Hardhian Singh Road, Karol Bagh, New Delhi 110 005; Tel: 5717985,5728349
LI
39, Ring Road, Lajpat Nagar III, New Delhi 110 024; Tel: 6843206,6838458;Fax:6844001
JAGDISH
S T 0 B. E Everything your home deserves. Under one roof
I can think of no better way to begin this, my first letter to SPAN's readers, than by saying how pleased I am to be in India. For the past two years, I have been following the growth and development of Indo-U.S. relations from a perch in Washington and can report with some authority and considerable pleasure that India has captured the attention of America as seldom before. That observation has been confirmed many times over in my first few weeks here. In the midst of settling in and getting oriented to a new home, office, and responsibilities, I have been invited to one meeting after another with high-level American visitors-a former U.S. senator and a current U.S. Supreme Court justice as well as numerous academics, and corporate and government officials. The list of visitors slated to come-among them several Clinton cabinet members-is impressive and lengthy, a measure of the resurgence of interest in India on the part of Americans from all walks of life. A driving force behind this activity is the rapidly expanding commercial relations between our two countries. So much is being said and written on this subject that we run the risk of trivializing the multifaceted and complex relations we enjoy with your country. That said, there is no disputing the fact that the world of business is changing faster than just about anything else these days. This is illustrated in our article "The Virtual Organization," which notes that corporations using integrated computer and communications technologies "will increasingly be defined not by concrete walls or physical space, but by collaborative networks linking hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people together." Joel Kotkin pursues that theme on a much more personal basis in his book Tribes, which presents a fascinating study of collaborative networks with and among such "global tribes" as the Anglo-Americans and the Indians. He illustrates how our global-girding diasporas are contributing to a new commercial world order. We present a brief review of the book, followed by an extract about an Indian immigrant to the United States who swept away (almost literally; he himself was to wield a broom on the factory floor) some outdated management practices and turned three rusting, money-losing foundries into profitable enterprises. Our opening feature on the impressive Madras Cancer Institute underscores the fact that diversity characterizes our bilateral relationship. The institute's success in treating cancer patients provides a striking example of Indo-U.S. cooperation in science and technology. Ambassador Frank G. Wisner took appropriate note of this last month when he presented a check to institute director Dr. V. Shantha in Madras. "There is much in this historic collaboration for us to be proud of," the ambassador said. "But perhaps we should be most proud of the contribution we have made collectively to the improvement of health for all mankind." -T.A.H.
2
Care & Hope
5
Shared Objectives
6
Why Me?
8
Paradox of a Genius
12
by Malini Seshadri An Interview
With Ian T. Magrath
by Sandra Blakeslee by Paul Goldberger
The Virtual Organization-Anytime,
Anywhere
by Samuel E. Bleecker
16
Send Me a Memo-Or
Better Yet, Don't
by Owen Edwards
18
Prairie Prophet
by Vince Magers
22 Driving Into the 21st Century
26 32
Rites of Passage
by Mimi Swartz
Journalism in a New World Disorder by Henry A. Grunwald
34 37
Reporters' Journal
38
The New Calvinists
41
On the Lighter Side
Tribal Power
An Interview
With Suzanne B. Levine
A Review by Guy E. Olson by Joel Kotkin
42 Focus On ...
44
What Type Do You Like?
An Interview
With Kit Hinrichs
Front cover: The long and arduous journey from poverty to privilege has failed to dilute actor Tommy Lee Jones's West Texas individuality. See page 26. Publisher, Thomas A. Homan; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Assistant Managing Editor, Swaraj Chauhan; Senior Editor, Amrita Kumar; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistant, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American
Center Library, New Delhi. Photographs: Front cover-Andrew Eccles. 2-3, 6--Avinash Pasricha. 8 center-The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation/Museum of Modem Art. 9-eourtesy Sandak. ll-eourtesy Mansinh Rana. l2-l3-eourtesy GE Plastics. l8-21-eourtesy Wes Jackson. 22-eourtesy General Motors Corporation, Pontiac Division (5). 23-eourtesy Chrysler Corporation, Dodge (4). 24-25-eourtesy General Motors Corporation, Cadillac Division (5). 26-Andrew Eccles. 27-28-Movie Still Archives. 31-eourtesy Universal Studios. 32-Alfred Eisenstaedt, courtesy of Time Warner. 34-R.K. Sharma. 39-Mike Steinberg. 42 topcourtesy Brooklands Museum; bottom-eourtesy India Abroad. 43 top & center-James L. Stanfield, Š 1994National Geographic Society (3); bottom left-eourtesy National Science Centre, New Delhi; bottom right-Faroakh Chotia. 44-48-eourtesy Pentagram Design Inc. Back cover-eourtesy School of Visual Arts, New York. Published by the United States Information (phone:
3316841),
Faridabad. Government. the Editor.
on behalf
Service, American
of the American
Embassy,
Center,
New
Delhi.
24 Kasturba Printed
Gandhi
at Thomson
Marg, Press
New Delhi (India)
110001 Limited,
The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Use 0/ SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to Price o/magazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 120 (Rs. 110 for students); single copy, Rs. 12.
Haryana.
he Cancer Institute in Madras has cooperation and sharing of data, informacome a long way since it opened its tion, and results continue. doors 40 years ago. At that time it The statistics relating to remissions had a mere 12-bed capacity and a staff of achieved in patients with these cancers two honorary medical officers, two auxilduring the collaborative program show iary nurses, and one technician. Today its positive results. Says Shantha: "As staff numbers about 425, inclusive of eximportant as the measurable tangible perts in virtually every field of cancer digains, are the opportunities in extended agnosis and therapy. It is a recognized scientific contacts that opened new perresearch and teaching center with universpectives and exposed us to the ideas and U.S. Ambassador Frank G. Wisner sity affiliation for postgraduate and docapproaches of different scientific groups, presents a check to Dr. Shantha in toral degrees, and receives funding from to which we might not have had ready Madras on August 27, 1994. government and nongovernment sources. access otherwise. Equally important, it It serves about 60,000 patients every year, including many who provided the funds for the conduct of the studies, which are unable to pay for their care. In the past few years, the we would not have been able to afford. It has initiated prosurvival rate of the institute's patients has been on the increase. tocols, provided laboratory support, funded training programs Dr. V. Shantha, director of the Cancer Institute, recalls the for our personnel in the United States, and arranged data analearly days of the fight against cancer, particularly among ysis and critical reviews that would not have been readily availchildren: "The children would appear to improve, but in a few able to us otherwise." months they would come back with a relapse. This was the To continue the research initiated in 1989, the institute picture in the early 1970s. At that time, many hospitals in the recently received a second grant of Rs. 3 million from the West were reporting a 35 percent success rate in the treatment United States government. Speaking at the institute in Madras of leukemia, for instance. We were nowhere near that figure." on August 27, 1994, U.S. Ambassador Frank G. Wisner said: Shantha undertook a mission to find a reason for the poor "This unique program remains a cornerstone of the deep survival rate in her institution, and a treatment protocol friendship which exists between India and the United States. It (precise treatment schedule, and all aspects of patient care and also is a demonstration of what can be accomplished when two management) that could save young lives. Her search ended nations work together as intellectual equals-this quality is at when she met Dr. Ian T. Magrath at the National Cancer the heart of Indo-U.S. science and technology cooperation." A visit to the pediatric ward of the Madras Cancer Institute is Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. not as depressing as one might anticipate. It is clean, bright, Shantha recalls her long quest: "I had to rely entirely on available literature to formulate programs and protocols and airy, and functional. Most of the children sport a cheerful cautiously feel my way forward. The problems and difficulties I disposition and are delighted to see visitors. Almost all of them have no hair on their heads, a common side effect of chemoencountered were numerous, and I tried to seek clarifications during my trips to foreign cancer hospitals. The clinicians I met therapy. But this does not faze them, as they entertain us with would listen with polite condescension, quite often impatiently, group singing, and then get ready for a game of carrom. and suggest vague solutions which took me nowhere: Magrath Hopefully, some years down the road, cancer will be, for a was the first one who seemed interested in our problem." majority of them, only a memory. Not just interested, it turned out, but of great practical help. A new wing of the Cancer Institute contains state-of-the-art Magrath helped to devise a treatment protocol which produced diagnostic and therapeutic equipment including linear accelencouraging results, even among patients in whom the disease erators, cell separators, and whole-body scanners, many of them gifts from foreign governments and voluntary agencies. had advanced considerably. The new approach stressed the importance of precise tailoring of anticancer drugs, broad The latest addition is the bone-marrow transplant facility with its sterile chambers and marrow storage systems for autospectrum antibiotics where necessary, and special supportive logous transplants. care during treatment to minimize the chances of relapse. Important programs at the institute include a comprehensive However, the institute had to contend with a host of other problems-large numbers of patients, many of them unable to cancer registry to generate a data bank; organ preservation, particularly through early detection and treatment of cervical afford treatment, and a chronic shortage of staff and funds. and uterine cancers; and limb preservation through a combinaThen, in 1989, the institute received a Rs. 9 million grant from the U.S. government under its PL-480 program for a five-year study tion of drug therapy and hyperthermia. Shantha firmly believes that dreaded diseases such as cancer of the incidence, optimum treatment, and epidemiological procan best be fought through pooling of expertise and sharing of file of two key pediatric cancers-acute lymphoblastic leukemia research among the world scientific community. It is in this and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Research was conducted in colcontext she stresses the importance of the Indo-U.S. collabolaboration with Magrath. The findings of the five-year project, rative program. 0 which has now ended, are being evaluated. Meanwhile, the close
T
Shared Objectives As part of her research for the preceding article, Malini Seshadri conducted an interview with Dr. Ian T. Magrath via fax messages between Madras and Bethesda, Maryland, where Magrath serves as head of the Lymphoma Biology Section, Clinical Oncology Program, Division of Cancer Treatment of the National Cancer Institute. Below are excerpts from the interview. QUESTION: Dr. Magrath, in addition to your participation in a joint program with Dr. V. Shantha of the Cancer Institute, Madras, what other cancer institutions have you been involved with in India and in other parts of the world? Are the results of your studies there being shared by all parties? DR. IAN T. MAGRATH: Similar programs in India are currently in place at the Tata Memorial Hospital, Bombay; the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi; and at the Kidwai Memorial Institute, Bangalore. Programs are being formalized with cancer centers in Ahmedabad and Trivandrum. We have a similar program in Cairo, Egypt, which has been supported by USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) funding as part of a Cooperative Health Agreement that has been in place for three years. We have other ongoing studies in a number of countries in Latin America, and in Pakistan. We have held two workshops, one in Bethesda in 1990 and one in Cairo in 1993, at which the results of our collaborative endeavors were discussed, and to which many of our collaborators from various parts of the world were invited. The results will be (and to some extent already have been) published in scientific journals and will be available to the rest of the world. At the
present time we are working on a number of publications with our colleagues in India and Egypt, which we hope will be available in the course of a year. What have preliminary results of the joint studies shown about the role that genetic and ethnic factors may play in the incidence and onset of cancers in children as well as in their response to treatment? There is no question that genetic factors playa significant role. Doubtless, too, ethnic factors are important with respect to their response to treatment and their ability to tolerate chemotherapy. In certain childhood diseases, the genes which are at least in part responsible for the development of these diseases (for example, retinoblastoma and Wilms' tumor) have been identified, and abnormalities of these genes are known to be inherited in certain circumstances. P53 is another gene in which inherited mutations can predispose to cancer. We do have an interest in exploring the importance of mutations in other genes that can be inherited in the genesis of lymphomas in children, and recognize that the very large cancer institutes in some of the countries with which we collaborate provide a valuable resource for the identification of individuals and families with an inherited predisposition to cancer.
In what other ways are such joint programs beneficial to the participants? I believe the,answer to this question, at least with respect to our collaborators, has already been provided. In addition, we ourselves, and scientists in the Western world in general, hopefully benefit from the opportunity to understand more about the pathogenesis of
Dr. Ian T. Magrath and the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland. the diseases that we are studying. Because populations in different world environments have very different lifestyles, differences in the incidence of diseases and the biological characteristics of those diseases should provide us with many insights into the causes of cancer. Ultimately, we believe that such information will translate into improved approaches to prevention and treatment of cancer. Also, the differences in per. spective on cancer in developing countries help focus our thinking about cancer in the United States. What has not been done much, but which we hope will be done in the future, is to conduct studies to determine the least amount of therapy that will be effective. While such a point is important to all patients with cancer and to health care in all countries, pressures to conduct this kind of research are much greater in the developing nations, where resources are scarce. One might ask such questions as whether the duration of therapy in acute lymphoblastic leukemia needs to be two years? Do we need to use as many drugs as we do in the treatment of certain chemotherapy-responsive cancers? Can more of the therapy be conducted in an outpatient setting? Finally, we believe it is more and more important in the modern world that we work together with our colleagues in other world regions to achieve the same objectives that all of us have. 0 About the Author: Malini Seshadri, afrequent contributor to SPAN, is a Madras-based freelance journalist.
R
esearchers are finding ways to answer a question that haunts every cancer patient: Why me? The explanation, they say, can be found deep within the cells of the body in biological factors called markers. Like the smoking gun in a crime novel, markers are physical evidence of the foul interplay between cancercausing agents in the environment and a person's genes. But, as in all whodunits, the true villain could be the one that arouses least suspicion. The new research shows that cancer is not primarily caused, as many people tend to think, by the poisons spewed into the air, water, and land by industry. Rather, each person is born with various genetic susceptibilities, essentially weak spots in their genetic makeup, that playa leading role in the cellular mayhem called cancer. For example, researchers have found that some people From The International The International
Herald Tribune. Copyright
Herald Tribune/NYTSS.
Š
1994.
have genes that enable their bodies to detoxify chemicals rapidly, including the carcinogens found in cigarette smoke and natural carcinogens found in foods. Others are born with slow acting varieties of the same genes; their bodies are less efficient at getting rid of carcinogens. If exposed to large enough quantities of the chemicals, these slow detoxifiers are more likely to get cancer. The research sheds light on a vexing question. Why do some people who smoke cigarettes and eat an unhealthy diet live to be 90 while others who live healthy lives succumb to cancer at a young age? The classic methods for studying cancer risks have been very frustrating, said Dr. Frederica Perera, a leader in biomarker research at Columbia University's School of Public Health in New York City. Epidemiologists, who study large populations of people over time, have made great strides in linking cancer to chemicals, she said, although since the deaths usually occur decades later, long after exposure to the chem-
icals took place, making the connection is often problematic. With the tools of molecular biology, however, Perera said: "We can get inside the black box everyone talks about. We can get some fingerprints on environmental carcinogens and look for their targets inside cells." Molecular toxicologists and molecular epidemiologists are looking for physical signs of damage in human cells. Some, called adducts, are chemicals bound up with DNA or proteins. Others are gene and chromosome mutations, alterations in DNA repair enzymes, various forms of enzymes for metabolizing foreign chemicals and levels of nutrients in the bloodstream. Adducts are formed when chemicals stick to DNA, Perera explained. Unless the damage is repaired before the cell divides, mutations can occur that may lead to cancer. Sometimes the adduct may attach itself to a length of junk DNA, where it does the body no harm. At other times, with the luck of a crap shoot, it may damage DNA that controls cell division. Adducts are often found in people exposed to pollution, Perera added. For example, foundry workers have varying levels of a chemical, polyaromatic hydrocarbon, bound to their DNA, depending on their exposure to the chemical and their innate ability to detoxify chemicals. People living in the polluted air of a large city in Poland have more ad ducts and chromosome aberrations than people living in the cleaner air of a Polish village. And women exposed to polyaromatic hydrocarbons from the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial sources have varying levels of adducts in their breast tissue, depending on their genetic makeup. Such findings may help determine why one woman gets breast cancer and her nextdoor neighbor does not. Wark is continuing to determine whether biomarkers like these can predict who will get cancer, Perera said. Researchers are looking for such adducts in blood samples stored ten and 15 years ago to see whether they foretell disease in given individuals. Another kind of physical damage to cells that can lead to cancer is a set of mutations in an important gene known as p53. The gene's normal function is to suppress cancerous changes in the cell, and these are very prone to develop when the gene is inactivated by mutations. Recent studies have shown that several environmental carcinogens cause mutations at characteristic sites on p53 gene. In other words, the site of the mutation
on a person's p53 gene will indicate whether it was induced by ultraviolet light, aflatoxin from peanut mold, or cigarettes. Dr. Ilan Kirsch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, is studying another type of biomarker involving the inherent instability of human DNA. DNA tends to jump about and recombine in ways that drive evolution, Kirsch said, but such recombinations can also cause cancer. The marker is an inverted DNA sequence that is found in one of every 5,000 to 50,000 white blood cells in the human body. Located on chromosome 7, it is an "innocent genetic aberration," Kirsch said, because it seems to cause no harm in most people. But other people have a genetic defect in which the chromosome 7 aberration is 100 times higher than normal, Kirsch said. They develop leukemia or lymphoma 100 times more often than people with the innocent aberration. With this clue in mind, Kirsch is studying the chromosome 7 marker in farmers exposed to pesticides. He said chemicals could influence a person's baseline level of genetic instability, making DNA alterations more or less likely at any given time. A third type of marker consists of enzymes found in the liver and other tissues. The human body has evolved families of enzymes for metabolizing chemicals-the natural carcinogens in food as well as drugs and industrial compounds. When a chemical comes into contact with a cell membrane, it is met by enzymes that render the chemical more or less water soluble. If all the chemical is thus transformed, it is excreted completely from the body. Sometimes, however, a chemical can be altered into a form that makes it prone to binding with DNA or protein, raising the risk of cancer. . There are wide genetic variations in these enzyme systems, said Dr. William Evans, a pharmacologist at St. Jude Children's Hospital at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. In some people an enzyme may be very slow acting; they can be easily poisoned by the drugs or chemicals detoxified by that enzyme. Others may inherit a fast-acting form. of the enzyme. Their bodies deactivate the drugs or chemicals handled by that enzyme with lightning speed. "We have observed ten- to 100-fold differences in enzyme activity," Evans said. Enzyme activity often declines with age, helping to explain why cancer tends to be a disease of old age. And enzyme activity varies between ethnic and racial groups, Evans said, providing clues about different cancer rates among races. 0 About the Author: Sandra Blakeslee is a New York Times science reporter based on the West Coast.
