Shift to the Right

AS good an article as there is about the emergence of the Republican Party in the late 20th Century. Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 19, 2006
'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips
Clear and Present Dangers
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY

Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen.

Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive.

Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.

The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.

And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."

Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.

He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.

Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.

THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.

The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.

There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change. By describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.

Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at Columbia University.
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Woman Up

This article had an immediate and profound impact upon me - and i am still pondering it and finding new meaning each time i read it. Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Modern Love
I Need to Woman Up and Do This on My Own
By ASHA BANDELE

FIVE months after we were married, my husband, Rashid, and I had a honeymoon of sorts, a 44-hour jaunt in a trailer at the New York State prison where he lived. At 21 he had been convicted of a gang-related murder, which occurred three years before, and on this day he was in the 13th year of a 20-year sentence.

We had met five years earlier, when I was 23, a college student teaching poetry to prisoners. I believed then, as I do now, that poems can expand a soul. They had done so for me, and I was watching the same thing happen to prisoners, especially Rashid, already a man seeking transformation.

Over the course of a year and many discussions about changing ourselves and our world, we fell in love. With Rashid there was this breadth of dialogue I hadn't experienced before. Our conversations — unspeakably honest — were for me life-saving.

When I met Rashid, a failed marriage already behind me, no college degree yet, no direction for my future, I saw my life as a series of mistakes. He set that lie aside, made me see myself through his eyes until I could love my reflection.

When I could no longer stand not being able to touch this man who had so touched me, we married in the prison visiting room. Five months later we qualified for conjugal visits, and in a small two-bedroom trailer in a yard on the prison grounds we made love, again and again. But more, we had a period of semi-normalcy. We cooked, danced slow, watched television, showered together. For five years this was our life, the life we chose.

I didn't tell Rashid during this time that I would never have a baby with him while he was locked up. I knew many women with incarcerated husbands did so, and while I didn't judge them, it wasn't for me. I didn't want to be a single parent or bring a baby into a prison. But I didn't say this because at the time I didn't think I could get pregnant. I had been married before and never conceived. I made love to my husband and didn't worry.

Three weeks later I found out I was pregnant.I never considered keeping the baby. Even as I wept, listened to Rashid's pleading, I knew I wouldn't keep it. It wasn't just the prison or my unwillingness to be a single parent. It was also financial. Whatever income I generated as a freelance writer and poet covered the rent, lights and food but precious little else. What did I have to offer a child, except instability?

Against the love I felt for the baby who'd barely begun to take shape inside of me, I had an abortion in a Manhattan clinic that seemed less like a medical center than a factory. Despite the doctors, the nurses, all those women waiting just outside for their turn on the table, it was the most alone I've ever felt.

Though having the abortion was the right thing to do, I carried guilt about it for years. Had I been married under "normal" circumstances, I surely would have had the baby. The weight of destroying something that was created from great love was nearly unbearable. There was no way I could ever do it again.

A few years later I was on a book tour, celebrating what I felt was the beginning of my career, when Rashid and I were issued a date for a trailer. I flew home, armed myself with birth control and never thought once about the possibility of pregnancy. I was thinking about what was next for me on the literary horizon.

We made love and talked about our dreams, and when my period was a couple of days overdue, it didn't occur to me that I might be pregnant. But after six or seven days, reluctantly, I bought a test. The stick turned into dark pink double lines that could not be denied. When Rashid called, I told him directly: "We're having a baby."

I never thought not to have this baby.

She created herself in spite of spermicides. Her presence was predetermined. And I was 32. I might not have another chance to be the one thing I always wanted to be: a mother. Still, there were fears.

I worried about finding a stable job and child care. I was terrified of going through labor alone. But mostly I worried whether I would be able to raise a black girl safely in a world that seems to expand in its ability to hate and destroy.

LIVING in a culture where violence is extolled and blacks and women are often stand-ins for the bulls-eye, I worried about whether the life of my girl could be honored by anyone other than me. The rates of drug and alcohol abuse among young people, the violence that's glorified in pop culture, the girls who at 8 are having oral sex in school stairwells and the groundswell of so-called good girls out on the stroll terrified me.

Not because I judged any of these kids, but because I had been my own version of them. Against a Manhattan backdrop, my sister and I were given music, dance, horseback riding, swimming lessons and art classes. I attended private schools, went to the ballet, saw Judith Jamison dance "Cry." But it was also a childhood punctured by violence. All the education and culture were no armor against the excesses and dangers of growing up in an urban environment too unwieldy to notice its children coming undone.

I began high school at 12, graduated at 15, and while I could put on heels and stumble behind the older girls, I couldn't negotiate the social settings — bars and clubs — where I found myself. On more than one occasion, what began for me as a fun night on the town ended as a date rape. There was always racism. When my child reached an age when she would have to negotiate survival, would she know how to speak to me, as I was unable to speak to my parents? Would I know how to listen?

And I had both my parents. My daughter had only me, and she would have to spend the first years of her life passing through metal detectors. Those concerns, more than any others kept me awake through the nights, wondering: Where could I go, where could I raise my child safely? I wanted to run, live off the grid, have my child, tell no one, keep her forever in my womb.

But I had to stay connected to Rashid, even as my trips to the prison became more hellish. The prison guards, normally disdainful of family members, became especially awful once I swelled with life. During one visit I had to request toilet paper four times so that I could please, please go to the bathroom.

The love between Rashid and I no longer disguised the blight, the stench and a terrible question took form in my head. As a mother, would I be able to navigate the prisons and maintain my relationship with Rashid?

But the rounder my tummy became, the more those fears either fell away or shrank to a manageable size. I gave myself over to reason, faith, Dr. Spock. I found work, and child care too. And I made it through labor, quite easily.

