Felsomat, a German manufacturer that makes automation equipment for the automotive industry, has a talent problem that's become a growth problem.

Plans to triple the size of its Schaumburg facility, to 100,000 square feet, have stalled in part because it is difficult to find skilled technicians to design, build and service the automated systems that have allowed U.S. carmakers to produce more than ever before with fewer people, said Richard Gilchrist, chairman of Felsomat USA.

Despite the national hand-wringing about manufacturing jobs lost to automation and cheaper foreign labor, and President-elect Donald Trump's threats of penalties against companies that offshore, some manufacturers say the industry's health relies more on training people for the jobs that will keep their companies competitive in the future.

The low-paid assembly-line jobs "will never come back," Gilchrist said. "The jobs that can come back are high-tech jobs, if we have the industry to support it."

Those jobs are within reach of working-class populations that traditionally found solid pay in manufacturing.

Gilchrist, who employs 60 people, said about 70 percent of his jobs do not require a four-year college degree. Among the hardest positions to fill are mechatronics engineers — which are essentially mechanical, hydraulic and pneumatic engineers rolled into one. The job calls for an associate's degree and on-the-job training plus, in some cases, a willingness to spend long stretches away from home on service missions. It pays about $25 to $30 an hour.

Recruiting has been an uphill climb as an increasingly high-tech manufacturing sector battles the image of a dirty, dying industry and a mindset that idealizes a university education. Many manufacturers are bringing workers back from retirement to fill positions.

"Unfortunately, there hasn't been enough effort and activity by employers to really set themselves up for long-term success," said Jeannine Kunz, vice president of Tooling U-SME, a Cleveland-based company that helps manufacturers develop in-house training programs.

Many companies that are expanding their buildings and upgrading technology are not balancing their capital investments with training investments so people actually know how to meet the new demands, Kunz said. Her organization, which gave the manufacturing industry a C-minus for talent development, found in a survey that 9 in 10 manufacturers have a hard time finding workers.

As a result, productivity, quality, innovation and safety suffer, she said.

Some Chicago-area manufacturers have responded by partnering with local high schools and community colleges to train a new generation of workers excited for a career in advanced manufacturing.

The Golden Corridor Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, an organization of about 20 manufacturers along Interstate 90 between O'Hare International Airport and Rockford, works with Palatine and Arlington Heights school districts to create a sustainable talent pipeline. The companies host students in internships, sponsor robotics contests, donate equipment and hold open houses to give kids an inside look at their modern facilities.

Developing a pool of skilled young people not only helps current employers but also could attract new employers to the area, said Gilchrist, chair of the group.

"Companies will locate where there is a ready-trained labor force," he said.

At Wheeling High School, which works with the Golden Corridor manufacturers, plans to create an engineering program a decade ago took on a heavier manufacturing focus after employers complained of a dearth of skills on the factory floor.

Convincing kids — and most of all, their parents — to consider factory careers was difficult at first because of the blue-collar associations, said Tom Steinbach, a technology engineering instructor at Wheeling. The classes are labeled "manufacturing engineering" to make them sound more highbrow, just as the terms STEM and maker movement have lent sex appeal to the industry.

"Now we've seen a total 180, where parents are excited," Steinbach said, in part because huge college bills aren't always translating to students being prepared for good-paying jobs.

Given higher unemployment rates among people without college degrees, it would seem like there should be an eager manufacturing talent supply.

But weak programs to support new employees lead to a revolving door of workers who don't last longer than six months to a year, said John Hindman, learning and performance improvement leader at Tooling U-SME.

And there are knowledge-transfer concerns. Manufacturing workers tend to be either veterans on the verge of retirement or newbies fresh out of school, as the generation in between — for the most part Generation Xers who should be in management — came of age when parents and teachers were steering kids away from what appeared to be a sputtering industry, Hindman said.

Illinois' manufacturing sector has been shrinking for some time.

The state counted 568,500 manufacturing jobs in October, down from 877,000 at the start of 2000, when manufacturing was the second-largest employer in the state — behind only the trade, transportation and utilities category, which remains the state's jobs leader. Manufacturing has since been eclipsed in jobs by professional and business services, education and health, government, and leisure and hospitality.

The state's manufacturing job losses have stabilized since 2010 and the industry remains an economic powerhouse, with total output of $100 billion in Illinois in 2014, about 13.4 percent of the state's GDP, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.

High turnover stemming from retirements is leaving employers scrambling to fill positions, said Jim Nelson, vice president at the Illinois Manufacturing Association.

This summer City Colleges of Chicago announced construction of a $75 million manufacturing center that will accommodate another 3,800 students at Richard J. Daley College, which houses the community college system's manufacturing program in the West Lawn neighborhood near Midway Airport.

But an even greater challenge than training workers on technical skills is finding people with basic professional skills, Nelson said. He recalled that when applicants to a state manufacturing training program were told they would be drug tested to qualify, nearly half of them failed to return.

"Getting people to work on time and drug-free and alcohol-free is a big challenge," he said.

Some research suggests that worries about a manufacturing skills gap are overblown.

In a nationally representative survey of 900 manufacturers, researchers found that just 16 to 25 percent of companies had hiring difficulties connected to a skills shortage, much less than the numbers provided by trade groups, said Andrew Weaver, assistant professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who co-authored the study.

Jobs that demanded higher-level reading and math skills, not computer and tech expertise, were most predictive of extended job vacancies, said Weaver, whose findings were published in the July issue of Industrial and Labor Relations Review.

Hiring challenges also came into play among small firms located in clusters during times of changing demand. That's because those clustered firms rely on community colleges or other external sources to cultivate a talent pool, rather than large internal training departments, and it can be hard to efficiently coordinate and communicate their needs, Weaver said.

But employers should be heartened that today's workforce is much more educated than that of 40 or 50 years ago.

"If anything, retiring workers should be an opportunity to vastly upgrade the skills," Weaver said.

Manufacturers keeping a close eye on margins as they grapple with global competition often are reluctant to make a long-term investment in creating their own talent pool.

But strong growth plans and a looming wave of employee retirements pushed Woodward, which makes airplane fuel systems and controls, to take steps to home-grow its own workforce.

A quarter of its employees, or about 412 people, are over 55, and the so-called silver tsunami of baby boomer retirements is just starting to crash, said June Hazzard, vice president of human resources for the Aircraft Turbine Business Group at Woodward, which has a plant in Niles and two plants in Rockford.

Woodward calculated that over a short period it would need to hire 500 new employees, and it made a conscious decision not to poach workers from other manufacturers, which wouldn't be enough and often isn't effective because people are loyal, Hazzard said.

Instead, the company partnered with the Rockford School District to create a summer manufacturing program for high school students at Rockford Valley College, to sow interest and create a foundation of knowledge that would make them hire-ready. Woodward, a client of Tooling U-SME, then trains new hires through a set of in-house classes that combine classroom work, online classes and applied work on the floor, plus regular skills assessments to track progress.

Employees start at $14 or $15 an hour and those wages go up to the high $20s and $30s after several years as they become fully skilled.

Positions haven't gone unfilled and the company has exceeded its goal of retaining 95 percent of its workers for at least a year, making the return on investment "a no-brainer," Hazzard said.

"When a position is posted, most leaders want to find someone who already has experience," Hazzard said. "We made the fundamental shift away from that concept that we will find someone who is a good fit for the organization and we will teach them to make our products."

Elena Valentine, co-founder of Skill Scout, a startup that helps manufacturers hire from overlooked talent pools, agreed that company hiring practices remain stuck in the past. Many employers still put bland job descriptions on yard signs or "post-and-pray" job boards.

To appeal to the new generation, Valentine's company helps manufacturers tell their story through behind-the-scenes videos that show what working there is like. To get away from relying on resumes that focus on number of years worked rather than ability, Skill Scout incorporates hands-on work samples into applications.

At A-1 Tool in Melrose Park, one of Valentine's clients, promotional videos are one of several efforts to attract a skilled workforce.

The company, which manufactures steel molds to make plastic parts, built a spacious kitchen and gym to help retain talent and created a process map with detailed steps and goals that not only improves efficiency but shows people how to move up the career ladder, from sweeping floors to running grinders to fitting molds.

"What I've recognized is that most companies are failing at providing a path for success," said Geoff Luther, A-1's owner and president. Entry-level jobs start at about $12 to $13 an hour and those who move up to become mold-makers can earn more than $30 an hour, he said.

