Brownian Motion

"I'm Putting All My Eggs In One Basket" by the Great Guitars (Herb Ellis, Charlie Byrd, Barney Kessel).

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By June 6, 2008 Germany Abuzz at Racy Novel of Sex and Hygiene By NICHOLAS KULISH TEGERNHEIM, Germany — Not many literary readings are restricted to an over-18 audience. Fewer still take place under circus tents. Yet nothing could be more appropriate for the scandalous German best-seller “Wetlands,” by a television personality and author, Charlotte Roche. With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Ms. Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany. Since its debut in February, the novel (“Feuchtgebiete,” in German) has sold more than 680,000 copies, becoming the only German book to top Amazon.com’s global best-seller list. The book, which will be published next year in the United States, is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator’s body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel, and hard to describe in a family newspaper. “Wetlands” opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen’s hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and — here is where the debate kicks in — just possibly female empowerment. The subject has struck a nerve here, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women’s roles and image in society. With its female chancellor, Angela Merkel, and progressive reputation, Germany would hardly seem to be thirsting for such a discussion. Yet, Germany has an old-fashioned tendency to expect women to choose between careers and motherhood rather than trying to accommodate both. Last year, another German television personality provoked a storm of controversy about the role of women by suggesting that they should stay home to raise their children, and then referring approvingly to the Nazi policy of encouraging German women to have large families. Beyond the historical land mines, there are also measurable gender-equality problems in Germany, Europe’s largest economy. Of the 27 European Union members, Germany is tied with Slovakia as third worst in the wage gap between men and women, with women earning 22 percent less, a figure surpassed only by Cyprus and Estonia. So the topic is being debated in every newspaper and magazine in Germany right now. The discussion has been amplified by two nonfiction books about young women, the more traditional “New German Girls” and “We Alpha-Girls.” A provocative female rapper in Germany, Lady Bitch Ray, who runs her own independent label, Vagina Style Records, grabbed headlines when she accused Ms. Roche of stealing her explicit form of empowering raunch. “I am what’s in the book,” said the rapper, 27, whose real name is Reyhan Sahin, in a telephone interview. Germans have been accused, on occasion, of overanalyzing. Sometimes a funny, dirty book is just a funny, dirty book, but not this one, according to its author. Ms. Roche, 30, has long identified herself as a feminist and, in a vein first explored in 1960s-era American feminism, describes the book as a cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women’s world. Newspapers here have contrasted her unhygienic, free-spirited fictional heroine to an American-import model of womanhood: the stable of plucked, pencil-thin contestants on “Germany’s Next Top Model,” a popular reality show hosted by the German supermodel Heidi Klum. But Ms. Roche told the audience here that her inspiration for the book came not from those women, but from the feminine-product aisle of her local store. Peeking out at the audience from under dark brown bangs, speaking in a childish voice that accentuated her transgressions against propriety, Ms. Roche explained, to howls of laughter, how the lemon-scented products called out to her in uncensored terms that she was, as the commercials put it, not so fresh, or at least not fresh enough. “It’s not feminist in a political sense, but instead feminism of the body, that has to do with anxiety and repression and the fear that you stink, and this for me is clearly feminist, that one builds confidence with your own body,” Ms. Roche, the mother of a young daughter and more serious in person than onstage, said last week in an interview after her reading here. Ms. Roche’s critics say that it is just a modern spin on not shaving your legs, this time for the genital-waxing generation. Meanwhile, sex sells and tends to grab the spotlight. As a result, a