Fascinating behind-the-scenes look at what's happening in New Orleans right this moment.
The New York Times
March 5, 2006
Speculator
Après Le Deluge, Moi
By GARY RIVLIN
The flooding that overwhelmed vast stretches of New Orleans last summer and rendered homeless a large portion of its population has taught Patrick Quinn some things. For example, there's the nifty alternative use he found for his otherwise worthless cellphone when the city's telecommunications system collapsed. Quinn is a New Orleans native, a hotel impresario of modest local renown for whom Hurricane Katrina has been not just a disaster but also a once-in-a-lifetime chance to realize his dream of becoming the Donald Trump of the Gulf Coast. In those first weeks after what some simply refer to as the Big K, Quinn frequently found himself prowling around dark and deserted properties throughout the city's flood zones. That's how he learned that a mobile phone, especially the bulky, all-in-one cellphone he carries, gives off a surprisingly bright beam of light.
Quinn was no mere sightseer. When water covered most of New Orleans and nearly everyone else in town might reasonably have been wishing that they owned real estate anywhere else in the country, Quinn was bidding on properties of all shapes and sizes, both residential and commercial. It was an exercise in improvisation. Three feet of fetid water had flooded his own home, a three-story stone edifice built in the style of a Venetian palazzo, forcing Quinn to buy a new house in Baton Rouge, 80 miles away, and move his family there. The New Orleans headquarters for his hotel chain, Decatur Hotels, was dry, but it lacked electricity for weeks after Katrina hit, so Quinn paid $500,000 for a bus that could serve as a rolling office as he wheeled and dealed his way around the Gulf Coast.
On a sultry Sunday morning less than two weeks after Katrina, I boarded the bus with Quinn and an entourage of eight that included a driver everyone called Butterbean and one of the full-time assistants Quinn always had by his side in those days — so, he explained, "every time I think of a big idea, I have someone to write it down." Soon we were heading out of Baton Rouge, southeast toward New Orleans on an eerily empty Interstate. It was Quinn's maiden journey in this vehicle, a sleek black behemoth befitting a rock star. The forward section of the coach, which sleeps nine, was outfitted with a black leather couch, a kitchen table that seated four and a well-stocked wet bar. At the back of the bus, past matching rows of bunk beds, was a surprisingly roomy master bedroom with a mirrored ceiling. A satellite dish enabled Quinn to watch hundreds of channels on either of the bus's two large plasma TV's and, more crucially, stay in constant e-mail contact.
Quinn was already on the phone when I arrived, just past 9 a.m., and he would still be working his cellphone 12 hours later. Another week would pass before he gave in to his wife's wishes and took a day off. (Or most of a day. Later he would confess to me that he woke up even earlier that morning to get in a few hours of work before spending the rest of a Sunday with his family.)
"We're giving people 48 hours" to accept offers to buy, Quinn told me then. This despite the chaos everywhere and the uncertainty surrounding New Orleans's future. "I'm telling people, 'Yes or no, we're moving on.' " That approach, he said, "doesn't leave me much time for rest right now."
F. Patrick Quinn III is hardly the only one to see economic opportunity in the disaster of Katrina. The waters had yet to recede from large stretches of New Orleans before Interstate 10, which ribbons through the city, was dotted with pickups from across the South bearing the decals of disaster-recovery firms. Signs promoting gutting and demolition firms and the services of self-proclaimed mold-remediation experts sprouted like spring gardens at well-traveled intersections around town. Roofers, construction firms, big-box stores like Home Depot: the list of those for whom Katrina was a boon is long. From almost the moment the city started allowing residents back home, the trinket shops dotting the French Quarter were thick with hurricane-related T-shirts, like the one that proclaims, "Katrina and Rita: Girls Gone Wild."
The disaster would prove a boon for real-estate brokers too, though it was not an immediate one. Today, major brokers around town shake their heads in giddy disbelief over all the calls they have received from out-of-towners interested in buying up property in and around New Orleans. Don Randon, for instance, says he has received dozens of those inquiries, including one from a New York-based real-estate investment firm, which he declined to name, willing to spend $25 million on multifamily apartment complexes. He has also received calls about condominium development. Condos are increasingly popular in the city right now, perhaps because they allow people to live high above sea level in structures unlikely to blow over in a storm. "I'm overwhelmed by outsiders who want to come into this market," Larry G. Schedler, a local real-estate agent whose specialty is large apartment buildings, told me. Schedler figures he receives an average of five calls per day from potential investors, "most of whom have never been in this market."
Mike McKinney owns Coleman Homes, a Dallas-based building company specializing in single-family homes. He is among those scouring New Orleans and Baton Rouge for potential sites for a residential subdivision. Brownsfield Partners, a Denver-based real-estate firm that specializes in fixing up and reselling environmentally distressed properties, sees big opportunities in the Gulf Coast region, according to Douglas Elenowitz, a Brownsfield partner. Another firm, Waveland Ventures in Milwaukee and Denver, is looking to take advantage of federal tax breaks established shortly after Katrina struck. But the going isn't easy, a Waveland principal, Chet Schwartz, told me, because "it seems a lot of people are looking to invest in the Gulf Coast area."
Yet it was readily apparent, sitting in the cool, luxuriant embrace of Quinn's rock-star bus so soon after the storm, that whenever someone in the real-estate industry woke up to the opportunities lying in Katrina's wake, he would find that Patrick Quinn had already been there, checkbook in hand. Throughout the time we were together, Quinn was almost constantly on one of the two cellphones he carried. If he was talking on one, a member of his entourage answered the other. Quinn spoke in a clipped fashion, in a mumbly voice and accent that was equal parts mud and honey. Somehow he always sounded conspiratorial, even when he was making a simple request to meet someone at a certain time and place. On occasion he badgered underlings responsible for cleaning up his New Orleans hotels ("Tell him if he can't make it happen by 5 tonight, he should find another job"), but mostly this man whose roots in New Orleans date back three generations used his buttery charms to sweet-talk and wheedle favorable deals.
Of average size and soft features, Quinn, 51, is a former altar boy whose baby face can at times make him look downright cherubic. That's not to say he's incapable of the occasional fib. Perennially late, he habitually tells people he's running "5 or 10 minutes late" even if he's still eating lunch in a restaurant at least 30 minutes away. And occasionally he has been accused of more than a harmless white lie. In 2004, he sold one of his hotels for $3.1 million to a group from Mississippi — and then was sued by the buyers, who accused him of masking a festering mold problem with wallpaper and paint. (A judge dismissed the suit because it was filed in the wrong jurisdiction. The matter was dropped when Quinn bought the hotel back.)
He's a man of boundless energy but also surprisingly few movements; he often darts his eyes or gives a quick glance rather than fully turning his head and, like a ventriloquist, barely moves his lips when throwing off dry, often self-deprecating bons mots. He tends to lean forward when he walks, his shoulders hunched, as if he might get where he's going that much quicker, and he often fails to finish sentences — another time-management tool, perhaps.
"It was that really innocent look he has that really got my attention," his wife, Julie, told me. She's a first-term state senator and the mother of their two young children (he has four children from a previous marriage). Only in time, she said with a laugh, "did I realize it was a really good cover for all he had going on underneath the surface." When the couple married, in 1996, Quinn and his partner, Edwin (Mickey) Palmer III, owned only a few hotels. By Aug. 29, the day Katrina landed, they owned 15.
Quinn's lightninglike transition from hotelier to would-be real-estate baron, while swift, has not been entirely smooth. His first get-rich-quick scheme was to drastically expand the number of beds he could offer to the multitude of blue-collar laborers that would soon be descending on New Orleans, first for the cleanup and then the rebuilding. Almost immediately after the storm, Quinn spent about $1 million on 5,000 bunk beds. The plan was to buy or lease empty buildings around New Orleans and convert them into makeshift barracks. He bought the footlockers to sit beside each bunk and living-room furniture to create common areas. That's when he learned a hard lesson about supply and demand in the midst of a crisis: the portable shower truck that cost maybe $25,000 before Katrina went for more than twice as much after. Quinn said: "I had a guy tell me, 'You want it, $55,000. If not, I'll sell it to the next guy — in five minutes."
That project, like others, turned out to be a disappointment. It wasn't a money loser, but neither was it the gusher he imagined it would be. Other schemes ended up flat-out busts, like his plan to set himself up as a broker booking rooms, even those operated by his rivals in the hotel business. But those rivals, it turned out, had limited interest. "I noticed that everyone else was kinda frozen in place, so I figured we'd get in the booking business," Quinn said with a shrug.
He could afford to be nonchalant because as one idea fell by the wayside, another took its place. By the time he stepped on his bus for the first time, he had bid on about 20 properties, and those deals accounted for only a fraction of his efforts. Condos, nursing homes, halfway houses, more hotels — there seemed no shortage of ways to make money when so much of the city's housing stock had been destroyed, or at least so severely damaged that it would be months before most people, even those with the means, could move back home.
Within weeks of the storm, Quinn was already exploring the possible creation of a new subdevelopment with "thousands of homes" somewhere in the greater New Orleans area. The fastest way to do that would be to import prefabricated homes — so it wasn't long before he was thinking that maybe he should open a factory somewhere in Louisiana to stamp them out.
"I'm going to really make it big," Quinn told me. Then he let out a nervous, high-pitched giggle and added, "Unless I fall completely flat on my face."
