Tips to Clean and Store Gardening Tools for the Winter

Posted on October 20, 2011 by admin

October 19, 2011 One day One world
“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.”
Olin Miller
“Minds are like parachutes, they only function when open.”
Thomas Dewar

Putting gardening tools away properly for the winter can add years to the life of your equipment. Your tools will be protected from rust and wear, and better yet, they’ll be ready to go the moment spring fever hits on that first balmy day next year.

Instructions

Scrape off any excess mud or dirt. Use a stick to knock off large pieces and a wire brush for tougher spots. If the soil is really caked on, you may need to let the tool soak in a bucket of water for a few minutes before tackling it again.

Wipe off the Gardening tool with an old rag and let it dry thoroughly.

Remove any rust by rubbing it vigorously with a small piece of steel wool. (Be sure to wear gloves.)

Sharpen the tool, if it has a sharp portion (this includes spades), with a file made especially for sharpening tools. Hold the tool steady against a solid object, such as a tool bench, and draw the file repeatedly across the edge at a 45-degree angle.

Condition wooden handles by sanding any rough or splintery portions with sandpaper. Follow up by rubbing paste wax over the handle.

Spray metal parts with a penetrating lubricating oil to protect from rust.

Store in a dry spot. Avoid leaving tools on the floors of garages or other places likely to get damp during the winter.

Tips & Warnings

•Protect wooden handles and make tools easier to find by giving them a coat of red paint before putting them away for the winter.

•Never leave garden hoses outside over the winter, as this dramatically increases their chances of springing leaks. Instead, drain the hoses at the end of the season and hang them in a garage or other protected spot until spring.

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A Hometown Visit, en Route to the Past

Posted on October 17, 2011 by admin

October 17, 2011 One day One world
“Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.”
Henry Steele Commager
“The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world it’s own shame.”
Oscar Wilde

“Fireflies in the Garden,” a family melodrama about coming to terms with your parents (they’re people too, as it turns out), weighs in as such an innocuous appeal to the heart that it hardly seems deserving of the critical lash. The familiarity of its milieu, its characters and their hurts and grievances, recall any number of other movies. What’s striking about this one, though, is how its predictability can seem like a hedge or maybe a defense against the very possibility of surprise.

A single shot helps explain all. Early in the film, Michael (a wan Ryan Reynolds), a writer, starts up the stairs in his family’s Midwestern home. As he begins his ascent, there is a cutaway to his left hand, with its wedding ring. The trouble is, you’ve already seen him unsmilingly slip the ring on in a previous scene while he’s en route on a plane. A few beats later a fan asks him to sign one of his books, and he purposely writes over its dedication (“For Kelly”), pressing into the paper as he obliterates the name and broadcasts his feelings. So why that second shot of his finger? It’s unlikely anyone watching forgot about it or his grimacing.

The shot exists because, in his feature debut, the writer and director Dennis Lee (or his producers) doesn’t trust his storytelling or the audience. Repetition can be a useful strategy, a way of focusing attention on themes and motifs. The use of eye and bird imagery in “Psycho,” for instance, adds uncanny notes and suggests that one may do in or, rather, peck out, the other. And in “Moneyball,” bookending shots of Brad Pitt on an empty baseball field convey that his character begins and ends as a man alone. By contrast, the shot of Michael’s hand only affirms the little that was so studiously laid out in another scene minutes earlier: that he’s conflicted about his marriage, reluctant to announce those feelings or both. It says nothing.

Or rather, it discloses that nothing new and surprising will happen scene to scene, despite characters who do plenty of talking, explaining and telegraphing. When Michael returns home, he arrives in the midst of a fresh family tragedy. The story then toggles between the family’s present-tense strained relationships (Emily Watson plays his young aunt) and Michael’s memories of his unhappy childhood with his brutish father, Charles (Willem Dafoe), and loving mother, Lisa (Julia Roberts). Mr. Dafoe and Ms. Roberts are serviceable if awkwardly matched, and his bad-dad lines can be risible. The idea that these two could have spawned Mr. Reynolds is temporarily distracting, as is Carrie-Anne Moss in a fitted black dress swooping in as, yes, Kelly.

“Fireflies in the Garden” has appealing actors you want to spend time with, and it’s pretty in a soothing, glossy, commercial-advertising way (it was shot by Danny Moder, Ms. Roberts’s husband), with aerial images of green vistas that convey that this is a world of growth. Despite a few harsh outbursts from Ms. Watson, who can rage like a Fury, the film lacks urgency and discovery, partly because the psychology, emotions and words feel already processed rather than newly revealed. Like too many other, similar American independent films about families and their dealing and healing, it turns the profundities of human life — the heaviness and lightness of love, the epiphanies, disappointments, pleasures, sorrows, bliss-outs and losses — into teachable moments. Mr. Lee gathers together a lifetime of hurt without conveying that there’s something personal at stake.

Written and directed by Dennis Lee; director of photography, Danny Moder; edited by Dede Allen and Robert Brakey; music by Jane Antonia Cornish; production design by Rob Pearson; costumes by Kelle Kutsugeras; produced by Sukee Chew, Philip Rose, Marco Weber and Vanessa Coifman; released by Senator Entertainment. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes.

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Two Families, Two Homes, One Green House

Posted on October 14, 2011 by admin

October 14, 2011 One day One world
“I’m gonna live forever, or die trying.”
Joseph Heller (Catch 22)
“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”
John Locke

GENEVA — Atop a hill on the south side of Geneva, overlooking Mont Salève, is a rectangular house painted a lime green so bright that it practically glows.

Obscured by trees, the two-story structure is what might be described as modern minimalist, its exterior concrete facade devoid of any design except for large boxy windows that resemble the cutouts created by a kindergartener in a cardboard home.

“It’s a bit of a landmark,” said Gabor Luka, 40, a bespectacled veterinarian, who co-owns the 2,152-square-foot home with his brother, Tibor Luka, 43, a financial adviser who owns bluecap, a wealth management and pension planning company in Geneva.

