Brownian Motion

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By December 8, 2007 Op-Ed Contributor Union-Busting at the Hall of Fame By FAY VINCENT Vero Beach, Fla. THE National Baseball Hall of Fame, itself based on the historical error that baseball was invented in Cooperstown, N.Y., has just let one go right through its legs. On Monday, a committee of 12 baseball executives, newspaper reporters and former executives and players posthumously elected Bowie Kuhn, the earnest but unsuccessful former commissioner, to the Hall while overlooking Marvin Miller, the former union leader who dragged baseball, against strenuous resistance, into the modern age of labor relations. There is simply no way to comprehend this absurd decision by the Veterans Committee. Here are some facts that even this historically challenged committee would have to acknowledge as accurate. Free agency came to baseball during Kuhn’s tenure. He fought it with the owners’ total support. The concept of baseball players having the same legal rights as the rest of us to bargain with their employers on even terms caused Kuhn to warn that baseball might not survive such a cosmic alteration in the relative power of the two sides. Kuhn’s devotion to baseball was genuine, but his judgment was not sound. He was unwilling to seek middle ground with the baseball players’ union, despite protracted legal battles that the union repeatedly won, because to have done so might have cost him owner support and even his job. And he loved the job and title. When Andy Messersmith, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, sought free agency in 1975, the arbitrator in the case encouraged Kuhn and the owners to settle on the best available terms. Kuhn arrogantly dismissed the suggestion. He took the ridiculous legal position that he and his side would have the arbitrator’s decision overturned in federal court. Of course, he was wrong, and free agency has now become an accepted part of baseball. During the era of free agency, baseball has profited beyond all possible expectations, with owners and players making enormous amounts of money. It is not possible to study that history without wondering how much baseball would have prospered in the 1970s and early 1980s had Kuhn provided better leadership at a much earlier stage. The decision by the Hall to overlook Miller is grounded in a bad reading of history. Miller had a bigger impact on baseball than any commissioner, owner or player in the past 40 years. Part of his legacy is a powerful, well-run union. The more important part is the present legal and financial structure of the sport, including free agency, arbitration and the enormous pension and benefit programs for the players, all due largely to his efforts. Miller was much smarter and more talented than Kuhn. Though not a lawyer, he was a public relations genius. He had been an economist with the United Steelworkers when he became the executive director of the players’ union. Miller presented the economic issues in baseball largely in moral terms. Kuhn was the lawyer who argued against change. Miller argued against evil. Guess which was more appealing? Kuhn permitted Miller to portray the owners as unenlightened and mean-spirited rich men while casting the players as downtrodden and benighted workers who wanted only to be treated fairly. The owners never had a chance. When Kuhn was pushed out of baseball — as I was years later — he went back to his law firm. In 1988, he and another lawyer started a new firm that was expected to be a grandly successful practice. At the end of 1989, Myerson & Kuhn filed for bankruptcy. At this point, Kuhn moved to Florida — a move that his creditors’ lawyers said was made to claim the protection of that state’s homestead exemption. Under that law, the home of a debtor may not be used to satisfy debts, and so Kuhn, with a large, valuable and recently purchased Florida residence, was literally home free. In effect, he thumbed his nose at the banks and court in New York, and he left his partners, some of whom he had vigorously recruited, holding a huge empty bag. One such former partner, a tax expert, complained bitterly to me when I was in baseball. He has since died but I wonder how he would have felt about this latest honor by an institution that claims to value character when it considers candidates. The members of the committee that elected Bowie Kuhn and passed on Marvin Miller should feel ashamed. But they do not. They almost surely believe that Miller and the union won the war, but they refuse him the honor of his victory. This is a set of actions by little men making small-minded decisions. Electing Kuhn and Miller together might have been a tolerable result. But electing Kuhn alone is intolerable. These are old men trying to turn back time, to reverse what has happened. Theirs is an act of ignorance and bias. I am ashamed for them. I am ashamed that they represent our game. Fay Vincent was the commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1989 to 1992.

Ross Macdonald Raymond Chandler The Little Sister

I'm astonished that a school readying students for "government careers in international relations and foreign affairs" is sniffed at by Princeton officials, especially given the many blunders in US foreign policy over the last 60 years.

