'Confidence will come back to the market': a crowd at the 2009 Armory Show art fair, New York. Photograph: James Westcott

Things can't be that bad when you pull up to New York's Armory Show – the granddaddy of six art fairs in the city this week – in a sparkling customised golf buggy, driven by a bloke wearing a spacesuit, while gorging on a free chocolate doughnut. This wacky races-style transportation service, laid on by veteran New York artist Kenny Scharf, gave a welcome touch of levity to the start of an art fair taking place in pretty dire circumstances: the DOW plunged below 7,000 points this week for the first time since 1997, New York galleries are downsizing or disappearing, major dealers Matthew Marks and Lehmann Maupin are among many skipping this year's fair, and who knows how many New York-based collectors – the Armory Show's lifeblood – got stung in Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme.

Regardless, the Armory Show – now in its 11th year, and named after the 1913 art fair that brought Marcel Duchamp and modern art to New York – is actually expanding rather than contracting. In addition to the 177 contemporary galleries (17 more than last year) in pier 94, which juts out into the near-freezing Hudson river, this year the adjoining pier 92 plays host to the "Armory Show – Modern": 68 galleries, many with that unnerving suffix "fine art" to their names, selling older, less edgy but more established work. A Lucian Freud is being sold here for an ambitious $14m at Faurschou gallery (and was unsold as of last night). The Armory Show figures it needs to start appealing to the older money – as well as the young collectors with Wall Street bonuses, so common in recent years.

That said, there's still plenty of trashy collector-bait around: the first piece my eyes rested on in pier 94 was a neon sign by Italian artist Paola Pivi that reads "Stop the complaint, we just bought it". One hour into the fair, two collectors had done just that – each paying $32,000 for an edition of the work. Next door, in the booth of the Milan gallery Massimo de Carlo, there stood a headstone bearing the epitaph "Everyone is broke", by the relentlessly cheeky duo Elmgreen and Dragset. The piece can be yours for $37,000. So long as you're not broke.

I began to dread glib references to the recession becoming a running theme. Many in the art world are impatiently curious to see what effect the recession will have on art, as if it might herald a new Renaissance. I've heard artists calling for a full-scale "cull" of the apparently overpopulated art world – a cull that of course would never dare to include the person pining for it. But it's still too early to gauge the effect of this recession on the making of art itself, only on its circulation.

Many galleries are playing it safe, showing smaller works (cheaper to transport), and artists with sturdier reputations (one critic noted a lack of Chinese artists this year). At least a couple of galleries are using the fair to try to offload pieces leftover from recent exhibitions: Hauser and Wirth is showing roughshod, hulking brass sculptures by octogenarian Hans Josephsohn; Victoria Miro have a couple of disturbing but beautiful paintings by John Kørner of Danish soldiers being killed in Afghanistan, works that were on show at the gallery a couple of months ago. In this cautious atmosphere, elaborate installations and ambitious projects are rarer than before, so they really stand out in the amnesiac channel-surfing experience of the art fair.

Christine Hill has set up an apothecary counter in Ronald Feldman's booth. Tell her what ails you and – for $40 – she'll prescribe something from a mysterious tin marked with a promising name like equanimity, altruism, or sanctity (or was it sanity?). Apparently patrons were extremely forthcoming in their misery. At Lombard Fried gallery, Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi has made an electric chair and surrounding death chamber out of 1,500 VHS tapes, suggesting an obsessive, murderous – or maybe suicidal – archiving project. The only other work that induced such delicious sickly chills was a self-portrait in meat (well, horrible look-a-like plastic meat) by American artist Tony Matelli. The sculpture is disgusting, abject, hilarious, and more visceral – however one-dimensional that feeling may be – than anything else in the fair.

On the more cerebral end of the scale, Marine Hugonnier took New York Times front pages from election week last November, and replaced all the images of Obama and McCain with geometric collages of paper cut out from Ellsworth Kelly's book Art for Modern Architecture. Huggonier may have sourced an American modernist, but in the pure bold colours – red, white and blue – and the thrusting perspectives in her patterns, the piece has an exhilarating aesthetic optimism similar to Russian constructivism.

As the fair's opening day wore on, the mood wasn't exactly "yes we can" but more "maybe we just might". Far from tumbleweeds blowing across the aisles, foot traffic almost increased to the throng of recent years. Dealers were reporting decent-enough sales – but they would say that – and the British New York gallerist Sean Kelly even declared: "Yes it's been bad, yes it's been bloody awful, but in the last few weeks it's been picking up. I think people will understand that art is the best asset class right now and confidence will come back to the market."

Summary: James Westcott: At New York's Armory Show art fair, artists and gallerists are turning the worldwide economic crisis to their advantage


A detail from Lady Anne Clifford by William Larkin. She battled to secure her inheritance and went on to become one Britain's wealthiest women. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery

The mouth is smiling but the dark eyes are wary: a lost portrait of Lady Anne Clifford – the 17th-century noble who became one of the wealthiest women in England and a patron of the arts – has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.

The poet John Donne admired her intelligence and her conversation: "She knew well how discourse of all things, from predestination to slea-silk." A more exasperated relative described her stubbornness and determination as unstoppable "as the Rhone river" – Clifford did face her family and two husbands in her fight to secure her inheritance.

Sandy Nairne, director of the NPG, said: "Lady Anne Clifford painted by William Larkin is a fascinating portrait of an important woman, and I am very grateful to the Art Fund and our generous individual supporters who have made the acquisition possible."

Catharine MacLeod, the gallery's curator of 17th-century portraits, regards the painting as outstanding.

"The modelling of the face is particularly refined and subtle, conveying a sense of individuality and personality unusual in English portraiture at this time."

