Aseity
For years, when the artist Steven Parrino wasn’t jamming power chords on his electric guitar or tinkering with his motorcycle in his garagelike studio in Brooklyn, he was recycling his unsold paintings: twisting them into eccentric new shapes, smashing their stretcher bars or stabbing them repeatedly with scissors.
His destructive approach to art making earned him the admiration of some fellow artists, but it also concealed a painful reality: There was no market for his work. In eight years and five solo New York shows, his former dealer José Freire said, he sold only two of Mr. Parrino’s paintings, one for $9,000 and the other for $10,000.
Then, on New Year’s Day 2005, Mr. Parrino died from injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident. Demand for his art has since increased, and in September a Parrino retrospective that had toured European museums surfaced at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue. With Gagosian’s high-profile endorsement and a limited number of works for sale — only two paintings and a dozen drawings out of 56 exhibited works — the top price for a Parrino in that show reached nearly $1 million.
Mr. Parrino’s posthumous ascent was not an anomaly.
While Gagosian was busy folding unsold Parrinos into its seasonal repertory, Zwirner & Wirth was plotting a comparable resuscitation of the career of Al Taylor, who died in 1999 of lung cancer. And Jay Gorney and his colleagues at Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery were busy tapping collectors and auction houses for paintings by Jack Goldstein, who committed suicide in 2003. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Call it the Dawn of the Dead Artist. The message from the market is as clear as it is macabre. In a quest for fresh material, blue-chip contemporary-art dealers are finding a healthy source of revenue buried six feet under.
With the soaring prices of contemporary art, dealers admit that they have a strategic incentive to seek dead artists and give them recognition. “It’s supply and demand,” said David Zwirner, the Chelsea dealer and co-owner in Zwirner & Wirth, which represents Mr. Taylor’s estate. He said the limited inventory imposed by an artist’s death can end up increasing prices.
“Although overall market conditions are not our only motivation, we are a for-profit gallery,” he added. “There is a commercial angle, or we’d be going out of business.”
All dead artists are not created equal, however. Several other important factors are at work in the surge of interest in Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein. First, all three were active in the 1980s, a period now considered hot.
“It’s very infrequent to find an artist of this period that you’d never even heard of,” said Zwirner & Wirth’s director, Kristine Bell, referring to Mr. Taylor.
Second, each artist’s work fits into the context of each gallery’s artists. Mr. Parrino, for example, is right at home in the somewhat macho male club at Gagosian, which shows the likes of Richard Prince and Richard Serra. And Mr. Taylor’s playful use of materials and droll one-liners aligns with Zwirner & Wirth artists like Richard Tuttle and Fred Sandback, for whom the gallery already has an established and devoted client base.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, where Mr. Gorney described programming as “intergenerational, and gravitating toward artists who challenge media genres,” seems a cozy niche for Mr. Goldstein’s provocative disregard for traditional image making.
And even if they did not strike gold during their lifetimes, Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein had earned the respect of their peers, as van Gogh had before he died, adding to the credibility of their newfound status.
Despite the market parallels, the work of the three artists could hardly be more different. In his embrace of the American road, for example, Mr. Parrino, born in 1958, mined multiple sources, from zombie movies to underground literature to punk rock and extreme metal. (He often gave reverb and feedback performances in conjunction with his exhibitions.) Convinced that painting was dead, he then tried to jump-start it. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
A onetime assistant to Robert Rauschenberg, Mr. Taylor shunned heroic impulses. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Combining discarded objects like broomstick handles with absurdist gestures and lighthearted wordplay, Mr. Taylor even based a series of work on dog-urine stains, a joking reference to the so-called accidents and heroic mark making of Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis.
Spectacle was a primary focus for Mr. Goldstein, who had himself buried alive in 1972 while a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. With a stethoscope attached to his chest, he breathed air from plastic tubes while a red light above ground flashed to the rhythm of his beating heart. Like his performances Mr. Goldstein’s short films, his recordings of sound effects — like barking dogs and fog horns — and eventually his paintings combined a West Coast embrace of landscape with an almost scientific interest in technical strategies for image making.
With the significance of contemporary artists typically measured by their success on the market, Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein saw others — often their friends — faring much better than they were. Still, they refused to cater to dealers and collectors. In 1998, for example, Mr. Parrino responded to a Swiss dealer’s complaint that he couldn’t sell Mr. Parrino’s work by sending a fax to Marc-Olivier Wahler, then a curator at the Centre d’Art Neuchatel Switzerland. The fax instructed Mr. Wahler to remove all of his works from the dealer’s Geneva commercial gallery.
“Do not worry about damaging anything (damage is good),” it read. “Nothing will be for sale. All will be thrown out after the show.” Seeing his unsold works strewn across the floor of the gallery, Mr. Parrino coolly proceeded to cover their surfaces with black enamel and carve them up with an electric saw.
“Steven was extremely anarchic, especially in relation to gallerists,” said Jutta Koether, a German-born artist who was a friend and frequent collaborator of Mr. Parrino. “He’d been put through the ringer so much. He was like, ‘I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to.’ ”
Far less aggressive in his tactics, Mr. Taylor quietly gave up painting in 1984, when he found it hard to pay for paint and canvases. The following year he began incorporating found objects into three-dimensional works. He stubbornly referred to them as “drawings in space” and refused to promote them to dealers.
“Al was not an art businessman at all,” said his widow, Debbie, in an interview. “He would have never gone around to David Zwirner and said, ‘Would you come to my studio?’ And he wouldn’t have let me do that while he was living. He wasn’t into the audition.”