Quinn was on the phone in his new Baton Rouge home when I arrived a few days after the maiden journey on the bus. The house was a spacious brick mansion with an expanse of lawn large enough to field a five-on-five football game, and Quinn was pacing back and forth in the kitchen, suffering a bad case of bed head and trying to cajole a prospective seller into lowering his price. Meanwhile, two of his adult sons sat sipping coffee at the kitchen counter, giggling at their father. "I keep meaning to take a shower," he said after he hung up, "but" — he thrust his chin at the cellphone that was being handed to him by his oldest son, Frank Quinn, who was 27 and ostensibly the head of sales for his hotel chain, but now was a key cog in what might be called Quinn Enterprises.
Quinn proved resourceful in those chaotic, often frightening early days when even getting in and out of New Orleans required ingenuity. Hundreds of guests were still trapped inside Quinn's hotels when flood waters started to cover the city on that Monday afternoon. Some were tourists who couldn't catch a flight out of the city, others were locals who had sought the security of a stone or concrete structure downtown. "People would just show up at our door," Quinn said. "We let them in because we figured they had a better chance staying with us than in a two-story wood-framed house." On Tuesday, he consolidated the remaining 700 guests at the Astor Crown Plaza, the largest hotel in his chain, under the care of Peter Ambros, its general manager. On several occasions police officers and National Guardsmen stopped by the Astor, Ambros said, and recommended that the hotel's guests be sent to the Convention Center or the Superdome, but Ambros ignored them with Quinn's blessings.
That meant that caring for and feeding the guests largely fell on Quinn, his family and anyone else whose help he could wrangle. ("It's dangerous to be a member of my family or a friend right now," he cracked.) Securing the fuel needed to keep the generators at the Astor running proved challenging. Tuesday night, Quinn finally found a friend who could provide him with not only several barrels of diesel but also the flatbed truck and driver required to cart the 55-gallon drums into the city. By Wednesday morning, Quinn's son Frank, through a friend in the oil industry, had found a tanker truck filled with fuel, and they were able to top off the tanks of businesses in and around the French Quarter, including the aquarium, which has credited the Quinns with saving the lives of some of its fish. Quinn himself made any number of trips to the Astor, cramming into a Lexus sedan as much bottled water, peanut butter and other supplies as it could hold. He maxed out one credit card, then another and then a third. It wouldn't be until Saturday, six days after the flooding, that buses picked up the last of his guests.
The French Quarter and central business district escaped relatively unscathed, which was heartening news for New Orleans and its tourism industry and also for Quinn. Most of his properties took on some water through broken windows and roof damage, but with two exceptions, his hotels were not flooded. Still, despite a lack of structural damage, he already had hundreds of out-of-towners on the payroll to repair and clean them up. He was able to house his construction crews and the security personnel he felt obliged to hire, but other businesses didn't have that luxury. It was while driving back and forth to New Orleans during those early days after the storm that he first imagined himself as a post-reconstruction land baron.
In the Baton Rouge living and dining rooms, now turned into an office, Frank Quinn expressed amazement that 17 days after the storm, most hotel owners, even the large chains, had yet to take even the first steps necessary to clean up their properties. But the same amazement could be held for Quinn and his family. People were still coming home and discovering dead relatives, the streets were piled with mounds of garbage and Frank Quinn spent the bulk of each day talking to everyone who might need to house employees in New Orleans, from local law firms eager to reopen to insurance companies to Wal-Mart, which, it turns out, dispatched employees to scope out the damage to area stores. "There's tons of opportunity here," the younger Quinn said enthusiastically.
Patrick Quinn acknowledged that there's a fine line between an entrepreneur and a vulture. Borrowing a term coined during Reconstruction, he allowed that there was a question of whether he was a hero or a "scalawag" — a son of the South exploiting a chaotic and defeated region. Was he working to revitalize his city, or was he taking advantage of its vulnerability? Still, he steadfastly tried not to sound defensive. "I'm giving a place to stay to rescue workers," he said. "For doctors. For people who are going to rebuild this city. It's just like if I was a cook and I was cooking food for these people." I teased him about casting himself in such humble terms when he stood to make millions, and he crumbled. Of course the prospect of making mounds of money is spurring him on, he said, but then his voice grew plaintive. "What's my alternative?" he asked. "What else should I be doing with my time?"
He had a point. Much of the city's property records had been lost or damaged by the flood waters, and brokers had scattered to the corners of the country along with most everyone else in the city. There was talk of the waters staying for months and the possibility of malaria and airborne diseases. Hope was a precious commodity in New Orleans right after the hurricane, when many wondered if the city had any future at all, and Quinn's every action screamed optimism and a belief in the long-term viability of New Orleans. "While a whole lot of other people were sitting there moping," Don Randon, the real-estate broker, said, "Pat was on the move and doing something to help rebuild the city."
The mayor declared housing the city's top priority. Business leaders were voicing the same lament: a lack of housing meant the city was suffering from an acute labor shortage, and without the requisite number of employees, how could they ever rebuild? One blue-blood New Orleanian described Quinn to me as "aggressive to the point he is rubbing a lot of people the wrong way," but at least he was a man of action in a city whose few leaders were plagued by indecisiveness.
"He's one of the guys I wish we had more of right now," said Larry Schedler, the real-estate broker, who has met Quinn but doesn't really know him. "He's a doer."
When I met Quinn again in mid-December, 15 weeks after the storm, he had moved back into his downtown office. (Though to put some easy cash in his pocket, he chose not to occupy the first floor and instead rented it out to a city agency that had been washed out by the flood.) He was once again set up in Old Metairie, the pricey suburb just west of the city that had been his pre-Katrina home. His family was living there part time, and as best Quinn could tell, they were the only ones on the block that had tried to move back.
"I did it as a kind of statement," Quinn said. "To say to people: 'Hey, this can be done. It's hard, but it can be done.' " The family lived on the second and third floors while a construction crew worked to repair flood damage on the ground floor. They set up a microwave, toaster and coffee maker in a walk-in closet, transforming it into a makeshift kitchen.
On that December evening, New Orleans felt more like a small town than a major American city. You couldn't spend an hour or two in any public place without running into at least a few people you knew. At one point, Quinn spotted a prominent local banker. "Got any money you can loan me?" Quinn said with a grin. When the man said he had maybe $25 million for commercial loans, Quinn immediately responded, "I'll take it." The banker laughed, but it wasn't clear whether either man was joking. "Will you be around tomorrow?" Quinn asked.
By that point, Quinn and his partner, Mickey Palmer, had closed, or were soon to close, on the purchase of six hotels. They paid $3 million to buy back the hotel that ensnared them in litigation, a 102-room Quality Inn in Midtown, a dowdy property that before the storm had ranked No. 138 out of 148 on a popularity index published by the Trip Advisor Web site. It had suffered considerable damage and would require about an additional $1 million in repairs. The 200-room Highrise Inn, in the badly damaged New Orleans East community, cost another $6 million, repairs included. It didn't matter that each had been on the market before Katrina and, Quinn suspected, were losing money. Quinn was convinced he could successfully transform them into temporary dormitories for reconstruction workers. "I guess I'll have to come up with another use for these properties in a year or two," he said with a shrug, "but I'll worry about that when the time comes." He was aggressively acquiring other properties around town, but his plans for them would have to wait for his imagination to catch up with his checkbook.
"I'm not sure what I'll do with it," Quinn admitted when asked about a commercial warehouse that he had just bought for a million dollars. "It was for sale, and it looked like a good buy." (Quinn has declined to say how much money he has borrowed since Katrina, or how much of his existing holdings are leveraged, except to confirm that he has already spent tens of millions of dollars. "Some of it was money I had lying around," he says.)
He was hardly done, however. At a time when it was still not clear whether the federal government would commit to rebuilding the area's levee system, Quinn was deep in negotiations on two much larger deals. One involved a 250-room hotel that he described as a "real quality asset," the other a historic office building in the center of town he was thinking of converting to a condominium tower or a hotel.
All of this activity could strike the casual observer as manic, but Quinn saw himself as adding some jet fuel to what he considered a proven and successful business model. Over the years he had built himself into a player in the tourism industry primarily by buying up office, warehouse and apartment buildings well past their prime and converting them into hotels. Post-Katrina, Quinn said, the plan was "to meld our background and experience in acquisitions and development and construction with the opportunities that were available and based on what the city was going to need over the next several years."
Not that he was above plucking other post-Katrina low-hanging fruit when he spotted it. "Pat," said Hayden Wren, a broker who owns a small share in one of Quinn's hotels, "has always been the type of investor that if he sees an opportunity, he's going to make a very aggressive play to take advantage of that opportunity." When the mayor and City Council started feuding about the placement of FEMA temporary housing trailers around town, Quinn contacted people he knew at the agency: he just happened to have an empty parking lot he could spare — if the price was right. "I've been told FEMA pays $400 a month per trailer," he said. "If I can fit 100 trailers there, that's $40,000 per month."
The growing tension between local residents and big insurance companies proved another rich — and to him obvious — vein to mine. By November, Quinn had hung banners around town advertising a business he called American Claims Consulting ("We Work for You, Not Your Ins. Co."). The business was just a phone number, really: a woman answering the phone directed callers to one of a stable of independent insurance adjusters who had agreed to give Quinn as much as one-fifth of any business he steered their way. The idea and its execution seemed quintessential Quinn. To drape oversize white banners on buildings he owned might be slightly tacky, but he was providing people if not a practical service, then access to one.