Frank Lloyd Wright, albeit a 20th-century cultural icon, has not always been entirely understood-as an architect or as a man. He has been called outrageous, unrealistic, elitist, a historical anachronism,
in
turns. But of his genius, there was never a doubt.
(t: 0
a Genius
work, held earlier this year at the Museum of Modern Art He was a hustler and a ge(MOMA) in New York, was] nius, though perhaps it would the most comprehensive exbe fairer to say of Frank Lloyd hibition ever produced on this Wright that he was a genius protean figure, and the largest first and a hustler second. But it architecture show MOM A has is no accident that, 35 years ever mounted. All kinds of after his death at the age of 91, Wright buildings, from the vast Wright lives on, not only as the Guggenheim Museum in New greatest architect of modern York to the tiny Seth Petersen times but also as the only archiCottage in Lake Delton, Wistect whose name is recognized consin, are being restored; nearly forgotten Wright designs by millions who pay no attention to architecture at all. for bowls, chairs, and fabrics are Wright worked at fame, and being unearthed and reprohe knew his buildings alone duced and sold everywhere; and Model of Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright's vision would not earn for him the so many publications on Wright of a modern city that was never realized. celebrity status he craved. When have poured out that there is a he appeared on television in a long interview with Hugh Downs virtual, well, cottage industry of printed Wrightiana. in 1953, Wright was quick to see the power of the new medium, For all his lust for a 20th-century form of celebrity, Wright's and exploited it eagerly, dismissing most American architecture roots were planted in Emersonian America, with its craving for in a deft sound bite as "imitation by imitators of imitation." It certainty and order, and his instincts seemed to reach back to was just as a younger Wright had done all he could to make his Jefferson. To Wright, the very idea of design was intimately connected with the land, with a dream of stretching out across private life the stuff of high drama. This 19th-century man became the 20th century's first architecture media star. the continent and making a new architecture that would reflect the democratic spirit and would in some way be American. Wright, who loved nothing more than being talked about, did not believe his 15 minutes would be up, in his lifetime or in any If Whitman had been an architect, he would have been Frank Lloyd Wright: Bombastic and cornball, yet compelling other. To judge by the attention being lavished on him now, he and deadly earnest. may have been right. [The retrospective devoted to Wright's
Fallingwater, the Pennsylvania country house that is considered by some to be the greatest house of the 20th century.
Wright came out of the heartland determined to reinvent architecture, and all but did. He derived much of his architecture from the buildings he saw around him, but he synthesized these influences brilliantly and made them new. It was an architecture of powerful horizontals, oflow, smooth forms, of potent geometries, of profound and serene space. Wright spoke of it as "organic," as if his buildings grew as naturally out of the land as trees and grass. But even though he favored wood and stone more than the hard-edged metal and glass, a Wright building was no more truly natural than a glass box by Walter Gropius. Can there be any doubt of Wright's greatness when you stand in the rotunda of the Guggenheim, where the space at once encloses you like a dome and lifts you like a rocket? Or on the balconies of Fallingwater, the house in Bear Run, Pennsylvania, where you are poised beside nature, yet completely conscious of architecture as a frame? Or at Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, where the space of the sanctuary, complex yet brilliantly resolved, is constructed as precisely as a fugue? His ideology hardly matters when we confront the reality of
his buildings, which transcends his talk about organic architecture and building for democracy, just as it transcends Wright's manipulative, if colorful, character. Wright's absolute certainty, his grandiose pretension, would seem to make him the last man for an age so skeptical of the grand gesture and so consumed by a sense of irony as ours. Wright liked to say that early in life he had to choose "between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility," and no one ever doubted on which side he ended up. Yet within all that determined bluster there was such a dazzling sense of invention that one cannot but look upon it in awe. With Wright, irony suddenly becomes unnecessary. In an age of skepticism, he makes one want to believe. Wright's only true equal in modem times was Picasso, the only other figure who remained a vital creative force through generations. Like Picasso's, Wright's early work emerged out of 19thcentury academicism, which he turned on its head. And both careers ended in old age with bursts of energy that many found vulgar, but have come to view with increasing respect. Both men were mercurial, equally capable of charm and tyranny. Yet Wright had one passion that Picasso lacked, and it is key to what makes him more than merely a historical artifact today. He was a missionary, determined to bring his art to the masses.
He cared passionately that his work affect everyone, not just the cognoscenti, and if this attitude made him sound at times like a hollow populist, it reminds us now that he had a striking social consciousness. He was also a proto-environmentalist, an early "green architect" in his bias toward natural materials and toward relating his buildings to the land. If many modern architects disdained popular taste, and if many postmodernists have pandered to it, Wright neither sneered nor condescended. He believed unwaveringly in his own work, and never gave up trusting that given the right incentives, it was only a matter of time before the masses would come around to his thinking. And so Wright took pleasure in designing small objects-book jackets, tableware, and fabrics-that would bring some of his aesthetic to people who could not afford Wright houses. He also made a point of designing prototypes of small houses that people of modest means could afford. Later in his career, from the 1930s through the 1950s, Wright called these his Usonian houses, inspired by Samuel Butler's acronymic name for the United States, Usonia. If continual cost overruns meant that Wright's dream of making fine architecture affordable was only rarely realized, the Usonian houses were at least an aesthetic success. Dozens were built all around the country, and they are among his most consistently likable buildings, sleek, stretched-out ranch-style houses that helped define the suburban style that later came to be called "contemporary." Wright was determined to shape the workplace as well. When the call came to design the Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, he tried to rethink the modern office, and gave the grandest, most monumental, most light-filled space to clerical workers, naming it the Great Workroom. (Wright had a complicated relationship with Herbert Johnson, who was one of his greatest patrons but seemed to bring out his arrogance. When Johnson telephoned Wright to complain that the first dinner party in his new house was being disturbed by the constant drip of a leaky roof on his head, Wright told him to move his chair.) Wright thought also of the world his Usonian houses and workrooms would make. In the Depression years when work for architects was scarce, Wright designed Broadacre City, his extraordinary vision of the modern city. Or perhaps it should be called his vision of the anticity. It was fundamentally antiurban, a sprawling place based on the notion that every individual was entitled to an acre ofland, and that the auto would render dense city cores obsolete. I. The Research and Development Laboratory/or the S.c. Johnson and Son Company of Racine, Wisconsin, one ol Wright's notable commercial buildings. It has a i5-slory lOwer anchored 10 a concrele core thaI penelrates deeply inlO Ihe ground. 2. The Guggenheim Museum on Nell' York Cily's Fiflh Avenue, described as the cily's "mosl daring, mosl revolulionary, and most conlroversial building." A continuous ramp spirals up in ever-widening loops around a glass-dome-covered courtyard. 3. The Frederick C. Robie House, now headquarters 0/ the Universily 0/ Chicago Alumni Association.
Birth of a masterpiece. Wright is consulting here with apprentices at his Spring Green, Wisconsin, studio, called Taliesin, on the Guggenheim Museum drawings. In the background at far right is Mansinh Rana, who spent four years at Taliesin after World War II and is now dean of the Sushant School of Art and Architecture in Gurgaon, just south of New Delhi. Sushant School, which is affiliated with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture under the
Wright saw in Broadacre City a mix of high-rise buildings (he loved skyscrapers in the open; it was clustering them on city streets that he hated) and low ones, many of them Wright's elegantly simple Usonian houses, set on a grid intermixed with farmland. It's a remarkable vision, the final outgrowth of Wright's transcendentalist romance with spreading out across the land. It's also a reminder of the fact that Wright, before almost anyone, saw the cataclysmic impact that the car would have on the city, and wanted to tame it. He knew, too, that a suburban landscape needed occasional bigger buildings, nodes of modest urbanization, and so in a sense he also predicted the auspices of the American Institute of "edge cities," the dreary clusArchitects, operates on the Wright ters of towers and shopping principle of learning by doing (see SPAN, malls that have now sprung May 1992). "Wright was a remarkable up around large cities. Yet man," Rana says. "I never came across Broadacre City was in some another man who could change your ways a horrific attempt to imtotal outlook-whether it was on pose a degree of rationalization over a landscape that neither architecture, poetry, literature, music, or can nor should be planned with some other subject." Rana helps to such Cartesian precision. Perscreen students from South Asia haps even more disturbing than seeking admission to the Frank Lloyd Wright's elevation of suburbia Wright Foundation School at to the status of the ideal city Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona. was the social community he envisioned. Broadacre City seemed to have room for only one kind of person, a lover of democracy, family, order, and the agrarian landscape: Someone like Wright himself. So while Wright cared passionately about bringing architecture to the masses, his view of what the masses were was, by present standards, hopelessly elitist. Wright was not, in the end, much of an urban theorist. His vision of community was dull, and ponderously righteous, with none of the spontaneity or passion of a real cityscape--or real society. Wright's genius was for art, not for theory. What the salesman was trying hardest to sell wasn't really worth buying. And this is the paradox. Behind all the hustle was something far more precious, something that Wright almost never tried to sell: The magic of his art. D
A desk and chair for the Robert D. Winn House, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Wright designed the desk specifically for a corner.
About the Author: Paul Goldberger is the chief cultural correspondent for The New York Times.
Enterprises increasingly are operating without walls. Their "offices" are wherevel Look around. The corporations you see today on the business landscape are changing rapidly in structure and function and will be, within a few decades, almost entirely new entities. Virtual enterprises are evolving. Using integrated computer and communications technologies, corporations increasingly will be defined not by concrete walls or physical space, but by collaborative networks linking hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of people together. These collaborative, or consultative networks--eombinations of local-area and wide-area computer and communications networks-allow businesses to form and dissolve relationships at an instant's notice, thus creating new corporate ecologies. They also allow a single worker to seem like an army of workers and for work to collapse time and space. For example, let's suppose you head a large company. It is Christmas time, and you need to add 100 customer representatives to the payroll. It doesn't make sense to keep 100 offices with 100 computers open all year long just to accommodate one month's rush of business. Instead, it makes sense to Reprinted World
by permission
Future
Copyright
Š
Society,
from the March/April 7910 Woodmont
1994 World
Future
Avenue.
Society_
1994 issue of The Futurist, Suite 450. Bethesda.
published
Maryland
by the
20814.
hire 100 people who work at home and have their own computers. These "virtual workers" can be in Hong Kong or Singapore or Cincinnati. It makes no difference. They dial into the company's database and become an extension of the company. When a customer calls in, all information about that person is flashed on the computer screen of the temporary worker, wherever located. The widely scattered workers can operate as if they were all at company headquarters. A prelude to virtual enterprising appeared in one American state's efforts to find jobs for the homeless. Colorado's dilemma was this: How do you locate a homeless person to tell him or her that a job interview has been scheduled or an opportunity for work has opened up? After all, the homeless have no addresses, no telephones. The state decided to establish individual voice mailboxes accessible by toll-free telephone numbers for each homeless person in the program. The individuals simply call their personalized numbers to get their messages. And it works: So far, more than 75 percent of the homeless people enrolled in this program have found jobs. In the future, virtual enterprising will follow Colorado's example by operating without walls. These collaborative networks make it possible to draw upon vital resources as needed,
AN their workers are doing their jobs-not
the other way around.
regardless of where they are physically and regardless of who "owns" them-supplier or customer. "Collaborative networks deliver better products, higher quality, improved time-to-market, and higher returns to the bottom line," says Gordon Bridge, president of AT&T's messaging company. "They leverage the strengths of each link in the value chain, improve efficiencies, reduce expenses, and focus on the interoperability of processes and supporting systems."
"Virtual" Trends in the Marketplace Several factors are driving businesses toward virtual enterprising .. Pace. As Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, predicted more than two decades ago, businesses now run at warp speeds, demanding immediate responses-anywhere, anytime. Today, "it's survival of the fastest, not the fittest," he notes. Cost. The cost of market entry is often smaller than previously, especially in the information services and other technology-driven industries, where even undercapitalized startups can have an enormous impact on innovation. Personalization. Computerized manufacturing has made it economical to produce assembly-line product runs of a
few dozen items instead of a few thousand. This has meant that corporations are now driven more by customer demands than by internal needs. Today, customers get what they want or go elsewhere. Globalization. Businesses no longer compete only with their nearest rivals, but internationally. In the recent past, businesses could count on a steady stream of profit from a product line because a product's life cycle stretched ahead for years. Current product cycles have dropped to 18 months or less for some products. For example, the time it takes to conceive, design, manufacture, and sell 386chip-based computers lasts about 18 months. If a company wants to recoup its R&D (research and development) investments, it must truly be nimble. As a result, large corporations are under pressure to drastically cut the time it takes to deliver a product from the engineer's workbench to the showroom floor. If they can't, they will lose millions of dollars in investment to a faster competitor. What has insulated many corporations from this reality, particularly in the United States, has partially been the high cost of entry into well-entrenched distribution networks. For years, U.S. car manufacturers could ignore consumer demands
because it was too costly for a foreign competitor with a better idea or a better-made vehicle to enter the U.S. market. All that changed when new technologies and political realities blurred national borders. GM (General Motors), Ford, and Chrysler sprang to their feet when well-financed Japanese and German auto manufacturers started penetrating American barriers and delivering cheaper and better-designed cars. Other industries besides car manufacturers are also getting the message. Giants like AT&T and IBM are reengineering themselves to be more agile. They are using their cash, extensive marketing machinery, and manufacturing might to form relationships with faster, less-encumbered companies--even start-ups. Recently, the business news pages have been bloated with reports of joint ventures between IBM and Apple, and AT&T and start-ups such as the Go Corporation, which develops pen-based operating software, and EO, which manufactures pen-based palmtop computers. Many corporations are also motivated to form alliances by marketing and manufacturing considerations. Some form joint ventures with foreign partners (or even competitors) simply to gain better coverage of international markets or to take advantage of reduced labor and delivery charges in other countries. As a result, business is no longer local or even national. It's global. For example, I know of a Spanish-speaking person who drives an "American" Ford designed in Europe, with a Japanese-built engine, assembled in Korea, and sold in Connecticut. Getting that car developed, assembled, delivered, and sold required important structural changes in business.