Luther estimates nearly a quarter of his 85 employees come from East and West Leyden high schools, which have longtime metals programs. Among them is Gregory Zaucha, a 25-year-old mechanical engineer who started working at A-1 as a summer intern when he was 16. Zaucha started sweeping floors and cleaning machines making $8 an hour — "a character builder," he said — and kept working at the plant through community college and then a bachelor's program at University of Illinois at Chicago, where he got his mechanical engineering degree last year.

Zaucha said he initially dreamed of being a police officer but his factory colleagues persuaded him that manufacturing was a better route, in part because he gets holidays and weekends off. He is glad he got his hands dirty on the floor because "it makes me a better designer, I understand how things actually work," and expects to keep climbing at the company, perhaps to a job in sales.


S advertisers struggle to reach increasingly distracted and jaded American consumers, they have sought nontraditional vehicles for their ads, from elevators to cellphone screens.

Now Sony has given advertisers another venue to try: its PlayStation Portable, or PSP, a sleek hand-held game system that also plays movies and music.

Heavy.com, a large Web host of short films and animation, has started making many of its clips available as free content specially formatted for the game system. The company hopes advertisers will support the free content by paying for quick commercials before or after the downloads, or by providing content in the form of branded entertainment.

Whether audiences of large enough mass will watch videos and ads on the devices, however, is far from clear.

Unilever, the first advertiser to take Heavy up on its offer, will test the potential with a series of branded shorts about two guys roaming the country and filming their efforts to meet women, all to promote Axe body spray. People can watch them at www.evanandgareth.com, on Heavy.com or on PSP's after a download from Heavy.

The typical Axe customer, a man between 18 and 24 years old, has such fractured media habits that 30-second commercials and magazine ads are not enough, said David Rubin, development manager for Axe at Unilever. "He is still watching television, but even when he's doing that, he's online or might have his PSP on in front of him," Mr. Rubin said. "The more pieces you can reach, the better."

Web advertising also allows more interactivity and measurement than traditional ads, Mr. Rubin said. "If you were to just do television or print, which do play a very important role, you miss the opportunities that other media allow."

Other companies are exploring the marketing potential of the PSP and other new hand-helds. ABC News has converted reports on topics like cybersecurity and hybrid cars for the PSP. Sony Pictures has also made available previews for movies like "Lords of Dogtown," about surfing and skateboarding during the 1970's.

Even with Sony claiming sales of 500,000 PlayStation Portables during its first two days on sale in North America, the potential for advertisers may depend heavily on how much people like watching the clips.

Even the appeal of full-length Hollywood movies has not been proved. Brian D. Crecente, editor of the Kotaku gaming site (www.kotaku.com), has shown some ambivalence about movies in the portable format.

Mr. Crecente wrote on Kotaku one Monday in April about buying the movie "House of Flying Daggers" in the PSP format over the weekend. "I haven't watched it yet," he wrote, "because I would feel weird sitting in my house, which has DVD players, VCR's and countless TV's, watching a movie on my PSP. I was going to go out in the hammock and watch, but it's too bright."

Mr. Crecente said yesterday that he still had not watched the movie but was hoping to find an excuse. "If I'm in a car on a road trip, I can pull it out and watch," he said, "or if I'm stuck at an airport."

Short clips from Heavy.com, which can be watched online anyway, do not necessarily make more sense, Mr. Crecente said. "Why take the extra step of downloading it and taking it somewhere?" he said.

On the other hand, the brevity of Heavy.com's clips might help attract viewers, said David Carson, co-chief executive at Heavy, the New York parent of Heavy.com and an ad agency called TeamHeavy. "Someone doesn't want to spend two hours watching something on the PSP," he said. "But they want something kind of short and kind of funny that they can show to their friends."

Ads and branded entertainment on the PSP will find fewer viewers than most broadcast television programs, but they may be more efficient than most television commercials, said Simon Assaad, Heavy's other co-chief executive.

"The most interesting thing from an advertiser's point of view is the amount of engagement that the audience has with this device," Mr. Assaad said. "The difference between that and television, which is completely passive, is enormous."

Marketers will monitor who buys the PSP and devices like it. If the universe of owners stays relatively confined to young male fans of video games, the PSP's appeal to many advertisers will probably be limited.

Entertainment and retail marketers may be the most intrigued for now, said Wendi Dunlap, interactive strategist at Horizon Interactive, part of Horizon Media in New York. But the place of powerful portable entertainment devices in a fragmented media world will be defined by the ways consumers use them over time, she said. "As consumers adapt, we'll find new ways to support and distribute content."

Summary: Sony has given advertisers another venue in their struggle to reach increasingly distracted consumers: its PlayStation Portable.


Desiree Jennings was living a dream come true. The 25-year-old had a marketing job at a major company, was married to a handsome, successful man, and had challenging hobbies: she was an avid runner, and a cheerleading ambassador for the Washington Redskins football team.

Desiree Jennings, 25, claims after flu shot, she lost the ability to walk, speak

But almost overnight Jennings went from the picture of happiness and health, to a twisted, stuttering vision of pain and suffering.

After a routine flu shot last fall, Jennings said she began experiencing fever and painful body aches. The symptoms quickly progressed until she could only walk with a twisted, halting gait, and had trouble reading, doing simple math -- even remembering things. Her condition put a halt on her once-frenetic lifestyle.

"I want to work, I want to be doing something," she said. "But who's going to hire somebody who can't remember what they did the day before?"

Jennings developed another odd symptom -- a strange foreign accent; the Midwestern woman suddenly sounded British. "It sounds like an accent, but it's not. I just can't pronounce words anymore," she said.

But perhaps worse of all is what happens when Jennings tried to recall specific memories. In her "20/20" interview, Jennings' speech devolved to stuttering, then complete gibberish.

"The mind keeps bouncing and it won't stay on that memory," she explained. "It gets garbled up on a bad hard drive so to speak."

In search of a cure, Jennings and her husband Brendan visited countless doctors and four hospitals, among them Johns Hopkins Hospital. There, a physical therapist told Jennings about dystonia, a rare movement disorder that causes the muscles to twitch or convulse involuntary. The symptoms resembled her own.

Jennings looked online and saw that in some cases, people with dystonia, who have trouble walking forward like she did, can walk backwards. Even more exciting for the devoted jogger was that a medical website said some sufferers can run.

"Within five minutes of seeing it on the website, she had her running shoes on," Brendan recalled.

Miraculously, Jennings could run. She also found out she could walk backwards, and even sideways, and that while doing so, her speech returned to normal.

"It's the strangest thing," she said. "As soon as you try to get into a running motion, you feel the whole body correcting itself."

It wasn't long before Jennings became a media sensation. Video of the beautiful young cheerleader, flopping about and stuttering one moment, running and talking normally the next, went viral. At once, she became the poster child of the anti-vaccine movement and a global Internet joke. YouTube comics garnered millions of hits setting her jerky movements to rap music.

Summary: Desiree Jennings, a 25-year-old cheerleader ambassador for the Washington Redskins, had everything going for her until one day her body suddenly stopped working, turning into a twisted, jerky mess. For some inexplicable reason, when she runs, Jennings' body untwists and straightens out, and sometimes she can walk backwards and sideways without trouble. Footage of this unusual phenomenon spread quickly online, making her an internet sensation. Was it caused by a flu shot, as Desiree thought? Her journey for answers to this medical mystery takes her to a controversial osteopath in North Carolina and ultimately leads people to question whether or not her affliction is real.


BY GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY

Friday, May 5th 1995, 2:34AM

Blaine Trump, Ann and Charlotte Ford and 1,100 other women put on the big hats and ate lunch in the park Wednesday to benefit the Central Park Conservancy.

But whatever you do, don't call them Ladies Who Lunch.

And don't call them Society Women, either.

We've gotten complaints from, shall we say, really well-off, smartly dressed women for hanging such tags on them. They don't want them. Not anymore.

"I'm not a society person," Chessy Rayner told us recently.

"I work for a living. I'm a decorator. That's how I pay the rent."

And Nan Kempner, whom Tom Wolfe surely described in "The Bonfire of the Vanities" as a "social X-ray" told us, "I don't consider myself a society woman."

What gives? In the 1980s, we had a stampede of the nouveau riche clamoring for the title. But in the get-serious '90s, many well-off women (let's call them WOWs) want to be known for their shudder work.

"I'd rather be known for my work for Christie's and my work for Memorial Sloan-Kettering," said Kempner.

Kempner is an international representative of the auction house, and has chaired benefits that have raised millions for the hospital.

"I do have lunch, of course," Kempner added. "But I'm far more interested in the arts and philanthropy."

Linda Wachner has her Warneco lingerie company and Georgette Mosbacher had La Prairie cosmetics.

