Beatles

Roll Over, Brian Epstein: The Beatles Get Mashed

Frank Herrmann

George Martin with Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in 1967.

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By JON PARELES

Published: November 19, 2006

THE latest Beatles collection, “Love” (Capitol), isn’t a retrospective: it’s a recombination. After the innumerable reissues, archival gleanings and rescued live recordings that have made the Beatles catalog an endlessly milked cash cow for EMI Records and the Beatles’ own Apple Corps, the “Love” CD and its surround-sound DVD mix, both due for release on Tuesday, are different. Instead of simply collecting Beatles tracks, “Love” actively manipulates them.

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George Martin and Giles, his son, who together edited and reconstructed assorted Beatles songs in “Love.”

Songs are edited together, dismantled, reconstructed from unused takes, overlapped, mined for guitar licks or orchestral bits, segued into free-form montages, even run in reverse. The result is both familiar and disorienting. “Love” is part of that snowballing 21st-century phenomenon, the mash-up.

It’s an authorized one, approved by the Beatles and their families and made by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, and Giles Martin, his son. They assembled this music for the Cirque du Soleil production “Love,” now running in Las Vegas. The tone is admiring verging on reverent.

Mash-ups can mock their sources; “Love” emphatically does not. Nor does it venture outside the Beatles’ own catalog. All the music is from the Beatles, 1963-70, except for a new string arrangement by George Martin, which is overdubbed onto the bittersweet, acoustic-guitar version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that appeared on “Anthology 3,” part of the “Anthology” series of alternate takes.

For people who have been hearing Beatles albums since they were first released, “Love” is a memory test, a jolt to the ingrained experience of the music. Did it always sound that way? Wasn’t that guitar solo in a different song? All mash-ups do that to some extent, but the déjà entendu effect is exponentially stronger with material like Beatles songs that millions of listeners have memorized from end to end. The effect, as it was with the “Anthology” albums, is not to devalue or dethrone the well-known versions, but to illuminate them.

Giles Martin said in an interview that he was tempted to have the album packaging read, “No original Beatles recordings were harmed in the making of these tracks.” It’s a nervous joke. By reshuffling Beatles nuggets even this much, the Martins have breached the hermetic domain in which the Beatles have tried to keep their music.

The Beatles’ EMI recordings aren’t available on iTunes, and Apple Corps turns down most requests to use the Beatles’ catalog in other contexts. When Danger Mouse made “The Grey Album,” his razzle-dazzle combination of the raps from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with microsliced samples from “The Beatles” (a k a “The White Album”) in 2004, he immediately got a cease-and-desist letter from EMI Records, which instead could have capitalized on a new surge of interest in a 1968 oldie. (The album circulated anyway as a widespread free download.)

Like any other recordings the Beatles’ songs have been fodder for unauthorized mash-ups. But officially, they have been treated like sacred texts, to be kept inviolate. “Love” doesn’t open the door to Beatles recycling (which was going on anyway) as much as it recognizes the inevitable.

“Love” was made for Cirque du Soleil, which, astonishingly, persuaded the surviving Beatles and family members not only to let Beatles songs be used as the soundtrack for a big Las Vegas production but also to allow them to be rejiggered. Cirque du Soleil’s needs clearly affected the programming of the album — of course the Beatles’ circus song, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” is included — but “Love” was also a good pretext to sift through the tapes one more time.

The Martins searched the Beatles catalog for coincidences of key and tempo, for bits of songs that could be turned into connectors or musical puns. Vocals from “Nowhere Man” drift in above the keyboard and cello of “Blue Jay Way”; the guitar introduction to “Blackbird” leads into “Yesterday” instead.

It’s an album of connoisseurship, revealing the inspired details tucked into so many Beatles songs. (Paul McCartney’s bass line in “Something” emerges, with the rhythm guitar track removed, as a true countermelody.) It’s a sonic close-up too.

Because “Love” was made from early generations of the Beatles’ original, unprocessed studio master tapes, the timbres of voices, fingers on strings and drumsticks on skins are more immediate than they have been on other digitized Beatles releases. Which ought to raise the pressure on EMI to release better remastered CD’s of the original Beatles albums.

Some of the juxtapositions are revealing, pointing to threads that run through the Beatles’ music. “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Within You Without You” were both in the same key, so the rhythm track of the first can fit the melody of the second. But both were also Beatles songs that matched mystical reflections to the drone of Indian raga. Other combinations are merely clever, a matter of trivial coincidence. A few are cutesy and annoying.