Instead he relied on word-of-mouth support from his friends, among them the painter Cy Twombly, Mrs. Taylor said.
Mr. Goldstein, for his part, abandoned hard-to-sell films and sound recordings for the more lucrative medium of painting in 1979, only to be criticized for his flagrant use of assistants. “Now it’s totally commonplace to have technicians doing the nitty-gritty,” said the photographer James Welling, a friend of Mr. Goldstein. “But when Jack was doing this, it was considered extreme. People said he didn’t make his own paintings.”
Although Mr. Goldstein’s sales gained momentum in the late 1980s, his gnawingly competitive spirit and addiction to heroin alienated his friends and supporters.
“Jack had a very short temper and made a point of burning bridges,” Mr. Welling said.
Mr. Goldstein dropped out of sight and spent several years living in a trailer in East Los Angeles with no running water or electricity. His career was being resuscitated somewhat in 2003 when he was found hanging from a tree on his parents’ property in San Bernardino, Calif.
After Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein died, admirers of their work assumed responsibility for what the artists had been unwilling — or unable — to do for themselves.
In late 2006 a retrospective of Mr. Parrino’s work organized by the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva was en route to the Palais de Tokyo in Paris when Blair Thurman, a friend and an adviser to his estate, called Andisheh Avini at Gagosian Gallery in New York. Mr. Avini was developing programming for a newly opened series of low-ceilinged, fluorescently lighted rooms at Gagosian’s headquarters on Madison Avenue.
“Blair thought that space kind of screamed for Steven’s work,” Mr. Avini recalled, adding that he proposed a Parrino show to Larry Gagosian, who embraced the idea.
Likewise, after several false starts, Mrs. Taylor approached Zwirner & Wirth, sending them a small selection of her husband’s catalogs. The package sat for several months among a stack of similar parcels until the summer of 2006, when a gallery assistant showed it to Ms. Bell.
Ms. Bell scheduled a visit to the artist’s TriBeCa studio. There, she said, Mrs. Taylor pulled out portfolio after portfolio of drawings arranged by year, beginning with 1974-75 and ending with Mr. Taylor’s death in 1999. Ms. Bell arranged for a visit with Mr. Zwirner, who said he was “blown away” by the work.
After devoting a room in its booth at Art Basel Miami in December to Mr. Taylor, Zwirner & Wirth presented a tightly focused show of drawings and three-dimensional pieces made from 1985 to 1990, just after the artist gave up painting, at its Upper East Side gallery. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
At the Art Chicago fair in April and most recently at Art Basel in Switzerland, Ms. Bell said, the work sold well. Mr. Taylor’s drawings now fetch up to $20,000, and three-dimensional works range from $40,000 to $200,000. “It was a classic rediscovery,” Mr. Zwirner said. As for Mr. Goldstein, his paintings now top out at around $250,000.
With Mitchell-Innes & Nash’s support and a planned retrospective of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Mr. Goldstein’s place in the contemporary art pantheon is all but secured.
Still, the market’s embrace of Mr. Parrino, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Goldstein within a decade of their respective deaths elicits some skepticism. “On the one hand, it’s incredibly romantic,” the artist Robert Longo said in an interview. “These artists are finally getting their due. On the other hand, it’s about a commodity. There’s a limited supply.”
Comparisons to van Gogh are inevitable. The art dealer Theo van Gogh was not successful at selling his brother Vincent’s work, said Joachim Pissarro, director of the Hunter College Art Galleries and a co-curator of “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” opening in September at the Museum of Modern Art. Then six months after Vincent’s suicide, Theo also died, leaving the unsold trove of van Gogh’s artwork to his wife, Johanna.
“Johanna was a very shrewd businesswoman,” Mr. Pissarro said. “She knew how to sell a legend. But Vincent was also very, very respected among artists.
“Had van Gogh lived a few years longer, he would have been a millionaire.”
une 23, 2008
Media Talk
For Tom Petty Fans, the True Sound of Vinyl, Also Captured on a CD
By ROBERT LEVINE
The vinyl version of the new album from Mudcrutch, the recently reunited band from the early ’70s that features Tom Petty, comes with a CD that buyers can play in their cars or rip to make MP3 files. Those who do will notice that it is abnormally quiet — and that the CD holder instructs listeners to play it on a good stereo and turn it up.
One reason CDs sound different from LPs is that mastering engineers can make them louder in much the same way commercials sound louder than television shows. This is done by raising the level of the softer sounds, so there is less difference between a bass drum and a whispered vocal. This dynamic compression, as it is called in the audio world, can make songs jump out at listeners who hear them on the radio.
But it can also cause fatigue over time — and audiophiles hate it. So Warner Brothers Records, Mr. Petty’s label, decided to package the vinyl LP that comes out on Tuesday with a CD that was made from the same master. After Ryan Ulyate, a Mudcrutch co-producer, played the regular CD and the LP masters for Tom Biery, the executive vice president for promotion at Warner Brothers Records who also oversees vinyl releases, they decided to use the LP master for the CD.
“Everyone is in love with the way vinyl sounds,” Mr. Biery said. “We started talking about how cool it would be to let people have that experience anywhere they are.”
On a reasonable stereo, the difference between the regular CD and the CD packaged with the LP is noticeable: the drums hit harder, because they’re much louder than the other sounds, and the vocals jump out. “When we did the regular CD, we had to deal with the realities of the marketplace, and we came up with a good compromise,” said Mr. Ulyate, who produced the album with the guitarist Mike Campbell. “But this is a different experience.”
