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From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face. Lurie, the star of the Jim Jarmusch films "Stranger Than Paradise" and "Down by Law" and the saxophone-playing leader of the jazz-punk group the Lounge Lizards, was droopy and skinny and intensely charismatic. His "Down by Law" co-star, Roberto Benigni, described him in his fractured English as "a very big actor and musicist that in the world everybody know . . . between Ray Charles and Brigitte Bardot." Lurie wore a Borsalino fedora and old suits and painted expressionist album covers and picked up girls at the Mudd Club and snorted coke at the Palladium with Steve Rubell and Rick James. He got addicted to heroin, but kicked it; he got hepatitis, but kicked that, too. He was young and cocksure and he wouldn't truckle. Between Fourteenth Street and Canal—the known universe, basically—he was the man.
In the nineties, Lurie became less cool but more interesting. He mouthed off to Woody Allen and Barry Sonnenfeld and let his acting career go. His money disappeared, of course, but he co-wrote Conan O'Brien's "Late Night" theme song, and his "Get Shorty" soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy. He made a beguiling album that purported to be the influential blues stylings of a half-Jewish, half-African mental patient named Marvin Pontiac. And "Fishing with John," a tongue-in-cheek cable show about his fishing trips with wild men like Dennis Hopper, showcased all his ingenuity and lacerating candor. Tom Waits got so mad at Lurie during their trip that the two stopped speaking. Matt Dillon complained about his episode, Lurie recalls, saying, "You made me look dumb." "No," Lurie replied. "God did that." (Dillon says that he doesn't remember the conversation.) And so ended that relationship, too.
At the conclusion of an ice-fishing episode co-starring Willem Dafoe, the narrator announced that both men had starved to death. In fact, Dafoe is still alive and still speaking to Lurie—or in theory still speaking to him. A year and a half ago, at the age of fifty-six, Lurie disappeared. Dafoe said, "Maybe this reclusiveness is his way of continuing to try to make sense of things—you could never separate John's work from his personal challenges."
What happened first was that Lurie was stricken with a mysterious disease that confined him to his SoHo apartment for six years. Then, in 2008, he and his closest friend, a younger artist named John Perry, had an explosive rupture, and Lurie went into hiding, believing that Perry intended to kill him. There were certainly grounds for concern, as Perry was stalking him and saying things like "Scumbag, one day you'll be gone and this earth will be delivered from the virus of your existence." Lurie's improvised witness-protection program has taken him from the island of Grenada to a house in Big Sur, California, belonging to his friend Flea, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to an obscure village in Turkey. In October, Lurie began living incognito in a rented house in Palm Springs, California. He keeps a ninja baton and a can of pepper spray by his bed, and only seven people have his new cell-phone number. He calls them late at night, asking, "Can I come home?" There is no easy answer.
One day in June of 2002, Lurie worked out hard to prepare for an expected nude scene in the HBO prison drama "Oz." Afterward, he went to the West Village restaurant Da Silvano, still thinking about ways to enhance his appearance—"I wanted to make my penis look enormous onscreen"—and suddenly the world was spinning violently and he couldn't move. "I had never been afraid to die before," Lurie said. "I had always thought either you go to the light or it fades to black. But now this creepy, ignoble, wormlike force rose up in me, saying, 'I don't want to die! I don't want to die!' "
The following weeks brought a cascade of strange and overpowering symptoms: flashing lights and roaring sounds, a sensation like rain pouring on his skin, a Kryptonite-like reaction to Windex, an inability to hold so much as a skillet in his left hand. His condition was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and about ten other things, including postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a verdict he resented because its acronym was so lame. Lurie finally came to believe that he had chronic Lyme disease—a condition whose very existence, as he wryly acknowledged, was fiercely disputed in the medical community.
He often couldn't leave his apartment, let alone play an instrument. When he felt up to it, he worked on his memoirs, and he did some voice-overs, hawking Toyota Tacomas in his growling baritone. He also began painting again, taking it more seriously this time. Lurie soon had a number of solo shows; as his canvases began selling, for up to fifty-five thousand dollars, the Times proclaimed that "music's loss may turn out to be art's gain." He'd move among four paintings at once, constructing vivid, childlike scenarios around the topics of sex, perplexity, God, and bunny rabbits—treating his brush the way he used to treat his saxophone, as if he'd just found it on the street. If the horse he'd painted had a mane that was way too short, he'd save the painting by titling it "Horse with Mullet."
But much of the time he just lay on his green couch, smoking and wincing at the slightest noise. During this period, the person who seemed most in tune with Lurie's needs—other than the bar owner who came by faithfully with fried chicken from Blue Ribbon—was John Perry. Perry was a six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-five-pound former college decathlon standout who rode a Kawasaki, knew judo, and cut his own hair. Capable and engaging, he had a soft voice and a deliberative manner, like a bear awakened early from hibernation. He lived to paint portraits and still-lifes, and only when he received the occasional eviction notice from his seven-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment on the Upper East Side would he put in a few days as a construction worker or a substitute teacher, keeping the anxious, scroungy details, like much of his private life, to himself.
Perry and Lurie got to know each other in the early nineties, at the SoHo restaurant Lucky Strike, where they both played in the back-room poker game. Lurie was a voluble half-Welsh, half-Russian-American Jew, and Perry a reticent half-Korean, half-Lithuanian-American Jew, but there was an instant affinity. Soon, they were playing pickup basketball with a group of bouncers, night-club managers, and drug dealers, most of them black and a decade or so younger than Lurie—warriors who did battle on the playground before sunrise, while lesser men were sleeping on percale sheets.
Lurie said, "After I got sick, my artist friends, except for Flea and Steve Buscemi, fled from me. And then I had my tough-guy friends, where the biggest guy would take the biggest piece of chicken; they didn't believe in evolution, let alone an internal life. John was both, but he really had my back, and I loved him. He seemed like Abraham Lincoln, the most decent, thoughtful person." Perry told me that Lurie was the only one he could talk to about his feelings of depression and misgiving, the only one who not only wouldn't think him weak but would respond with his own uncertainties.
The men had several extended breaches, over such questions as who failed to read whose autobiographical writings fast enough, but by the summer of 2008 Perry was again Lurie's mainstay. He taught him how to paint in oils, set up his new Apple computer, gave him a 3 A.M. haircut, and dropped by three nights a week to play cutthroat heads-up poker for a couple of hundred dollars. Lurie's girlfriend, Jill Goodwin, said, "I'd be with John at 2 A.M., and then John Perry would show up, and I'd be pissed." When Perry left the apartment, he'd say, "Ganbatte," a Japanese word meaning, in his loose translation, "Call on your fighting spirit."
Lurie knew that Perry's stoic countenance masked some turbulent impulses. In 1999, a bouncer at a club called Life beat Perry up after he got into a drunken scuffle. Perry, a frequent drug user at the time, quit pot and cocaine for a week, readying himself. Then he returned to the club on a Saturday night and dove over the ropes, getting the bouncer in a choke hold before the other bouncers beat him down. Perry was arrested for assault and sentenced to a day of community service, washing sanitation trucks in Central Park. A few years later, he fought off two men who broke into his apartment, apparently looking for drugs, beating them with the weapons at hand in his kitchen: a machete and a flute. In 2008, he was arrested for using a baseball bat to bar two off-duty cops from looking at a vacant apartment in his building.
Early in their friendship, when Lurie played the as yet unreleased Lounge Lizards album "Queen of All Ears" for Perry, he was surprised to see tears rolling down his friend's cheeks. "You really are an artist," Perry said. "What am I going to do if I hear that in public? I can't be seen crying." In October, 2008, Lurie took Perry out to lunch for his forty-third birthday, and Perry suddenly remarked, "I don't think I'll be able to stand it when you're dead." "I'm going to live way longer than you," Lurie replied.
Despite Perry's admiration for him, Lurie told me, "John never hung on my coattails like other people did—I really felt we were equals." Perry's independence was both a comfort and a provocation to Lurie, who, like many middle-aged artists, kept himself vital by seeking out younger friends and lovers. (Jill Goodwin is thirty-one.) Perry told me, "It would be natural to assume that we all felt John was the man, the way he had been, but the truth is that, downtown, we"—the club-hopping buccaneers Perry hung out with—"were the famous ones, in a sense, and John was like our little brother." Perry said that he and Lurie sometimes competed for women—"John was older, but he could be funny with girls, and if they knew his celebrity that always helped"—but added, "I didn't need John to get in anywhere, or to get laid. There was nothing John had that I wanted, except more recognition for my work."
In the fall of 2008, Perry asked Lurie for a favor. The younger artist was going to make an instructional television pilot titled "The Drawing Show," hoping to interest PBS in airing a series that would raise his profile. He asked Lurie to pose for him, and though Lurie had been turning down film work for years—the strong lights inflamed his symptoms—he agreed, and even offered to help pay for the shoot. (Although Perry was flat broke, he declined, not wanting to be further beholden to Lurie, and borrowed the necessary six thousand dollars elsewhere.) On the evening of November 8, 2008, Perry brought a five-man crew to a friend's apartment near Gramercy Park to film his and Lurie's collaboration.
Footage from the beginning of the shoot shows the two men facing each other, handsomely framed, with Lurie beside Perry's easel. Each had a shaved head, and each looked keen and attentive under spotlights that left a well of darkness between them. As Perry roughed out Lurie's face with charcoal, he explained what he was seeing—"His left eyeball, which is to my right, is a little bit lower than his right one"—and Lurie pursed his lips, then smiled. He had told himself to suppress his natural inclination to take over, but when Perry lapsed into silence, absorbed in depicting what he saw, Lurie would prompt him by asking why he closed one eye, or what he was using the eraser for. Perry's observations about composition and technique were apt and intriguing. You could see how, with editing, there might be a show in the idea. But some of Lurie's sallies tried Perry's patience:
LURIE: The name of the show is "How to Pose"?
PERRY: That's right.
LURIE: That's good. "Be a Poser"?
PERRY: I wouldn't go that far.
LURIE (a beat): Why do I feel like you're putting a pig's nose on my face?
When Lurie arrived, around 6:30 P.M., he had been struck by the crew's indifference to him. Celebrity is the power to rivet attention, and Lurie realized that his riveting faculties had lapsed. He told Perry, "When I went into my house, I was famous—I come out six years later and nobody knows who I am," meaning it as a cultural observation: I am Rip Van Winkle, returned but unknown. Perry thought the remark seemed self-involved, as did Lurie's asking him, "Am I going to get out of here by ten o'clock? I have an appointment to get laid." (He and Goodwin were not then together.)
Lurie now regrets the crudeness of the remark, and told me that when Perry looked stressed out he called his date, a librarian, and cancelled. As it happened, the shoot ran long and took a toll. A few hours in, Lurie was clearly ill, wincing and slumping in his chair. Sweat bloomed on Perry's forehead as he eyed his model—"You're doing great"—and haltingly explained to the cameras why he was erasing his original lines and hatching in subtly different ones: "It's really the essence of drawing—to separate what you think is there from what is actually there."
Around 10:30 P.M., in the middle of a take, Lurie, who by now felt as if bees were stinging him all over, said, "I really am in agony. I just—I can't handle it. You've got to figure out how to make it shorter." Perry looked stunned. "How much longer?" Lurie asked, head down. "I could use another fifteen, twenty minutes," Perry replied. After a moment, Lurie said, "Let's just keep going." As Perry raced to put on the finishing touches—mouth, cheek, shirt—the portrait grew fuzzy and self-doubting.
Seven minutes later, Perry stretched and said, "Want to take a look at it, John?" Lurie growled, "Naw, I gotta go." "That's part of the thing," Perry said, dismayed. He had the apartment only for the night, and he needed to film Lurie's reaction to the drawing, and get footage of him from Perry's point of view, so the audience could see what the artist saw. Lurie rose, put a hand on Perry's shoulder, and said, "Bye, everybody. Sorry." As the crew was huddling with Perry, reassuring him that they could still make the program work, his cell phone rang: it was Lurie, who had collapsed in the hallway. Perry went and helped him to his feet and walked him out to a cab, neither man saying much. As Lurie pulled away, he was struck by Perry's expression: "He looked intense, lost, childlike, and large. Later, I thought, That was the moment he decided to kill me."
In Palm Springs, Lurie rents a small two-bedroom house with a tiny pool. He keeps the blinds drawn against the desert sun, but there isn't much to see inside: a guitar and an amplifier; a few of his canvases on the beige walls; and a gleaming silver case containing an oxygen tank and the apparatus he uses to inject ozone into his veins. Lurie heard about ozone therapy, a controversial and potentially dangerous treatment, from Flea, and began going to a doctor for ozone three times a week. In June, 2008, after six months of injections, he was able to do his first pullup in six years, and he began to believe, before the Perry mess, that he would recover completely.
One recent morning, Lurie was chewing Nicorette gum and gazing at his painting "Twelve Bottoms Against Nature." He'd applied too much linseed oil, and the surface shone like a puddle at a gas station. "You do realize I don't know what I'm doing, right?" he announced. "Motherfucker!" Are you a painter now? I asked. "I'm a school of thought," he said, deadpan.
Lurie lay on the couch, then blew a few bars on a harmonica. The harmonica was his first instrument; he started when he was fifteen, and quickly got so good that he played onstage with John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat. He was wearing a muscle shirt and loose khaki pants, having gained sixty pounds since back in the day. Often, he and his assistant, Nesrin Wolf, spend mornings and even afternoons in their pajamas, trying, usually in vain, to reach the police or the District Attorney or the F.B.I. to discuss John Perry. Wolf, a thirty-three-year-old Turkish immigrant who attractively resembles a female Michael Jackson, began working for Lurie in New York, and came along on his travels in the Sancho Panza role. The two bicker a lot, fondly, and she often calls him gicik—Turkish for "an annoyance."