None of his plans capture the dreamer in Quinn quite so powerfully as his goal of becoming a major player in the home-building business. Before Katrina, he was a hotel operator with a single residential property among his holdings: a 20-unit condominium building in the city's warehouse district that he bought and finished rehabbing shortly before the storm. During his fall buying spree, he purchased a 48-unit apartment building for between $3.5 million and $4 million, with renovations. But his ultimate ambition has been to back a subdivision in the manner of the biggest real-estate developers. The city still has yet to determine which neighborhoods will or will not be permitted to rebuild, but that hasn't slowed Quinn down. He has been scouting locations in New Orleans proper and St. Bernard Parish, the areas hardest hit by the storm. So far, however, he hasn't found a suitably large tract of land. "Finding the property is the hard part," Quinn said. "Everything after that is easy."
He faces the opposite problem in his attempt to be the prefab king of Louisiana: he has identified a perfect location along the Mississippi River for a factory that will manufacture modular houses, but has found no one to take charge of the effort. He is convinced his wife's father is perfect for the role, but his father-in-law, who lives in Florida, has so far not been willing to drop everything and move to Louisiana to build and run a modular-home factory. "Something about having his own life," Quinn says with a laugh.
But not having his factory hasn't stopped Quinn from acting as if he does. He has purchased two drowned-out homes in Lakeview, a ravaged section of New Orleans, at a cost of between $100,000 and $150,000 each, with the intention of ripping them down and displaying a pair of model homes there. And even if he doesn't manufacture the modular homes himself, he could buy the component parts from those already in the prefab business and make money that way. "We can buy a bunch of lots and say, 'O.K., we'll build this house or that one for you on this lot,' " Quinn said, sketching out a vision of Quinn Enterprises adding a home-building division. "Or if you own a lot, and your house has to be destroyed, we'll build a new house on your lot for you."
The last time I went property hunting with Quinn was in January on a day full of distractions. The fire marshal had cited him for unlawfully housing a portion of his hotel cleanup crew in a crumbling four-story office building he used for storage before Katrina. Meanwhile, protesters were marching outside one of his hotels, claiming that he had evicted a group of evacuees so he could make room for those willing to pay a premium for a room during Mardi Gras season. Quinn told me his people had evicted a few troublemakers and drug users who had been abusing his property and had replaced them with other displaced locals. Still, when two television reporters showed up to report on the controversy, Quinn refused to comment.
The main event that day was a trip out to a suburb west of the city so that Quinn could check out a three-story, 82-unit condo complex. Though there had been no flooding, a large section of the roof caved in during the storm and mold had spread through at least a few of the units. The building, though, stood on a busy street in a stable community in a high-and-dry part of the metro area. Sight unseen, Quinn had earlier offered the owners, who lived in Houston, $2.5 million. Now one of the owners had come to town for further talks.
Quinn didn't think the owners would accept his bid of $2.5 million. It was a tactic, a way of sending the message that he was a man in a hurry. Before making the bid, Quinn had done a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: it costs at least $30,000 per unit to build a condo, so he simply multiplied that by 82 units. Even if they had agreed to the initial offer, he was confident it would have been a good deal. That price, even for a wind-damaged building, would be less than constructing a new one.
Quinn still had his bus, but these days his preferred mode of transportation was more conventional, a black Lexus with cream-colored leather seats. His entourage had shrunk considerably, but that's because everyone was busy working on his many projects. He now traveled with a driver and a single assistant, an ambitious young lawyer who was convinced that working with Quinn gave him a good shot at becoming a millionaire. This turned out not to be a day for learning at the feet of the master, though. The assistant stayed by the car, working the phone, while Quinn met with the hotel owner, who had arrived dressed in jeans and running shoes.
The man from Houston told Quinn that he was in no hurry to sell. Quinn frowned. "What if I made it worth your while?" he asked. Quinn asked Houston for a profit-and-loss statement from 2004, which the owner didn't have, so Quinn asked for ballpark figures, which the owner said he couldn't do. No dice. Though he was wearing shiny tasseled loafers, Quinn climbed up on the roof. He asked to see the rooms afflicted by black mold. He asked the owner how much it would cost to repair the place, but the man said he hadn't yet gotten an estimate. Safely back in the car, Quinn voiced his frustration. "I could probably make a deal with him," he said, shaking his head. "But it would take forever."
It was a frustrating, wasted day — and hardly his first since the storm. "In this business," he said, "you spend too much time on things that never come to fruition." But when I asked Quinn what motivates him to keep working at his current pace, it was as if he were hearing the question for the first time. He seemed at a loss for words. "We have all the money we need right now," he mused, referring to his family. "If I make another $5 million or $10 million or whatever, we're not going to live any differently."
Perhaps the payoff he seeks is in a softer currency: status. Quinn is a well-known figure among the New Orleans rich and powerful, and he's enough of an insider that the maitre d' at Galatoire's, that hoary standard-bearer of the local restaurant scene, knows him by sight. But he's not the kind of leader whom the mayor would name to a major commission or board. In part that may be because of the fact that among the New Orleans gentry, it's O.K. to have made money only so long as people don't see you sweat doing it. And in part that's because unlike another self-made man in town, Joe Canizaro, the reigning prince of the real-estate scene, Quinn is not quite so rich or so successful that people have no choice but to embrace him as one of the first citizens of New Orleans. Like Quinn, Canizaro lives in Old Metairie, which is not where you typically find the city's old-money aristocrats. They tend to live Uptown in grand old homes along St. Charles Avenue or on Audubon Park. Old Metairie is where the nouveau riche often buy so they can knock down understated homes and replace them with multimillion-dollar castles that shout success.
It's too early to say whether Quinn will make it to the exalted level occupied by Canizaro, who played a critical role on the commission chosen to put together a plan to rebuild the city. Canizaro made his reputation putting up some of the city's signature high rises, so it's probably no surprise that in recent weeks Quinn's acquisitive vision has been directed upward. He is negotiating a deal on an Art Deco gem called the National American Bank Building, a downtown high rise that he estimates will cost him $50 million once he is through converting it into a condo or hotel (or both). Now he is focused on a potential purchase that, if he pulls it off, would propel him into the top ranks of Crescent City developers: the World Trade Center, a once-successful office tower at the foot of Canal Street.
The building is not particularly handsome, and over the years it has fallen on hard times. Yet its location, on the edge of the Mississippi River, in the heart of downtown, makes it impossible to ignore. "It may be the most desirable property in all of New Orleans right now," said Arthur Sterbcow, the president of Latter & Blum, a New Orleans-based real-estate firm that bills itself as the largest on the Gulf Coast.
Though Quinn is still a long way from acquiring this building, which has drawn the interests of others, he recently became a member of the exclusive private club that occupies its loftiest floor. It's the sort of aerie that can nourish a man's imagination, a place where a native son can look out over his hometown — even one in the midst of a mortal crisis — and dream. "This," Quinn said between bites of carved beef in the hushed atmosphere of the club's dining room, "will be my final frontier."
Gary Rivlin is a reporter for The Times and the author of "The Plot to Get Bill Gates."
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Those who read this blog regularly know that i love words and the study of linguistics. In fact, I would have loved a life as a linguist. Then my fondest hope might have been, shared, no doubt, by distaff companions of mine, that I would have become one with lots of cunning.
The New York Times
March 7, 2006
Linguists Find the Words, and Pocahontas Speaks Again
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
In the new movie about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, founded in 1607, the paramount Indian chief Powhatan asks Capt. John Smith where his people came from. The sky?
Responding to the question, translated by an Indian whose smattering of English probably came indirectly from the earlier failed Roanoke colony in North Carolina, Smith replies: "The sky? No. We come from England, an island on the other side of the sea."
The dialogue continues as the interpreter puts Smith's reply in Powhatan's own words, Virginia Algonquian, a language not spoken for more than two centuries. Like most of the 800 or more indigenous languages of North America when Europeans first arrived, Powhatan's became extinct as Indians declined in number, dispersed and lost their cultural identity.
But a small yet growing number of linguists and anthropologists has been busy in recent years recreating such dead or dying Indian speech. Their field is language revitalization, the science of reconstructing lost languages. One byproduct of the scholarship is the dialogue in Virginia Algonquian for the movie "The New World."
More than moviemaking is behind the research. A revival of ethnic pride and cultural studies among Indians has stimulated Indians' interest in their languages, some long dead. Of the more than 15 original Algonquian languages in eastern North America, the two still spoken are Passamaquoddy-Malecite in Maine and Mikmaq in New Brunswick.
In other cases, the few speakers of an Indian tongue are the old people, never their grandchildren, and so the research is a desperate attempt to save another language from burial with a departing generation.
The passing of a language diminishes cultural diversity, anthropologists say, and the restoration of at least some part of a language is an act of reclaiming a people's heritage.
Blair A. Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, who specializes in reconstructing Indian languages, said several Algonquian communities in the East had efforts under way to recover their lost languages and return them to daily use.
"What turns out to be really important is just that they learn some piece of the language because it is reclaiming their heritage," Dr. Rudes said. "So much was lost that reclaiming any of it is a major event."
Ives Goddard, who is a curator for linguistics and anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, said, "The loss of languages continues, and it's a worldwide phenomenon."
At least half the world's estimated 6,000 languages, Dr. Goddard said, have so few remaining speakers that they are threatened with extinction. By 2100, he predicted, "there will be fewer than 3,000 languages still spoken."
