February 28, 2008

Front Row

By ERIC WILSON

IT was hard to tell just who was talking over a plate of scrambled eggs at a cafe in the West Village on Tuesday: was it Elisa DeCarlo, a playwright and part-time vintage dealer, or her online alter ego, the Mad Fashionista? But neither one of her personalities was very pleased with the red carpet parade at Sunday night's Oscars.

"Nicole Kidman was a disaster," Ms. DeCarlo said, slipping into a yodeling voice that was loud enough to cause other diners to look up from their papers. "She looked like a chandelier had fallen on her head. I thought Tilda Swinton was very nice to make a dress out of a black bedsheet she found in a 99-cent store. And someone should get their hands on Jennifer Hudson and get her a bra."

Ms. DeCarlo describes herself as a fashion outsider. She wears a size 14 or 16, and most of her clothes are very old, like the purplish fake fur coat that was crumpled beneath her and once belonged to her mother. But the Mad Fashionista, who came to life two years ago as a blog character (diaryofamadfashionista.blogspot.com), is a fashion freak. Ms. DeCarlo conceived of her as a surrogate personality to shill for the plus-size vintage clothes that she sells on eBay and at specialistauctions.com. But her invented other became so popular that Ms. DeCarlo wrote a play about her called "Diary of a Mad Fashionista."

"A lot of people think the Fashionista is real," said Ms. DeCarlo, whose play is included in the Frigid New York Festival that opened on Wednesday.

"It's scary," she said. "Fashion is the only environment I've seen that is more hysterical than show business."

The plot: the Fashionista, a successful celebrity stylist played by Ms. DeCarlo, has been awarded a grant from Bill Gates to teach a course about fashion to welfare recipients at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The class is called "Haute Cou-poor."

"It's a pun on haute couture," she said. "Nothing rhymes with indigent."

The Fashionista has all the money in the world and no conscience, and also a rival in Sabrina Airchild, who dresses Nicole Richie and Mischa Barton, and sounds a lot like Rachel Zoe. As they do battle over a 1967 Christian Dior cheetah coat with otter collar and cuffs, the Fashionista discovers the price of a lifetime of bad karma, but not so well as to learn a lesson.

As she concludes to her indigent subjects, "You must be superficial in fashion or it will drive you insane."

 Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Sol Neelman

February 26, 2008

Books of The Times

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

In the South-Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Margaret B. Jones grew up in the 1980s, gangs recruited "with the same intensity as the N.F.L. did," she says, and shootouts and hits were so ubiquitous that "the odds were stacked against a male child living to see 25." Peddlers went door to door selling life insurance policies, reminding parents of these deadly stats, and even teenage girls and elderly church ladies carried pistols to protect themselves. As the crack epidemic metastasized, and turf wars escalated, the 'hood became a combat zone, with police raids and deadly face-offs between Bloods and Crips becoming routine parts of daily life.

A dealer the young Ms. Jones made deliveries for lays out the unforgiving rules of the street:

¶ "Trust no one. Even your own momma will sell you out for the right price or if she gets scared enough."

¶ "War has no room for diplomacy, war is outright vicious. Never expect mercy and never show it."

¶ "There is no greater sin in war than ignorance. Never speak or act on anything you aren't 100 percent sure of, or someone will expose your mistake and take you down for it."

This violent world has been memorably depicted before in Sanyika Shakur's "Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member" (1993) and Leon Bing's "Do or Die" (1991). What sets Ms. Jones's humane and deeply affecting memoir apart is not just that it's told from the point of view of a young girl coming of age in this world, but also that it focuses on the bonds of love and loyalty that can bind relatives and gang members together, and the craving after safety and escape that haunts so many lives in the 'hood.

Although some of the scenes she has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times, Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood. She captures both the brutal realities of a place where children learn to sleep on the floor to avoid the random bullets that might come smashing through the windows and walls at night, and the succor offered by family and friends. She conveys the extraordinary stoicism of women like Big Mom, her foster mother, who raised four grandchildren while working a day job and a night job. And she draws indelible portraits of these four kids who became her siblings: two young girls she would help raise, and two older boys, whom she emulated and followed into the Bloods.

Ms. Jones — or Bree, as she was known to family and friends — was abused as a child, put in foster care, and after three years of carrying a trash bag filled with her possessions from one temporary home to another, ended up, at 8 ½, in Big Mom's home in South-Central — a part white, part Native American girl who looked utterly out of place in this nearly all-black world.

Bree had been told she had attention deficit disorder, reactive attachment disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and labeled "S.E.D. (severely emotionally disabled)." By age 8 she had "decided not to hurt anymore" and mastered the art of detachment: "I was shocked that I hadn't thought of it before. I would watch my life from the outside rather than feel it from within. If I couldn't feel it, it couldn't hurt me."

Though her foster family's love would help heal Bree's heart, the numbness always threatened to return, and she observes that this sort of emotional hibernation was rampant in South-Central. When Bree went to visit her foster brother Taye in prison — he'd been sentenced for selling drugs — he told her he loved her but didn't want her to come back for any more visits: waiting for visits and letters, he said, "was killin me," and he'd decided he wasn't going to "even find out what was up wit y'all." He had to do his "time solo" or he "ain gonna make it."