The “Love” version of “Strawberry Fields Forever” imagines the song being constructed: first John Lennon singing it by himself with acoustic guitar, then the other band members joining in one by one as a rhythm section, then layers of backup voices, of electric guitars, of horns and electronics, but with Lennon’s voice always vulnerable at the core. It’s touching and fascinating, like a time-lapse version of the Beatles at work. And then, unfortunately, the production goes off the rails, piling on bits of other, unnecessary songs.

“Love” isn’t the last word on the Beatles catalog — or at least it shouldn’t be. There’s far more material in the group’s archives than a single collection can encompass, especially if the point is not only preservation but extrapolation. The Beatles in their heyday held their music to extraordinarily high standards, but they weren’t rigid or exclusionary about what went into it, whether it was Bach or the Beach Boys.

They were playing in every sense of the word — even doing their own premonitory mash-ups in songs like “Revolution No. 9” and “I Am the Walrus” — and with “Love,” some of that old playfulness returns. Back in the 1960s the Beatles were pop’s vanguard; now, in this guarded way, they have joined the cut-and-paste present. Their originals stand up, but it wouldn’t hurt their legacy one bit to let some outsiders play with them too.

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Personal Space

Corners

In Certain Circles, Two Is a Crowd

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By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Published: November 16, 2006

CHANCES are that in the last week someone has irritated you by standing too close, talking too loud or making eye contact for too long. They have offended you with the high-pitched shrill emanating from the earphones of their iPod or by spreading their legs unnecessarily wide on a packed subway car.

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Illustration by LAURENT CILLUFFO

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What importance do you place on the concept of personal space?

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Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

On the subway, open spaces create a zone of comfort.

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Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Armrests on a long bench in Central Park allow for ample breathing room.

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Hiroko Masuike for The New york Times

In Union Square, a few feet between women goes a long way toward easing tensions about being in a busy area.

But what makes you feel hostile toward “close talkers,” as the show “Seinfeld” dubbed people who get within necking distance of you when they speak? Or toward strangers who stand very near to you on line? Or toward people who take the bathroom stall next to yours when every other one is available?

Communications scholars began studying personal space and people’s perception of it decades ago, in a field known as proxemics. But with the population in the United States climbing above 300 million, urban corridors becoming denser and people with wealth searching for new ways to separate themselves from the masses, interest in the issue of personal space — that invisible force field around your body — is intensifying.

Scientists who say Americans share patterns of movement and behaviors to protect their personal space have recently found new evidence in a cyber game.

Researchers who observed the avatars (digital representations of the humans that control them) of participants in Second Life, a virtual reality universe, found that some of the avatars’ physical behavior was in keeping with studies about how humans protect their personal space.

In other words, the digital beings adhered to some unspoken behavioral rules of humans even though they were but pixels on a screen.

Humans tend to avert eye gaze if they feel someone is standing too close. They retreat to corners, put distance between themselves and strangers, and sit or stand equidistant from one another like birds on a wire.

The study, which was accepted for publication in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, found that virtual environments may be another platform to study physical social interaction. It specifically found that the unwritten rules of personal space are so powerful, people even impose them on their cyber selves.

“The fact that they show up in the virtual world shows how deeply ingrained they are,” said Nick Yee, a graduate student in the department of communication at Stanford University and a lead author of the study along with Jeremy N. Bailenson, his adviser. “We don’t think about them. They’re very unconscious.”

According to scientists, personal space involves not only the invisible bubble around the body, but all the senses. People may feel their space is being violated when they experience an unwelcome sound, scent or stare: the woman on the bus squawking into her cellphone, the co-worker in the adjacent cubicle dabbing on cologne, or the man in the sandwich shop leering at you over his panini.

But whether people have become more protective of their personal space is difficult to say. Studies show people tend to adapt, even in cities, which are likely to grow ever more crowded based on population projections.

Yet studies involving airlines show the desire to have some space to oneself is among the top passenger requests. In a survey in April from TripAdvisor, a travel Web site, travelers said that if they had to pay for certain amenities, they would rather have larger seats and more legroom than massages and premium food. And a current advertisement for Eos Airlines, which flies between New York and London, is promoting the fact that it offers passengers “21 square feet of personal space.”

While people may crave space, they rarely realize how entrenched proxemics are. Scholars can predict which areas of an elevator are likely to fill up first and which urinal a man will choose. They know people will stare at the lighted floor numbers in elevators, not one another.

“In order to overcome the intimacy, you have to make sure you don’t make eye contact,” said Dane Archer, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who studies proxemics.

They know commuters will hold newspapers in front of them to read, yes, but also to shield themselves from strangers. And they know college students will unconsciously choose to sit in the same row, if not the same seat, each class.