Larkin painted the portrait of Clifford in 1616, when she was 28. It was given to her cousin, but then became lost for centuries. It was traced by the gallery owner Mark Weiss to a European private collection, and bought by the NPG for £275,000, including a £70,000 grant from the Art Fund charity.

The NPG already has a portrait of Clifford, a copy of a 17th century original showing a much older woman. Clifford's own description of her appearance, her autobiography, diary and a wealth of other documents helped identify the Larkin portrait. "The colour of mine eyes was black like my father's and the form and aspect of them was quicke and lively like my mother's. The hair of my head was brown and very thick … with a peak of hair on my forehead and a dimple in my chin."

She was 15 in 1605 and the only surviving child when her father, George Clifford, the third earl of Cumberland, left her money but his estates and properties to his brother. She contested this through extensive research and a string of legal actions, and eventually inherited on the deaths of her uncle and his son.

She went on to restore churches and castles on her estates, write extensively and commission works of art and books, and served as sheriff of Westmoreland until her death in 1676.

In middle age she commissioned The Great Picture, a barn door-sized triptych, now owned by the Abbot Hall Museum, showing her at different stages of life. Her two grand but unhappy marriages, to Richard Sackville, third earl of Dorset, and Philip Herbert, fourth earl of Pembroke and first earl of Montgomery, were represented by portraits on the wall of the husbands she long outlived.

Summary: William Larkin's portrait of 17th-century renaissance woman identified with help from her own words


North Korea launched four short-range missiles Thursday. The missiles were fired into the sea off the country’s eastern coast just before 6:00 p.m. local time, South Korea’s Defense Ministry said. It was the first confirmed launch in about nine months. Pyongyang has yet to comment on the incident. South called the launch “provocative”; the U.S. urged “restraint.”

Despite the stern words from Seoul and Washington, few here were surprised by the test or the timing. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the country is officially called, regularly tests weapons. This launch coincides with U.S.-South Korea military drills that the North insists are a dress-rehearsal for war. Last year, the drills provoked threats of nuclear Armageddon — short-range tests seem mild by comparison.

In fact, things finally seem to be looking up on the Korean peninsula. Last week, South Korea and the DPRK held their first high-level talks in years, followed by two rounds of reunions for families divided by the 1950-1953 Korean War. It was the first meet since the program was suspended following the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel, in 2010. An earlier round of reunions, scheduled for September 2013, was canceled at the last moment.

Korea-watchers believe North Korea agreed to the meetups as a way to re-engage with Seoul and, indirectly, Beijing and Washington. Dictator Kim Jong Un has promised to develop his country’s economy. To do so, he may need some help, or at least some relief from crippling economic sanctions.

“To sustain domestic politics the regime must be able to overcome economic difficulties,” says Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul’s University of North Korea Studies. “This requires improving external relations.” So, notwithstanding missiles tests, expect the North to play nice for now.

Summary: Lobbing missiles may appear belligerent, but Pyongyang can't afford hostilities


Among the 13 contributors to the second Immediate showcase, James Brown emerges as the one you'd least want to spend an evening with. According to Brown, Sheffield council operates an approximate four per cent acceptable failure rate for its streetlighting, accounting for some 700 lampposts remaining on all day. He knows this because has gone round photographing them all. (Curiously, streetlamps also featured prominently in the gallery's previous exhibition of work by Sophy Rickett. Sheffield's canine population must be getting increasingly frustrated at having to fight their way past all the artists whenever they need to pee.)

As a survey of the best new work emerging from the degree courses and new- media modules of the region, Immediate 2 displays plenty of technical facility but dispiritingly little original thought. Kim Clarkson makes unnervingly banal portraits of family and friends, while Michelle Sank concentrates on making self-conscious adolescents look gormless for the camera. All well and good, but Rineke Dijkstra and Beat Streuli have been doing this for years.

Janet Wang appropriates the technology of the rotating billboard to illustrate what the catalogue identifies as her "self-conscious femininity in a post-feminist state". There are photos of a woman in a field, in a car park and spilling coffee in an office - exhibiting self-consciousness in a post-beverage environment.

Anthea Hamilton's Coconut Girl is a video of herself stranded in a grass skirt on a diminutive desert island. It's fun, but the same image of entrapment is infinitely better expressed in the Canadian video artist Rodney Graham's Vexation Island, recently seen at Tate Liverpool. Only Simon Blackmore goes off on his own track, in a tatty orange caravan that functions as a miniature mobile gallery. Inside you relive Blackmore's tour around the beauty spots of Britain, filmed and framed through the caravan window. It points out a few engaging parallels between cultural tourism and landscape painting, but Blackmore's sheepish admission that one of his few visitors turned out to be an artist engaged in a similar project in Chicago says it all really.

·Until November 24. Details: 0114 281 2077 .

Summary: Site Gallery, Sheffield Rating: **


06/20/2014 at 08:20 AM EDT

The hills are alive with the sounds of "Goooooaaal!"

On Wednesday, Team Chile played against defending

champions, Spain, to prove their futbol prowess. Watching in his home country, Santiago resident Manuel Vásquez had a hunch that something magical would happen when Chilean footballer Alexis Sanchez stepped up for his free-kick. Hoping for a big reaction, Vásquez went outside and began to film his silent city.

Good thing he followed that gut instinct. Moments after Vásquez hit record, Sanchez's free kick connected with teammate Charles Aranguiz, who tapped the ball into the back of the net for Chile's second goal of the game. The citizens of Santiago reacted by enveloping their metropolis in a

, which Vásquez captured on film.