Wolf doesn't drive, so Lurie drove her to Jensen's market to do his shopping. While she was inside picking up salmon, he considered the white-haired ladies ambling around the parking lot and pursed his lips. Palm Springs is a golf-obsessed retirement community, and he doesn't get recognized there, even when he buttonholes strangers at the local Starbucks for a little conversation. Lurie said, "This thing that's happening now wouldn't be happening if I were more famous, Tom Cruise famous, because I'd be insulated. And it wouldn't be happening at all if I were less famous. Somehow I got it just exactly wrong."
Sometime after 1 A.M. on the night of the video shoot, Lurie reached Perry on the phone and said, "I'm upset." Perry said, "You're upset? You're upset with me?," and hung up. Perry had just walked the three and a half miles to his apartment. On the way, he took a detour onto the Queensboro Bridge and stood on its railing, feeling the wind. Lighting a cigarette, he stared down at the East River and considered plunging into it, thinking, This was all for nothing, what a fucking waste. Perry's girlfriend, Laksmi Hedemark, told me, "John was relying on John Lurie's celebrity to help with the show, and I know he regrets that, because he betrayed his own belief that there really wasn't a difference between them."
Lurie was nearly as low. He was depressed by his inability to get the job done, and also disheartened by Perry's apparent lack of concern: "He was looking right at me, but he didn't see me. He was thinking totally about the show." He laughed, sadly. "And I get that, it's what I did with the band—'You've got a blister on your thumb? Play. You've got strep throat? Play.' The show comes first."
In the days that followed, Lurie and Perry e-mailed each other a series of apologies—but Perry also, on a hunch, called Time Warner Cable. There had been a pay-per-view boxing match between Roy Jones, Jr., and Joe Calzaghe the night of the shoot, and Perry, pretending to be Lurie, discovered that Lurie had ordered it shortly after he left. That suggested to Perry that, whether or not Lurie was actually feeling lousy, he had gone home in order to watch the bout. (Lurie says that he ordered the fight as a distraction and watched less than a single round.)
When Perry sent Lurie a seven-minute assembly of footage from the shoot, on November 23rd, Lurie said that he needed some time before he could watch it; he was still feeling bruised. The next day, he e-mailed to say, "I suffered agony for you—it was met with disappointment and derision. I don't remember anyone suffering agony for me." Hedemark told me, "Women have more issues with this, but, when men ignore you, you're left with your worries and anxieties. So when John Lurie did that it was like the unintentional first move in the battle."
Perry began speed-dialling Lurie's apartment. After he had called thirty or forty times, Nesrin Wolf finally answered and said that Lurie was taking a nap. Perry replied, "Go wake his ass up." Then he called back, again and again. At 2:30 A.M., Lurie picked up his phone to make a call, and Perry was on the line. "Come down and talk to me, cocksucker!" he demanded, and then began ringing the doorbell. Perry was downstairs. "I thought he could easily break in and climb up the fire escape," Lurie told me. To make him leave, Lurie agreed to recompense Perry for the cost of the shoot.
That night, Lurie moved out to the Bowery Hotel, and in the morning he e-mailed Perry, saying that he didn't owe him any money, and that his threats amounted to extortion. Perry promptly went to his local police station and made up a claim that Lurie had threatened to hit him with a baseball bat. He then left Lurie a voice mail, saying in blank tones that when he saw Lurie whatever measures he might take would be "self-defense, because I've already gone to the police."
That afternoon, Lurie went to his local station house and filed a complaint against Perry for harassment. He'd already phoned several friends of his and Perry's from the basketball days, hoping that they could talk Perry down. They remember telling him that Perry believed Lurie had screwed up the shoot and therefore had to pay in cash or in apprehension, but that he had said he wasn't going to harm Lurie.
Lurie wasn't reassured. "I've seen this movie," he said. "The stalker convinces everyone he's not doing anything, and then . . ." One night, G. Calvin Weston, a former Lounge Lizards drummer, stayed with Lurie in his SoHo apartment. Weston recalled, "He had a baseball bat by the door, a fireplace poker a few feet away, a weight bar near that—weapons every few feet." The police hadn't acted on the harassment case, because Lurie kept temporizing about whether to prosecute his friend. So Lurie—feeling that New York had become unsafe, and that his friends were too timid to take a stand on his behalf—decamped to Grenada for two weeks with a woman he'd originally met on MySpace. It was the beginning of his flight.
The first line of Lurie's unpublished memoir is "Worcester, Massachusetts, has a dome over it, and God isn't allowed in." Born in Minneapolis in 1952, he grew up in Worcester, but was always headed out. In first grade, when he was assigned a composition about what he was grateful for, he wrote, "I am grateful for my skeleton, my brain, and the sun."
Lurie's parents, who met—depending on which of their children you ask—at a charades game or at a Communist Party meeting in Sherwood Forest, were the modern sort who went by Theda and David. (Lurie rebelled by calling them Mom and Dad.) After his beloved father died of emphysema, during his junior year in high school, Lurie colored in the circles on his S.A.T. and devoted himself to music. He'd play the sax until his lips bled, fasting all the while: "I was really trying to pass over to the other side."
By 1978, Lurie had settled in Manhattan. He paid fifty-five dollars a month for an apartment on East Third Street and lived off Supplemental Security Income for a supposed psychological disability. (In a trial run for celebrity, he claimed to hear voices calling his name.) Lurie's friend Rebecca Wright, who lived upstairs from him, said, "The block was a river of men with knives in their teeth, a crack corral visited by all the drag queens from uptown, and in the middle of it John was taking baths in the tub in his kitchen and practicing his saxophone in his boxer shorts, slippers on his delicate musician's feet."
In his memoir, Lurie writes of the East Village scene, "We were so sure of ourselves, we never doubted anything. We were powerful, smart, energetic, confident, egocentric, astoundingly naïve. Nothing outside of our fourteen-block radius mattered." In 1979, Lurie organized the Lounge Lizards, a five-piece band (it later grew to nine musicians) that played Danceteria and C.B.G.B., headlining the no-wave scene that followed punk. Lurie's friend Lisa Rosen, a downtown "It" girl, remembers seeing him that year "and thinking, God, he's really made it. He was carrying dry cleaning—he'd made enough money to dry-clean one of his suits." The Lounge Lizards wore thrift-store suits to satirize the iconography of jazz, but soon Lurie was writing complex original music, and the band's signature became a brassy, exuberant, borderline-annoying pulse of sound. Between songs, Lurie kept up an engaging, absurdist patter: "Just south of Madagascar there's a small, tiny little island where the people are made out of rubber." Onstage, he radiated a restless happiness. Weston, the drummer, said, "John used to walk around and shout, 'Play, play, play, play!' It just flowed out like water." The concerts didn't end so much as wind down, like a great party.
Yet Lurie's former office manager Sara Rychtarik observed that "with John, the doing of the art is a flow, but there's an obsessive perfectionism about its presentation." Stephen Torton, a friend of Lurie's who toured with the band, says, "All over the world there would be girls outside screaming under the balcony, and inside John would be fretting over some jazz arrangement, moaning to himself. That moan was always there, even before there was a real reason for it."
Growing up on Army bases all over, John Perry never lacked for models of discipline. He told me that his father, Richard, a lieutenant colonel in military intelligence, made Pat Conroy's harsh Army-officer father in his novel "The Great Santini" "look like a punk." His Korean mother, In-Ja, was warmer but even more determined; she regularly reminded Perry to "work like an ant."
After graduating from the University of Maryland, in 1988, he moved to Manhattan and attended the Parsons School of Design. Having read that van Gogh had set himself a goal of single-mindedly drawing the figure for a year, Perry focussed so intensely on his drawing that he didn't go out at night for two years. "I wanted to do van Gogh one up," Perry told me. "I'd look at Velázquez and Corot and think, If I work hard, I can do that. I thought hard work would be enough."
But, after receiving his M.F.A., in 1992, Perry emerged into a world of artists who favored vision and spontaneity over skill, and who followed Andy Warhol's model, in which a life style, a multifarious self-presentation, can outweigh actual works. Lurie would try to convince the younger artist to loosen up. "Perry's technique was so much better than mine, but I was always telling him, 'Just try to put in a bit of weirdness.' He's trying so hard not to be seen as crazy, his paintings look like the work of a skilled accountant." Perry said, "John saw a beautiful nude I'd painted and said, 'Put a squiggle of red in there, and you'll make a million bucks.' "
The struggle between them showcased their contrasting temperaments. Perry persistently aimed at verisimilitude: This is what a threat feels like. Saying that he's never been as angry as he was during the first few weeks after the shoot, Perry acknowledges that if he had encountered Lurie then he might have slapped him. But he says that he never intended to do more than that, and was simply trying to terrify Lurie into empathy. As he put it in an e-mail to a friend of his and Lurie's, "I decided then to embark on a course of using the demons of his own mind coupled with his lack of character to share with him the fear and frustration he had dispensed upon me."
When Lurie went to Grenada, Perry, who says he figured out from the accent on the routing message on Lurie's cell-phone voice mail that he was in the Caribbean, texted him to ask which hotel he was in. That same day, Lurie says—his fifty-sixth birthday, December 14th—Perry called and said, "When I find you, I will show you how I feel about you in the deepest way imaginable. I can wait longer than you. It will come when you least expect it." (Perry says that he sent the message—that he hoped they could meet so "I might intimately express my deepest feelings towards you"—only by text.)
Both men were avowedly heterosexual, but Lurie felt that Perry's behavior, and particularly this latest threat, suggested a rebuffed lover. It brought back to his mind the time that Perry had walked in while he was taking a bath and remarked, "You've got a beautiful penis." Perry denies any intent to imply that he would punish Lurie sexually, saying, "I knew that keeping it deliberately vague would infuriate him." He adds, "I'm sure I might have said, 'You've got a good-looking cock there, my friend,' but I wouldn't have used the word 'beautiful' about a friend's penis."
That December, Perry called several times, using a Web site that replaced his cell-phone number with a fake one, hoping to get Lurie to pick up. And he used another Web site's soundboard audio of Michael Jackson's voice, culled from songs and interviews, to prank-call Lurie. The conversation went like this:
LURIE: Hello?
PERRY (playing a Jackson snippet in which Jackson sounded like a woman): Can I stay with you tonight?
LURIE: Um, sure.
PERRY (another Jackson snippet): There was doo-doo and feces thrown all over the walls.
LURIE (exasperated sigh; hangs up).
From Grenada, Lurie sent a Facebook message to Perry's brother, telling him what was going on and saying, "I think [John] is in deep trouble. . . . I am certainly not asking you to do anything against your brother but to help him. Or to suggest to me how I should proceed." Lurie simply wanted guidance, but Perry took the message as a strike against his own vulnerability: his anxiety about his privacy and his reputation. Lurie's friend and former sound engineer Patrick Dillett said, "The two Johns know each other so well, their emotional strengths and weaknesses, that it's like 'Spy vs. Spy' "—the Mad cartoon about equally matched belligerents. "It's almost like fighting with yourself."
The Lounge Lizards recorded nine albums and played in Europe and Japan to packed houses. In the mid-nineties, they made thirty-five thousand dollars a week. But their albums usually sold only about fifty thousand copies. Lurie's younger brother, Evan, who played piano and organ in the band, and who now writes the music for "The Backyardigans," said, "Did John want to be really famous? I suspect some part of him did, and does. But—and I don't think John ever understood this—the Lounge Lizards' music was never going to be on the radio. It's too cacophonous, too demanding, too ethereal, too . . . a hundred things. But, because it was so heartfelt, John could never understand why everyone wouldn't immediately embrace it."
Lurie believed that largeness of spirit should be the measure of an artist's achievement, and so he grew disenchanted with many of his East Village compatriots. In the late seventies, he had let the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat sleep on his floor, and the two of them painted together. "John told me he thought Jean-Michel was his only equal—as a human being, artist, charismatic womanizer, whatever," Stephen Torton recalled. "I said, 'Yeah, you're the only two people who think like that.' " (Lurie says that it was Torton who made the comparison.) Lurie suggested that he and Basquiat stage a boxing match as a "happening," with posters of the two artists putting up their dukes in Everlast shorts. Then Basquiat went and posed for the Everlast-shorts photograph alongside Andy Warhol. When Basquiat became an art-world darling, Torton took a job as his assistant. "One day," Torton said, "me and Jean-Michel were painting and John threw a rock through the window with a note on it. He wanted to discuss what was going on, this idea that we were driving around in limousines and making fun of him. John always wants to work through things, but Jean-Michel just stared at him." Lurie says that the rock was a rubber ball, and that the window was open, but adds, "I gotta admit, Jean-Michel was stronger than me in spirit. He went from being this kid, this younger brother who followed me around, to Idi Amin. He had that thing—he was someone to be reckoned with."
Lurie's relationship with Jim Jarmusch was equally fraught. The germ of "Stranger Than Paradise," a black-and-white shaggy-dog story that won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 1984, was Lurie's idea about a New York gambler (the role he played) whose Hungarian cousin comes to town. Lurie felt that Jarmusch never gave him enough credit: "When 'Stranger' came out, I became this guy Jim discovered, this dumb Kiefer Sutherland guy, and that was the vessel people saw my music coming out of. I hated it." He burned his trademark fedora, which people had started to recognize from the film.
Jarmusch told me, "My life without John in it would have been a big hole. But John has a tendency to push people away from him when they get close—he's very demanding of attention, but on his terms."
In Palm Springs one night, after returning home, Lurie checked the alarm system, then flopped on his couch and announced, "The people who made it from the eighties had nothing to sell out in the first place. Jim Jarmusch, David Byrne, Keith Haring—all the bad ones got ahead, all the apple-for-the-teacher lightweights. The ones who are really great have a sense of madness and can't hold it together." Basquiat, for instance, died of a heroin overdose, in 1988. "Of the real artists from then, I'm the only one who is still alive and has his own liver."