Mobile Knowledge Workers Increasingly, the "office" is wherever the worker is doing his job-not the other way around. Today, 45 million U.S. workers spend more of their time on the road than at their desks. This new mobile workforce demands new tools that un tether them from the workplace and, at the same time, allow them to stay in touch anytime, anyplace, and (very importantly) in any wayvia phone, computer, fax, pager, videoconference, and so on. The new, ultra-mobile workforce, nicknamed "road warriors," are message-driven. They talk on the go and go where the action is. Road warriors need new tools as they go on their "infoquests" into the offices, factories, and homes of their clients. As Intel's Andy Grove says, we are in the midst of a major paradigm shift in both the computer industry and the workplace itself. The new mobile workforce does not so much need computer devices that communicate as they need communications devices that compute. We are at the brink of untethered communications. It is the dawn of a new era-the era of universal devices-when your pen-based palmtop PC becomes your personal communicator, serving as your mailbox, your fax m':\chine, your notebook, and even your electronic secretary. This single device will manage and store your electronic communications, becoming, in essence, your "briefcase office." Yet, for this revolution in work and workplace to materialize, an invisible worldwide infrastructure of new hardware tools,
The virtual enterprise is emerging largely because a new kind of product is seeing increased demand-the virtual product. Overnight package delivery, prescription eyeglasses, and high-quality photograph developing in less than an hour, instant movies from tiny camcorders, and custom-made tacos in 20 seconds are just a few of the dazzling array of virtual products leading the way. "What these products and services have in common is that they deliver instant customer gratification in a cost-effective way," write William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone in The Virtual Corporation (Harper-Business, 1992). "The ideal virtual product or service is one that is produced instantaneously and customized in response to customer demand." Products and services that were once never thought capable of meeting such enormous demands are being "virtualized." The automobile, for instance, is being virtualized by Japanese manufacturers who aim to meet a domestic order within 72 hours. "Not only will virtual products have great value for the customer, but the ability to make them will determine the successful corporations of the next century," the authors conclude.
wireless links, and land-based communications superhighways are needed for high-speed and broadband data transfer of high-definition documents, such as medical X-rays or multimedia presentations. Increasingly, we will see a host of personal digital assistants (PDAs), also known as "pocket pals" or "personal communicators." These handy devices feature built-in wireless telephones and modems, and voice-recognition and voicesynthesis capabilities. They have photographic-quality, touch-sensitive screens. Increasingly, companies will build their telecommunications operations around virtual networks, such as AT&T's Software Defined etwork, which allows a company to piggyback on a private virtual network that has the intelligence and reach of AT&T's global public telephone network. Once armed with these new tools, businesses will reengineer themselves. Powerful personal communicators are expected to trigger new applications in data collection so that, for example, an insurance claims adjuster can collect data in the field, complete an application or an accident report, and have it sent back to the office immediately. Personal communicators will also allow vital information to be passed along speedily and directly to the field. For example, that same claims adjuster might need a diagram of an older model car to be sent directly to his or her personal communicator for the accident report to be completed. Salespeople,
too, can get immediate answers to customers' questions or price quotes sent from headquarters on wireless transmission' and thus are able to close a sale on the spot, rather than having to postpone the sale until information is available. With electronic messaging and wireless communications, the road warrior can also have a universal mailbox. Colleagues need not follow his or her movements because they can deliver their communications-memos, faxes, spreadsheets, presentations-directly to the mobile worker anywhere by addressing his or her universal mailbox. And, wherever the worker is-on the road, on a plane, in a hotel, or at a client's office-those messages are waiting. And if there is no fax machine handy, the mobile worker can read messages on the computer through electronic messaging.
Unwiring Society In the 1980s we noted proudly that we were a wired society. Soon we can proudly say we are an unwired society. It's the age of emancipation. Time and space will collapse, and the barriers to communications will fall away. It won't matter if you're in America and your trading partner is in Bulgaria. You will be linked to one another by an invisible web of communications networks and intelligent, integrated appliances-the electronic virtual office. Traditional offices, on the other hand, will shrink to mere landing sites, where mobile workers dock for an hour or so at a communal electronic desk. Here, you will plug in your personal communicator, or personal digital assistant, and download all the data you have collected into a machine no larger than your current laser printer combining fax, copier, printer, and scanner functions. In the future, this intelligent accessory will not only receive, store, and transmit data, but also manage one's work flow. Truly an intelligent personal assistant, such a device will even turn notes into desktop-published reports, including graphs, facts, and figures. It will sort through your files for the references you include and insert them where instructed. It will also store and index information so that you can retrieve it instantly without intervention of a secretary. When you're on the road, it will receive your correspondence and, if the information is urgent enough, track you down and send you messages by electronic mail or fax. Right now, several E-mail software developers are working on such intelligent assistants, including Lotus's Notes and Beyond's Mail.
Winning the Business War Business is war. We battle our competition. We call our workforce an army. We call our mobile workforce road warriors. We invade markets. And, during crises, we call the conference room the war room. So what will make the virtual enterprise of tomorrow the most productive-that is, competitive-is war ware. Computers without it will be little more than expensive paperweights. Warware is strategic simulation software that allows exec-
utives to manage complexity, to create virtual realities (or virtual enterprises) on the computer screen, and to watch the results of their scenarios as they replay the parameters. It is not new. The U.S. Department of Defense has been doing it for years. Even civilian PC users have been doing it. With SimCity, they play town manager. But we haven't gone far enough. When computers are smart enough, business executives will chart reorganizations on computers, not on paper. They will make fewer mistakes and grow greater profits. They will assign project management to computers, not to line personnel. With warware, executives will open new markets, anticipate economic shifts, and play currency markets. They will have a strategic edge because they will be able to simulate business scenarios free of risk and will come away less bloodied when actions are taken later in the real world. In addition to corporate warware, however, there will also be personal software that increases an executive's capabilities. It is this sort of software that will cause executives to embrace hardware as never before. Contrary to popular myth, chief executive officers (CEOs) do use computers, but they are called vice presidents (VPs). The next generation of software will replace the VP as the CEO's intelligent assistant by mimicking the VP's activities. It will anticipate an executive's needs, learn from experience, conduct self-directed searches, synthesize data, provide analysis, and personalize reports. Right now, the software isn't smart enough, and computers aren't powerful enough, so human vice presidents are still needed. But two developments will help change all thatparallel processing and fuzzy logic. Parallel processing will allow software designers and systems experts to consider the workplace as a large number of independent processors acting in a coordinated fashion. By assigning rule-based operations to each processor and orchestrated actions to the whole, parallel processing will help more accurately simulate the corporation and anticipate the consequences of any corporate actions or policy changes. To "think" like a person, however, computers must not only think faster, but differently. In many cases, the answer to a question or solution to a problem is not yes or no, but maybe; not good or bad, but okay; not hot or cold, but temperate. Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic reject the binary notion that the world is entirely discrete, and accepts a continuum of values. As a result, fuzzy logic will enable computers to think more like people do and to create real-world simulations. Once we have accepted the preeminence of communication rather than location, we will have come a long way toward reshaping corporations. Virtual enterprises will develop not in the image of the factory floor of 100 years ago, but as a new business ecosystem characterized by flexible relationships formed electronically at a moment's notice. 0 About the Author: Samuel E. Bleecker specializing in the office of the future.
is a technology
consultant
Send Me a Memo-Or Better Yet, Don1t Of all the memos I've ever read-and I've read too many-the most unforgettable came my way when I served in the Marine Corps, stationed on Parris Island, South California. The situation was this: On the island at the time, among the omnipotent cadre assigned to train recruits, the "swagger stick"-an affectation probably adopted from the British Royal Marines-had become de rigueur. Everyone from the lowest noncoms to full colonels seemed to be carrying one. There were all sorts of unwritten sumptuary laws regarding their type and use: Buck sergeants could carry bamboo or ash sticks with brass tops; lieutenants and captains could sport mahogany or rosewood numbers; majors and colonels could go all the way to the ebony and silver deluxe style; only top officers dared actually return salutes with swagger sticks; and so on. This kind of display was decidedly not regulation, but the swagger stick, true to its name, fitted well with every Marine's self-image, and officers of sufficient rank to carry one tended to love them dearly. Then the island got a new commandant, a general named David Shoup who would, a couple of years later, leap over a dozen or so more-senior generals to become commander of the Corps and one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An already-legendary Medal of Honor winner for heroism at the Battle of Tarawa, Shoup reputedly wrote poetry in his spare time. With nothing left to prove, the general's style was adamantly utilitarian. From the minute he came aboard, it was obvious that the new top man did not carry a swagger stick. Reprinted behalf
by permission
of the author.
of the William
Copyright
Š
Morris
Agency,
1992 by Owen Edwards.
Inc. on
A few days after he made his first inspection tour of the island, the following memo was posted on the bulletin boards of all units: From the commanding general, regarding swagger sticks: If you need one, carry one. The next day, not a swagger stick was seen on Parris Island. If you go there now, almost 30 years later, you still won't find one. I've never forgotten the succinct brilliance of that memo, which achieved its desired effect totally and instantly, yet elegantly. In six words, the general got his way with an ironic twist that made a direct order superfluous. If all memos displayed even half the quality of that one, how much less cumbersome business life would be. Used well, the memo can still be a great communicator, and a powerful ally. However, its misuse is so rife these days that cautious handling is advised: Screw up a memo, and it will be held against you. Yet, contrary to expectation, success may result less from the writing of brilliant memos like General Shoup's bull'seye than in knowing what kinds of memos to avoid writing, and when not to write a memo at all. A mercifully brief list of rules applies.
Think twice about the take-no-prisoners memo If you're furious, try to overcome your genteel upbringing and be furious in person, not on paper. Remember, when your fingers do the talking, it's often the eloquent and indiscreet middle finger that speaks the loudest, and you may have calmed down by the time the target of your memo is putting out a contract on you. The solution to this dilemma? When
you care enough to send the very worst to a fellow employee, write a memo that rises to Shakespearean heights of invective, then store it in your briefcase, read it immediately upon waking the next day, and put it in a toaster oven set on high.
Remember, no publisher wants your collected memos Therefore, there is absolutely no need to worry about producing a thick volume. When you find yourself on the third page of your opus on television-audience potential for tractor-puller contests, cut to the chase. In fact, cut half of what you've written. At a computer magazine on the West Coast, memos are considered excessively long when they fill more than one screen. As your fingers dance across the keys, stop for a moment to consider how much you hate the long memos of others. Sure, yours make infinitely better reading, but try to imagine they don't. Your recipients will bless you for it.
Memos are modern-day public proclamations Don't put anything in one that you don't want everyone-including the Senate Select Committee on Idiocy in Business-to know. Remember the priceless maxim, "Better shred than dead." But if you find that you just can't bear to destroy your perfectly crafted memos, make sure there's nothing in them that can't be shared by the whole class.
Don't put your memo where your mouth is On the television show thirtysomething, the characters Elliot Weston and Michael Steadman, friends and business partners, knew they had a problem when they began communicating by memo. If you find you
would rather write "Good morning" to one of your colleagues than actually say it, something is wrong. Memos can only paper over fear and loathing for a while, and they usually make things worse. The way out: Write a memo to your bete noire, read it over, then tear it up and go say what has to be said.
Beware the Queegmire In the infamous manner of Captain Queeg's "purloined strawberries" broadside, some particularly ill-advised memos seem to take on lives of their own. The manager at a Los Angeles radio station taped the following memo to the refrigerator: Food in this refrigerator is private property. Any unauthorized use of someone else'sfood will be considered theft and will result in immediate termination! The memo was affixed to the door more than a year ago at this writing, and at latest report has begun to turn the sickly beige shade of aging copy paper. Inside the refrigerator, untouched for that same span of time, sits a partially consumed cup of strawberry yogurt well on its way to becoming a new life-form. The yogurt's ownership is obscure; many think it belongs to a long-departed staffer in the sports department. Of course, no one plans to violate the station manager's
stern injunction by throwing the stuff out, and everyone gleefully watches this symbol of managerial umbrage grow more and more ghastly, knowing that eventually the memo writer himself must reach in and do the janitorial honors.
Never forget the CYA Principle One major reason for the proliferation of memos in modern life is their popularity as CYA devices-government parlance for "Cover Your Ass." The underlying idea behind these memos is that something unwise, unethical, or plain illegal may be going on, and a written history ought to be kept indicating that the writer is either innocent or, failing that, no more guilty than others. Sometimes these memos are sent, sometimes they're just filed, occasionally they're leaked to the press, and sometimes they're written after the fact and predated. However many pages they may contain, they deliver only one message: "It wasn't me." The irony is that as soon as someone circulates a CY A memo, the dive siren starts whooping and everybody rushes to write his own. Within a day or two, not a person in the office remains unimplicated, including the guy who comes by with the coffee cart twice a day. Not everyone in business is memointensive. Like the population at large,
those rare birds who aren't tend to fall into two categories-straight-shooters and back-stabbers. Both are a problem, but the latter is a more treacherous species. When you encounter someone who never puts anything down on paper, ask yourself whether you would trust that person to handle your aging mother's estate. If not, look closer. In the course of considering a job offer, a friend of mine sent a series of carefully thought-out memos to his prospective employer, listing conditions that he considered essential, anticipating things that might be problems, and generally trying to put everything on the record before taking the job. The employer answered each memo with a telephone call, saying that nothing was a problem. That paper flow, however, was all one way, and when my friend took the job and found an entirely different situation than he had expected, he was left with a handful of copies of his own memos and a boss who denied he had ever okayed anything in them. No need to narrate the end of that story. 0 About the Author: Owen Edwards is the author
of Elegant Solutions and coauthor ofQuintessence. This article is adapted from his recent book Upward Nobility: How to Succeed in Business Without Losing Your Soul.
Wes Jackson is anything but a typical farmer. This son of the Kansas prairie wants nothing less than to remake American agriculture, to make it less abusive to the land. Jackson's has been a leading voice calling for sustainable agriculture for more than 15 years now. A plant geneticist, Jackson, with his colleagues, is looking for ways to make possible a kind of farming that is less dependent on chemicals and less mechanized. As he puts it, he wants agriculture to rely "less on human cleverness and more on the wisdom of nature." Jackson founded the Land Institute on II hectares near Salina, Kansas, in 1986. He assembled a small staff of researchers and began seeking a practical alternative to till agriculture, which has taken a heavy environmental toll. Among the ills of till farming, he says, are destructive soil erosion, herbicide and pesticide runoff, groundwater depletion, and a heavy reliance for energy and fertilizer on fossil fuels that, being finite, will someday run out. In addition, Jackson says modernday agriculture has driven many small farmers from their land, destroyed rural communities, and turned farmers into consumers of equipment and chemicals rather than producers. As a cure for some of these ills, Jackson This article appeared permission
from
Times Corporation.
in the December
1992 issue and is reprinted
The World & I. a publication Copyright
Š
1992.
with
of The Washington
He is no more forgiving of farming's proposes to tap the prairie's centuries-old heavy reliance on chemicals. "Here's all secrets for water use, converting nitrogen this concern about industrial pollution in the soil, and fending off pests, weeds, and yet we're paying farmers to spread and diseases. Under his scheme, fields would be plowed only every three to five these chemical poisons across the countryside," Jackson says. "We're subsidizing years, not every year, greatly reducing soil the poisoning of this continent and you erosion, which he views as the biggest have to ask why." threat. Much of the topsoil now being lost Jackson's story began on a 16-hectare would remain intact. Instead of a single farm near Topeka, Kansas, where his crop, fields would be filled with a mixed family grew a variety of fruits, vegetables, polyculture of perennials. In short, Jackand other crops during the Great Deson is attempting to mimic the prairie and pression of the 1930s. Because his family replace with' perennial plants the conrelied on the farm for sustenance, he came ventional annual crops such as corn and to respect the land. Still, it was not until wheat that are grown on sloping and erodible land. A key question he and his his mid-teens, when he worked as a ranch researchers must first answer is whether a hand one summer on a cousin's ranch in South Dakota, that he began to see the perennial polyculture can produce yields on par with conventional farming. prairie as something more than just a provider. He was fascinated by the seemJackson has been called a revolutionary, a radical, and a prophet who has looked into For more than 15 the past and seen the future years plant geneticist of agriculture in America. Wes Jackson has Land abuse through farming and agriculture's tendency, been a leading voice over time, to squander fercalling for sustainable tile soil is a story that agriculture in America. is "painfully old," he says. Here he is seen Ultimately such practices in his student days turn verdant fields into wastelands. While speaking with his pipe-smoking around the country, Jackson mentor, Ben Smith, condemns agricultural bioof North Carolina technology labs as "huge State University. temples to the goddess of human cleverness."