Gabor Luka said he and his wife, who is also a veterinarian, simply could not afford to buy their own house or even get a loan in Switzerland’s expensive housing market. “We’re only vets, not bankers,” he said. So the couple turned to his older brother for help. The brothers ultimately decided to build a home where they could live together with their families. In 2006, they bought a third of an acre for around $3.3 million, splitting the cost. In 2008, after 18 months of construction, the blocky home by Geneva’s group8 architects, known for its cutting edge and colorful design, was completed for an additional $3.7 million. The Luka families moved into the house in 2009.

The brothers have always had a symbiotic relationship, so their current living arrangement is not out of the ordinary for them. They shared bunk beds as children in Geneva, then as adults they lived in apartments beside one another in the same building for nine years.

“I’d rather have him as a neighbor than someone else,” Gabor Luka said.

When Daniel Zamarbide, a partner at group8, was approached about building the two brothers a home, he said the vision was to create a structure that somehow expressed the idea of brotherhood.

“It’s the complexity of being brothers,” Mr. Zamarbide said. “We knew they had some differences. It became about how to play with one single house and reflect on brotherhood with one volume. They have very differently rooted family culture. Tibor is straight, we had to do more to please him. Gabor is intuitive and artistic.”

The building is basically two homes under one roof, each with a similar layout. Both houses have same Furniture include three bedrooms, four bathrooms, and wide basements. Concrete pathways on opposite ends of the structure lead to the front entrances of the homes, which are both opened by sliding glass doors. But the similarities end at the front door. Outside the entrance of the home where Gabor Luka lives with his wife, Pia, 43, their three children, Csaba, 5, Zsenger, 3, and six-month-old daughter, Ildiko, and a cat named Lino, is a square, concrete open-air enclave with a wild patch of grass and a gingko tree. A prehistoric mammoth’s leg, bought for $6,000 from an antique dealer in the south of France, hangs inside the enclave draped with a white military hiding net.

Past the sliding glass front doors is the living room, where a polar bear rug is sprawled. Gabor Luka bought the rug at a local flea market in 2002. The hallway from the living room to the kitchen is filled with antiques from family travels to exotic places like Thailand and India. The entire house, in fact, is stacked to the rim with antiques. Large wooden sculptures, Toolkits, mirrors, taxidermy and Buddhas appear to be crammed into every corner. “I wanted to be an archaeologist,” he said. If the younger Luka house is maximalist, the elder Luka house is minimalist.

Tibor Luka lives with his wife Lise, 45, an event planner who is organizing a chocolate festival in Geneva this October, and their two sons, Paul, 9 and Nikola, 7. Their airy house has a Zen-like feel. The sliding glass doorway opens onto a sleek, metallic kitchen. Beyond is a contemporary living room, furnished with gray couches by the Swiss furniture store Interio.

The couple said it was most important for them to have a house that radiated light. “Especially in winter when it’s gray,” Tibor Luka said.

In the living room, natural light from Outdoor floods in through a floor to ceiling window facing the patio. And throughout the house, an automatic lighting system with special dimming effects conceals light fixtures underneath cupboards, behind sinks and in other curious places. “We have included many spots and indirect hidden neon lights which can all be dimmed,” he said. “It’s very, very convenient.”

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, which has 12-foot-high ceilings and stark white walls, a foot-long rectangular window spans the length of the wall above the couple’s bed to allow in morning sunshine.

“We have orange light coming in and it’s really nice,” the elder brother said.

In his view, the twin houses are part of a family tradition. “Sometimes we go two weeks without seeing each other,” he said. “But we can rely on each other. We love each other.”

This blocky home by Geneva’s group8 architects, known for its cutting edge and colorful design, was completed in 2008

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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Is Violence History?

Posted on October 11, 2011 by admin

October 10, 2011 One day One world
“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.”
George Eliot
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
Albert Einstein

It is unusual for the subtitle of a book to undersell it, but Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” tells us much more than why violence has declined. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who first became widely known as the author of “The Language Instinct,” addresses some of the biggest questions we can ask: Are human beings essentially good or bad? Has the past century witnessed moral progress or a moral collapse? Do we have grounds for being optimistic about the future?

If that sounds like a book you would want to read, wait, there’s more. In 800 information-packed pages, Pinker also discusses a host of more specific issues. Here is a sample: What do we owe to the Enlightenment? Is there a link between the human rights movement and the campaign for animal rights? Why are homicide rates higher in the southerly states of this country than in northern ones? Are aggressive tendencies heritable? Could declines in violence in particular societies be attributed to genetic change among its members? How does a president’s I.Q. correlate with the number of battle deaths in wars in which the United States is involved? Are we getting smarter? Is a smarter world a better world?

In seeking answers to these questions Pinker draws on recent research in history, psychology, cognitive science, economics and sociology. Nor is he afraid to venture into deep philosophical waters, like the role of reason in ethics and whether, without appealing to religion, some ethical views can be grounded in reason and others cannot be.

The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century.

Pinker assumes that many of his readers will be skeptical of this claim, so he spends six substantial chapters documenting it. That may sound like a hard slog, but for anyone interested in understanding human nature, the material is engrossing, and when the going gets heavy, Pinker knows how to lighten it with ironic comments and a touch of humor.

Pinker begins with studies of the causes of death in different eras and peoples. Some studies are based on skeletons found at archaeological sites; averaging their results suggests that 15 percent of prehistoric humans met a violent death at the hands of another person. Research into contemporary or recent hunter-gatherer societies yields a remarkably similarly average, while another cluster of studies of pre-state societies that include some horticulture has an even higher rate of violent death. In contrast, among state societies, the most violent appears to have been Aztec Mexico, in which 5 percent of people were killed by others. In Europe, even during the bloodiest periods — the 17th century and the first half of the 20th —­ deaths in war were around 3 percent. The data vindicates Hobbes’s basic insight, that without a state, life is likely to be “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force reduces violence and makes everyone living under that monopoly better off than they would otherwise have been. Pinker calls this the “pacification process.”