When the director of "The New World," Terrence Malick, decided that for authenticity Powhatan should speak in his own language, he called in Dr. Rudes, who has worked with Dr. Goddard in reconstructing the defunct Algonquian language of the Pequot of Connecticut. He is also engaged in language restoration for the Catawba of North Carolina and is collaborating with Helen Rountree, emeritus professor of anthropology at Old Dominion University, on a dictionary of Virginia Algonquian.
Dr. Rudes was asked what Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas would say and how they would say it. It was a daunting assignment.
The related Algonquian languages were among the first in America to die out, and no one is known to have spoken Virginia Algonquian since 1785. Like many other Indians, except some cultures in Mexico and Central America, Algonquian speakers had no writing system, and their grammar and most of their vocabulary were lost.
Just two contemporary accounts — one by Captain Smith and the other by the Jamestown colony secretary, William Strachey — preserved some Virginia Algonquian words, including ones that have passed into modern English as raccoon, terrapin, moccasins and tomahawk.
Clearly, even the wits of the celebrated roundtable at the namesake Algonquin Hotel, who had something cutting to say about everything and everybody, would have for once been at a loss for words in the presence of Powhatan and Pocahontas. Unless, perhaps, the two happened to wear their moccasins and the soup of the day was terrapin.
The first challenge for Dr. Rudes was the limited vocabulary. Smith, the colony leader, set down just 50 Indian words, and Strachey compiled 600. The lists were written phonetically by Englishmen who were not expert in linguistics and whose spelling and pronunciation differed considerably from modern usage, making it difficult to determine the words' actual Indian form.
Dr. Rudes had to apply techniques of historical linguistics to rebuilding a language from these sketchy, unreliable word lists. He compared Strachey's recorded words with vocabularies of related Algonquian languages, especially those spoken from the Carolinas north into Canada that had survived longer and are thus better known.
This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as Spanish is to Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related languages revealed the common elements of grammar and sentence structure and many similarities in vocabulary.
A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by Massachusetts Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee Delaware version spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, including those who sold Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and vocabulary are fairly well known to scholars.
"We have a big fat dictionary of Munsee Delaware," said Dr. Rudes, who adapted some of those words when needed for Virginia Algonquian. Recordings of the last Munsee Delaware speakers, a century ago, were a valuable guide to pronunciations.
Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of the extinct ones.
The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words for walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, "paukauns," "mawhcasuns," "aroughcoune" and "opposum." In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are paka-ni (meaning large nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and wa-pa'oemwi (white dog).
From this, Dr. Rudes reconstructed the Virginia Algonquian words pakán, mahkusun, árehkan and wápahshum," or pecan, moccasin, raccoon and opossum.
When he started the project, he was handed the movie script for the parts to be translated. "I had to rewrite terms for the dialogue," he said. "For example, we often use nonspecific verbs, 'He went to town.' In Algonquian, you have to tell the mode of travel, 'He walked to town.' "
The peculiar sentence structure required changes in the Indian translation. Pocahontas would not have said to Smith, if she ever actually did, "I love you." She would have used the verb for love, with a prefix meaning you and a suffix for I. "It is one of the few languages that give greater importance to the listener than the speaker," Dr. Rudes said.
Then there was the problem of creating dialogue reflecting what the Indians would have understood in the early 17th century. This also required changing the script for the initial Powhatan-Smith conversation.
In a paper summarizing his methods, Dr. Rudes said the original script had Smith saying: "The sky? No. From England, a land to the east." At the time, though, a land to the east was for the Indians more myth than reality, he noted, but they probably had already heard about "white-skinned people who lived on islands in the Caribbean."
So Smith's reply was changed to "We came from England, an island on the other side of the sea," and the translator then used documented words of Virginia Algonquian for sky, no, island and sea. The spelling was slightly modified to account for Strachey's misspellings and conform to similar words in other Algonquian speech. Because the word signifying a question is not known in Virginia Algonquian, Dr. Rudes borrowed the word sá from a related language.
Of course, Powhatan's interpreter could not be expected to have a word for England. He presumably did his best to reproduce what it sounded like in Algonquian, Inkurent, to which he added the general locational ending -unk, meaning at or in. He also followed the practice of naming the place first and adding the word for "we come from there."
The translation thus reads: "Sá arahqat? Mahta. Inkurent-unk kunowamun - mununag akamunk yapam."
William M. Kelso, director of archaeology of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, which owns the Jamestown fort site, said that he could not assess the language of the dialogue, but that the costumes, armor, arms and nearly all aspects of the fort were realistic.
Dr. Kelso and other archaeologists found the remains of the three-sided Jamestown fort in 1996. Their goal between now and the 400th anniversary celebration of Jamestown next year is to excavate the well at the site, search for artifacts and look for the foundations of the colony's storehouse and church. At the festivities next spring, some of the words of celebration may echo the Virginia Algonquian of 1607, the resurrected language of Powhatan and Pocahontas.
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It's one of life's most deceptive illusions: that there seems to be a gulf of difference between these two giants: Science and Spirituality. The author of this article, like myself, believes and thinks the only gulf is in the mind of those intent on driving wedges in lieu of recognizing natural bridges. Enjoy
The New York Times
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February 28, 2006
Essay
The Oracle Suggests a Truce Between Science and Religion
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
It may seem that the longstanding war between science and religion is entering a new phase: Darwin versus intelligent design, religious opposition to stem cell research, Western secularism versus Islamic fundamentalism. All around we see growing tensions between the scientific demand for truth through reason and experiment, and the religious desire for consolation and revealed truth.
What seems like a clear trend, however, in fact misrepresents the underlying reality. We have indeed seen many conflicts over the centuries, vividly in the case of Galileo versus the church.
But the truth is that science and spirituality, rather than addressing similar ground, speak to very different realms of human experience and, at least in theory, have the potential to coexist in peace, complementing rather than constantly battling each other.
Some scientists, theologians and philosophers have acknowledged this exclusivity over the years. But their tolerant views are frequently lost in the din of metaphysical warfare and the worldly positioning of each side for power.
The recent discoveries of a renegade four-member team of scientists illustrate how the two realms are quite independent. They found the truth behind the Oracle of Delphi's legendary powers, showing how the most influential figure of ancient Greece prepared for ecstatic union with Apollo. The scientists, analyzing the Delphi region and the god's temple, discovered tons of bituminous limestone down below, its layers rich in intoxicating gases.
They also found two faults that crisscross beneath the shrine to form a geologic pathway to the surface. They even measured traces of intoxicants still bubbling up today. This and other evidence suggest that the Oracle inhaled a mist of potent gases that could promote trancelike states and aloof euphoria, helping send her into mystic ecstasies.
The scientists' triumph, however, did little to pierce the Oracle's veil, as the scientists were quick to acknowledge. They claimed no insights into how her utterances stood for ages as monuments of wisdom. They had no explanation for how the priestess inspired Socrates, or the seeming reliability of her visionary pronouncements. In short, the scientists, while solving a major riddle of antiquity, wisely left other mysteries untouched.
The modesty of the Delphic investigators stands in contrast to some of the world's top scientists and their champions, who have claimed that science can answer questions far beyond the usual realm of physical phenomena, such as puzzles of religion, culture, ethics and, most important because of their centrality to the rest, mind and consciousness. Some evolutionary theorists argue that religion works because it fosters beliefs that aid the struggle for survival, not because it is true.
Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts, promotes this view in his new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" (Viking). He likens spiritual belief to disease and looks to psychology, philosophy and history to explain its grip on humanity.
Edward O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard biologist, argues in his book "Consilience" (Knopf, 1998) that "all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics." The insights of neuroscience and evolution, Dr. Wilson wrote, increasingly can illuminate even morality and ethics, with the scientific findings potentially leading "more directly and safely to stable moral codes" than do the dictates of God's will or the findings of transcendentalism.
Such views are more hope than fact, as the best theorists concede, and can exhibit a kind of arrogance.
For its part, organized religion has for centuries found means of accommodation, approval and even support for science to leaven its sometime resistance. The early Roman Catholic Church adapted cathedrals across Europe to serve as solar observatories. Muslims of the Middle Ages pioneered the forerunners of optics and algebra.
So too, many scientists in history have turned to the heavens. Galileo believed in the power of prayer. Darwin wrote "Origin of Species" as a theist, envisioning divine control of the universe. Today, surveys show that roughly 40 percent of scientists believe in a God who actively communicates with humankind and to whom one may pray in expectation of answers — hardly a mob of atheists.
The scientists who make sweeping metaphysical claims may represent a vocal minority. But hubris and celebrity are a potent mix, and threaten to intensify a cultural war that need not be. They might consider easing their rhetoric and learning a lesson in humility from the discoverers of Delphi's secret.
William J. Broad's book "The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi," is published this month by The Penguin Press.
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Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Right: Some of the residents of the Glacier Circle complex gathered last week for a meeting at the home of Dorie Datel. Clockwise from left, Lois Grau, Mary Ellen and Ray Coppock, Ms. Datel (obscured), and Stan and Peggy Northup-Dawson.
Elderhood. We're all headed there. So why not design our own spaces ? This is one of those ideas whose time has not only come, but also has come for all the time thereafter.
This is such an important article that it will also be posted at "Living Well..." and "Favorite Things" Blogs today. Enjoy.