ingly boundless grasslands, marveling at the diversity of life they sustained. It was here, deep in America's prairie country, that Jackson got what he calls his "psychological fix" on grasslands. Each strand of the prairie's web of life was connected to something else. The prairie sustained itself, wasting nothing. It seemed so right, so natural. It was not like the neat rows of crops that he remembered from Kansas that needed nurturing from man to prosper. It planted such gnawing questions within Jackson as: What did the prairie know that mankind didn't? Jackson left the farm for Kansas Wesleyan University, a liberal arts school in Salina, where he played football while finishing his studies. As he cast about for a career path, he leaned toward coaching and teaching. Not finding a coaching position, he went to the University of Kansas to get a master's degree in botany. He later completed his doctorate in genetics at North Carolina State University. There he met Ben Smith, who became his mentor and taught him to be methodical and
disciplined in his resaearch. It was Smith who also instilled in the young scientist the notion that nature was the standard against which agriculture should be judged. Jackson returned to Kansas Wesleyan to teach and edit an anthology called Man and the Environment. In 1971 he was invited to teach at California State University in Sacramento, where he reached what he thought was the pinnacle of his career-a professorship and tenure in his mid-thirties. His course on the environment and energy issues was widely popular. It was at this time that Jackson began having second thoughts about life on the academic treadmill. He began to envision an alternative school that would focus on finding solutions to the problems he pointed up in his teaching. He took a two-year leave from the university and returned to Salina with his family to do research and write. Jackson's home was a house that he had built atop a swell in the Kansas prairie overlooking the Smoky Hill River. More and more, the school took shape in his mind. "I stood in one spot out there and I was surprised to see everything that I had dreamed about in California, that I had dreamed about in coming back [to Kansas]. A greenhouse, an experimental place, a small building for students, an office close by where life and work were all one, and here it was," Jackson says. The allure was too great. When his
leave expired, he decided to give up his teaching position and remain on the Kansas prairie. The Land Institute was born on land adjacent to the Jackson home. It operated on a shoestring budget-and the will to make a difference. Its mission was research and the education of a small group of students each year. "We said early on that we were dedicated to sustainable alternatives-agriculture, energy, shelter, and waste management. We covered the full spectrum," Jackson says. The focus was later shifted almost solely to agriculture. Of all the problems facing agriculture, soil erosion was the gravest, Jackson argued in his 1976 essay, "A Search for Sustainable Agriculture." That, along with agriculture's heavy dependence on fossil fuels, convinced him that farming was headed down a ruinous path. Exploring how farming should be conducted, Jackson drew up a simple chart of the plant kingdom. He had categories for polyculture or monoculture, woody or herbaceous, annual or perennial, and plants grown for vegetation or fruits and seeds. All of the possible combinations that Jackson drew up, with one exception, were already found in nature or farming. (The one blank was for a polyculture of herbaceous perennial plants that produce fruit or seeds.) Jackson believed he had stumbled onto a way to shape a whole new sustainable future for agriculture. The essay ended up in New Roots for
Agriculture (1980), the book that put Jackson on the map as a voice for sustainable agriculture. It was followed by two other books, Meeting the Expectations of the Land (1984, a collection of essays by various authors that he coedited) and Altars of Unhewn Stone (1987), a collection of his own essays. In addition to new science, Jackson was advocating a new philosophy for agriculture through his writings. Farming had broken its bond with the land, he asserted, and the only hope for its sustainability lay in following nature's example. He believed that nature's patience with humankind's abuses would someday run out, as it had so many times before-to destroy fertile lands that fed whole civilizations. "Nature is at once uncompromising and forgiving, but we do not precisely know the degree of her compromise nor the extent of her forgiveness," he wrote in New Roots. Once nature is no longer willing to indulge humanity's indiscretions, his argument went, what is lost is nothing less than our ability to feed ourselves. Today, 14 years later, Jackson steadfastly issues the same warning: "We can get a meal out of an annual monoculture, but the history of civilization is replete with examples of civilizations building their power on topsoil and when that topsoil is gone, that's the end. That's the end of the civilization." What convinced Jackson of the need for wholesale changes was a 1977 U.S. General Accounting Office report on the soil conservation efforts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The average annual soil loss on sampled farms was 37 to 40 tons per hectare. Despite decades of effort by the Soil Conservation Service, America was losing the battle to save its cropland soils. Today, the annual soil loss is estimated to be at least 2,000 million tons on the nation's 160 million tillable hectares. Before Jackson could convince others, especially the scientific world, of the merits of his perennial polyculture approach, he knew key questions needed to be answered. Foremost among these
was: "Could perennials produce yields that would make them feasible as commercial crops?" The perennial crops' yields would be judged against wheat, which produces an average of 2,000 kilograms per hectare. Experiments at the institute and elsewhere, using a variety of plants and grasses, have produced yields approaching the wheat standard, although some required irrigation and fertilizer. Still, they are a sign of hope for Jackson and the scientists on his team, which includes a plant breeder, a plant pathologist, and an ecologist. Another significant question was "Could certain plants 'fix' or convert enough nitrogen in the soil to replace or greatly reduce the need for fertilizer?" Additionally, the polyculture would also need to provide natural controls for diseases, pests, and undesirable weeds. Using this framework, Jackson and his staff subjected dozens of plants to closer scrutiny. They picked four promising species, giving little thought to whether the plants could be used to feed human beings or livestock. Yield, ability to fix nitrogen naturally, and other issues were of more immediate concern. For if these could not be resolved, the issue of how the crops would benefit human beings was moot. Eastern gama grass (Tripsacum dactyloides) was chosen. Its seeds have three times the protein of corn and twice that of wheat. While test yields have been low, the species' seeds have plenty of protein that could be sacrificed during breeding to increase yields. Unlike corn, it would not require pesticides and weed killers such as atrazine, which washes into rivers and lakes. More promising may be giant wild rye (Leymus racemosus), a bunchgrass native to southeastern Europe and Russia. Though never cultivated, it has been used as a food source throughout history when wheat crops failed. The third species, Illinois bundleflower (Desmanthus illinoensis), was chosen for its ability to fix nitrogen in the soil. This key function is served today largely by fertilizers such as anhydrous ammonia,
the manufacture of which requires natural gas. Since 1989, the bundleflower, as part of a multiyear institute study, has been planted alongside eastern gama grass and giant wild rye to see how much nitrogen the spindly plant converts and how much nitrogen the grasses need. Institute plant breeder Peter Kulakow says that even though the bundleflower is providing nitrogen, it is too early to say whether it could replace fertilizers. Though not currently included in the perennial polyculture test fields, a fourth species, Maximillian sunflower (Helianthus maximillianus), has been studied for its ability to control weeds naturally. The sunflower is thought to emit a chemical into the soil that acts as a herbicide. Such allelopathic plants could someday replace chemical weed killers. Jackson says plants such as the sunflower will take on great importance as farm states increasingly have to grapple with chemical runoff contaminating land and water. When Jackson's seemingly nonstop schedule allows, he travels to Matfield Green, a tiny Kansas town in Chase County, where 85 percent of the land has escaped the plow. He has renovated a house in the town and goes there to write. With a population of only 38, down from 150, Matfield Green could be "resettled" to its former level, as could other small midwestern and Great Plains towns, once farming becomes less capital intensive. Whether Jackson's work on the plains of Kansas will bear fruit may not be known for years, maybe even generations. He figures it took the prairie thousands of years to store up its secrets for sustaining itself season after season; getting at them will be no small feat. While the scientific answers remain elusive, Jackson says he sees growing public sentiment over the high environmental price being paid for modern farming. That sentiment, he thinks, may push farming to change once science makes it possible. 0 About the Author: Vince Magers is afreelance science writer based in Greenwood, Missouri.
J
!)
The Pontiac Stinger, from General Motors, is an attempt to combine automobile and jeep,for the outdoor-minded sportsman. It can seat four, with a storage JU"eabehind the rear ~t (above). With all its lift-{)ffpanels pulled out (large photq), gentl~ breezes waft through the car's interior-as do gales and stinging rains. Either a glass side panel or a cooler and case can slip neatly into the door openings (top and center right). Five panels are removable, including the rear glass (bottom right).
T
hese days, there are several fashioned ("unseemly" is a faways to look at Tommy vorite). You see it in his face, Lee Jones, but only one is where vicious cheekbones defend essential. Certainly on this day, eyes that express equal parts with a scene to be shot in the danger and compassion. You see muraled and gilded dining room it in his body, with that chest of the historic Peabody hotel in presented like a gift to the world, Memphis, Tennessee, it is enough like someone who is well accusfor the assembled fans and fihn tomed to the attentions of crew to see him in character, coswomen and the challenges of tumed down to his buffed fingermen. And most of all, you see it nails as a self-important proin his manner, which can go from secutor in the film version of a courtly gentleness to the promise of a fistfight: This is a man John Grisham's best-seller The Client. The onlookers might also who belongs to the hard, arid note that Jones is an actor who West Texas of his youth and will has accrued his share of fame, forever live there, no matter thanks to unforgettable roles in where he goes. The Executioner's Song, Coal That he happens to be on a Miner's Daughter, Lonesome Memphis movie set becomes Dove, and JFK. With Jones's purely incidental after just a few electrifying performance in The moments. Pushed to reveal the Jones as prosecutor Roy FoItrigg in The Client, based on the Fugitive (he won an Academy erudition he is known for among best-selling thriller by John Grisham. Award as best supporting achis friends, the Harvard-edutor)--a film whose domestic grosses are projected to reach a cated Jones fidgets. An impressive discourse on the ways in which his beloved T.S. Eliot influenced American art is very impressive $200 million-it is also possible to see him as a man experiencing a particular rite of passage. abruptly punctuated with "He's had an influence on me-and All the signs are there. Flashy upcoming roles: A vengeful I'm working." Jones is not a man you are likely to catch jawing prison warden in Quentin Tarantino's Natural Born Killers and with or confessing his sins to television talk-show hosts; these talents he lacks. The game will be played, but only on his terms. a heartbroken GI in Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth. Blessings from the media: The New York Times (TOMMY LEE JONES "At home," he allows, as he lets the first light escape from his SNARLS HIS WAY TO THE PINNACLE), the Los Angeles Times bottomless dark eyes, "we do value our individuality." (HOT ON THETRAIL WITH MR. JONES),and Time (HOT DAMN, HE'S GOOD). The usual plaudits from formidable movie direcll I'm gonna do is show up and do what I'm told," Jones tors: Stone calls his work in Heaven and Earth "a shattering instructs Client screenwriter Akiva Goldsman as they performance"; Andrew Davis, who directed Jones in The confer over a few lines in Jones's trailer. Some of the Fugitive, christened him the Southwestern Bogart. People and people on the set are worrying whether the scene to be shot the tabloids are sniffing around his private life ("His dad was a today moves quickly enough, but Jones is not one of them. The drunk who made his childhood hell," declares the National troublesome party in this case is an oyster, which prosecutor Enquirer). And so it goes, as the popular culture makes its Roy Foltrigg, played by Jones, wants FBI agent Jason McThune, played by J.T. Walsh, to hurry up and eat. The effort to claim him, as his fabled ragged edges are smoothed, as everyone grows accustomed to viewing him in the most coveted longer McThune plays with his food, the longer their quarry-a of American roles-that of major motion picture star. boy who is the key to solving the assassination of a U.S. But to see Jones in this way is to miss the point, to miss a truth senator-remains on the run. The problem, presented by that is about as well hidden as the pocked and rutted sunGoldsman with the soothing but intent manner of a doctor on stained skin that easily defeats his pancake makeup today. The rounds, is that the oyster may be slowing down the movie as well. Jones's lines are: "Just eat the damn thing. I want that kid truth is that in spite of a long and arduous journey from poverty to privilege to this level of success, in spite of playing such in court tomorrow. Get it in you and grab that child." Should characters as homicidal killers, haunted lawmen, and heartsick they be cut or changed to speed things up? Jones grins at husbands-all in a way that gives them their due-Tommy Lee Goldsman and prints "just do it" at the bottom of the page. Jones, at 48, is fundamentally unchanged. You hear it in his Goldsman grins back. voice, which is both rich and rough, clipped and drawly in the "Just eat the damn thing and have it run down your throat," Jones sneers on his way to the set, as he begins transforming manner of a good country preacher. You hear it in his choice of himself into Foltrigg. Dressed in a splendid double-breasted words, which are measured and can sometimes verge on the old-
A
suit and a glorious foulard tie, Jones moves forward with a prosecutor's cock-of-the-walk stride. He stops to accept greetings from fans and to exchange small talk with the crew, already broader and more loquacious than his normal self, convincing as someone whose future depends on the vicissitudes of judicial politics rather than those of Hollywood. Foltrigg does not seem out of place in the shadier regions of the Tommy Lee Jones repertoire; he is a bully and an opportunist, one of The Client's less-than-likable personalities. But author Grisham excels at plot, not character. It will be up to Jones to bring Foltrigg to life, and the way his character orders a man to eat an oyster is just as important as the way he tries a case. Jones takes his seat at a table in the center of the lavish restaurant set, which positions him right in the center of director Joel Schumacher's video monitor and, at this moment, the movie. The Client has Big Box Office Potential written all over it: Audiences should be kindly disposed toward the film, as it has major stars (Jones shares top billing with Susan Sarandon), a major director (Schumacher's credits include Flatliners and Falling Down), and a script based on a wildly successful book (Grisham's The Firm was also a huge movie hit). The Client might serve as lighter fare for Jones's artistic side, but it could prove more substantial for his commercial prospects. The better roles go not necessarily to the best actors but to those who can bring in the most money; though Jones has enjoyed critical success throughout his career, it wasn't until the financial success of Under Siege (which starred Steven Sea gal but was stolen by Jones) and The Fugitive that he proved he, too, could draw audiences in large numbers. For now, at least, everyone wants him. "I'm so thrilled he said yes," coos Schumacher, who looks like a cross between a rabbi and a Cherokee. "He makes everything work. He can make chicken salad out of chicken shit." Or oysters. Schumacher says of the mundane scene to come: "The ones where they murder your children are easy. These are the hardest to do." In subsequent rehearsals, Jones improvises, building on the language and the delivery of his few lines. He is accustomed to working this way. In The Fugitive he and director Andrew Davis converted deputy U.S. marshal Samuel Gerard from a loner to someone who thrives on the energy and loyalty of his own investigative team. "The supporting players could have been played by rubber gloves," says Jones, describing the original script. "The audience had more to identify with if these characters became human." So too with Foltrigg. You may despise him by the time Jones is done with him, but you will know him. Take one: (impatiently) "Stab at it with your fork and stick it down your throat. I want that kid in court and on the stand manana. Take two: (angrier ) "You know what I'm telling you? Stab it with your fork. Just eat the damn thing, McThune. Get it in your mouth! Don't you have something to do somewhere?" Take three: (just as angry, but colder; oyster remains impaled) "You hear what I'm tellin' you? Don't you have something
to do? Go wake somebody up." (Slams a salt shaker down for emphasis.) What is interesting about the scene is how alone Jones appears in it, or rather how alone he is with the character. In just a few takes, Foltrigg has come alive in several variations. Schumacher rarely intervenes, and Jones seems to be the only actor on the set who needs little to nothing from him. Other actors eye the director expectantly with the completion of each take; Jones simply moves on to the next. When Schumacher finally decides that there is, indeed, too much talk of oysters and not enough action, Jones does not mourn his lost line; in the grips of his imagination, he simply diverts his energy elsewhere. As the scene continues, a woman at the next table in the restaurant approaches Foltrigg for an autograph, and the surly prosecutor becomes momentarily flirtatious. In character, Jones signs the autograph agreeably as he has done in previous rehearsals, but then he broadly studies the actress's backside as she returns to her chair. "Sure is nice to see you," he improvises winningly, and the crew bursts into applause. The oyster is gone, but Jones has lost nothing. he media have painted Tommy Lee Jones as an anti-star star; they deride him for being a hostile interview subject while they laud him for abandoning Hollywood for the home in northeast San Antonio, Texas, he shares with his wife of 12 years, Kimberlea, and their two children, tenyear-old Austin and two-year-old Victoria. But Jones is no critic of the film industry; a mildly contemptuous comment about Hollywood produces a torrent of praise not just for Oliver Stone and Andrew Davis but for Terry Semel and Bob Daly, the current heads of Warner Bros. He has devoted his life to the pursuit of creativity within a commercial context-to him it is important not just to be famous but to know why. The better to decide what to do with it. Born in 1946 in San Saba, Texas, Jones spent his early life tied to the oil fields. His people had worked ranches in the area for generations, but his father bet on the future and became a roughneck. "When I went to work with my dad, I got to see a very big machine and the brave men working on it," Jones recalls. It was a go-to-sleep-in-one-town-wake-up-in-another kind of life, hard and cold as a blue norther in the desert. "We were poor as snakes," says one of Jones's cousins, country singer Boxcar Willie. The domestic drama of divorce and remarriage that was his parents' life Jones once described as "a psychically horrifying story." An only child, he had nothing but his dreams as comfort. It was something of a family joke that whenever guests came to visit, he packed a suitcase and attempted to leave with them. By the time the family moved to Midland, Texas, Jones was a difficult and angry boy who lived on the wrong side of town, a kid whose jo b one summer was working on a garbage truck. But he was also handsome and charming when he wanted to be, a natural with the girls and a natural on the athletic field, the keys to fame in that part of the world. "Football was a reason for living," Jones says. "It was
T
everything. I'd lie awake at night dream'ing of the day I could play." When he signed on in the seventh grade, he weighed only 44.5 kilograms. "Most people I played with were bigger than me. That made me faster, meaner," he says. American football gave his life a center and some much-needed discipline; when his parents threatened to take that away-when Jones's father took an oil-field job in Libya-the boy balked. He wanted to play, and he was interested in a girl who, like many children of wealthy Midlanders, was headed for Hockaday in Dallas, Texas. Jones got himself a scholarship to nearby. St. Mark's and, in the tenth grade, left home, finished with the past. Entertainment writers like to make much of the tall Texan's heading for Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the real change in Jones's life occurred at St. Mark's. "They should have thrown me away, but they didn't," he once told a close friend. St. Mark's in the early 1960s was a cultural oasis in a city and, for that matter, a state that was still harshly conservative, with little to no appreciation for an intellectual, much less an artistic life. Perhaps more than any of his fellow students who came from more-comfortable situations, Jones understood absolutely the size and scale of the opportunity that had been made available to him, and he took to the place with a passion that could only have been forged in earlier deprivation. "He came to St. Mark's with a street kid's knowledge of life," recalls one former teacher. "St. Mark's was more or less a shelter for kids from the battering that life gives them, but Tom arrived a battered kid. He knew what life was like out there. He had been aged by his background." At the school, Jones discovered a deep love of literature (to this day, when confronted with a word he does not recognize, he stops to look it up), a chance to hone his athletic skills, and, most important, the world of the stage. One day, while walking to his dorm, he overheard a rehearsal in progress, directed by a magical Englishman named Tony Vintcent. Jones walked into the theater and never walked out. In those days, the drama teacher was in charge of a department that attracted much of the city with its productions; there was nothing schoolboyish about them. It wasn't long before Jones was a featured actor. Just as he had understood the value of football as a path to liberation in Midland, so too did he find, within the world of St. Mark's, the path that led to the most acclaim. He was smart, determined, preternaturally competitive; he had mastered the art of appearing afraid of no one. The caption under one yearbook picture baldly asked, "Who needs God?" On scholarship at Harvard in the late 1960s-where, most people now know, he roomed with Vice President AI GoreJones continued to play football. An offensive lineman, he made all-Ivy and all-East and was all-American honorable mention, but his size precluded a career in professional sports. His future was decided: In what he later described to the Los Angeles Times as his happiest period in the theater, Jones performed everything from Shakespeare to Brecht in summer repertory with Stockard Channing (then at Radcliffe), John Lithgow (Harvard), and James Woods (Massachusetts In-
stitute of Technology). Even then he had an eroticism onstage that attracted both sexes; a director friend used to joke that he would always be able to sell tickets if he could get Jones to remove his shirt while performing.