Chile's capital had even more to cheer about later in the day. Their team went on to defeat Spain 2-0 and will proceed to their next World Cup match.

Marcos Rojo (left) and Ezequiel Garay of Argentina

Summary: Santiago knows how to turn it to 11


Andrea Mitchell, the veteran chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News, is also the host of “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” an hour of political news and interviews with top news-makers that airs each day at 12 p.m. ET on msnbc. Mitchell covered the entire 2008 presidential campaign, starting with the kickoff in February 2007. She reported live from every major primary and caucus state and from all of the candidate debates for both NBC News and msnbc programs, including “Today,” “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “Hardball,” “Morning Joe,” and “Meet the Press.” She also covered Barack Obama’s trip to Iraq, the Middle East, and Europe during the presidential campaign. Mitchell currently covers foreign policy, intelligence, and national security issues for all NBC News properties.

As a featured political correspondent in 2004, Mitchell was a regular panelist on msnbc’s “Hardball” and was the first reporter to break the story that Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry had chosen Sen. John Edwards as his vice presidential running mate.

In September 2005, Mitchell authored “Talking Back,” a memoir about her experiences as one of the first women to cover five presidents, Congress, and foreign policy. That year, Mitchell also received the prestigious Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2004, the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) honored Mitchell with the Leonard Zeidenberg Award for her contribution to the protection of First Amendment Freedoms.

Mitchell’s extensive and varied reports include a series of exclusive interviews over the years with Cuban President Fidel Castro. Her unprecedented access resulted in a one-hour documentary on Cuba in December 2003. Throughout 2002 and 2003, Mitchell covered the United Nations debate leading up to the Iraq war and provided detailed reports on the questions surrounding pre-war intelligence and weapons of mass destruction. As a longtime analyst of the intelligence community, Mitchell’s past assignments for NBC have included exclusive reports from North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Bosnia, Kosovo, Pakistan, and Haiti.

During the 2000 campaign, Mitchell hosted msnbc’s “The Mitchell Report,” NBC News’ election year broadcast of record. In addition, she was the lead NBC News correspondent covering Hillary Rodham Clinton’s race for the Senate in 2000.

Among her many past assignments, Mitchell was NBC News’ Chief White House Correspondent, a position she assumed after covering Bill Clinton from the New Hampshire primary through the entire 1992 presidential campaign.

From 1988-1992, Mitchell served as chief congressional correspondent. During that time, she played a major role in reporting on the budget, the savings and loan bailout, the Clarence Thomas hearings, and other legislative issues. She also served as a regular political analyst on “Today” and was a panelist in the second Bush-Dukakis presidential debate.

Mitchell first covered the White House for NBC News during both of Ronald Reagan’s terms as President. She reported on a variety of noteworthy stories, including arms control, the budget, tax reform, and the Iran-contra scandal, and traveled extensively with President Reagan to summits with Mikhail Gorbachev and other world leaders.

Over the years, Mitchell has appeared on “Meet the Press” as a panelist and substitute host. An acclaimed political reporter, during the 1988 Republican National Convention, she beat both the competition and presidential candidate George Bush with the announcement that Bush had chosen Dan Quayle to be his running mate. She was also a panelist in the final Bush-Dukakis presidential debate.

Mitchell joined NBC News in 1978 as a general correspondent based in Washington, DC. In 1979, she was named NBC’s energy correspondent. In that capacity, she reported on the energy crisis and the Three Mile Island nuclear incident. Before joining NBC, she was a correspondent for WDVM-TV (then WTOP), the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. From 1967-1976, she was a broadcast journalist for KYW Radio and KYW-TV in Philadelphia.

A native of New York, Mitchell received a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania where she currently serves as a trustee, a member of the executive committee, and chairman of the Annenberg School Advisory Board. She also serves on the board of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and is a member of the Gridiron Club.

Mitchell is married to former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and resides in Washington, DC. Follow Mitchell on Twitter: @mitchellreports.

Get the latest news from Andrea Mitchell Reports.

Follow Andrea Mitchell’s activity on msnbc.com.


The Thames is the great London referent: metaphor and fact. Without the khaki, sediment-heavy river, our city would have no soul. Much of the original London, the riverside settlement, has been overbuilt, stacked, crammed, warped, twisted - until light is corkscrewed, bounced off dirty windows: a rare epiphany, a dole of pleasure. The memory is still present, of streets as sewers, floating sluggishly after rain; or, shocked by sunshine, baked into fissured mud. The surface of JMW Turner's massive oils, when you get close to them in their Tate Britain bunker, are a bouilla-baisse of steaming reds and yellows, stewed light, linseed and gristle. They duplicate the condition of a dried riverbed: a network of hairline cracks - like a vision, from the edge of the troposphere, of the Thames Estuary fracturing into a mantilla of tributaries.

Walking - within the Roman walls - we are aware of how London streets aspire to the condition of water. They solicit a re-connection with the Thames, the world ocean, the sources of trade and wealth. River gods in alcoves. Coade stone deities with fishy tails. Sir Edwin Cooper's old Port of London Authority building on Tower Hill is a Mount Olympus of decommissioned riverine emanations: body builders bulked-up like cosmological cartoons hoping to attract the attention of William Blake. Father Thames, in a chariot drawn by sea horses, oversees, with blind eyes, a city of greed, paranoia, self-aggrandisement. Traditions upheld, business as usual.

Fearful, we try to understand where we are, before we give ourselves up to the drift, the deceptive counter currents of the labyrinth. There are fleets of miniaturised vessels, blackened, carbonised, dressing the walls of financial institutions: fetishes of superstition. Even the dullest pedestrian, burdened with everyday panic and non-specific terror, will acknowledge the presence of underground rivers: Walbrook, Fleet. Liquid prompts guide our steps towards the scintillae of the supremely visible Thames.