In early January, 2009, Lurie was staying at a noisy Residence Inn in Plainview, Long Island, in order to be near an ozone doctor yet away from Perry. This quickly came to seem like a poor compromise, so he flew to Los Angeles to stay with Flea. Lurie reunited with Jill Goodwin, who'd moved to the city, and in late February he and Nesrin Wolf moved to Flea's house in Big Sur to paint. Flea told me, "I just wanted John to be in a beautiful place, and free of everything that binds him." The day Lurie arrived, Perry—who had been silent for two months—began calling and leaving messages. Perry says that he'd hang up at the beep, but Lurie heard tapping sounds and one sequence that sounded like someone walking on a pebble-strewn driveway. Flea's house had a pebble-strewn driveway. Lurie said, "I realized, Fuck, he knew I was going to come here, we'd talked about painting together at Flea's house. How do I know he's not in the woods outside?"
Lurie feared that Perry could track his every movement, not only because Perry had set up his computer and might have planted spyware in it (in anticipation of their breach) but because Perry had grown up among spies. So he hired a New York-based private detective to determine whether Perry was still in the city—then forbade the detective, whose surveillance of Perry's apartment produced no results, to simply call him up for an interview, because he didn't want to agitate him further. But Lurie's conversations about Perry with their mutual friends, which quickly got back to Perry, were doing just that.
One April evening at sunset, after Lurie received a "Private Caller" hangup, which he took to be Perry, he answered the phone and said, "Do you have the balls to say anything? You pathetic loser." There was silence, and Lurie hung up. The phone rang again, and Lurie, with Wolf listening in, answered and said, "I know you're there—if this problem isn't resolved, I'm going to send all our e-mails to everyone we know, including your parents, your brother, and Steve Nash"—the N.B.A. star, whom Perry had befriended after filming him for an Internet sneaker campaign. Silence, and Lurie hung up again.
The phone rang and Perry said, "Involve anyone you want."
Lurie asked, "Why are you doing this?"
Perry said, "If you can tell me why I'm doing this, I'll stop." Perry says that he meant If you can show me that you understand your part in provoking this campaign, I'll stop, but Lurie interprets the remark differently, as If you can help me to understand myself, I'll stop.
Lurie said, "You're doing this because I won't be your friend anymore." Lurie and Wolf say that he added, "You must feel so ugly, if doing this makes you feel better," and that Perry replied, "You have no idea." (Perry says that he doesn't remember this final exchange.)
Lurie told me, "I totally dominated him in that conversation—I was talking to him like I was his father." And Perry acknowledged, "The threat to call Steve Nash bothered me, because Steve doesn't know me well enough not to be swayed by how persuasive John can be." He told me that that day marked his last effort to harass Lurie.
In June, Lurie and Wolf moved on to the village of Gurece, in Turkey. Wolf wanted to visit her home country, and Lurie felt safe there, far from anywhere. After a productive summer, Lurie came back to his New York apartment in September for a show of his paintings. At the opening, he wore a bandage on his right index finger—a few nights earlier, disturbed by again being in the same city as Perry, and upset that a mutual friend seemed to be taking Perry's part, he'd got drunk, reached down for his cell phone, and cut his finger open on the machete under his bed.
One afternoon in Palm Springs, Lurie decided to visit Joshua Tree National Park. He wasn't feeling well, so I drove. As we waited in a bottleneck to get on the 10 freeway, he stared at a bed abandoned in the desert scrub. "What the fuck are we doing here?" he asked Nesrin Wolf.
"Yes," Wolf said. "We need not to be in so much quiet, with just old people."
"Next time, by the water," Lurie said. "Maybe South Carolina."
"South Carolina," Wolf repeated, musingly. "That's in the East, right?"
Lurie laughed, finding himself plunged into an episode of "Fishing with John." "I've already disappeared," he said. "I don't see why I shouldn't just say I'm dead, and see what happens to the value of the paintings."
Though Perry insists that his last attempts to jangle Lurie were the calls of April, 2009, Lurie sees a continuing pattern of alarming events. In December, there was a call to his unlisted cell phone from a number identical to one Perry had used, only with two digits, a 4 and a 7, transposed; when Lurie picked up he heard a howling sound, as if the caller were trying to imitate an airplane. And, this March, Lurie's personal and business e-mail accounts and Facebook page were hacked into, as was Wolf's e-mail account, and many of their old e-mails were erased. While Lurie and Wolf were staring at his Facebook page, trying to figure out what was going on, his status update changed in front of their eyes to "Pussy."
Lurie was determined to bring matters to a head. He considered a Kafkaesque approach: he'd just sit silently in an armchair in front of Perry's building. Or the "Taxi Driver" scenario: "Telling the police what I've tried to do to stop this, then going to Perry's house with a gun and killing him. I'd have my life back in five years, after I got out."
In the end, in December, Lurie paid a stiff twenty-one-thousand-dollar retainer to Bill Stanton, an on-air "safety-and-security expert" for "Good Morning America," so that Stanton would befriend Perry and then somehow gaslight him into certifiable insanity. (Stanton, who agreed to discuss the case only with his client's approval, says that he was hired to assess whether Perry posed a danger to Lurie, and then to advise on possible defensive measures.) The investigator checked Perry's priors and found no record. (N.Y.P.D. record-keeping can be somewhat haphazard.) Then, Stanton told me, "I went to some socio-behavioralist psychologists, and some retired analysts in the alphabetic agencies"—meaning the C.I.A.—"and gave them the details on Perry: male, white, artist, forty-four, never been arrested, no record I could find of violence, eking out a living, good-looking Eurasian type in a one-bedroom walkup, no cauliflower ears. And they said, 'This is not the profile of a Mark David Chapman, it's just not.' "
Perry had his first solo show in late December, at a SoHo gallery. Stanton dropped by and struck up a conversation with him, pretending to be a television producer named Bill Alexander. He said that he was interested in making a reality show in which Perry would draw real New Yorkers, and Perry said, "We can save a lot of time and effort—I already shot a pilot for a drawing-instruction show."
Lurie expected that Stanton would get Perry excited about the putative show, then say that he'd heard about the Lurie mess and insist that it be resolved before they went forward. But Stanton never followed through with Perry—or with Lurie, either, having apparently decided that his work was done. Stanton told me, "Yes, it might have originally gotten violent if Perry and Lurie had tangled on the street. But there's a world of difference between that and the idea that this guy could hack into NORAD, or that he's hiring ex-Navy SEALs to fly across the country and do wet work." Irked by Lurie's increasingly recriminatory e-mails—Perry's "work as a stalker is better than the person that I hired to stop him," Lurie wrote—Stanton finally retorted, "You, sir, are your greatest enemy."
That Lurie's requests for help from hired advisers and even from friends kept boomeranging only stimulated his suspicion that human beings sort of suck. He'd been so generous with his friends, loaning them money, even buying them houses—where were they now? Lurie said, "There were sixty people at my fiftieth-birthday party"—in 2002—"and only five are still in my life. It was all too much for my friends; they started to lose interest. It was like Darfur." A number of Lurie's friends now felt that Perry was his default topic, and paranoia his default mode. Patrick Dillett told me, "It had reached the point that if I said I saw John Perry in an 'I Love John Lurie' T-shirt John would have said, 'That's because he wants to kill me.' "
In January, when Lurie learned that Perry's work was going to appear in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, he got drunk and wrote an update on his Facebook page: "This psychopath has driven me from my home, and now he's having a group show in Brooklyn. What happened to civilization?" Wolf made him delete it. But the abortive outburst had inspired a Turkish fan of Lurie's—with his subsequent endorsement—to start a "Support for John Lurie" Facebook page, which declared that "John Lurie had to leave his home in New York because a friend of his went insane." Soon, more than two thousand people were fans of the page, and many posted messages of love and concern; the actress and eighties club denizen Ann Magnuson wrote, "Sending John major hugs from La La Land. Let me know how I can help!" Perry joined the fray, using the pseudonym Ron Beal, to defend his reputation. "Although [Perry] has no fame and less money," he wrote, "he has the love and admiration of REAL cats in New York who know him as a stand-up person."
Believing that Perry sounded reasonable, Jill Goodwin sent him a Facebook message telling him that Lurie was despondent and drinking too much. "Please, as someone who once cared about John, realize that he needs help . . . for someone who is already feeling emasculated by a crazy illness, it has just been too much for him. He has been living in constant fear; sleeping with weapons, never able to relax."
When Perry turned from his computer, Laksmi Hedemark says, "he was white." He e-mailed Lurie that evening, writing that he really didn't want any harm to befall his old friend and—responding somewhat ambiguously to Goodwin's concerns—added, "As sick as you are . . . you probably would have taken a beating, even, just to prove [you weren't a coward]." He also acknowledged that his behavior in the weeks following the video shoot "was not only wrong but perhaps disproportionate to the events that precipitated it," and declared, "As much as I've loved any friend, I loved you, and still do. I think I had forgotten that until I saw you in my mind's eye, in the state Jill described."
Lurie wrote back, saying that he would love to accept the olive branch, but "unfortunately, that would make me an idiot." He knew that Perry had heard previous accounts of the effect of his campaign on Lurie, and believed the apology was motivated less by solicitude than by Perry's concern about the Facebook page. He went on, "YOU MADE EVERY EFFORT TO CONVINCE ME THAT YOU WERE INSANE AND DANGEROUS," and listed, at considerable length, all of Perry's harassments. "Where do you learn this stuff? Stalkers' Monthly?" He concluded, "I FORGIVE YOU. But do not ask me to believe you."
After a further e-mail exchange, Perry observed, "YOU are the one obsessed. YOU are stalking ME." He told me he wasn't surprised by Lurie's response: "John knows how tenacious and committed I can be, and I knew his respect for me would increase his fear. I also knew, given John's ego, that his imagination would do the rest. He'd buy into the idea that I was stalking him because he sees himself as a celebrity, and to have a stalker is to say, 'I'm in the highest echelon of notable people.' "
Neither man wants to apologize unilaterally—or, really, at all. Perry told me, "I regret the whole thing, it was silly and cruel." But, he added, "I'd like John to be able to say, 'John, you scared the fuck out of me, you're a heartless, coldhearted motherfucker—but, at the same time, I shouldn't have said I'd call the cops, I shouldn't have called all your friends, I should have answered the phone when you needed me.' "
Lurie told me that he'd done nothing wrong and said, "I could forgive John Perry if he's just insane. But if he were enjoying this? That would be unacceptable, and I'd have to destroy him." When his symptoms recede, he feels eager to resolve the maddening anxieties and ambiguities once and for all, and often says to himself, "God, I hope he comes now!"
I drove Lurie back from Joshua Tree late in the afternoon. He slumped in the front seat, saying that his head was roaring. As the sun slipped behind the Little San Bernardino Mountains, Lurie said, "Illness has a beautiful way of bestowing a glow on you. You notice the way the light hits the top of the trees." Then he fell silent for thirty miles. As we passed the outskirts of Indio—a scatter of isolated houses braced against the darkness—he said, "How do these people end up here? Do they all have stalkers?"
The dream of artists—which is simply the dream of friends and lovers, magnified—is to plant themselves in other people's heads. By that standard, John Perry has created a masterpiece. Last summer, Lurie wrote a friend that Perry "has been in every facet of my consciousness for months. . . . Every dream, every brush stroke. He has infected my mind."
Perry, too, continues to have Lurie on the brain. One night not long ago, he e-mailed me to say, "It is 3:24 A.M., and I thought I should let you know immediately that I just dialed John's number from my phone book by accident. I heard the voice on the machine and hung up." When I inquired how this accident had occurred, Perry said that he had been looking up Lurie's home number on his cell phone in preparation for calling Time Warner Cable. He was planning to again pretend to be Lurie to try to determine for exactly how many minutes Lurie had watched the Jones-Calzaghe fight, and thereby to ascertain, once and for all, maybe, whether Lurie really had been sick.
The protracted duet has become a kind of living performance piece, but neither man is able to see it as art: Perry because he views himself solely as a painter, and Lurie because he never before associated art with a fear of death. Curiously, though, the struggle seems to have inspired them both; artists sometimes require an enemy. Perry sold two pieces at his December show, one for nine thousand dollars, and just had a show of nudes at a downtown boutique. When he looked at the footage from "The Drawing Show" recently, he thought it could actually make a pilot. And, now that his life has begun to improve, Perry said, Lurie should feel emboldened to come home: "I wouldn't shove him down at this point—if only not to give him the satisfaction of being right." He laughed, then added wistfully, "Anyway, I can't kill him over the phone—he should call me."
Lurie recently had successful shows in Japan and Los Angeles. He told me, "It's strange, but being ready to fight every day—I think it's made me younger. I look better. If something this formidable hadn't happened, I would never have left my apartment. But I got away, I started painting again, I saw the whales in Big Sur. . . . On the other hand, the whole thing has left me really confused about the nature of life. I guess I expected there to be more sanity in the world."
He left Palm Springs in May, but he hasn't decided where to settle next. Thailand seems interesting, or Cuba. He thought about driving to Las Vegas and entering the World Series of Poker, relishing the idea that he would emerge from hiding on national television. After not playing his saxophones since 2001, Lurie recently had them repaired, and on good days he thinks about coming home and working his lip back into shape. "Putting together another band and touring—ennh," he said. "Too much stress, and I don't have the armor anymore to deal with people. I'd probably just play on the street. There's a spot on Astor Place, near where the cube is, between Broadway and Lafayette—a saxophone sounds incredible there at about six o'clock." ♦