My water broke a minute after midnight, and less than 11 hours later my daughter, Nisa, was in my arms. Seven hours later we were home, and I was eating pizza. Fifteen days after that I was placing Nisa's body in her father's arms for the first time. He cried at the sight of her, and I wept too, but from the frustration of not having a place where we could be, at the most basic level, a family.

"You're such a good mother," my sister said once and then added, "How do you do it?" I heard this a lot during the first two years of Nisa's life, when I was writing a novel, working full time and meeting my deadlines. I told her not to believe the facade. It's impossibly hard to be a single mother.

I hate having to be the sole emotional and financial provider for my child. The pressure's too great. If you slip, there's no one to catch you. But worse, there's no one to catch your baby. So somewhere among potty training, play dates, bylines and balancing the household books, I lost pieces of myself I'm only now trying to reclaim.

I started smoking again. I spent too many nights drinking wine and crying. There were times when pain threatened to define the whole of me. And no, no, I couldn't hold my marriage together.

CARING for Rashid and Nisa at the same time was more than I could bear: the weekly treks through metal detectors, the parts of my spirit that always got snagged by the razor wire. I still take Nisa to see her father, but staying romantically entangled with Rashid, when I most feel his absence, was too painful.

Every time I see her change, fall down, stand up again, I'm reminded that the only other person who loves her as I do isn't there to bear witness to her beauty. No one would ever lose an hour, as I still do, just watching her sleep. How could I live with that?

"I can't play at house or marriage anymore" is what I finally said. "I love you. But I need to woman up and do this on my own."

Still, in that breakup I felt like I lost my husband, best friend, father and brother all at once. And I didn't just lose him — I banished him. For that I may never be able to forgive myself. But I had to choose my child. Again.

Most mornings I'm awakened by Nisa's messy kisses. Her eyes ablaze with mischief and wonder, Nisa's query to me each sunrise is, "What's our big adventure today, Mommy?"

I grin back at my beloved, my child, and my mind begins to work. But before I come up with a plan, this is what I think each time she asks: Yes, Beloved. Our big adventure, indeed. Ours.

Asha Bandele lives in New York City and is the author of the memoir "The Prisoner's Wife." This essay is adapted from the anthology "Maybe Baby," edited by Lori Leibovich, to be published by HarperCollins next month.
###

Panther, Panther

Regular readers know of my love for wild animals - here's a tale of the Florida Panther. Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 14, 2006
A Rare Predator Bounces Back (Now Get It Out of Here)
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

OCHOPEE, Fla. — In the weeks before Valentine's Day, a healthy Florida panther kept emerging from the dense, sloshy wilderness around Big Cypress National Preserve to kill things he shouldn't: chickens, ducks, a turkey, a pig and a house cat, all on residential property that his stealthy species normally shuns.

The hungry panther — nicknamed Don Juan by scientists who had radio-collared him years earlier and knew he had fathered some 30 kittens — kept coming back for more, despite efforts to deter him. So on Feb. 16, wildlife officials had dogs chase Don Juan up a tree, shot him with a tranquilizer gun and removed him from the wild. It was no light decision, as the number of Florida panthers, the only subspecies of puma east of the Mississippi, is estimated at fewer than 100.

Cars have already hit and killed five other panthers in 2006, including one pregnant with four kittens and another that was crossing a road just north of the Florida Keys, far from typical panther habitat. A sixth was apparently killed by another panther, an increasingly common fate as the territorial cat loses habitat to subdivisions, golf courses and the like.

A new federal report in January announced the obvious: that the Florida panther population must grow to survive — ideally, to three separate populations of at least 240 each — but that it is ever more desperate for space. The report, by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, rehashed the thorny old idea of moving some of the cats to Central Florida and eventually to other states where they once roamed, like Georgia and Arkansas.

But there are no firm plans, and with the panther population still endangered but healthier than it has been in decades, South Florida is facing an equally thorny new question: what to do when panthers get too comfortable on human turf?

The question is compounded by a scientific dispute: some researchers say Florida panthers no longer qualify as a separate subspecies, partly because many are descendants of a crossbreeding program with imported Texas pumas in the 1990's. If their classification were to change, they could lose their federal protection.

But whatever their status, they are making other species uncomfortable. After Don Juan attacked the domestic animals here, the National Park Service sent letters to about 500 residents of Ochopee and Copeland, tiny communities in the Everglades, stressing "the importance of securing livestock properly." They included tips like installing outside lighting ("will allow you to see if a panther is present"), and renderings of panther-proof pens. At a campground in Big Cypress National Preserve, a vast hodgepodge of cypress swamp, prairie, pinelands and hardwood hammocks — rangers scrawl warnings on a memo board when radio-collared panthers are detected nearby.

The federal government will soon go further, releasing a new plan for dealing with "panther-human interactions" and instructing people how to live among big cats. Stephen Williams, founder of the Florida Panther Society, an advocacy group, said Western states with large puma populations had adopted similar plans a long time ago.

Even before the exploits of Don Juan — who had a 620-square-mile range in the wild but is now living at Busch Gardens outside Tampa — the panthers of South Florida had encountered public relations problems.

In 2004, the Miccosukee Indian Tribe persuaded wildlife officials to relocate a young male panther that had been glimpsed several times near a sacred ceremonial site on tribal lands. The tawny cat was moved about 60 miles northwest, but it was killed within months by another panther, presumably in a turf battle.

The tribe complained again recently, this time about a female panther and two of her year-old cubs that it said were getting too close to residences, campgrounds and an education center on an isolated road in Big Cypress National Preserve. The tribe, which monitors some of the 33 or so collared panthers, wants the mother cat removed. Federal officials are considering doing so, despite protests from the National Wildlife Federation and even government biologists.