Here begins the work of poets and painters, their argument and co-dependence; treacherous depths, imported narratives, shows of light. Here begins the difficulty with representing a force that resists representation. Here begins the substance out of which London's dreaming is made. The Thames floods, ebbs: a seductive surface, active, dirty, copywritten by Eliot, Pope, Spenser, Conrad, Céline.

When I worked, in the 1970s, as a gardener in Limehouse, I used to see the grey spectre, an X-ray with its own microclimate, of Francis Bacon. At the bus stop. Belted aluminium raincoat, hands in pockets. Solitary. He had a house in Narrow Street, convenient for social interaction, pub life, redundant dockers, but useless as a studio. He couldn't, he had no ambitions in that direction, paint the river. He kept the blinds down, promiscuous light was excluded. He couldn't paint at all; the shifts, the sounds, were overwhelming. He commuted to Kensington. The studio, in a noble tradition, was a down-river bolthole: off-limits, taking advantage of present malaise and a recoverable tradition of submersion and erasure.

Turner inherited property in Wapping, which included a pub, the Ship and Bladebone. He devoured river light and relished the potential profits that would accrue from Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Rotherhithe Tunnel. He enjoyed sexual favours hidden from the pinch of polite society. The Thames at Wapping reflected low skies, migrating weather systems. Turner worked, as always, inside and out, filling his sketchbooks: the heat of women's bodies, muscle and fold, twinned with meaty sunsets. A poker-red eye burning off the murk, the sullen damp. Locals knew the short, peppery gentleman as "Admiral Booth". He was often out on the river.

London air was foul, soot coating the lungs, but attractive to painters: a thick membrane penetrated by prismatic shafts. Turner was a walker. Like old Betty Higden in Dickens' last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend , he could manage 20 miles a day, if put to it. Even his ageing father, caretaker of the Twicken ham property, would trudge 11 miles, in and out of London, to open Turner's gallery. Painters shadow the river, struggling to fix the unfixable; trying to nail a fistful of mercury to a wet wall.

"I adore London," Monet said, "but what I love more than anything is the fog." Industrial pollution, sea coal fires, river fret: every element contributes to the London Particular. Light so thick you can taste it. Monet, a refugee from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, factored strategic tourism into vision: unscripted postcard views dissolving sky into river. A grand project of dematerialisation. Visiting public places, Hyde Park, Green Park, the Embankment, he transfigured the dull weight of an imperial capital into reefs of pink coral, candy floss islands. Instantaneous sense impressions, graphs of mood temperature, were laboured over in the studio and reluctantly ceded to his dealer. The Thames below Westminster, painted in 1870, presents the new Houses of Parliament as a smoky cliff, a series of jagged outcrops. Monet established the franchise: Thames as melting Polaroid. Noise muffled, veiled in chiffon. Non-leisured citizens are deleted to enhance the calligraphic spasms.

Monet's friend and colleague, James McNeill Whistler (a man who was not-at-home everywhere), also progressed towards the elimination of vulgar riverside activity (human traces). He chose instead the pre-electronic virtuosity of "lamplight and starlight": medieval magic with a Japanese spin. Chelsea nocturnes, bruised minimalism: he had to deal with the nuisance of Crystal Palace on the southern horizon, an unsightly invasion of the actual. As much an affront to the elective decadence of the late 19th century as our own civic folly, the Millennium Dome on Greenwich Peninsula. Such is the characteristic Xerox impressionism of New Labour: a white blot, seagull droppings on a pristine computer screen. Whistler's zen bridges have been revamped as the portal to Thames Gateway.

Without the Thames, there would be no viable London aesthetic. What you depict will always overlap some previous account of the same view, a topographical record of the position from which the painting was made. The serial excursionism of Monet, with his privileged Savoy Hotel balcony, a room stacked with enough canvases to cover every freak of our infernal weather, interrogates contrary visions: upstream, downriver. Two bridges, two substantial chunks of civil engineering to be broken down into beads of shimmering light. London as a studio. Like Whistler, Monet took up Baudelaire's challenge: to depict "the landscape of great cities". The English Channel narrowed to a ditch, as poets and painters travelled in both directions. Sickert to Dieppe. Apollinaire to Lambeth. Stéphane Mallarmé translated Whistler's Ten O'Clock Lecture . Whistler and Monet made their treaty with the irritating genius of Turner; by studying his works, praising his energy, damning his failure to appreciate the subtle depths of shadow.

Riverside subjects are borrowed, never owned: the fireworks from the Cremorne pleasure gardens that decorate Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1872-5) return as flares in the wartime sky of Cecil Brown's A Prospect of London from the South East in the Year 1945. A wood engraving (skeleton rowing through drowned bodies), from Punch in 1858, is finessed into the opening sequence of Our Mutual Friend . Gaffer Hexam and his daughter corpse-fishing, setting up future television adaptations: London Gothic.

Images produced with such intense concentration become the medium by which folk memory survives: the thin, horizontal bands of Whistler's wet-on-wet technique in Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea (1871) are honoured in the recent work of that laureate of stagnant canals, filling stations and night football pitches, Jock McFadyen. McFadyen, in his large-scale representations of the silvery blight of Purfleet and the QEII Bridge, pays a very knowing homage. He follows his mentor into the aesthetics of entropy. They began, both of them, with peopled compositions, then let the actors go. McFadyen's dog walkers, his drinkers with half-cooked faces, occupy the riverside that Francis Bacon couldn't paint.