I
nitially, Jones's road to success was not circuitous. After graduation he moved to New York, performing on the soap opera One Life to Live during the day and on and off Broadway at night. When he saw better roles going to actors, who were "more famous," he moved to Los Angeles in 1976, rented the home where Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, and went about getting himself on-screen. He had little trouble finding work-within months, he was featured in the pilot episode of Charlie's Angels-and soon landed his first starring role, in a Roger Corman picture called Jackson County Jail. In what would become something of a Jones specialty-thanks partly to his more-than-slightly-menacing good looks-he played Coley Blake, a sociopath with a heart of gold. HEIFERSARE JUSTFORFUN, BUTTOMMYLEEJONESIs PAIDTO KNOCK THE LADIESOFF THEIR FEET was the headline on a breathless People profile that appeared in 1978. By then Jones's seven-year marriage to Kate Lardner (the granddaughter of author Ring Lardner) had broken up, but he was well positioned on the Hollywood Hunk track. He had starred in The Amazing Howard Hughes on TV and had played a homicidal homicide detective alongside Faye Dunaway in Eyes of Laura Mars. For People, he showed off his calf-roping skills and his new girlfriend, model Lisa Taylor. "It's love," he told the magazine with typical gruffness. "There's no reason to keep it secret-nor is there any reason to go into detail." The roles kept coming, but it was a two-steps-forward-onestep-back kind of career for a person bent on becoming a star. He appeared in some stinkers (The Betsy), a few mediocres (Back Roads), and some films in which he could really show his range (The Executioner's Song, for which he won an Emmy, and Coal Miner's Daughter). Considering the bland handsomeness that much of Hollywood banks on, Jones's progress was something of an inspiration: He stayed in the game, even though for a star, his face was wrong, his accent was wrong, his manner was wrong. He exploited his best roles and didn't sleepwalk through the worst; he educated himself about screenwriting and camera lenses with a ferocity that would occur to only the most ambitious performers. And then he left. "Probably the most difficult times Tommy Lee had were the years he lived in Hollywood," says his friend Sissy Spacek, his costar in Coal Miner's Daughter and JFK. Along with a sinister black Porsche and California real estate investments, there were the predictable excesses of parties and alcohol. There was a slugfest on one set and an even more belligerent public stance. "Sometimes I've been drunk at the wrong time," he told People in a rare concession. "But who hasn't?" In 1980, after meeting San Antonio photographer Kimberlea Cloughley on the set of Back Roads, Jones had his worldly goods shipped back home; the couple married in 1981 and have remained in Texas ever since.
"That's probably the closest he when you're called on to be courageous." He continues has come to living the Hollyworking through the list mewood life, and it just didn't suit him at all," Kimberlea says of thodically-"generosity," "eduJones's sojourn in Southern cation," "some practical underCalifornia. "He tried that on, standing of faith"-and even and it just didn't fit." though he has described himself, he would insist otherwise. "I Fortunately, the work foldon't believe my work is about lowed him home. He desperme," he says. "I hope not." ately coveted the part of Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove and Literally, Jones is right. When beat out the likes of Richard the people closest to him brag on Harris and Burt Reynolds for him, he doesn't sound like he has the role. Jones's performance a thing in common with muras Call inspired Oliver Stone to derer Gary Gilmore, whom he cast him as Clay Shaw in JFK, portrayed in The Executioner's for which he received an AcadSong. Also, the fact that Jones emy Award nomination for has long been associated with best supporting actor. Nowheavies has more to do with adays Jones has grafted more Hollywood than with him. The A scene from Coal Miner's Daughter in which Loretta Lynn (Sissy than a little bit of Hollywood dispersal of movie roles is caSpacek) says good-bye to her twin daughters and to her husband Mooney glamour onto the world he Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones) as she leaves on a tour of one-night stands. pricious, depending on an actor's inhabits, but fame has meant popularity as well as his availmore to him than the usual opportunity to play better roles and ability, and it's awesomely conservative; it is much safer to match make more money: It has given him the chance to make his up Jones's rough-and-tumble features with tough guys than with peace with the place he came from. He pours his money into a romantic heroes. Still, it is possible to see his life in his art and to sprawling cattle ranch in San Saba (also the base for his see why, as he declared earlier, "the creative act is redemptive." extensive polo addiction). A play that he directed five years ago Jones is, after all, a man who cites as one of his favorite essays in San Antonio, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, still seems as T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." In it the important to him as many of his movie roles. When Al Gore English poet talks of the artist's self-sacrificial role as requiring was running on the Democratic ticket, Jones loyally rode the "a continual extinction of personality." It is a demand oddly campaign bus from San Antonio to Austin, Texas. Should a compatible with the harrowing home life of a poor West Texas Texas organization invite him to speak, Jones is there with a boy-not the public life of the football star, but the private flawless text, playing both the appreciative star and, in some history ofa child who had to make his own way. When Loretta oddly over-prepared way, the restless, unsure boy who still has Lynn's husband, Mooney, sadly twiddles a beer bottle in Coal to prove himself. That vigilance endures, fame or no. "There's Miner's Daughter, when Sam Gerard brusquely but affecplenty of ranches I can go to and get a job," he says. "I can ride tionately tells his team to "listen up" in The Fugitive, each and most anything, I know cattle, I can do most things you'd expect every time Woodrow Call pushes love away in Lonesome a cowboy to do, and I'm not afraid to work. Even if you're my Dove-if you know the world of West Texas, you will find it in age and have a wife and two children, there are some places that those people as imagined by Tommy Lee Jones. will give you a place to live." Maybe he was acting when he Streetwise and intuitive, Jones taught himself to know people delivered these lines, and maybe he wasn't. better than they know themselves. Absorbing the lesson that he was nothing, he learned to make something of that by dissolving himself into the roles of others. St. Mark's, Harvard, hat makes a good actor?" Tommy Lee Jones asks, repeating the question. Riding to the set in the back Hollywood-the years of study and discipline rest on that seat of a Lincoln, Jones shifts his focus as the lush foundation. "He approaches a character on a gut level and on Tennessee countryside whizzes by. "Desire is the first ingredient. an intellectual level," says Sissy Spacek. "He just crawls inside Hard work follows desire, and the motivation to do something 'em. Tommy Lee is very strong physically, mentally, emoabout it all day, every day." He pauses thoughtfully, settling tionally, and intellectually. All these things add to his strength into the subject as he puts his feet up, legs splayed, over the front as an actor. He has enormous intensity and great compassion. seat. Something about his posture suggests that there should be a He has all that deep well to draw from." 0 beer can between his legs, and boots, instead of Foltrigg's dress shoes, on his feet. "Actors need to be pretty well fearless," he About the Author: Mimi Swartz, afreelancer, has writtenfor magazines continues, "able to achieve a fearless state. The moment will come such as Seventeen, Life, Mademoiselle, and Vanity Fair.
W
Journalism in a New World Disorder Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism. At least one sector of the U.S. press is suffering from a serious case of obsoles- . cence. With the defense industry, armed forces, and the espionage business shrinking, many correspondents in the military/ security field require difficult retraining in more relevant specialties. So do yesterday's Kremlinologists. Gone are the days when clues to Moscow politics could be read in the lineup atop Lenin's A former diplomat and editor-intomb and between the lines of the official chief of Time magazine says press; when intrigues, while shadowy, fol- journalists need to find a new role lowed certain logical patterns. Now the in a world that has become Russian political scene is more open but more complex-no longer divided chaotic, with most familiar signpostsbetween East and West, but left/right, radical/conservative, communist/nationalist-having lost most of marked by unfamiliar links and their meaning. conflicts and an understanding But the problem is much larger. The that people move events press is faced with at least six new factors: independently of governments. History, geography, global optic, journalistic agenda, sensibility, and audience. The new history is really ancient hissimply using the catchall label "ancient" tory newly discovered. Journalists are is intellectually lazy. Like other Ameritaking crash courses in the bloodcans, journalists have often neglected the drenched background of Serbs, Croats, study of history; they have much remedial Bosnians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis. work to do in trying to understand who Two social scientists, Susanne Hoeber did what to whom, why, and when-and Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, mainwho did it first. tained in The New Republic that the "anAmerican history itself is not as remote cient hatreds" constantly mentioned in from this condition as one might think. reporting of strife from the Balkans to Understanding President Woodrow WilIndia are really new hatreds instilled by son's role in the dissolution of the AustroHungarian empire at the end of World contemporary politicians. The argument is only partly convincing at best, but the War I and the promotion of the doublewriters have a point when they say that edged concept of self-determination is
pertinent to much of the evening news. The new geography involves the republics of the former Soviet Union and the remains of Yugoslavia. It brings with it a fresh cast of characters. Just as the U.S. State Department must appoint ambassadors to many of these self-created states, the press must send correspondents. But for private-sector publishers and broadcasters, the financial strain is serious, the logistical problems horrendous. Many news organizations are forced to "parachute" correspondents into these places for stints of a few days or weeks, wi th the usual risk of superficiali ty that comes with quick reporting. Moreover, despite the sweep of democracy in former communist countries, there are stubborn rearguard actions against press freedom and access by politicians who do not understand--or understand only too well-the role of independent journalism. Most major news organizations have actually coped well, given the difficulties and dangers. In a piece about covering the Balkan wars, a reporter for The New Yorker has described how "often we barely finish hiding one accreditation (press pass) when it is time to fish out a totally different one!" In the fighting to date, at least 30 journalists have been killed in the former Yugoslavia. The new global optic results from the disappearance of the bipolar world. The conflict with communism prompted a great Western system of alliances; even the creation of the European Community was partly a defensive effort against communism. Among the first to see the difficulties arising from the absence of that unifying force was then-Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who in 1989 said almost wistfully that the Cold War, for all its risks, "was characterized by
a remarkably stable and predictable set of relationships among the great powers." He might have been speaking as an editor. The superpowers' prolonged confrontation furnished an organizing principle for analysis. Virtually every foreign policy move and world event, from a coup in Central America to cultural legislation in France, was to a great extent judged by its relation to the Cold War. Journalisls often criticized this view as oversimple, but they usually followed it. The press is now searching for a different organizing principle-North-South tensions, religion versus secularism, nationalism versus internationalism. These formulations are accurate enough but none by itself offers a satisfactory pattern. The new agenda consists, first of all, of some long-familiar topics that have been transformed by events and must be treated with fresh insight. In economics, the new forces of the information society are sweeping across national boundaries and eroding sovereignty; they are also reshaping standard concepts, such as capital and labor, making much of the old economic vocabulary used by the press misleading. In less developed areas, old patterns of reform, revolution, and reaction have begun to change, and journalists are finding that the move toward free markets and democracy is complex and sometimes deceptive. Crucial among the newer topics journalism must address are tribalism and ethnic self-assertion. phenomena about which social scientists, let alone reporters, know little; likewise with religion, a subject most journalists have found unsettling ever since it wandered from the Sunday religion section to the front page. Religious wars, large and small, seem increasingly likely in the decades ahead. Time magazine [last year] tied together in one cover package the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City that led to the arrest of Muslim fundamentalists, the siege in Texas ofa group of cultists whose leader apparently thought he was a messiah, and the conflict between Muslims and Christians in Bosnia. This link was legitimate but fragile, because these were very different mani-
festations of "religion." Not every Muslim fundamentalist wants to blow up New York City, and few Christian fundamentalists belong to cults ready for Armageddon. The press must discuss such distinctions knowledgeably and conscientiously. The new sensibility is best understood if one recalls how the present period started, how the Soviet empire collapsed. The press by and large was surprised by these momentous events. So was practically everyone else. Some critics of the press maintain tha t one significant reason journalists were unprepared is that they paid too much attention to governments and officials. They did not pay enough attention to "civil society"-the many forces and people who move events quite independently of governments. The new sensibility will require avoiding such mistakes, which may not be as simple as it sounds. Robert Karl Manoff, who heads the New York University Center for War, Peace and the New Media, invokes the German philosopher Karl Hegel (1770-1831) to underline this point. Hegel believed in Spirit as the driving force of history. The press as a whole, argues Manoff, is poorly equipped to deal with Spirit, having dwelled for too long on the State as the final arbiter of human affairs. What is needed now from the press is a form of self-consciousness through which the world can seize the new opportunities for freedom. A tall and perhaps impossible order for the press. Unlike historian Francis Fukuyama, who also noted the work of Hegel, Manoff does not proclaim the end of history, but the end of journalism (by which he means, one hopes, only journalism as we know it). The audience is new in the sense that its receptivity to news has changed. Americans, like most people, are not very interested in foreign affairs unless they perceive the national interest to be involved. The Cold War outlook could turn anything into an issue of national interest if communism was somehow implicated. That easy link is gone. As James Woolsey, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency recently put it, the big dragon may have been slain, but the world is still full of poisonous snakes. How does the
press explain where the snakes lurk and why they are dangerous? It will not be easy to do, unless there is an increase of blatantly hostile acts against the West, such as terrorism by groups from abroad. Even so, how does the press relate national interest to more or less obscure civil wars in remote areas, to communal strife in India, corruption in Brazil, AIDS in Zaire, or overpopulation worldwide? How does it make clear to the public (and to some of its own) that the old dividing line between foreign and domestic affairs is getting ever thinner? To the extent that it can be done at all, it will take all the skills of reporting, writing, and reasoning, plus a few tricks of the trade usually described under the heading of "human interest." That often means an appeal to terror and pity, the stuff of tragedy (and sensationalism). In an earlier era of satellite transmission in 1977, American correspondents managed joint interviews with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sad at; during the talk Sadat first made his historic offer to go to Jerusalem, if invited. The late Clare Boothe Luce, an editor and ambassador, once observed that TV journalism was replacing diplomacy. That is even truer today, not necessarily through anything as conventional as interviews, but thanks to instantaneously transmitted images that now have even greater impact than they did during the Vietnam War. It is the heartrending television pictures of starvation (the sort of pictures one never used to see from many other zones of famine and slaughter around the world) that helped persuade Americans to police the tribal wars and banditry in Somalia. The episode illustrates the tremendous and growing responsibility of the media in exercising their ability, often haphazardly used, to stir the emotions. The ability to stir reason, however, lags behind. The press is up against another phenomenon that did not result from the end of the Cold War, but partly caused it. By wide consensus, a major reason for the Soviet Union's collapse was its inability to control information and insulate its people from outside messages and signals. Ideas and
images were not delivered solely by the officially sanctioned Soviet outlets, but by daring people with fairly primitive technology, including mimeograph machines and telephones. Technology worldwide is getting less primitive and more widespread. The world has entered, it has been said, an age of terrorists with fax machines and guerrillas with software. Something similar is happening in the United States. The forces of information are bursting through the conventional bounds, beyond the control of the established media. Independent [presidential] candidate Ross Perot was, in a sense, a guerrilla with software. In the 1992 election campaign, he used the latest computer, telephone, and electronic technology to assemble a vast organization in a stunningly short time. He transmitted his message through call-in radio and television shows, which are major new carriers of public anger and favor. If the "electronic town meeting" does not exist yet, it is certainly feasible, evoking the highly unsettling vision of instant referendums on every conceivable issue. Americans will soon have television cable systems with hundreds of channels, hungry for program fare. There will be many services bringing us constantly close to the action, including politics at every level. Telephone companies may get into the information business. The traditional media will lose even more of their role as mediators between events and the public. In short, the force that was instrumental in bringing down the Berlin Wall is likely to bring down many walls in American society. Amid this bewildering welter of comm unication, who will pay attention, to what, and how carefully? The sifting of truth from falsehood, fact from propaganda, sentiment from argument will be even more difficult than before. It will not be the end of journalism, surely, but in many ways the beginning of a new one. 0 About the Author: Henry A. Grunwald was editor-in-chief of Time magazine from 1979 to 1987 and served as Ambassador to AUSTria, The counTry of his birTh, from 1988 To 1990.
u.s.