It is not an experience for everyone. Background noise can block some of the quieter passages, and those who use the CD to rip files for an iPod will find that Mudcrutch sounds quieter than other bands. Mr. Biery said that Warner Brothers Records made only 3,500 copies of the LP, but that he thought the company would soon make more, since vinyl sales were rising.
“I think that with the right titles, there’s a market for this in limited quantities,” said Joel Oberstein, president of the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a music store marketing company. “There’s a new generation of audiophiles now.”
Mary Walls thought she was home-free after annual mammograms found no recurrence of the breast cancer she’d suffered in 1996. Then last fall she also got an ultrasound screening, which showed two questionable areas in her right breast.
• The American Cancer Society issued these guidelines1 on use of MRI for breast-cancer screening last year.
• Here is the abstract2 for a study published JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, that looked at the use of ultrasound.
• Here are abstracts for two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine (here3 and here4) that look at the use of MRI for screening.
After a biopsy confirmed that the two spots were malignancies, the Matteson, Ill., human-resources consultant got a lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. “I don’t think I’ll ever trust just mammography by itself again,” says Ms. Walls, 62, who received the ultrasound after deciding to participate in a research study her doctor was helping to conduct.
For many years, women worried about breast cancer have been given a simple prescription: annual mammograms, or X-rays of the breasts, typically starting at age 40. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Now, doctors are increasingly advising some women who may be at higher risk for the disease to consider supplementing a mammogram with other, potentially more sensitive tests.
For those women whose family background, genetics or other factors signal a high level of concern, a growing number of physicians are suggesting magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, which is typically the most sensitive form of screening. Some doctors are also recommending ultrasound, the sound-wave technology often used during pregnancy to view a fetus. Ultrasound can cost $100 or less, compared with $1,000 or more for an MRI. But ultrasound also is less sensitive than an MRI. Health insurers say they generally pay for ultrasound screening, but guarantee coverage of MRI screening only for women at high risk.
The heightened interest in additional screening follows new guidelines issued by the American Cancer Society last year. The cancer society recommended annual MRIs, in addition to mammograms, for women with certain genetic mutations tied to breast cancer and those whose family history signaled a significantly elevated lifetime danger of the disease, among other high-risk categories.
Backing the recommendation were a series of studies that showed an MRI could detect cancers missed by mammography. One study published in 2004 in the New England Journal of Medicine found that in high-risk women, MRIs detected 32 out of 45 breast cancers, while mammograms picked up 18, including some missed by the MRI screening. The two types of screening, plus physical exams, together found 41 of the cancers. The cancer society hasn’t issued any recommendations regarding ultrasound screening, but says it continues to accumulate research data. One downside: the risk that MRI and ultrasound screenings can produce many false positives, creating needless anxiety in some patients.
After the cancer society’s guidelines came out, Jerry Gehl, medical director of the St. Vincent Breast Center in Little Rock, Ark., started routinely recommending an MRI to high-risk patients, in addition to mammograms. In general, though, he doesn’t urge patients to get an MRI if they face only a somewhat-elevated risk. “You have to draw that line somewhere,” he says.
Stacy Adams, 36, got a breast-screening MRI for the first time in April at Dr. Gehl’s suggestion after also getting a mammogram. Ms. Adams, a receptionist at a radiology clinic, says her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at 31, and her grandmother was similarly diagnosed at 35. Ms. Adams says her tests showed there were no malignancies, and she plans to keep getting both screenings. “I’m just terrified I’m going to miss something,” she says.
The American Cancer Society, in its 2007 guidelines, also identified a group of women at an above-average risk of developing breast cancer and for whom MRI might be helpful. But the society concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to recommend for or against the scans. This group included breast-cancer survivors and women with dense breast tissue. Dense breasts, which are more common in younger women, are harder to read with a mammogram. Fatty tissue provides clearer contrasts.
“It’s not very reassuring to hear ‘your mammogram is normal, but it’s only because we can’t see anything at all,’” says Robert Smith, director of cancer screening at the cancer society. For women at average risk of breast cancer, the cancer society’s guidelines opposed MRI as part of routine screening.
The cancer society also says that women can be separated into different screening-recommendation categories using computerized risk models that focus mainly on family history. Those with a lifetime breast-cancer risk of around 20% or more should supplement annual mammograms with MRI screenings, while those with a 15% to 20% risk are in the middle group, and women with a lifetime risk of less than 15% can stick with just the annual mammograms. More information is available at http://CAonline.AmCancerSoc.org5. Search for “MRI screening.”
Major private insurers Aetna Inc., WellPoint Inc. and Cigna Corp. say they pay for annual MRI screening in women at high risk of breast cancer, typically using criteria close to those of the cancer society. For women who fall short of high risk, but who still have a somewhat elevated chance of developing breast cancer in their lifetimes, insurers may not always pay. “Our policies provide benefits in situations in which there is adequate evidence to make a specific recommendation,” says Bob McDonough, Aetna’s head of clinical policy research and development.
For ultrasound screening, Cigna doesn’t require prior authorization, so “it’s at the discretion of the physician,” says Douglas Hadley, director of the company’s coverage policy unit. Dr. McDonough of Aetna says the insurer is for the moment “simply covering [ultrasound] without scrutinizing its use.” WellPoint says it also doesn’t require prior authorization for breast ultrasound screening.