“If you videotape people at a library table, it’s very clear what seat somebody will take,” Dr. Archer said, adding that one of the corner seats will go first, followed by the chair diagonally opposite because that is farthest away. “If you break those rules, it’s fascinating,” he said. “People will pile up books as if to make a wall — glare.”

Edward T. Hall, an anthropologist and the father of proxemics, even put numbers to the unspoken rules. He defined the invisible zones around us and attributed a range of distance to each one: intimate distance (6 to 18 inches); personal distance (18 inches to 4 feet); social distance (4 to 12 feet); and public distance (about 12 feet or more).

But personal space is not merely a numbers game. Preferences differ from culture to culture. Scholars have found that Americans, conquerors of the wild frontier, generally prefer more personal space than people in Mediterranean and Latin American cultures, and more than men in Arab countries.

“In the U.S., it’s very closely linked to ideals of individuals,” said Kathryn Sorrells, an associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Northridge, who is writing a book, “Globalizing Intercultural Communications.” “There’s an idea that you have the right to this space,” she said, noting that it was born of a culture that prizes independence, privacy and capitalism.

Dr. Archer tells of a Brazilian man he interviewed who, when speaking to the American waiters with whom he worked, used to casually touch them for emphasis. The man’s overtures of friendship toward his co-workers were always rejected and he wanted to know why. So when business was slow he observed how the Americans interacted. And eventually he arrived at this conclusion: Americans hate to be touched.

“He’s absolutely right,” Dr. Archer said. “He figured it out by himself and no one ever told him. The sad thing about these nonverbal rules across cultures is you’re on your own.”

The Brazilian man’s experience also shows how people are quick to judge those who break the unwritten rules, unless we are attuned to the cultural differences.

John Bringardner, 26, a staff reporter at IP Law & Business, said that when he was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, he lived next door to an Algerian man who had a habit of standing mere inches from his face. “His spittle would get in my face,” said Mr. Bringardner. But he did not back away. “If it were an American guy that close,” he said, “it would have been a different situation.”

Yet it is rare for people to have confrontations about personal space. “No one will ever turn to the nice person from Italy or Greece and say ‘I like you but you’re standing too close to me,’ ” said Dr. Archer, who has videotaped strangers’ responses to personal-space violations.

Rather, they will likely angle and inch their bodies away from anyone they feel breached their buffer zone. Blood pressure may rise, the heart rate may go up and the palms may sweat, said David B. Givens, the director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Wash. “All animals tend to have an aversion to being touched by a strange critter,” he said.

Proxemics, however, is not merely about interactions between individuals. On a larger scale, it helps developers, urban planners and executives in various industries understand how people move through public spaces, how they shop, even what type of restaurants they find most comfortable.

Paco Underhill, the author of “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping” and the chief executive of Envirosell, a research and consulting company whose client list includes Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Starbucks and McDonald’s, discovered that most consumers will walk away from whatever they are looking at in a store if a customer inadvertently brushes against their backside, disturbing his or her personal space.

And so, what may seem like a minor behavioral tic can help department stores determine how far apart to place racks of clothes, bistro owners figure out how to configure the bar area and college campuses to design residence halls.

Yet there are paradoxes to personal space, and one is that people do not always want it.

“If you’ve gone to see a funny movie in an empty theater, you can appreciate the facilitative effects of the presence of others,” said Robert M. Krauss, a professor of psychology at Columbia. “We went to see ‘Borat’ and every seat in the theater was full, and I have no doubt that it enhanced our enjoyment of it.”

Being crowded in a dance club or running the New York City Marathon is far different from being packed into a train car during rush hour or stuck on a freeway (yes, proxemics has been linked to road rage).

“In these spaces, when you’re not commuting, you feel fine,” Dr. Givens said. But in both positive moments of closeness and those that make the blood boil, one tenet of proxemics is the same: the near presence of people is arousing. “It will enhance the amount that you enjoy things that are enjoyable,” Dr. Krauss said. “It will make more aversive the things that are not enjoyable.”

And when people want to avoid someone who is less than enjoyable, they employ a variety of tactics. Some scholars say this goes a long way toward explaining the iPod craze, which turns city streets and commuter trains into islands of individuality.

The same principle makes it easier to get close to strangers in low-lit places. “Visually, you’re not getting as much information,” Dr. Givens said, adding that if the lights were suddenly flipped on in a dim bar, “everybody would spring back.”

In general most people understand the rules of personal space and heed the cues. Then again, the world is littered with clods. As Dr. Archer put it, people generally view personal-space rules in one of two ways: “the wrong way and my way.”

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Waltzing

Lucky for me, I was taught to waltz early and have danced all of my life. Enjoy.