It’s not only deaths in war, but murder, too, that is declining over the long term. Even those tribal peoples extolled by anthropologists as especially “gentle,” like the Semai of Malaysia, the Kung of the Kalahari and the Central Arctic Inuit, turn out to have murder rates that are, relative to population, comparable to those of Detroit. In Europe, your chance of being murdered is now less than one-tenth, and in some countries only one-fiftieth, of what it would have been if you had lived 500 years ago. American rates, too, have fallen steeply over the past two or three centuries. Pinker sees this decline as part of the “civilizing process,” a term he borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias, who attributes it to the consolidation of the power of the state above feudal loyalties, and to the effect of the spread of commerce. (Consistent with this view, Pinker argues that at least part of the reason for the regional differences in American homicide rates is that people in the South are less likely to accept the state’s monopoly on force. Instead, a tradition of self-help justice and a “culture of honor” sanctions retaliation when one is insulted or mistreated. Statistics bear this out — the higher homicide rate in the South is due to quarrels that turn lethal, not to more killings during armed robberies — and experiments show that even today Southerners respond more strongly to insults than Northerners.)

During the Enlightenment, in 17th-and 18th-century Europe and countries under European influence, another important change occurred. People began to look askance at forms of violence out of Bookstore that had previously been taken for granted: slavery, torture, despotism, dueling and extreme forms of cruel punishment. Voices even began to be raised against cruelty to animals. Pinker refers to this as the “humanitarian revolution.”

Against the background of Europe’s relatively peaceful period after 1815, the first half of the 20th century seems like a sharp drop into an unprecedented moral abyss. But in the 13th century, the brutal Mongol conquests caused the deaths of an estimated 40 million people — not so far from the 55 million who died in the Second World War — in a world with only one-seventh the population of the mid-20th century. The Mongols rounded up and massacred their victims in cold blood, just as the Nazis did, though they had only battle-axes instead of guns and gas chambers. A longer perspective enables us to see that the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were, sadly, less novel than we thought.

Since 1945, we have seen a new phenomenon known as the “long peace”: for 66 years now, the great powers, and developed nations in general, have not fought wars against one another. More recently, since the end of the cold war, a broader “new peace” appears to have taken hold. It is not, of course, an absolute peace, but there has been a decline in all kinds of organized conflicts, including civil wars, genocides, repression and terrorism. Pinker admits that followers of our news media will have particular difficulty in believing this, but as always, he produces statistics to back up his assertions.

The final trend Pinker discusses is the “rights revolution,” the revulsion against violence inflicted on ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals that has developed over the past half-century. Pinker is not, of course, arguing that these movements have achieved their goals, but he reminds us how far we have come in a relatively short time from the days when lynchings were commonplace in the South; domestic violence was tolerated to such a degree that a 1950s ad could show a husband with his wife over his knees, spanking her for failing to buy the right brand of coffee; and Pinker, then a young research assistant working under the direction of a professor in an animal behavior lab, tortured a rat to death. (Pinker now considers this “the worst thing I have ever done.” In 1975 it wasn’t uncommon.)

What caused these beneficial trends? That question poses a special challenge to an author who has consistently argued against the view that humans are blank slates on which culture and education draws our character, good or evil. There has hardly been time for the changes to have a basis in genetic evolution. (Pinker considers this possibility, and dismisses it.) So don’t the trends that Pinker chronicles prove that our nature is more the product of our culture than our biology? That way of putting it assumes a simplistic nature-nurture dichotomy. In books like “How the Mind Works,” “The Blank Slate” and “The Stuff of Thought,” Pinker has argued that evolution shaped the basic design of our brain, and hence our cognitive and emotional faculties. This process has given us propensities to violence — our “Outdoor demons” as well as “the better angels of our nature” (Abraham Lincoln’s words) — that incline us to be peaceful and cooperative. Our material circumstances, along with cultural inputs, determine whether the demons or the angels have the upper hand.

Other large-scale trends have paralleled the decline in violence and cruelty, but it is not easy to sort out cause and effect here. Are factors like better government, greater prosperity, health, education, trade and improvements in the status of women the cause or the effect of the decline in violence and cruelty? If we can find out, we may be able to preserve and extend the peaceful and better world in which we live. So in two chapters on human psychology, Pinker does his best to discover what has restrained our inner demons and unleashed our better angels, and then in a final chapter, draws his conclusions.

Those conclusions are not always what one might expect. Yes, as already noted, the state monopoly on force is important, and the spread of commerce creates incentives for cooperation and against violent conflict. The empowerment of women does, Pinker argues, exercise a pacifying influence, and the world would be more peaceful if women were in charge. But he also thinks that the invention of printing, and the development of a cosmopolitan “Republic of Letters” in the 17th and 18th centuries helped to spread ideas that led to the humanitarian revolution. That was pushed further in the 19th century by popular novels like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Oliver Twist” that, by encouraging readers to put themselves in the position of someone very different from themselves, expanded the sphere of our moral concern.

To readers familiar with the literature in evolutionary psychology and its tendency to denigrate the role reason plays in human behavior, the most striking aspect of Pinker’s account is that the last of his “better angels” is reason. Here he draws on a metaphor I used in my 1981 book “The Expanding Circle.” To indicate that reason can take us to places that we might not expect to reach, I wrote of an “escalator of reason” that can take us to a vantage point from which we see that our own interests are similar to, and from the point of view of the universe do not matter more than, the interests of others. Pinker quotes this passage, and then goes on to develop the argument much more thoroughly than I ever did. (Disclosure: Pinker wrote an endorsement for a recent reissue of “The Expanding Circle.”)

Pinker’s claim that reason is an important factor in the trends he has described relies in part on the “Flynn effect” — the remarkable finding by the philosopher James Flynn that ever since I.Q. tests were first administered, the scores achieved by those taking the test have been rising. The average I.Q. is, by definition, 100; but to achieve that result, raw test scores have to be standardized. If the average teenager today could go back in time and take an I.Q. test from 1910, he or she would have an I.Q. of 130, which would be better than 98 percent of those taking the test then. Nor is it easy to attribute this rise to improved education, because the aspects of the tests on which scores have risen most do not require a good vocabulary or even mathematical ability, but instead test powers of abstract reasoning. One theory is that we have gotten better at I.Q. tests because we live in a more symbol-rich environment. Flynn himself thinks that the spread of the scientific mode of reasoning has played a role.

Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. Among the wide range of evidence he produces in support of that argument is the tidbit that since 1946, there has been a negative correlation between an American president’s I.Q. and the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States.

Reason also, Pinker suggests, moves us away from forms of morality more likely to lead to violence, and toward moral advances that, while not eschewing the use of force altogether, restrict it to the uses necessary to improve social welfare, like utilitarian reforms of the savage punishments given to criminals in earlier times. For reason does, Pinker holds, point to a particular kind of morality. We prefer life to death, and happiness to suffering, and we understand that we live in a world in which others can make a difference to whether we live well or die miserably. Therefore we will want to tell others that they should not hurt us, and in doing so we commit ourselves to the idea that we should not hurt them. (Pinker quotes a famous sentence from the 18th-century philosopher William Godwin: “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”) That morality can be grounded in some commitment to treating others as we would like them to treat us is an ancient idea, expressed in the golden rule and in similar thoughts in the moral traditions of many other civilizations, but Pinker is surely right to say that the escalator of reason leads us to it. It is this kind of moral thinking, Pinker points out, that helps us escape traps like the Cuban missile crisis, which, if the fate of the world had been in the hands of leaders under the sway of a different kind of morality — one dominated by ideas of honor and the importance of not backing down — might have been the end of the human story. Fortunately Kennedy and Khrushchev understood the trap they were in and did what was necessary to avoid disaster.

“The Better Angels of Our Nature” is a supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline. But what of the future? Our improved understanding of violence, of which Pinker’s book is an example, can be a valuable tool to maintain peace and reduce crime, but other factors are in play. Pinker is an optimist, but he knows that there is no guarantee that the trends he has documented will continue. Faced with suggestions that the present relatively peaceful period is going to be blown apart by a “clash of civilizations” with Islam, by nuclear terrorism, by war with Iran or wars resulting from climate change, he gives reasons for thinking that we have a good chance of avoiding such conflicts, but no more than a good chance. If he had been able to see, before his book went to press, a study published in Nature as recently as August of this year, he might have been less sanguine about maintaining peace despite widespread climate change. Solomon Hsiang and colleagues at Columbia University used data from the past half-century to show that in tropical regions, the risk of a new civil conflict doubles during El Niño years (when temperatures are hotter than usual and there is less rainfall). If that finding is correct, then a warming world could mean the end of the relatively peaceful era in which we are now living.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University. His books include “Animal Liberation,” “Practical Ethics,” “The Expanding Circle” and “The Life You Can Save.”

via Bookreview

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Who Needs a Black Cat? Rally Squirrel Toys With the Phillies

Posted on October 7, 2011 by admin

October 7, 2011 One day One world
“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”
Booker T. Washington
“Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.”
Sachs

PHILADELPHIA — Fans in St. Louis had not seen anything this elusive at Busch Stadium since Lou Brock or, come to think of it, anything this furry since Al Hrabosky.

In the fifth inning of Game 4 of the National League division series, a squirrel darted across home plate, distracting Phillies pitcher Roy Oswalt and presaging a scampering home-run rally by the Cardinals.

St. Louis won, 5-3, on Wednesday to force a decisive Game 5 on Friday. If the Phillies did not have enough to worry about — like the suddenly dormant bat of Ryan Howard — they now have to contend with a rally squirrel with a Twitter account.

“I may make it to Philly,” the squirrel tweeted. But given the famously querulous nature of Philadelphia fans, it added, “Am going to stay out of sight for my own safety.”

Tony La Russa, the Cardinals’ manager, said he fully expected Rally Squirrel to attend Game 5. In case of rain, he said, “maybe he’ll have a suite.”

June Cantor, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Streets Department, said she could not comment on whether any laws prohibited the transportation of rodents across state lines for purposes of supporting a playoff baseball team. She did have a suggestion, though, for keeping Rally Squirrel out of Citizens Bank Park.

“Maybe they could have lots of acorns and peanuts outside the stadium to lure him out,” Cantor said.

Despite Pumart recent ascendance, the Phillies have lost more games than any franchise in professional sports. Defeat through the years has come in the most exotic and excruciating ways. So a squirrel jinx would fit right in with this team’s agonizing history. And there is a baseball precedent.

In August 2007, a squirrel clambered up and down the right-field foul pole in Yankee Stadium during a game with the Red Sox. To some, this recalled the legend of Ratatosk, a squirrel from 13th-century Norse mythology that scurried along a tree representing the world, instigating a rivalry between an evil dragon at the bottom of the tree and an eagle perched on top.

“The dragon will destroy the world in Norse mythology,” Roberta Frank, a professor of Old Norse and Old English at Yale, told The New York Times that summer.

Sure enough, the evil dragon, representing the Red Sox, prevailed over the eagle, representing the Yankees, as Boston won its second World Series in four seasons.

The current squirrel (or squirrels) in question first made an appearance Tuesday in Game 3 in St. Louis. Nobody knew where the rodent came from, whether it had season tickets or was just angling for a cameo on Animal Planet. Perhaps it had scurried up the Mississippi basin from Louisiana’s Cajun country, where squirrel hunting season opened last weekend and a careless animal might end up in a bowl of gumbo.

“It was probably seeking political asylum,” said Tim Fontenot, a physical therapist from Ville Platte, La.

The squirrel briefly delayed Game 3 as it darted across the field and capered in foul territory along the third-base line. “We need to win,” the squirrel tweeted. “I’m not ready to hibernate yet.”

In the end, there was no squirrel sustenance as the Cardinals lost, 3-2. Yet, if the furry critter had ever found a welcoming place, Busch Stadium was it. La Russa is an animal rescue advocate.

“There’s a squirrel on the field at Busch Stadium,” a St. Louis fan named Matt Sebek tweeted Tuesday. “96% chance it sleeps at La Russa’s tonight.”

To which La Russa’s daughter, Bianca, replied, “I’d say 98%.”

Wednesday, a squirrel paid another visit. It was difficult to tell whether this was the same squirrel; unlike other Sports players, rodents don’t wear names on their backs. This time, Skip Schumaker stood at bat in the fifth with the Cardinals holding a 3-2 lead. The count was 1-1 when the squirrel bolted from the St. Louis dugout and crossed the plate shortly after Oswalt’s pitch.