"Generations ago, if a woman worked it was a sign the husband was not able to support her," said "society" furrier Dennis Basso. "Today, they work for stimulation and enjoyment. A little extra never hurt."

Many WOWs pointed to Blaine Trump and Pat Buckley as examples of women who don't have to work, but do for charity. Married to Robert Trump, Blaine has raised millions for "God's Love, We Deliver," and Buckley (Mrs. William F.) has done the same for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Judy Peabody, the former debutante who works 12-hour days for AIDS patients and GMHC, has noticed a definite change in her peers in recent years. "A lot of us are much more committed to specific, serious interests," Peabody told us.

Peabody opines that the AIDS epidemic, which does not discriminate, has contributed to the change.

"I think a lot of people have suffered losses. It makes a big difference when you lose someone you love.

"I think more women are saying it's time I did something beyond my home, my own pleasure and needs. People rethink their lives. You try to make a difference with the time you have left."

Like Buckley, Trump and other WOWs, Peabody still allows herself one indulgence: clothes. You'll see Peabody at the couture shows of Bill Blass, Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta. Dedicated or no, they've all still got to eat midday, so why not Aureole, Le Cirque or Mortimer's?

That's where you'll often find Ann Slater with her trademark Noxema-blue glasses. Slater is one of the few left who is completely guilt-free about being a socialite.

Asked if she worked, or was involved in a charity or the arts, Slater smilingly said, "I'm not involved in anything except my friends."

One of those friends, art dealer Sam Green, told us that ladies who only lunch serve a social purpose preserving the dying art of conversation.

"Lunch is the canvas," said Green. "The ladies are the palette and language is the brush."

Slater concurred. "I have lunch, and I have dinner," she said.

The missus to uncover Cochran

Hell hath no fury like a scorned woman with a book deal as Johnnie Cochran is about to find out. Barbara Cochran Berry, the ex-wife of O.J. Simpson's lawyer, just signed a six-figure contract with HarperCollins' usually scholarly Basi c Books.

The title: "Life After Johnny Cochran: Why I Left the Sweetest-Talking, Most Successful Lawyer in L.A." Maureen O'Brien reports in next Monday's Publisher's Weekly that Barbara calls Johnny "the ex-husband from hell" and promises to lay bare his alleged "philandering, mind games, put-downs, long-term two-timing with a white mistress, and even his physical abusiveness."

Two Oscars haven't spoiled Tom Hanks. He's insisting that his co-stars on "Apollo 13" Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise and Bill Paxton stand shoulder to shoulder with him in Universal's ad campaign. Also, don't send baby booties to Tom and his wife, Rita Wilson. They insist they are not expecting another child. . . .

Joely Fisher wants the world to know she's a natural blond. A dyed brunette in the sitcom "Ellen," Fisher wore an even darker wig in her "Grease!" debut Wednesday night when she replaced Brooke Shields. But at a party at Gaugin in the Plaza Hotel afterward, the daughter of Connie Stevens and Eddie Fisher said "Ellen" producers had asked her to tone down her locks in order to play opposite Ellen DeGeneres. "Two blonds can't be friends," Fisher said . . .

If Mark Dowie and Joe Kane are proof, environmentalists are some of the sexiest men in the country.

Dowie, a rugged Robert Redford lookalike, has just published "Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century" (MIT Press), which blasts big and logy environmental groups. Dowie claims it will be a network of smaller local efforts that will save the Earth.

Kane, the first known man to kayak down the Amazon ("Running the Amazon"), will talk about encroaching oil development in the rainforest tomorrow at St. Peter's Church on E. 54th St. as part of Amanak'a's Amazon Week. You may remember his New Yorker piece in which he described his visit to Washington with a Guarani Indian, who had never seen elevators, plumbing or women in heels.


Just four months ago, when her

was being finalized, Olivia Wilde described herself as "wobbly." But now, it seems like the actress is starting to stand tall again.

"When you go through a breakup, you lose faith for a while," Wilde, 27, tells

"It makes you feel like such a failure, but I think this whole traumatic year has made me a better actor. And the good thing about getting divorced young – if there is a good thing – is that it makes you realize there's no schedule in life. It blasts you wide open and frees you to be honest with yourself."

Looking back, Wilde may describe her decision to elope with Ruspoli at age 18 (they were wed on a bus) as impulsive. "The danger is that you evolve over the years and find yourself in a different place," she says of marrying at a young age.

nearly a year ago, she seems to have nothing but respect and admiration for Ruspoli.

"Tao was, and is, totally involved with his work, and for me there's nothing sexier than a man who is busy and obsessed with what he's doing," she tells

. "I guess I saw that in my parents' marriage. They had real respect for their work and for each other."

It was Wilde's parents, in fact, who gave their daughter her first taste of Hollywood.

"My dad took me to see

as a birthday treat, and I knew at that moment that this was what I wanted to do," she says.

Later, as a teen, Wilde remembers having lunch with

, the 1997 movie for which her parents, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, wrote the screenplay.

"Having George Clooney be the first Hollywood actor I met set a pretty high standard," she said. "He's genuinely sincere, smart, gracious, and I like his politics, too, which always helps."

Another influential Hollywood leading man? Wilde's costar on

"I spent four years on

and learned so much from Hugh," she tells

. "I owe my entire film career to him. I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am now without Hugh and the series. It was the first time I'd been allowed to play somebody not defined by my looks."

Meanwhile, Wilde's formative experience with

may not be her only connection to the show. Though she confirmed to

that she's seeing someone in the entertainment business, Wilde stopped short of specifically naming

cast member Jason Sudeikis, whom she's been

Summary: The star says her "traumatic year" has made her a better actress


Air travel isn't as fun as it used to be. The wait at the check-in, the line to go through security and the all too frequent delay before boarding have tested all our nerves. But, as Jon Sopel reports, if you're on your way to London, make specially sure you're not in a hurry.

Summary: British Prime Minister David Cameron returned to London after an official trip to the United States to meet with President Obama. UTTM Contributor Lance Price discusses why meetings between world leaders are very important.


Stan Brakhage, one of the leading figures in American experimental cinema, died on Sunday in Victoria, British Columbia. He was 70.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Marilyn, said in a statement.

In a career that in the early 1950's and continued until the last weeks of his life, Mr. Brakhage made about 400 films. He also wrote about film and taught extensively.

Like the work of many artistic radicals, his is often described in terms of what it is not: working in a photographic medium most commonly defined by storytelling and the reproduction of real-world objects and events, Mr. Brakhage made films that usually had no narrative, were often not representational and at times even dispensed with photography altogether. With a few exceptions, his films were also made without sound, which he felt might spoil the intensity of the visual experience.

An admirer of Ezra Pound and a close associate of poets like Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, Mr. Brakhage preferred to think of his films as metaphorical, abstract and highly subjective -- as a kind of poetry written with light.

''He was a painter or poet in cinema,'' said P. Adams Sitney, a film historian at Princeton University, ''not a novelist like everybody else.''

Mr. Sitney continued, ''In the entire history of the medium, when all the pop-culture interests have faded, a hundred years from now, he will be considered the preeminent artist of the 20th century.''

Mr. Brakhage's work is as notable for its variety as for its quantity: some of his films last only a few seconds, while others are epic in scope and duration; they include meditations on sexuality and domestic life, as well as wholly abstract compositions made by scratching, dyeing and otherwise altering the celluloid itself.

In ''Window Water Baby Moving'' (1959) he unflinchingly documented the birth of one of his children long before camcorders became standard delivery-room accessories. In ''Mothlight'' (1963) he sandwiched leaves, petals and insect parts between strips of perforated tape and then transferred their images to film. In ''The Text of Light'' (1974) he examined the shadings and refractions of light filtered through a heavy glass ashtray.

But for all their differences of mood, style and formal method, Mr. Brakhage's films were the expression of a singular and uncompromising aesthetic program, which he articulated in numerous lectures, interviews and essays.

''Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective,'' he wrote in ''Metaphor on Vision,'' first published in the journal Film Culture in 1963, ''an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.''

The idea that the physical act of seeing could be separated -- liberated, even -- from the shape and nature of the things seen, and from our preconceptions about them, was the basis of much of Mr. Brakhage's art.

Stan Brakhage was born Robert Sanders in a Kansas City, Mo., orphanage on Jan. 14, 1933, and adopted two weeks later by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage, who named him James Stanley. He performed on radio as a boy soprano, attended high school in Denver and dropped out of Dartmouth after two months. In 1952 he made his first film, ''Interim.''

Among his early influences were Jean Cocteau and the Italian neo-realists but, after arriving in New York in 1954, he gravitated toward the flourishing avant-garde film scene, drawing inspiration from artists and filmmakers like Maya Deren and Marie Menken and with Joseph Cornell, with whom he collaborated on several occasions.