Medicare covers mammograms, but the federal insurance plan for older people won’t pay for ultrasound or MRI as part of routine screening. The program can pay for the exams if a doctor feels they are medically necessary, a plan spokesman says.
A study published in May in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, highlighted the use of ultrasound as a supplement to mammograms. The study, conducted by American College of Radiology researchers, looked at women at a somewhat-elevated level of risk. It found that of 40 women diagnosed with breast cancer, mammograms raised red flags for 20, while mammography plus ultrasound detected 31.
But the study also highlighted a downside of ultrasound — it generated many false positive readings. MRI screenings also carry this risk. Though the false alarms may result simply in extra time and stress pursuing additional scans, some women also get unnecessary biopsies. Often, these involve little more than a needle stuck into the breast, with no scarring or long-term effects.
But biopsies can also be quite invasive. Sharon Nelson, 54, who had cancer in her right breast nearly a decade ago, had a scare when an MRI in 2003 picked up potential trouble spots in both breasts. Alarmed that her disease may have returned, and worried about her health while her two daughters were still young, she got biopsies that involved removal of significant tissue. There was no cancer, but she was left with a visible indentation in her healthy left breast. “It’s hard to have a surgery that wasn’t necessary,” says Ms. Nelson, a nurse at a breast-health nonprofit center in Arcata, Calif.
Medical practitioners are divided about the proper role of ultrasound in breast-cancer screening. Wendie Berg, a radiologist at a clinic in Lutherville, Md., who was the lead author of the study published in JAMA, says she recommends ultrasound screening to some women who don’t have evidence of very high risk that would justify an MRI. “It is a judgment call. The denser the breast, the more difficult the mammogram is to read, the more likely I am to recommend an ultrasound,” she says. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
But Constance Lehman, a University of Washington professor of radiology who led a study published last year in the New England Journal on MRI screening, says she never advises ultrasound for patients. “We find it ineffective as a screening tool,” she says. “It’s not even in the same ballpark” as an MRI.
Here’s a prediction: Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
He would be its worthiest recipient since the prize went to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi (one of the prize’s few worthy recipients, period) in 1991. He deserves it for standing up – politically as well as physically – to Robert Mugabe’s goon-squad dictatorship for over a decade; for organizing a democratic opposition and winning an election hugely stacked against him; and for refusing to put his own ambition ahead of his people’s well-being when the run-off poll became, as he put it last weekend, a “violent, illegitimate sham.”
Here’s another prediction: Mr. Tsvangirai’s Nobel will have about as much effect on the bloody course of Zimbabwe’s politics as Aung San Suu Kyi’s has had on Burma’s. Effectively, zero.
Zimbabwe is now another spot on the map of the civilized world’s troubled conscience. Burma is also there, along with Tibet and Darfur. (Question: When will “Free Zimbabwe” bumper stickers become ubiquitous?) These are uniquely nasty places, and not just because uniquely nasty things are happening. They’re nasty because the dissonance between the wider world’s professed concern and what it actually does is almost intolerable.
Look at the legislation that has been proposed or passed in the U.S. Congress on Darfur. There is the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (H.R. 3127), signed by President Bush into law in 2006, which sanctions officials identified as responsible for the genocide. There is House Resolution 992, which urges the president to appoint a special envoy to Sudan. (The president did appoint an envoy; care to remember his name?) http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
There is the 2007 Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act, which allows (but does not require) U.S. states and municipalities to divest from companies doing business in Sudan. There is Senate Resolution 559, urging the president to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur. There is the Clinton Amendment, the Reid Amendment, the Menendez Amendment, the Durbin/Leahy Amendment, the Jackson Amendment, the Lieberman Resolution, the Obama/Reid Amendment and the Peace in Darfur Act.
This is a partial list. Meantime, here are the accumulating estimates of the conflict’s toll on Darfuri lives. September 2004: 50,000, according to the World Health Organization. May 2005: between 63,000 and 146,000 “excess deaths,” according to the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain. March 2008: 200,000 deaths, according to U.N. officials. April 2008: The U.N. acknowledges the previous month’s estimate might have undercounted about 100,000 victims.
In a video clip for the Save Darfur coalition, Barack Obama offered that the genocide is “a stain on our souls.” His proposal for removing it? “Ratcheting up sanctions” on the Sudanese government and making “firm commitments in terms of the logistics, and the transport and the equipping” of an international peacekeeping mission for Darfur. No word, however, as to whether Mr. Obama would actually risk the lives of American soldiers to stop the slaughter.
It’s a similar story in Zimbabwe. The U.N. Security Council met yesterday to discuss the crisis, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told parliament “the world is of one view: that the status quo cannot continue.”
But, of course, the status quo will continue. Just possibly, Mr. Mugabe and his senior ministers will no longer be allowed to travel to Europe, though that does nothing for the people of Zimbabwe. Other sanctions will have no effect: The regime is already busy expelling relief workers and seizing food aid. Mr. Mugabe wants “his people” to die – it means fewer mouths to feed, and fewer potential opposition supporters to jail, maim or murder.
A solution for Zimbabwe’s crisis isn’t hard to come by: Someone – ideally the British – must remove Mr. Mugabe by force, install Mr. Tsvangirai as president, arm his supporters, prevent any rampages, and leave. “Saving Darfur” is a somewhat different story, but it also involves applying Western military force to whatever degree is necessary to get Khartoum to come to terms with an independent or autonomous Darfur. Burma? Same deal.