Darrell Land, the panther team leader for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said that unlike Don Juan, this cat had shown no signs of abnormal behavior and should not be moved from the dry and slightly elevated area, ideal panther habitat. Instead, he said, the center should install a fence so that deer could not stray into its yard and attract panthers.

"Her biggest sin is that people occasionally see her on that road or that, heaven forbid, she goes and chases a deer," Mr. Land said of the cat, known as Florida Panther 124. "I don't see that those behaviors have elevated to the point that I'd be concerned about human safety."

While California has experienced several mountain lion attacks in recent years, Mr. Land said he knew of only one documented case of a Florida panther's attacking humans, in the late 1800's. Deborah Jansen, a biologist at Big Cypress National Preserve, said California simply had far more people living in panther habitat.

Mr. Land said Florida panthers, which mostly feed on deer and wild boar, were curious enough to stop and perhaps stare if they saw people, but would flee if approached. He added that the radio-tracking program that has helped scientists better understand the cats now appeared to have a drawback: creating unnecessary public anxiety about them.

"It's one thing to know you live in panther country, but it's another thing to see a map showing a panther was 100 feet from your back door," he said. "Stuff like that has happened all along, but now we have the technology to show it. It gives people too much information, and we don't know how to deal with it yet."

Mr. Land and other government officials said they hoped the new federal plan for dealing with "panther-human interactions" and educating the public would avert conflicts like the one concerning Florida Panther 124. A draft of the plan sets protocols for sightings, encounters and attacks on pets, livestock and people.

A panther that stalked or showed other aggressive behavior toward people would immediately be removed from the wild. But with one that killed pets or livestock, or did not retreat when a human tried to scare it away, wildlife officials would first try "aversive conditioning": chasing it with dogs, hitting it with a slingshot or otherwise trying to deter it from returning to the area.

That plan, to be released soon for public comment, already has detractors. In letters to Big Cypress National Preserve, Billy Cypress, tribal chairman for the Miccosukee, said the tribe preferred a "three strikes and you're out" plan, under which panthers that lingered within 100 yards of a residence three times would unequivocally be relocated or removed from the wild.

David Shealy, who owns a campground in Ochopee and lost chickens, ducks and a turkey to Don Juan in February despite a fence he said he had installed to protect them, said there were already too many panthers.

"The Everglades has become a giant cage with limits and boundaries," he said, "and the amount of food available for these cats is just insufficient."

Mr. Shealy is among many landowners and developers who say the Florida panther is identical to pumas elsewhere in the country and so does not deserve species protection. Indeed, a 2000 study by Melanie Culver, a geneticist with the United States Geological Survey, found that panthers and other North American pumas shared enough genetics to be a single subspecies.

But others say that Florida panthers still have distinctive traits, like their nasal bone structure, and that the question needs much more debate. Even Dr. Culver said she would not advocate officially lumping the Florida panther with other cats.

"I certainly wouldn't push for the taxonomy to be formally changed because that would change their protected status," she said, "and that's the last thing I want to do."

The new federal report — the latest draft of a panther recovery plan last updated in 1995 — suggests keeping panthers far from urban areas by moving some of them into rural Central Florida.

But many scientists, including Mr. Land, are skeptical. They say that Central Florida does not have enough contiguous panther habitat, that the cats would have to cross more highways, and that much agricultural land would have to be turned into the dense forests that panthers prefer.

A better alternative, many scientists agree, is moving some Florida panthers to remote areas of Georgia, Arkansas or other states where they used to roam and where choice panther habitat still exists.

But as history and the recent tensions here suggest, getting the public to embrace what the report calls "large carnivore reintroduction" will not be easy. When Texas pumas were released in North Florida in 1988 and 1993, to gauge whether a permanent population of Florida panthers could be established there, local opposition was fierce and hunters shot some of the cats.

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service emphasizes that there is no schedule for moving panthers out of South Florida, to the frustration of many conservationists. "We were down there begging them to put time frames on it," said Mr. Williams of the Florida Panther Society, who was on the team that wrote the latest recovery plan. "The cat was listed as endangered in 1967 and we're still waiting, 39 years later."

In Arkansas, home to four of the nine recommended relocation sites, David Goad, deputy director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said panthers were unlikely to be welcome there.

"Before you can move a large predator into an area you've got to have a lot of support from the public," Mr. Goad said. "Their hands are going to be full getting that public support, and I would almost guess it's an insurmountable problem."

But what kind of reception panthers get elsewhere is a moot question until South Florida has a large and healthy enough population to dispatch them to other regions. Some scientists fear that will never happen if their habitat keeps shrinking.

Under pressure last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged that it had relied on incomplete data about the space panthers need. It looked only at their movements during the day, when they usually sleep. Critics said the faulty data had helped justify decisions to approve development in the marshes, prairies and pastures where the cats roam at night.

In its new report, the agency calls preserving panther habitat in South Florida its top priority. Yet construction has just begun on Ave Maria, a new town that will hold a Catholic university and up to 30,000 people, on 5,000 acres of panther habitat bordering Big Cypress National Preserve and the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.

Since it is too late to save that land, Mr. Williams said, the focus should be on persuading its human inhabitants to accept panthers in their midst.

"North America's wonderful natural heritage without a predator?" he said. "It's doesn't make any sense. We need to learn how to live in the woods, instead of like we're in a glass capsule."
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Opportunity knocking

This is the glory of the web: breaking the centralized stranglehold on the display of artistic creation.

Now anyone with the tools, energy and follow through can get their art seen and - hopefully - appreciated.

We should all be so lucky in our pursuits here on the Third Rock from the Sun.

Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 13, 2006
Online Auteurs Hardly Need to Be Famous
By RICHARD SIKLOS

On his computer screen, Jake R. Sanowski scrutinizes a short video of a baby eating its first pickle. Next is a skit of a woman getting drunker over the course of a meal at which, it turns out, her dining companion is a dog. That is followed by a clip of a band playing a song, but the lighting is so dim that the screen is nearly black. "I feel really bad for it," Mr. Sanowski said.

Mr. Sanowski, 24, who recently moved to Los Angeles from Minnesota, is an editor at iFilm, a company that displays short-form videos, movie trailers and music videos on its Web site (www.iFilm.com) He wades through many of the nearly 500 video submissions that the site receives each day from average Joes and Janes seeking fame — and now cash and prizes — via the Internet.

Many of the contributors are happy just to have their clips posted on the site for all to see. But the number of postings has jumped in the last few weeks since the company introduced a contest with the cable channel VH1 called "Show Us Your Junk" that will feature the best submissions on the television program "WebJunk20" and reward winners with digital gadgetry and flat-screen TV's.

Increasingly, the new, new thing in media is getting paid for the homemade. Reflecting the surge in the popularity of user-created material, both online and traditional media companies are opening their wallets to make sure that the best of it finds its way onto their television shows and Web sites.

Even Yahoo, the nation's most-visited Web site, has signaled a change in its strategy by moving away from creating its own professional content in favor of user-generated material — and it appears willing to pay for anything its users deem worthy.

All this is part of a trend seeking to turn conventional media business models on their heads in the digital age. Typically, media content was either paid for by consumers in the form of subscription fees or by marketers through advertising. In offering to pay users for creating content, companies like Yahoo are not looking to turn every amateur into a professional so much as acknowledging the growing appeal of homemade material to audiences and hence its value to media businesses.

"At some point in the next six to nine months, this will become competitive," said Michael Hirschorn, executive vice president for original programming at VH1, which, like iFilm, is owned by Viacom.

Already the money is starting to flow, mostly in the form of contests. YouTube.com, another Web site for sharing clips, is soliciting people to create a music video for a band from Seattle called Pretty Girls Make Graves. Aspiring auteurs can download the band's song "Nocturnal House," create a video and submit it; the winner gets $1,000 and a trip to New York to hang out with the band.

A similar Web site, Metacafe, is offering $2,000 for the best short video shot at Mardi Gras, as determined from the feedback of people coming to the site to watch them.

On Current, a cable television channel spearheaded by former Vice President Al Gore that began operating in August, short videos are selected for broadcast by the votes of an Internet audience; successful entrants are paid $250 to $1,000 apiece.

Several networks have shows in the works featuring both found and original online material, including pilots from Bravo and NBC, the latter's starring the television host Carson Daly.

The USA Network, which is also part of NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric, is developing a pilot for a user-generated show based on another popular site, eBaum's World. In October, the Web site, named after its founder, Eric Bauman, began offering monthly prizes up to $1,000 for the best submissions, which can be jokes, audio files, flash animation or homemade video games as well as clips.

There is no scarcity of material as high-speed connections grow, cellphone cameras proliferate and more people become adept at editing video and creating flash animation. But user-generated content is much more. Think of it as anything not professionally conceived: it could be blogs or short videos, a salsa recipe on a bulletin board, a Web page created for a school class, a book review on Amazon.com or a withering comment posted on a magazine's Web site. According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project released in January, half of all teenagers in the United States have created material for the Web.

Of course, much of what finds its way onto Web sites is not ready for prime time or can seem like "America's Funniest Home Videos" with cybergloss. Mr. Sanowski and his colleagues at iFilm, for instance, marvel at the number of recent video creations that consist of young men dancing and lip-syncing music.

Still, user-created material increasingly competes for the audiences of traditional media companies and holds some appealing qualities as a business model. For one thing, it is cheap. And it taps into the social aspect of interactive media that has fueled the advance of the Internet.

It also represents an attempt to improve the quality of material online as people's desire to not only surf the Internet but also contribute to it rises at a breakneck pace. For example, the research firm Technorati estimates that in January there were 27 million blogs, and that number is doubling every 5.5 months, with 75,000 blogs created daily.

The notion of money flowing to people who generate the best material has been gathering steam. Google, the Web search leader, and Yahoo already run services that automatically place advertisements on other Web sites — allowing people who create their own Web pages and blogs to share in the growth of online advertising revenue without ever making a sales call.

Now Yahoo plans to begin offering cash prizes to people who generate the highest-rated responses to other people's questions on a Web service it introduced in December, Yahoo Answers. "Get rewarded for your best answers with cash," Yahoo Answers promised in a notice on the site that the company took down last week after three months because it had not decided just how the payments would work or when they would begin.

The head of Yahoo's programming operations said early this month that company was retreating from a strategy of creating original content for its sites in favor of attracting and highlighting the best user-generated content.

Jerry Yang, a Yahoo co-founder, said in an interview recently: "I think ultimately we're trying to field a community where people feel comfortable and productive, and that with every investment on Yahoo, they're getting more back. How we reward, and how we implement that, I think, is still very early."

Although it is a relatively new phenomenon, the spread of financial incentives should not come as a shock in an industry whose biggest players have been given valuations in the many billions of dollars by Wall Street. Microsoft, for instance, is offering cash and prizes in a contest intended to get people to use its MSN search service over those of Google and Yahoo.

One question is whether the use of financial incentives will put a damper on the spirit of unfettered self-expression and generosity that has infused much of the growth of user-created material. "Right now, people are doing all sorts of things on the Internet for the good of the community — it's like volunteering," said Dan Ariely, a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab. "The question is, In what ways will it change the willingness of people to help? In this way I actually worry."

On the Web site eBaum's World, the winner of the latest $1,000 prize is a faux trailer for the 1995 horror movie "Seven," starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. With the addition of schmaltzy music and a voice-over narrator, the movie is re-edited to look like a buddy movie turned love story between the two actors.