The New York Times
February 27, 2006
In California, New Kind of Commune for Elderly
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
DAVIS, Calif., Feb. 23 — They are unlikely revolutionaries. Bearing walkers and canes, a veritable Merck Manual of ailments among them, the 12 old friends — average age 80 — looked as though they should have been sitting down to a game of Scrabble, not pioneering a new kind of commune.
Opting for old age on their own terms, they were starting a new chapter in their lives as residents of Glacier Circle, the country's first self-planned housing development for the elderly — a community they had conceived and designed themselves, right down to its purple gutters.
Over the past five years, the residents of Glacier Circle have found and bought land together, hired an architect together, ironed out insurance together, lobbied for a zoning change together and existentially probed togetherness together.
"Here you get to pick your family instead of being born into it," said Peggy Northup-Dawson, 79, a retired family therapist and mother of six who is legally blind. "We recognized that when you're physically closer to each other, you pay more attention, look in on each other. The idea was to share care."
The four couples, two widows and two who are now living solo live in eight individual town houses, grouped around an inner courtyard. Still under construction is the "common house" with a living room and a large kitchen and dining room for communal dinners; upstairs is a studio apartment they will rent at below market value to a skilled nurse who will provide additional care. It is their own self-styled, potluck utopia.
"It's an acknowledgment that intimacy doesn't happen by chance," said John Jungerman, 84, a retired nuclear physicist and one of several Ph.D.'s in the group, who is perpetually clad in purple socks and sandals.
"At first John said, 'I'm not old enough,' " his wife, Nancy, said of the commune. "I said, 'You're 80 years old. How old do you have to be?' "
There are about a dozen co-operative housing developments for the elderly in development, from Santa Fe, N.M., to St. Petersburg, Fla., a fledgling movement to communally address "the challenge of aging non-institutionally," said Charles Durett, an architect in Nevada City, Calif., who imported the concept he named co-housing — people buying homes in a community they plan and run together — from Denmark in the late 1960's.
Though communal housing for the elderly is new, intergenerational communities have been around since 1991, when the first opened in this politically progressive university town. There are now 82 across the country.
In Abingdon, Va., residents are beginning to move into ElderSpirit, a development founded by a 76-year-old former nun, Dene Peterson. The community of 37, 10 years in the making, includes a "spirit house" for ecumenical prayer and meditation.
"I just thought there had to be a better way for older people to live," said Ms. Peterson, who formed a nonprofit development corporation with three other former Glenmary sisters, a Catholic order, and knit together a variety of private and governmental funds (16 of the 29 units are subsidized affordable housing).
Ms. Peterson says she was haunted and inspired by her work with elderly public housing residents in Chicago in the 1960's.
"The elderly were dying," she recalled, "and they were anonymous."
With millions of baby boomers moving toward retirement, gerontologists and developers are looking to communal housing for the elderly with growing interest, building on a generation's mythology that already includes communes and college dormitories.
In co-operative housing, said Janice Blanchard, a gerontologist and housing consultant in Denver, "the social consciousness of the 1960's can get re-expressed." Baby boomers, she predicted, "are going to want to recreate the peak experience of their lives. Whether a commune or a college dorm, the common denominator was community."
Rich Morrison, 79, a retired psychologist from Sacramento State University and the sole single man at Glacier Circle, only recently gave up his hobby, swimming the major rapids of the Colorado River. "Emotionally, there's no reason why I can't continue to grow until I'm 100, if I'm lucky," he said.
Mr. Morrison is once widowed and twice divorced. Like others in the group who have struggled through every loss, from a child's suicide to the death of a spouse, he speaks about now being able to make "heart choices," hard won.
"I've been lonely," said Lois Grau, 87, whose husband died three years ago. "Little things go wrong that he would have fixed."
Mrs. Grau and her friends have known each other for nearly 40 years, raising children in the same neighborhood. Many residents met through the local Unitarian Universalist Church, and they still begin weekly meetings by pledging to "listen deeply and thoughtfully" to each other. Davis is known for its involved citizenry who dash off to their book groups at 7 p.m. The Glacier Circle 12 even partake of what they call a "dream group," in which they discuss their dreams.
Their talents and resources are by no means typical. They are all accomplished professionals, and the market value of their homes allowed them to purchase land and build their dream at a cost of $3.2 million, or about $400,000 each, plus $350 a month in dues. They expect to collect $850 a month in rental income. Individuals own their own homes but share expenses of common areas.
Stan Dawson, 75, a resident who has a doctorate from the Harvard School of Public Health, retired as chief of air pollution standards for the State of California to navigate the project full time through bureaucratic hurdles.
"It was a wonderful thing my dad played golf every day," he said of his father's retirement. "But I wanted to further my life in old age."
The design-by-democracy may not work for everyone.
The architect, Julie Haney, 49, said tension broke out over the color of gutters and trim on their bungalow-style homes. As Ms. Haney explained, "Ann likes blue, Stan wanted brown, Ann hates brown, everyone liked purple."
Ms. Haney, whose own elderly parents died as the design was nearing completion, said the residents forgot things more often than her younger clients did but made up for it with perspective. "I asked, 'Do you want a 20-year roof or a 40-year roof?" she recalled. "They said, 'If it lasts five years, we'll be happy.' "
To be sure, the challenges are daunting. Sue Saum, 74, for instance, moved in with her husband Jim, 84, a retired professor who, during the course of planning the community, was told he had Alzheimer's disease. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Saum was operated on for breast cancer, and recently she had back surgery. At some point, she acknowledges, her husband may need care beyond their friends' abilities.
"It's one of those day-at-a-time, figure-it-out-as-you-go things," she said. "But creating a community like this, you learn a lot about the strength of the human spirit."
Twelve friends' buying land at age 80 requires a certain leap of faith. By its nature Glacier Circle will change over time. A homeowners association, consisting of one resident from each unit, has the right of first refusal to buy any home when a vacancy arises, for whatever reason, or what Dr. Jungerman nonchalantly calls a visit from "the great father in the sky."
Glacier Circle is too small to legally mandate age restrictions, but Ray Coppock, 83, a retired editor, thinks that will take care of itself. "They'll take one look at us," he said. "That should reduce the potential buyer situation."
At ElderSpirit in Virginia, which will be fully occupied in late spring, spirituality is the major draw. Ms. Peterson defined spirituality as "people finding meaning in their lives, acknowledging ways to give up the ego and grow the soul."
Six more ElderSpirit communities, in St. Petersburg, Fla., Wichita, Kan., and elsewhere, are in planning stages, with some financing from the Chicago-based Retirement Research Foundation.
Not surprisingly, a streamlined form of community housing may be in the wind, as efforts spring up around the country to speed up the planning process, which normally takes two and a half to three and a half years.
Unlike intergenerational co-operative housing, a niche market of about 5,000 people, communal housing for the elderly has "far more market potential," said Jim Leach, president of the Wonderland Hill Development Company in Denver, which is building Silver Sage, a communal housing development for the elderly scheduled to open in Boulder next year.
Dr. William Thomas, who developed the "Eden Alternative," a widely publicized effort to make nursing homes less institutional, is developing Eldershire in Sherburne, N.Y., south of Syracuse, a hybrid between co-operative housing and a traditional development. The idea is to build first and then attract residents who will run it themselves.
Dr. Thomas compares co-operative housing, and its time-consuming community planning, with "homemade bread — people get together, mix the ingredients, let the dough rise." He's trying to adapt the concept for broader consumption — "100 million people," he says, "buy bread at the store."
Even revolutionaries need to be flexible. At Glacier Circle, where the first tulips of spring are popping up, the group had approved special wall insulation for Mr. Morrison, who has a penchant for playing Mahler's Ninth Symphony at 3 a.m. When the bass and timpani pulse through his subwoofer, his neighbor Dorie Datel, a youthful 80-year-old, just lets it slide. For Ms. Datel, whose husband left her for "the other woman" he met at Elderhostel, this group's wisdom and resolve are embedded in the square footage.
"We've all lived through the Depression and war and the big stuff, so we know that things don't always stay the same," Ms. Datel said. "All of us are interested in living."
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Sometimes, if you are lucky, someone writes something that touches you right where you live, at the core of who you are. In this piece, the writer describes the attitude of one of my favorite new actresses, Rachel Weisz.
While reading it, I realized just lucky I am to know and love a special friend who loves me but struggles with intense personal issues (having nothing to do with me), and she must think of death every so often, as Rachel Weisz does. She also has much of Rachel's attitude, and that's a gift.
I just know that, despite her struggle, when I am in her presence, she mostly epitomizes the incredible courage of the Life Force, despite all the hellish, death-dealing demons around her that must be tempting her the other way. This article is a blown kiss to you, sweetheart.
Enjoy.
The New York Times
February 26, 2006
The Rachel Papers
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
Rachel Weisz has a tattoo of a ladder on her hip. It's a symbol of her Cambridge days as a co-founder of Talking Tongues, an ambitious theater troupe that incorporated a ladder into one of its productions, and also of the spirit behind that endeavor.
The tattoo is a reminder to have guts, take chances and throw yourself into what's scary and hard. "It's very difficult to get great roles," Weisz said in early January, over a late-afternoon tea of yogurt and orange juice (she was five months pregnant) at a coffee shop near her Manhattan home in SoHo. Weisz can look smoky and irresistibly alluring on film, which seems to bring out the dark lushness of her hair and eyes, but in person she has a lovely, fresh-scrubbed quality.
