beautiful home they loved, and they bought it." The house is in Bridgehampton, in the $2 million range. "Now they may have to sell it. They've told me it's not that they're afraid of being foreclosed upon. But they're frightened. They have a big apartment in New York, and they feel they have to choose between New York and out here—they can't carry both. And they have small children, so they want to be in New York for the kids. It's very sad."
Bad news has brought the bottom-feeders; every broker has a story. "The worst was one who said, 'I know it's a distressed market—show me somebody who's bleeding,' " one broker reports. "And of course you want to say, 'Please get out of my car now.' " Instead, the shark in the passenger seat nosed around and made low offers on four houses in the $1.5-million-to-$2-million range. "Three of the four [owners] said go to hell," the broker recounts. "The fourth said, 'I hate this, but I need the money.' It was actually a very amicable transaction after we agreed on the number. They were both very nice people, and it turned out they had friends in common."
That's a rare happy ending for a bottom-feeder story. One New York woman who owns a good-sized business has driven Hamptons brokers to distraction with her relentless lowballing. "She's still looking!" one broker groans. "Am I taking her out? Only when I have to!" Another broker tells of his firm showing at least 200 properties to a Wall Street guy who finally chose 2 or 3—and made offers of 50 cents on the dollar. "This isn't an isolated case," the broker sighs. "We call them the undertakers."
The undertakers' fondest scenario, the word they mutter like a mantra, is foreclosure. Last May, the New York Post ran an article headlined trouble in paradise: foreclosures looming for the hamptons' poshest pads. The story was hyped, to say the least. None of the handful of homeowners the Post cited had actually been foreclosed upon. They'd received notices of delinquency in their mortgage payments; if they didn't act, their banks would foreclose at some point. The headlines brought back memories of the early 1990s, when some Hamptons properties in foreclosure did get sold on the steps of Town Hall. So far this year, not one foreclosure sale has occurred east of the Shinnecock Canal, the dividing line between the low-rent Hamptons (West Hampton and Hampton Bays) and the glamorous ones. The proportion of Hamptons mortgage holders who got notices between January and late May, notes Pat Ammirati of the Real Estate Report, a company that tracks Long Island foreclosures, is dramatically smaller than that of most areas of the country, and most of the 160 delinquents appear to be working-class families lured into subprime mortgages. (Shockingly, some working-class families do still live in the Hamptons.) Nevertheless, a few owners of big Hamptons houses will likely lose them at some point.
"We'll be in for at least a year, but they've initiated foreclosure," says one homeowner, who received a notice from the bank this spring after his financial business faltered and he fell behind on mortgage payments. Initially he put his house on the market at nearly $3 million. "Now I'm taking it down to closer to $2 million," he says of his capacious home. "If I can get out from under it at $1.7 million I'd be thrilled—just to unload it before the bank grabs it." Yet even with the price reduction, he says, "the only people who come by are the brokers. They don't come in with any clients at all. The house market over $10 million is flying, and anything under $1 million, everyone wants to get in. But anything between $1 million and $10 million, you sit and churn. It's dead."
White-Elephant Blues
The elite sector—actually quite a bit higher than $10 million, more like $20 million and up—seems the only happy slice of the market these days. At about the time Old Trees sold, rumors swirled that a mansion on Southampton's oceanfront Gin Lane that had once belonged to producer Marty Richards, of Chicago fame, had sold to pro golfer Tiger Woods after sitting on the market for merely a month at $65 million. A media scrum descended, with helicopters overhead, until Woods denied the story and the rumor changed. Now the buyer was said to be hedge-funder David "Tiger" Williams. But that story was shot down, too. The buyer is, as usual for trophy Hamptons properties, a cryptic limited-liability company (L.L.C.)—South Lane Properties. Determining who ended up paying $60 million for the mansion has become Southampton's parlor game for the summer. "Actually, I've heard it's Tiger Woods after all," says developer Kim Pape, who with her husband, Phil, builds some of the best of the grand new houses in Southampton's estate section. "The seller told someone who told me." (Neither Tiger Woods's representatives nor South Lane Properties responded to queries.)
Even at the elite end, though, many Southampton properties are sitting—and sitting. At those prices, the slightest deterrent can be fatal. Canadian publishing magnate Louise McBain had no luck selling her oceanfront Stanford White house on Gin Lane for $70 million. (The property does have a history of beach erosion.) Former Warnaco C.E.O. Linda Wachner has had her Meadow Lane property on the market in the $60 million range for two years. ("It's overpriced, and Linda's hard to deal with," says one broker.) And the 15.4-acre Howard Gittis estate, on Southampton's Ox Pasture Road, which went on the market after the right-hand man to Revlon's Ronald Perelman died in his sleep last year, remains orphaned at $59 million. Perhaps the estate's lack of a water view is to blame. "If there was water, it would be more salable," says one broker. "When you're up in those numbers people like water."
John Paulson has put his three-acre Southampton estate on the market for $l9.5 million—an "aggressive" price, as brokers put it—just two years after he acquired it for $l2.75 million from former Esprit head of operations Jurgen Friedrich, who buys and sells big Hamptons houses as a hobby. So far, no takers. A buyer will have to like the somewhat cheesy indoor swimming pool with child-friendly slide, and the semicircular master bedroom that feels like the prow of a ship, not to mention a claustrophobic guest bedroom whose window faces a shingled outbuilding only inches away.
For most high rollers, such as private-equity mogul Stephen Schwarzman, the better solution is to build new compounds of their own, the farther from stuffy Southampton the better.
Every day now, dozens of construction trucks turn south off the Montauk Highway at Water Mill's quaint green and rumble a quarter-mile or so to an unprepossessing turnoff called Mohawk Avenue. "Avenue" is a misnomer, since the road ends a quarter-mile farther down, at the northern end of Mecox Bay. There, past relatively modest, new houses that fill former fields, lies the tree-enclosed spread that once belonged to the farmer who worked those fields. Now it belongs to Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group chairman and C.E.O., who's once again living up to his reputation for transforming his trophy properties—history be damned—into baronial dwellings built just for him.