International relations theorists, including prominent Obama adviser Susan Rice, justify these sorts of interventions under the rubric of a “Responsibility to Protect” – a concept that comes oddly close to Kipling’s White Man’s Burden. So close, in fact, that its inherent paternalism has hitherto inhibited many liberals from endorsing the kinds of interventions toward which they are now tip-toeing, thousands of deaths too late.
So let’s by all means end the hand-wringing and embrace the responsibility to protect, wherever necessary and feasible. Let’s spare the thousands of innocents, punish the wicked, oppose tyrants, and support democrats – both in places where it is now fashionable to do so (Burma) and in places where it is not (Iraq). If that turns out to be Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, it will be a worthy one. It does come oddly close to the Bush Doctrine.
America’s house prices are falling even faster than during the Great Depression
As house prices in America continue their rapid descent, market-watchers are having to cast back ever further for gloomy comparisons. The latest S&P/Case-Shiller national house-price index, published this week, showed a slump of 14.1% in the year to the first quarter, the worst since the index began 20 years ago. Now Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University and co-inventor of the index, has compiled a version that stretches back over a century. This shows that the latest fall in nominal prices is already much bigger than the 10.5% drop in 1932, the worst point of the Depression. And things are even worse than they look. In the deflationary 1930s house prices declined less in real terms. Today inflation is running at a brisk pace, so property prices have fallen by a staggering 18% in real terms over the past year.
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
William Thomas Burns M.D.
, died June 15, 2008 in Atlantic City Medical Center after suffering a massive stroke.
He was born in Harrisburg, Sept 6, 1921 to Mildred and Walter Burns
He was a graduate of Harrisburg Academy, Bucknell University and the Temple University School of Medicine. At Harrisburg Hospital he was chairman of the Utilization Committee (1968), Constitution and By-Laws Committee (1969), Chairman of the OB-GYN Department (1977-1980), Co-Director of the OB-GYN Residency Program (1978-1980), President of the Medical Staff (1980) and served on the Board of Managers (1981-1984). From 1994-1995 he was on the board of trustees at Homeland Center.
Dr. Burns took three trips to Indian Reservations to volunteer medical services at Chinle Indian Reservation in Arizona and Pipe Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Also, in 1960 he served on the hospital ship Hope in Peru.
He was a member of Camp Hill Presbyterian Church and the West Shore Country Club.
“D.B.” was proud of the years in practice in OB-GYN in Harrisburg. He was very proud the family and enjoyed watching the children grow and mature. He will be greatly missed by the extended family.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Marjorie Clayton Burns and his son, Walter Thomas Burns. “D.B.” is survived by his wife Shirley, a daughter Bonnie Huzey (Tom) of Knoxville, PA; and step-children, Vickie Bowman (Jim) of Camp Hill, Anna Bierce (David) of Tallmadge, Ohio, and Anna Bissette (Brad) of Mechanicsburg and Peter Neavling (Lisa) of Camp Hill; five grandchildren, three great grandchildren and eight step-grandchildren
Memorial services will be at noon, Saturday, June 28 in Camp Hill Presbyterian Church. Burial will be at the convenience of the family. Visitation will follow services in the church.
Musselman Funeral Home and Cremation Services, Inc. Lemoyne is handling arrangements.
http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Stanton Terry Friedman (July 29, 1934) is a professional ufologist, currently residing in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
Friedman graduated from the University of Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Science (1955) and Master of Science (1956) degree in nuclear physics. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NETFriedman used to bill himself as “The Flying Saucer Physicist” due to his nuclear physics degrees. He currently refers to himself as a “scientific ufologist.” (Moseley & Pflock 2002:201-2) Friedman was employed for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, TRW Systems, Aerojet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell Douglas where he worked on highly advanced, classified programs on nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and various compact nuclear power plants for space applications. Since the 1980s, he has done related consultant work in the Radon-detection industry. Friedman is a member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and AFTRA.
In 1970 Friedman departed full-time employment as a physicist to pursue the scientific investigation of UFOs. Since then, he has lectured at more than 600 colleges and 100 professional groups in 50 states, nine provinces, and 16 foreign countries. Additionally, he has worked as a consultant on the topic. He has published more than 80 UFO related papers and has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs. He has also provided written testimony to Congressional hearings and appeared twice at the United Nations. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET(About the Author: (Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience) 
He is the original civilian investigator of the Roswell and supports the hypothesis that it was a genuine crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft. (See Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident.)His publications regarding Roswell have been criticized by skeptics, but his meticulous investigation has produced convincing evidence, including sworn statements by eye-witnesses and government documents to support his conclusions. Friedman has also been criticized among skeptics for refusing to accept that all of the Majestic 12 papers are fakes, although he has found evidence that some are hoaxes.http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Friedman has criticized the scientific SETI program to search for extraterrestrial life, and has successfully debated against its director on the extraterrestrial hypothesis. He has also threatened those who have slandered him with legal action.
In 1968 Friedman argued to a Committee of The House Of Representatives that the evidence suggests that earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial vehicles.
Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Ph.D. (May 6, 1942) is an optical physicist employed by the U.S. Navy, and a leading UFO researcher.
He is listed in Who’s Who in Technology Today and American Men and Women of Science. In addition, he is a noted contemporary UFO investigator specializing in technical analysis and photoanalysis of UFO cases. The following information is derived primarily from his website’s biography page. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Dr. Maccabee received a B.S. in physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and then at American University, Washington, DC, (M.S. and Ph. D. in physics). In 1972 he commenced his long career at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, presently headquartered at Dahlgren, Virginia. He has worked on optical data processing, generation of underwater sound with lasers and various aspects of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) using high power lasers.