Where Monet worried at serial versions of the Houses of Parliament from a secure viewpoint in St Thomas' Hospital, the Scottish expressionist John Bellany goes a stage further: by moving in. For intrusive medical procedures, before a liver transplant in Cambridge. His river is yellow, vicious - like the anamorphic urban panoramas painted by Kokoshka from the upper floors of Millbank Tower. Monet shreds light into straw. Kokoshka butchers it, like a surgeon, to incubate an apocalypse of venture capital, bad news and worse politics.

So the business of colliding those blue-chip culture stocks - TurnerWhistlerMonet - for an exhibition at Tate Britain is not a harmless act. Complex issues of promotion, scholarship and sponsorship are involved. The show was first floated in 1988; at the time I was being fed sandwiches and coffee, while discussions were held on ways of making an event around the theme of the river. My unworkable (and definitively unfundable) proposal leant towards the Tate Gallery as a cabinet of dredged curiosities (after the fashion of John Tradescant's eccentric jumble, his Lambeth Ark). I wanted to retrieve the dark history of sugar, Sir Henry Tate's bequest shackled to the Silvertown refinery. I wanted documentation from the Tate's early disguise: as Millbank Penitentiary. And convalescent traces from the First War; the dying carried ashore, wheeled down a ramp into a subterranean chapel. I wanted to challenge the alternate art collection on the far shore, Lord Archer's penthouse conversation pieces. His Dufy riverscapes, his Monet totem like Winston Churchill's gifted trophy at Chartwell. (Owning a Monet is about owning a Monet, not seeing what it does or says.)

Art plunder, sanctified by public display, confers virtue on its keepers. A notable show diverts attention from the grubby realpolitik of the river. Tactfully hung apartments are what we require, walls with radiant windows. We file through, nudged by prompt cards, in money-laid-out reverence. While outside, en plein air, the Embankment is deserted. Sharky cruisers, defaced by a rash of expectorated Damien Hirst Smarties, shuttle between the ex-power station (Tate Modern) and the former prison (Tate Britain). The true exhibition, I decided, would involve knocking down that wall, letting the river in. Go with the flow. With Turner, dying in his Chelsea house, being absorbed in the rush of light; calling on his god, the sun.

· Turner Whistler Monet is at Tate Britain, London SW1, from Thursday to May 15. Tickets: 020-7887 8888 or www.tate.org.uk/tickets

Summary: It is the filthy, seductive soul of London. No wonder the Thames has transfixed - and defeated - artists for centuries. By Iain Sinclair.


Chicago-based CF Industries CF and Norway’s Yara ASA are in talks about a merger of equals that could create a $27 billion global fertilizer producer, rivalling Canada’s Potash Corp POT in size in a fragmented and oversupplied market.

The deal would give Yara, the world’s biggest nitrate fertiliser maker, major production units in the U.S., where costs are lower due to cheap gas. CF Industries would gain a global footprint through Yara’s presence in 150 countries with production assets and a well established distribution network.

The two firms’ combined market capitalisation of $27.5 billion would put it almost on par with Potash Corp, the world’s largest fertilizer company worth $28.9 billion.

Both companies said in regulatory filings that the talks were at an early stage, and there were no assurances that these would result in any transaction. Yara said it wanted to conclude the process quickly but said nothing is expected in the coming days.

Yara shares surged nearly 9% in early trade and were 6.4%percent higher by lunchtime in Europe, valuing the company at $13.7 billion. CF was worth $12.7 billion based on Monday’s close.

Global fertiliser margins have been under pressure, mainly due to Chinese overproduction, and the International Fertilizer Industry Association expects global production growth will outpace demand at least through 2018.

The two firms already work together through GrowHow, a 50/50 joint venture operating production units in Britain.

CF, with big U.S. production assets, has higher margins and access to cheap U.S. gas while Yara has higher revenues and operates a coveted distribution network.

Natural gas is the main ingredient of ammonia, which forms the base of nitrate fertilizers.

The fertilizer industry group sees nitrogen fertiliser output rising nearly twice as fast as demand between 2014 and 2018, increasing a surplus in the market that could reach 9% of global production by 2018.

“In terms of revenues, Yara has the highest revenues but the lower margin, while CF has higher margin and lower revenues,” Per Haagensen, an analyst at RS Platou Markets said. “It seems to me that it is a pretty fair merger of equals.”

“I don’t think there will be a third company coming in and trying to join in because these are the two biggest nitrogen producers essentially.”

The biggest hurdle to any deal would be the Norwegian government, which owns 36.2% stake in Yara.

The government said in June it would not cut its stake below 34% and any change in that stance would likely require approval in parliament, an uphill battle as the government rules in a minority and relies on opposition parties to push through its agenda.

The trade ministry said it has not taken a position while the majority of parties contacted by Reuters said they could support the deal as long as the combined firm’s headquarters stayed in Norway and the state maintained a 34% state.

With U.S. gas prices trading near historic lows, Yara has been working to build capacity in North America and plans to construct an ammonia plant with Germany’s BASF AG in Texas.

It has also been expanding rapidly in South America in recent years, buying Bunge’s Brazilian fertiliser business and acquiring the majority of Brazilian phosphate miner Galvani Indústria.

CF Industries in March sold its phosphate business to rival Mosaic Co for $1.4 billion to focus on its core nitrogen fertilizer products. It has also been working on a $3.8 billion expansion of nitrogen fertilizer production in Louisiana and Iowa.

Summary: Deal would seal meteoric rise for CF, which was only a quarter of Yara's four years ago, before the U.S. shale gas boom took off.


The man presented to doctors with a stomach ache and itchy skin. (East Network News)

A Chinese man’s body has been left riddled with tapeworms after he ate contaminated sashimi.