An Interview With SUZANNE B. LEVINE
Reporters' Journal During her visit to India a few months ago, Suzanne Levine, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, talked with SPAN about her influential publication and issues facing the American press. Presented here is an adapted version of the interview.
QUESTION: To begin, please tell us something about your journal and your association with Columbia University. SUZANNE B. LEVINE: Well, the Columbia Journalism Review was started in 1961. The dean of Columbia School of Journalism is the publisher of the magazine and our losses are borne by the school. Otherwise we are completely independent. Our articles are all freelance. To their dismay, we hardly ever use articles by members of the faculty. Our circulation is about 31,000. Working journalists comprise about 78 percent of that figure. We try to cover the universe of the working press. This includes everything from working conditions, eye strain and injuries from working at computers-something that is becoming an epidemic in the United States-to flexible work hours and the ethical issues in the performance of the press. We regularly evaluate coverage of some event like the GATT talks. And we try to zero in on the experiences of individual journalists to the extent that other journalists can learn from them. Our most popular feature is called Darts and Laurels. How do you put that feature together? That's the section where we single out good performances (Laurels) and bad performances (Darts). Generally, we discover the Laurels in our review of the media, and the Darts come to us via a very active underground that tips us off to these things. Frequently, the tipster is an injured party. Half the job of checking these out is to figure out whose hidden agenda is at work. People are wildly distressed when they get a Dart. The press always comes in for scrutiny after an election campaign. What conclusions did you draw from the coverage of the 1992 U.S. elections? Well, the major phenomenon was the way in which the candidates bypassed the press. The emergence of the talk show as a forum for public discourse was really fascinating. It was not a totally unwarranted slight of the press. The press made a lot of promises after the previous campaign that it was going to take the high road in the future and pursue the issues and all that. Then they went crazy over the Gennifer Flowers story. It was ridiculous. The women's issues were very interesting. I was editor of Ms., a feminist magazine, for a long time. So I was fascinated to watch the gender gap emerge dramatically, and to watch the press try to cope with Hillary Clinton. It's still fascinating to watch. The thing that continues to fascinate us editorially is the alienation of the public from ¡the press. It hasn't gotten better. How is this alienation being expressed? Well, there's always Janet Malcolm. She wrote an article in The New Yorker several years ago that continues to resonate, saying that
journalists are basically always taking advantage of people. Every time journalists interview somebody, they are being manipulative, basically doing something corrupt. This brought tremendous response. In the meantime, she was also involved in a lawsuit at The New Yorker, accused of fabricating quotes. She says she didn't fabricate quotes. She just conveniently put pieces together from different interviews and found better words for what people were saying. So, she has become sort of a lightning rod for many of the issues in journalism. Where do you draw the line on what you're going to cover in the Columbia Journalism Review?The whole area of news and entertainment is becoming blurry, particularly in radio and television, with their discussion and interview shows such as Oprah, Donahue, and Larry King, which can be seen in India via cable systems. We're always trying to draw that line. The Donahue television show I think he does important is an interesting example. Although journalism, there's always somebody who pipes up and says he's not a journalist. Part of our job is to help us all understand the difference between a journalist and an entertainer, what is expected of a journalist, and why some of these talk shows are not journalism, especially in connection with what's happening politically. The object of many such shows is not to really probe, but to stir things up and get headlines. What are the implications for newspapers and magazines that are accessible via computer? The whole question of electronic journalism is becoming increasingly important. Newsweek has a CD-ROM addition and Time has gone on-line, so that people can get Time magazine the day before the printed copy comes out. And what's interesting, in terms of journalistic judgment, is you'll soon be able to look at the research the journalist has compiled. For example, you could look at the entire interview he's done. Say, I interview you and publish half or even one-tenth of that. People really want to know what else you said. They push a button and they can see the whole interview. They can see the questions I asked, and can make judgments about whether I was fair in excerpting that. So a lot of the secrets of journalism will be there in the open. Tell us about your long association with Ms. What were the circumstances that led you to join the magazine? Ms. needed a managing editor and there weren't many women doing that kind of job at that time. So, I came into the women's movement basically through ajob opportunity, but very quickly it became my life. I wish every journalist the experience of working with material that is at the same moment changing his or her life. It was an incredibly exhilarating 17 years. The purpose of the magazine was twofold: One was to report news that wasn't being reported about women and to correct misconceptions where it was being reported. The other was to create a forum for women's experiences. Has the status of women in journalism in America improved? Certainly things have improved. For one thing, 55 to 60 percent of the students in journalism schools are women. If you look at any news program, you see women on camera. One day some months ago, every byline on the front page of The New York Times was that of a woman. And two major photographs were by women. That's a milestone of some kind. What hasn't changed is salary. Women have not reached parity with men in salaries. Men are still making 40 percent more than what women are making. Then there is the question of the level of power. For example, there's no woman at the head of any major
media company. Katharine Graham was, but she has now handed it (the Washington Post) over to one of her sons, not her daughter (laughter). So the seats of power still are not open to women. But whether that's because it's taking a while to come through the system or whether it's still resisted by men is not clear-probably a combination of both. How much attention do you pay to the international press? We try very hard to cover the international press. I think we are probably the only publication that does that. Although we did a survey which showed that our readers were not so interested, we will continue to cover the international press anyway. We did a story about Doordarshan sometime back. We'd do more if we came across stories that would be good for us. We count on the kindness of strangers to alert us about what's going on out here. Is the good old concept of objective reporting losing ground to comment and opinion in newspapers? I think there's a much more clear distinction between reporting and comment. On the surface there's always the question of what the reporter's intentions are. Beneath the surface, because so much news is available to people on television, newspapers are constantly trying to find ways, in a more feature kind of writing, to enlarge the storyto give background information or to zero in on a character or anecdote or some trend. Whom you choose to profile in a story, or what conclusions you choose to draw from a .trend story, are subtle ways that judgments are being made, opinions being projected. It's very complicated. What fascinates me about journalism is to try and pinpoint which judgments are being made and who's making them and how they affect the news that is told to the public. There are so many stops along the way. It's not only reporters. It's the editors, the publishers, the influen~e of advertisers, and politics. How does advertising affect reporting? Well, in recent years, because of a bad economy, advertisers have been hard to come by. And I think journalists have been under a lot of pressure by their publishers. They say: "Listen, we've got to work together to save our publication." That means everything from writing supportive stories-that's one extreme-to not writing negative stories, which is harder to detect. Certainly every editor I know in the magazine business, and I think it's comparable in newspapers, has had an experience where publishers ha.ye said something like: ''I'm not going to tell you not to run this story, but I'm just going to tell you that we're going to lose 80,000 dollars in advertising. If you feel it's that important then I'm certainly going to stand behind you." It makes you think twice. The American press by and large seems oblivious to the goings-on in the Third World, unless they have something to do with man-made or natural calamities. Don't you think that the United States should devote more time and space to news from the developing countries? Absolutely, absolutely. I think that's going to happen. It has been easy for the press, just like it has been easy for politicians, to determine who the good guys are and who the bad guys are in Cold War terms. It's not possible any more to tell a story of the world without doing some reporting and background work. I mean now that the slate is kind of clean and we need to reach out again, I think we can do it with a little more sophistication. America is desperately in need of understanding how the world works. I think the best American journalists actually are the ones who have been foreign correspondents. They've got a real challenge, curiosity. and willingness to work. 0
of the line technology the
b'enefits
of millions
and innovation; of dollars
Xerox is a multimillion dollar cOlporatioh anois not available for 40 paise.
Xerox is not another word for photocopying.
you reap of ongoing
\$!I
ith ethnic strife raging from Bosnia to Rwanda, Somalia to Cambodia, Afghanistan to any number of West em cities, is there anything good to be said for tribalism? Most definitely yes, says Joel Kotkin, who documents the economic success of tribal diasporas down through history and trumpets their potential for bringing prosperity to today's world. In Tribes: Holl' Race, Religion and Idenrity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, published last year by Random House, Kotkin discusses in depth the experiences of five major groups-the Jews, British, Chinese, Japanese, and Indians-against this thesis: "As the conventional barriers of nationstates and regions become less meaningful under the weight of global economic forces, it is likely such dispersed peoples-and their worldwide business and cultural networkswill increasingly shape the economic destiny of mankind." They will wield considerable power through suc:h "cosmopolitan mechanisms" as the multinational corporation and the financial conglomerate. Kotkin, an international fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Business and Management in Malibu, California, recounts the influence and accomplishments of each group, or global tribe. The Jews, widely dispersed for millennia, have been instrumental in establishing networks of transnational business. Great Britain and its progenies-the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-make up the Anglo-American tribe, which controls by far the most foreign investment in the world and accounts for 13 of the world's 15 largest companies. The Japanese Tribes: HOlt" Race, Religion and JdenlilY Delermine Success in (he New Global Economy, Random House, New York, 1993, 343 pp., $24.
have achieved a "diaspora by design," driven by a need to develop markets abroad and relieve the crush of population at home. Overseas Chinese represent the fastest-growing economic force in the world; their financial centers in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have huge foreign reserves. Indians, the most recent to emerge of the major global tribes, are positioned to become the world's next great economic force. Up to this point in history, the Anglo-American tribe has been the most consequential. "Even where American or British power has all but evaporated," Kotkin writes, "Anglo-American standards of business behavior and cultural forms, as well as the English language, remain preeminent." He attributes the tribe's ascendancy to the influence of Calvinism, which, in addition to its cultural and moral traditions, "fostered attitudes conducive both to trade and to an interest in the acquisition of technical knowledge." But that may be coming to an end. Kotkin believes the tribe's influence is waning because many of its core values-such as probity, competitive will, thrift, and hard work-have eroded over the past few decades. "Many of these vital ethical principles and attitudes are today more evident among the emerging global tribes from Asia," he says. "These ascendant ethnic groups-notably the Japanese, Chinese, and Indians-have successfully exploited the commercial pathways created by the Anglo-
Americans with often devastating success." As an example of this, Kotkin profiles Indianborn Vinny Gupta in the chapter titled "The New Calvinists," an excerpt from which begins on the following page. "In a manner perhaps most reminiscent of the Jews before the establishment of the state ofIsrael," Kotkin writes, "the Indian diaspora has concentrated on those fields where global extension, a solid ethic of hard work and communal self-help, and the ability to think and adapt quickly to changing economic conditions are critical advantages." Kotkin points accurately not to one Indian diaspora but to many, based on the country's vast array of castes and ethnic and religious groups. "In this sense, the Indians are best understood, at least to date, as a series of 'tribes within tribes,' where the primary loyalties and networks often follow narrow sectarian lines rather than a single overarching Indian identity." The collapse of Western and Soviet imperialism, increasing concern for religion and ethnicity, and the increasingly global nature of trade and commerce are giving rise to the growth and influence of many smaller tribes as well, Kotkin says. Palestinians, Koreans, Mormons, and Armenians are among the several that he describes. Some reviewers have criticized Kotkin for failing to adequately support one or more of his conclusions. For instance, Peter L. Berger, the distinguished sociologist and author from Boston University, wrote: "Put simply, both in his list of global tribes and in his arguments about their importance, Kotkin keeps mixing apples and oranges. Though his book has some value in drawing attention to a number of valid issues often ignored by professional analysts of the international economy, it falls far short of an adequate discussion of these issues." It is curious that in so much discussion of global commercial networks, scarcely any mention is made of regional trading organizations, and no mention whatsoever of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). Kotkin, who has published two previous books, The Third Cenrury and California, Inc., and frequently contributes articles on domestic and global economic issues to newspapers and magazines, relies heavily on second-hand sources and engaging anecdotes to tell his story, not on rigorous formal research and analysis. One of the persuasively engaging stories is
that of the Lalvani brothers. Gulu and Pratap. As young immigrants in London. they met a pair of Jewish brothers who were selling costumejewelry. Gulu and Pratap took out a loan and purchased wholesale jewelry from family contacts in Hong Kong, selling them at great profit to the Jews. The Lalvanis soon moved into other consumer products and were
among the first to distribute Japanese transistor radios in Europe. "The Japanese had the produ'ct~ but they also had problems with language, market access, and distribution. Lalvani, and his network of Sindhi friends across the Continent, who had been selling everything from pearls to garments, knew the markets. The Japanese
made the goods, the Indians provided the channels. and they both made money selling European consumers the product.¡¡ One story among many in this informative, breezy, occasionally redundant account of a world being woven together, not split asunder, by tribal groups acting in their own self interests. 0
:'~~:c~--------------------'----'~----G;J
~
---------------------------------------
INÂŽW
111 iillJ
-------~--------------~ --------------------------------
ortheastern Ohio is classic America, a land of rolling green hills, well-tended Amish farms, and old redbrick industrial towns whose best times seem largely ~ past. Yet where many have seen only the fading of a great industrial tradition, Vinny Gupta looked out upon a vista of opportunity and renewal. "The fundamental thing is that by and large people in America have forgotten what the next world can be. They think luxury is a birthright," the Indian-born entrepreneur said in his spartan office in the old Ohio industrial town of Canton. "The only way it's going to go ahead is changing the way business is done. You have to bring back the ethics that there used to be." For Vinny Gupta, these "ethics" are not the stuff of parental scolding but the foundation of business principles that have helped him turn around three failing Midwestern foundries. In the past, one might think of the values proposed by Gupta as typical of Max Weber's "Calvinistic diaspora"-epitomized by thrift, the willingness to defer gratification, and single-minded devotion to building an enterprise. Today, however, one is more likely to hear such archetypical attitudes from resourceful Hindus, or refugees from Southeast Asia, than from "natives" who inherited their wealth. Vinny Gupta first arrived at Michigan Tech during the early I970s, intent on learning the latest about industrial technologies. After graduation, he planned to return to India, hoping to lend his newfound expertise to his family's small steel business. But Nita, his wife, who had waited patiently in Bombay for him to return, also wanted to experience life in America. At first, the reality probably didn't seem so promising. Arriving back in 1975, Gupta's promised fellowship at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland was delayed, leaving him with no means of support. The young couple survived largely on handouts from Indian friends; schoolmates loaned them cars
-------------
and even arranged for credit cards. Nita added to the family's finances by cleaning houses in upscale Shaker Heights. something she kept secret from her husband for over six months. Since she wouldn't spend money on boots, she often trudged through the Midwestern snow in slippers. These experiences, and the hostility, even outright racism, Gupta encountered in the corporate world strengthened his resolve. In one case, when he was working for Gould Corporation, helping to turn around several of its troubled foundries, he was suddenly ordered to help smooth a sale to a subsidiary of the McGraw Edison company_ Years later, Gupta recalls: They came in with a show to tell us how good they were. how big they were. So I asked them. "You say how good you are. So I want to know, are you making money?" They hated me for that. The president of the division later came up to me and said, "How are you doing, elephant boy?" Now, no one calls me elephant boy, not even my father.