debate that might more profitably center on career counselors and day care is instead mired in old questions about sexual liberation. With this in mind, critics have asked what practical help a book like “Wetlands” can offer, and even whether, by hyper-sexualizing the main character, it represents an all-too-familiar commercial ploy rather than a step forward. “The combination of pornography and feminism is old, and was already a favorite marketing strategy for Playboy in the ’70s,” said Alice Schwarzer, Germany’s best-known feminist and founder of the magazine EMMA, modeled in part on Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine, in an e-mail message responding to questions about the recent books. “Right now we’re living through another revival.” Those revivals come along fairly frequently — think the porn star turned “sex educator,” Annie Sprinkle, Madonna and Eve Ensler of “The Vagina Monologues” — with varying degrees of relevance to feminism. “When a woman breaks a taboo, it is automatically incorporated into the feminism debate, whether it really belongs there or not,” said Ingrid Kolb, a German writer and longtime feminist. While her generation in Europe and America grappled with many of the same issues in the early 1970s, there are differences, said Ms. Kolb, 67. For instance, the extremity of the beauty cult, particularly with surgery, was nowhere near what it is today. The notion of sexiness and sexual frankness as feminism — pop empowerment, if you will — is well established on both sides of the Atlantic. As in the United States, “Sex and the City” roared past the new “Indiana Jones” movie for the top spot at the German box office last weekend. “Wetlands” is something different. It is far more anatomical and scatological than erotic. In the interview, Ms. Roche said she wrote scenes specifically to build up arousal, only to bury them again in the repulsive. Lost in the whole hubbub is also a very sad story about a young woman who has undergone family traumas, the emotional core of the novel. The event had something of a circus atmosphere. Some 200 fans showed up at the yellow-and-red-striped tent, paying more than $25 each to hear Ms. Roche read and answer questions. As the signing began, the song “Rivers of Babylon” pumped through the speakers, which, in the book, one of Helen’s lovers sang as an ode to her sexual readiness. Ardent fans have shown up to her readings with avocados as presents and, in several instances documented in the local media, the unprepared have fainted at some of the scenes. In one of those, Helen describes saving dried semen under her fingernails as “a keepsake” to savor later. And as attested by the reading in tiny Tegernheim — a suburb of Regensburg on the Danube River, in famously conservative Bavaria — the controversy surrounding the book is more than a media ruckus just in Berlin and other big cities. “ ‘Sex and the City’ is always just about sex, whereas this is more about hygiene, or, better put, not-hygiene. It’s just something completely new,” said Katja Bergmeister, 24, a student in Regensburg. She came with her roommate and her roommate’s sister, all in their 20s and all clutching autographed posters of Ms. Roche. “I could see how we would be able to speak more openly with one another now,” she said. Ms. Bergmeister and her friends knew of Ms. Roche from her work as a presenter for music video channels, but many others said they had come to her through the book. “It’s sexuality like it’s never represented in women’s magazines, but more the way it is in real life,” said Silvia Wilfurth, 28, a psychiatrist. “It speaks to themes of the body and sexuality that normally are not addressed and that it is not bad at all to be discussed.” Ms. Roche, who was born in Britain but moved to Germany when she was a small child, said she hoped to help women find “a language for lust.” The sensational response to her book was unexpected, but she has taken it all in stride, including her first turn under the big top. “I would say that my own profession is circus pony, so I feel quite comfortable,” she said. Alex Bolland, the organizer of the reading, said that the local authorities had made him limit the event to an over-18 audience, but that he was still glad he could book Ms. Roche. “There are almost no taboos today,” Mr. Bolland said. “I appreciate it when someone can show that there are still a few out there.” Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin. Home