Ms. Jones's portraits of her family and friends are so sympathetic and unsentimental, so raw and tender and tough-minded that it's clear to the reader that whatever detachment she learned as a child did not impair her capacity for caring. Instead it heightened her powers of observation, enabling her to write with a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines.

She tells us how her brother Terrell became an "official" Blood, getting "jumped into" the gang by surviving a savage initiation beating. ("So five grown men beat 13-year-old Terrell for two minutes in the street.") She tells us about getting a .38 for her 13th birthday and learning how to cook up a batch of crack to pay her family's overdue water bill. She tells us about survival tips for visiting the local park. ("You must always scan the park, figure out who is where and the best escape route from each direction.") And she tells us about the iconography of the tattooed tear many prisoners and ex-prisoners wear on one cheek. (It "can mean a few things, but usually it's that the wearer killed someone in prison or lost a loved one while in prison.")

Ms. Jones's own story is strewn with loss and death and grief. She saw a gang elder named Kraziak, who'd patiently taught her about the history of L.A., gunned down by rival Crips. She saw her next-door neighbor Big Rodney, who used to give her books to read, grabbed by the police in a violent raid.

Both her older brothers, Terrell and Taye, were sent to prison, and after his release, Terrell, who'd talked of getting a straight job so his children wouldn't grow up in the 'hood, was shot to death by Crips as he sat outside Big Mom's house, waiting to meet his son for his weekend visit. Ms. Jones's friend Marcus, a brother figure with whom she used to drive around Los Angeles, dreaming of what life might be like "beyond the lights" of the city, was shot and killed, she says, and her boyfriend, Slikk, was arrested for an attempted murder he didn't commit.

Although one of Bree's teachers urges her to apply to college, the idea initially seems "almost unimaginable" — "so beyond my reach that I couldn't really picture myself doing it." Finally, however, she does apply and eventually graduates from the University of Oregon with a degree in ethnic studies. She finds love with, of all men, a Crip who "changed every detail of my life" and who taught her that "we are not each other's enemies," we "were just born into different streets and neighborhoods."

"Unlike most of my homies," she writes, "I made it out of L.A. with my life and without a prison record. Wait, let me reword that, as it is not entirely true as it stands. I made it out of L.A. with what life I had left. I wake up in the morning, and where I live, in a little house on a dead-end street in a small Oregon town, I hear birds singing in a big-leaf maple outside my bedroom window, and I thank God because I know it shouldn't have been so."

There are "some parts of me that did die in L.A.," she adds, "and that I'll never get back, and other parts of me that die daily because I exist away from the city, in a world where people can't begin to imagine what it was like where I grew up."

One of her friends in prison writes her that "so few of us will ever get the chance to see what it's like outside L.A.," that she should "be our eyes." That Ms. Jones has done, and with this remarkable book she has also borne witness to the life in the 'hood that she escaped, conveying not just the terrible violence and hatred of that world, but also the love and friendship that sustained her on those mean streets.

 Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Jon Higgins/Koch Lorber Films

February 27, 2008

Published: February 27, 2008

Because the last shot of Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop" is as quiet and matter-of-fact as most of the rest of the film, it takes a moment to register as a metaphor. For nearly an hour and a half we have been immersed in the rhythms of daily life in the battered Willets Point section of Queens, and Mr. Bahrani's hand-held camera has remained studiously fixed at street level. Now, all of a sudden, it pitches upward to follow a flock of pigeons breaking toward the sky, a shift in perspective that also changes, subtly but unmistakably, our understanding of the movie.

Like its prosaic title, or like those homely birds, "Chop Shop," written by Mr. Bahrani and Bahareh Azimi, dwells mainly in the realm of the literal. Filmed inside shady auto-repair businesses, on bleak overpasses and in vacant lots in the shadow of Shea Stadium, this film, like Mr. Bahrani's 2006 feature, "Man Push Cart," is concerned principally with the kind of hard, marginal labor that more comfortable city dwellers rarely notice. But there is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart, an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival.

When you stop to think about it, the life of Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco) — known as Ale — should be cause for despair. A skinny, fast-moving boy a year or so from puberty, he sleeps in a makeshift room above the shop where he works. His main concern, aside from the daily scramble for cash, is his older sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales), who seems more passive than her brother and more detached, perhaps self-protectively, from her emotions. Their parents are never seen or mentioned, and school is more an abstract notion than a real possibility.

Ale's plan, equally a childish fantasy and a hard-headed entrepreneurial scheme, is to save enough money to buy a broken-down vending truck and fix it up so he and Isamar can sell hot meals to chop shop workers and customers. Isamar works in a similar business and also sells sex after-hours to drivers who park at the edge of the neighborhood. Ale's desire, all the more acute for remaining unstated, is to rescue her from this fate and also, more generally, to formulate the plausible idea of a secure adult future for the two of them.