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Jon Hopkins announced for Electric Picnic 2015
Announcements, News, etc from the good people of the Electric Picnic - Lineup announcements, festival details etc
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Expert artist producer and Ivor Novello-nominated film score composer, Jon Hopkins makes his Picnic debut this coming September following his fourth studio album 'Immunity' which was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.
Starting out on keys for Imogen Heap, his past work includes daring remixes for artists such as Coldplay, Moderat, Wild Beasts, Nosaj Thing, James Yorkston, Four Tet and David Lynch; and film scores for directors including Peter Jackson amongst others notable names in the film industry.
Ranging from solo acoustic piano performances to explosive, bass-heavy electro sounds, Hopkins is an accomplished talent that still has an unpredictable career yet to forget.
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subset: commoncrawl


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The Universe - Kavli Science Journalism Workshop
12 April 2010
The deadline is April 20 to apply for this summer's Kavli Science Journalism Workshop on The Universe. Hosted by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT, this three-day intensive workshop will cover everything from new discoveries about dark matter and energy, to the most promising planets on which life may be found. The 15 journalists selected to participate will be awarded up to $750 towards travel expenses.
Find a list of faculty and other details at http://web.mit.edu/knight-science/bootcamps/current.html
Search IYA2009 Updates
National Nodes: 148
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Organisational Associates:33
National Websites: 111
Cornerstone Projects: 12
Special Task Groups: 11
Special Projects:16
Official Products:8
Media Partners:22