Bambi Snow White Pinocchio Geppetto God Godot

Jack Bauer Rutger Hauer Dwight D. Eisenhower Sergei Eisenstein Serge Chaloff Victor Serge Serge Prokofiev Lieutenant Kije The French Lieutenant's Woman

Yosemite Sam Daffy Duck Porky Pig porcy62 Lester Piggott Piglet A.A. Milne B.B. King See See Rider

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By June 4, 2008 Alton Kelley, Poster Designer, Is Dead By WILLIAM GRIMES Alton Kelley, whose psychedelic concert posters for artists like the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Big Brother and the Holding Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in Petaluma, Calif. He was 67. The cause was complications of osteoporosis, said his wife, Marguerite Trousdale Kelley. Mr. Kelley and his longtime collaborator, Stanley Mouse, combined sinuous Art Nouveau lettering and outré images plucked from sources near and far to create the visual equivalent of an acid trip. A 19th-century engraving from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” inspired a famous poster for a Grateful Dead concert at the Avalon Ballroom in 1966 that showed a skeleton wearing a garland of roses on its skull and holding a wreath of roses on its left arm. The Grateful Dead later adopted this image as its emblem. Mr. Kelley and Mr. Mouse also designed several of the group’s album covers, including “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead.” Mr. Kelley was born in Houlton, Me., and grew up in Connecticut, where his parents moved to work in defense plants during World War II. His mother, a former schoolteacher, encouraged him to study art, and for a time he attended art schools in Philadelphia and New York, but his real passion was racing motorcycles and hot rods. He applied his artistic training to painting pinstripes on motorcycle gas tanks. After working as a welder at the Sikorsky helicopter plant in Stratford, Conn., he moved to San Francisco in 1964, settling into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. With a group of friends he helped stage concerts at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nev., by the Charlatans, a electric folk-rock band. On returning to San Francisco, he became a founding member of the Family Dog, a loose confederation of artists, poets, musicians and other free spirits who put on the some of the earliest psychedelic dance concerts, first at the Longshoremen’s Hall and later at the Avalon Ballroom. Mr. Kelley was in charge of promoting the concerts with posters and flyers, but his drafting ability was weak. That shortcoming became less of a problem in early 1966, when he teamed up with Stanley Miller, a hot-rod artist from Detroit who worked under the last name Mouse. The two formed Mouse Studios, with Mr. Kelley contributing layout and images and Mr. Mouse doing the distinctive lettering and drafting work. Often, they took trips to the public library in a search for images from books, magazines and photographs. “Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing,” Mr. Kelley told The San Francisco Chronicle last year. “But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Déco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever.” One of their first posters, for a concert headlined by Big Brother and the Holding Company, reproduced the logo for Zig-Zag cigarette papers, used widely for rolling marijuana joints. “We were paranoid that the police would bust us or that Zig-Zag would bust us,” Mr. Mouse said. From 1966 to 1969, Mr. Kelley worked on more than 150 posters for concerts at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore, publicizing the most famous bands and artists of the era, among them Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Butterfield Blues Band and Moby Grape, as well as the Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, and Country Joe and the Fish. They created three posters for concerts headlined by Bo Diddley, who died on Monday. With time, Mr. Kelley’s drawing improved, and the partners virtually fused into a poster-generating unit. “Kelley would work on the left side of the drawing table and Mouse on the Right,” said Paul Grushkin, the author of “The Art of Rock: Posters From Presley to Punk” and a longtime friend of both men. “They turned out a poster a week.” At the time, the posters were put up on telephone poles. Everyone who attended a concert at the Avalon received a free poster advertising the next show on the way out the door. Some were sold in head shops for a few dollars. Today, mint-condition posters by Mr. Kelley and Mr. Mouse can command prices of $5,000 or more. With the waning of the 1960s, Mr. Kelley and Mr. Mouse diversified. They formed Monster, a T-shirt company, in the mid-1970s. They also designed the Pegasus-image cover for the Steve Miller album “Book of Dreams” and several albums for Journey in the 1980s. In their final collaboration, in March of this year, they contributed the cover art for the program at the induction ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On his own, Mr. Kelley designed posters and created hot-rod paintings that he transferred to T-shirts. In addition to his wife, Mr. Kelley is survived by three children, Patty Kelley of San Diego, Yossarian Kelley of Seattle and China Bacosa of Herald, Calif.; two grandchildren; and his mother, Annie Kelley, and a sister, Kathy Verespy, both of Trumbull, Conn. “Kelley had the unique ability to translate the music being played into these amazing images that captured the spirit of who we were and what the music was all about,” said the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. “He was a visual alchemist — skulls and roses, skeletons in full flight, cryptic alphabets, nothing was too strange for his imagination to conjure.” Home