"I'm positively absolutely amazed at some of the things that people will do for $1,000," said Neil Bauman, who is chief financial officer for the Web site that his son Eric, now 25, founded as a junior in high school.

In its infancy, at least, it seems that financial gain is likely to be seen as a bonus, but not the main reason for creating content. For example, Anirudh Koul, 20, a computer science student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is among the highest-rated participants in Yahoo Answers. The Web site is a competitor to sites like Google Answers and About.com (owned by The New York Times Company), where people can access information from experts in specific fields, rather than just cull the most relevant results from a broad search.

The best answers are given rating points by people who visit the Web site, and it is here that Mr. Koul has answered more than 1,100 questions since the site began operating in December, including "Who did invent the Internet?" and "Can I download episodes of 'Kitchen Confidential?' " For now, Mr. Koul says, he enjoys interacting with others from his dormitory room and being recognized as the smartest guy in a digital room. "The only incentive one gets is the satisfaction in sharing some useful knowledge," he said in an e-mail message.

But since Yahoo makes money either by directly putting ads on its sites or indirectly by keeping Web surfers in its network, it is willing to share the spoils with people like Mr. Koul, just as it might pay an entertainment company for access to its content.

The idea of pay for content has been around in a small way for years in publishing; for instance, those who take part in surveys for the Zagat restaurant review books receive a free book. Robert J. Markey, a consultant specializing in consumer loyalty at Bain & Company, said that companies like Yahoo must be careful not to let financial incentives become the only reason for people to contribute material.

"If it's just about some ancillary reward," he said, "you're introducing an externality that degrades the value of the community itself. It undermines that whole model."

But while user-generated content can attract lots of attention, so far it has not been regarded as a winning format for major advertisers. A prominent example of this is the Web site Myspace.com, which was purchased by the News Corporation last year. While MySpace is adding as many as a million registered users each week who create or peruse Web pages of other members, sharing photos, blogs and such, it has so far attracted little advertising revenue relative to its audience size.

Viacom's chief executive, Tom Freston, while promising to expand its ventures in such social networking, said recently, "It's like inserting the advertising into a conversation between two people, and there are still a lot of questions about advertisers supporting user-created content."

Chris Charron, an analyst at Forrester Research, said people should not be left with the impression that they can make small fortunes sitting in their underwear at home surfing the Web.

"Many users who hope to make a lot of money creating content will probably be disappointed," Mr. Charron said. "All content is not created equally."

Homebound

Liz Seymour, in white, sitting beneath a collection of hitchhiking signs, began an experiment in group living at age 52. Five of her six housemates are pictured; the youngest is Skye Tull, 6.

Those who know me - know that i would love to do this kind of thing. Those of us who grew p in big houses with lots of people miss that. Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 9, 2006
Essay
Inviting Anarchy Into My Home

By LIZ SEYMOUR

Greensboro, N.C.

ON Aug. 1, 2002, I left behind the comfortably roomy semicircle marked "married-couple household" on the Census Bureau pie chart and slipped into an inconspicuous wedge labeled "two or more people, nonfamily." Having separated from my husband of 28 years the day before, I opened our three-bedroom 1927 Colonial Revival house to a group of men and women less than half my age. Overnight, the home I had lived in for 12 years became a seven-person anarchist collective, run by consensus and fueled by punk music, curse-studded conversation and food scavenged from Dumpsters.

Thoreau famously said that he had "traveled much in Concord." I would venture to say that I've traveled just as much, and maybe more, without ever leaving my house.

It happened like this: My husband and I had come to the end of the line, as married people sometimes do. We had helped each other into adulthood and careers (Bill is a high school English teacher; I'm a freelance writer). We had raised two daughters together, but with Isabell and Margaret grown and both of us entering our 50's, it was clear that our hopes and goals for the next couple of decades were diverging.

Bill longed for quiet and solitude; I wanted noise and movement. To complicate matters, I had become the court advocate for Justin, a 15-year-old runaway from a foster home who had been in and out of juvenile detention since he was 12. After a year of trying to find a workable home for him, I had concluded that the only recourse was to be his foster mother myself.

Now, faced with the prospect of becoming a 52-year-old single mother to a teenage boy and the challenge of supporting us both, I panicked. Trying to imagine how I could make it work, I found my mind turning to a collective house in Oregon where Isabell, my older daughter, had lived the summer before, and to a group of young anarchist artists and musicians in Greensboro whom I knew through both of my daughters.

After Isabell came home from college an anarchist herself, I began to put aside my preconceptions about these people — as disorderly, violent and destructive — and to see them as a community dedicated to replacing hierarchy with consensus and cooperation. (Isabell once described them as Quakers who swear a lot.) Over time I found myself drawn to their hopeful view that people know best what is best for them and to their determination, naïve or not, to build a better world right away. Anarchism, at least as practiced here, seemed to be more about building community gardens and making your own fun than about black bandannas and confrontations with the riot police (although it was about those things, too).

Amid the chaos of my own life I wondered if this approach to living might have something in it for me. Unconventional as it was, I figured it couldn't be any worse than struggling to pay the mortgage and being Justin's mother on my own.

So Justin and I entered a microeconomy in which it is possible to live not just comfortably, but well, on $500 a month. When we pooled our skills in our new household, we found that we had what we needed to design a Web page, paint a ceiling or install a car stereo. Sharing services and tools with people outside the house saved us thousands of dollars a year. If there is a historical model for the way we live, it is not the communes of the 60's or the utopian experiments of the 19th century, but the two-million-year prehistory of our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Looked at through that lens, the life of our miniature tribe feels a lot like the way people were meant to live.