Mr. Bahrani does not treat his characters with pity, and they feel very little for themselves. Perhaps this is because they are too young, and too focused on the present-tense demands of getting by, to dwell on what they don't have. But the film's emotional restraint, while impressive, also feels limiting. Mr. Polanco and Ms. Gonzales have the wary inscrutability that often characterizes nonprofessional actors, and though Mr. Polanco is a lively and likable presence, there are times when his performance is tentative and stiff.

Mr. Bahrani was born in the United States and lived for a while in Iran, his parents' native country (and Ms. Azimi's), and the influence of recent Iranian cinema on "Chop Shop" is unmistakable. The oblique, naturalistic storytelling, the interest in children and the mingling of documentary and fictional techniques — these have been hallmarks of the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, but they are rarely deployed with such confidence or effectiveness by American filmmakers. "Chop Shop" suggests the potential of such an approach, which has roots in postwar Italian Neo-realism, to compel an encounter with local reality that is both poetic and clearsighted.

Whether the situation in "Chop Shop" is entirely realistic is another question. I found myself wondering not only about what had happened to Ale and Isamar's parents, but also about the total absence of any adult or institutional concern with these children's lives. The shop owners pay Ale his wages and teach him new skills, but there is a hardness in their dealings with him that struck me as implausible. That may be wishful thinking on my part. Or it may be that I was taken in by the rough surface of this film, seduced into mistaking a subtle, artful fable for the cold, hard facts of life.

CHOP SHOP

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Directed and edited by Ramin Bahrani; written by Bahareh Azimi and Mr. Bahrani; director of photography, Michael Simmonds; production designer, Richard Wright; produced by Lisa Muskat, Marc Turtletaub and Jeb Brody; released by Koch Lorber Films. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Alejandro Polanco (Alejandro), Isamar Gonzales (Isamar), Carlos Zapata (Carlos), Ahmad Razvi (Ahmad) and Rob Sowulski (Rob).

February 26, 2008

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

One of the more intriguing elements in the confrontation between Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee has been whether the needles, syringes, gauze pads and vials that McNamee turned over to federal authorities contain Clemens's DNA or traces of steroids or human growth hormone.

What has not received the same amount of attention is whether any of those used items or the eight vials of unused steroids that McNamee also turned over to authorities contain Clemens's fingerprints. If they do, that fact could bolster McNamee's assertions that he injected Clemens with steroids or H.G.H. on at least 16 occasions between 1998 and 2001.

In January, McNamee gave the items — some of which he said he had kept in his home since 2001 — to federal investigators, who have sent the materials for testing. McNamee also handed over the eight unused vials of steroids, which he said Clemens had kept in his New York apartment until he gave them back to McNamee as he prepared to return home to Houston at the end of the 2002 season.

Lawyers familiar with the case said federal investigators would undoubtedly look for fingerprints from Clemens as well as traces of his DNA. Still, when McNamee's lawyers first revealed that McNamee had turned over physical evidence to federal authorities, much of the attention was on the DNA issue; the issue of potential fingerprints — an old-fashioned concept compared to the high-tech nature of DNA testing — was largely ignored, except by bloggers.

Clemens has denied using performance-enhancing drugs. He has said that McNamee did inject him, but only with vitamin B12 and the painkiller lidocaine, an assertion McNamee has denied.

If Clemens's DNA is found on any of the syringes, needles, gauze pads or vials, he could conceivably argue that it stemmed from B12 or lidocaine injections. If traces of both his DNA and steroids or H.G.H. are discovered, Clemens could argue that the evidence was tampered with and that the drug traces were added after the injections were given.

And the fact that the evidence was in McNamee's possession for so long would allow critics, or Clemens, to raise questions about tampering.

In fact, forensic experts said it would be easy for Clemens to attack the credibility of the evidence if it relied on traces of his DNA. Refuting the presence of a fingerprint would be a more difficult task.

Erin Murphy, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert on forensic evidence, said it was not difficult to plant a person's DNA on an object that person had not touched. She said the argument that DNA evidence had been tampered with was often made in similar cases.

"Especially with someone like a trainer who is around an athlete who may be bleeding, it would not be hard to spread someone's DNA all over the place," Murphy said. "It is much more difficult to get someone's fingerprint on something without them knowing and makes it harder to refute he didn't handle these things."

If a Clemens fingerprint is found on a vial of steroids, it would not prove that Clemens had used the substance, but it would show that he had come in contact with the vials and raise new questions about his denials.

Richard Emery, one of McNamee's lawyers, said McNamee gave Clemens an undisclosed number of unused steroid vials in 2001; it was from that batch, Emery said, that Clemens returned the eight unused vials to McNamee at the end of the 2002 season.

"Brian is not sure what Clemens did with the vials but they were in his possession," Emery said. "Prosecutors will be looking for prints on the vials. If his fingerprints are there, I don't know how he can say his fingers weren't on them."

Emery also said that Clemens's fingerprints may be on the syringes.

"Although Brian supplied the syringes and they were kept at Roger's apartment, he remembers the routine was such that Roger would handle the syringes," Emery said. "Roger would usually lay them out; he was very organized. The syringes may have been in plastic, or maybe Roger removed the plastic and touched them."