Yet behind the racist bravado, Gupta noted as well an erosion of the old industrial values the British and Americans had once so confidently employed to dominate the world. As a metallurgist at plants in Wisconsin and Saint Louis, he saw an industry dominated by conglomerates who, to a large extent, were either feverishly getting out of the business or milking their foundries dry_ Whether at Gould or later, at Condec, another conglomerate, Gupta saw "the hotshots in their corporate jets" as fundamentally disinterested in the basic operation of their businesses. Condec, based in Connecticut, controlled the Orrville, Ohio, foundry where Gupta worked as general manager. The old plant was just one of several businesses that included more highly prized operations in robotics, power-control devices, and military electronics. "The managers in Connecticut didn't know anything about the business," Gupta, a short 40-year-old with thinning black-gray hair, recalls. "You'd go to these meetings in Connecticut and you'd go into the dining roomeveryone had one of those beepers-and I'd get to spend ten
Vinn)' Gupra poses with employees aT Ohio Cast Products, one of three aging foundries that he purchased and turned around.
make his mark and employ his approach on a mill no one wanted. Using his own savings, a long-term note from Condec, and cash from Cincinnati investor Jerry Pollack and some Indian businessmen, he took a majority interest in the plant. Finally in control, Gupta proceeded to do all the things that previously he could not push through Condec management. He cleaned up the plant, often taking up the broom himself. Rather than "milk" the operation, he invested when necessary in new machinery and, wherever possible, found economical ways to purchase raw materials and processing equipment. From the time he bought the facility in 1984 until 1991, sales at Gupta's new company, renamed Technocast, soared from under $2 million to near $10 million. Productivity among the plant's 125 employees improved fourfold and quality improved to the point where the company has gained a lengthy list of new, top-drawer customers for its castings. Subsequently, Gupta bought two other plants, one in Michigan and another in Ohio, where he is attempting to duplicate his previous success. "The way I see it, foundries are dirty work," remarked the casually dressed Gupta, walking through his recently purchased century-old Ohio foundry. "The rationale I see is that having an education in a dirty business is a unique skill. A lot of educated people don't want to work in a dirty business."
minutes talking business and they'd spend two-and-a-half hours eating lunch. They were talking about scuba diving and what they'd do on their vacations." By the early 1980s, Condec was under financial attack by Bill Farley's orthwest Industries and was scrambling for cash. Orrville. which was losing a quarter of a million dollars annually, seemed ripe for closing. Gupta saw an opportunity to
The movement of newcomers such as Vinny Gupta to the United States reflects the growing influence of commercially and technically gifted people from Asia on the Anglo-American metropolis. Not since the mass movement of Europeans into North America, South Africa, and Oceania-what historian Brinley Thomas has called "the great re-shuffie"-has there
been such a movement of global tribes from one region of the world to another. Like the British and the Jews in their time, these new immigrants bring along with them a common ethos of discipline, work ethic, and frugality-a sort of Asiatic form of Calvinism. Among Indians, the roots lie within a strong family system and a predisposition to maintain traditional values and Japanese, Chinese, Korelinkages. Among East Asians-the ans-Confucianist value systems provide some of the basic attitudinal elements that so characterized the Calvinists of the early Anglo-American industrial revolution. "There is a value congruence," notes Korean sociologist Illsoo Kim, "between Confucianism and the Protestant ethic in the sense that both are directed toward self-control and self-abnegation." Like the Jews, Scots, and dissenters, as sociologist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, such migrating Asians have been forced by their "precarious" existence as outsiders and immigrants to practice thrift. In the classic Calvinist mold of Benjamin Franklin, they often willingly eschew immediate pleasure in order to own property or found a business, often raising their capital among kinsmen and connections from home. As one Pakistani real estate agent in northern England explained: "Why pay rent for property that can never be yours? Better to save money and buy a house, so you can also live in it and also make more money." Many of these Asians have used their entrepreneurial and professional skills to rise up through the supposedly impassable barriers of the British class system. Indian and Pakistani males in Britain have a 60 percent higher rate of self-employment than their white counterparts and a 300 percent higher rate than other nonwhite immigrants. They also account for a disproportionate share of managers and professionals among the British working population. David Cooksey, a close adviser to the Conservative party and chairman of Advent International, Britain's leading venture capital firm, notes: The British have reached the point where they want social status first but if you look at the immigrants, they've had to fight for their place. The need to succeed was burned out of the Brits. The immigrants still keep the fires burning. To a remarkable extent, these efforts have had the desired results. During the 1970s Indians and Pakistanis raised their class status three times more often than either whites or other immigrants. Their commitment to enterprise often would not compare unfavorably with that of the English Rothschilds, or a Victorian businessman attending a Samuel Smiles lecture in mid-19th-century Leeds. "You have to understand," says Sudhir Mulji of the Great Eastern Shipping Company, "how much Indian businessmen love business. It isn't just their work, it's a way of life, it's their passion." As happened with the Jews in Europe and America, difficulties associated with being an immigrant-and an ethnic outsider-help shape such entrepreneurial attitudes. Almost by definition, the immigrant faces an uncertain and unfamiliar world, often playing by unfamiliar codes of behavior and organization. And within most societies in the West, their
welcome has often been less than enthusiastic. In the 1970s and 1980s British hostility to new Asian immigrants intensified, and nonwhite immigrants turned, as two British experts put it, from "the object of public acclaim" to "public enemies." A 1990 survey found Asians 50 times more likely to be victims of violent attacks than whites. A similar process has taken place in the nations of the British diaspora. By the late 1980s, Australian liberal leader John Howard made public his concern over a possible loss of "social cohesion" from an influx of too many Asians. According to a 1991 poll, nearly two out of three Australians favored curtailing or stopping all immigration. On the West Coast of North America, where the Asian population more than tripled in the two decades between 1970 and 1990, fears of rising immigration incited outright hostility. In Vancouver [Canada], where the massive influx of Hong Kong Chinese has led some locals to rename their city HongCouver, the newcomers have been blamed for everything from rising real estate values to the denuding of old-growth forests. The intensity of opposition to immigration is, if anything, even greater farther south, in California, the region most deeply affected by Asian trade, capital, and immigration flows. By January of 1989, 57 percent of all Southern Californians felt there were "too many" immigrants in the region, where within 20 years the majority of the population will be Asian or Latino. Fears over economic competition, gangs, and environmental impacts from immigration have led to mounting tensions between the region's bewildering assortment of ethnic groups. Such prejudices influence the behavior of even well-educated Asians, who often feel their careers are limited by a "glass ceiling" that restricts their mobility beyond strictly technical jobs. Indeed, according to one 1985 study, Asians accounted for three times as many professionals and technicians as managers. Indian-born professionals, according to a study by Alka Saberwal of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, earn some 17 percent less than their similarly qualified American-born counterparts. British-born professionals, she points out, earn only four percent less. As a result, rather than seek acceptance within the established order, many such immigrants create a controllable space outside, drawing upon family and culture as resources in the new environment. In the immigrant generation particularly, many of these ethnic businesspeople develop what UCLA [University of Calif ornia at Los Angeles] researcher Ivan Light has called "entrepreneurial collectivism." Rotating credit associations among Japanese and Chinese, kye among Koreans, and the susus of West Indians all help overcome discrimination or lack of familiarity with local conditions. These ethnic businesses often operate in networks, with shops and other businesses passing from one member of the group to another, keeping the enterprise, so to speak, "in the family." Nearly 30 percent of Koreans in Los Angeles in the 1980s, for instance, found jobs in firms run by other Koreans, although the group accounted for barely one percent of the enterprises in the region. 0
~
ORDER FORM
Position/Designation
To: SPAN Magazine Subscription Post Box 213, New Delhi 110001
send the next 12 issues of SPAN for Rs. 120 (Rs. 110 for students)
nAl\. T "I S£1li Please Name Present Address
I
I"
checks, please.)
n 0
Ui
(I
J C'
l.U
:::.
z
~
W
c(
-J
~ ~ .z
Service, to:
"~"",
W
0
:;. cI.
1U V)
~
~
~
Q~ 0
Z
0
.:
oL
z
~
~ ~
w \9
::>
'"'
"
lu ::>
C.
l!J
U
f- -«" ::l: Lu lu rcD
V\
l:""
~ ~
':.
Il_ 1 0 ~
I
0 ~
I
\
.~ "-
'E
E 0 <.':
1'::
~
0
1
~ '"
e_l 8
~
a-
-i
CHANGE OF ADDRESS FORM
Position/Designation
In case of a change in your address, please fill auf the form below; also atlach the ad· dress label from a recent SPAN envelope. Since four to SIX weeks are needed to process a change of address, please lei us know about any change promptly.
Name Present Address
I
~
l/)
'~
J
I \g LI~ @
~.
'C
"fr ""
":i
<.>
~ ...:::
'"
.::;
EO
<1-)
g:
~
v ..c f-
Z
~
'"<; >-
v
i
>::: '" ~ >::: ~ 'N~ gJ,
'EO"
."l•...
-:::'"
a
EO
"" EO
a
'" ~
~'" ~
"l
.6'
::>: •.... '" ;i ,,;
~
Ci
'" g,o C>. .~
>:::
'"
EO
~
'" ;;;
/
~
~
r./)
~
~
~
~
UQ
~
""
tenclose payment of 0 Rs. 1200Rs. 110in lavorof SPAN magazine by 0 AIC Payee Check 0 Bank Draft 0 Postal Order 0 Money
~J
'N
~ ~
..
~) :E
~
~~ o~ OIl
» 0 .0>:s c v .~ z Of-
~~ ~ ~
a-
«,,)
~ "-.~
~)
-~ "-. a '" •...
"<J:
"l _ '" a ""
C
2
Order (receipt enclosed). Check 0 (Add Rs. 5 on outstation
~'
~>
~
EO-:::
<.':
0
i'
~ ,~ <.> ~ '" ::: '"
a '"
:::
-"!:; ~ ·s "l~ "<J s::: ~ ~ ...s::::'" i=::E ~.~
.~
-
"l
0-
'C
.~ ~ ~ ~
~
Aviation IIistory Two pilots-an American and an Australian-attempting to retrace a record-setting 1919 flight from England to Australia landed in New Delhi September 28 to a warm and enthusiastic welcome. American Peter McMillan, 35, and Australian Lang Kidby, 47, flying a full-scale replica of a twin-engine Vickers Vimy bomber named "Shell Spirit of Brooklands," started their voyage on September 11 on the last day of England's Farnborough International Air Exposition. The pilots are expected to reach their destination in Darwin, Australia, by the middle of this month. McMillan, who helped conceive the project, said: "Anyone who travels by airplane today owes a debt to the courageous crew [of four] who risked all back in 1919....Not only was it key to
> e( c a: ~ le( CJ)
~ w ..J e( J: l~ i a: ~ C' c ~:~., ~ C' w ~ Qi 0 J: 0 E a: f= ~ a: n. U
~' ;.'U'~
"l
CJ)
J: I-
> e( C
z ~ CJ)
THREE
the future of aviation, but it also linked the continents of Europe and Asia as never before." McMillan, a San Francisco resident, is a veteran flier of vintage aircraft In 1990 he finished first in the World Vintage Air Rally from England to Australia in his 1942 Harvard IIA/AT-6. In that rally he met Kidby and the two decided to build and fly a replica of the Vickers Vimy plane for their current flight. Kidby has 8,000 hours of experience flying 58 types of aircraft. In 1990 he organized the World Vintage Air Rally, a race among 24 pre-1950 aircraft that flew from London to Brisbane. Major sponsors of this flight are the National Geographic Society (NGS), which published a first-person account of the
Clockwise original
from top left
The
Vickers Vimy bomber
before takeoff
in November
1919; pilot Peter McMillan the replica bomber
and
Vickers Vimy
in England
pilots McMillan
last month;
and Kidby,
Ross and Keith Smith.
OF THE BEST
The Best Doctors in America directory, brought out by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory W. Smith, includes in its second edition the names of three Indian-American cardiologists. They are Dr. Navin Nanda, professor of medicine and director of the heart station and echocardiography laboratories, University of Alabama in Birmingham; Dr. Kanu Chatterjee, professor of medicine and cardiology, University of California at San Francisco; and Dr. Natesa Pandian, asso-
ciate professor of medicine, Tufts School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts. The three were among 235 cardiologists chosen for the directory from nearly 25,000 cardiologists practicing in the
United States, according to InThe directory is Abroad. published by Woodward/White Inc., of Aitken, South Carolina. Approximately 1,500 IndianAmericans are practicing physicians in the United States. dia
Gallaudet
University
well-known
modern
choreograph premiere Hughes. an award
of ÂŁ10,000
to
issue of National and Shell, which for
the
College
trip
England
to Austra-
lia. The story
of Austra-
lian
Ross
brothers
rative
flight,
crew
for the
series.
The
fuel
the commemo-
as is the TV film NGS EXPLORER will
be
on the TBS Superstation
in 1995. The
Australian
Prime
1919
flight
of
of
20th-century
Minister
1919
flight
by a challenge aviators W.M.
the
I-and
as the historic is landing and
Myanmar
were
then
part
from "Billy"
of
contained
and
75 years
erated
it
Paki-
India.
The
Mesopotamia,
Malaysia
was Siam,
was
the
Fed-
Malay States.
Among
Deboo's
dance
family
in western
Company
boarded joined
a cargo the School
Graham
Centre
at
Delhi organized
last
a commemorative on
with support
from the United
States
Service. It a number
of film
and live lectures
landing
11 lunar
25 years ago.
For children, held a science competitions
the center quiz and in painting
and essay writing Students
(photo)
from more
than 20 schools participated.
and
South
in Dhrupad
style, Steve
by Indian
recognized
his natural
He also learned
in India.
ship in Bombay
Murray
He was so impressed
and sailed to London,
of Contemporary
Dance
He moved on to Japan
to learn
to acquaint
for
Bolshoi
introduced
tribal dances prima drug
the Martha himself with
Dance
and for the royal families
Dance
in Australia.
ballerina
addicts
at the Great Wall of China,
of the American
he
where he
with British rock star Pink
Ballet
Canadian
Louis that
He also worked with the Wuppertal and studied
grace
Kathakali.
he saw the New York-based
perform
traditional
He was born in 1947 in a Parsi
school.
He has performed
Science
on the Apollo
sing
India. His parents
choreographed
Carolina,
included
dance.
in West Germany
anniversary
Pragati Maidan in New
shows
Western
Noh and Kabuki theater.
therapy.
Information
who
"Dance
in Charleston,
music to his compositions
Over the years Deboo has collaborated
titled "Man
for the Calcutta-
and performed
U.SA
style has been influenced
technique.
Company
Festival
Brothers,
Deboo was 22 when Dance
he National
exhibition
in Honolulu,
and Luigi Nono.
and sent him to a Kathak
Plisetskaya,
the Moon"
works
choreographed
those who provided
dance and modern
Floyd,
month
as well as at the
of Hawaii
has choreographed
at the Spoleto
Reich, Keith Jarrett,
(Burma)
and Persia. Thailand
Center
in Miami and Los Angeles.
In May this year Deboo Expression" Carolina.
such names
Palestine,
Kennedy
in Ohio, the University
It is affiliated to the National Theater of the Deaf in the United States."
as
this time did not even
stan
top
impaired.
only one of its type in India, has been quite active for the past six years.
Vickers
exist in 1919. For example,
is one of the world's
for the hearing
of
aviation
voyage
will
their
ago, some of the 17 countries
as
of Wooster
In the past Deboo
epics
the current
to
Their program
on tour in the United States, is also scheduled
were the Gundecha
Although
the
Deboo,
based deaf artists group, Action Players. Says Deboo: "This group, the
endures
greatest
Astad
and
history.
Mideast original
was prompted to
War
18. Gallaudet
learning
Washington's
and at theaters
Vimy flight takes the same route
S. Stan-
program
World one
Award-
Geographic
James
field is covering
aired
flight.
National
photographer
Geographic, provided
original
winning
1921
Deboo, currently
the
Keith Smith-veterans
flight in the March
of higher
to perform-at
from
original
on November
the first team to complete 18,1 OO-kilometer
D.C., has commissioned
artist from Bombay,
a dance for 15 of its deaf students.
institutions
He announced
in Washington,
dance
Festival
of Japan
to
Maya dance
at the 50th
in Durham,
and Thailand.
North
What In his book Typewise, Kit Hinrichs shares the philosophy that has made him one of America's foremost designers. The book offers more than 60 detailed case histories from the portfolio of Pentagram, an internationally recognized design firm in which he is a partner. Pentagram is unique among design consultancies in that it has no traditional management hierarchy. The 17 partners, located in London, San Francisco, and New York, each manage their own design teams and projects but share financial and administrative staff. The arrangement has successfully allowed them to retain the entrepreneurial spirit and creative freedom necessary to produce fresh, original work while receiving interdisciplinary support from peers. Any financial growth, the partners believe, must come from talent that adds creative growth to the firm. Hinrichs's own designs for annual reports, sales promotions, exhibits, and editorial graphics have won numerous awards. Excerpted here from Typewise is an interview with Hinrichs. Five case histories of his designs on the following pages show how his ideas can be applied to actual projects.