James Fenimore Cooper Natty Bumpo Mark Twain

T. Boone Pickens T-Bone Walker Captain Beefheart

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By June 3, 2008 Advertising Mr. Bill Returns (in One Piece) to Pitch a Debit Card By WENDY A. LEE MasterCard executives have found a new poster boy for the angst-ridden economy: Mr. Bill. The small clay figure that appeared in “Saturday Night Live” short films three decades ago — being dismembered, pulverized and humiliated to his falsetto cries of “Oh, nooooo!” — will be the latest star of MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign. He is being revived as a debit-card holder who gets roughed up but keeps on going. The 30-second spot, to start airing next Monday, casts Mr. Bill as an urban professional on his daily routine: Mr. Hands pours hot coffee on him (“coffee: $2”), a personal trainer launches him off a treadmill (“gym: $59/mo.”), and an opened briefcase flips him onto the windshield of a city bus (“briefcase: $120”). Mr. Bill, rolling with endless punches, just enjoys the ride home: “Making it through the day: priceless.” A voice-over adds, “For whatever comes your way, there’s debit MasterCard.” The spot is meant to tap into the current “unsureness about what’s going to happen next,” said Joyce King Thomas, executive vice president and chief creative officer at McCann-Erickson, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, which created the “Priceless” campaign for MasterCard in 1997. “This is the sunny Mr. Bill,” she added. “We wanted to make him a character who can handle things beyond his control and stay optimistic.” Part of the idea is that baby boomers who made “oh nooooo!” jokes in their college dorms will remember Mr. Bill fondly, and younger people to whom the shorts are ancient history will enjoy seeing him get abused. “It’s very interesting that 30 years later, you can bring this character back,” said Edward Russell, an assistant professor of advertising at Syracuse’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “It tells me that they’re really going after 44-plus-year-olds, which would make sense since this is a group with more disposable income.” Mr. Russell, who remembers watching the “SNL” skits in college, did have one quibble: “It’s hard to say that this is completely true to the real Mr. Bill. In the ad, Mr. Bill always finds something positive. That wasn’t true in the original series — he just got hurt.” Ms. Thomas of McCann-Erickson said that Mr. Bill tested well with viewers of all ages. People who had never heard of him before “found him to be a charming character,” she said. “He’s a little clay guy who things happen to and he’s just fine.” Mr. Bill made his debut on “Saturday Night Live” on NBC in 1976 when his creator, Walter Williams, won the show’s home video contest using a reel of film that he shot in his living room with a budget of $10. “No one hired me to create Mr. Bill,” said Mr. Williams, now a filmmaker in New Orleans, in a telephone interview. Mr. Bill appeared on the first five seasons of the show, and Mr. Williams became a staff writer after three years, which is when he started being paid for Mr. Bill for the first time. He owns all the rights to the character, and he directed the MasterCard spot. “I’ve been doing everything I can to kill him