In a written statement Monday night, Rusty Hardin, Clemens's lead lawyer, referred to the fingerprint issue as "a bunch of 'what if' speculation" and expressed the hope that any investigation would be allowed to run its "natural course."

"We would expect if the Department of Justice conducts an investigation, it would be a thorough and fair one," he added. "Does that mean that they would test items they were given for fingerprints? Of course, they would."

 Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Brian Walsh/Associated Press

February 26, 2008

By KATIE THOMAS and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

A Congressional committee has taken the first steps toward asking the Department of Justice to start a criminal investigation into whether Roger Clemens committed perjury during testimony about performance-enhancing drugs, according to three lawyers with knowledge of the matter.

A draft letter referring Clemens, but not his accuser Brian McNamee, had been drawn up by staff members for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform by the end of last week, according to two of the lawyers. But all three lawyers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the matter, said it was possible that McNamee would also be included in the referral by the time it was sent to the Justice Department.

If the committee does decide to refer Clemens alone, it would indicate that the Democratic majority, led by the chairman Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, had prevailed over any Republican reservations about the truthfulness of McNamee's statements in the Mitchell report, a subsequent deposition and his testimony at a nationally televised committee hearing Feb. 13.

That hearing split along partisan lines, with most Republicans attacking McNamee and most Democrats challenging Clemens. The next day, Waxman said he regretted that the hearing had been held — he said he thought the depositions would have sufficed but that Clemens's lawyers wanted a public airing of the issues — and that he also believed that Clemens did not tell the truth.

In an interview Monday, Waxman said that no decision on a referral had been made, but that one would be forthcoming by the end of the week. He said he had not yet spoken to the committee's ranking Republican, Tom Davis of Virginia, about the matter.

In addition, Keith Ausbrook, the Republican chief counsel of the committee, said he was not aware that a letter had been drafted. Joe Householder, a spokesman for Clemens's defense team, declined comment.

Because of the partisan nature of the Feb. 13 hearing, there had been speculation that the committee would refer the entire matter to the Justice Department rather than single out Clemens. In his deposition to Congressional investigators and at the hearing, Clemens denied that he had ever taken steroids or human growth hormone, even though McNamee has testified that he injected Clemens with one drug or the other on at least 16 occasions between 1998 and 2001.

In a related case last month, Waxman and Davis jointly asked the Justice Department to investigate shortstop Miguel Tejada for suspected false statements in 2005, when Tejada spoke privately with committee staff members about performance-enhancing drugs.

It was unclear Monday whether any Clemens referral would be similarly bipartisan. Although sending the entire matter to the Justice Department could be seen as a compromise between Democrats and Republicans, referring only Clemens's testimony could be read as an endorsement of the work of George J. Mitchell, the former Democratic senator who identified Clemens as a steroids user in his report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

Any referral from the committee is primarily a symbolic gesture. The Justice Department can decide on its own to investigate a Congressional perjury case, and indeed, several federal agents were present during the hearing Feb. 13. One of those in attendance was Jeff Novitzky, the I.R.S. agent who has spent the past several years investigating steroid use among professional athletes.

McNamee is cooperating with federal authorities and, under a proffer agreement, he will not be charged with any crimes if he tells the truth. In January, he gave federal authorities syringes, vials and gauze pads that he said contained proof that he injected Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs.

A referral by Congress is like an extra push to the Justice Department, said Todd D. Peterson, a law professor at the George Washington University School of Law who worked in the department's Office of Legal Counsel during the 1980s and 1990s.

"It simply puts informal public pressure on the Department of Justice to take a look at it and respond in some way to Congress's action," he said.

In addition, a referral also sends a message about "Congress's own view as to which testimony seems not plausible to them," Peterson said. If the committee chooses to refer Clemens's testimony and not McNamee's, he said, "that's a pretty clear statement as to what their views are."

 Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

February 26, 2008

By BILL VLASIC

WOODHAVEN, Mich. — The Ford Motor Company is applying the hard sell these days — piling on incentives, doling out marketing DVDs and brochures, and making offers it hopes are too good to pass up.

But Ford's big new push is not to sell cars. Instead, it is trying to sign up thousands of workers to take buyouts, partly by convincing them that their brightest future lies outside the company that long offered middle-class wages for blue-collar jobs.

So, Ford is pitching a buffet of buyout packages that are easily among the richest ever offered to factory workers, including one-time cash payments of $140,000 or college tuition plans for an entire family.

The automaker is also putting on job fairs in its plants and mailing each of its 54,000 hourly workers a feature-length DVD, titled "Connecting With Your Future," that extols the promise of new careers beyond the assembly line.

Last Friday, inside a huge sheet-metal stamping plant in this industrial center south of Detroit, Ford workers spent their lunch hour perusing opportunities to go back to school, hire on at growing companies and open fast-food franchises.

"I am taking it seriously, but it's really hard to think about leaving," said Jerry Thomas, a 37-year-old millwright with 12 years at Ford. "The only thing that would make me do it is the uncertainty. We just don't know what's going to happen with Ford."