Johns Hopkins Leland Stanford Oral Roberts

Pushkin Mandy Patinkin Peter Pumpkin Eater

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By December 6, 2007 If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original? By RANDY KENNEDY Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight? Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum’s spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy’s hat and outstretched arm. Mr. Krantz knew it quite well. He had shot it in the late 1990s on a ranch in the small town of Albany, Tex., for a Marlboro advertisement. “Like anyone who knows his work,” Mr. Krantz said of his picture in a telephone interview, “it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror.” He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.” When Mr. Prince started reshooting ads, first prosaic ones of fountain pens and furniture sets and then more traditionally striking ones like those for Marlboro, he said he was trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images. He once compared the effect to the funny way that “certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves.” But he was not circumspect about what it meant or how it would be viewed. In a 1992 discussion at the Whitney Museum of American Art he said of rustling the Marlboro aesthetic: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.” People might not have been looking at the time, when his art was not highly sought. But as his reputation and prices for his work rose steeply — one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million — they began to look, and Mr. Prince has spoken of receiving threats, some legal and some more physical in nature, from his unsuspecting lenders. He is said to have made a small payment in an out-of-court settlement with one photographer, Garry Gross, who took the original shot for one of Mr. Prince’s most notorious early borrowings, an image of a young unclothed Brooke Shields. (Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, saying in an e-mail message only, “I never associated advertisements with having an author.”) Mr. Krantz, who has shot ads for the United States Marine Corps and a long list of Fortune 500 companies including McDonald’s, Boeing and Federal Express, said he had no intention of seeking money from or suing Mr. Prince, whose borrowings seem to be protected by fair use exceptions to copyright law. But with the exhibition now up at the Guggenheim — and the posters using his image on sale for $9.95 — he said he simply wanted viewers to know that “there are actually people behind these images, and I’m one of them.” “I’m not a mean person, and I’m not a vindictive person,” he said. “I just want some recognition, and I want some understanding.” Mr. Krantz, whose clients generally own the copyrights to his photos for them, said he had been aware for several years that his work had been lifted by Mr. Prince, along with that of several other photographers who have shot Marlboro ads. But he said he did not think much about it, and said he had never talked with other Marlboro photographers about the issue. “If imitation is a form of flattery, then I will accept the compliment,” he said. But on one occasion a woman active in the art world visited his studio in Chicago, and, seeing a print of one of his pictures, Mr. Krantz recalled, “she said, ‘Oh, Richard Prince has a photograph just like that!’” And in 2003 Mr. Prince’s version of an image that Mr. Krantz shot for Marlboro — showing a mounted cowboy approaching a calf stranded in the snow — sold for $332,300 at Christie’s. Although the shot was blown up to heroic proportions, “there’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” he said. And so Mr. Krantz, whose Marlboro ads now appear mostly in Europe and Asia, began to grow angry. He said that while he is primarily an advertising photographer, when he was growing up in Omaha, he did attend workshops with Ansel Adams. He studied graphic design and got into commercial photography, starting out in Omaha taking shots of toasters and pens and heating pads because that was where the work was. But he has long exhibited his own art photographs, recent examples of which show stark images of an empty prison as if seen through defaced or broken glass. Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be. “People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images,” he said. He has considered trying to correspond with Mr. Prince to complain more directly but said he felt it would probably do no good. “At this point it’s been done, and it’s out there,” he said. “My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It’s an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn’t create his own work, and I don’t understand the frenzy around it.” He added: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.” Home

I like this one also. I'm also partial to "The Real Ambassadors" with Pops, Carmen McRae, and Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross.

William Ruckelshaus Elliot Richardson Archibald Cox

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1154214041

Victim of Circumstance The Deceased The Late George Appleby

The week brought record-breaking bids in three categories at auction houses in Europe: Sculpture: $51 Million The 3 1/4 inches high statue made of white limestone was called “one of the first great sculptures of civilization.” Sotheby’s expected bidding to top out at $18 million, but an anonymous buyer went much higher. Pre-1905 Car: $7,275,000 The world’s oldest surving Rolls-Royce “would be a trophy in any collection.” Now, it’s part of an anonymous British citizen’s garage for more than three times the expected price. White Truffle: $340,230 In a year of truffle shortages and heists, a strong-willed and secretive billionaire from Macao beat out Damien Hirst, the British artist.

Thanks to Jim and to everyone who made this board such a interesting, stimulating community. I'd be willing to help financially support a new board. My email address is birdcrash@yahoo.com.

Oh well. At least there's still sex on Earth. Too little sex, too much procreation but hey, who's counting?

I wish I'd known; I probably would have paid the extra. I think I put a feeler out on the board about a year ago, looking for someone to do this or to suggest someone who would. Must have been too subtle a feeler.

I know that some folks here do their own conversions of analog to digital, but, if your needs are limited, here is an alternative: http://reclaimmedia.com/index.html I've used them recently, and I was satisfied with the results.

Willie the Weeper The Little Cloud That Cried Misty Gland

Esther Rolle Heinrich Boll Cozy Cole

Ezra Pound Bebop-o Jean-Michel Basquiat

William Carlos Williams William B. Williams Thomas Thomas

Jack always loved a good piano, and on this session, with Ken Kersey, he had a great one. Love "Lover"!