He has been active in UFO research since the late 1960s when he joined the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and was active in research and investigation for NICAP until its demise in 1980. He became a member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in 1975 and was subsequently appointed to the position of state Director for Maryland, a position he still holds. In 1979 he was instrumental in establishing the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) and was the chairman for about 13 years. He presently serves on the National Board of the Fund.
His UFO research and investigations (which, he often stresses, are completely unrelated to his Navy work) have included the Kenneth Arnold sighting (June 24, 1947), the McMinnville, Oregon (Trent) photos of 1950, the Gemini 11 astronaut photos of September, 1966, the New Zealand sightings of December, 1978, the Japan Airlines (JAL1628) sighting of November 1986, the numerous sightings of Ed Walters and others in Gulf Breeze, Florida, 1987 – 1988, the “red bubba” sightings, 1990-1992 (including his own sighting in September, 1991), the Mexico City video of August, 1997 (which he deemed a hoax), the Phoenix lights sightings of March 13, 1997, and many others.
He has also done historical research and was the first to obtain the secret “flying disc file” of the FBI (what he calls “the REAL X-Files”). In addition, he has collected documents from the CIA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, and other government agencies.
Maccabee is the author or coauthor of about three dozen technical articles and more than a hundred UFO articles over the last 30 years, including many which appeared in the MUFON UFO Journal and MUFON Symposium proceedings. Among his papers was a reanalysis of the statistics and results of the famed Battelle Memorial Institute Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, a massive analysis of 3200 Air Force cases through the mid 1950s. (See Identified Flying Objects (IFOs)). Another was a reanalysis of the results of the Condon Committee UFO study from 1969. (Like many others, Maccabee concluded that Edward Condon lied about the results.)
In addition, he has also written or contributed to half a dozen books on the subject of UFOs and appeared on numerous radio and TV shows and documentaries (some given below) as an authority on the subject.
Maccabee is also an accomplished pianist who performed at the 1997 and 1999 MUFON symposia. He lives in Frederick County, Maryland.
The defining quality of great children’s literature is persistence: It stays with the reader with undiminished vitality into adulthood. There is a certain type of gloomy old man who, for A.A. Milne’s readers, will always be an Eeyore; children who read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” understand her befuddlement at the curious ways of the world only more acutely as they grow older.
No children’s book has had a greater influence on the minds and attitudes of young English-speakers than “The Jungle Book” (1894) and its companion, “The Second Jungle Book” (1895), written by Rudyard Kipling while he was living in Brattleboro, Vt. These exciting tales and thumpingly rhythmic poems tell of the childhood and coming of age of Mowgli, a baby lost in the Indian jungle after a tiger attacks his village, who is adopted and raised by a pack of wolves and grows up to become a great hunter. Baloo, the wise, patient bear, teaches the “man-cub” the Law of the Pack, the animals’ code of chivalry in the bloody battlefield of the forest.
[Jungle Book image]
Christopher Serra
What makes “The Jungle Book” so absorbingly vital, the reason it has persisted, is its naturalism. In Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” Mrs. Rabbit goes to the baker to buy brown bread and currant buns for her baby bunnies; Mowgli learns to hunt and kill for food, and to escape being hunted and killed by his implacable foe, the tiger Shere Khan. The architect of Kipling’s jungle was Darwin, both in that it’s governed by the principle of the survival of the fittest, and in its relative paucity of sentimentality for an age that had an insatiable sweet tooth.
Another fundamental reason “The Jungle Book” has maintained unsurpassed prestige in the competitive jungle of children’s books is that it was literally institutionalized in 1916, when Robert Baden-Powell created the Cub Scouts based on “Mowgli’s Brothers,” the first story. The largest captive audience of boys ever created still adopts the names of Kipling’s animals in their games, and recites a promise to do their best to do their duty to God and country, to help other people — and to obey the Law of the Pack.
In tone, Baden-Powell’s version of “The Jungle Book” veers closer to Beatrix Potter than to the original; yet the most significant departure of the Cub Scout’s Promise from Kipling is its declaration of duty to God. Although Kipling routinely (in every sense) invoked the Christian God in his patriotic verse, he himself was an atheist. This passionate champion of the British Empire was just as hostile to Christian missionaries as he was to Hindu pandits; if there was a religion he admired, it was Islam. In conversation, he habitually referred to the deity as Allah.
God plays no part in Kipling’s jungle; more crucially, neither does Empire, the principal theme of Kipling’s life and work. Writing about animals, ironically, enabled him to observe humanity (for the animals in the stories are plainly people) without the strictures of nationalism, which eventually strangled and embittered his thinking.
Written precisely on the cusp of the cinema era, “The Jungle Book” predicts that medium’s power to move and excite — a compliment returned in at least a dozen film versions. Events are narrated boldly, in a verbal equivalent of real time, and are often told from multiple points of view. Unencumbered by the need to proclaim the glory of Empire, “The Jungle Book” permitted Kipling to glory in pure storytelling, always his greatest gift. Henry James, an unlikely friend and defender, who once called him “the most complete man of genius” he had ever known, considered “The Jungle Book” to be Kipling’s finest work.