In 1957 he married Jane Collom, and the details of their lives together, and the lives of their five children, would figure prominently in his work. They divorced in 1987. In 1989 Mr. Brakhage married Marilyn Jull, with whom he had two sons.

He is survived by Marilyn, their sons, Anton and Vaughn; the children from his first marriage, Myrrena Schwegmann of Aurora, Colo., Crystal Brakhage of Longmont, Colo., Neowyn Bartek of Denver, Bearthm Brakhage of Denver and Rarc Brakhage of Selmer, Tenn.; and 14 grandchildren.

Mr. Brakhage's work, beginning with ''Anticipation of the Night'' (1958), which he at one point considered ending with a scene of his own suicide, soon placed him at the center of the underground film movement.

Jonas Mekas, a fellow filmmaker, longtime friend and director of Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan, recalled on Monday that, before Mr. Brakhage, ''the avant-garde was very much in the classical French/German tradition, and here comes this guy in his 20's from Colorado with this electrifying personal style, very open and free, and that was really the beginning of the American avant-garde.''

Mr. Mekas compared Mr. Brakhage to Willem de Kooning and the other Abstract Expressionist painters. In the 1980's, with ''painted films'' like Mr. Brakhage's ''Dante Quartet,'' this affinity would become even more explicit, as though Mr. Brakhage had been able to transform the implicit velocity of action painting into actual, literal movement.

According to Marilyn Brakhage, Mr. Brakhage's doctors believed that the coal-tar dyes that he used in making those films may have contributed to his bladder cancer, which was diagnosed in 1996.

Although the centers of experimental filmmaking in the 60's and 70's were San Francisco and New York, Mr. Brakhage spent much of his working life in Colorado, where he lived from 1960 until last year, when he moved to Canada.

From 1969 to 1981 he taught for one semester each year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (His lectures there, on his colleagues and precursors, were collected in the book ''Film at Wit's End.'') From 1981 until his retirement last year, he taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Mr. Mekas said that in his final months Mr. Brakhage was still working on film, softening the emulsion on pieces of celluloid and scratching it with his fingernail.

Photo: Stan Brakhage examining film in his office at the University of Colorado at Boulder. (Ken Abbott/University of Colorado at Boulder Photography Office, 2000)


With four hours of driving left to reach his destination, Ryan Sawyers was dutifully following the purple line on the GPS of his rental car when his conscience abruptly adjusted the route.

The Purdue baseball assistant had just spent six straight 12-hour days on the road scouting high school prospects on the East Coast, and now he was feeling guilty for not spending a seventh. It was Monday morning on June 22, 2009, and he had left his hotel in Cherry Hill, N.J., for the five-hour-plus drive to Albany, N.Y., where he was scheduled to catch a flight back to Indiana early the following morning.

About an hour into the drive, he yanked the wheel into a Dunkin' Donuts parking lot in Flemington, N.J., went in and grabbed an iced tea, and decided to turn the car around. He punched the address of the University of Pennsylvania's Meiklejohn Stadium in Philadelphia into his GPS and headed back in the direction he had just come from. He would assuage his guilt over not maximizing his recruiting time by watching a 10 a.m. game in the Carpenter Cup, a 16-team tournament featuring regional all-star squads of unsigned seniors and talented underclassmen from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

"I just thought, 'I'm being lazy,'" said Sawyers, who is now the pitching coach and recruiting coordinator at his alma mater, West Virginia Wesleyan College. "I had a guilty conscience. Purdue sent me there to work and paid for me to be out there, so I thought that if I can see a game, I should see a game."

The night before Sawyers pulled his U-turn, Freehold Township (N.J.) High senior outfielder Stephen Talbott was on the phone with one of his Jersey Shore Carpenter Cup teammates, mulling over whether to play in the game the next morning. The game had been postponed twice because of rain, and now the makeup date conflicted with Talbott's final exams on the day before he was scheduled to graduate. Talbott called his high school coach, Todd Smith, wondering what he should do.

"Smitty said, 'You have to go to this game,'" Talbott said. "That's ultimately one of the things that changed my life forever."

Nearly three years after that day in Philadelphia, Talbott was mugging for the cameras with his Purdue teammates on May 12 after helping the Boilermakers end a Chicago Cubs-like streak of 103 years of futility. Purdue beat Michigan to 14-3 to capture its first regular-season Big Ten title since 1909.

On May 27, the Boilermakers beat Indiana to win their first Big Ten Tournament championship. This weekend, they are one of 16 programs nationally that will serve as the site of an opening-weekend regional in the beginning of the road to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb., on June 15.

The starting leftfielder, Talbott is a primary contributor on the best Purdue team ever when he easily could be with another program or just a regular college student on an intramural softball team right now. A junior who was a third-team All-Big Ten selection as a sophomore, Talbott also met with scouts from the Indians, Yankees, Cardinals, Tigers and Orioles during the fall. Purdue head coach Doug Schreiber called him a fringe prospect for this year's draft but said he has a good shot at being selected in 2013.

Sawyers had never seen or heard of Stephen Talbott until that day in 2009. Just a week earlier, Talbott only had interest from Division III schools, and his plan was to attend James Madison University as a regular student in hopes of walking on the team.

As Talbott warmed up for the Carpenter Cup game on that June morning, the wheels were literally in motion on a five-hour period that was like something out of "Back to the Future," where the slightest change in events could have altered an entire life.

"It blows my mind how differently my life would have gone if any little thing goes another way that day," Talbott said. "When you think of all the other things that had to happen, it's just surreal."

"It's amazing," Smith said. "The whole progression is incredible and just keeps going. You think it will eventually come back to reality, but it hasn't. All because of one day."

As a junior at Freehold Township, Talbott had a subpar high school season and a mediocre summer, failing to generate much college interest beyond in-state Division III programs. As a senior, he batted .423 with 27 stolen bases and 26 RBIs in 26 games, but did not have any Division I interest at the end of the season. But his performance was good enough for local coaches to select him for the Jersey Shore Carpenter Cup team, and he was determined not to waste the opportunity.

"I think he just developed later than other kids did," said Red Bank Catholic (N.J.) High School coach Buddy Hausmann, who was one of the Jersey Shore Carpenter Cup coaches in 2009. "You remember the last game you'll play for the rest of your life, and that's how that kid was playing in that tournament. I think he had that mentality to play as hard as he could until someone took the game away from him."

Helping Talbott's cause was a Carpenter Cup rule instituted a year earlier that any player who signed with a Division I program by March was not eligible for the tournament, with the notion being that the tournament would be a chance for unsigned players to get a look. It meant Talbott wouldn't be blocked for playing time by a Division I player starting in front of him. The rule has since been changed back to allow Division I signees to participate.

After Jersey Shore won its initial game in the tournament, its quarterfinal game was postponed twice to the morning of June 22nd. On that day, Sawyers initially had planned on seeing another prospect, current San Jacinto College pitcher Steven Sarcone, up in Utica, N.Y. However, Sarcone's travel team coach had changed his schedule, allowing Sawyers to see Sarcone earlier in his trip. Monday was now a blank slate.

Once his schedule changed, Sawyers was going to try to fly back to Purdue from Philadelphia instead of Albany now that he no longer had a prospect to see in upstate New York. But when Hertz informed him that it would be a $1,000 charge if he dropped his rental car at Philadelphia International Airport instead of its intended destination in Albany, he scrapped the idea and hopped in the car for the trip to New York.

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After his change of heart in the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot in Flemington, Sawyers arrived in the second inning of the Jersey Shore Carpenter Cup game in Philadelphia. He came just in time to see Talbott, who had a 50-50 chance of getting his name immediately crossed off Sawyers' list when he walked up to the plate.

"We were only recruiting right-handed outfielders that year because we had all lefties," Sawyer said. "If Steve bats left-handed, I don't even look at him."

Talbott, who was able to push his final exams to the morning of the next day to play, proceeded to smash a solo home run and belt two doubles in the game. Sawyers was intrigued enough to call Purdue's compliance officer during the game and was told that by NCAA rule, no face-to-face contact with a recruit is allowed in an ongoing tournament. If Talbott's team won to advance to the semifinals, Sawyers could not speak directly to him. Burlington County took care of that with a 10-5 win over Jersey Shore, making Talbott fair game.

By then, Sawyers figured something else had to be up. A 6-foot-3, 205-pound outfielder with good speed, a solid bat and a 3.7 grade-point average is not supposed to be unsigned a day before his graduation. However, before he could grill Talbott after the game, he had to find him.