Study: Waltzing Helps Mend Hearts

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 12, 2006

Filed at 3:04 p.m. ET

CHICAGO (AP) -- Italian researchers have come up with a novel way for cardiac rehabilitation patients to exercise their damaged hearts without having to squeeze into spandex or gyrate in a gym: waltzing.

The dance proved to be just as effective as bicycle and treadmill training for improving exercise capacity in a study of 110 heart failure patients. Dancers also reported slightly more improvement in sleep, mood, and the ability to do hobbies, do housework and have sex than the others.

''This may be a more effective way of getting people to exercise, and may be more fun than running on a treadmill,'' said Dr. Robert Bonow, cardiology chief at Northwestern Memorial School of Medicine. ''Maybe we should try that here. I'm not sure we can get Americans to waltz, but they can certainly dance.''

Exercise is crucial after people suffer heart problems, but getting people to stick with it is tough. As many as 70 percent drop out of traditional programs, said Dr. Romualdo Belardinelli, director of cardiac rehabilitation at Lancisi Heart Institute in Ancona, Italy.

''We have to find something that may capture the patients' interest,'' he said Sunday at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago where he presented results of his study.

They chose waltzing because it is ''internationally known'' and is quite aerobic, as the study ultimately verified, he said.

The same researchers previously showed that waltzing could help heart attack sufferers regain strength. The new study involved 89 men and 11 women, average age 59, with heart failure. The condition occurs when weakened hearts can no longer pump blood effectively, making simple activities like climbing stairs and taking the dog for a walk tough to do, let alone enjoy.

Researchers assigned 44 patients to a supervised exercise training program of cycling and treadmill work three times a week for eight weeks. Another group of 44 took dance classes in the hospital gym, alternating between slow and fast waltzes for 21 minutes, three times a week for eight weeks. A third group of 22 patients had no exercise.

Heart rates were checked during both activities, more extensive exercise tests were done at the start and end of the study, and artery imaging exams were performed.

Cardiopulmonary fitness increased at similar rates among those who danced or exercised and did not change in those who did neither.

Oxygen uptake increased 16 percent among exercisers and 18 percent among dancers. The anaerobic threshold -- the point where muscles fatigue -- rose 20 percent among exercisers and 21 percent among dancers. Other measures, including a general index of fitness, were comparable.

Imaging showed that dancers' arteries were more able to dilate and expand in response to exercise than non-exercisers.

Part of the benefit may be that dancers had a partner and social companion rather than cycling or walking on a treadmill alone, doctors said.

''This type of program is more effective,'' Belardinelli said, ''because it is fun.''

------

On the Net:

Heart Association: www.americanheart.org

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Burning Man

When I lived in the northwest, I atrtended this mind-blowing event in Nevada and will never ever forget it. I hope to return one summer.

Burning Man Spreads Its Flame

Ann Johansson for The New York Times

Michael Spezialy paints black-light paint on Luna Hendricks at the Los Angeles Burning Man “decompression” party last month.

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By JULIA CHAPLIN

Published: November 12, 2006

THEY were all there: the shirtless guys in weird top hats walking around on stilts; women with unexercised buttocks spilling out of metallic hot pants; people in loincloths twirling fire. To anyone who has visited Burning Man, the arts festival in the Nevada desert now in its 16th year, the cast was instantly recognizable.

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Kate Lacey for The New York Times

BORN TO BE WILD: Members of the Black Label Bike Club ready to joust at a party in Brooklyn. The club wanted a scene less “soft and safe” than Burning Man.

Kate Lacey for The New York Times

A reveler at the Black Label Bike Club’s block party in Brooklyn.

Except this party wasn’t in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, with close to 40,000 alternative culture-vultures covered in dust.

It was a few blocks from Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and the 101 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles.

An estimated 5,000 Burners, as festival-goers are known, gathered Oct. 14 for a “decompression” party, part reunion and part fund-raiser for the Burning Man organization. The purpose was to reconnect with friends last seen dancing in a pagan frenzy near neon-lighted art installations, before the ritual torching of the 40-foot effigy that gives the gathering its name.

A man dressed like a Goth minotaur whispered a password to Burners he deemed worthy of admitting to an after-party in a loft. “We want to preserve the vibe,” said the man, called DJ Wolfie. “You know, so women can dance topless and not get harassed.”

Part arts festival, part “Mad Max” encampment, Burning Man — as its ample coverage in the news media has described — attracts a mix of neo-hippies, robot hobbyists, tech billionaires (Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google have flown in by private plane) and even the occasional celebrity like Sting and Rosario Dawson. For a week ending on Labor Day, people try to break free from societal rules and conduct.

The event has grown each year, attracting 39,100 in its latest incarnation, up from 35,567 in 2005, according to Andie Grace, a spokeswoman. Now many attendees are bringing the festival home.