Like Paulson, Schwarzman is the rare Wall Street player who avoided disaster last year: Blackstone's I.P.O. of June 2007 enriched him, on paper at least, by about $7 billion, even though that has now shrunk to between $4 and $4.5 billion. He'd been drawn to the Water Mill site not only by its lovely specimen trees and old farmhouse and its 300-degree views of Mecox Bay—but also by its social pedigree. The house had been owned for years by Carter and Susan Burden, one of New York's most glamorous couples. Carter, a "progressive patrician," as his New York Timesobituary proclaimed him when he died prematurely at 54, in l996, was a direct descendant of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt's and had made his own mark as a New York City councilman, owner of The Village Voice, philanthropist, and man-about-town. Schwarzman loves trophy names: his wife, Christine, is a Hearst by a previous marriage, and his triplex at 740 Park Avenue was once owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. A Vanderbilt house would fit right in.
In fact, Schwarzman nearly lost the house to Edgar Bronfman Jr. When Susan Burden put it on the market at $32 million, the Seagram heir and Warner Music chairman offered the full asking price. Bronfman had just missed out on a $25 million house on nearby Sagg Pond by refusing to contemplate a bid of more than $23.5 million, only to see another buyer snap the house up. He was determined not to let this one get away. Yet Schwarzman countered with $34 million—$2 million over the asking price!—and won the deal. Bronfman was heartsick until he heard that the Sagg Pond deal had fallen through and the irritated seller had taken his house off the market. With the negotiating savvy for which he'd become so well known, Bronfman went back to that owner and insisted on buying his house after all—for $31 million.
Schwarzman has a funny way of appreciating the pedigree he purchases. About the only visible evidence of the old Burden place that remains on the 9.9-acre property is the oak trees—though many of those have been moved—and the modest boathouse. Scores of workmen spend their days erecting half a dozen structures that will provide the Schwarzmans with roughly 20,000 square feet of interior space. A "sports barn" will have roughly 5,500 square feet, a carriage house 3,000 square feet, the greenhouse l,400 square feet, a garage 1,200 square feet, the pool house 1,040. As for the Burdens' main house, its interior designed by the late Mark Hampton, no outside trace of it remains. Schwarzman's wife, Christine, according to one friend, wanted the gracious old house to stay, and there was some talk of keeping it. (The Schwarzmans have no comment.) But in the end Schwarzman received permission for a "partial interior demolition," as well as a complete demolition of the pool house, shed, garage studio, pool, tennis court, and greenhouse. In fact, the house appears to be encased within the brand-new, if traditional, structure that dominates the site. That structure is so big, with l3,000 square feet of living space, that it looks less like a house than a Thanksgiving-parade float.
Perhaps it's just a coincidence that Peter G. Peterson, co-founder with Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group, has a weekend place on Mecox Bay, too. Or perhaps not. At 82, Peterson was once a father figure of sorts to the 61-year-old Schwarzman, but the relationship is not what it was, and some friends of Peterson and his wife, Sesame Street creator Joan Ganz Cooney, have discerned in Schwarzman's quest for control of the firm an Oedipal instinct. Peterson's Water Mill house is large but hardly grandiose. Schwarzman's place, when it's finished, in a year or less, will dwarf it. Blackstone spokesman Peter Rose says the notion of real-estate rivalry is absurd. "This is the longest partnership on Wall Street It's survived any number of little Pekingese yapping at their heels about a rivalry."
Ironically, Peterson moved to his current house from a much bigger one, right on the ocean dunes, some years ago. (Cooney had found the roar of the ocean disturbing and wanted a view of still water instead.) Shrewd deal-maker though he is, he never imagined that the $11 million he got for that house would look meager a decade or so later. But it does. After a renovation so thorough it amounts to a teardown, the old Peterson place is now back on the market—at $80 million, making it the most expensive house for sale in the Hamptons. "That's ridiculous," says Cooney when apprised of it. "How could it possibly be worth $80 million?"
Late one afternoon, Sotheby's Harald Grant does his best to answer that question with a private tour that starts at the gates of the 11-acre estate and leads up a long driveway, past half a dozen gardeners, to the new, l3,500-square-foot house, traditional in style with a slate roof and stone and cedar siding, by Kurt Andresson, the Hamptons' highest high-end builder. Everything inside is very … solid. Doors as thick as those of bank vaults. Dark-wood floors that never creak. The lowest of four levels has a private theater as plush as any Hollywood screening room. The top floor is taken up entirely by the master suite, with two lavish bathrooms—hers with a huge tub overlooking the pond and farm field behind the house—and his-and-her offices. Beyond the master bedroom's balcony, the Atlantic's rollers crash dramatically—but without any sound. Thanks to steel-reinforced walls and double-glazed windows, the silence inside is absolute.
So is the security. Video monitors offer ceaseless scrutiny of every outside view, one after another. If an interloper manages to evade the cameras and somehow get inside, he will face other high-tech security measures. Grant is forbidden to say who the security-conscious seller is, but a memo left on a desk in the master suite suggests he's a top venture capitalist at J. P. Morgan Partners. You've never heard of him. He's just another of those quiet Hamptons plutocrats who live in homes like these. Except that he doesn't. "That's why they're selling it," Grant says of the mystery sellers. "They never use it."
Supersize Me
Compared with the old Peterson place, the McMansions that litter Bridgehampton are mere cottages, often built not terribly well on spec by small-time builders hoping to double their money. North of the highway, especially, most of the newest McMansions sit unsold in former potato fields, their builders unwilling as yet to lop $3 million off their inflated $9 million price tags.
The king of the big-house builders, though, is riding the downturn with ease—or so he says. Joe Farrell, 45, still works out of a little office overlooking Bridgehampton's Main Street. Only his houses are huge: anywhere up to 17,000 square feet. A former trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange, Farrell realized 13 years ago that his Wall Street peers didn't have the time or patience to personalize their houses. They wanted big, they wanted it fast, and they wanted to walk in to find everything done. Farrell saw that in building big, bigger was better. "If my competitor had a 9-foot ceiling, I had a 10-foot ceiling. If my competitor had a two-car garage, I had a three-car garage. I was the first guy to finish basements, unbelievably. Then we went to elevators and steam rooms and wine cellars."
Now Farrell has partnered with the Carlyle Group, giving him access to as much as $100 million in funds to construct more new houses. It's as if the Hamptons have been not just exploited but securitized. Still, Farrell admits he's cut way back. Of the 24 mansions he's building, only 5 are going up on spec. "I used to have 10 spec, 12 spec. And we're going to keep it around 5. Only when we sell one will we buy land for another. In the old days if it was a good deal, we'd buy without reloading."