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Currently, there is no cure for Alzheimer's. But drug and non-drug treatments may help with both cognitive and behavioral symptoms.
Researchers are looking for new treatments to alter the course of the disease and improve the quality of life for people with dementia.
In this section:
- Medications for Memory Loss
- Treatments for Behavioral Changes of Alzheimer's
- Treatments for Sleep Changes
- Alternative Treatments for Alzheimer's
- Questions for Your Doctor
- Treatment Horizon
- Clinical Trials


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Chess 4 is an abstract game for 4 players.Game info on BoardGameAtlas.comGame info on BoardGameGeek.com
Game info on BoardGameAtlas.com
Game info on BoardGameGeek.com
This form will move this price for this item to a new item. Search for the item you want to move to below, then submit.
You can find a BGG ID for a game by visiting it's game page on BGG's website. Then copy/paste the ID found in the URL. Below is a screenshot of where to find the ID.
We just got a copy of Wingspan European Expansion and take a look at everything in the box. About Wingspan European Expansion: https://www.boardgameatlas.com......
We have compiled a list of "order by" dates and other important information to help you as you do your holiday shopping this year. When you're comparing prices on games, please click the links from boardgameprices.com and boardgameatlas.com to the game stores. We receive a small referral ...
Gloomhaven Sequel called Frosthaven was Announced!>
Wingspan Gets the Pokemon Go AR experience!>
Monopoly: Longest Game Ever Unboxing>
The Latin Quarter Playing Cards and Gaming Chips>
GoDice - Smart Connected Dice>


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One of the curious benefits of the digital age is that it allows access to past treasures of culture.
For me, crowded — and occasionally smelly — train journeys home are lifted by listening to old episodes of Desert Island Discs. This week, for example, on the 30th anniversary of the death of Tennessee Williams, I listened to his interview with Roy Plumley, from 1978, and enjoyed his droll humour and an unexpected anecdote about meeting Elvis Presley. I also laughed at another Williams (Carry On star Kenneth, in 1987) talking about death. He said he had wanted an epitaph on his tombstone as good as the one Dorothy Parker suggested ("This one's on me").
Williams (the A Streetcar Named Desire one), incidentally, chose as his favourite song a version of Danny Boy by Harry Belafonte, one of the speakers last year at the Telegraph Hay Festival. Belafonte was one of the many special acts at the 25th anniversary festival.
Some tickets have now gone on sale for the first announced events of 2013 — with Philip Glass, Quentin Blake and John Le Carré among a fine cast — and to complement them Hay has made available for download some highlights from its rich quarter century-old archive.
In a free weekly podcast which you can subscribe to using iTunes you can listen to some stirring past talks. The first 23 will include writers Seamus Heaney, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Harold Pinter, Nadime Gordimer and Ted Hughes.
Former USA president Jimmy Carter is included, and Desmond Tutu. If you want something more lighthearted, there is Catherine Tate. If you want heavyweight, there is Norman Mailer talking about Hemingway and Muhammed Ali.
I guess that's sorted the ipod playlist for a few train journeys.
• Click here to subscribe for free to the Hay Festival podcasts


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Lions and tigers and bears and just about any other exotic animal you can think of were found on a mega yacht in Miami and caused quite an expensive problem for one of the wealthiest men in America.
The decorative animal hides, stuffed heads and ivory carvings are illegal to have in the U.S., an endangered species law lost on Tamir Sapir, the New York billionaire who owns the vessel.
Even though Sapir was not smuggling the items, U.S. Customs agents seized the boat and fined the real-estate tycoon $150,000. The expensive trinkets were also taken away.
"Personally, I think these items are rather creepy items," said U.S. District Attorney Alex Acosta. "And I would not want them in my house, but some people like them and are willing to buy them. The reason laws exist is because there is a market."
The yacht was found on an Italian freighter at Port Everglades and was explained to be Sapir's personal boat for trips to the Caribbean.
Agents said Sapir will get his boat back, minus the snarling Bengal tiger head and snake-skinned cigar box. But his misfortune highlights a particularly rough year for the Russian immigrant.
Two months ago, Sapir fell out of the Forbes.com 500 Richest Americans list, landing at No. 522 with a net worth of just over $1.4 billion. Now, he doesn't have his beautiful dead and exotic animals. What's a billionaire to do?


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Sheldon Adelson: Inside the mind of the mega-donor
The Billion-Dollar Buy: About this series
Like never before, big dollars are having a big impact on politics and governance. This series examines how the new wide-open fundraising landscape will affect the 2012 campaigns.
See also: Inside Koch world | GOP groups plan record $1 billion blitz | Rove hits big: Birth of a mega-donor | Myth of the small donor | The IRS's 'feeble' grip on big political cash | The new normal: $9 million for a rural House seat | Secret money funds GOP door-knockers | The billion-dollar bust?
LAS VEGAS — At the Republican National Convention in Tampa last month, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson got high-fives from strangers; entertained Karl Rove, Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki in his well-stocked luxury box; ate dinner with House Speaker John Boehner; and had a private meeting with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Story Continued Below
Last week, Adelson got a front-row seat — and a shout-out from Mitt Romney — at a $1 million campaign fundraiser at a Vegas casino. Paul Ryan held a private meeting with Adelson four days after being named Romney's running mate.
Worth just over $21 billion and now in the cross hairs of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Adelson has made history: He is the first person to spend $70 million to sway a presidential election, and he plans to spend more — perhaps as much as $100 million — by Election Day. An estimated $20 million to $30 million of the giving went to groups that do not disclose their donors and had not been reported before.
Adelson (pronounced ADDLE-son) is the dominant pioneer of the super PAC era — by far the biggest donor to the web of secretive groups that are adding nearly $1 billion to the more traditional spending by the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee.
The 79-year-old literally spreads the wealth: He sent $5 million to the super PAC run by Boehner allies and $5 million to the super PAC run by Cantor allies.
( LIST: Republican mega-donors)
Despite his soaring influence as a party kingmaker and his mammoth financial footprint, Adelson is rarely seen or heard, and he has remained mysterious even to many top Republicans. He broke his silence to POLITICO to explain his methods and motives in the most detail he has yet offered.
Blunt and chatty during a two-hour interview in his owner's suite at The Venetian resort on the Las Vegas strip, Adelson said he will continue to ante up — "whatever it takes" to defeat President Barack Obama, as he repeatedly put it. "I don't believe one person should influence an election," he said as he dined on salmon and mixed vegetables in his conference room, with a napkin tucked over his lavender tie. "So, I suppose you'll ask me, 'How come I'm doing it?' Because other single people influence elections."
( Also on POLITICO: Full series: The Billion-Dollar Buy)
He wants to beat them — and beat them badly: "I suppose you could say that I live on Vince Lombardi's belief: 'Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.' So, I do whatever it takes, as long as it's moral, ethical, principled, legal."
Adelson has already given about three times as much as the previous record-holder, hedge fund manager George Soros, who dropped $24 million to try to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004. And Adelson has already given about one-third of the amount that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) spent on his entire campaign in 2008.
Everyone wants Adelson's money, and so he knows why everyone loves him and comes calling. But he doesn't really seem to mind getting hit up, enjoying the combat as an eccentric, happy warrior. "I meet with everybody, even people looking for small charity. If I have the time to take their call or to see them, I'll do that." Asked about unusual requests, he said with a laugh, "Well, money is money. So, I think the requests are all the same. They're all looking for money."