The push to move workers out reflects the tough times in Detroit. Ford has lost $15 billion in the last two years, and General Motors and Chrysler are also revamping after heavy losses.

While Detroit's Big Three have already cut about 80,000 jobs through buyouts and early retirements since 2006, a new blitz is under way to shrink employment even further to make way for lower-paid workers in the future.

The aggressive approach to buyouts is particularly striking at Ford.

In the early 1900s, the company founder, Henry Ford, transformed the American workplace by pioneering $5-a-day wages on the assembly line. And the company's paternalistic culture still lingers in the way workers often refer to the company as "Ford's," in reference to the family that provided them a comfortable income.

Ford executives say the buyout packages, which are the most lucrative and diverse ever offered in the industry, reflect a belief that Ford should look after its workers and ease their transition into different careers.

"We need to restructure, and it's important to our business to do so," said Joseph R. Hinrichs, Ford's head of global manufacturing. "But we want to do it in the best way for our employees."

But there is no mistaking Ford's message that this is the last companywide offer, and there could be layoffs if further downsizing becomes necessary.

Ford is not saying how many workers it expects to take the buyouts by a March 18 deadline. But Wall Street analysts say the company has set a goal to get 8,000 employees to sign up.

General Motors is also extending buyout offers to all of its 74,000 hourly employees, while Chrysler is offering buyouts to workers on a regional and individual plant basis.

The belt-tightening comes after years of declining market share and increased competition from foreign automakers, led by Toyota.

"These companies are trying to do in the last 24 months what they should have done over the last 24 years," said John A. Casesa of the automotive consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group. "That's why it's such a shock to the system."

Ford has eliminated more than 32,000 jobs over the last two years through buyouts and early retirements. But it needs to cut more to improve productivity, make room for transfers from its former Visteon parts plants, and pave the way for new hires at wages of $14 an hour — roughly half of current pay scales.

"We always prefer for people to voluntarily leave and that's why we put the energy and effort into this package of buyouts," said Martin J. Mulloy, Ford's vice president for labor affairs.

The buyout deals were developed with the United Automobile Workers union. In fact, one senior union official endorsed the downsizing effort in a cover article titled "Fresh Opportunities" in the company's internal Ford World magazine.

"Because of the loss of market share and because the economy is so bad, there aren't enough jobs for everybody," said the official, Bob King, the U.A.W.'s Ford division vice president.

The company is offering a broad range of buyout and early retirement packages.

Employees with as little as one year of seniority can receive $100,000 cash, although they give up all health benefits after a six-month period. For employees at least 55 years old and with at least 10 years on the job, the payout jumps to $140,000.

Ford, which has a younger work force than G.M., also included many educational options. One buyout offer provides a worker four years of tuition reimbursement up to $15,000 annually, plus health care coverage over that period and a stipend equal to 50 percent of base wages.

At the Woodhaven stamping plant, the 1,142 hourly workers are wrestling with the many choices facing them.

"They want to give people incentive to walk away," said Jim Irey, who has worked in the plant for 40 years. "It's the reality of the business, whether you like it or not."

Another worker, Andy Linko, contrasted the buyout deals to how he fared when his previous job as a steel worker disappeared.

"We never had this type of opportunity when I was in the steel industry," Mr. Linko said. "We knew for years that the industry was in trouble, and one day the doors just shut."

The job fair at Woodhaven offered a mix of career prospects, from truck driving to electrician work at the local utility to franchise opportunities at the Little Caesars pizza chain.

One recruiter, Heidi Daniels of DTE Energy, said the plant was a "great opportunity" to find skilled labor. "I've heard of offering out-placement assistance, but this is unique," Ms. Daniels said. "It's almost unheard-of."

Ford has also gone to great lengths to promote the promise of life after the auto industry.

In its DVD, Ford employs actors to urge workers to take "the opportunity to step out and try something new." Various segments of the DVD highlight former Ford workers who have started their own businesses after taking buyouts.

The company does not track the fortunes of all its former employees, but said it was proud of the "success stories" of people who have taken buyouts.

One such worker, Dale Beck, took a $100,000 buyout in 2006 to open a Little Caesars outlet in St. Louis.

"I went from making cars to making pizzas, and it's turned out pretty well for me," Mr. Beck said. "I also know some people who took the money and spent it, and now they're struggling."

Workers in the Woodhaven plant seem to split among younger workers who see the buyouts as a window to a new life, and older employees who cannot imagine giving up their Ford paychecks.

"I'm taking the $100,000," said Stacy Haynes, a 34-year-old mother of four children. "I've been here 12 years, and I can't believe I lasted this long."

Bill Fender, a 58-year-old tool and die maker with 37 years on the job, sees it differently.

"I'd like to retire, but it's just not enough money for me now," Mr. Fender said. "I'm making almost $80,000 a year, and I can't see leaving that behind."

One thing Ford workers are proud of is that their buyout options are more extensive and, in some instances, better paying than those at G.M.