To scrape by, many builders for the first time in memory listed their new houses for summer rental. They asked six figures, and found a lot of takers, for when house sales are down in the Hamptons, the demand for rentals is up. Even Farrell has joined the trend: last fall, when confronted by the first-ever of his spec houses that failed to sell, he rented it—for $600,000.
"You can get a nice house in Bridgehampton with tennis court for $250,000," says Corcoran's Susan Breitenbach of the 2008 summer-rental market. "But north of the highway. To get the same house south of the highway, you need to spend $350,000 to $400,000." In Sag Harbor, a young Wall Street banker paid $395,000 for a waterfront rental this summer—about $250,000 more than anyone's paid in Sag Harbor before. On East Hampton's elegant Middle Lane, one house rented for $450,000. On the same street, even the house of murdered investment banker Ted Ammon rented for $275,000. The 2001 tragedy, followed by the 2003 death from cancer of his widow, Generosa—who had married Danny Pelosi, eventually convicted of Ammon's murder—left the two Ammon children, now teenagers, as titled owners of the house. Their onetime English nanny, who has the right of lifetime tenancy, is said to be cut in on the rent. "Everybody's suing everybody," says one person close to the situation, "and it really is a mess."
How long ago it seems that rock musician Sting, in 1996, set a record for Hamptons summer rentals by paying $100,000 for a mansion on East Hampton's Further Lane! This year the record appears to have been set in Sagaponack, where a builder-broker named Andrew Saunders coyly asked $1 million for the summer for his McMansion on 4.1 acres on Parsonage Lane, ensuring enough buzz that it went for $700,000. At the same time, he set a purchase price of $19.9 million. Because the house is well built—and perhaps helped by a bit of luck—he got an offer close to his asking price from a European buyer. The renters were upset to learn the house had been sold out from under them. Sotheby's Beate Moore admits they said, "If we had been in the house, it's very likely we would have bought it."
Europeans are circling, that much is for sure. A sign in the window of the Loaves & Fishes Cookshop catering business on Bridgehampton's Main Street says it all: we accept euros. (At Loaves & Fishes' wildly extravagant food shop in Sagaponack, the price of lobster salad, always the annual benchmark for Hamptons excess, is thus either $100 or 63 euros per pound this season.) Prudential's Jane Gill, a former Ralph Lauren model, reports "a lot of Germans, a lot of Brits" for high-end rentals. "A hundred thousand dollars is nothing to them."
In Sagaponack a generation ago, writers gathered on the front porch of novelist James Jones's Victorian farmhouse, on the town's wide and graceful thoroughfare to the beach, Sagg Main: Truman Capote, William Gaddis, Willie Morris, John Knowles, Irwin Shaw, and others. Now all are dead, and so is Jones's famously feisty widow, Gloria, whose memorial service at the house two summers ago brought an era to an end. A frail Kurt Vonnegut spoke then; now he's gone, too. The original 1860 house seemed to join them, but when the construction dust cleared last spring, a complete restoration appeared instead on the hilltop, like a vision of hope, green-designed from roof peak to cellar by owner/builder Peter Sabbeth and his conveniently named wife, Melissa Green, of Modern Green Home. A late July opening gala to benefit the Peconic Land Trust is scheduled; soon after, Sabbeth hopes to sell the house for $12 to $14 million to a green-minded hedge-fund manager with too much green to worry about the downturn. (Jones would be astonished.) Perhaps no era ever ends exactly: Peter Matthiessen still lives at the ocean end of Sagg Main, vigorous at 81, having just published his 900-page masterpiece, Shadow Country. But hardly any writers under 60 can afford Sagaponack—or anywhere else in the Hamptons—anymore. One of the few is Jay McInerney, 53, who, unlike Stephen Schwarzman, is married to a true Hearst—Anne—and lives with her in Water Mill on a property called Ashgrove Farm with an emu, a wallaby, a parrot, and various dogs.
With its farm-field views and country-store cuteness, Sagaponack appeals to a broad range, from screenwriter William Goldman to singer Billy Joel, and offers the priciest real estate, acre for acre, in the Hamptons. Because of that, the standoff between sellers and buyers here is most intense, and most properties—those, that is, between $3 million and $10 million—are, as a result, going unsold. The prices are so high that even when they're lowered, buyers hold back. One longtime resident of Sagg Main Street put his three-and-a-half-acre property up for sale not long ago at $6.9 million—a not unreasonable price, considering it has a tennis court and an artist's studio, and Sagaponack land south of the highway usually goes for at least $2 million an acre. When no bids came in, he lowered the price to $5.7 million. Still no bids. Now it's off the market. Around him, like the last twitchings of a slain giant, four new houses are going up, three on spec.
The pressure on Sagaponack's last farm fields may be less intense than it was three years ago, but not by much. The Whites, a prominent farming family, recently protected 34 more acres of their oceanfront land just to the east of Sagg Main (46 acres of White land were already protected) by selling the development rights to the town of Southampton, which had to pay $19 million for those rights. Throughout the Hamptons, communities have used proceeds from the infamous 2 percent property-transfer tax to buy and preserve open land. But those coffers are almost bare, at least for now, and the campaign, while very successful, has had the perverse effect of driving up land prices.
One of Sagaponack's most beautiful fields, on the road to Gibson Beach, is now up for grabs as a result. A new owner has indicated he's open to selling the land for preservation instead of development. "But this is a tough piece of property to get the public to want to protect," explains John Halsey, of the Peconic Land Trust. "It's so extremely valuable, and you're not dealing with a farm family. There's clearly a finite amount of public money available.… It's hard to justify a big purchase here." The likeliest scenario by next year: six new houses on that gorgeous 17-acre field.
A quarter-mile away along the ocean, industrialist Ira Rennert has settled into his lavishly landscaped 63-acre fiefdom. The trees don't quite obscure one of America's largest private dwellings—more than 100,000 square feet, including various outbuildings—but local fears that Rennert would use his compound as a Zionist synagogue have proved groundless. Rennert's once ghastly environmental record has improved—both his lead operation in Missouri and his magnesium plant in Utah have reduced their pollutants—and a whopping suit by the E.P.A. has been turned back for now. True, Rennert's metal mining operation in Peru remains one of the world's 10 worst polluted places, according to the Blacksmith Institute, and 99 percent of the children in its vicinity have significantly high levels of lead in their blood. But that's out of sight and mind in Sagaponack, where the 74-year-old Rennert is viewed now as a benign presence, and certainly a shrewd land speculator: the reported $11 million he paid in the mid-90s for those 63 acres is chicken feed today.