Reunions like the one in Los Angeles have taken place in San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; San Diego and New York, where last weekend an all-night party was held at 3rd Ward, a raw industrial space and rooftop in Brooklyn.

“There’s pretty much some crazy Burning Man-type party every weekend,” said Steve Ratti, an account manager at an advertising agency in New York, who started a Wednesday-night Burner happy hour, now held at the Continental bar in the East Village.

Lorin Ashton, a popular D.J. at the festival, said he is hired to spin about four nights a week at Burner-type events from North Carolina to Massachusetts. “It was really funny,” he said, recalling recent dates he played in the Rockies in September. “I was at a saloon in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, called the Mangy Moose. I thought it would be all these wing nuts and redneck cowboys, but instead it was packed with all these freak-show Burners. It was the same thing in Missoula.”

Burners insist it’s more than the prospect of a good party that brings them back together; for many the festival, with its communitarian ethos and anticommercial philosophy (and in some cases its free-flowing drugs and spontaneous hookups), makes a lasting impression.

“People have a transformative experience and they can’t go back to the old way of living,” said Daniel Pinchbeck, an author who has written about Burning Man in books and magazine articles. “For me, going the first time was like the a-ha moment that people use to describe the first time they saw a Cubist painting or a Surrealist painting. It really changes ideas of what art is and what a community can do together.”

Two years ago, the Burning Man organization set up an official regional network program to meet the demand for year-round gatherings. It offers advice on how to buy event insurance and an application process for official chapters representing the festival, of which there are about 65 around the world.

Regional chapters play host to camping trips, art exhibitions and loft parties, where people dress in costumes and refer to one another by their festival aliases. (Burning Man attendees are often christened with whimsical names, like Playa Barbie or Hot Sauce, which are supposed to make it easier to shed real-world identities and inhibitions.) One need only log onto Tribe.net, Burningman.com or local blog lists like Nonsense or the Squid List to track the coordinates of the many gatherings.

In New York, there are events influenced by Burning Man at the Madagascar Institute and Rubulad, alternative arts spaces in Brooklyn, as well as roving parties held by communities of people who bonded by staying at the same desert campsites, often elaborately constructed, at the festival. One clan, Disorient, was founded by a group that included the artist Leo Villareal and Nicholas Butterworth, an Internet impresario. “I’m happy to see Burning Man grow and bring that spirit into the culture,” said Mr. Villareal, whose light sculptures have been exhibited at P.S. 1 and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Disorient is a host of several New York-area parties a year, including the Black and Light Ball earlier this year. “The rules and the spirit of generosity and collaboration is very different than the spirit of New York, where it’s more cutthroat and why would you get anything for free, and everyone is suspicious when you’re giving them something,” Mr. Villareal said.

The Burning Man aesthetic reaches beyond parties to influence public art projects and even advertising and entertainment. “Burning Man is used as an adjective amongst agency art directors now,” said Keith Greco, a production designer who uses fellow Burners as performers or artists for clients like Cirque du Soleil, Sony Pictures and Red Bull. “It’s up there now with ‘Blade Runner’ or Cirque du Soleil. They’ll say, ‘Can you make it a little more Burning-Man-ish?’ ”

It’s fitting that San Francisco — where the first festival took place on a beach in 1986 — now is home to public artworks that originally appeared at Burning Man: “Passage,” a giant scrap-metal sculpture of a mother and child on the Embarcadero; and “Stan, the Submerging Man,” an 18-foot bell diver covered with 45-r.p.m. records that is headed to a park south of Market Street. The works have been paid for in part by the Black Rock Arts Foundation, the official Burning Man arts organization, which has raised $500,000 this year.

As Burning Man’s tentacles stretch outward, some groups have broken away, claiming the mother festival has lost its more confrontational and youthful energy.

“The image that Burning Man has these days is just a bunch of naked 30- to 40-year-olds wearing a bunch of raver lights,” said Ryan Doyle, an artist who is part of the Black Label Bike Club, whose members across the country customize bicycles and style themselves after motorcycle gangs like the early Hells Angels. “That’s not an image anyone who cares about their image would really want to be associated with.”

Mr. Doyle and a dozen or so members of his club work each year during Burning Man for the festival’s Department of Public Works, camping for six weeks and setting up the infrastructure. His crew “has always been a punk, younger crowd,” he said. “Who else is going to go work out in the desert for cheap for six weeks? Plus you can still blow stuff up and have explosions before anyone gets there. Burning Man has gotten too soft and safe.”