Those bragging rights seem a poignant commentary on the depth of Detroit's difficulties, said the historian Douglas Brinkley, author of a book on Ford titled "Wheels for the World."

"There was a time in the 20th century when you flashed a Ford badge in Detroit and it meant you were a man on the rise," Mr. Brinkley said. "Now, the new status symbol of the Rust Belt is they are downsizing people better than other companies are."

 Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Photograph courtesy of the Edith Wharton Library

February 22, 2008

By PAMELA REDMOND SATRAN

I WAS wandering down an unassuming street in London, where I lived in the early 1990s, when I came upon an otherwise-ordinary Georgian house that proclaimed itself to be the home of Charles Dickens. The front door was propped open, and a small sign advertised the visiting hours and entry fee. I was trying to write my own first novel then, and had been reading the great British novelists — from Jane Austen to P. D. James, from Martin Amis to, yes, Charles Dickens — for both inspiration and insight into my adopted country. But it had never occurred to me that Dickens might be my virtual neighbor.

Standing in what had been Dickens's study at 48 Doughty Street, my scalp prickled as I thought: Here. Gazing out these windows, breathing on these very walls, the great writer dreamed up "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickleby." I felt nearly as close to my idol as if we'd been at the same dinner party.

That unexpected feeling of community was what started my mania for visiting writers' houses, compulsively, detouring to one for an afternoon or making a tour the point of the whole journey or — the ultimate experience — actually sleeping in a (dead) great author's bed and writing at his desk. Spending an hour in a writer's house gives you an understanding of that person and the work that's more vivid than anything you can glean from a thousand pages of biography. And as I evolved as a novelist, these tours inspired me to reach further in my work and made legendary writers more accessible as human beings.

Touring Mark Twain's Victorian mansion in Hartford, for instance, doesn't just make you want to write like Twain, it makes you want to be him. As inventive and exuberant as any Tom Sawyer escapade, Twain's house features hand-stenciled gold-leaf wallpaper, one of America's first telephones (ensconced in its own booth) and a third-floor study dominated by a billiard table. It's evidence that an author can not only make piles of money, but also know how to enjoy it

Twain sometimes had tea with his equally famous yet older and far less flamboyant neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Picture one of the Def Jam poets, maybe, or Jackie Collins living next door to Toni Morrison or J. M. Coetzee. Stowe was a socially conscious wife and mother who churned out dozens of works to help support her family, among them a manual she co-wrote called "The American Woman's Home," including her own principles of kitchen design, which were carried out in her humble clapboard cottage.

Stowe wasn't the only novelist with a sideline in shelter books: Edith Wharton, mistress of the fabulous mansion the Mount in Lenox, Mass., was an author of "The Decoration of Houses" as well as the author of "The House of Mirth." Writers are often house-obsessed, maybe because bookish children who spend lots of time at home alone are most apt to become writers, which naturally keeps them home alone tweaking not only their sentences but also their paint colors. And because novel writing demands a sensitivity to setting and atmosphere, the person who spins out great characters and plots is also often capable of creating great rooms.

Sometimes writers' houses show a dimension of an author you wouldn't guess from his or her work or reputation. Hemingway's French Quarter-style house in Key West, for instance, seems at once more modest and more genteel than you might expect for the home of the big-talking, rough-riding chronicler of machismo. And Eugene O'Neill's Asian-inspired ranch in the hills east of San Francisco is a study in control and solitude that's the opposite of his sprawling and chaotic family dramas.

You can get married in Hemingway's house — but, even better, you can live in Rudyard Kipling's gorgeous and original mansion outside Brattleboro, Vt. Every room in the place, which was designed by Kipling to resemble a ship, has a view across the Connecticut River Valley and to the mountains beyond.

EVEN more evocative, perhaps, the house is still full of Kipling's own furniture and paintings and books, so that you're not just visiting his life but feel as if you're actually living it. That can make the work of any writer, even one you're not a fan of, seem as fascinating as the words that flow from your own fingertips.

Even when I don't know anything about a writer, I can fall in love with his house, as with the apartment of the poet John Betjeman in the City of London, where I spent an idyllic week one summer via the Landmark Trust (which also rents out the Kipling house). While the quirkily shaped rooms overlooking the ancient churchyard of St. Bartholomew-the-Great didn't have the resonance for me of Dickens's or Twain's homes, they still seemed to be the roost of a person I'd love to have known.

But the very best writer's house is the one that has been inhabited by an author whose work I adore. Jane Austen's brick house in Hampshire, hard up against a busy crossroads in a still-tiny village, and her rickety little table that looks as if it would barely support the writing of a thank-you note, are every bit as vivid and inspirational to me as Emma Woodhouse or the Dashwood sisters.

If Jane could sit there surreptitiously scribbling her masterpieces, I think, as her family swirled around her and carriages rattled by not 10 feet outside her window, then what excuse do I have for not forging ahead through all the distractions and discouragements with my own much-less-brilliant writing?