The Great Wall of Sagaponack
Doubtless to Rennert's relief, the new bad boy of Sagaponack is a neighbor to the east: William Macklowe, the 40-year-old son of hard-hit real-estate magnate Harry Macklowe. Last year, the father-and-son team took on nearly $7 billion of debt to buy seven office towers just as the subprime crisis was about to freeze the credit markets. Their precipitous fall into near insolvency ended in late May with the sale of their crown jewel, the General Motors Building, on Fifth Avenue, and three other Manhattan office towers for $3.95 billion to a group headed by developer (and East Hampton neighbor) Mort Zuckerman. Though the deal shrunk his empire considerably, Macklowe père maintains his Georgica Pond mansion—and Macklowe fils is building a vast contemporary house near the ocean in Sagaponack that has his neighbors up in arms.
It's not the size of the house—about 12,000 square feet—that has some neighbors incensed. It's the concrete wall which runs 217 feet in length, nearly as long as a city block, and stands roughly 16 feet high. The house looks oceanward; the wall is attached to its rear. "The arrogance to build that wall!" marvels Hamptons chronicler Steven Gaines, author of Philistines at the Hedgerowfame. "On a potato field!" Doubtless it will provide privacy and serenity to Billy and Julie Macklowe and their guests, once the scores of workmen swarming over the site are done. (Macklowe declined to comment to Vanity Fair.) But it also blocks the ocean view for passersby. (About 12 years ago neighbor Martha Stewart got so irked by Macklowe senior's view-blocking hedge of trees, planted on her land, that she removed some of them, precipitating a bitter feud.) Oddly, when the Macklowe house plans were reviewed in 2006, they were deemed "non-substantial." That meant they were reviewed and approved by merely one member of the Architectural Review Board. Normally, a project as large and untypical as Macklowe's house would have come before the whole board. Why didn't it? Unfortunately, the member who approved it, architect Michael Tortorice, can't answer that question: he died, prematurely, in the spring of 2007.
Nothing so grand is going up in Sag Harbor—the onetime whaling village that has long drawn writers, editors, and artists—but only because the village plots are too small. That puts a premium on the town's historic homes, especially on Main Street, where the largest of the whaling captains' houses was on the market not long ago for $9 million—a shockingly high price for a town that languished apart from the rest of the Hamptons for decades. Yet already that record has been broken: Christie Brinkley, supermodel and ex-wife of Billy Joel, recently paid nearly $10 million for a waterfront North Haven house, originally built in 1805, with a view of downtown Sag Harbor. It's a new phase after the collapse of her marriage to architect Peter Cook; as part of the change, Brinkley's old Bridgehampton house, famous for its castle tower, north of Scuttlehole Road, is on the market for $30 million. Now even that seems low: at the far end of North Haven, just to the right of the Shelter Island ferry slip, lie the densely forested 55 acres of Tyndal Point, its houses overgrown and dilapidated, but with so much potential, for the right person with $75 million.
Still, the town's most expensive properties are the floating ones. To the stupefaction of longtime locals, Sag Harbor now looks like St. Tropez by midsummer, its modest marina filled with mega-yachts more than 100 feet long. The yacht of Florida sugar baron Pepe Fanjul appears regularly. New York developer Larry Silverstein, leaseholder of the Ground Zero site, brings his Silver Shalis here. Tiger Woods has been in and out, as has Jim Simons, the code breaker turned quant hedge-fund manager who earned $2.8 billion last year, by trading with complex mathematical programs. Leslie Wexner, of the Limited Brands clothing empire, used to dock up here, too, recalls Bruce Tait, who runs an eponymous yacht-chartering-and-sales operation on the Sag Harbor wharf, but then his boats got too big. Now he's relegated to the Mediterranean in the summer.
Every summer night, crowds spill down from Sag Harbor's crescent-shaped Main Street to the wharf to gawk at the big boats and revel in some sense of Hamptons-ness—though what exactly that is, they never seem quite sure. Now they may be on the verge of loving the town to death. From afar, the big-box chains have noted the numbers. In September, the first of them, CVS, is due to open a 17,000-square-foot store near the water. The mega-pharmacy may well kill the town's family-owned five-and-ten, which sells toiletries, as well as the small Main Street pharmacy. Neither could compete on price with mighty CVS. With the town at a tipping point, New York lawyer and Sag Harbor homeowner Duncan Darrow took out full-page ads in the local paper, blasting CVS and stirring locals to action. "Save Sag Harbor" now has more than 100 members and land-use lawyers drafting a zoning plan that may yet thwart other big-boxers. Whether CVS gets in under the wire to take the space it has leased will be clear all too soon.
For sheer bragging rights, the biggest number in Hamptons real estate still belongs to Ron Baron. He's the mutual-fund guy who last year paid $103 million for 40 acres of oceanfront land on East Hampton's Further Lane—the estate long owned by Adelaide de Menil Carpenter, heiress to the Schlumberger oil fortune. But that story has taken a new twist.
Baron, 65, started in 2001 with an adjacent, 11-acre compound closer to Two Mile Hollow Beach. He was appalled to learn he'd just paid $23 million to live next to the Hamptons' notorious gay beach, where nighttime activity in the dunes was quite robust. He tried everything from rallying the neighbors to having the beach policed, to employing private security patrols. Recently he just knocked his house down and had another one built farther from the dunes of sin, this one a 30,000-square-foot mansion designed by the architectural firm of Hart/Howerton. As of Memorial Day, armies of workmen were rushing, as at the Macklowe place in Sagaponack, to finish the house for summer—a Hamptons real-estate game pioneered by Ronald Perelman, who famously bought the old Ossorio estate on East Hampton's Georgica Pond and had it re-done in six weeks. Baron's new house is to be given the old-money look by society decorator Bunny Williams; it is said to have a full-size basketball court in the high-ceilinged basement, perhaps a fantasy come true for the New Jersey–born Baron.