QUESTION: Why a book on typography? KIT HINRICHS: I hope it will provide an understanding of how typography is used as a communications tool. From a graphic-design perspective, type is more than gray matter on either side 01: a photograph or an image; it is a vehicle for presenting information and ideas. More than that, the visual form and shape of individual typefaces convey different impressions that can be used to capture the author's [or] client's tone of voice. Typography itself can persuade and reinforce the ideas presented in words .... Graphic designers seem to focus more attention on images than on type. Is typography the least understood element of design? I wouldn't say it's the least understood, but maybe the most underrated in terms of effectiveness. I believe many people don't realize how important typography is to total print communications-how it enhances an image, how it can become the image, how it influences a reader's understanding of ideas or the way in which those ideas are communicated. Typography is as important as the imagery used. Is legibility the most important gauge of typographic effectiveness? Good typography involves more than legibility. Type is one of the strongest emotional tools available to designers. Everyone, no matter what his age-60, 35, or IS-has absorbed and continues to absorb a whole series of visual and typographic impressions that have a personal meaning. The Century Schoolbook typeface used in children's primers, for instance, conjures up images in [Americans'] collective memories,just as the organic letterforms used on psychedelic posters of the 1960s impart a different message. Typography used in World War II propaganda posters or in newspapers, street signage, From
Typewise.
I.Jorth Light
Copyright
Books,
Š
a division
1993 by Kit Hinrichs
and Delphine
of F and W Publications,
Inc.
Hirasuma.
Used by permission
of
Bibles, scientific journals, "Wanted" posters, postage stamps, and novels conveys emotional as well as informational messages .... Can you give some examples of what you call "typographic vernacular"? These fall into two categories. The first and most interesting group is the one-of-a-kind message-hand-Iettered "For Sale," "Fresh Produce," or "No Parking" signs. These naive, nondesigned typographic images are a vital, ever-changing part of our common culture. The second group is designed or at least professionally engineered. It includes everything from license plates and money to neon signs to computer-display type, tattoos, crate stencils, and bus transfers. The often funky typographic "look" of these items may transcend its original use, becoming a symbol for a whole industry or cultural expression. We as graphic designers need to be aware of typographic vernacular on a conscious level and understand the common visual language of certain typefaces. This awareness allows us to use given typefaces at appropriate times and in the most effective ways .... If certain typefaces bring specific feelings to mind, doesn't their use always create cliches? Cliches may be the most undervalued tools of our profession, as they represent our culture's commonly accepted ideas and images of itself. For the designer, it is crucial to understand cliches and know when to twist them in fresh and interesting ways. Often by simply contrasting the cliches you enhance the message being communicated .... Designers who understand the typographic cliches, the historical context of the typeface, gain control of their craft. They know when to specify which typeface to create the appropriate response. Size, weight, and scale of type are also part of the appropriateness. A frilly Spencerian script blown across a page suddenly conveys a surprisingly new impression, a much stronger image. Think of typography as imagery. It isn't just a set of letters. It's words and ideas. Typography is the vehicle to express those ideas most effectively. Do you have a process to develop your. typographic ideas? I tend to think of the total-be it a poster or an entire book-as an environment, as a graphic ecological system in which type, color, scale, paper, illustration, and photography all work together in harmony. They cannot be examined individually because it is the balance, the totality of the system that makes it work or not work. How do you develop your "graphic ecological system"? How do you start the process of generating ideas? I begin by gathering information through client briefings, written outlines of the client's objectives, identification of the intended audience, the budget, and possibly the medium. I also keep a lot of visual stimuli around-reference books, typebooks, magazines that I'm continually sifting through. One thing that works for me is the ability to draw. The connection between hand and eye-putting random sketchy ideas on paper and contemplating them-helps me expand those ideas. For me the approach to the solution often lies in free association. It's a matter of stepping back and leaving myself open to the possibility that all ideas are relevant-not locking any doors to ideas. Once the doors are open, the most unusual things begin to be generated. What gets the ideas flowing is the information gathered beforehand. Within that information, the solution always exists. HolV do you recognize the best solution? A creative solution,'always seems to be one that, when seen, appears
Typography, according to Kit Hinrichs, can invite readership, support ideas, elicit emotions, evoke an era, bring cachet to a product, become a work of art. obvious, but completely unexpected. Anyone seeing it understands it immediately. It does not require explanation. Everything fits. There are no holes, no rough edges, it feels complete. You understand it more from an intuitive than from a logical thought process. Once the idea is there, once it has been stated, I'm able to make the appropriate decisions. It seems extremely clear. I may say, "The best way to express that idea will be with a photograph." I'll probably have an idea of who the photographer should be and even a feel for the light and mood of the photograph, how complex or simple it needs to be, how large it should be on the page. Same with typography. The idea will suggest the appropriate typeface, the scale, weight, leading, and spacing .... Your method sounds straightforward, but some may argue that is not always the case. What's the biggest pitfall? A lack of adequate information? No. I think that is rarely the problem. Without being too metaphysical, I think the problem lies in being unable to unlock the doors to ideas. The pitfall comes when someone assumes there are always logical solutions to things, that there are "seven rules" to follow, that design is a science and not an art. The designer must pursue a solution that contains logic but is not necessarily a logical solution. You have said a particular typeface will occur to you as part of the design solution. Doesn't that mean you must be familiar with hundreds of typefaces? If so, how did you learn? I'm still learning. I can't tell you the number of times I've looked through typebooks. Part of the process when I'm developing a project is to review typeface-familiar ones and new ones-to see if I have a visual connection between the character of that face and the story I want to communicate. The associations I'm trying to make are often multi tiered, multi-informational. So, as I review typefaces I ask myself a number of questions to help make these associations. What will the headline type be? What is supposed to happen at each level of information? How should the text relate to the headlines and images? Will there be sidebars, pull quotes, footnotes, or captions? Should the type complement or contrast the images? Do I let the type lie back quietly behind the image and have the image tell 90 percent of the story? Or is the type going to be the story, the strongest element. ... Do you see computer-generated typography playing a large role? Yes. It's a question of to what degree. Many young designers have made computers their tool of choice. Technological improvements are occurring at an amazing accelerated pace. While drawbacks still exist, it has advanced enough so that we are using this technology extensively. What are the advantages of computer-generated typography? The advantage is that it allows the designer to become the typographer, which goes back to how things were 400 years ago. Historically, the designer/typographer set and often created the type and designed the page. With computers we can do that again. The flexibility of this medium gives designers the opportunity to explore more options with greater speed before making a final choice .... How about the negatives? I think there are several aspects of computer-generated typography that need to be approached with special care. For example, while the democratization of typography-giving everyone access to the toolshas resulted in an upgrade of low-end, in-house publications such as
reports and newsletters, it has also led to a lot of ugly stuff-artificially distorting faces, making them too bold, too italicized, instead of redrawing them. This was especially true when computer type first appeared. Engineers, not designers, developed the earliest type for the sole purpose of functioning efficiently with the computer. Aesthetics were not considered at the time .... Over time, this problem has been alleviated as design considerations have become incorporated into computer-generated faces. But today the economic advantages offered to computer users sometimes obscure the fact that publishing in whatever medium still requires the same design judgments it has always demanded over the centuries .... Doesn't typography go through trends? Aren't certain faces in vogue? No doubt about it. Each generation creates new typography or reinterprets existing typography, often based on earlier typographic styling or historical periods-Victorian, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Classical Modernism, Russian Constructivist, and so on. Each face is altered and enhanced by its new "creator" to reflect or become the style of the day .... How would you categorize the faces you use most often? I think in terms of three categories of typography: Classics, which transcend all periods of design; Period, which represent former and future eras; and Vogue, which exhibit the most extreme (the best and often the worst) in current typography. I also have typographic styling categories: Leading, letter spacing, paragraph indents, initial caps, caps and small caps, dingbats, and all those kinds of tricky, voguish things that designers tend to do. Do you talk to the writer while the design is in progress? I like to get together with the writer from the beginning of the project because it's useful in developing a design solution. We can bounce ideas off each other, often strengthening the content of each other's work. Together we can arrive at a sense of the appropriate length for the copy, the pacing of the project, the style and tone of voice, what can best be communicated through images or text. It's a back-and-forth process, a collaboration. How influenced are you by the content of the copy? Some designs out there are eye-catching but appear to have little to do with the text. Why do you think this happens? I feel it's imperative for the design to reflect the content of the text. Inappropriate images juxtaposed to copy and incongruent typographic choices can confuse the message, making it unintelligible. This often occurs because the designer is looking at the page and asking, "How does it look?" not "What does it say?" Designers can get so involved in other parts of their craft that they forget the basics-like reading the copy. Isn't it also true that we tend to think in terms of division of labor-the writer communicates; the designer illustrates and adds style. Do designers forget that they too are communicators? That's often the case. Because we are in a visual business and there's so much style intertwined with the communications we're involved with, sometimes a designer will substitute style for content. It's the curse of the profession. Many design "stylists" can become very "hot," do very exciting images, but they aren't communicating anything except their own style. Ideas drive communications. When ideas determine the right style to be presented, a work will never be flat; it will always be fresh. D
~G](~E
conlinued
The Nature Company is founded on the unique sales premise of "increasing our sense of wonder in the natural world." Its chain of stores, located in shopping malls, museums, and at historical sites, create a tranquil shopping environment enhanced by falling water, lush green plants, and the music of natural sounds. Parricularly popular are the company's notepad cubes. The use of Century Old Style caps as thefirm's typeface provides for strong name recognition and also harmonizes with the subject matter. The company logo in corporate uses always includes the "bunny," but the system is designed to allow for the substitution of other natural images such as leaves, elephants, birds, etc. This adds interest and subtly expands the identification of the company without
blatantly stamping its logo on every item. On the right is the company's tabloid-size spring catalog, which, with its highly flexible format (from flush left to flush right to centered to irregular rag-arounds), would normally be a typographic nightmare but within the context of these high-energy layouts, works.
Dolphin Trifold Notecards From The California Academy of Sciences. n.,li,I!_I.}hJ*f,(;,!'tIftr". WJr,l#-SIdrdDtJl,,,",ul_ /IKOori\,,,,,,"A"'kocJ01 .""""""M •••••.•••• ('Ilt •••1>
"'I.rTlw,'."' •• C-".;""i
••.••"J_"'fh.c.llln/oIti
~~';:;;f:;~:~';: •.••.u.'_I ••.•.• "•.•. ".. tt.11•• ~I_N;<lNIJ'M "-"'Iu,lI>u'lfiJllHNtl/;~
IN_'I."'~I""
~.w.~~
-1btJt>_;,t.,,"ft"JO"I' ""'·-I~·~;\}·Srl •• i~1
The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles, is known for the experimental nature of its art collection. This lively, contemporary brochure highlights the works of some of MOCA's best-known artists and captures the personality of the museum. The die-cut edges reinforce the bold geometric shapes that form the Chermayeff & Geismar-designed MOCA logo. Futura Light with Extra Bold, a clean, modern sans-serif typeface, was used for the text.
_.0.1.1" SS.9"
The Art Center College of Design, with campuses in Pasadena, California, and Vevey, Switzerland, is one of the world's most prominent design schools. Within the design profession, the name of the school is just the punchy Art Center. The inclination to choose the most modern typeface to show the school as a cutting-edge design institution was given up infavor of a more restrained approach for two reasons: First, the audience was broad, including design professionals, students, businesses, and government; and second, it was crucial that the logo not compete with but complement the contemporaneity of the posters, catalogs, magazines, invitations, newsletters, and sundry other items.
REVIEW
11
\.vho'sWho in The World of Animals. ,: •••• !"d.."'.lthi"'~_·:t(J.id"~
InnatabieGlObc512 Great for Any Alj:c. 7/>.''; '"'II.Mh <J>i;>', i/ J ••lh J, I<;,"J
,,~J
~,_I,,r:.,·kJN.I<X''''''·.T''''''''
.
I
,~,if.""';'
•.:.."',"'<'} •••!" ..•••.,.H~/;".""""'''''';I''hl,_of,' ,•••• ,/!u;,."'''i ••..••.tf •• ."f'<Y/ .<;t ••• .- •• d l,..l(d~T(,,' ,i,r.r."I" •.InI<;,«:J:q"j J""~;''''
o·.tlilrtJ:"'I'd"',.,f)"': .••·.,trlJ~f
••.
r""
bC1f"IIli.~ ll:,..:,a,t'<! A••,~I opr<ho_l.::'~'_. '1>4~1yY)(~.'1 ;!1l/jmrt •••••• olo ' ••••• .,..r~d••,;,) Jt"t1IU>"r.J""' •.••• ~";h>1'{
1,,:~:;'1r/~'':}~:'_'H:
IN.-....IJ4<;,'d ••J' ••• fl/.~IA "<lIT"
I:r•• ,'""'&~J<-:»1:~t"·,,,,,,,:·· ~
;r££:!:J~'~~~'
1I!Iok>
SUI.(/{/
I"h "~";"
""' ••• ..,f
~;-~~'
u./II'.l".""".
.'W.oo
24
Our Be'l Oisco,;er)' Kll E\"er!
21
OllJ'Fa\"OriteSeil-Dtter
r~••,""lo;i.""""w.,; .. "I ••,·,"'.""~-.lJA.;."',.:,
':~ti~~~:.;i~I::t~!. :r;,;;.~..J:., """"',,,."' •.••••••,.l<._'.,"' •••·.'''' .. .1IMASt- •••••.•f>,
Poster.
OwO!,;,,/t""' •• __ :><-" •• ,_I~~ •.kJrF-.t: .•""''l1' ,.JbttN'Mrt<nl~It"..,It«f".J"'I:.·II"C.lif,.,..»St<o(J"'·-,kr 1c:nt' ••.••.• tJtorc_....-Yi_ K'ili" .••.Sn>n_u.J',.,_ ••~ .•••.r/r tl> :n~It.<rliM.wILA<'itiJrikll"'frll.d",.f"'¥lrlI""...".,."I' •• _J-'_I/ •• -.>riJJ<<<rtI",f'cU 25"" 2;" tf/6$A 4'./••.•.• S20.1i(}.916>iA F",,,,..J S9Q.OO
The Art Center's Review (left) features a custom-designed alphabet by Photo Lettering for its masthead, and a table of contents strip using images and Bodoni numerals and text. The four spreads (below) from the Review show the flexibility design format. The narrolV, newspaperlike selling of Bodoni
II
II: ;/;:,
",~
,,~:,
-.,J''''-'''''{:u .•.•• ,~;;, ~HS/I
'f ••••
BROOO
of the
type works equally well in selling off the trademark pencil, student work, or a conglomeration of different typefaces. The composition of the word MAGAZINE on the third spread demonstrates the variety of typographic tones, styles, and periods appropriate to the article on magazine design. Bodoni captions were set vertically to simulate Japanese characters on the fourth spread.
'llrG}(~E
continued
The Oakland A's baseball organization promotes the team and its varied activities to corporations in hopes of financial support through the sale of box-seat and season tickets, advertising sales, and product promotions. This promotion, developed in conjunction with ad agency Hal Riney & Partners, is intended to evoke the feeling of pinball games in the 1940s and 1950s. The tone of the copy takes a humorous view of baseball and its rituals.
Selling Type 10 conform to shapes-in This case, the diamond shape of a baseball field-is a wonderful device 10 idel1lify special informarion and highlighT impOrTanT areas of il1leresÂŁ. The subTle use of leller and word spacing also aids infilling copy 10 specific line lengThs.
Thefunky, cozy character of Cheltenham type is perfecT for bOThThe copy's tone of voice and The down-home. 1940s' look of The illustraTions. 1t works wellfor straight texT. sidebars, and heads and is also easy TO seT in curves and boxes 10 call up The TradiTional baseball Typography found on scoreboards. uniforms. and banners. Where appropriaTe, Type and images have been pulledfrom The illustration 10 enhance the message.
YOUR WINDOW
ON
AMERICA
~YORKERJ GEoaR3HIC
[FORTUNE II
[HARPERs
Forb~iJ
I [Smithsonian I
I~II~I and other leading magazines - plus incisive observations from some of India's leading writers - read SPAN, the magazine that helps to build bridges of understanding between America and India.
Subscribe
to
SP..AN"
Fill out the form on page 41