“Not sure that’s covered in the rule book, varmints running on the field,” the commentator Bob Brenly said on TBS.

The pitch was called a ball by home plate umpire Angel Hernandez. Oswalt gestured as if he wanted a no-pitch. “I was wondering what size animal it needed to be” for a do-over, Oswalt explained. “I got distracted. I didn’t really know that would be a pitch. If it ran up the guy’s leg, would he have called the pitch for a strike? It’s hard to say.”

Hernandez saw no obstruction. The count moved to 2-1. As Brenly said, “Unless the squirrel called timeout as it ran by, that’s a live ball.”

Schumaker flied out on the next pitch, but an inning later, David Freese homered to center field with Matt Holliday on base. The Cardinals’ lead expanded to 5-2. Afterward, Charlie Manuel, the Phillies’ manager who grew up in Virginia, said he wished he had been armed with something more than a Louisville Slugger.

“Being from the South and being a squirrel hunter, if I had a gun there, I might have did something,” Manuel said. “I’m a pretty good shot.”

Thursday, in an interview with The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Rally Squirrel insisted that Holliday had urged him to charge the plate. “He said I love Gardening and there were sunflower seeds in it for me.”

By Thursday afternoon, Rally Squirrel had 11,000 followers on Twitter. And a news conference had been called at Busch Stadium to explain how a rodent got in without credentials.

With that, Rally Squirrel entered baseball lore along with other animal encounters, including the black cat that sauntered past the Cubs’ dugout at Shea Stadium during a futile pennant chase in 1969 and the midges that swarmed Joba Chamberlain in Cleveland during a 2007 playoff game.

Then there is the proverbial minor league animal story, said Bob Waterman of the Elias Sports Bureau.

“A pig runs across the outfield and grabs the ball,” Waterman said, “and the batter ends up with an inside-the-pork home run.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 7, 2011, on page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: Who Needs a Black Cat? Rally Squirrel Toys With the Phillies.

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As It Did at Its Start, Carnegie Hall Embraces Tchaikovsky

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

October 6, 2011 One day One world
“Its not what I had feared, but what I had not thought to fear”
Edgar Allan Poe
“Forgive, but never forget.”
John F. Kennedy

Carnegie Hall, to begin its new season on Wednesday evening, picked up pretty much where it had left off in the old one: still fixated, for whatever reason, on the 120th anniversary of the hall’s opening.

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Carnegie celebrated the actual anniversary on May 5, with a concert by Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic. Now it takes its cue from a particular aspect of that 1891 opening, the participation of Tchaikovsky, who conducted his own “Marche Solennelle” on the first evening of the inaugural festival and made similar appearances in three of the concerts that followed.

To flesh out the Tchaikovsky angle, Carnegie is presenting a five-concert residency by Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg as anchor to a loose festival running through October and beyond: a citywide, multidisciplinary exploration of two themes, Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg, and New York at the turn of the 20th century. Mr. Gergiev and the Mariinsky are performing all the Tchaikovsky symphonies in three concerts, followed by an evening featuring the young pianist Daniil Trifonov, the winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June, performing in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, one of the works the composer conducted in the hall in 1891.

In the season-opening gala on Wednesday, Mr. Gergiev presented works by Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich as well as Tchaikovsky.

There was little pretense of great artistic ambition here. So as not to detain or distract postconcert partygoers, the program was relatively brief and consisted of lightweight or popular works: Shostakovich’s “Festive Overture,” a seven-minute mix of imposing fanfares and scurrying activity tossed off in 1954 to commemorate the October Revolution; Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist; and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.”

But neither was there anything perfunctory about the performances or presentation. Mr. Ma and the orchestra added a substantial encore, a transcription of the Andante cantabile movement from Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet for cello and strings. And Mr. Gergiev, after an expansive account of “Scheherazade,” offered another encore, the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin.” It all stretched the program to an hour and 45 minutes, without intermission.

The “Rococo Variations” were given a fascinating twist. Although the program book listed the movements of Tchaikovsky’s original version, the one usually played today, Mr. Ma played an 1889 edition by the German cellist and composer Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, who played in the work’s premiere, in 1876. The program notes mention the Fitzenhagen arrangement, suggesting that the cellist had taken Tchaikovsky’s “cannily constructed Neo-Classical piece and ‘celloed it up’ for his own grandstanding purposes.”

Well, who better than Mr. Ma to play something celloed up? Mr. Ma met Tchaikovsky’s already strenuous demands, as enhanced by Fitzenhagen, with his usual flair and aplomb. He tore through an athletic series of exchanges with the orchestra, beaming at the concertmaster after each phrase as if to say to the orchestral strings, “Just try and match that.” The strings, to their credit, gave a plausible echo.

But what lingers in the memory more than the acrobatics is the gorgeous singing tone Mr. Ma achieved in the lyrical variations. And that was also the hallmark of his lovely account of the haunting melancholic folk tune that forms the basis of the quartet movement.

Mr. Gergiev led an unusually spacious, obviously loving performance of “Scheherazade,” and the concertmaster, Kirill Terentyev, gave the extended violin solos an exquisite turn. The strings as a whole could rival his fluidity and grace, as they had rivaled Mr. Ma’s outbursts, but they could also produce ferocious tremolos as appropriate to the exotic scenario.

Here, as throughout the program, the orchestral playing was notable more for its individualities — for the color and character produced by each player, especially among the woodwinds — than for its smoothness and blend. Hearing these distinctive timbres and hues in Mr. Gergiev’s attentive and detailed interpretation, with no posy left unsniffed, was like seeing Rimsky-Korsakov’s book on orchestration come to life on the stage.

Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra will perform Tchaikovsky symphonies on Thursday, Sunday and Monday, and a mixed program on Tuesday at Carnegie Hall.

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Four Legs and an Eye for Landscaping

Posted on October 6, 2011 by admin

October 5, 2011 One day One world
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it!”
Socrates
“The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
James B. Cabell

I DIDN’T want a dog. They’re needy and messy, you have to walk them, and they get between people. There had been a stepdog, Rudy, my girlfriend’s large black, placid Labrador and German shepherd mix, and it is true that my dad loved Rudy because he was the only member of the family willing to share his luncheon meats. But Rudy had driven me to a Jungian analyst after I had yelled, “What is this dog doing on the bed?” and Lois had replied, “What are you doing on the bed?”