Baron's purchase price for the de Menil estate may have seemed insane, but Paul Brennan, the sage of Hamptons brokers, still thinks Baron got a bargain. "When you look at what he got for his money, it wasn't that expensive. An acre south of the highway with a little teardown would be at least $2 million. An acre on the ocean? At least $5 million."
Both buyer and seller faced a curious dilemma. De Menil Carpenter—whose grandfather Conrad Schlumberger built, with his brother, one of Houston's largest oil fortunes, and whose late mother, Dominique, founded the city's Menil Collection museum—had saved 14 far-flung historic houses and put them on her Further Lane estate. She didn't want to sell them, too. Fortunately, Baron didn't want to keep them. But what then to do with them? One day last year, East Hampton locals gawked as six of the houses rolled down Montauk Highway to be placed around the town's tiny municipal building. De Menil Carpenter had agreed to pay for their transport and endow their re-siting as new town offices. (Another five have since found other town homesteads nearby.) Only in the Hamptons would a buyer be happier to buy land without a dozen historic houses than with them.
Now it seems that Baron has a spin-off plan like the one that Rodney Propp tried to carry out with Old Trees. The easternmost 10 or so acres of the property are being hedged off and landscaped to be sold. One broker says the price of the oceanfront plot will be $85 million. If Baron can get anything close to that, he'll not only recoup most of his cost but boost the value of his remaining acres by tens of millions of dollars. That may be a tall order. Scarce as oceanfront is, one of the few available parcels near Baron is sitting unsold at $24.5 million. It's a house that used to belong to Washington lobbyist Liz Robbins and former newscaster Doug Johnson. They sold it in February 2007, after listing it for $15.5 million, to a Texan who thought he could flip it for a fast profit. Now it's languishing. "In a good market it would be gone," says Prudential's Ray Smith, who has the listing. "Still, if you want to buy in East Hampton there's no inventory on the ocean! The next stop is $40 million. At $24.5 million, this is a deal!"
Famed architect Stanford White's Seven Sisters houses, in Montauk, are now occupied by, among others, artist Julian Schnabel and photographer Bruce Weber.
One rumor has Baron selling the $85 million spin-off to Steven Cohen, the Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge-fund mega-billionaire. Cohen did buy an $18 million Further Lane house (built by Joe Farrell) last year. But a spokesperson says any talk of Cohen's extending his domain is just wishful thinking.
Certainly Cohen is indicative of the buyers who are still shopping, unperturbed by the downturn. All up and down Further Lane, new money is supplanting old. Reed Krakoff, executive creative director of Coach, has spent 18 months renovating Lasata, the onetime summer home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's paternal grandparents, and more recently the home of New York socialite Miriam Fitzsimmons Meehan. About the same time Baron bought the de Menil place, the old Tyson estate, just east of it, went to adman and TV talk-show host Donny Deutsch, for $29 million. On nearby Lily Pond, however, old money isn't letting itself be pushed around.
The pond and its gently sloping meadow are a precious glimpse into the East Hampton of old—one of the village's last sylvan settings. Neighbors assumed the meadow was preserved in perpetuity—after all, wasn't it staked with Peconic Land Trust signs? But the late industrialist and conservative philanthropist John M. Olin, it turns out, only put this portion of his land into a 30-year "scenic enjoyment easement." Last fall, when that easement ended, five of his grown grandchildren moved to subdivide the land. The plan they've proposed would carve the 20-acre meadow into five 4-acre lots. Most directly affected would be the neighbors, who include director Steven Spielberg, writers Nick Pileggi and Nora Ephron, and Vornado Realty Trust's Steven Roth. But the grandchildren seem adamant. "It's their land," says their mother, Evelyn Williams. "They have the right to do with it as they wish."
East Hampton has the cachet—and four Ralph Lauren stores to go with it. (As a family, the Laurens actually have five stores, all on Main Street: 34-year-old daughter Dylan opened one of her candy stores last year.) Amagansett, four miles east, is still much quieter, though that's made it, in a low-key way, the new hottest Hampton. Paul McCartney sightings are common. Gwyneth Paltrow is a recent arrival; so are actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, as well as author James Frey. (Actress Kathleen Turner has lived here long enough to be a local. And so, of course, has actor and activist Alec Baldwin.) The once humble "lanes" that lead from Main Street toward the ocean are now a whole neighborhood in mid-teardown, with 1950s ranch houses tucked between new, baronial shingled homes—many, however, still awaiting buyers.
One reason new arrivals love Amagansett is its greater distance from Manhattan: that extra hour on the highway on an August Friday night inching out from Southampton keeps a lot of weekenders away. And what fun to fly over them all, alighting at the newly expanded East Hampton Airport for the seven-minute drive home. So it is with Montauk—"The End," as locals fondly call it—whose tiny airport accommodates prop planes and helicopters. The difference is that Montauk still has wide-open spaces, and compared with Ron Baron's Further Lane purchase, they're cheap.
Seclusion-loving artists have long constituted a colony of sorts in Montauk—among them songwriter Paul Simon, artist-filmmaker Julian Schnabel, photographers Peter Beard and Bruce Weber, and art critic (and Vanity Fair contributing editor) Ingrid Sischy. Ralph Lauren is there, too. Last year, J. Crew chief Millard "Mickey" Drexler startled the lot of them by paying $27 million for Eothen, the 5.6-acre estate with panoramic views long owned by Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey. Polo player and media entrepreneur Adam Lindemann followed with a six-acre beachfront buy for $21.5 million. "It's the new frontier—you get a lot more for your money," says Prudential's John Golden. "The coastline is extremely dramatic, and it's coming into its own because everything else has been so saturated."
Surfers have always flocked to Montauk's Ditch Plains beach, but now, along with nationally known surfing veterans like Joel Tudor and Herbie Fletcher, you're likely to see Schnabel, Lindemann, or activist hedge-funder Daniel S. Loeb, who paid $45 million for a penthouse apartment at newly built 15 Central Park West earlier this year. Some of the hottest real estate is in the beachfront trailer park. Singer Jimmy Buffett reportedly offered $430,000 for a trailer not long ago; Paul Morrissey has decamped here from Eothen. "The status symbol is to have a double-wide and a double lot," Golden explains. "It's where the elite meet." Even trailer rentals are climbing: $35,000 for the season is about average.