On my wish list still is Balzac's house in Paris, as well as Emily Dickinson's in Amherst, Mass. But the place I most want to see is the Brontës' home in Haworth in the north of England. I'm sure that when I stand on the moors, I'll hear not just Cathy's voice calling for Heathcliff, but Heathcliff's own, crying out for Emily Brontë to bring him to life, and Emily's, too, whispering in my ear.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Jill Connelly for The New York Times

February 22, 2008

By LOUISE TUTELIAN

WITH its classic amusement pier, glittering bay and surfers bobbing on swells, Santa Monica was a perfect setting for "Baywatch." But take a short walk inland, and this city on the edge of Los Angeles reveals itself as more than a stereotypical beach town.

Within its borders, drawings by Picasso and Dubuffet hang in the same art complex as a vast installation by a graffiti crew. A well-preserved Mission-style bungalow sits around the corner from a steel performance space by Frank Gehry. Shops sell goods ranging from vintage Parisian wedding gowns to a whimsical map made entirely out of license plates. There are homegrown coffee bars on nearly every block, with names like Groundwork or the Legal Grind, dispensing caffeine and counsel at the same time.

"The pier, the bike path — they're the only things most people know about Santa Monica," said Colleen Dunn Bates, editor of "Hometown Santa Monica," an insider's guide to the city. "And they're fun. But they don't reflect everything that the city really offers."

Although it's surrounded on all sides by districts that are part of the City of Los Angeles — Pacific Palisades, Venice and West Los Angeles — Santa Monica asserts its own identity as an eight-square-mile separate city, and its population of about 96,000 is spread through several distinct neighborhoods. To make the most of time there, enjoy the games and famed carousel of the Santa Monica Pier and then step back from the beach to sample the city's variety the way Santa Monicans themselves do.

On one recent Saturday, Ren Farrar was luring passers-by to his stand at the open-air Santa Monica Farmers' Market, close to the beach on Arizona Avenue. By state law, all goods at the market must be grown in California, and much of the produce is picked within 24 hours of its appearance there.

"Care to try a sample?" Mr. Farrar, 37, of Spring Hill Jersey Cheese of Petaluma, shouted as I walked by. Watching intently as I savored a cube of his Old World Portuguese, he observed, "This is mild enough to go with anything, yet firm enough to stand up to the heat."

Down the block, Adams' Stuff' N Olives featured feta and anchovy-stuffed olives. Fair Hills Farms offered six kinds of organic apples. Across the street, shoppers dropped dried nectarines, plums and pears into bags. A family strolled by, munching on Cajun spiced almonds and sipping ice-cold lemonade, both produced only a few miles away.

Nate Allen, 30, a personal chef and restaurant consultant from nearby Venice, shops at the market routinely, as do many of the top chefs in the area.

"The greatest thing about this market is that you're going to get what is absolutely perfect and in season for this region," said Mr. Allen, who flaunts his trade by sporting a seven-inch-long tattoo of a knife on one forearm and a tattooed fork on the other. "For visitors, by the time you get to the last vendor, you've got a great picnic for wherever you want to go."

He often takes his own picnic to the Backbone Trail, a 69-mile system that roughly follows the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from Will Rogers State Historic Park just north of Santa Monica to Point Mugu State Park in Ventura County. Hikers can take an easy, sage-scented, two-mile loop from the parking lot at Will Rogers up to Inspiration Point, a sensational overlook of Santa Monica Bay from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Point Dume in Malibu.

On a clear day, a hiker can see Catalina Island and the white dots of sails. Behind are the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains, and in the distance, the high-rises of downtown Los Angeles. Up there, the muted chattering of birds and the hum of insects are the only sounds.

Back in northern Santa Monica, natural sights give way to architectural ones. Adelaide Drive, at the north end of the city, offers intriguing examples of early-20th-century architecture. Two of the homes designated as city landmarks are the Craftsman-style Isaac Milbank House (No. 236) — designed by the same firm that did Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood — and the stucco Worrel House (No. 710), which was built in the mid-1920s and has been described as a "Pueblo-Revival Maya fantasy."

(Another selection of carefully kept old houses, in styles from Victorian and Craftsman to Spanish colonial revival, await in the Third Street Historic District.)

Some of the city's best shopping is also on its northern rim, where the 10-block Montana Avenue district is known for upscale clothes, home décor, crafts, jewelry and art. At Every Picture Tells A Story (No. 1311-C) a lithograph of the cover of "Charlotte's Web" signed by the illustrator, Garth Williams, hangs on a wall, and in the gallery (the store is also a children's bookstore) original works by Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss and others are $150 to $150,000.

Next door, Rooms & Gardens (No. 1311-A) sells furniture, antiques and accessories like pillows fashioned from an antique Indian sari. The actress Mary Steenburgen, one of the store's three owners, praised the walkability of the area — not a common commodity in Southern California — when I asked her about the location of her store.

"The thing I love about Montana is that you feel as if you are in a pedestrian city," she said. "It's fun to look out the window and see people walking by with their dogs, instead of just cars streaming by."