Talbott had hopped into a car with a teammate to head back to New Jersey while Sawyers was talking to the Jersey Shore coaches. Hausmann took off running toward the parking lot, face-planting in mud and grass while running over a hill as he tried to stop Talbott from leaving. Hausmann finally was able to track him down to come back and talk to a skeptical Sawyers.

"I said, 'I'm going to be blunt,'" Sawyers said. "Why aren't you signed? Have you been caught dealing drugs, using drugs or cheating on tests?"

Once Talbott assured him there were no issues, Sawyers offered him a guaranteed place on the Purdue roster as a walk-on because he did not have any scholarship money to give. Wagner College and Seton Hall had just offered Talbott two days before the game, but he took Sawyers' offer as a sign. Talbott's maternal grandfather, the late Stephen Vanderhoof, played football at Purdue in the 1930s.

Talbott took an official visit a week later and loved it. Despite only seeing Talbott once, Sawyers didn't have to give the hard sell to get Schreiber to take a chance on him.

"Sometimes you're almost looking on it like it's fate, and you have to follow through with it," Schreiber said.

By Talbott's sophomore year he was on scholarship and considered to be one of the top 10 outfielders in the Big Ten. Heading into the regional tournament this weekend, he is fourth on a loaded team with a .347 average and second with 15 stolen bases in 16 attempts.

If Sawyers doesn't turn the car around that day, if Talbott takes his exams on their scheduled day, if the game had not been postponed earlier by rain, if Talbott batted left-handed, if the other recruit doesn't change his schedule, if ...

"You can make yourself crazy thinking about all the different things that had to happen," Talbott said. "If you would've asked me three years ago if I would be playing Big Ten baseball, I would've never thought it was possible. It's almost too good to be true."

"As a recruiter, it's like how chipping in off the green keeps you coming back to the golf course despite all your other bad shots in the round," Sawyers said. "Now trying to find the next Steve Talbott is addicting to me."

Following that first encounter with Talbott, Sawyers nestled into his rental car with a clear conscience this time, fully committed to following that purple line on his GPS all the way to Albany. As he blew by that Dunkin' Donuts in Flemington, he picked up the phone and called his father. "I told him, 'I think I just somehow found a guy in June who's going to be an All-Big Ten player," Sawyers said.

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Summary: With four hours of driving left to reach his destination, Ryan Sawyers was dutifully following the purple line on the GPS of his rental car when his c...


Nov 1st 2012, 8:34 by B.F. | KABUL

THE countdown to what must be one of the world’s most difficult presidential elections has begun. Afghan voters will be empowered to choose a successor to Hamid Karzai on April 5th, 2014, according to the country’s Independent Election Commission.

On October 31st the electoral body unveiled an 18-month timetable of preparations which must somehow prevent a repeat of the rampant ballot stuffing and fraud which marred the last such poll in 2009. As this newspaper reported last week,the election marks one of three momentous transitions Afghanistan must face that year. While the security handover as NATO troops withdraw has received more of the available attention in the West, it is the political transition which most worries many in Kabul.

Mr Karzai will end his second term as president in 2014. He is constitutionally barred from a third and says he will neither stand again nor encourage any of his relatives to run. His opponents have little faith in his assurances, though. The possibility that he will try to hang on, appoint a successor, or somehow manipulate the result has greatly contributed to the uncertainty over what will happen as NATO’s combat troops withdraw. Some bleak forecasts have predicted that the resulting power struggle will tip the country into civil war.

Naming an election date has therefore been seen as a critical way to inject a bit of certainty into the next 18 months, even if it is only a little bit. It should also allow election officials time to try overcoming the formidable technical, security and logistical hurdles.

Diplomats say they have spent months trying to make the Afghan government understand that support from weary donors will be facing a terrible risk, if the election were to repeat the tainted presidential poll of 2009, or 2010’s parliamentary vote. Moreover such an outcome would rob the government of what precious credibility it has left, and play to Taliban propaganda.

So the announcement of a date has been welcomed not just by the diplomats, but also by parties from across the Afghan political landscape. Mr Karzai’s acceptance of the date can also be seen as reassuring.

A date however is only the beginning; the obstacles remain numerous and daunting. Legislation aimed at electoral reform remains worryingly delayed and the country still has no reliable voter-registration process. Millions of excess voter cards are known to be in circulation.

Security is unlikely to be much improved in time for the poll and indeed it may have got worse by then, which would once again disenfranchise swathes of the south. But such is the degree of worry over 2014 that even the setting of a date can be claimed as a sort of lodestar, at a time when everything else is in motion.

Summary: THE countdown to what must be one of the world’s most difficult presidential elections has begun. Afghan voters will be empowered to choose a successor to Hamid...


The body of Jeffry Picower, the man who pulled more money -- $7 billion -- out of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, underwent an autopsy today and the cause of death is determined to be drowning as a result of a massive heart attack, according to Dr. Michael Bell, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy.

Bell told ABC News that the toxicology results will take ten weeks and if there is anything found that could have contributed to Picower's death he will amend the death certificate.

Click here to go behind the scenes of Brian Ross' investigation into Bernie and Ruth Madoff.

The body can now be released for burial, according to Bell.

"Usually the family will have a funeral home fax a release form, at which time we will hand over the body to the funeral home for burial," said Bell.

Picower's wife Barbara called 911 yesterday at around noon when she noticed her husband, who had been swimming in the pool outside their gigantic Palm Beach mansion, had sunk to the bottom.

"There was a 15 minute window from the time that she saw him actually conscious and swimming in the pool until she went back out and saw that he was not responding and that he had actually gone to the bottom of the pool," a rescue worker told ABC News.

Palm Beach Fire Department spokesman Joe Sekula said that rescue workers found Picower without a pulse and though they were able to restore his pulse in the ambulance, he died at Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach.

The Palm Beach Police Department said the investigation is ongoing, and the 911 tape will be released when the investigation has concluded.

Click here to purchase "The Madoff Chronicles" from Amazon.com.

"There are still so many factors that can affect the length of the investigation," Palm Beach Police Department Spokeswoman Janet Kinsella told ABC News.

Picower's attorney William Zabel told ABC News Sunday that the family was shocked at the death of his client and were grieving.

Marcia Horowitz, a spokeswoman for the Picower family, said today that Picower had a number of heart related medical issues, as well as Parkinson's disease.

No one benefited more from the Madoff scheme than Picower, according to bankruptcy lawyers who sued him and alleged he had taken out $7 billion more than he had put in.

Investigators told ABC News that Picower would also have likely faced criminal charges.

Some investigators considered Picower to have been the actual mastermind of Madoff's massive con, or at least an equal "partner in crime."

"He made 30 times what Madoff did from the scam and about a third of the missing money went to Picower," said one of the investigators on the case Sunday.

Picower, a tax shelter lawyer and accountant, was not well known in financial circles until his name surfaced in the Madoff case in the past few months. His $7 billion profit stunned other Madoff investors, many of whom lost their life savings.

Click here for complete Blotter coverage of Madoff and his Ponzi scheme.

Investigators say Madoff documents show that Picower regularly gave instructions for Madoff to create phony trades on his behalf so that he could withdraw billions.

The lawsuit brought by the bankruptcy trustee named Picower, his wife Barbara and the Picower Foundation, which gave generously to charities.

Click Here for the Blotter Homepage.

Summary: Toxicology report pending for man who gained most out of Madoff's scheme.


It's safe to say that sports fans in the United States (and Canada) have learned more about lockouts during the past two years than they ever wanted to know.

Two of the four major sporting leagues have succumbed to lockouts since 2011, with both the NBA and the NHL cutting a season short because of the inability to work out a deal.

The work stoppages have been a drain for the teams, fans and the media, but what about local economies?

Business Insider recently combed through the exhaustive review of the NBA lockout published by The Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the findings are quite interesting.

The NBA lockout resulted in the cancellation of 16 games per team, but the study found that even if the entire season had been scrapped, it likely would have had little affect on the economy of NBA cities. The authors cite a 2000 study by Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys that suggests that work stoppages in professional football and baseball had little economic impact on the city itself.

Sometimes the cities even benefitted from the lockout.

The reasoning is twofold. Without the option of sporting entertainment, fans tend to spend money elsewhere in the city. The city itself also saves the cost of having to provide security for the sporting events.

Somehow we don't think this will provide much solace to hockey-starved fans, although if you are looking for a silver lining to the NHL lockout, this is it.

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Summary: It's safe to say that sports fans in the United States (and Canada) have learned more about lockouts during the past two years than they ever wanted t...


His taxes are going up, and Woody Kaplan isn’t happy.