On Oct. 28, members of the Black Label Bike Club held a block party in a street behind a Home Depot parking lot in Brooklyn. While spectators crowded around, cyclists in body armor jousted with big sticks, knocking each other onto beer-soaked mattresses. Mr. Doyle doused the crowd in a wet clay mixture shot from a giant phallus.

Mr. Pinchbeck, the writer, said the official festival now “has its own tendencies towards conformism.”

He continued, “Over time it becomes a style of hipsterism, where everyone dresses the same and is nonconformist in the same way.”

Despite the festival’s anticommercial credo, art made by Burners is winding up in the corporate realm. Lexus has been giving celebrity-packed parties for its new LS model luxury car inside mini replicas of a 15-story installation made of secondhand pine nailed into a free-form cavern, which lighted up the skyline at last summer’s Burning Man.

A Belgian businessman had spent 500,000 euros (about $640,000) to send the designer of the installation, Arne Quinze, and a crew of 85 to Nevada for a month to erect it, and then to import 20 journalists to cover the spectacle. Burners called it the Belgian Waffle, and some decried it as crass.

Probably the most far-reaching integration of Burning Man into the real world has been among art collectives living in industrial areas of cities, including Oakland, Calif., and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Fellow Burners have moved into communal live-work lofts. Patrick Shearn, whose festival name is Eleven, moved into a loft in the Brewery, an arts complex in downtown Los Angeles, with a group of five friends he met at Burning Man. They named themselves Abundant Sugar.

To pay the rent, they hold dinners with circus performances and build whimsical sets for movies and Hollywood events, like a giant fake oak tree in their living area that was used as décor at the Emmy Awards last year. “Before this I was living in a two-bedroom apartment by myself in Santa Monica surrounded by jogging soccer moms and Range Rovers,” Mr. Shearn said. “I met a group at Burning Man and said to myself, ‘Why can’t I do this every day?’ ”

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Deer Hunt

This account comes as close as any I have ever read concerning my own feelings.

Enjoy.

Rituals

Deer Hunting with a Hesitant Finger on the Trigger

T. C. Worley for The New York Times

Brian Bullis, left, trying to drive deer toward other members of his group. A large buck, center, flushed from hiding, flees from the hunters. The group, right, leaves the woods, dragging a deer.

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By STEPHEN REGENOLD

Published: November 10, 2006

THE hunt began at dawn. But the sun never did seem to rise. Not a whiff of blushing orange. The sky, a frog-belly gray, socked in with low, ugly clouds, wasn’t its usual self.

Neither was I. In my hands, ungloved in the 45-degree air, the cold metal of a 12-gauge shotgun on bare skin felt harsh, almost sinister.

But I was committed to the hunt. This was a family tradition. Whitetail deer in autumn. My father, my brother and his wife, and two family friends were together, decked out in blaze orange and ready to go.

“Should we head right down to the swamps?” my father, Chuck, asked. “That’s where Gary got his deer last year.”

On the trail, heading east and downhill toward the St. Croix River, the tall tan grass of Chengwatana State Forest in east-central Minnesota was quiet and still. The forest had yet to awaken. Trees bordered the marshy land, bare branches reaching in silhouette against the colorless sky.

Wide-winged cranes, aloft in ragged V’s, drifted hundreds of feet overhead. A shot echoed in the distance, thunderous, abrupt in the early morning woods.

“Wow, someone’s got a deer already,” said my brother, Jon.

My journey to this hunt began years before. Sometime after college, I’d sworn off all meat derived from factory farms and corporate feedlots. Mechanized, industrial slaughter — and all the inhuman treatment and environmental consequences that flow from it — was hard to justify. I never fully disavowed meat, but I became pseudovegetarian, eating fish and wild game on rare occasions.

Hunting never struck me as wrong. Wolves and hawks and owls — and humans — take life to perpetuate their own. Killing is a part of our condition. It’s easy to forget that with prepared food, a perfect steak or grocery store meat prepped, cleaned and wrapped in plastic. It’s easy to forget the literal blood and guts of it all.

The best I could do, I rationalized, was to try conscientiously to take responsibility, morally and physically, for the meat I ate.

But I’ve never killed a deer. The ubiquitous herd animals of the woods — and, increasingly, of local suburban and city backyards — are large, brown-eyed mammals. I don’t anthropomorphize. Deer aren’t like Bambi to me. But they are creatures of will, running free, ducking away to hide, minding their own business.

An hour into the hunt, my head racing with apprehension, I was unsure if I wanted to — or even could — pull the trigger on a bounding deer in my sights.

“Hold up,” my brother whispered, a hand open wide in a wave, signaling a stop. A branch broke in the thicket a few yards off the trail. Then silence. Six hunters stood frozen on cue, guns cradled and ready.