That account, of course, leaves out the terror I felt through the summer of 2002 as I prepared to open my house to anarchy. Also the occasional awful days and nights early in the experiment, like the evening that began with Justin's skateboard at the bottom of the stairs and that ended with shouting, slammed doors and the skateboard flying out a second-story window. Then there were the guests who wouldn't leave; the short-lived but horrifying rat invasion (brought on, I suspect, by boxes of food from Dumpsters on the back porch); and the friends who drifted out of my life, baffled by my new living arrangements.

I still own about two-thirds of the house, sharing the title with two young women in the collective, Mackie Hunter, a 25-year-old full-time political activist who had an insurance settlement to invest, and Stef Smith, a 26-year-old drummer with a never-to-be-used college fund. Their investment, and my refinancing of the house, allowed me to buy out Bill after we divorced two years ago, and gave them about a third share of the property. Since I do not want to profit from the collective as its landlady, I have decided that the portion of the equity that builds up from my housemates' monthly rent will not go to me if the house is sold or refinanced, but will serve to help keep the collective going. In essence I've converted my capital from the house to the household. Twenty years from now, when I'm in my mid-70's, I may regret giving up my equity in return for time and community, but I don't think so. I'd rather take my retirement now.

The ages in the house span 50 years, from Jodi Staley's 6-year-old daughter, Skye, to me. Justin, now 18, moved out more than a year ago to live with his girlfriend; he hopes to go to a music conservatory. (He turned out to be one of those children it takes a village to raise, and he not only thrived under the group's care but rebelled into surprisingly mainstream respectability.)

None of us work full time. We support ourselves by painting houses, typing legal depositions, teaching (as substitutes), subjecting ourselves to medical studies, cooking in restaurants and writing. The time I save allows me to help care for an elderly relative, cook for a free meal program, spend time with friends and work on a book.

On paper we look like paupers. The monthly cost of living in the house comes to $160 to $245 a person, based on the size of one's bedroom. That includes the mortgage, property taxes, household insurance, utilities (we have an unlimited long-distance plan) and wireless Internet. In addition we each put $30 a month into a house fund that pays for bulk food like rice, beans, olive oil and spices, and supplies like toilet paper, light bulbs and laundry detergent.

As for produce, a typical evening of hunting and gathering in various grocery store Dumpsters brings in plenty of food: cartons of apples, oranges, potatoes, bananas and red onions, slightly soft or spotty perhaps, but still fresh and edible.

Every Sunday it is someone's turn to fix dinner while the rest of us sweep and mop, with Al Green or the Pixies blasting from the kitchen stereo. Since the dining room has been turned into a bedroom (as have the downstairs study and a small upstairs room that was my office), we eat on the screened-in side porch or in the backyard under the crape myrtle tree when the weather is warm, or around the kitchen table or in the living room when it is cool.

On Tuesday night we hold the weekly house meeting. It is surprisingly helpful to know who has a headache, who just fell in love, who is sleepy. More than one set of roommates have blown apart over dishes piled up in the sink and wet towels left on the bathroom floor; then again, so have quite a few nuclear families. We talk things out.

Though our daily activities are a lot closer to the Waltons than to the Weather Underground, we keep "In Case of Police Raid" instructions posted by our front and back doors. It is a reminder that houses like ours in other towns do get raided.

In spite of the stigma attached to the word "anarchist" and the scrutiny openly anarchist households receive, the number of such houses is growing. Anarchists are no longer just in college towns and big cities; there are now thriving anarchist communities and houses like ours in places like Lake Worth, Fla.; Machias, Me.; and Springfield, Mo. The online directory maintained by the Fellowship for Intentional Community lists more than 1,000 collective houses, ecovillages and co-ops in the United States, compared with about 400 in the 1990 directory. Although not all of them identify themselves as anarchist, more than half make their decisions by consensus. Even that number is clearly low: none of the five collective houses I know of in Greensboro, for example, are listed in the directory.

It is a rare week when we do not have at least one guest in residence. One winter we had a Danish filmmaker living in the garage. On a rainy night last spring an entire old-time string band showed up on the doorstep. The musicians had been hopping freight trains around the country and gotten stranded; they played fiddle, banjo and musical saw in the living room and left the next day. Another guest walked from Maine to North Carolina, the first leg of a trip home to Oregon. He stayed for a week, mended some rips in his backpack, then walked off down the driveway due west.

I have friends who tell me they could not live the way I do. I believe them. The constant sound of footsteps on the stairs, the coffee cups in the sink, the mysterious things in the refrigerator that no one claims, the sheer intensity some days of so many personalities rubbing up against one another, is not for everyone. But then neither are more conventional living arrangements. For me, a household of friends — more loosely bound than a family but tied together by loyalty, affinity and shared space — satisfies a need for kinship and companionship that did not end when my family did.

The old house's former incarnation as a middle-class, nuclear-family household still rises up in my mind now and then. Someone will ask about an umbrella or a bottle of aspirin or a pair of needle nose pliers, and I'll picture so clearly the place where the object used to be that for a moment I'm there instead of here. It is not an unpleasant sensation, just a little strange.

For the most part, though, my memory keeps up a pretty sturdy firewall between the time I have come to think of as "before" and now. Where I live now is not utopia. What it is, though, is fun. It is fun to hear people laughing on the porch; it is fun to dance in the kitchen; it is fun to go out on a Wednesday evening Dumpster run. As messy as it is, to my mind it is a lot more interesting than utopia could ever be.
###

The Eyes Have It

When I was a little boy, eyeglasses were a symbol of "elder" status. My grandparents wore them, but neither my parents nor any of us eight children wore them; I assumed you had to be a certain age to even need them.

All that gradually changed as I grew older and saw my father, then mother, then, at 20, myself, come to need them. Along the way I've met and interacted with many vision-impaired people.