The man went to the doctor complaining of a stomach ache and itchy skin, with x-ray scans later revealing his entire body was infected with tapeworms, China’s East Network News reported.

Doctors believe raw fish the man had eaten had become contaminated.

The man’s condition was so severe that he was referred to Guangzhou No.8 People’s Hospital, located in the largest city of Guangdong province in South China.

Dr Yin told East Network News eating uncooked food contaminated with tapeworms’ eggs could lead to Cysticercosis, where adult worms enter a person’s bloodstream.

The condition is understood to be life-threatening if the parasites reach the brain.

Scans revealed the man's whole body was infected with tapeworms. (East Network News)

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You can’t write a story about the rumored Apple smart pen — or iPen as it’s inevitably dubbed — without referring to two of Steve Jobs’ most famous dicta:

So when an Apple stylus patent gets approved (as one did in April), or another gets filed (as one did last week, the 10th so far this year), one of these quotes is usually trotted out for ironic effect.

But if you watch the video that started it — the Macworld 2007 keynote where Jobs unveiled the iPhone — you’ll see that what he actually said isn’t what people remember him saying.

How are we going to communicate with this,” he asks rhetorically, referring to the iPhone. “We don’t want to carry around a mouse, right? So what are we going to do? Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus. (Pause) Nooo. (Big laugh) Who wants a stylus? You have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.”

Note that Jobs didn’t say nobody would ever want a stylus. He said nobody wants a stylus as the primary input on a mobile phone. For that, fingers are better.

That there already is a stylus market — albeit a modest one — is evident on Amazon, where you can buy them on sale in packets of three for $6.99.

That Apple has a team of engineers working on building a better one is evident from the collection of more than 32 filings that Patently Apple’s Jack Purcher has helpfully assembled.

According to Purcher, the iPen is one of Apple’s longest-running projects, if not the longest. Apple Pay emerged 52 months after after its first public filing. Apple Watch is scheduled to ship less than 30 months after it first surfaced. Apple started filing stylus patents, according to Purcher, six or seven years ago, shortly after the iPhone shipped.

“Why is Apple spending so much engineering time and money on a project for 6+ years,” Purcher says, “if there isn’t a real chance of this becoming a real product down the line?”

If there is to be an Apple smart pen, he adds, we’ll probably see it roll out with the rumored iPad Pro. That jumbo-sized tablet, made with design, engineering and graphics professionals in mind, is now expected in first half of 2015.

“Steve Jobs wasn’t a big fan of the ‘dumb stylus’ of yesteryear that was basically a tiny plastic stick,” Purcher wrote in 2011, when Jobs was still alive. “And so he set out to reinvent it.”

I usually stay away from patent stories because most of what Apple files never ships. But 10 patents in one year is too many to ignore. To me, this feels like the watch did last summer. It feels like we’re getting close.

Link: Patently Apple’s smart pen patent collection.

Below: 30 seconds of Steve Jobs on the stylus at the 2007 iPhone launch

Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter at @philiped. Read his Apple AAPL coverage at fortune.com/ped or subscribe via his RSS feed.

Summary: Last week, Apple filed this year's 10th stylus patent. That makes 32 and counting. Something's in the works.


Ted Turner, who has battled depression for most of his adult life, is feeling low these days and is filled with regret at having merged his brainchild, CNN, with Time Warner in 1996. Sources say the Mouth of the South has been telling friends that if he had it to do over, he would have held onto the 24-hour-a-day news channel. Let's not forget that he's saying these things at a time when war coverage - and Americans - are filled with uncertainty. But Turner, it seems, has been a doom-and-gloom kind of guy from the very day in June 1980 when he launched the cable network. He said then, as only he could, "We gonna go on air June 1, and we gonna stay on until the end of the world. When that time comes, we'll cover it, play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee,' and sign off.

" Ten years later, I'm told, Turner used CNN production facilities to create what he called his "end-of-the-world" video. Sources tell me it consists of a recording of "Nearer, My God," over footage of a waving American flag. Turner is said to have ordered the tape locked away until it was determined that the world was about to end. "It was like a sign-off tape that you often see in the middle of the night," says one source. "But to Ted, it was a sign-off forever.

" Turner's assistant in Atlanta said her boss was traveling outside the country and could not be reached for comment. ONE HEROINE FORGOTTEN Glamour magazine really blew it in their December issue when their editors honored Moira Smith and Yamel Merino as the only female rescue workers to die in the line of duty Sept. 11. They forgot to add the name of Capt. Kathy Mazza, the first female commanding officer of the Port Authority Police Academy. When the first plane struck Tower One of the World Trade Center, Mazza rushed from Jersey City through the Holland Tunnel with two other Port Authority officers. She ran into the building shortly after 9 a.

m., and was last seen climbing the stairs between the 28th and 29th floors. "It is awful to hear there was a third woman," says a Glamour rep. "We are so deeply sorry to hear that, and our thoughts and prayers go out to her family.

" THIN-SKINNED DERMATOLOGIST SUES Just when his long-running custody battle with Patricia Duff is winding down, Ron Perelman has ticked off another woman. The Revlon billionaire is going to court with dermatologist Patricia Wexler, who says she's owed $20 million for helping create and promote Revlon's Almay Kinetin Skin Care line, according to papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. Wexler filed the suit in response to a $10 million lawsuit Revlon filed against her, charging breach of contract. Perelman's company accused Wexler of not being available to promote the product, leading to damages that included loss of sales. The company even accused her of refusing to help secure bookings on "Live With Regis & Kelly" and "Oprah" to push the products, reports The News' Helen Peterson. Wexler denies those claims, and said no interviews had been scheduled on those shows. However, in her suit she says Revlon wanted her to reveal the names of her celebrity clientele to help land the high-profile interviews. Wexler's rep, Leslee Dart, says releasing the names of the doctor's clients would be unethical, illegal and immoral. In a statement, Wexler theorized that Perelman's refusal to pay her what she is owed is "an indication of the disastrous financial problems facing the company.