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The WLOL catalogs the original location for DXpedition and historical reference plus the museum location as two distinct ARLHS numbers.
The information contained within the ARLHS World List of Lights is Copyright 2003-2019 ARLHS, LLC.
Visit ARLHS for usage information.
Database HTML Rendering Programs, MySQL Schema and Web Site Content (excluding the actual lighthouse data)
Copyright 2006-2019 John Huggins
PHP/MySQL Database Engine: $Revision: 1.88 $
Lighthouse Display Program: $Revision: 1.49 $


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Stretching Beauty: Ballerina Misty Copeland on Her Body Struggles
It was about an hour after my last pirouette of the evening onstage with the American Ballet Theatre, and I was already in my pajamas. With a glass of wine in one hand and the phone in the other, I ordered my usual: a dozen glazed doughnuts from my local Krispy Kreme. Once they arrived, I sat on my couch, turned on Sex and the City and ate them all straight from the box. They tasted so good, and while I was eating them, the sugary richness made me feel comforted and cared for. The next morning, I woke up guilty and ashamed, but a few nights later I felt so miserable that I did it all over again.
I was 21 years old, thrilled to be dancing with the most famous ballet company in the country, and I was bingeing regularly. I could pinpoint exactly when and why it started. One day after rehearsal, I saw my name posted alongside the words "See the artistic staff." They made all the company's big decisions, including casting, and for me this summons from them was nerve-racking. I remember sitting down in their office, so anxious that I was sweating. They told me: "Your body has changed. The lines you're creating don't look the way they used to. We'd like to see you lengthen."
That, of course, was just a polite, safe way of saying, "You need to lose weight." I was so embarrassed that all I could answer was "I understand. I'd like to change this." And then I got out of there as fast as I could. When I reached my apartment, I started crying uncontrollably. I knew that since I was 5'2' and 108 pounds, most people would consider me super thin. But in my own little world, I was devastated to learn I was "fat." I had always been proud of my body—its strength and grace enabled me to pursue my passions. But now it had become the enemy.
Ever since I discovered ballet at the relatively late age of 13, it had been the one part of my life where I was the ideal. I grew up poor in San Pedro, California, sleeping on the floor of shady motels with my five siblings and not always sure when or where I'd get my next meal. I never thought of myself as special or particularly good at anything. But once I started ballet, suddenly I had a new identity: prodigy. I remember my first instructor telling me that George Balanchine, the revered founder of the New York City Ballet, thought that a ballerina should have a long neck, sloped shoulders, a small rib cage, a narrow waist and long legs and feet. "You're everything he wanted," she said. "You're perfect."
But from a health perspective, when I moved to New York City to dance with ABT, I wasn't perfect at all. I was 19 and tiny—I'd never even menstruated. I know people see dancers as thin as I was and assume we must be anorexic. Actually, I just burned a lot of calories from the demanding routine of dancing up to nine hours a day. I didn't have an eating disorder—then. But about eight months after I started with the company, I fractured a bone in my back during a rehearsal. My doctor told me I needed to start menstruating because the hormones would help strengthen my bones, and he put me on the Pill. Almost overnight, my body was transformed. In one month, I gained 10 pounds, mostly in my stomach, and my 30B breasts swelled to double D.
It took me a year to recover from the injury and return to dancing, but I still wasn't used to having breasts and a belly. And when I finally came back to ABT and put on my leotard again, it was an even bigger shock: I didn't look or feel like the dancer I remembered being. Usually, ballerinas share costumes since we have similar builds. But now the leotards had to be altered for me—with a sheer material added to cover my cleavage, for instance. I hated this sign that I was different from the others, and I felt singled out for all the wrong reasons. I became so self-conscious that, for the first time in my life, I couldn't dance strong. I was too busy trying to hide my breasts. After a few months, I was called in for The Talk, and the bingeing began.
After that meeting, I became so ashamed of my body that I started wearing T-shirts and shorts over my leotard and tights during practice. For the first time, I made myself exercise at the gym just to burn calories, which was awful and didn't help. And I'd duck down hallways to avoid the artistic staff, afraid they'd tell me to "lengthen" again. I didn't even want to be seen in ballet class, which I'd always loved. I realized that bingeing wasn't a logical reaction, but at night, when I was alone, I got so angry: Who do they think they're talking to? I have so much talent. I'll eat what I want. But I knew ABT saw my once "perfect" body as a problem, so I resented them. And I hated myself for not being able to fix it. My perverse form of rebellion (and comfort) was doughnuts.
But as I grew more introverted at ABT, always nervous that I'd be criticized, I started to venture outside that tightly knit world to make friends. That's when everything began to shift. I noticed that most people didn't have the same rigid expectations I had about how their bodies should look. Gradually, I started to feel more relaxed and comfortable in my frame—and even happy with it. Then I met my boyfriend, Olu, who was studying law at Emory University. Since our relationship was long-distance for the first year, we spent every night talking on the phone. He'd tell me over and over that I was talented and beautiful. I'd never experienced that kind of affirmation before, even when I was being praised for having a traditional dancer's physique. As a ballerina, you always stand in front of the mirror searching for flaws. You're so used to criticism—from yourself and others—that it's hard to remember that your body is something to enjoy, not just a never-ending fix-it project.
Around the time I met Olu, I also found a mentor in Victoria Rowell, a former ABT dancer turned actress. After she saw me perform in Hollywood, she left me a note asking me to call her. I did, and when we met, we talked nearly all night long. I told her I thought I'd become "the fat dancer" and that I felt awful about it. Over the course of many conversations, she made me see that what I ate should be about making myself feel good, healthy and strong, not about attempting to please (or defy) anyone else. "Your body is fine," she said. "But you'll feel better if you take care of it."
I'd always believed that what mattered was how I looked, how well I embodied certain standards of perfection. But now I started to understand that my body's natural evolution into womanhood had validity, too. Dancing had always made me happy, and I wanted that back. So my priority became simply accepting my new self. I focused on what I wanted: to feel good, to be confident in my skin again, to dance.
I really didn't try to stop bingeing. Instead, I started thinking about food not as solace but as the fuel that gave me the energy and strength I needed to dance—and to live. I paid attention to how my meals made me feel physically, started eating more vegetables and fish and gave up red meat and poultry. I still ate sweets occasionally because I love them—especially cupcakes and banana pudding—but now just one serving was plenty. Within a few months, I'd forgotten Krispy Kreme's number.
Over the course of the next year, I ended up losing a few pounds (finding a better birth control regimen helped, too), but I kept my full breasts and hips. My body was still different than it had been; I couldn't go back to being a little girl. But now I owned it. My curves became an integral part of who I am as a dancer, not something I needed to lose to become one. I started dancing with confidence and joy, and soon the staff at ABT began giving me positive feedback again. And I think I changed everyone's mind about what a perfect dancer is supposed to look like.
Over the next few years, things at ABT just got better. I became a soloist with the company—the first black dancer to do so in more than two decades. And in 2012 I landed my biggest role yet, headlining in Firebird. I remember walking out of rehearsal in jeans and sandals to get my hair done for the premiere. When I turned onto the sidewalk, I saw it: a huge billboard on the front of the Metropolitan Opera House with my picture on it. I was in profile, wearing a red leotard, with my chest and back arched so you could see my full, feminine breasts and my round butt. It was everything that people don't expect in a ballerina. I stood completely still for five minutes, just crying. It was beauty. It was power. It was a woman. It was me.
Photo Credit: CN Digital Archive


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You take an everyday pencil and magically make the No. 2 jump from the top to the bottom of the pencil! Then this amazing pencil goes a step further by revealing the spectator's selected card, printed right on the pencil! Trick comes with two special pencils.
Do you own this product? Write a review.


text:
renku, I'm not able to download the Windows version of 3.11.0. github always shows a "File was not found." error. Never had this issue when downloading previous versions.
renku, I'm not able to download the Windows version of 3.11.0. github always shows a "File was not found." error. Never had this issue when downloading previous versions.
Indeed. Unfortunately can't fix this right now as I don't have a Windows machine at hand. It'll have to wait a week or two while I'm away. Sorry.
Thanks renku. The previous version is working fine for me right now, just wanted to give you a heads up.
Releasing JSDuck 4 beta
While the parser is new, it's backwards compatible - so what worked in 3.x should also be working in 4.x. Mostly it should just detect more stuff - lot's of private members, etc. But I'm sure there are regressions that my unit tests haven't caught. That's what the beta is for. There are many more things that can be implemented on top of the new parser, but currently my main interest is how it compares with 3.x.
There's currently one major downside that I'm aware of: performance under Windows has degraded considerably. I'll be looking at some alternative approaches to improve on this area.
Installation instructions and more...
As always, any feedback will be most appreciated.
I'm having some trouble getting my custom tags working. This is the error:
This is my class:Code:C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require': C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11. 0/lib/jsduck/tag/feature.rb:5: class/module name must be CONSTANT (SyntaxError) class feature < JsDuck::MetaTag ^ from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/meta_tag_loader.rb:37:in `load_file' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/meta_tag_loader.rb:27:in `block in load' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/meta_tag_loader.rb:27:in `each' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/meta_tag_loader.rb:27:in `load' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/meta_tag_loader.rb:22:in `load' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/meta_tag_registry.rb:38:in `block in load' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/meta_tag_registry.rb:38:in `each' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/meta_tag_registry.rb:38:in `load' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/lib/jsduck/options.rb:134:in `parse!' from C:/Users/mtooke/AppData/Local/Temp/ocr62D3.tmp/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/jsduck-3.11.0/bin/jsduck:25:in `'
I can pass it in on the command line without problems, and it works when I used the provided sample LicenseTag as the class name, but when I change the class name to something else, I get this error. What am I doing wrong?Code:require "jsduck/meta_tag" module JsDuck::Tag # Implementation of @featureID tag class feature < JsDuck::MetaTag def initialize @name = "featureID" @key = :featureID @signature = {:long => "featureID", :short => "TMP"} @boolean = true end def to_html(contents) <<-EOHTML

This is a featureID method. a hook into the functionality of this class. Feel free to override it in child classes.

 EOHTML end end end
Thanks in advance. Awesome tool btw!
Class names and other constants must begin with an uppercase letter in Ruby. Just use "Feature" instead of "feature".
Ahh - thanks!
@John220: Your command of the English language makes it hard to decipher what you're trying to say. You can use --images option multiple times to specify several paths (if that's what you were asking for).
Alternative Windows version of JSDuck 4 beta
Given the downsides of the current exe, I'm experimenting with bringing JSDuck 4 to Windows using JRuby.
It should work better out-of-the-box, without requirering an existance of nodejs. Though the speed is still about the same as using the exe. So not much progress on that side, but I'm hoping to improve that using native threads available in JRuby.
See the installation instructions in wiki.
And any feedback is still most appreciated - so far there's been zero of it - if you're depending on jsduck, you should really give a test run to the beta, it should fairly solid actually.
Apologies if this has been asked before, but can you tell me if markdown tables are supported in JSDuck? I can't seem to make anything work.If not, is there a list of supported and unsupported markdown syntax available?
I'm trying to write an XSLT transform that converts our XHTML to markdown.
Thanks in advance!