“Let’s do a push through this woods,” my father said.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources estimates that there are 1.3 million deer in the state, or about one deer for every five humans. But in these woods of Chengwatana State Forest they are somewhat elusive at about 35 deer per square mile. An average hunt in this area — where my family has hunted for more than 20 years — yields one or two close deer sightings a day.

ALONE in the woods, our group spread out to cover a larger area. I walked west through thick brush. I scanned the periphery, moving as quietly as I could. Sticks snapped underfoot. Leaves crunched. Thorny wisps flung back, stinging my face.

In the corner of my eye, a daub of blaze orange stuck out from the monochrome scene of the forest. Another hunter, stationary a few hundred feet away, sat waiting for a deer. An orange phantom, armed and silent, sitting still in a tree.

“See anything?” my father asked as I stepped back onto the trail. “Jon had a big buck walk right past him.”

The hunt was on. The deer were out. By 10 a.m., the group had seen four deer, though no shot had been fired.

I climbed a tree to sit and wait. Brian Bullis, my father’s longtime hunting partner, stood 300 feet to my right. Tess, my sister-in-law, was left and down a hill, gun in hand and leaning on a big oak tree.

We stood still. We waited.

From my perch in the crook of a tree, tied in with a strand of webbing for safety, I held my gun and watched to the north. My brother and my father were a half-mile away, walking straight at us trying to drive deer in our direction.

Give the forest 10 minutes, and it forgets you’re there. Human presence initiates the scurrying and hiding of animals. Birds stop chirping. But when you’re quiet, the woods wake up. Little birds pick it up first. Owls swoop in, even in daylight. Squirrels move loudly, breaking branches, jumping in the canopy. I’ve had black bear amble by.

Thirty minutes passed. No one moved. A chill seeped in through my coat.

Brown fur blends almost perfectly into the backdrop. Deer can run through a thicket hardly making a sound. But the incongruence of motion on a still scene is unmistakable.

Two deer, moving close together and quickly toward Brian and me, emerged from the trees. They crossed a trail and paused. I had the front one in my sights. I clicked the safety off, gun ready to fire. The stock pressed hard on my shoulder. Blood pounded in my ear.

But I didn’t take the shot. I wasn’t ready for it.

I put my gun down. The deer walked by, and — BOOM! — Brian had pulled his trigger. I climbed down from my tree.

“He ran right at me,” Brian said.

Blood painted the fallen autumn leaves beside the dead deer. Nothing moved. I looked at its body, then walked away.

Predator and prey is a tough dichotomy. Nature can seem cruel and unfair. It’s easy to try to put that all out of mind.

Meat in our society is morally sanitized. A steak or a hamburger is just that. Its origin unseen, undiscussed, unrecognized.

In Chengwatana State Forest, the consequence of my choice to hunt — my choice to stock venison in a freezer for a winter’s worth of meals — was dead on its side on the forest floor. No way around it.

The deer was as free-range and organic as it comes. It was never subjected to a cage or a feedlot. It lived and — one could argue — died in a natural way.

Thinking hard on these matters is nothing new. I’ve come to no real answers. For me, being conscientious about the meat I eat — and the lives that end because of it — is a step toward rationalization.

Our day ended with no other deer taken. The group saw nine deer all day, but I didn’t get another chance to shoot.

We dragged out Brian’s kill as the sun set, a rope around its body. Four people pulling, leaving a long matted trail through the meadow grass, north toward the cars. Leaving a mark on the land that would soon fade away.

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The Good Death

Personal Health

World Enough and Time for ‘a Good Death’

By JANE E. BRODY

Published: October 31, 2006

As sudden deaths from heart attacks continue to decline and more people leave this life after a protracted illness, the concept of “a good death” has become ever more important to both the dying and those who survive them.

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Stuart Bradford

But what is a good death, and is it really the same for everyone? And what are the consequences of different approaches to death for those left behind?

Nearly four decades ago, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined what she recognized as five stages people go through after the diagnosis of an incurable illness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance of their impending death. She recognized that people approaching the end of life might seesaw between the various stages, but that those who reached “acceptance” were most likely to die in peace with the least trauma to their survivors. Indeed, hospice care practically demands that people who are dying reach acceptance, since they must accept only comfort care and give up all treatments aimed at staving off their demise.

Still, there are many people who choose to continue fighting for life, leaving no therapeutic stone unturned, until they take their last breath. There are people who will not acknowledge that they have a fatal illness, remaining in denial even as their bodies shrink under the onslaught of disease. There are people who weather their medical storm in fury because they are being robbed of their future. There are people who cannot emerge from depression over the prospect of losing everyone they love.