The downturn has slowed sales in Montauk—but not sellers' fond new expectations. Peter Beard is trying to get $26 million for his five-plus-acre compound of cottages with ocean views and access. And former TV talk-show host Dick Cavett has put 77 acres of oceanfront land next to his home on sale for $30 million. Conservation groups want to buy but haven't been able to move quickly. "My personal wish would be that someone build an eighth sister and place a conservation easement on the rest of it," says Corcoran's Krae van Sickle, referring to the adjacent enclave of seven houses designed by architect Stanford White. (Cavett lives in one, rebuilt exactly as it had been before a 1997 fire; Weber, Sischy, and Schnabel are all Seven Sisters neighbors.) But that's for the market to say, and van Sickle, the listing agent, will field all offers. Chances are that, when the market hits bottom and starts bouncing back, some builder will subdivide the land—and start putting up houses.
When will the market hit bottom? Sotheby's Ed Petrie is asked that question all the time by his customers. "These are Wall Street guys. And I say, You should be telling me! I'm just the guy out here selling houses."
"If we're not at bottom, we're close," suggests Corcoran's Tara Newman. "It's all about collective consciousness, and now that we have a two-person presidential race, people are stimulated, looking toward the future. In fact, as soon as Hillary quit, we got a little Obama bump." Corcoran C.E.O. Liebman is more cautious. "We have to get through the election and some more layoffs, and then find our stable ground. I hope next spring things will be active again."
Perhaps they will. Though Sotheby's Frank Newbold, one of the Hamptons' most experienced brokers, recalls a cautionary tale. Back in 1941, Gerald and Sara Murphy, the Jazz Age golden couple who grew so close to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and others, faced a conundrum. The Great Depression, and their own elegant lifestyle, had left them with a vast East Hampton spread they could no longer afford. They'd already sold much of their land—some of it becoming part of the golf course for the Maidstone Club. But no one wanted the Dunes, the oceanfront mansion that was East Hampton's largest residence at the time. It was just too big to heat in hard-pinched times, and no one wanted to maintain it. It was, as the Murphys' daughter, Honoria, put it, "a big white elephant." Rather than keep paying the $1,200 in annual taxes on it, the Murphys simply ordered it burned to the ground.
The lesson is that the bottom never really drops out of the Hamptons real-estate market—until it does.
Michael Shnayerson is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.


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Centro Station
THE PARTY Hundreds gathered in the heart of Downtown Miami at the historic Alfred I. DuPont Building to celebrate the grand opening of the brand new Yves Béhar-designed sales gallery for Centro condominium. THE PLAYERS Brenda Bichili, Jesse Ottley, Alicia Cervera Lamadrid, Harvey Hernandez, Vivian Martins, TJ Sabo, Jessica Sagatto THE SCENE Hosted by developer Newgard Development Group and Cervera Real Estate— with a special appearance by the award-winning creative genius himself, Yves Béhar—attendees mingled, danced and enjoyed cocktails and hors d'oeuvres by gigi, while getting an exclusive sneak preview at Béhar's designs for downtown's hottest new residential address. Photography by World Red Eye


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Fayetteville, West Virginia Criminal Lawyers
Ernest Skaggs Esq
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Joshua Mingo Winters Esq
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Accomplice liability: If a person aids, assists, or encourages another in the commission of a crime, they are criminally liable as an accomplice to the crime.
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Hannu Lintu Leads Stephen Hough, BSO in Liszt's Second Piano Concerto, Feb. 7-9
Conductor Hannu Lintu will lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and pianist Stephen Hough in Liszt's Second Piano Concerto on Thursday, February 7, 2013 at 8 p.m. at The Music Center at Strathmore and Friday, February 8, 2013 and Saturday, February 9, 2013 at 8pm at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Also on the program are Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem Francesca da Rimini and Sibelius' Second Symphony. Please see below for complete program details.
Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu's 2010 BSO debut prompted Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun to rave, "Even in the finale [of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony], at max tempo, the conductor ensured subtle varieties of expression so that the sound was never monochromatic. Lintu was no less engaging in the other movements, balancing propulsion with warmth, and his efforts drew some of the most cohesive, colorful and electrifying playing I've heard from the BSO in my 10 years here."
The late-Romantic composer Franz Liszt's dazzling technical mastery of the piano and charismatically winsome public persona made him an incredibly popular performer throughout his career. But Liszt the extroverted performer was quite a different man than Liszt the introspective and meticulous composer. The first draft of this work was completed in 1849, but it was not until some seven years later in 1857 that pianist Hans von Bronsart premiered it, with the composer leading the orchestra. The delay was worth the wait, as the final version contains plenty of the showy, brilliant virtuosic passages for which Liszt is known; but these passages are contrasted with lovely opportunities for the piano to volley the main theme with smaller sections of the orchestra. Stephen Hough, the first classical performing artist to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, will perform the work. Hough earned critical acclaim for his 2011 recording (on the Hyperion label) of Liszt's virtuosic piano concertos, which celebrated the 200th anniversary of Liszt's birth. This spring on March 4th, he will perform a solo recital at Carnegie Hall in which he will perform the New York premiere of his own composition: Piano Sonata No. 2, "Notturno Luminoso."
Finnish composer Jean Sibelius rose to prominence at the beginning of the 20th century, just as his fellow Finns began to endure oppression under Russian rule. As a result, an impassioned Finnish nationalism emerged throughout the country, with Sibelius' ' music as his compatriots' voice. His grand Finlandia served as an unofficial national anthem for his people. In contrast, his Second Symphony was composed while in Italy. This dramatic, victorious symphony therefore reflects the sunny, brighter weather of that country. Said Sibelius of the work's creation, "It is as though the Almighty had thrown the pieces of a mosaic down from the floor of heaven and told me to put them together."
Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem, Francesca da Ramini is an interpretation of the tragic tale of the beautiful Francesca da Ramini who was immortalized by Dante in his Divine Comedy. Her tragic tale has been the subject matter for many musical and theatrical works. Tchaikovsky's use of tragic gothic material and his treatment of it show the possible influences of Liszt on this work.


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It's Thursday. You know what that means? We're too lazy to blog.
But hey, check out these cool posts happening at an interwebz near you.