On the day we met, this was accentuated by a white wool sailor cap and an oversize blue-and-white-striped nautical sweater. Although she had just returned from a Christmas holiday in sunny Jamaica with her fiancé, the director Darren Aronofsky ("I'm in charge of the wedding," she explained about the reverse order of baby first and ceremony later, "and I haven't figured all that out yet"), Weisz was alabaster pale and looked less like a siren and more like a radiant English schoolgirl, home from university.
While no one would admit it, Weisz (pronounced VICE) might have initially been cast in films for her unique and startling beauty. "I was not one of those talented children who starred in every production at school," said Weisz, who is 34. "In 'Alice in Wonderland,' I was cast as the Dodo — a nonspeaking part.
Later, when I played Ismene in 'Antigone,' which is the second lead and a great role, I wasn't very good. But I thought, This is where I want to be. Even if nobody else was saying that to me. My dad actually suggested that I think about other careers." She laughed. "I hadn't been the shining light, but I was still burning to pursue this profession. And then, with Talking Tongues, a plan was hatched."
There were only four members in the group, and they created a kind of extremely physical, highly personal theater based on improvisation and Eastern European techniques. "We'd hurl each other around the stage, and the dialogue was largely about how lovers try and possess each other," she said. "The plays don't read well — they had a kind of fraught naturalism."
After winning the student award at the prestigious Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the troupe performed at the Gate Theatre and, two years later, disbanded. Weisz then auditioned for an innovative production of Noël Coward's "Design for Living," directed by Sean Mathias, at the Donmar Warehouse. "It was a very romantic, very sexy production," she recalled between bites of fruit.
"In the first scene of the play, I was wearing only a loose kimono, and I open a freezer and rub an ice cube between my legs because I'm hot and sore from sex." The Coward play is about a triad of ambitious artists, and it was a sensation in London. "Sean gave me wonderful advice," Weisz recalled. "He said: 'Stop trying to be so nice. Bring out the monster!' He'd scream, 'We're all monsters."' She paused. "I thought a lot about that when I was playing Tessa."
Tessa Quayle is the doomed, infuriating woman whom Weisz portrays in "The Constant Gardener." She fought to get the part, flying at her own expense to London to meet with the director, Fernando Meirelles, and then writing him long personal letters during the five months of casting.
"I was passionate about this project," said Weisz, who was perhaps best known in films for playing the brainy, beautiful archaeologist love interest in "The Mummy." "Parts like Tessa don't come along very often. It was agony waiting to hear because it meant so much to me."
"The Constant Gardener" establishes Weisz as a complex cinematic presence. She won the Golden Globe for best supporting actress, and her work in the film has transformed her career: she can no longer be dismissed as just a thinking man's sex symbol.
Her next film, "The Fountain," which is due in the fall, is directed by her fiancé, Aronofsky, and is even more ambitious. It tells interlocking stories, set in different eras and woven together like a braid: Weisz plays Queen Isabella in 16th-century Spain, as well as a girl who is dying of cancer in present-day America and also living in outer space in the future. "The title refers to the search for the fountain of youth," she said.
The film has been in the works since her first meeting with Aronofsky five years ago. "Darren was never going to cast me," she recalled. "At the time, 'The Fountain' was to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett." Weisz smiled. "But everything changed, and here we are."
Weisz, whose mother is a psychotherapist and whose father invented an artificial respirator that is still used in emergencies, has often played characters who die. "I know," she said. "I keep dying. Tessa is murdered. And I'm about to die in 'The Fountain.' But then I've always had a preoccupation with death."
This preoccupation, she said, is both good and bad: "Bad because it has sometimes led me into hellish places, as part of my quest to devour life. And good because I recognize that time is short, and we must act on our beliefs. We're all looking for something great — something singular — to push us out of what's safe and easy."
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Don Knotts as Barney Fife is one of my all-time favorite characterizations in comedy. His role on the old Black & White days of "The Andy Griffth Show" made that show a joy to watch then and since then - and I still love to catch episodes whenever i can.
Somewhere in Heaven today, angels are laughing, fondly. Thank you, Barney.
The New York Times
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February 27, 2006
An Appreciation
Don Knotts, Ever Proud to Be a Bumbler
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Don Knotts was a high-status comic who played low-status roles. Actors who worked with him almost universally deferred to him as a comedic grandmaster, yet his characters were not jokers but the butts of jokes. He was absolutely flappable. No one had a better tremor or double-take, and with his unmistakable homeliness — bulging eyes, receding chin, stooped shoulders, broad hips — he didn't bother to play the wise fool; he wisely stuck to just the fool.
Of Barney Fife, Mr. Knotts's character on "The Andy Griffith Show," Billy Bob Thornton said, "Don Knotts gave us the best character, the most clearly drawn, most perfect American, most perfect human ever."
Mr. Knotts, who died Friday, grew up during the Depression, in Morgantown, W.Va., where his mother leased a house and took in boarders. He slept in the kitchen. His older brothers, Sid and Shadow, were funny, but they also drank and fought, and Shadow died of an asthma attack while Don was a teenager. Their father, who had suffered hysterical blindness and a nervous collapse before Don was born, rarely left his bed.
The Depression was a high time for Mr. Knotts's act. He practiced magic and ventriloquism for the neighbors and the boarders, many of whom were students or jobless and welcomed satire. When World War II came, his friends thought the Army wouldn't take him, since he looked unwell and undernourished, but he ended up serving out his duty as a comedian in the Stars and Gripes, a revue that played in the South Pacific. At first, he performed only with his ventriloquist dummy, Danny, but one day he caught Red Ford, an older Texas comic, staring at him and laughing. "You know something?" Mr. Knotts remembered Ford saying in "Barney Fife, and Other Characters I Have Known," his 1999 autobiography. "You're a funny little son of a bitch."
He was a generous performer who liked to share the stage, and he thrived in duets, teams, variety shows, ensembles. Back in New York, he noticed a man whose hands shook and who spilled water; he combined that with Robert Benchley's famous apologetic speaker from the monologue "Treasurer's Report," and the nervous character, who went on to fame on "The Steve Allen Show," was born.
Mr. Knotts plainly stole stuff, and other comics didn't mind lending him material. He was wonderfully unthreatening to other male comics, all of whom could think of themselves as one step closer to leading men than Mr. Knotts was. It's hard to think of an actor, in fact, who got more helping hands than Mr. Knotts in his early days. Male actors were forever offering him parts, trying to get him to join their acts. Sharing the stage with this skinny, spazzy guy could only make them look more commanding.
Among these mentors was Andy Griffith, whom he met when they were both cast in the play "No Time for Sergeants" in 1955. Mr. Griffith and Mr. Knotts cracked each other up. A few years later, when Mr. Knotts proposed himself as a deputy to Andy Taylor on Mr. Griffith's sitcom, Mr. Griffith went for it. Andy's crinkly, deep-set eyes conveyed calm and sagacity, while Barney's popped ones expressed pure anxiety — something akin to horror at the demands of ordinary life.
Mr. Knotts's popular movies, "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken," "The Incredible Mr. Limpet," "The Reluctant Astronaut" and "The Shakiest Gun in the West," put him on a winning streak. To comedy geeks, especially the preteen kind, his send-up of 60's superheroism came as a delight and a relief.
One by one, Mr. Knotts mocked the pretenses of the comic actor who often has his eye on nobler pursuits. In the nervous man, he reveled in the discomfort that most comics tend to pass off as indignation or savoir-faire. As Barney, he satirized swagger and self-importance. Finally, on "Three's Company" in the late 70's and 80's, he sent up the comedian's hypersexuality, which is often his pride. Mr. Knotts, over and over, was willing to play the desperate, pathetic low-man-on-every-pole. He did it so well — never forsaking his persona and trying to seize the lead, as nearly all major comedians do these days — that his talent for abasement became a source, paradoxically, of great authority. By revealing but never indulging these pretenses, he enlightened everyone he worked with, and his audiences.
And once in a great while he even got to be the hero. On "The Loaded Goat," a winning episode of "The Andy Griffith Show," it's Barney who saves the day. Playing an achingly melancholy song on his harmonica, he leads a dangerous goat, which has swallowed dynamite, out of town.###
The New York Times
February 25, 2006
Don Knotts, TV's Barney Fife, Dies at 81
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Don Knotts, who kept generations of TV audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on ''The Andy Griffith Show'' and would-be swinger landlord Ralph Furley on ''Three's Company,'' has died. He was 81.
Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center, said Sherwin Bash, his friend and manager.
Griffith, who had visited Knotts in the hospital before his death, said his longtime friend had a brilliant comedic mind and wrote some of the show's best scenes.
''Don was a small man ... but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions,'' Griffith told The Associated Press on Saturday. ''Don was special. There's nobody like him.
''I loved him very much,'' Griffith added. ''We had a long and wonderful life together.''
Unspecified health problems had forced Knotts to cancel an appearance in his native Morgantown, W.Va., in August.
The actor's half-century career included seven TV series and more than 25 films, but it was the Griffith show that brought him TV immortality and five Emmys.
The show ran from 1960-68, and was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season, including a No. 1 ranking its final year. It is one of only three series in TV history to bow out at the top: The others are ''I Love Lucy'' and ''Seinfeld.'' The 249 episodes have appeared frequently in reruns and have spawned a large, active network of fan clubs.