off for 30 years, but he seems to be coming back,” Mr. Williams said. Since “SNL,” Mr. Bill has appeared in ads for Burger King, Ramada Inn, Pringles and Lexus. Mr. Williams has declined offers to appear in promotions for beer and casinos. “It taints the character,” he said. “I didn’t want Mr. Bill associated with the end of Johnny’s college fund.” MasterCard is not the only company that sees Mr. Bill as a reflection of the nation’s mood: Subway sandwich shops picked up the character for ads in January. ”I think it’s the times, like how Charlie Chaplin flourished in the Depression,” Mr. Williams said. “People are looking for comedy.” Dark humor had been out of vogue in the period after 9/11, Mr. Williams said; requests to use Mr. Bill declined. “Having a character stepped on and crumbled was just not funny,” he said. Apparently, it is again. Mr. Williams, who devotes most of his time to promoting wetlands restoration in New Orleans, said that Mr. Bill’s commercial activity helps underwrite his nonprofit efforts, like public service announcements for hurricane protection. After Katrina, Senator Mary L. Landrieu famously said, “How can it be that Mr. Bill was better informed than Mr. Bush?” Although MasterCard insisted that it was not using Mr. Bill to market specifically to consumers’ economic plight, the spot does highlight debit cards, which do not permit their owners to spend more money than they have (in theory), rather than credit cards, a riskier tool. Americans are not backing away from spending and accumulating debt, but “they are being more careful,” said David Wyss, chief economist of Standard and Poor’s. People are “trading down,” he said, compensating for higher food and energy prices by shopping at discount stores like Wal-Mart and Costco. Tim Murphy, president of the United States region for MasterCard Worldwide, said that more dollars were being spent in “the everyday categories, with gasoline taking up a larger part of consumers’ pocketbooks.” That trend is not a bad one for MasterCard, which wants consumers to use debit cards to pay for casual purchases, like $2 cups of coffee. “The pitch for debit is that it gives consumers control and versatility,” Mr. Murphy said. “Mr. Bill uses it to buy everyday items and to pay a recurring bill.” But Ed Mierzwinski, the consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, said that debit cards were far from a panacea. “If you’re using plastic, you tend to spend more than when using cash,” he said, adding that cardholders can incur heavy fines if they overdraw their accounts. Mr. Mierzwinski also said that debit transactions — and the right to dispute them — are not legally protected the way credit card transactions are. “Zero liability promises on debit cards are only promises, they’re not the law,” he said. MasterCard is not the only payment card company that has adjusted its pitch in light of economic conditions. Discover Financial Services recently started advertising its “paydown planner,” an online calculator that shows cardholders how to reduce their balances within a certain time frame or by making specific monthly payments. However the economy swings, Mr. Bill will probably not be a recurring mascot for MasterCard. “We usually try to do something just once,” Ms. Thomas of McCann-Erickson said.