When Rudy died in 2005, I made it clear to Lois, by then my wife, that there would be no more dogs. She seemed to agree, at least as long as Asia, her cat, was alive. Asia had filled our homes — a duplex near Union Square and a house on Shelter Island — with an unpredictable nastiness, like a pin hidden in a couch cushion. She had sent me to doctors four times for antibiotics after sudden tooth-and-claw raids on exposed toes or petting hands. But, just to keep a new dog out of the house, I kept her alive with “gourmet” cat food, nonjudgmental conversation and wary stroking.

After Asia finally died, at 18, I still tried to stave off the concept of a new dog. But I was in denial. After years without Rudy, Lois was kissing strange hounds on the street.

And so one day, after trolling through the Web site of a group called Last Chance Animal Rescue, Lois sent me a picture of a heart-stopping face, a cocker spaniel with soul, humor, deep tolerance and possibly an appreciation for both opera and Nascar. It had recently been saved from a South Carolina kill shelter. It was beseeching us to claim it. Its name was Snoopy.

When I told Lois I could never live with a dog named Snoopy, she sensed I was caving. She made a call. It turned out that a woman we know was taking care of Snoopy, a woman who lived only a block away from us on Shelter Island. Lois and I looked at each other and tried not to say the word.

We went over to take Snoopy for a walk. By the time we got him back to our house, I was gone, in love. The dog was upbeat, friendly, curious, unafraid, all the virtues I have tried to instill in myself. We renamed him Milo, after the protagonist in my son Sam’s new novel.

But I would not cave on one thing. I said Milo could not sleep on our bed. Lois seemed to agree.

Milo was about 6 years old, the veterinarian told us. He had had heartworm and a skin disorder. He was overweight from what had probably been a diet of junk food. He had only recently been neutered. He was needy, messy, he had to be walked, and he got between us. He was perfect.

Unexpectedly, he made our homes perfect, too.

He began with the gardening at our Manhattan duplex, an outdoor space that we rarely used and had allowed to become brown and bedraggled. I loved the idea of these two wood and stone patios with birch and mulberry on the terrace above, and bamboo below, but it was hard to justify their impact on our monthly maintenance. Until Milo, that is.

Inside the duplex, there is an open-stepped steeply winding circular staircase. I am scared going up and down, but at least I can grip the banister. Milo rejected the staircase, and he also wouldn’t use the building’s interior stairway. The only other option to keep him from being marooned on one floor was to go outside and head down the two short sets of concrete garden steps, which had a large landing between them for restoring courage. It took a little cajoling, but he did it. And if it wasn’t raining or snowing, I did it with him.

This got me into the garden. Sometimes, I’d take a cup of coffee while Milo sniffed the trees, the teak chairs, the pots of failing flowers. It was nice out there. I was amazed at how much … life there was in the garden. Weird green things growing. Birds, squirrels, interesting bugs. I called the irrigation guy, the gardener in Brooklyn. She raked the long-dead leaves, pulled the uninvited vines, cut back the dying holly, planted ferns and chrysanthemums.

I started thinking of it as Milo’s Gardening. Inside, I turned my desk chair to face it. The play of light and shadow through the trailing ivy and bamboo canes is now my respite from the computer screen.

There are lots of stairs in the Shelter Island house too, and Milo didn’t like them any better. He balked at the standard stairs up to Lois’s office until she began placing smelly treats, step by step. Within two days, he was scampering up and down. But he would not even consider the steep open stairs from the main living area down to my basement office.

To get him down there, we had to go outside, just as we had in Manhattan. In the back of the house, there is a 1.2-acre woodland that happened to be on the market. Lois and I did not think about bidding for it; its $395,000 asking price was an impossible sum for us. But we were terrified that someone would buy that lot, cut down all those trees and put up a McMansion that would loom over our little plot.

In other words, we looked on the woods as a shield against potential neighbors; we never looked at it for itself. But then Milo came along.

When he and I took our outdoor walk, we began to pause at the basement door and gaze at the woods. The plot was beautiful and mysterious in the summer. When I looked at it through my office window, I could imagine I was writing in the forest.

Milo became very alert as we stood staring. There were more creatures than in our Manhattan garden. The woods were thick with maples and black walnut trees, home to screech owls and yellow-bellied sapsuckers, and a refuge for the deer that Milo strained to chase.

I started thinking of it as Milo’s Backyard. I told Lois that he had probably been a gun dog once, that if we bought the parcel, Milo and I could hunt.

She said, “You get a gun, and Milo comes into our bed.” I backed off.

But I wanted those woods. I began to negotiate aggressively for the property, something I never would have done if Milo hadn’t urged me on. He wanted those woods, too! The price inched down. My ace in the hole, a home equity loan on Milo’s Garden, could buy Milo’s Backyard, but using it meant I’d have to keep writing until I was 100. Maybe I could make it, though, with Milo as my muse. When the price hit $250,000, I took out the loan and went for it. Milo joined us at the closing in March.

So now, past our second summer, thanks to Milo, that McMansion will never be built, and we tramp over fallen trees and grasping vines, lost in that strange magic of simultaneous birdsong and hush. I follow Milo’s nose to a pile of fresh raccoon scat, trying to appreciate it from his point of view; struggle through the clumps of wild roses; and find the old road to the abandoned well that preceded the neighborhood’s tiny public water system.

Sometimes I let Milo off the leash, but only after I’m sure there are no lurking deer. Milo is good about coming when called, unless he is chasing deer. And I often fantasize about us hunting. We’d share the venison with shelter dogs and shelter people. I’ve told him this, and he seems interested, although I think he wants me to write a little faster before I go shopping for a gun. He understands debt limits.

By the way, that warning from Lois about the gun is no longer a factor. Did I mention that I was the one who invited Milo into our bed?

Robert Lipsyte, a former reporter and columnist at The Times, is most recently the author of a memoir, “An Accidental Sportswriter.”