As the bug-eyed deputy to Griffith, Knotts carried in his shirt pocket the one bullet he was allowed after shooting himself in the foot. The constant fumbling, a recurring sight gag, was typical of his self-deprecating humor.
Knotts, whose shy, soft-spoken manner was unlike his high-strung characters, once said he was most proud of the Fife character and doesn't mind being remembered that way.
His favorite episodes, he said, were ''The Pickle Story,'' where Aunt Bee makes pickles no one can eat, and ''Barney and the Choir,'' where no one can stop him from singing.
''I can't sing. It makes me sad that I can't sing or dance well enough to be in a musical, but I'm just not talented in that way,'' he lamented. ''It's one of my weaknesses.''
Knotts appeared on several other television shows. In 1979, he joined the cast of ''Three's Company,'' also starring John Ritter, Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt.
Early in his TV career, he was one of the original cast members of ''The Steve Allen Show,'' the comedy-variety show that ran from 1956-61. He was one of a group of memorable comics backing Allen that included Louis Nye, Tom Poston and Bill ''Jose Jimenez'' Dana.
Knotts' G-rated films were family fun, not box-office blockbusters. In most, he ends up the hero and gets the girl -- a girl who can see through his nervousness to the heart of gold.
In the part-animated 1964 film ''The Incredible Mr. Limpet,'' Knotts played a meek clerk who turns into a fish after he is rejected by the Navy.
When it was announced in 1998 that Jim Carrey would star in a ''Limpet'' remake, Knotts responded: ''I'm just flattered that someone of Carrey's caliber is remaking something I did. Now, if someone else did Barney Fife, THAT would be different.''
In the 1967 film ''The Reluctant Astronaut,'' co-starring Leslie Nielsen, Knotts' father enrolls his wimpy son -- operator of a Kiddieland rocket ride -- in NASA's space program. Knotts poses as a famous astronaut to the joy of his parents and hometown but is eventually exposed for what he really is, a janitor so terrified of heights he refuses to ride an airplane.
In the 1969 film ''The Love God?,'' he was a geeky bird-watcher who is duped into becoming publisher of a naughty men's magazine and then becomes a national sex symbol. Eventually, he comes to his senses, leaves the big city and marries the sweet girl next door.
He was among an army of comedians from Buster Keaton to Jonathan Winters to liven up the 1963 megacomedy ''It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.'' Other films include ''The Ghost and Mr. Chicken'' (1966); ''The Shakiest Gun in the West'' (1968); and a few Disney films such as ''The Apple Dumpling Gang'' (1974); ''Gus'' (1976); and ''Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo'' (1977).
In 1998, he had a key role in the back-to-the-past movie ''Pleasantville,'' playing a folksy television repairman whose supercharged remote control sends a teen boy and his sister into a TV sitcom past.
Knotts began his show biz career even before he graduated from high school, performing as a ventriloquist at local clubs and churches. He majored in speech at West Virginia University, then took off for the big city.
''I went to New York cold. On a $100 bill. Bummed a ride,'' he recalled in a visit to his hometown of Morgantown, where city officials renamed a street for him in 1998.
Within six months, Knotts had taken a job on a radio Western called ''Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders,'' playing a wisecracking, know-it-all handyman. He stayed with it for five years, then came his series TV debut on ''The Steve Allen Show.''
He married Kay Metz in 1948, the year he graduated from college. The couple had two children before divorcing in 1969. Knotts later married, then divorced Lara Lee Szuchna.
In recent years, he said he had no plans to retire, traveling with theater productions and appearing in print and TV ads for Kodiak pressure treated wood.
The world laughed at Knotts, but it also laughed with him.
He treasured his comedic roles and could point to only one role that wasn't funny, a brief stint on the daytime drama ''Search for Tomorrow.''
''That's the only serious thing I've done. I don't miss that,'' Knotts said.
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Associated Press writer Vicki Smith in Morgantown, W.Va., contributed to this report.
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This is the future. Enjoy.
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February 23, 2006
David Pogue
Wi-Fi to Go: The Hot Spot in a Box
YOU know what would be so cool? A portable Wi-Fi hot spot. Whenever you wanted Internet access, you wouldn't have to hunt for a wireless coffee shop or pay $24 a night to your hotel.
Instead, you'd travel with a little box. Plug it into a power outlet — or even your car's cigarette lighter — and boom, you and everyone within 200 feet could get onto the Internet at high speed, without wires.
Actually, such boxes exist. They come from companies like Kyocera, Junxion and Top Global, and they're every bit as awesome as they sound. (Unfortunately, the category is so new that it has no agreed-upon name. "Portable hot spot" is descriptive but unwieldy. "Cellular gateway" is a bit cryptic. Kyocera's term, "mobile router," may be as good as any.)
Before you start thinking that you've died and gone to Internet heaven, however, you should know that these boxes don't work alone. Each requires the insertion of a PC laptop card provided by a cellular carrier like Verizon, Sprint or Cingular. The card provides the Internet connection, courtesy of those companies' 3G ("third generation") high-speed cellular data networks. The box just rebroadcasts that connection as a Wi-Fi signal so that all nearby computers — not just one privileged laptop — can go online.
With those PC cards, you can go online anywhere there's a cellular signal: in a taxi, on a bus, in a waiting room or wherever. In major cities, the speed is delightful, like a D.S.L. or slowish cable modem (400 to 700 kilobits a second). In other areas, you can still go online, but only slightly faster than with a dial-up modem. (Also note that uploading is far slower than downloading.)
All right, go ahead, ask it: If you can already outfit your laptop with one of these miraculous cards, why do you need a mobile router that translates the cellular connection into a Wi-Fi one?
First, not all computers have the necessary card slot. ( Apple's iBooks and new MacBook Pro laptops come to mind.) Second, a mobile router can accommodate machines with no wireless features at all — like desktop computers — thanks to standard Ethernet network jacks on the back. (The Kyocera has four, the Junxion two and the Top Global one.)
Above all, Wi-Fi lets lots of computers share the same Internet signal. Cellular PC-card service is very expensive: $60 a month for unlimited use ($80 if you don't also have a voice plan). That's a lot to pay for a single computer to go online. A mobile router opens up that signal to any computer within about 200 feet; $60 a month is a lot more palatable when 10 or 20 of you are sharing it.
MOBILE routers have become essential equipment for traveling groups. Bus and train companies are experimenting with these boxes to see if having high-speed Wi-Fi on board appeals to passengers. These boxes are also becoming standard amenities for the casts of TV shows and movies and for rock bands, so that they can check e-mail or surf the Web between takes or whenever they're on location or on the tour bus.
But a mobile router might make sense even in stationary environments. Small businesses can use one as a backup connection when the power goes out. (A mobile router can draw its power from a car or battery pack.)
Other people are canceling their home D.S.L. or cable modem service altogether. Instead of paying twice for Internet access — for a cable modem and a cellular laptop plan — they use the cellular card at home and on the road and save a lot of money.
To use a mobile router, you insert your cellular laptop card (which must first be activated in a Windows laptop). Then you connect the router to your computer using an Ethernet cable (included). You type the box's numeric address into your Web browser, and presto: you're viewing its configuration page. Here's where you indicate which brand of PC card you have (Novatel, Sierra Wireless or whatever), turn on password protection, and fiddle with pages and pages of network and security settings, if you're into that sort of thing.
The Junxion box is a biggish slab of folded sheet metal, unimpressive except for its bright green paint job, measuring 6.3 by 10.3 by 1.1 inches and costing $600. As you can tell from the price, Junxion seeks corporate buyers, not individuals. Yet only a few of its features cry out "corporate." (One of them lets a network geek configure a fleet of Junxion boxes by remote control, from the comfort of company headquarters.)
For $600, you might expect more than two measly status lights, and geeks might expect the wireless signal to be 802.11g instead of the older "b" variant. On the other hand, the Junxion has some neat features, including the ability to greet colleagues with a splash screen. ("Welcome to Dave's free Wi-Fi highway! Click Connect to continue, and don't forget to thank Dave by dropping off cash or baked goods at his cubicle.")
The new Kyocera KR1, developed jointly with D-Link, is more attractive for a couple of important reasons. First, it costs only a third as much ($200 after rebate). It's also much smaller and better-looking (8.5 by 5.3 by 1.3 inches) and feels more like a finished commercial product.
Note, however, that the KR1 works only with Verizon and Sprint cards — or as the techies might say, it works only on EV-DO networks. Its rivals, by contrast, can accommodate almost any card from any service, including the new BroadbandConnect service from Cingular (so far available in 16 cities).
On the other hand, only the KR1 can draw its Internet connection from certain EV-DO cellphones instead of a PC card. That is, you can connect the Samsung A890 or Audiovox 8940, for example, with a U.S.B. cable. The phone becomes a sort of Internet antenna for the router.
If the Junxion box represents the complete absence of industrial design, then Top Global's 3G Phoebus represents the height of it. This mobile router is a white, gray or black plastic pyramid (7 by 7 by 5.5 inches) that makes no attempt to look like a piece of networking equipment. You either love that approach or you don't.
Design aside, the Phoebus has a lot to recommend it. It's the only model with an on-off switch — a clicky chrome marble on the front. It's also the only model that when used with Sprint or Verizon cards, automatically configures itself; you can skip the setup steps involving the Ethernet cable and Web browser. You literally plug the thing in, insert the card, and start surfing. That feature, and its super-clear browser-based Web setup page, makes the Phoebus the simplicity champion.