I do believe that Restaurant Crillon ad is the work of Winold Reiss. You're right--here's another from his archive, same restaurant--

Sorry, I was thinking of Yentl. Yentl played YSL?

Boris the Spider Bellboy Maryann with the Shakey Hands Shakey Jake Harris Magic Sam Mighty Joe Young Mighty Mouse Jerry Maus

Gary "U.S." Bonds Gene "Daddy G" Barge Little Milton Campbell Kim Campbell Jean Cretien Brian Mulroney Wallace Roney Edgar Wallace Ed Garland Scott McKenzie John Phillips John Phillips Sousa

Reginald Van Gleason III The Poor Soul Joe the Bartender Gary Bartz Bart Simpson St Bartholomew Bartholomew Cubbins Hattie McDaniel Oddjob

Peter Wolf The Little Boy

Chrissie Hynde Earl Hines Heinz Hines Hines Dad Fatha Hines Teddy Wilson Toy Wilson

Buzzy Bavasi Branch Rickey Larry Doby

I wish that I patronized them so that I could boycott them.

Warren Harding Tonya Harding Tony Soprano

Nice, an email death threat. Did you contact the FBI? Probably nothing they can do, except maybe reassure you that 15 million other folks have received the same threat.

Mr Clean Jackie McLean Jackie Paris Jilly Rizzo Willy Ley Milli Vanilli

The New York Times May 28, 2008 A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue By PATRICK FARRELL and KASSIE BRACKEN CARRIE DASHOW dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a “chocolate shake.” Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!” They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy. The host was Franz Aliquo, 32, a lawyer who styles himself Supreme Commander (Supreme for short) when he’s presiding over what he calls “flavor tripping parties.” Mr. Aliquo greeted new arrivals and took their $15 entrance fees. In return, he handed each one a single berry from his jacket pocket. “You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón. The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit. During the 1970s, a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration dashed hopes that an extract of miraculin could be sold as a sugar substitute. In the absence of any plausible commercial application, the miracle fruit has acquired a bit of a cult following. Sina Najafi, editor in chief of the art magazine Cabinet, has featured miracle fruits at some of the publication’s events. At a party in London last October, the fruit, he said, “had people testifying like some baptismal thing.” The berries were passed out last week at a reading of “The Fruit Hunters,” a new book by Adam Leith Gollner with a chapter about miracle fruit. Bartenders have been experimenting with the fruit as well. Don Lee, a beverage director at the East Village bar Please Don’t Tell, has been making miracle fruit cocktails on his own time, but the bar probably won’t offer them anytime soon. The fruit is highly perishable and expensive — a single berry goes for $2 or more. Lance J. Mayhew developed a series of drink recipes with miracle fruit foams and extracts for a recent issue of the cocktail magazine Imbibe and may create others for Beaker & Flask, a restaurant opening later this year in Portland, Ore. He cautioned that not everyone enjoys the berry’s long-lasting effects. Despite warnings, he said, one woman became irate after drinking one of his cocktails. He said, “She was, like, ‘What did you do to my mouth?’ ” Mr. Aliquo issues his own warnings. “It will make all wine taste like Manischewitz,” he said. And already sweet foods like candy can become cloying. He said that he had learned about miracle fruit while searching ethnobotany Web sites for foods he could make for a diabetic friend. The party last week was his sixth “flavor tripping” event. He hopes to put on a much larger, more expensive affair in June. Although he does sell the berries on his blog, www.flavortripping.wordpress.com, Mr. Aliquo maintains that he isn’t in it for the money. (He said he made about $100 on Friday.) Rather, he said, he does it to “turn on a bunch of people’s taste buds.” He believes that the best way to encounter the fruit is in a group. “You need other people to benchmark the experience,” he said. At his first party, a small gathering at his apartment in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy. “You kept hearing ‘oh, oh, oh,’ ” he said, and then the guests became “literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table.” “It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup,” he said. Many of the guests last week found the party through a posting at www.tThrillist.com. Mr. Aliquo sent invitations to a list of contacts he has been gathering since he and a friend began organizing StreetWars, a popular urban assassination game using water guns. One woman wanted to see Mr. Aliquo eat a berry before she tried one. “What, you don’t trust me?” he said. She replied, “Well, I just met you.” Another guest said, “But you met him on the Internet, so it’s safe.” The fruits are available by special order from specialty suppliers in New York, including Baldor Specialty Foods and S. Katzman Produce. Katzman sells the berries for about $2.50 a piece, and has been offering them to chefs. Mr. Aliquo gets his miracle fruit from Curtis Mozie, 64, a Florida grower who sells thousands of the berries each year through his Web site, www.miraclefruitman.com. (A freezer pack of 30 berries costs about $90 with overnight shipping.) Mr. Mozie, who was in New York for Mr. Gollner’s reading, stopped by the flavor-tripping party. Mr. Mozie listed his favorite miracle fruit pairings, which included green mangoes and raw aloe. “I like oysters with some lemon juice,” he said. “Usually you just swallow them, but I just chew like it was chewing gum.” A large group of guests reached its own consensus: limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat. Bananas were just bananas. For all the excitement it inspires, the miracle fruit does not make much of an impression on its own. It has a mildly sweet tang, with firm pulp surrounding an edible, but bitter, seed. Mr. Aliquo said it reminded him of a less flavorful cranberry. “It’s not something I’d just want to eat,” he said.

Joe Morris Elmo Hope Philly Joe Jones Joe Jones Thomas Hart Benton Jackson Pollack

Bobbitt (Lorena) Babbitt (Lewis) Rabbit (Updike) D.B. Updike Elmer Adler David Milne