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Life and Art, Side by Side in the French Quarter

Posted on October 5, 2011 by admin

October 5, 2011 One day One world
“There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.”
Michael de Montaigne
“Happiness is not something you experience, it is something you remember.”
Oscar Levant

ERSY SCHWARTZ, a sculptor, and Josephine Sacabo, a photographer, are old friends, neighbors and artistic collaborators who live in the crumbling village known as the French Quarter, in houses that are exemplars of a certain local aesthetic composed of equal parts grandeur and mystery, funk and rot. They are also fomenters of the sort of time-traveling artwork that comes with a distinctly New Orleans point of view.

In Ms. Schwartz’s meticulous, mischievous pieces — which might be peopled with tiny winged figures that have bird skulls in place of heads or real mice cast in bronze — and in Ms. Sacabo’s ghostly, smoky female figures, you can see the collision of magic realism, allegory and surrealism. It’s a territory of fallen angels, omnivorous ancestors and all manner of fantastic creatures.

The two artists are the subject of side-by-side retrospectives, “Ersy: Architect of Dreams” and “Óyeme con los Ojos (Hear Me With Your Eyes),” opening here Saturday at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

This is significant not just because it’s a celebration of two local heroes. (Although devotees of Ms. Schwartz, a shy, gruff woman who is clearly allergic to self-marketing, will find it satisfying to see four decades’ worth of her work in one place for the first time.) It is also an intermezzo in the drama of real life, which has dealt some blows to both women in the last decade, a period that has not been easy for anyone in this town.

As Kyle Roberts, Ms. Schwartz’s partner, said, it signifies a moment “when we can all exhale.”

“Sorry about the dust,” Ms. Schwartz was saying early last week, as she handed over a photograph of her grandmother decked out as Queen of Comus (that’s high up in the caste society of New Orleans, as it plays out in Mardi Gras krewes).

This reporter added it to a little pile of objects she had accumulated on the red velvet and rosewood sofa, part of a suite of furniture that in all likelihood had occupied the same spot in Ms. Schwartz’s front parlor since 1925, when her grandmother bought the place, which was built in the mid-19th century as a billiard house, an extension to the gaming club next door.

There was also one of Ms. Schwartz’s cast-bronze mice, in a horizontal arabesque pose, and a painted metal parakeet, a prop in a practical joke her father liked to play on her, which involved hiding her real parakeet and replacing it with this tinny simulacrum.

“I had a very odd childhood,” said Ms. Schwartz, 60, whose family moved into the house when she was 10. Indeed, her father, an avid hunter who ran a wholesale hardware company, liked to use his only daughter as target practice, shooting her with his BB gun as she ran back and forth on the front lawn.

“It didn’t hurt,” she said unconvincingly.

Ms. Schwartz’s childhood was also marked by tragedies, including the early deaths of several family members. In a city where you expect a gothic family history, Ms. Schwartz’s stands out.

“If my work seems a little grim, it is,” she said.

At Cooper Union, in Manhattan, where she taught for 20 years, Ms. Schwartz would harvest the mice that sanitation workers flushed out from under the statue of Peter Cooper. She cast them in bronze and tucked them into pieces like a cheese grater fitted out on the inside with spiky teeth and tufted red velvet — a luxurious, toothy coffin. (After Hurricane Katrina, Ms. Schwartz mourned the contents of her freezer here, when she lost a shark, part of a deer, some lovebirds, frogs, a snake and a lizard.)

She returned to this city, and this house, 12 years ago, when her mother was no longer able to live alone (Ms. Schwartz’s father died in 1982). “I loved my mother,” she said, describing a fiery human-rights activist and preservationist who used to throw herself in front of the tour buses rattling the foundations of the houses in the French Quarter. “And I loved the house, so there was really no choice.”

That was when she resumed a friendship begun decades earlier with Ms. Sacabo. (The two met when Ms. Sacabo was assigned by a local magazine to take a photo of Ms. Schwartz. “It was love at first sight,” said Ms. Sacabo, who is as outgoing as Ms. Schwartz is taciturn.) As it happened, Ms. Sacabo had just moved into a 170-year-old merchant’s house around the corner with her husband, Dalt Wonk.

For the record, no one in this article uses his or her given name. Ersy was christened Eugenie, after her mother, and her partner, Ms. Roberts, a photographer, was named Louise. Ms. Sacabo was born Mary Alice Martin in Laredo, Tex., and Mr. Wonk, Richard Cohen, in Passaic, N.J.

Multimedia

Slide Show A New Orleans Aesthetic: Part Grandeur, Part Mystery.When they were young theater students at Bard, Ms. Sacabo and Mr. Wonk (she calls him Wonkie) decided they needed stage names, and after a while the names stuck. Dalt Wonk is a play on “Don’t Walk,” but Mr. Wonk, a playwright and theater critic, said these days he tells people it’s Romanian Jewish.

“I got sick of telling the story,” he said. “And anyway, I didn’t want people to think I didn’t want to be Jewish.” (Mr. Wonk, 69, is also the author and illustrator of books of fables with a jaundiced worldview. “Experience teaches nothing until it is too late” reads the epigraph of one he dedicated to Ms. Schwartz’s mother, who died in 2001.)

MS. Sacabo, 60, was raised Catholic, in a formal Latin family that was not overly thrilled by her choice of a husband. Her father never really forgave her, she said, for marrying “outside of my milieu.” When he died, her mother bought her the merchant’s house as a kind of peace offering. Since the 1970s, Ms. Sacabo and her husband had been living in an atmospheric rental nearby, after a decade in the south of France, where they’d had a theater company.

Their new house had been owned by a reclusive architect who was a hoarder. He had covered the windows in black plastic, to save on air-conditioning, and was camping in two rooms. The rest of the house was stuffed with birdcages of his own design, brass chandeliers, wooden shutters, old doors, kitchen cabinets, vacuum cleaners, spiral staircases, curious iron grillwork boxes and fire irons, to name a few of his obsessions. When he died, his family sold the house for about $380,000, contents included.

“That was the condition,” Ms. Sacabo said. “That we clear all the junk out. But for people like us, it was like some serious flea market.”