Can these people, who never achieve acceptance, also have a good death? The answer seems to be yes, although the consequences for survivors may sometimes be less than desirable.

Nails Polished to the End

Dr. Joseph Sacco, a palliative care specialist at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center in New York, tells about a patient, Mrs. Santana, in his book, “On His Own Terms,” the story of his father’s losing battle against lung cancer. Mrs. Santana had terminal cancer and was near death, but she never uttered the words “cancer” or “death.” During her final hospital stay, she maintained her lifelong elegance and dignity, polishing her nails, grooming her hair, always cheerful and calm, until the day she died.

Dr. Sacco’s father, Joe, on the other hand, kept insisting he would “beat this thing,” even as his breathing became ever more labored and his weight dropped by half. Though Dr. Sacco, based on his training, thought his father should come to accept his fate, he felt he had no choice but to humor the dying man and play along.

Joe’s death was peaceful enough, occurring as it did on his terms. But it took its toll on Dr. Sacco, who laments: “Had my father not been frozen by fear, he might have been able to talk openly and reaffirm his knowledge that his son really did love him. Instead, paralyzed by the implication that death was imminent, he brushed me aside with a wave of the hand and the comment that he wasn’t going to die.”

Dr. Greg A. Sachs’s father-in-law, Al, who also had lung cancer, chose to have no treatment for his disease and spent not one day of his remaining 18 months in the hospital. As Dr. Sachs told it in The Journal of the American Medical Associationend-of-life symptoms assuaged by morphine, anti-anxiety medication and oxygen. (Nov. 15, 2000), Al spent the year “straightening out files; reconciling accounts and labeling everything in the house, including fuse boxes and cabinet drawers, so that his wife would be able to find everything when he was gone.” According to an agreed-upon plan, Al died peacefully at home surrounded by his loving family, with his distressing

No Easing Existential Suffering

But as Dr. Sachs tells it, Al’s equanimity about dying, his methodical preparations and his gentle demise did not ease the family’s pain as he lay dying, for they knew Al didn’t want to die and nobody in the family wanted to lose him.

Dr. Sachs explained that for survivors, “some of the suffering is existential or spiritual” and even the best end-of-life care cannot ease that kind of suffering.

He cautioned his fellow physicians against “painting too rosy a picture of end-of-life care” and creating unreasonable expectations of “spiritual growth” and “transcendence.”

But while no one is likely to rejoice at losing a loved one, having people die in accordance with their wishes is, in my experience, far less painful than the alternative, which all too often involves futile medical rescue efforts that patients do not want and that can get in the way of comforting end-of-life conversations and reconciliations.

When my mother-in-law’s cancer recurred four years after treatment, she chose, at 84, not to have anything done that might prolong her life. And no one dared to contradict this decision by a woman who had always lived life on her own terms and was determined to die that way.

A Chance to Say Goodbye

Living will in hand and fully in control of her faculties, she entered the hospital hemorrhaging, and at her request a “Do Not Resuscitate” notice was posted on her door. The family was called, and all had a chance to say goodbye unimpeded by machines, tubes and medical personnel. Twelve hours later, she was gone, leaving behind a sad but grateful family. Her minister, at her bedside until the end, said he had never before seen such a peaceful death.

Dr. Karen E. Steinhauser and colleagues at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Durham, N.C., examined the constituents of a good death for patients, their families and health care providers. The 85 study participants had no trouble describing a “bad death” — having inadequately treated pain while receiving aggressive but futile cure-directed therapy.

Patients felt disregarded, family members felt perplexed and concerned about suffering, and providers felt out of control and feared that they were not providing good care. Decisions not previously discussed usually had to be made during a crisis. Families unprepared for what happens when death is imminent often panicked and rushed the patient to the hospital, where last-ditch and usually futile attempts at resuscitation were made, when both patient and family would have preferred a home death.

The study identified six components of a good death, described in The Annals of Internal Medicine of May 16, 2000:

¶Pain and symptom management. Pain, more so than dying itself, is too often the cause of acute anxiety among patients and their families.

¶Clear decision making. Patients want to have a say in treatment decisions.

¶Preparation for death. Patients want to know what to expect as their illness progresses and to plan for what will follow their deaths.

¶Completion. This includes reviewing one’s life, resolving conflicts, spending time with family and friends, and saying good-bye.

¶Contribution to others. Many people nearing death achieve a clarity as to what is really important in life and want to share that understanding with others.

¶Affirmation. Study participants emphasized the importance of being seen as a unique and whole person and being understood in the context of their lives, values and preferences.

This study says that dying can, and should, be a much less painful experience for many more people and their loved ones than it now is.

Check Out My Other Blogs (click on blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/