“I’m disappointed that they’re not going up more,” said Kaplan, a retired Back Bay real estate developer who is now a civil liberties activist.

Following congressional approval this week of a deal that raises federal income and investment tax rates on wealthy Americans, some of the loudest applause is coming from people who now must share more of their income with Uncle Sam.

Kaplan is one of six Massachusetts members of a national organization called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength. The group’s high earners have been asking Congress to increase taxes on the wealthy since 2010, saying they can afford to pay more for the sake of stronger social service programs and smaller budget deficits.

When President Obama delivered a speech in April arguing in favor of the Buffett Rule — a failed proposal that would have taxed all income over $1 million at 30 percent, even if it came from investments — he stood on stage flanked by members of the group.

The Patriotic Millionaires represent a minority opinion within the 1 percent, Kaplan conceded, but even some nonmembers who are less enthusiastic about bigger tax bills say they are willing to open their wallets if Congress uses the revenue as part of a sound plan to reduce the federal deficit.

The founder of Staples Inc., Tom Stemberg, a Mitt Romney supporter, reiterated his position stated before the election.

“As I said then, I am OK paying the higher taxes if this leads to balancing the budget,” Stemberg said in an e-mail.

“We have yet to see the expense side of the ledger addressed to get us there. I would not be happy paying more if we continue to bleed as a country.”

After months of brinksmanship, both houses of Congress approved a package of measures on New Year’s Day that pulled the nation back from the fiscal cliff.

The compromise extended Bush-era income tax cuts for most Americans, while allowing the top rate to rise to 39.6 percent from 35 percent for individuals who earn more than $400,000 and couples who make more than $450,000.

In addition, the deal raised capital gains and dividends taxes on the wealthy to 23.8 percent, up from 15 percent.

The White House has estimated that the tax changes will generate an additional $620 billion in revenue over the next 10 years.

Members of the Patriotic Millionaires embraced the higher rates.

“The overnight increase in my taxes is itself more than the annual income of almost anyone I know,” Rick Steves, a travel writer and host of the public television series “Rick Steves’ Europe,” said in a statement provided by the group.

“It won’t impact my lifestyle or outlook or enthusiasm for employing people a bit. In fact, the very thought of this brings me joy.”

Frank Patitucci, chief executive of NuCompass Mobility, a relocation services company in Pleasanton, Calif., predicted “a great year for the economy, thanks to the job-creating increase in tax rates on the wealthiest taxpayers.”

“The reaction of the markets to the fiscal cliff deal is immediate proof that higher tax rates on the wealthiest taxpayers will not kill jobs or tank the economy,” Patitucci said.

“In fact the opposite will be true, and investors in the stock market know it.”

The Dow Jones industrial average rose more than 2 percent on the first day of trading after the fiscal cliff deal. Stock markets in Europe and Asia also climbed.

The cliff agreement has its detractors.

The Campaign to Fix the Debt, founded by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan K. Simpson, cochairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, called the deal “a squandered opportunity.”

The group, whose members include many executives who have expressed a willingness to pay more taxes, as a matter of policy is pressing for spending cuts and economic growth and for overhauling entitlement programs.

Jon Romano, a spokesman for the group, said Fix the Debt is for “raising revenue, yes. Raising taxes, no.”

Ultimately, most wealthy Americans can accept higher tax rates if they believe the increases are part of a broader fiscal solution, said Jeremy Gonsalves, managing director of BNY Mellon Wealth Management in Boston.

“Our high-net-worth clients are mostly about what else we’re going to do, because we haven’t solved all our challenges with the deficit for the next 10 years,” Gonsalves said.

“They’re willing to pay more, but they’re anxious to see a sustainable path going forward.”

Summary: His taxes are going up, and Woody Kaplan isn’t happy. “I’m disappointed that they’re not going up more,” said Kaplan, a retired Back Bay real estate developer who is now a civil liberties activist. In the wake of a fiscal cliff deal that raises federal income and investment tax rates on wealthy Americans, some of the loudest applause for the hike is coming from people who now must share more of their incomes with Uncle Sam.


By Kristin Butcher The Active Times

It's been nearly 40 years since a small group of fun-loving tinkerers in Marin started racing down dirt roads on old cruiser bikes modified with fat knobby tires. Though mountain biking began as a fringe sport in the 70s, it's since evolved into an athletic outlet embraced by communities everywhere.

From the flatlands to the highlands, these top mountain bike towns are drawing riders of all kinds with amazing trail systems, bike parks, and pump tracks galore. We've called out a few classic stand-bys here -- Bend, Oregon, and Asheville, North Carolina, for example (but not Moab) -- but also found a few hidden gems that you've probably never even heard of. Click through to our slideshow to see some of our favorite places to get our tires dirty in the good ol' U.S. of A.

Designated as both a League of American Bicyclists Bicycle-Friendly Community and IMBA Ride Center, Harrisonburg is becoming a haven for anyone with a garage full of bikes. In a demonstration of partnership, the City of Harrisonburg teamed up with Shenandoah Valley Bicycle Coalition to bring purpose-built bike trails of all levels to downtown Harrisonburg. In addition to the Rocktown trails, townsfolk can ride one of three epics, Massanutton Resort’s flow trails, or spend a day barely scratching the surface of the George Washington National Forest. The town even comes together to celebrate trails and trailwork during the annual Shenandoah Festival. Shenandoah Valley Bicycle Coalition

Located in the far northern reaches of Michigan, Marquette has a growing status of being a mini-mountain bike mecca. That makes living in the Upper Peninsula an appealing proposition even for those unaccustomed to 11 months of winter. Trails wind through the area's rugged terrain, undulating over rocky ridge, and through old-growth forests. Though there are plenty of beginner trails, many technical trails featuring mind-boggling wood-stunts have caused some to nickname the area "B.C. of the Midwest." Upper Peninsula Mountain Biking

Park City is the only city qualified as a Gold Level Ride Center by the International Mountain Bicycling Association, and it's a well-earned title. With a cohesive network of of city-wide bike lanes, scenic bike paths, cross-country trails, lift-access downhill runs, top-notch bike parks and freeride opportunities, Park City offers a ride experience that is perfect for anyone -- whether that means an easy cruise around the town loop, an all-day tour on the epic Mid-Mountain Trail, or flying off stunts at Deer Valley Resort. Mountain Trails Foundation

Sante Fe has plenty in its favor. It’s an artsy town with beautiful views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and it’s more than 400 years old, which is flat-out cool. Riding past adobe architecture and galleries, riders can pedal to more than 50 miles of trail and choose whether to get lost in the 30-mile spaghetti bowl of twisty Dale Ball trails, head out for more technical adventures on the Whoops, or treat themselves to 8 miles of giggle-inducing downhill on the Windsor Trail. Santa Fe Fat Tire Society

Situated in the Sonoran desert, Tucson is surrounded by five separate mountain ranges -- and in those mountain ranges are endless supplies of sweet singletrack. With more than 300 miles of trail, residents can head off into the backcountry, enjoy the popular Fantasy Island Network or, if they’re feeling extra adventurous, they can join the makeshift tent city and ride (or wrench) at the 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo. Just watch out for those Teddy Bear Chollas. Sonoran Desert Mountain Bicyclists

Located along the Deschutes River in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, Bend is what would happen if you had access to a magic mountain bike wand. With more than 200 miles of trails, there is no shortage of good rides including flowy lunchtime laps at Phil’s Trail Complex, the 3,400-foot descent from Mt. Bachelor to Bend, and Cog Wild's Bike & Brew tour of the town’s trails and 11 breweries. The hardest part of being a mountain biker in Bend is choosing which trail to ride. Thankfully, there are 300-plus days of sunshine to enjoy it all. Discovering Bend

Louisville normally conjures images of bourbon and horse racing, but the town is working hard to add mountain biking to that list. With a vision of becoming the first metropolitan city with 100 miles of singletrack, Louisville boasts about 20 miles of in-town trails with plans for 25-40 more around the corner. Throw in the permanent cyclocross course at Eva Bandman Park, recent host of the 2013 UCI Cyclocross World Championships, and it might not be long before Louisville is known for bikes as much as bourbon. Kentucky Mountain Bike Association

For the complete slideshow of Best Mountain Bike Towns, go to TheActiveTimes.com.

More Stories from The Active Times: -- America’s Best Bike Vacation Towns -- Dream Machines: 14 Insanely Expensive Bikes -- Fresh Gear: Spring 2013 Biking -- A New Long-Distance Bike Trail Takes Shape

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By Kristin Butcher
The Active Times
It's been nearly 40 years since a small group of fun-loving tinkerers in Marin started racing down dirt roads on o...


Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955 from Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans published by Steidl. Photograph: Robert Frank/Steidl

The "Robert Frank Project" is the name given to the German publisher Gerhard Steidl's initiative to make the photographer's complete works available to the public over the next two years. It involves the issuing and reissuing of his books and films, including all the small personal photo-projects that Frank has put together over his lifetime and either published in limited numbers or not at all.

The project began officially on 15 May last year, with a 50th anniversary edition of The Americans, the hugely influential book Frank made after he had driven across the United States taking photographs in 1955 and 1956. This edition returned the book to its original size (it had grown larger in later editions) of eight and a quarter by seven and a quarter inches, printed the 83 newly-scanned black and white images as smooth, rich reproductions, and included Jack Kerouac's famous introduction, from the 1959 US edition.

The books that followed were like pieces of a jigsaw, adding to the picture of Frank's past. Peru was a book of photographs taken during a trip to South America in 1948; it had been planned but never published. The pictures alternate between close-up studies of people and the landscape. The layout reflects the style of photo books Frank had seen as an apprentice photographer in Switzerland in the early 1940s.

Pull My Daisy is another title reissued in 2008, based on Frank's first film, an enigmatic, surreal work made in New York in 1959 with the director Alfred Leslie. Frank was behind the camera, while Jack Kerouac recorded the narration. The cast was made up of Frank's friends including Allen Ginsberg, fellow beat poets Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, and the painter Larry Rivers. Frank's camera observes the scene like a member of the cast, panning across blank walls, peering out of the window into the street, closing in on a face from below. A book of the film was first published in 1961.

The series of reissues this year continues with the publication of Frank's Polaroids, 40 Photos and Black White and Things, the last two based on handmade books from 1946 and 1952 respectively. But the major Frank publication of 2009 is a book about him, and must constitute the most comprehensive study of his work to date.

Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans accompanies the exhibition which has just opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The book comes in two sizes, neither of which you can take easily to bed: the regular 374-page paperback, and the 506-page hardback "expanded edition", which includes reproductions of Frank's contact sheets, a comparative sequencing of the different editions, comparative cropping of the negatives, a map of Frank's route, a chronology (which I wish they had included in the regular edition) and copies of various letters and papers.

Why all this, you might ask, about a book of photographs made over half a century ago? Was The Americans really so important? The answer has to be: yes. Frank's book was condemned almost unanimously when it was first published, but for decades now it has been recognised as a work that identified a cultural shift in America; that showed the country back to itself, and more clearly than most of its inhabitants cared to acknowledge. Frank was Swiss, an outsider, who had spent less than a decade in America by 1955 (and most of that in New York). His pictures showed America not as a confident, post-war, united nation, but an atomised, unequal, prejudiced country, where bigotry and violence existed casually and often together; where many people felt fearful and poor and alone.

As photography critic and teacher Paul Bunnell put it, Frank's pictures minimised "the obviously pictorial", stressing instead "the meanings of his subjects rather than the subjects themselves". Or, as Frank put it: "It was just pure feeling that I expressed visually." What Frank proved, perhaps more than any photographer before him, was that a camera was not just an automatic mechanism, but that it could be given a personality, even a soul in the right hands. It was a tool, but in the same way that a pencil is a tool: and what it produced depended on who was using it.

Frank's photographs convey a mood, a feeling, an experience. They might include, as he wrote, "a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none … the dictation of taste, the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights ..." He used a small, handheld camera and available light. Sometimes the shots looked snatched, perhaps at the photographer's personal risk; some were so close-up they had a voyeuristic quality; others cut away to the horizon or looked down the empty highway, which has always in America combined promise with escape. As a visual experience, The Americans is closer to cinema than photography, and it is hardly surprising that it anticipated Frank's move into film-making by barely a year.

What makes The Americans an ideal subject for study is that it is a complete, finite piece of work. Frank conceived it, published it, and moved on. "For me, photography is in the past," he wrote in a letter to Creative Camera in London in 1969. Though The Americans had inspired generations of photographers to make the trip across the country, and though he had identified the national mood so accurately, Frank gave himself over to film-making. He moved to Nova Scotia, suspicious and wary of fame.

In 1990 Frank donated all the negatives, contact sheets, maquettes and papers relating to The Americans to the National Gallery of Art, Washington. He had returned to photography, but his works were much more fragmented, emotionally jagged, multiple images with words scrawled across them. They were works about memory: allusive, poetic, even elegiac. Sometimes he worked an image from The Americans into a picture, but the meaning had changed. It was as if, to move on, he had to go back to the past and look at it another way.

Summary: In focus: Liz Jobey looks at the torrent of material being published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Robert Frank's The Americans


Perched precariously on the as yet un-defined rim of the 21st century, we struggle to rescue the figure of the artist from the avalanche of material that is presented as art. At first glance, the figures in our style magazines are traditional. They pastiche Sickert and Degas. The raptor male - white shirt, spattered apron - and the compliant woman, naked, spread-eagled on the bed. But Lucian Freud, acknowledged as our greatest living painter, fierce and forbidding, is performing for the benefit of a fashion supplement. The legend, a century too late (for city and artist), overwhelms the work. It's no longer possible for these magnificent old men to sustain the mystique: submission by sitters who must endure grotesque poses, intense scrutiny, revision, curses. Portraits, in the end, are of the rooms in which they are executed: spiky plants, limp dogs, bare boards. Humans, drowning under layers of pigment, under the burden of impersonating themselves, struggle to make dim spirits shine. Volunteer mannikins busk for a longshot at immortality. The painters are no longer on the streets, witnessing the discriminations and microclimates of London. They have become wealthy anchorites, honoured, indulged, redundant. The city has drifted away from them, from futile attempts to identify a subject, a model. Through misplaced sentiment, we cling to the invocation of a period, more than 100 years ago, when artists crossed the channel, visited one another, posed for group photographs. The much-reproduced John Deakin shot of Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, Michael Andrews and Tim Behrens in Wheeler's restaurant (1962) is the last of its kind.

A special moment for cities and for artists arrived at the end of the 19th century: self-consciousness in balance with achievement, engagement with exploitation. Paris and London stared at each other across a grey ditch churned up by the incessant traffic of paddle-steamers. Poets, novelists, painters: they were agitated by the urgent potentialities of metropolitan life. Newly confident businessmen and solvent aristocrats socialised with the more presentable practitioners: Degas in top hat, the obliging Tissot, Manet (before he succumbed to syphilis).

Degas is the pivotal figure, an irascible solitary with private means, his own space, access to such society as he is prepared to endure. Always alert to new techniques, he photographs Renoir with the poet Mallarmé; he makes difficulties, the better to conquer them, working early and late, long exposures by candlelight. And while they pose, the Parisians talk: a proper exchange between disciplines. Baudelaire's vision of the modern city floats before them, an unresolved poem of walking, dreaming and noticing. Zola's serial novels are shocking to the English, garlic-sweat realism: lives of laundresses, market women, butchers and pimps. The now overindulged figure of the flâneur never had to struggle quite so hard to recover his dandified reflection.

Fond of paradox, Degas insisted on the artifice required for the illusion of naturalism: "real effects by false means". He experimented with cropping, unusual angles. He drew on the established methods of the masters - Giotto, Van Dyck, Velázquez, Ingres - and modified them with the technology of advertisements, photo-journalism, the Japanese prints that were arriving in Europe as wrapping paper. In the catalogue for the forthcoming Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at Tate Britain, Anna Greutzner Robins tells us that "Sickert was fascinated by the elaborate lengths to which Degas went to give the effect of spontaneity." The French painter had discovered the essence of modernity: customised accident, the abdication of authorial responsibility. Snapshots. Smudged prospects from train windows (dirt on the glass as relevant as landscape). Manoeuvring jockeys blocked by a post. Degas' careful oils and pastels are the forerunners of mobile phone impressionism, the steady stare of surveillance systems.

He walked. Daily. Miles across Paris. In what the critic Richard Kendall called "his legendary ambulomania": a fugue of reforgetting, making new the buildings he had seen 1,000 times. The city tipped is the city renewed. He was not attempting a sociological survey, a Mayhew interrogation of lowlife (pathos, empathy): it was much sterner than that. He scoured the foggy newsreel of contemporaneity through which we all struggle, bodies in the trance of mechanical labour, to validate the dream of the city. To freeze it as fine art. Preliminary sketches, painstaking studies, were required to achieve that miraculous instant: Mlle La La at the Circus Fernando (1879). A powerful acrobat, suspended on a wire, spins against the complex geometry of the arched ceiling. It is rumoured that Degas brought in an artisan to achieve the effect. And the result? Something as sinister and inexplicable as the empty circus tent, erected by the visionaries of New Labour, as a valid symbol for the new millennium.