Santa Monica is sunny almost all the time, but visitors who hit a rare rainy day might spend a good portion of it at Bergamot Station, a complex of art galleries that many miss because it's so hard to find. Built on the site of a former trolley-line stop — hence its name — the complex is on Santa Monica's east side, next to a freeway on a dead-end street. Inside corrugated tin warehouses, two dozen galleries show contemporary drawings, paintings, photographs, sculpture and mixed-media works.

Sherrie Goldfarb of West Los Angeles and her friend Nancy Recasner of Studio City, Calif., hopped puddles between buildings after one rain this winter. "I wander through here with friends and the variety of work is amazing," said Ms. Goldfarb, 57, a regular at the galleries.

Many boldface names are represented. At Ikon Ltd./Kay Richards, drawings by Dubuffet, Basquiat and Picasso, among others, are on display through March 1. "Rarely Seen," a show of Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs, is running through May 10 at the Peter Fetterman Gallery.

Those who want to sense what Santa Monica was like as a sleepy town of tiny bungalows can visit Ocean Park on the city's south end, which borders Venice. This funky neighborhood, one of the birthplaces of skateboarding in the late 1960s (part of "Lords of Dogtown" was filmed there), got a makeover in the 1990s; the tiny bungalows now sell for millions.

Artsy Main Street, Ocean Park's central artery of merchants, restaurants and galleries, manages to merge sneaker stores and used-book shops with Armani Exchange and Patagonia stores. At Varga (No. 2806) apparel and accessories seem jointly inspired by '40s pin-ups, Barbie dolls and young Hollywood celeb-style. The inventory at Relish, off Main Street at 208 Pier Avenue, ranges from bath salts ($20 to $40) to a pinball baseball game ($110). The Frank Gehry-designed steel boxes of Edgemar (No. 2415-2449 Main Street) house retail tenants and a performance space around an open courtyard.

Appraise your purchases over a martini with a mermaid toothpick at the Galley (No. 2442), a steakhouse with signature décor (think tiki bar with Christmas lights), a soulful juke box and old-salt appeal. No wonder — it opened its thick plank doors in 1934, making it Santa Monica's oldest restaurant.

As the day wanes, consider watching the jet set (the one with its own jets) fly into the sunset. Opt for dinner next to the runway at the Santa Monica Municipal Airport. Those in the know reserve a window table at the Pan-Asian fusion restaurant Typhoon or the more intimate sushi restaurant the Hump (pilot slang for the Himalayas) upstairs.

But at sunset, the most thrilling view in town is back at the beach, from the top of the solar-powered 130-foot-high Pacific Wheel, the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier. Yes, it's touristy, and yes, it might be crowded, but it is, after all, the city's iconic symbol.

As my seat on the wheel glided upward one evening, the entire city of Santa Monica, and far beyond, slid into view. Below, the cast and crew of the film "17 Again," starring Matthew Perry and Zac Efron, were shooting on the beach, as they would be all night long. The whole scene was bathed in a deep pink and violet glow.

It felt just fine to act like a tourist for a while.

VISITOR INFORMATION

SANTA MONICA, adjacent to Los Angeles, has 3.5 miles of coastline, all publicly accessible; two miles of this waterfront make up Santa Monica State Beach. The city's north-south numbered streets run from Second Street, a block from the water, eastward to 26th. The major east-west arteries are San Vicente, Wilshire, Santa Monica, Pico and Ocean Park Boulevards.

The Santa Monica Pier, with rides, games, souvenir shops and a 1922 carousel, is at the foot of Colorado Avenue. The Pacific Wheel, a Ferris wheel at the pier, will be closed May 5 to 22 as a new wheel is installed.

Beach lovers can step onto the sand from Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel at 1700 Ocean Avenue (310-458-6700; www.loewshotels.com; rooms from $349). The 72-room Ambrose (1255 20th Street; 310-315-1555; www.ambrosehotel.com; from $229) feels more like a Mission-style hideaway with stained-glass windows and fireside library.

The Santa Monica Farmers' Market is held on Arizona Avenue from Second to Fourth Streets, on Wednesdays from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The Backbone Trail is in Will Rogers State Historic Park (1501 Will Rogers State Park Road, off West Sunset Boulevard, Pacific Palisades; 310-454-8212; www.nps.gov/samo/planyourvisit/backbonetrail.htm), which is open from 8 a.m. to sunset daily. Parking is $7. Picnic tables are available at Inspiration Point.

Most galleries at Bergamot Station (2525 Michigan Avenue; www.bergamotstation.com) are open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, and 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Saturday. Because Michigan Avenue is bisected by a freeway, the best access to this dead-end section of it is off Cloverfield Avenue.

At the Galley (2442 Main Street; 310-452-1934, www.thegalleyrestaurant.net) a 12-ounce sirloin is $23 and seafood diablo is $24.

Typhoon, at the Santa Monica Airport (3221 Donald Douglas Loop South off Airport Road; 310-390-6565; www.typhoon.biz) offers Pan-Asian fare including Thai river prawns ($21) and stir-fried crickets ($10). Upstairs, the Hump (310-313-0977; www.thehump.biz) serves some of the freshest sushi in town.

 Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company