In fact, I am one of them, needing prescription eyewear to correct my less-than perfect eyesight. This is an excellent pair of articles about our plight.

Enjoy.

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

February 28, 2006
Personal Health
Sane Steps May Save Your Precious Central Vision
By JANE E. BRODY

Dr. Sidney Schreiber, a cardiologist from Scarsdale, N.Y., was in his mid-70's and still working in the lab and caring for patients when he noticed that he could not see clearly with his right eye.

A visit to his ophthalmologist produced a discouraging diagnosis. Dr. Schreiber had macular degeneration, a rapidly progressive form at that, and within three years he lost 90 percent of his vision, leaving him functionally blind.

An estimated 10 million Americans have this progressive retinal disease, though most are not as severely affected as Dr. Schreiber, and some are not yet aware that they have the painless condition. It afflicts one person in four older than 75 and is the leading cause of legal blindness in Americans over 55.

The numbers affected will continue to climb as the population ages, prompting an escalating race to develop more effective treatments and, perhaps, even preventives, including measures based on recently identified genetic factors that raise the risk of developing the disease.

A Familiar Regimen

Meanwhile, there is much that people can do now to ward off this disabling condition or slow its progress. Interestingly, the very same steps that lower the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and some cancers can also help protect the eyes.

Though peripheral vision remains intact, macular degeneration robs people of their central vision, making it hard or impossible to read, write, drive, watch television, see the time, recognize faces and see where they are going.

Still, many who are seriously afflicted manage to pursue active lives. The late Don Knotts, a co-star of "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Three's Company," was 57 when his disorder was diagnosed. But he continued to work almost until his death on Friday at age 81.

"I got pretty depressed for a while," the American Macular Degeneration Foundation quotes him as saying. "And then one day I said to myself, 'I bet a blind person would give his right arm to have the vision I have.' "

Although most patients are over 55 when found to have what is commonly called age-related macular degeneration, some develop macular disease as children or young adults. Marla Runyan was in the fourth grade when she was struck with a juvenile form of the disease. Yet she finished college and competed twice in Olympic running events despite being legally blind.

Dr. Schreiber, the cardiologist, was an accomplished artist when macular degeneration forced him to abandon his hobby and his career. Like Mr. Knotts, he lapsed into a serious depression for nearly two years, emerging only after a visitor from Lighthouse International showed him all he could do with low-vision aids.

Encouraged by his wife, Freda, who became his eyes, he gradually resumed his favorite activities, with modifications. He visits museums (his wife reads the legends aloud), listens to recorded books ("I've never been so well-read"), gardens (though he sometimes pulls up flowers instead of weeds) and has resumed painting, his artistic talent apparently intact judging from a recent rendition of poppies in a vase.

He has even been able to put his medical training to good use. Now 84, he is scientific director of the American Macular Degeneration Foundation, which sponsors research and provides support and information. It also publishes a quarterly newsletter and has produced the helpful "Hope & Cope" DVD, both available for a $25 contribution. The foundation can be reached at P.O. Box 515, Northampton, Mass. 01061-0515 or at (888) 622-8527. Its Web site is www.macular.org.

The macula is a dense collection of light-sensitive cells in the middle of the retina along the back of the eye. These cells are used for the "straight-ahead" vision needed to read, sew, drive and see fine details. Most cases of macular degeneration begin and remain in one or both eyes as what is called the dry form of the disease. Yellow deposits called drusen form under the retina, increasing in number and size until they destroy macular cells and blur central vision.

The disorder can progress so slowly that deteriorating vision is not noticed until it is quite advanced. But as it worsens, more light may be needed to read and faces may become hard to recognize. Far less often, macular degeneration occurs as the wet form, leading to a rapid loss of central vision when abnormal blood vessels grow under the retina and leak blood and other fluids, raising the macula off the wall of the eye. In about 10 percent of cases, dry macular degeneration eventually develops into the wet form.

Looking for Early Signs

Dr. Schreiber said: "I might have had the dry form for 10 years, for all I know. It's probably my fault for not seeing an eye doctor every year."

Which raises a critical point. Early signs can be readily detected by a thorough eye exam in which the pupil is dilated, allowing the doctor to examine the retina and optic nerve for signs of trouble. People 50 and older should have such exams yearly, or twice a year with signs of disease.

A simple test can be done in any doctor's office (or at home) to detect vision distortions that might not otherwise be noticed. It uses a graphic device called the Amsler Grid, a box of cross-hatched lines with a black dot in the center. Covering first one eye, then the other, a person stares at the black dot. If any of the straight lines appear wavy or missing, that could be a sign of macular degeneration.

Prevention and Treatment

The established risk factors offer strong clues to avoiding or delaying onset of the condition. They include smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, sedentary living, overexposure to sun and a diet deficient in green leafy vegetables and fish.

Other risk factors are being a woman, farsighted or Caucasian and having light eye or skin color, cataracts and a family history of the disorder. Two factors, oxidation and inflammation, appear to cause macular injury. Studies sponsored by the National Eye Institute found that daily consumption of a high-dose formula of antioxidants and zinc could reduce the risk that early macular degeneration would advance.

Various products sold over the counter contain this formula or one like it: 500 milligrams of vitamin C, 400 I.U. of vitamin E, 15 milligrams of beta carotene, 80 milligrams of zinc oxide and 2 milligrams of copper. Smokers should avoid products containing beta carotene, which may increase their risk of lung cancer.

In addition, most experts recommend a supplement of lutein, zeaxanthin or both, carotenoids found in dark green leafy vegetables like spinach and collards. Twinlab makes a supplement, Ocuguard Plus, that contains lutein.

Several drugs, Visudyne by QLT and Novartis and Macugen by Eyetech Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer, have also been shown to slow deterioration of eyesight in wet type macular degeneration. One Visudyne patient in six is said to have shown improved vision, a most exciting advance. Another drug awaiting approval, Lucentis by Genentech, may also help.