" Perelman's rep countered that Wexler had an exclusive arrangement with Revlon and was sued because she "sought to circumvent and betray that relationship by seeking a separate deal with a [unnamed] competitor.

" A COURT DATE AT THE GARDEN It was a classy move for Cablevision's Jim Dolan to invite ousted Madison Square Garden president Dave Checketts to Tuesday's game between the Knicks and Michael Jordan's Washington Wizards. And it was just as gracious for Checketts to accept. Checketts, who was fired by Dolan earlier this year, told me he was anxious about going back to the Garden. "I was very nervous," he said. "But I wanted to see Michael play. I watched him kick our butts for 10 years. I detested him all that time. But now I admire him.

" QUICK HITS  Rappers Sean (P. Diddy) Combs and Jay-Z both wanted to attend Tuesday's Knicks-Wizards game. But after Garden honchos informed each of them that courtside seats were not available, they decided not to show.  The NYPD's singing cop, Danny Rodriguez, who has been a fixture at Yankee Stadium during the team's post-season run, will sing "America the Beautiful" with Grammy winner Jennifer Holliday at Denise Rich's G&P Foundation gala Nov. 8 at Planet Hollywood.


Russia’s currency and stock market fell again Monday after a new offensive by Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine drew threats of more sanctions from President Barack Obama and allies in Europe.

The forces of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic launched multiple rocket artillery attacks on the port city of Mariupol at the weekend, killing at least 30 civilians and injuring another 100, in what appeared to signal a new and more intensive stage of fighting in the conflict, which has killed over 5,000 in the last eight months.

That followed a declaration on Friday by the Donetsk rebels’ leader, Alexander Zakharchenko, that the rebels would no longer stick to the increasingly shaky truce agreed in Minsk, Belarus, last year but rather seek to extend the territory under their control. Mariupol is a key objective because it sits astride the shortest route from Donetsk to the peninsular of Crimea, which Russia annexed last year.

President Obama, who heard of the attack while on a state visit to India, said he “will look at all additional options that are available to us short of military confrontation and try to address this issue.”

Obama said the rebels had received ”Russian backing, Russian equipment, Russian financing, Russian training and Russian troops.”

The Russian ruble fell by 3% against the dollar Monday as markets priced in the risk of new sanctions that would add to the problems facing the country’s economy. The World Bank and IMF estimate that the combination of low oil prices and sanctions will cause the economy to shrink by nearly 3% this year.

The RTS, Moscow’s benchmark stock index, fell 5.0%. Although it’s up 24% from its December low, when a full-blown currency crisis was threatening to erupt, it’s still down 43% from a year ago.

Russia’s political leaders had voiced defiance last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov saying that “we will withstand any privations–we’ll eat less food, use less electricity…and other things that we have gotten used to.” However, business leaders are striking an ever-gloomier tone. The once-bombastic tycoon Oleg Deripaska said at Davos that the government’s plan to overcome sanctions with import substitution was doomed to failure, and said “the worst is all still ahead.”

In Europe, meanwhile, the attack led to an abrupt end to suggestions that sanctions might be eased in March. Federica Mogherini, the E.U.’s new foreign policy chief, warned that “further escalation…would inevitably lead to a further grave deterioration of relations,” while Donald Tusk, the president of the E.U.’s council, tweeted that it was “time to step up our policy based on cold facts, not illusions.”

“Once again, appeasement encourages the aggressor to greater acts of violence,” Tusk said.

The E.U. has called an emergency meeting of foreign ministers for Thursday to discuss the situation.

Russia, however, continues to blame the government in Kyiv for the fighting, in which the indiscriminate use of artillery by both sides is inflicting more and more civilian casualties.

In a telephone call with Mogherini, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that “if Ukraine’s authorities had accepted President Putin’s suggestion…to withdraw heavy artillery from the demarcation line in the Minsk memorandum…then tragedies such as Volnovakha, Donetsk and Mariupol could not have happened.”

Last week, 12 civilians were killed and wounded when a bus at a Ukrainian checkpoint was hit by what appeared to be a rebel artillery attack. Civilians in rebel-held Donetsk have also come under fire repeatedly this year, eight being killed by a mortar blast as they waited for a bus last Thursday.

President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile turned the accusation of sending soldiers into Ukraine back on the West Monday. Putin said the Ukrainian army “in essence isn’t an army, it’s a foreign legion, in this case a foreign legion of NATO soldiers who, of course, aren’t pursuing the national interests of Ukraine, RIA Novosti reported.

Summary: Obama threatens to look at "all additional options that are available to us short of military confrontation."


FORTUNE — Fifteen minutes may save you money, but Geico is not benefiting Warren Buffett as much as it used to.

Profits at the auto insurance company, which is owned by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway brk.a , plunged 48% to $587 million in 2011. It was the first time since 2003 that Geico earned so little. The disappointing results were disclosed in Berkshire’s annual letter to shareholders released Saturday.

Geico struggled throughout 2011, but things appear to have gotten worse at the end of the year. In the fourth quarter, the auto insurer fell into the red, losing $34 million. That compares to a profit of $200 million in the same period a year ago. The main culprits: Higher advertising costs and the fact that Geico had to pay out more money in claims than in past years.