The last in YA-writer-on-sub Corrine Jackson's How Writers Do it Series. Read about how nine writers (some of them OPWFTers)
pull stories out of their butts plan their stories. AND WIN BOOKS!
Check out twitter-friendly agent Kathleen Ortiz's blog, for chances to win A FREE 8 MINUTE SKYPE SESSION with her and her partner in crime agent friend, Suzie Townsend. (If you win, maybe they'll even tell you what they have against multiples of five. )
Oh, and AW member and YA writer Marilyn Almodovar actually thought one of our own was cool enough to interview (yes, I'm totally writing this about myself. Am feeling weird now, in a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest kinda way.)
Happy Thursday, and check back in tomorrow for your regularly scheduled bloggy goodness.
Sparkle Out.


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In August we kicked off a four-part series comparing five leading NLEs--Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress Pro, Pinnacle Liquid Edition, and Sony Vegas--based on key aspects of their performance in pro postproduction. Here we explore how they fare when editing what's arguably the hottest technology in videography today: HDV.
In the first installment of our Battle of the Software NLEs series, we examined three key components of digital video editing: Overlay, Chromakey, and color correction, using MiniDV as our exclusive capture source. Here we move on to HDV, the much-ballyhooed HD format that delivers highly compressed digital video at MiniDV-or-better bitrates (25Mbps or 18Mbps) that mainstream PCs can handle. How well the systems handle them is another issue, as is how effectively the top software NLEs in the pro market have been adapted to work with HDV in much the same way they work with the more familiar DV format.
Out HDV tests focused on several aspects of production. First, we tested capture and writing back to tape with all HDV-compatible editors, using a simple one-minute test project. Below, we report how each editor handled the capture and write-to-tape task, as well as associated rendering times.
Then, since most HDV video in the short term will be distributed in standard-definition DVDs, we tested how well each editor could pan into and around the HDV video, and then measured rendering time and output quality. In these tests, we used video of a ballet performance, shot from the back of the theater with the Sony HVR-Z1U HDV camcorder. The camera framed the entire stage during the sjoot and was left unattended, while I used another camera, the Sony VX2000, for closer shots from the side of the stage. For audio, I plugged directly into the theater's sound system.
Zooming InWhile producing the ballet video, the goal was to pan and zoom the HDV footage with the editor's 2D motion controls for close-ups of the stage, while mixing the footage with video from the DV camcorder. Out tests simulated this activity with all editors, and revealed significant differences in toolset and performance. As it turns out, in this review, there was no ideal solution.
For example, unless you've moved exclusively to HDV, you'll probably be mixing DV and HDV for awhile. Adobe Premiere Pro can handle both formats on the same timeline, but has no multicam capability, which is a huge timesaver for multi-camera shoots.
Final Cut Pro has the multicam feature, but can't edit HDV and DV on the same timeline, and as a result, the multicam doesn't feature works only with identical formats. You can down-sample HDV to DV and then mix the two, but the workflow is suboptimal and wastes time, since you'll have to down sample all HDV video up front, even the video you'll ultimately replace with DV from the other camera.
Avid Xpress is out, since it doesn't currently capture or edit HDV video (Avid will add HDV capability to the Windows version this fall, but they have no timetable yet on when the Mac version will support HDV, which is too bad, since Mac users could really use an HDV-capable editor that, like Xpress Pro, can mix multiple formats in the same timeline). Pinnacle Liquid Edition can handle multiple formats and has a multicam feature, but currently takes 30 minutes to downsample and render each minute of HDV, about 30 rendering hours per hour of HDV footage. If you're thinking wedding-day edit, this simply isn't going to work, though Pinnacle says that the long rendering times relate to a bug they should resolve in the short term. Like Premiere Pro, Vegas is reasonably fast and can handle the multiple formats, but has no multicam feature.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. When evaluating an editor for HDV production, there are four discrete elements to consider: the nature of the 2D and motion tools, responsiveness while editing, rendering time (performance) and output quality. Let's see how each editor fared.
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5.1Premiere captures HDV and immediately converts it to the CineForm intermediate codec, which takes a few moments after capture, but otherwise is transparent. Premiere controls the camera during capture and writing back to tape, and took 4:39 to render our one minute test project before writing back to tape, which was the fastest of the group.
When starting any project, you have to select a preset; we used the HDV 1080i preset and all non-HDV assets, like the title and logo, conformed automatically, which was among the most seamless operation we encountered across the board.
Figure 1 shows Premiere Pro's 2D and motion editing interface, which includes position, scale, and rotation. The rotation feature proved necessary in our tests to correct a slight tilt in our camera setup. Te diamonds to the right of the position and scale controls are keyframes, which allow you to adjust these settings as you go along. In this test, for example, I started at 100% image resolution and then zoomed in to 250% resolution (shown).
Premiere presents a strong toolset for these types of edits. Positives include the ability to view safe zones while editing (you can't do this with Vegas or Edition), which is critical to precision placement. You edit directly in the preview window, so can preview in more or less real time at any time, which helps you assess the smoothness of the 2D motion (you can't preview from Vegas' pan and zoom window).
Though it's not apparent from the controls, you can adjust each setting by dragging over it with your cursor. For example, if you wanted to smoothly shift the image to the left without effecting vertical position, you simply click the left position number and drag your cursor to the right. It sounds simple, but you can't do this with Final Cut Pro; you have to drag the image and hope you stay on the same horizontal plane, or enter a new numerical value.
While editing HDV video, Premiere Pro was very responsive, and there was minimal lag when we dragged or zoomed in or around a frame. However, during these adjustments, the frame becomes very grainy, though you can see enough to position the image effectively (see Figure 2). Once you stop for a moment, the image settles back in and gains resolution. While definitely preferable to Edition, which was quite sluggish while editing, it's not as elegant as Final Cut Pro, which suffered no lag time and didn't experience degraded visual quality.
Rendering performance on the 250% zoom test file was quite strong, as Premiere Pro produced our one-minute test sequence in 1:58 (min:sec) on our Dual 3.6GHz Xeon Dell Precision workstation. Premiere's output quality, however, was clearly the worst of the bunch, fuzzy and lacking detail (see Figure 3). We queried Adobe about this with two weeks left before press time, but got no resolution (no pun intended). Accordingly, we recommend caution if you plan on downconverting HDV video to DV resolutions in Premiere Pro.