This is the first of two columns on vision problems. Next: Living with low vision.


The New York Times
March 7, 2006
Personal Health
Latest in Technology Gives Life a Clearer Focus

By JANE E. BRODY

Is low vision limiting your world?

This condition, which can result from a number of eye diseases, including age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, often results in depression and social isolation.

But vision rehabilitation services, the use of low-vision aids and help from family members, friends and caretakers can bring back a productive, enjoyable and independent life for most people who are visually impaired.

Remarkable advances have been made through electronics, computerization and miniaturization to create devices that can help patients read, see and function well again. New and better gadgets are continually being developed at places like the Schepens Eye Research Institute.

But the devices are useful only if patients can afford them, know how to select those that are most likely to help, and receive training and practice in their use. All too often, people spend heavily on devices that are either not right for them, or they never learn to use them properly.

Knowing Where to Turn

The cost of low-vision aids is not yet covered by insurance. Before wasting money on products that may be less than useful, patients should consult an eye doctor who specializes in low vision. Even with professional help in selecting an appropriate vision aid, arranging a trial period to test the equipment may be wise.

A great place to start is Lighthouse International, a source of referrals to low-vision specialists around the world and educational and rehabilitation services for both old and new low-vision aids. This 100-year-old nonprofit organization, at 111 East 59 Street, New York, N.Y. 10022, can also be reached by phone (800-829-0500), e-mail (info@lighthouse.org) or through its Web site (lighthouse.org).

Also helpful is Prevent Blindness America at (800) 331-2020 (preventblindness.org), which, among other services, can help patients find support groups in their areas.

Low vision is not the same as blindness, but it can make normal life a tremendous challenge. As Dr. Eleanor E. Faye, a low-vision ophthalmologist in New York and longtime affiliate of Lighthouse, pointed out about people with low vision:

"Daily life becomes complicated when they are unable to read their mail, check price tags in stores, read nutritional information on food packages, drive, sew or travel alone. Social isolation often becomes the rule when they can no longer see facial details or enjoy simple activities such as playing cards or going to a movie. Even their health may be compromised when they cannot recognize medications or labels or when they lose interest in cooking because the microwave panel or stove dials are indiscernible."

There are both adaptive aids and optical aids. The former include large-type books and recorded books (available from the Library of Congress); talking clocks and calculators; boldface, Braille and talking watches; big button telephones; large-print cards and address books; easy needle threaders; bump dots to help with location (for example, on an oven dial, computer or telephone) and high-intensity lamps and lighting.

The variety of devices is endless. Magnifiers, for example, come in different strengths and styles. There are hand magnifiers, stand magnifiers, pocket magnifiers, magnifiers that look like tiny telescopes and others that look like glasses. Some are worn, others attach to lamps, and some have built-in lights.

Optical aids include simple and advanced electronics. They include closed-circuit television systems (even portable ones), special goggles onto which images from a video camera are projected and computer programs that enlarge text and switch it from black on white to white on black, reduce distracting color to black and white, and convert text to speech.

Computer accessibility aid is available for PC users through microsoft.com/enable and for Mac users through apple.com/accessibility. Before buying any device to make a computer more accessible, be sure it has adequate memory and the needed ports.

Training and practice in the use of optical aids is critical to success. Even learning to use a simple magnifier can require practice. For example, a hand magnifier should be held straight — tilting will distort the image — and on the paper, not lifted to the eyes.

But in focusing on devices, low-vision patients often neglect simple "housekeeping" aids. For example, the Low Vision Center in Bethesda, Md., suggests that hallways and staircases have good lighting that shines on the walls, floor, steps and railings. Mark the edges of steps with contrasting strips.

When working on a task or reading, good lighting should be provided throughout the room. Move lamps close to the work area and light it from both sides to eliminate shadows. Reduce glare by covering shiny surfaces with carpeting or clothes, placing shades on bare bulbs, using adjustable blinds and curtains on windows, and sitting where you don't look directly at a window.

Provide contrast wherever possible. Avoid clear drinking glasses. Rather, use a dark glass for a light-colored drink, and vice versa. Likewise, place foods on plates of contrasting colors. Use contrasting-colored drawer pulls and door handles throughout the home.

In the bathroom, use a toilet seat that contrasts with the wall and floor, and place contrasting-colored tape on the edge of the sink if it is the same color as the wall. Use different colored containers for shampoo and conditioner and use soap that is a color different from the wall. A lighted magnifying mirror is useful for shaving and applying makeup.

To keep track of medications, ask the pharmacist to provide a large-print label and information sheet. Color-code different medications or use bump dots.

Outdoors, the Low Vision Center suggests painting gates and doors in different colors from fences and walls to aid in their location.

Helping a Low-Vision Person

Family, friends and helpers can do much to aid the functioning and safety of people with low vision. Always ask first if help is wanted or needed. A person with limited vision may want to retain as much independence as possible.

When you approach a person with low vision be sure to identify yourself, and tell the person when you leave the room. In social situations, grasp the person's hand in greeting — your extended hand may not be seen. Try to avoid sudden changes in illumination, like having the person go from a brightly lit room to a dark one.

Night lights should always be used wherever there are dim areas and in bedrooms at night. Furniture should contrast with the walls and be positioned to avoid collisions day and night. Needless to say, trip hazards like shoes, clothing or books left on the floor are unacceptable.

In guiding a person with impaired vision, be precise. Say, for example, "There's a flight of steps going upstairs directly to your left," not just, "There are steps over there."

In serving food, identify what is on the plate using the clock — "the meat is at noon, the potatoes at 4, the string beans at 9."
###

The Speculator's Game

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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