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Oct. 28, 2007
SANTA CLARA, Calif. - The eighth-ranked Santa Clara women's soccer team lost a tough battle to No. 6 Portland Sunday afternoon at Merlo Field in Portland, Ore. The Pilots topped the Broncos, 2-0. With the loss, SCU falls to 10-5-3 on the season and 2-3-0 in West Coast Conference action, while Portland improved to 13-3-0 and remains undefeated in league play with a 3-0-0 record.
"I'm very proud of my team's performance at the start of the game," said head coach Jerry Smith. "For the first 30 minutes we were the aggressors and had good control of the game. Yet at the end, Portland was the more aggressive team. They are a very good team and are well coached. The way our schedule is laid out is partially to blame for the outcomes this season. We have had tough and long road trips and rest is something we haven't really had too much of. For us to rebound next weekend, we need to rest."
The Pilots came out strong in the first half, yet the Broncos defense and goalkeeper Meagan McCray did a solid job in holding Portland off. Sophomore Kiki Bosio attempted the first shot of the afternoon for the Broncos in the 23rd minute, however the ball went high. After gaining possession, Portland applied heavy pressure on SCU's defense. Yet, freshmen Maxine Goynes and Anessa Patton provided excellent play for the Broncos in the back to hold off the Pilots advances. With less than a minute left in the half, Michelle Enyeart's shot from 12 yards out into the lower right corner of the goal put the Pilots on the board, 1-0.
In the second half, freshman Kendra Perry tried her had at tying the score but her shot was blocked by a Portland defender. A penalty kick was awarded to the Pilots after Chioma Iqwe and Enyeart got tangled with one another. Angie Woznuk converted the penalty kick to increase Portland's lead to 2-0. Santa Clara fought hard to come back on shots from senior Meagan Snell and Patton, but was unsuccessful.
Santa Clara plays their final regular season road game on Sunday, Nov. 4 against the Dons of San Francisco. Kick off is scheduled for 1 p.m. at Negoesco Stadium.


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Monday, July 2, 2007
Canada Day Hangover
A few random thoughts to consider while we scrub down the walls and clean up the broken beer bottles and stray spent fireworks of the streets.
Hearty Congrats: To Alex Rios on being named to the AL All Stars. Funny how a guy who's been perpetual trade bait for three or four years now has proven himself to be the Jays' best player for much of last season (pre-staph infection) and all of this season.
Halladay's Snub: In truth, this has not been the most stellar start by Doc over the past few years, and the list of other pitchers included thus far is actually pretty unassailable. However, Doc could still be voted into the lineup to keep Alex Rios company, if all of the computers in New England and Japan suddenly go on the fritz.
A.J.'s DL Madness: Was he rushed back too soon, or is he simply being hypersensitive about the shoulder? The lack of velocity on his fastball last time out would indicate that the Jays likely should have given him an extra few days to recover, which begs the question: why didn't they?
J.P. in the Boston Globe: In case you need a respite from the Ken Fidlins or Richard Griffins of the world, here's an interview with J.P. from the Boston Globe on July 1.
3 comments:
- Darren Priest said...
When I read about AJ Burnett and the myriad players that hit the DL for shoulder injuries and so forth, I can't help but think: damn! Dr. James Andrews must be one rich SOB!
- July 2, 2007 at 7:16 PM
- Sebastian said...
Rios has not been the best Jay this year. Glaus has. By far.
- July 3, 2007 at 1:33 AM
- Adam said...
Hahahahahahaha good one sebastian I needed a good laugh
- July 3, 2007 at 8:54 PM
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
(Re-posting this must-read press release from Occupy Homes MN)
Colleen McKee Espinosa, a single mother of three -- including Nick Espinosa, a volunteer organizer who has helped other homeowners fight foreclosure -- hoped that negotiations with officials at Citibank would allow her to catch up on her mortgage and keep her home. But Citibank still has the home scheduled to be auctioned off at a sheriff sale at 11 on Wednesday, June 13th.
McKee Espinosa, a registered nurse, has owned her home for 16 years. Last year, she attempted to pay her Citibank mortgage to catch up on three past-due payments on the indicated due date. The bank told her the home had already been sent into foreclosure.
"I've come up with the money I owe them but they refuse to take it," McKee Espinosa said.
Colleen's son Nick Espinosa is a volunteer organizer for the group Occupy Homes Minnesota, a group that has waged successful campaigns that saved the homes of Monique White and US Marine veteran Bobby Hull.
Despite her son's activism, Colleen McKee Espinosa was initially reluctant to speak publicly about her case. But after meeting and finding support from others fighting to stop their foreclosures, McKee Espinosa joined forces with homeowners and Occupy Homes activists to begin a community campaign to ask Citibank to negotiate a fair settlement that would let her keep her home and finish paying a mortgage that, until recently, had only six years of payments left.
After the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the blog Crooks and Liars, and others covered the story, Citibank officials contacted the family, assured them they were doing everything they could to resolve the case, and assigned them a contact in the "executive response unit." Despite this, the bank is moving to auction the home at a sheriff's sale this Wednesday at the Hennepin County Government Center, after which time the bank would have no legal obligation to work with the family.
"My mother has struggled her entire life to keep our family afloat and give my siblings and I a better life than she had," said Nick Espinosa, "I've dedicated the last 8 months of my life to helping families fight against unjust foreclosures and the greedy banks that would rather leave homes vacant than work to keep families in their communities even after being bailed out with our tax dollars. CitiBank won't be stealing the home I grew up in from my mom--it stops here."
The family has seen a huge outpouring of support from the community since the campaign started. McKee Espinosa's union of 20,000 nurses statewide, The Minnesota Nurses Association, St. Anthony East Neighborhood Association, and hundreds of neighbors have called for Citibank to negotiate with the family and signed an online petition asking Citibank to work out an agreement with the family. Most neighbors on the block have sent letters to Citibank and display yard signs in support of the family.
"I have decided that I'm not leaving my home until we get a good faith negotiation. I'm fighting to send the message to other people not to give up, because if you're isolated you can't fight these people," said McKee Espinosa. "I'd tell the banks they better watch out because people are catching on to their game and a lot of people are going to fight back now."
(One additional note-- we'll be having an Occupy Homes-themed poetry slam and open mic on Tuesday, June 26 at Kieran's Pub in MPLS. Sign-up at 7:30, show at 8pm. Bring poems about economic injustice, activism, fighting back or just social justice in general. Proceeds will go to Occupy Homes)


text: IMG_0081 written by Melissa 20/11/2011 0 comment 0 Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest Melissa Melissa Meister - Entrepreneur always reinventing herself. Melissa Meister has lived in Hollywood CA. for 20 years. Began as a Wilhelmina Model and professional commercial actress. Seen in Madonna and Michael Jackson videos. Next, Melissa designed and created MeisterCouture, a young designer apparel line sold in Fred Segal. Naturally she morphed into a personal stylist to all your favorite stars (Kevin Garnett, Serena Williams) and then was successfully inducted into the Costume Designers Guild. Recognized for movies such as Sherlock Holmes and Arthur. Now, instinctively directing and producing pop culture celebrities (Kim Kardashian, Ron Artest) for CameoStars.com. This is Melissa's first attempt at blogging. Who know's what she will do next. Leave a Comment Cancel Reply


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More posts
- There are two hard and fast rules in life: Never ever run with scissors and never sell an award-winning wine for under$1
- Running with Scissors Cab Central Coast CA 2010 Dark cassis, Cedar, BlackBerry, cherry Pairs w steak and roasts Total Wine $9.99
- Found add Hy Vee- approx $10-12
- Total wine $9.99. Liked it but feel that BV is a better wine for the price.
- Just ok. I would drink again if on sale.


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It is finally warm, really warm, here in Ohio. Yesterday the temp was in the mid-high 80s. Can't argue with that! It was actually too hot in our house! I am not complaining one bit. I am so tired of being cold! LOL! From looking at the forecast, I believe that the temps are supposed to stay at 70 or above all week! Sure, some rain is involved, but it's all good.
Sunday ~ Grilled Chicken (balsamic marinade), rosemary roasted potatoes, fresh green beans & salad
Monday ~ Filet mignon, baked sweet potatoes (or reg. potatoes), sugar snap peas & salad
Tuesday ~ Dinner out at Uno's Chicago Grill for GF Pizza! YAY!!!
Wednesday ~ Bourbon chicken, brown rice (or quinoa), broccoli & salad
Thursday ~ Soft Tacos, refried beans, corn & salad
Friday ~ Homemade Pizza (trying Bob's Red Mill Pizza Crust mix) & salad
Saturday ~ leftovers or breakfast for dinner
Baked Goods for the Week
PB Cookies
Don't forget to check out Orgjunkie for lots more meal plans! Cheryl, at GF Goodness is hosting this week's GF Menu Swap! Thanks Cheryl!
Filed under: Family, Gluten-Free |