The only causes for pauses are the single Ethernet jack in the back, the price ($400) and the difficulty of finding a place to buy the thing. (Homemade-looking Web sites like americanevdo.net carry it.)
There's no overstating the joy of carrying around your own Wi-Fi hot spot, ready for your whole gang to enjoy wherever you can find a power outlet or even a car's cigarette-lighter socket.
Not everyone is happy about this product category, however. Verizon, in particular, strongly objects.
"Broadband access is designed for individual customers," said Brenda Raney, a Verizon Wireless spokeswoman. "When customers use unauthorized devices to share the service, they are in violation of their service agreements."
Yet this objection should sound distinctly familiar to anyone who remembers the dawn of the cable modem era. The cable companies originally hoped to charge $40 a month for each computer in your home, and did everything in their power to dissuade people from hooking up network routers that could share the signal. In the end, of course, common sense won, the cable companies lost, and now just about every home D.S.L. or cable modem signal is shared among two or more computers.
If you like the idea of a mobile router, any of these hot-spots-in-a-box will do the trick. But considering its polish and low price, the Kyocera KR1 has the edge (provided you're a Sprint or Verizon customer). Until the United Nations finally gets around to blanketing the earth with an uninterrupted cloud of Wi-Fi coverage, these gadgets are the next best thing to finding a wireless connection everywhere you go.
E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com
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left: Francine Plant and Ruth Yeager, back, work Friday on their show's computer files in the Acadiana Open Channel control room.
In the early 1990s, I got involved with Acadiana Open Channel (AOC) and have stayed in touch ever since. Here's the latest on them. AS for me - I may be producing / hosting a show there soon ! (Stay tuned, as they say)
AOC: Tune in, speak out
Public station gives people forum for various topics
Marsha Sills
msills@theadvertiser.com
Surfing the channels, a stop on channels 5 and 19 is a bit like the clichéd box of chocolates.
The city-parish president could be explaining fiber - and not the kind in your vegetables. Live tabletop discussions could range from national debt to the deceits of the mainstream media. You could catch a pastor's sermon or residents helping city marshals pin those who haven't served their jail time.
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Programming on Lafayette's public access channel - Acadiana Open Channel - isn't so much Wayne's World, but more real world - and not like the one on that other cable channel.
AOC is on a mission to continue to change its image, as it has another three years before its contract with the city is up for renewal. The station also is trying to keep pace with emerging technologies and consumers' desire for "on-demand" information. All this comes as Congress is considering video franchising legislation that could change how public, educational and governmental access channels are funded.
The station still broadcasts amateur videos, like endless minutes of a kitten playing with a ball of yarn or hours of a wedding ceremony and the reception that follows. But, for the most part during the past few years, AOC appears to have grown out of the shock-value stage that once brought viewers a show hosted by a self-proclaimed Ku Klux Klan member and programming that bordered on slanderous and scandalous.
The station is all about letting the viewers decide just how much the AOC's programming truly reflects the community.
"This used to be a place where you could go down and make TV and have a good time and have no consideration," said Ed Bowie, AOC's executive director. "We're not as Wayne's World as we used to be. It's not as kooky. We've transformed over time, where we've reached our maturity level a little bit. ... Now we have people who want to sit down and talk about the community."
Like other public access channels across the country, the station prides itself on serving as the community's outlet to express their views and their First Amendment rights.
The channel is an invaluable resource, said Stephen Handwerk, who hosts AOC's Meet the Democrats. Handwerk admitted his concern about federal legislation that could impact the station's funding.
"People may tune in and see people's dogs or plants, but it gives people a voice," Handwerk said. "This is something that makes the standard of living in Lafayette better. The only other place in the state that has an operating public access station is New Orleans, and that's scary."
The channel gets $220,000 from the city, allocated from the city-parish's franchise agreement with Cox Communications and another $50,000 from Cox. Federal legislation mandates that cable operators pay a certain percentage to local municipalities for use of rights of way. The legislation also requires cable companies to provide channel space for public access.
Now, future funding could be at risk as companies like Verizon and AT&T lobby for video franchising. If video providers aren't required to pay the comparable franchise fees, it could mean that cable operators would fight to not have to pay the fees, which are used to help fund public access channels, according to Anthony T. Riddle, executive director of Alliance for Community Media. Riddle testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee during hearings Feb. 15.
"Alternatively, the incumbent cable operator might eventually transform itself into a broadband video service provider, thereby freeing itself directly from its PEG support obligations," Riddle testified.
The committee has not met again to discuss the issue.
Community service factor
While Bowie is executive director of the channel, he also finds himself in the role of teacher, leading orientation sessions and explaining camera composition and how to make a show more visually engaging for the viewer.
"You've got to keep their brain active," Bowie told members who produce News from the Underground on Friday when the crew came in to learn how to revamp their show.
The live call-in news show looks at topics not covered by the mainstream media. Filmed the first Monday of each month, they're preparing for a show about privacy issues with guest Rick Swanson, a political science assistant professor at the University of Louisiana, according to Barbara Conner, one of the show's producers.
For about two hours last week, Conner and the crew took a crash course on how to improve their show, from picking out the right font for their graphics to perfecting camera angles.
The training is provided free of charge. Last year and through February of this year, 290 people were trained at Acadiana Open Channel. The channel offers courses in editing, production, camera operation and even teaches people how to use their own camcorder.
The show is a tad boring, admitted Ruth Yeager, another producer of News from the Underground.
"We're not satisfied with the way it was," Yeager said Friday. "Basically, it's a talking heads show. We'd like to make it interesting. There are times we could have used graphics but didn't know how."
First Amendment forum
Public access channels put the First Amendment into action, Bowie tells those who show up for volunteer orientation. Those interested in having their own show or having their own work aired on the station first have to go through the orientation training. Before being allowed to submit programming or train on equipment, volunteers have to take the workshop.
"We're here to let you speak," is one of the first things Bowie tells first-timers.
At any given orientation, the reasons that bring people to AOC are different.
Last month, Jonah Bascle, a student at UNO, said he wanted to learn more about how to get involved.
Alvin Jones, the director of SMILE/Head Start, wanted to see how he could get his nonprofit's work some publicity.
Bowie discusses issues producers should consider, like privacy, community standards, copyright laws and the fact that the station can't be used to turn a profit - in other words, there's no chances for a local home shopping network.
"You're responsible for your content. I am not," Bowie said.
During last month's orientation, Bowie referenced one former show host, Andy Hebert, who "pushed the envelope" a few years ago, pointing fingers at city council members and the past city-parish president. The host no longer has a show on the station, but Bowie said Hebert wasn't asked to leave. However, Bowie said he thinks the station still is living down Hebert's comments. Hebert also attends and comments at city-parish council meetings regularly.
On air
Three minutes before his camera man gives him the go signal, Hesham Tillawi makes a confession.
"Right now, my heart is in my stomach," the host of Current Issues, a live call-in show, said, grinning. "But when they say 'Go,' it's fine."
About two years ago, Tillawi, created Current Issues because of his frustration with the mainstream media's coverage of the situation in Iraq.
"We decided to start the program up for people to see the truth as it is on the ground, not as it's fabricated in editors' offices," Tillawi said.
On a night last month, Tillawi's first caller who identified himself as "Freedom" gave Tillawi kudos for discussing lobbyist Jack Ambramoff's questionable practices eight months ago.
"And the mainstream media has just caught on," the caller said. "... Everything now is about bin Laden" - a planned distraction by the administration to divert attention from Abramoff, the caller said.
Callers aren't always polite, but their right to be heard supersedes formalities. But, as host of the live call-in show Talkmeisters, Mark Pope will cut callers short.
"People can say whatever they want. They can call me names. They can criticize what they want. I don't tolerate foul language or people talking about local people. If people say 'He's a crook' or 'He's dishonest,' I want them to back it up or I will cut them off," Pope said before his live show's filming one night a few weeks ago.
One rule Pope has, though, is that he doesn't discuss Lafayette Consolidated Government on his show. Pope is the city-parish environmental quality manager. Pope is also an AOC board member.
"I do this to inspire thought - even with people who disagree with me," Pope said.
Going global
With the help of the Internet, shows like Tillawi's and Meet the Democrats have attracted an audience on the Internet. Tillawi's show is simulcast on the Web.
Tillawi said his site has helped bring more attention to Lafayette, as well.
"They think Lafayette, Louisiana, is a huge metropolitan area," Tillawi said, smiling. "How would a small city do such a show?"
Tillawi noted some limitations producers have with the equipment.
"But it's public access, so we can't complain," he said.
Podcasting training is in the works, but financial constraints have put that project on hold, Bowie said.
Bowie said the station's mission will need to keep up with technology.
"The technology communication landscape is changing," Bowie said. "We've been given reason to believe that we'll be part of the (city-parish) fiber project. We're also going into media literacy programs and how-to programs."
Some of that involves teaching people how to interpret and use the information they're "bombarded with from their cell phones," computers and television.
"I think AOC's new position in the world will be how to make and interpret media communication," Bowie said. "Instead of coming in and spending hours producing a show, they'll be able to produce something on their living room couch, and we'll be a distribution hub. We have a bright future, but we've got to reinvent ourselves."
Originally published February 21, 2006
Remember - SCROLL DOWN to find the Georgia pictures - they are below, beneath a few other articles.