Apple Final Cut Pro 5Final Cut captures and edits in native HDV format, controlling the camera while capturing and writing back to tape, with a very polished interface for writing to tape, complete with bars, tone, countdown, and even a text title, which all proved very helpful. Note that after rendering your file into HDV format, Final Cut takes an extra step to "conform" your HDV, which took 9:23 for our one-minute test file, a serious potential bottleneck on longer projects.
When working with HDV video, remember to set your Sequence, Capture, and Device Control presets to HDV; otherwise the aspect ratios that you see may not be correct. Once these initial settings are done, however, Final Cut adjusts titles and other imported non-HDV assets automatically.
Final Cut's HDV editing interface is near the top with great responsiveness on our Dual 2.7GHz PowerPC G5 at full display resolution. Note that if you have a title or other overlay over your HDV image, Final Cut can become quite sluggish. You can speed things up by clicking the "Visible" toggle to the extreme left of the track, which making the track invisible.
Editing goes most smoothly when your monitor is in Image+Wireframe mode, where you can grab and manipulate the frame directly (those are the wireframes you see in Figure 4). Otherwise, you have to click the cross to the right of the Center control, and then drag the frame, an extra step that adds no value.
Apple could improve the interface by providing sliders and perhaps arrow keys for all controls, so, for example, you could slide the image to the left without worrying about vertical positioning. That's about our only complaint, however; rendering time was acceptable (4:58), and image quality was the best in the test set.
Pinnacle Liquid EditionLiquid Edition edits HDV in native format, capturing with machine control (using the FireWire preset). Working with HDV can be persnickety, particularly when downsampling to DV, since there are at least three settings that must be aligned to produce optimal results.
For example, when you start a project, you choose a preset, which typically should be your target output, or 16:9 DV for our downconvert test. Each time you create a timeline sequence, you also have to choose a Render:Fuse codec, which should also match your target output. Finally, each asset imported into the project can be configured with different Pixel Aspect Ratios and field order. If all these don't match up, bad things can happen.
For example, in our full-length ballet project, we captured and imported 60 minutes of HDV, which we mixed with 16:9 video using Edition's Multicam feature. After rendering the first DVD, we noticed severe ghosting on the HDV clips, which we tracked down to a faulty field order and aspect ratio in the properties window of the HDV clip.
How they got that way, I have no idea, though I'm sure it's user error. Whatever the cause, however, after changing this on each and every HDV sub-clip used in the production (about 100) and re-rendering the set (which took 15 hours), the video looked great.
The lesson learned is that the first time you produce in HDV, start with a mini-project that encompasses all the elements of your final project-video, titles, transitions, logos, etc.--but is much, much shorter. Capture, edit, render, and produce your DVD with the mini-project, so you understand the workflow and can catch any production errors while they take you minutes to correct, rather than hours. Though this holds true for all editors, Edition's lengthy rendering cycle and highly configurable workspace makes it absolutely essential.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? I've always considered Liquid Edition's 2D interface (shown in Figure 5) to be among the best, though examining it under an HDV lens reveals several flaws. First, you can't display a safe zone while making your adjustments, so you risk obscuring the sons and daughters of your paying customers on the extreme edges. That's a big problem. In addition, the 2D controls were very sluggish, often taking 2-3 seconds to respond, which hindered our efforts.
Though you don't insert your pan and zoom effects in the preview window, as with Premiere and Final Cut, you can still preview your work in more or less real time, which is good. Edition's dedicated 2D interface provides excellent keyframe controls, with faster and easier copying and pasting, for example, than either Final Cut or Premiere Pro. When you're assigning several hundred keyframes in a project, a few seconds here and there really add up.
Unfortunately, what Edition gives in keyframe manipulation, it takes away with a glacial rendering time of 30:48 (min:sec), which is surprising, since Edition is generally a top performer. We discussed this with Pinnacle, who stated that PAL rendering times were much quicker than our NTSC results, probably no surprise given that PAL is the predominant format used by their German development group. Our contact surmised that NTSC rendering times should soon align with the PAL rates, but we'll believe that when we see it, as with most manufacturer promises. Rendering quality was good, just a touch behind Vegas and Final Cut.
Sony VegasHDV capture in Sony Vegas is accomplished in a minimalist embedded window on the bottom left hand side of the program, rather than the usual, more robust separate capture application. Vegas controls the camera during capture, storing the file in native MPEG-2 format. A wizard guides you through the process of writing back to tape, first creating a rendered video file--which took a lengthy 7:40--then writing it to tape, with machine control.
To edit HDV in Vegas, choose an HDV preset, which Vegas will use to ensure that titles and other generated media have the correct parameters. Even with the proper preset, however, Vegas' preview never assumed the proper 16:9 position, which was disconcerting.
For example, in Figure 6, you can see that the video in the Event Pan/Crop window has a different aspect ratio from the preview window on the bottom right, leading to the inevitable question, "What's the final output going to look like?" You'll also notice the absence of safe zones in the Pan/Crop tool, and the lack of playback controls, forcing you to return to the main interface to preview your work in real time.
Like Edition, however, Vegas provides excellent control over keyframes with its Pan/Crop interface, and avoids the cramped feel you often get when making 2D adjustments in Final Cut and Premiere Pro. Operation is pretty snappy while panning around within a frame, but moving from frame to frame was more time-consuming than it should have been. Vegas's downconverted output was quite good, trailing Final Cut only slightly, and Vegas produced the file in 4:29, behind Premiere (as shown in the EIA Resolution chart comparison in Figure 7), but well ahead of Edition.
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HDV SummaryTable 1 summarizes our findings regarding HDV editing, and underscores the lack of a product that dominates the category.


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Yesterday's sad news about astronaut Chris Hadfield's surprise retirement made me wonder what was the most remarkable performance of the Canadian astronaut during the time he spent on the International Space Station. And yes, without any doubts, the cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity was the most entertaining.
Hadfield's Oddity is a one-of-a-kind event: the first ever music video actually recorded in space — the history of pop music will surely devote a full chapter to it. But there were excellent space music videos before Hadfield's Oddity too, including a recent one from Hungary.
So here's my ultimate list of the best space music videos (by definition: a short space-themed video, made exclusively for a specific pop or rock song). Please add your own choices in the comments!