text: SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY COMMISSION Minutes of the regular meeting of Thursday, November 6, 2003. (As approved January 6, 2004) The San Francisco Public Library Commission held its regular meeting on Thursday, November 6, 2003 in the Koret Auditorium, Main Library. Vice President Steiman called the meeting to order at 4:05 pm. The following members were noted present: Commissioners Bautista, Coulter, Steiman, and Strobin. Commissioner Chin joined the meeting at 4:15PM. President Higueras and Commissioner Streets were reported as excused attendance. Agenda Items: 1) Approval of October 2, 2003 Minutes 2) City Librarian's Report 3) 04/05 Library Bidget Workshop 4) Commission Officers for 2004 6) Friends of the Library Report 7) Labor Union Report 8) New Business 9) Public Comment APPENDIX A -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA ITEM #1 APPROVAL OF THE OCTOBER 2, 2003 COMMISSION MINUTES Public comment on APPROVAL OF THE OCTOBER 2, 2003 COMMISSION MINUTES An anonymous member of the public suggested that the full name of Mr. Loranger's organization be provided rather than its abbreviation and suggested that the minutes obliterated history by not reporting details of comments. This person also noted that comments regarding the draft Strategic Plan by the Deputy City Librarian and regarding the BALIS Report were not included. Mr. Ed Regan found his comments had been accurately reported. Mr. Peter Warfield commented that the reported discussion of the Strategic Plan was insufficiently detailed to highlight changes called for by the City Librarian and the Commission President. Mr. Warfield also commented that some of his remarks and the City Librarian's response to them were not reported. Commission discussion of APPROVAL OF THE OCTOBER 2, 2003 COMMISSION MINUTES Vice President Steiman asked that the full name of the San Francisco Neighborhood Antenna-Free Union (SNAFU) be spelled out rather than just be identified by its abbreviation in the minutes. MOTION: by Commissioner Bautista, seconded by Commissioner Strobin for approval of the October 2, 2003 Minutes. ACTION: 5-0 (Bautista, Chin, Coulter, Steiman, and Strobin) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA ITEM #2 CITY LIBRARIAN'S REPORT City Librarian Susan Hildreth began her report with an extensive report and analysis of the decisions made, including the lack of success of the Library's Prop 14. Application for the Richmond Branch, at the October 28th Sacramento Prop. 14 Bond meeting. The City Librarian additionally presented: information concerning a Branch Library Improvement Program bookmobile purchase; a report on Tool Lending Center developments; a Millennium transition update; and an update on Library exhibits and programs. Ms Hildreth also called attention to a "Closing Party"[PDF] planned for the Excelsior Branch Library on November 23rd. (copy attached) Public comment on AGENDA ITEM #2 CITY LIBRARIAN'S REPORT An anonymous member of the public commented on the Library's lack of success with Prop. 14 applications and noted that the competition for these funds would likely become even more intense in the 3rd cycle. This person suggested that the Library's chances for success were iffy if not farfetched and that fiscally responsible plans should be undertaken to be prepared. Mr. Ed Regan found the presentation informative, but expressed reservations with the proposed use of book mobiles to provide interim services, suggesting that a larger vehicle such as a mobile home or temporary building would serve better. Commission discussion of AGENDA ITEM #2 CITY LIBRARIAN'S REPORT In response to questions by Commissioner Coulter, the City Librarian reported that that negative comments offered by critics of the Richmond Prop. 14 Application had limited impact on the Bond Board's decision making process. Commissioner Coulter expressed dismay that individuals who were not Richmond residents would attempt to damage the chances for funding. Commissioner Chin expressed no such surprise noting that these critics were purely negative and that contrary to their words of concern about books and the Library their actions were simply mean and nasty. The City Librarian reported that Supervisor McGoldrick had informed her that at the next Board meeting he would be taking a bus full of Richmond District neighbors to Sacrament to demonstrate neighborhood residents' strong support of the Library's application for State Library Bond Act funding. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA ITEM #3 04/05 LIBRARY BUDGET WORKSHOP Library Finance Director George Nichols presented a detailed overview of the current fiscal landscape and economic outlook as well as the advent of a new regime in Sacramento in order to set the stage for his discussion of the outlook for the Library's 2004/05 Budget (copy attached). Public comment on AGENDA ITEM #3 An anonymous member of the public commented that the report simply noted that in good years prudence should be exercised so that in bad years when less could be expected services could continue. This person then discussed the Board of Supervisors action to allocate Library funds and the way in which the various Library fund sources were used, noting that the cost of the purchase of the school property was not included when adding up the Library funds that the Board of Supervisors had allocated for the schools. Mr. Ed Regan lauded the report and requested a detailed breakdown of the Library's book collections, particularly its non-fiction collections, and expressed a hope that funds would be available for expanded hours of service. Mr. Peter Warfield urged that the Commissioners consider the priorities mandated by Prop E, (Library Preservation Fund) for more books and hours, suggesting that for a wealthy library, among the nation's best funded, a larger share of funds should be allocated to books and additional hours of service. Commission discussion of AGENDA ITEM #3 04/05 LIBRARY BUDGET Vice President Steiman pointed out that the Library was meeting the goal of increased public service hours mandated by Prop. E (Library Preservation Fund) and that the Commission would be prudent when considering what other needs could be funded if additional funds were available. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA #4 COMMISSION OFFICERS FOR 2004 The Commission Secretary recommended that in view of the certainty of the election of a new Mayor that the Commission act to postpone nominating and electing officers for 2004 until the new administration had had an opportunity to make its wishes known regarding the Commission's membership. Public comment on AGENDA #4 COMMISSION OFFICERS FOR 2004 An anonymous member of the public noted that there was uncertainty with change of administrations but that historically some Commissioners were usually retained along with new appointments so as to maintain continuity. Commission discussion of AGENDA #4 COMMISSION OFFICERS FOR 2004 MOTION: by Commissioner Bautista, seconded by Commissioner Strobin to postpone nomination and election of Library Commissioner for 2004 ACTION: 5-0 (Bautista, Chin, Coulter, Steiman, and Strobin) Vice President Steiman announced that she was continuing discussion of Agenda Item #5 Library History Plaques to a later meeting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA ITEM #6 FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY REPORT Friends of the Library Executive Director Martín Gómez reported that the Friends had gone to Sacramento to support the Library's Prop 14 (State Library Bond Act) Application for the Richmond Branch and expressed disappointment at the mean spirited opposition to this worthy project voiced by the Library's critics. Mr. Gómez announced that the Planned Giving Program was underway and then invited the Commissioners to attend a reception honoring author Amy Tan. Mr. Gómez next discussed a $50,000 gift for the Excelsior Branch Capital Campaign that the Friends had received from the Silver Giving Fund. The Executive Director of the Friends reported the happy news that Deborah Doyle, Chair of the Friends Board, had been recognized with the prestigious California Library Association President's Award and would receive it on November 15th at the upcoming CLA meeting in Ontario. Additionally, he noted that Friends Board member Ellen Huppert was being recognized for her contributions during National Philanthropy Day activities and then concluded his report with a reminder of Project Read's 20th Anniversary Commission discussion of AGENDA ITEM #6 FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY REPORT Commissioner Chin lauded Ms. Huppert's contributions, noting that she was also a school volunteer. In response to questions by Vice President Steiman, Mr. Gómez briefly discussed the Grants to Branches for the coming year. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA #7 LABOR UNION REPORT Librarian's Guild member Ruth Maginnis called the Commissioners' attention to issues of concern to Guild members relating to Workers Compensation Claims and about increased numbers of hand injuries thought to be related to the new ILS system. Concerning branch library renovations, Ms. Maginnis urged that all seismic risk level 4 facilities be given highest priority for repair without waiting for additional grant money to do so. Ms. Maginnis then presented a lengthy critique of the proposed Wall of Library Heroes reporting Librarian's Guild opposition to the proposal and suggesting that the Friends of the Library's contributions were being favored while those of library staff and members of the public were being overlooked. Ms. Maginnis concluded the Labor Union Report commenting that this was an expensive project in times where there was a shortage of funds and that short staffing was already a problem. Commission discussion of AGENDA #7 LABOR UNION REPORT In answer to a question by Vice President Steiman, Ms. Maginnis replied that while there had not been a vote by the Librarian Guilds to oppose the Wall of Heroes, there was total lack of support for it by those attending Guild meetings. There followed a discussion of various issues related to the proposed Wall of Heroes with Commissioner Coulter emphasizing that the goal was to recognize citizen volunteer support for the creation of and maintenance of the Library throughout its history. Commissioner Coulter left the meeting at 5:45pm. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA #8 NEW BUSINESS Commissioner Bautista requested a report to the Commission on the Library's bookmobile services. Public comment on AGENDA #8 NEW BUSINESS An anonymous member of the public suggested that the report to the Commission on bookmobile service should be comprehensive. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENDA ITEM #9 PUBLIC COMMENT An anonymous member of the public noted no report was made concerning the "Reversing Vandalism" project or on the Richmond Neighborhood meeting concerning the proposed renaming of the Richmond Branch Library to honor the late Senator Milton Marks. Additionally, this individual expressed their opposition to Supervisor Chris Daley's action in reallocating Library funds to the school district. Mr. Eugene Lee, a library user, applauded the catalog upgrade but called for the Library to provide more help for those learning how to navigate the new system. Mr. Lee noted however that, even with the bugs yet to be resolved, the new system was much faster and better than before. Commissioner Chin left the meeting at 6.05pm. The meeting ended with the abrupt loss of the quorum at 6:05pm Michael Housh, Commission Secretary 11/20/03 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Minutes of the regular Commission Meeting of November 6, 2003 Appendix A The Public Comment Summary Statements included in these Minutes are authorized by San Francisco Administrative Code Section 67.16. These summary statements are provided by the speaker. Their contents are neither generated by, nor subject to approval or verification of accuracy by, the San Francisco Public Library Commission. The number of members of the public who spoke anonymously at this meeting. 1 Public comment available for viewing in pdf format. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- City Librarian's Report – 11/6/03 October 28th Proposition 14 Bond Board meeting – A dedicated contingent from San Francisco traveled to Sacramento for this important meeting. 66 projects totaling $547 million in requests were submitted. 16 projects totaling $91 million were funded. Projects ranked as follows: outstanding – 13, very good – 38 (Richmond was in this category), acceptable – 15, limitations – 1. All outstanding were funded as well as 3 very good projects. Over 100 people gave testimony on projects; two members of the public testified against the Richmond project, the only project that received any negative testimony. We received useful information in the project evaluation on how to make the Richmond application more competitive; and we also had a useful phone consultation from the rating panel on the morning of 11/6. We plan to resubmit the Richmond project for Cycle 3 funding, the final cycle, as well as 4 other new projects. Branch Library Improvement Program bookmobile purchase – After great effort on the part of the Library Finance staff, the City has issued a check for the Sunnyvale Public Library bookmobile that will be used for temporary services in the Excelsior neighborhood during the branch closure as well as other neighborhoods in the future. The bookmobile is in excellent condition and we hope to have it ready for the Excelsior Branch closing party on November 23rd. The Library is also purchasing a new bookmobile which will be manufactured according to our specifications and be ready in Spring 2004. Tool Lending Center update – The grant agreement with Clean City Coalition has been signed. We hope to reopen the popular service before Thanksgiving. We have an effective agreement with good management controls. The Library staff will actively assist the CCC staff with the Tool Center program. Millenium update – The migration to Millennium was successfully completed at the end of August. The new online system is very popular with the public and reference staff. The circulation system is web-based and entails use of a mouse. The previous system was text-based; and the introduction of the mouse and lots of clicking is a challenge for circulation staff. In order to address outstanding issues since the migration, a Post-Migration Team has been formed. Chaired by John Kenny, Assistant Chief of Main Library, the team will be organized into subgroups focusing on public catalog review, holds/reserves, circulation and training. A weekly progress update is posted on the staff intranet. Exhibits and Programs – Report is attached. Explanatory documents: Copies of listed explanatory documents are available as follows: (1) from the Commission Secretary/Custodian of Records, Main Library, 6th Floor, (2) in the rear of the Koret Auditorium immediately before and during the meeting, and (3)to the extent possible, on the Library's Web site. Additional materials not listed as explanatory documents, if any, that are distributed to the Library Commissioners prior to or during the meeting in connection with any agenda item will be available to the public for inspection and copying in accordance with Government Code Section 54954.1 and Sunshine Ordinance §§ 67.9, 67.28(b) & 67.28(d).