Degas depicts cafe life, brothel life, ballet girls. It is not clear if he indulges, partakes, performs. We do not need to know. Is he anything more than a fastidious eye at the keyhole, using curtains to make the bed a stage, relishing the shape and distortion of a tensed back? Women washing, combing their hair, labouring. The relationship with the model, that implied narrative, creates a new kind of fiction: Degas becomes a character for the Irish novelist George Moore. He becomes a model himself, gossiped over and promoted by his peers.

When he produces an apparently Impressionist work, La Plage (1876), it's not a seascape but a travesty of his studio: rug on the floor, model with parasol. The landscapes he reluctantly attempts are luminous but provisional: the last light before his eyes give out. In Dieppe, which had become an English resort, the alternative to Hastings or Broadstairs, he socialised with Walter Sickert. An unequal friendship. Degas, the acknowledged master, sketches Sickert, his back to the rest of the group, as a tolerated outsider. The younger man, Anglo-Danish, with a Parisian dealer, produces endless views of the French provincial town. Degas, yawning loudly, indulges the absurdity of being away from the capital. Mortality lay heavily on him: stomach troubles, weak eyes. Manageable hypochondria, he swore, is the badge of the metropolitan artist. He conquered boredom by granting his painted figures the space in which to sag and droop. Interior (The Rape) of 1868-69: a man slumped against the bedroom door, woman crouching. Flowered wallpaper like a grassy cage. That skirted lampshade, the open night-case. Or, again, the banker in Bad Mood (1869-71): folded arms, sunken head. His partner leans towards him, but the equestrian painting keeps them apart.

Walter Sickert's Ennui (1914) is the London translation of this mood. Utter exhaustion. A thousand featureless streets crushing walls held up by layers of paper and paste. Not so much post-coital as post-human, Sickert's servants impersonate the Sunday afternoon tragedy of married life: dead souls in a dead place. The deformed pint glass on the table has just enough weight to stop Camden from tumbling into the abyss.

The English in Dieppe are excur-sionists or runaways: Sickert living with a local woman, Wilde in disgrace. The French come to London for very different reasons; political exiles from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, or believers in English wealth (and tailoring). Monet's suits were Savile Row. Degas hoped his paintings of New Orleans cotton-brokers would appeal to Manchester industrialists. Lautrec held a major exhibition and sold nothing.

After all the fretful cross-channel exchanges, Sickert (and by extension London) gained the most. He used his wife's money to buy paintings by Degas. And devoured them. Learnt his craft. (Degas could afford to collect works by Cézanne, Manet, Van Gogh, the Old Masters.) Sickert matured into the definitive painter of a city stranded between eras; gaslight to sodium, spinning on towards the new world of electricity and photoflash. He made paintings inspired by newspaper dots: the aviator Amelia Earhart arriving at Croydon airport in the rain. He tried to map out, through serial composition, the heat and essence of London, its "four-mile radius": night roads, music halls, theatres, restaurants. The mob at play; the human mess Degas spurned. Sickert painted the damage bodies do to mattresses, the deepest indentations. His English murder scenes are so implicated, rhetorical in the best sense, that foolish commentators, unable to separate artist from art, accuse him of enacting the lurid metaphors he laboured to achieve. Palette knife as Ripper's blade.

But, of all the late-century masters, Toulouse-Lautrec is the one whose reputation has suffered most from mythologists. John Huston, an enthusiastic collector, made the film Moulin Rouge as a way of extending his cultural holdings, inflating the notion of the suffering artist (a Hollywood conceit). The infamous absinthe drinkers of Degas, shocking in their realism, the starkness of their presentation, are friends of the painter, actors playing a role. Lautrec's A la Mie (1891) - wine bibbers occupying a cafe table - is more than a homage to Degas. This couple are clownish, fighting for breath. Lautrec's palette is spontaneous, lurid. He is the most present of the painters. His profile sketch of Van Gogh is there as much as it needs to be, and barely that; an instant in which speed of line rescues the subject from erasure. He has such fallible generosity for his subjects. He paints portraits only to give them away.

Degas remains at the centre of any Sickert biography. Lautrec recognised Degas as a master. In return, Sickert is granted the merest footnote in the critical apparatus that surrounds Degas. Lautrec is barely acknowledged. In their oblique relations, their exchanges, the passage backwards and forwards across the English Channel, these men taught us how to read the city: through experiment and risk, scorn for the fixers, fudgers, promoters and politicians. "I would like," said Degas, "to be illustrious and unknown!"

· Degas, Sickert & Toulouse-Lautrec is at Tate Britain, London SW1, from October 5 to January 15. Details: 020-7887 8000.

Summary: Lowlife, cafe life, all the messy reality of urban life ... when we imagine fin-de-siècle Paris and London, we think of the intimate scenes painted by Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. Iain Sinclair on an extraordinary era of cross-Channel creativity.


There was a time when Tom Sadowski thought he’d stop working after turning 65 earlier this year. But he’s put off retirement for at least five years — and now anticipates continuing to work afterward.

In an illuminating sign of changing times and revised visions of retirement, baby boomers such as Sadowski are not only are delaying their retirement plans, they’re also embracing the fact that retirement won’t necessarily mark a complete exit from the workforce.

Indeed, some 82 percent of workers 50 and older say it is at least “somewhat likely” they will work for pay in retirement, according to a poll released in October by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago. Almost half of boomers polled now expect to retire later than they previously thought — on average nearly three years later than what they thought at age 40.

The recession claimed Sadowski’s business and a chunk of his savings, and with four teenage daughters, the graphic designer from Sterling, Va., accepts the fact he won’t retire for another five years or more.

“At this age, my dad had already been retired 10 years and moved to Florida,” Sadowski said. “Times are different now for most people.”

Money, of course, factors heavily into boomers’ retirement plans. More than three-quarters of those polled said financial needs are a huge part of their retirement decisions, and many also cited access to employer benefits such as health insurance for working longer.

“Many people had experienced a big downward movement in their 401(k) plans, so they’re trying to make up for that period of time when they lost money,” said Olivia Mitchell, a retirement specialist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

The shift in retirement expectations coincides with a growing trend of later-life work. Older adults are now the fastest-growing segment of the American workforce; people 55 and up are forecast to make up one-fourth of the civilian labor force in 2020.

That growth has paralleled a rising interest in retirements that are far more active than the old stereotype of moving to Florida, never to work again.

Among those who retired, 4 percent are looking for a job and 11 percent are already working again. And those still on the job showed far greater interest in continuing to work: Some 47 percent of employed survey respondents said they are very or extremely likely to do some work for pay in retirement and 35 percent said they are somewhat likely.

“The definition of retirement has changed,” said Brad Glickman, a certified financial planner in Chevy Chase, Md., with a large number of boomer clients. “Now the question we ask our clients is, ‘What’s your job after retirement?’”

One such retiree who returned to the workforce is Clara Marion, 69, of Covington, La., a teacher who retired in 2000 and went back to work a year later.

She retired again in 2007 but soon returned to part-time work because she needed the money.

Though Marion’s finances are primarily what keep her working, she said she enjoys her work — and she’s not alone: Nine out of 10 workers polled said they are very or somewhat satisfied with their job.

Many boomer-aged Americans are remarkably unprepared for retirement: One in 6 reported having less than $1,000 in retirement savings and 1 in 4 working respondents aren’t saving for retirement outside of Social Security. Some 12 percent of non-retired people reported borrowing from a 401(k) or other retirement plan in the past year. Though 29 percent reported at least $100,000 in savings, some find even that’s not enough.

“All too often, people have a lump-sum illusion. They think, ‘I have $100,000 in my 401(k),’ and they think, ‘I’m rich,’” said Mitchell, the Penn professor. “But it doesn’t add up to much. It certainly is not going to keep them in champagne and truffles.”

Summary: There was a time when Tom Sadowski thought he’d stop working after turning 65 earlier this year. But he’s put off retirement for at least five years — and now anticipates continuing to work afterward. In an illuminating sign of changing times and revised visions of retirement, baby boomers such as Sadowski are not only are delaying their retirement plans, they’re also embracing the fact that it won’t necessarily mark a complete exit from the workforce.  Indeed, some 82 percent of workers 50 and older say it is at least “somewhat likely” they will work for pay in retirement, according to a poll released in October by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago. Almost half of boomers polled now expect to retire later than they previously thought — on average nearly three years later than what they thought at age 40.