In no way does the rationalist-nationalist genius more closely resemble Darwin than in the scientific accuracy of his observations of wildlife. The best-known story in “The Jungle Book” is “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” one of the many non-Mowgli tales, about the doughty mongoose who does battle with Nag the cobra. Here, the snake makes his terrifying entrance:
“From the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss — a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet. Then inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he had lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion-tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake’s eyes that never change their expression, whatever the snake may be thinking of.”
Kipling not only conveys a vivid sense of danger and wickedness but also describes the appearance and defensive behavior of Naja naja, the Indian cobra, with as precise an eye as any herpetologist.
He saw just as clearly into the workings of a boy’s mind. (There are no girls in Kipling’s jungle.) Boys, he knew, like to be petted by their mothers so long as there are no other boys around to see it, but they understand that the playground is the real world. The cruelty of Mowgli’s code has been familiar to generations of children, who have instinctively felt the rightness of its central tenet: “The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.” That first moment of reading a home truth that one already knows but has never seen put down in words is where the life of a reader begins. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Even as a youngster, Rollie looked older and wiser than his years. His white mustache sprouted longer by the month, until it flamed from his cheeks like a German kaiser’s. Sometimes, it all but hid his mouth.
In the last few years, though, the tribulations of age — not just the appearance of it — have begun catching up with Rollie. It wasn’t immediately noticeable on the outside. But his keepers are reminded each time they get a look past the Emperor Tamarin’s flowing whiskers, and into his jaws.
The tiny monkey, used to crunching away on raw sweet potato and celery, has surrendered all but 6 of his 32 teeth to the toll of time.
At 17, Rollie — a resident of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo — is a senior citizen of his species. In the wilds of the Amazon, his keepers say, he almost certainly would never have made it this long.
In captivity, he’s got plenty of company.
The Golden Years have arrived at the nation’s zoos and aquariums, and that is taking veterinarians and keepers, along with their animals, into a zone of unknowns.
Do female gorillas, now frequently living in to their 40s and 50s, experience menopause?
Can an aging lemur suffer from dementia?
How do you weigh the most difficult choice — between prolonging pain and ending life — when the patient is a venerable jaguar who’s been around so long she’s come to feel like a member of the family?
All of those questions hang on a larger one that, until recent years, has been left to educated guesswork based on limited evidence.
“How old is geriatric? How old do animals really live?” says Sharon Dewar, a spokeswoman for the Lincoln Park Zoo, whose keepers have adjusted to Rollie’s toothlessness by serving him a diet of soft-cooked veggies. “That’s the million-dollar question.”
Zeroing in on the answer takes years of tracking births, deaths and the age of animal populations. But zoos, which have pooled information on animal births and genealogy since the 1970s, are drawing some early conclusions. For example, records show that the median age of Siberian tigers living in zoos in the two decades ending in 1990 was a little over 11 years old. Since then, however, the median age of those tigers has topped 15 years old.
The increase in animal longevity is no mystery. Just as with people, health care for animals has become much more sophisticated.
At the San Antonio Zoo, keepers noticed that George, a 37-year-old tapir, was slowing down. In the mornings, his legs seemed stiffer, and he had trouble getting up. The diagnosis was clear: arthritis.
At first they put him on dietary supplements. They moved on to Adequan, a prescription that helped ease the discomfort further. Still, wasn’t there more they could do? The problem is there’s no textbook for how to treat a geriatric tapir.
Reasoning that tapirs are not so different from horses, the zoo called in a specialist who performed acupuncture on George, inserting tiny needles at various medians in an effort to ease the pain.
Since then, George “acts like he’s five years younger,” says Rob Coke, the zoo’s senior staff veterinarian.
Even as San Antonio and other zoos have improved on health care, they’ve also become much more careful and cooperative in managing animal populations, tracking their animals to make decisions about breeding. Keepers focus on more than just keeping animals healthy, creating habitats and social environments that will make them happy and less-stressed.
The result is more robust animals, with the potential to live longer. That potential is realized because life in a zoo or aquarium grants animals an exception to nature’s laws of survival. In the wild, weaker animals fall victim to predators, parasites and poachers before they ever have a chance to grow too old.
“Life as a wild animal is tough,” says Steve Feldman of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
Without predators, and treated for disease, animals are far outliving their wild counterparts.
At the Minnesota Zoo, a pair of bottlenose dolphins have reached 44 and 42 years old, and in Florida a couple have reached their 50s.
“We know from studying the teeth of animals (dolphins) that have washed up on beaches, in studies I’ve looked at, that there are no animals that old,” says Kevin Willis, an expert on animal life expectancy at the Minneapolis zoo, in the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley.
But old age subjects animals to wear and tear and changes in physiology that they would never have known otherwise.
On a recent afternoon at the New York Aquarium, the uncertainties of animal aging are evident in the case of a California sea lion named Fonzie.
For years, he was one of the top performers for the crowds in the stands of the aquarium’s amphitheater. But at 21, he’s definitely slowing down. He started hobbling. The corneas on his eyes turned cloudy. He lost interest in his trainers. His weight dropped to 552 pounds. Under the X-ray, veterinarians noticed subtle changes in his bone structure.
“You know how it is when you have arthritis and in the winter time your bones creek because it’s so damp and cold?” says Kate McClave, who runs the aquarium’s onsite hospital. “Well, it’s a similar thing for a marine mammal.”
To help, vets moved Fonzie to an indoor pool where the water temperature is a closely controlled 55 degrees and he is protected from winter winds, and put him on anti-inflammatories. Nearly three months later, the eggplant-shaped mammal lumbers in to the checkup room with all the grace of a sandbag, his breath fragrant with fish. In exchange for a finned snack, he submits himself to the probe of a stethoscope, a few eye drops, an ultrasound and a look inside his mouth.