Belle Starr Venus de Milo Milo Minderbinder

Graf Zeppelin The Hindenburg Colonel Blimp

Mount McKinley Mount Mitchell Pike's Peak

Bat Masterson Miff Mole Mouse Randolph

Front, from left, Gary Belkin, Sheldon Keller, Michael Stewart, Mel Brooks; behind, Neil Simon, Mel Tolkin and Larry Gelbart. The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By November 27, 2007 Mel Tolkin, Lead Writer for ‘Show of Shows,’ Dies at 94 By MARGALIT FOX Mel Tolkin, the long-suffering head of Sid Caesar’s celebrated television writing team, who was present from the cramped, sweaty, malodorous beginning, died yesterday at his home in Century City, Calif. He was 94. Mr. Tolkin‘s son Michael confirmed the death. As the lead writer for “Your Show of Shows” and its successor, “Caesar’s Hour,” Mr. Tolkin presided over a team that at one time or another included Mel Brooks, Lucille Kallen, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen. “Your Show of Shows,” starring Mr. Caesar and Imogene Coca, was broadcast on NBC from 1950 to 1954. A wellspring of American television comedy, the show endures to this day as a national treasure. Mr. Tolkin, who went on to write for Danny Kaye, Danny Thomas and Bob Hope, was later a writer for “All in the Family” and other television shows. With several colleagues, he won an Emmy in 1967 for “The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special.” An accomplished pianist, Mr. Tolkin also wrote the musical theme, “Stars Over Broadway,” for “Your Show of Shows.” Broadcast live on Saturday nights, “Your Show of Shows” was a voracious beast that had to be fed 90 minutes of pitch-perfect comedy every week. For the writers, this meant laboring seven days a week, 39 weeks a year, in the famed (and famously unsanitary) Writers’ Room, an office on West 56th Street in Manhattan. In the heady atmosphere of cigar smoke, pooled coffee and cures for a thousand diseases growing on long-forgotten sandwiches, Mr. Tolkin and his colleagues paced, muttered, swore, occasionally typed and more than occasionally threw things: crumpled paper cups, cigars (lighted) and much else. The acoustical-tile ceiling was fringed with pencils, which had been flung aloft in a rage and stuck fast; Mr. Tolkin once counted 39 of them suspended there. The room was an orgy of interruption. “Nobody ever finished a sentence,” Mr. Tolkin told The New York Times in 1982. “Somebody else would jump on it, competitively grab a sentence, a thought.” When the pace slackened, Mr. Tolkin had the perfect spur. “Gentlemen, we’ve got to get something done!” he cried. “Jews all over America will be watching Saturday night!” As Mr. Tolkin and other writers made repeatedly clear in interviews, a shtetl past, which many of them shared, proved an ideal qualification for the job. “I lived through pogroms in the Ukraine,” Mr. Tolkin told The Los Angeles Times in 1992. (He was born Shmuel Tolchinsky there on Aug. 3, 1913.) “The pressures made heroes of some, and poets and violinists of some. But it made for a lot of broken human beings too. I’m not happy to have to say this: It created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.” The Tolchinsky family moved to Montreal in 1926. There, Shmuel (known in the New World as Samuel) set out, with his parents’ blessing, to study accounting. But what he actually did, without his parents’ blessing, was compose musical numbers for various left-wing revues. It was then, in an effort to conceal his real vocation from his family, that he became Mel Tolkin. In World War II, Mr. Tolkin served his country by playing the glockenspiel in the Canadian Army. After moving to New York in 1946, Mr. Tolkin honed his art at Camp Tamiment, a Poconos resort famous for its entertainment. He was paired there with Ms. Kallen, who would be his longtime writing partner. In 1949, the two of them were hired by “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” a forerunner of “Your Show of Shows” that also starred Mr. Caesar and Ms. Coca. Mr. Tolkin and Ms. Kallen were the revue’s only writers. This was just as well, since their office was a tiny corner of the male dancers’ dressing room, redolent of sweaty underclothes. After the revue went off the air later that year, Mr. Tolkin, desperate to stay in New York, sought help from Mr. Caesar. “I thought I’d have to go back to Montreal and be an accountant again,” he said in a 1995 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “I borrowed $70 from Sid. I never repaid him. I never will.” Mr. Tolkin’s indebtedness, at 6 percent interest compounded annually, is now $2,055.12. Besides his son Michael, a novelist and screenwriter in Los Angeles, Mr. Tolkin is survived by his wife, the former Edith Leibovitch, whom he married in 1946; a brother, Sol Tolchinsky of Montreal; another son, Stephen, also a Los Angeles screenwriter; and four grandchildren. Over the years, the motley crew of the Writers’ Room has often been memorialized on stage and screen. One of the best-known incarnations is in Mr. Simon’s play “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” which opened on Broadway in 1993. In an interview quoted in The Houston Chronicle in 1995, Mr. Tolkin had this to say about the play: “Not a single word said onstage was ever uttered by any of us.” He added: “But all of it is true.”