She and Mr. Wonk and Ms. Schwartz made the house habitable, laying in new plumbing and wiring, and plastering and painting. Shutters became closet doors; the weird iron boxes are now planters.

“We were broke, Ersy was broke, dah dah dah,” Ms. Sacabo said cheerfully. A cattle inheritance back in Laredo was a windfall that paid for the kitchen, though its cabinets she found in the former owner’s stash upstairs.

Ms. Schwartz built the grand floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the living room and the sinuous spiral staircase, with help from her Cooper Union students. They painted the living room four times, under Ms. Sacabo’s precise direction. It looks like a cloudy sky, and now that the paint has peeled, exposing the crumbly, water-stained plaster, it has that distinct New Orleans patina. As in Venice, decay is a design element here.

“Ersy said it looks like someone under ether,” Ms. Sacabo said. “She’d say, ‘Sacabo, if you make me paint this one more time. …‘ But it had to be just right.”

Jon Newlin, an author of “Geopsychic Wonders of New Orleans,” said that like so many New Orleans artists: “Josephine and Ersy are sui generis. Josephine is sort of guided by her literary enthusiasms, and Ersy is completely instinctual. I think everything comes out of that deranged head of hers. The connective tissue? They are both eccentrics in their art.”

D. Eric Bookhardt, Mr. Newlin’s co-author and a longtime art reviewer for Gambit, the city’s alternative weekly newspaper, noted that each artist’s habitat is tangled up in her work.

“Josephine’s influences are the French Symbolist poets,” he said. “But being a Latina, she has that sort of magic realist DNA in her blood.” Like Keith Carter and Debbie Fleming Caffery, Ms. Sacabo is representative of a group of Southern Gulf Coast photographers who have their antecedents in the work of Clarence John Laughlin and E. J. Bellocq, the Storyville documentarian who inspired Louis Malle’s “Pretty Baby.”

The artwork of both women “reflects this sort of transmutation of humanistic values into these, hmm, symbolic creatures,” as Mr. Bookhardt put it, and “that all relates to the environment they live in. Because what I would designate as the New Orleans modus operandi for interior décor is surrounding oneself with talismanic objects that create a certain aesthetic.”

Multimedia

Slide Show A New Orleans Aesthetic: Part Grandeur, Part Mystery.“Small things take on a certain charge that somehow communicates,” he added, “even if you don’t know what they mean to the owner.”

And if these two houses are “tropical magical realist” environments, as Mr. Bookhardt would say, they are merely emblematic of the sort of rotting grandeur, the embrace of the inevitability of decay, that pervades the city.

Time, Mr. Bookhardt continued, warming to his theme, “is really the design element here. It’s a palette, a creative pool and expression.”

Peeling paint, family photographs thick with dust and decomposing on a mantel, pockmarked plaster walls: these represent existential truths, memento mori. And who can be bothered, or has the money, for upkeep? Better to make a friend of decay.

“It keeps you in touch with the organic unity of life,” Mr. Bookhardt said. “It’s going to happen to us all one day.”

THE year before Katrina, Mr. Wonk had a mysterious seizure, and surgeons removed a piece of his brain. It was Ms. Schwartz who met Ms. Sacabo and their daughter, Iris, at the airport (they had been in New York for a show of Ms. Sacabo’s photographs) and let them know he had made it through the night. It would be three months before Mr. Wonk left the hospital. When he did, Ms. Schwartz made him a piece of art: a little bronze Icarus figure caught in a goblet.

Two years earlier, she had finished a significant work, called “Hommage to the Society of Ste. Anne.” A darkly comic piece with 105 precisely rendered bronze figures, tiny mythic creatures — a headless pig, a cowboy boot, a bird — striding across a table at eye level, it conjures up the real Ste. Anne’s parade, which was started in 1974 by three local characters, Henri Schindler, Paul Poche and Mr. Newlin, and took on a funerary quality during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when marchers would carry the ashes of friends and tip them into the Mississippi.

The piece was also a tribute to Ms. Schwartz’s mother, some of whose ashes Ms. Schwartz poured into the river that year at the parade. The rest are buried in the garden out front, under a camellia bush, next to those of her aunt and her grandmother.

As in most New Orleans houses, the dead are everywhere. Ms. Schwartz’s cousin, Jack McIlhenney, is in the front parlor, in a wooden box. Most of the ashes of Jimmy Vial, a friend who died of AIDS in the mid-1990s, are in the Pacific Ocean, in a piece Ms. Schwartz made to look like a metronome, but some were stuffed into capsules and laid on the seat of another artwork, a miniature wheelchair inside a pyramid. That sculpture is at the Ogden this week, but not the capsules: “They’re in the house somewhere,” Ms. Schwartz said.

Like Ms. Schwartz herself, who battled lung cancer a year and a half ago (“Yes, and I’m still smoking,” she’ll say, brandishing an unfiltered Camel), her house is standing through sheer force of will, and, perhaps, the will of the ghosts collected there.

“It’s a beautiful house,” said Ms. Roberts, 53. “But its needs are insatiable.”

When Ms. Roberts left town the day before Katrina, she said, “I was really convinced Ersy was going to come with me. But no, the house always wins.”

As Ms. Schwartz said, “The house is an illness with me.” She stayed on for a week, post-Katrina, entertaining several guests. They bathed in the fountain.

In 2008, Ms. Roberts bought the “Hommage” piece and donated it to the Ogden, which gave the museum’s curator at the time the idea to collect Ms. Schwartz’s work in a major retrospective, and pair it with Ms. Sacabo’s.

“When things were really ugly,” Ms. Sacabo said, “when Ersy was in the hospital, I’d say, ‘Come on, we’re doing this show.’ It was like an incentive.”

“You know, there is no art manifesto between us,” she continued. “It’s not this surrealist dah dah dah. That’s irrelevant. What connects us is a more sustaining feeling, this life of going back and forth, this emotional support.”

She added: “It’s more a life-experience sort of connection, rather than Ersy’s surrealist bird heads and my eyeballs. The point is that we are friends.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 29, 2011, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Life and Art, Side by Side.
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Posted on June 18, 2010 by admin

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