“This is one of our few patients that will actually say ‘ahhhh’,” says Paul Calle, senior veterinarian for the Wildlife Conversation Society, which runs the aquarium.
Careful treatment appears to have eased Fonzie’s discomfort and he’s ready to rejoin the other sea lions. But his days as a performer are probably over. At the aquarium, his seniority is far from unusual. Immediately after his exam, keepers moved on to take a blood sample from Spook, a 43-year-old gray seal believed to be the oldest on record. Earlier in the week, the aquarium lost a sand tiger shark named Bertha who, at 65, also held an age record.
That longevity confronts zoo managers with mysteries and doubts they’ve never really had to deal with before.
“The simple question was: ‘Does a 41-year-old gorilla need to be on birth control?’ And nobody really knew,” says Sue Margulis, curator of primates at Lincoln Park.
Years ago, there wouldn’t have been much need to consider such a question. Even today, a gorilla that reaches 30 is getting up there. Now, though, the question applies to far more than the one gorilla at nearby Brookfield Zoo that provoked it. When Margulis and a fellow researcher set out to study the possibility of menopause in gorillas, they looked at 30 gorillas in 17 zoos around the country. Of those, 22 are considered geriatric, including one who’s now 55.
They found that about a quarter were no longer going through monthly menstrual cycles, while others were in transition. But while gorillas in menopause spent much less time with the male silverbacks, most were quite healthy. In the wild, female gorillas typically leave the group in which they’re born. In zoos, older female gorillas stick around, sometimes playing a grandmother role in childcare that is likely unique to captivity.
At the St. Louis Zoo, the uncertainties of aging have keepers wondering about the well-being of Ruffles, a black-and-white ruffed lemur. At 31, he’s a sage.
Some of Ruffle’s problems are easily identifiable and treatable. He gets an anti-inflammatory pill twice a day — he likes it tucked inside a grape — to combat the pain of spinal arthritis. When blood tests showed he had liver problems, he was put on medication for that, as well. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
But there’s no easy diagnosis for another symptom. At times, Ruffles seems to be staring off into nowhere.
“Dementia is one of those things that’s very difficult to pin down just because we can’t use the same sort of testing as we do with humans,” says Joe Knobbe, St. Louis’ zoological manager of primates.
Ruffles has good days and others that could be better. The best keepers can do is make him comfortable, including installing a tiny hanging platform where the lemur, who no longer climbs like a young primate, enjoys resting with a blanket.
Many zoos have been making similar changes to animal habitat to ease geriatric residents into retirement. At the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a black bear named Spike and his sister Missoula are no longer youngsters. The 22-year-old siblings both have arthritis and Missoula has a problem with inner ear infections that makes it difficult for her to keep her balance. They struggled to climb to their den on the third tier of an exhibit featuring steep, rugged artificial cliffs.
“You start seeing these changes and you realize that if you just let it go, eventually it’s going to be a problem where they can’t get up there,” said Craig Ivanyi of the museum, which is just outside Tucscon. “You realize it’s just a matter of time.”
So in December, keepers moved to the pair into retirement in a new, specially designed enclosure, with gently graded ramps and a large, sloping pool. Spike and Missoula will spend their lives there, off-exhibit, while the zoo renovates the old enclosure so that when new bears arrive, they will be able to age in place.
Ivanyi says that, even with the bears now too old to be exhibited, the zoo is obligated to take care of them and make them comfortable as long as their quality of life can be assured. The challenge for his institution and others is deciding what to do when quality of life begins to ebb away.
Even in old animals that appear healthy, examination after death often finds they “suffer from a range of health problems that may not have been apparent when they were alive,” a group of mostly Swiss veterinarians wrote in an article published last year in the journal Animal Welfare.
“Zoos often unwittingly condemn their animals to long painful lives,” wrote the authors, calling on zoos to use a scoring system to evaluate geriatric animals’ quality of life in order to make more informed decisions about euthanasia.
Animals don’t make diagnosis easy. Their instincts remain rooted in the wild, where survival requires covering up weaknesses and infirmities. But keepers who spend years watching these animals sense when something’s wrong.
At the El Paso Zoo, keepers noticed six years ago that Sheba, their regal black jaguar, was faltering. Worsening arthritis made it difficult for her to climb. Her kidneys were failing. Cataracts limited her ability to see.
Keepers fashioned a hammock from old firehose, and hung it low so she could climb in more easily, but even that became difficult. At day’s end, Sheba would retire from the exhibit space to be near her keepers as they cleaned up, quietly absorbing the sound of their voices.
But by last fall, as Sheba neared her 27th birthday, it became clear that pain and weakness were winning out. That left the zoo’s veterinary staff, managers and keepers with a very difficult choice.
“It’s a lot easier to second-guess yourself when you say, well, she probably would’ve lived four more days, slipping slowly down the slope,” said Victoria Milne, the zoo’s veterinarian.
They decided not to wait. On Nov. 8, vets anesthetized Sheba, then administered a solution by intravenous drip that, in a few seconds, shut down the big cat’s body for good.
Then, as she lay there, keepers, vets and other zoo workers gathered around the cat they’d cared for for 17 years. Some whispered a few words, others reached out to lay a hand on her glossy black coat as they wept.
Like many of the zoo’s other geriatric animals, their girl had lived a long, full life. But that didn’t make it any easier to say goodbye.