As anyone who turns on a TV or drives on a highway knows, Geico spends a lot on advertising – $900 million in 2010. At the time, Buffett said it was an amount he was glad to shell out. In last year’s annual letter, Buffett wrote, “If we could spend twice that amount productively, we would happily do so though short-term results would be further penalized.” Geico’s advertising rose in 2011, though Berkshire didn’t say by how much. What is clear is that all that spending appears to have finally hit the point of diminishing returns, at least for now.

MORE: Buffett beats the S&P for the 39th year

Geico did add over 700,000 new auto policies last year, and its revenue rose 7.6% to $15.7 billion. Costs, though, which Berkshire said were driven in part by additional advertising, rose faster, up $239 million or 9.4% in 2011. On top of that, Geico paid out nearly $1.4 billion more in claims in 2011 than it did the year before, a rise of 13%. The company didn’t say why claims were up, but damage from hurricanes and floods last year could be at least one cause. Geico said that catastrophe losses more than doubled in 2011 to $252 million from $109 million the year before. The rise in the two expenditures combined to produce the big drop in Geico’s bottom line.

Oddly enough, Geico’s bottom line problems didn’t seem to bother Berkshire’s chairman. Buffett praised Geico’s CEO Tony Nicely in his letter to shareholders again this year, though perhaps not as much as in the past. In this year’s letter, Buffett told shareholders not to “bet against Tony.” Back in 2006, Buffett suggested shareholders name their newborns after Tony. And it doesn’t look like Buffett plans to get rid of the Geico’s spokesperson anytime soon either. He quipped in this year’s letter that “Our lizard has another endearing quality: Unlike human spokesmen or spokeswomen who expensively represent other insurance companies, our little fellow has no agent.”

MORE: Don’t believe every “Buffett buys…” headline

Buffett has long cared less about the profits his insurance companies produce, and more about the cashflow they provide for his investing side of his business. Insurance companies, in general, collect premiums for their policies, most of which they expect to pay out in claims over time. In the meantime, the insurer gets to hold onto that cash. Make good investments in the time between when you take in the premiums and have to pay out the claims, and you can do quite well.

Buffett has, of course, invested brilliantly. But part of his magic has been this cheap source of funds. Berkshire’s insurance “float” rose 1,600% in the 1990s and another 300% in the 2000s. And in that respect Geico had a pretty good 2011, generating an additional $900 million in potential investment funds. Berkshire ended 2011 with $70.6 billion in float. But the troubles at Geico and indeed the rest of Berkshire’s insurance businesses – collectively profits for the group fell nearly 90% in 2011 – could signify a shift ahead for Berkshire’s future, and potential problems. In this year’s annual letter Buffett wrote, “It is unlikely that our float will grow much – if at all – from its current level.” So Berkshire appears to be entering a new era – one in which it will need to find more float, or learn to do without.

In fact, the new era at Berkshire may have already started. Whitney Tilson, a Berkshire shareholder who runs the Tilson Focus fund, says Berkshire’s insurance float is not nearly as important to the company as it used to be. Major acquisitions, like railroad company Burlington Northern Santa Fe, provide the majority of Berkshire’s cashflow.

“Berkshire now brings in a billion a month from its other businesses,” says Tilson. “Buffett has the opposite problem of being capital constrained. He’s drowning in it.”

Buffett on housing: Was ‘dead wrong,’ but still believes

Warren Buffett: Why stocks beat gold and bonds

Summary: Troubles at auto insurer Geico could signify a larger shift going on at Buffett's Berkshire.


The Algonquin Incremental Market natural gas project, which would build a five-mile spur through West Roxbury, will face a legal battle in Massachusetts after being approved by federal regulators.

In a ruling posted online Tuesday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted the Houston pipeline company Spectra Energy Corp. permission to move ahead with the project, which would increase the capacity of New England’s biggest natural gas pipeline by 300 million cubic feet of gas per day, Spectra has said.

But US Representative Stephen Lynch, a South Boston Democrat whose district includes the proposed West Roxbury pipeline, said opponents would seek an injunction to stop construction.

“We’ve reached out to a couple of [state] governmental departments that would have sufficient legal firepower to engage in such a lawsuit,” Lynch said. “It’s uphill. There’s no question about it. But I think the fight is worth fighting, and I think we’re right.”

It wasn’t clear Wednesday what the next steps would be. Before construction begins, the ruling said, Spectra must file detailed building and environmental protection plans.

New York state regulators also are reviewing Spectra’s proposal for construction in that state, but winning the FERC’s approval was the most significant legal hurdle.

The project has faced opposition from environmental and community groups, and national activists have raised concerns that it would lead to an increase in a controversial form of natural gas drilling called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. West Roxbury residents have protested a portion of the project that entails laying pipe adjacent to an urban quarry where explosives are regularly detonated, but the commission rejected suggestions that the project would be unsafe.

“Spectra and FERC have ignored our requests and simply paid lip service to our concerns about safety,” said Paul Horn of West Roxbury, a leader of the group Stop the West Roxbury Lateral. “We are disappointed, but not surprised.”

In addition, Rhode Island activists said they would begin a multiday, 28-mile march on Wednesday to protest pipeline construction in that state.

Other politicians have voiced their disapproval, too. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey cosigned a letter with Lynch warning of “serious consequences” if the pipeline is approved too hastily, and Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh and city councilors have said they oppose the pipeline expansion. Spokesmen for Walsh and Markey on Wednesday said that they were still reviewing the federal order.

The West Roxbury spur is a small part of the overall project. Spectra plans to lay a total of 37 miles of pipeline, most of it in a 20-mile stretch from New York to Connecticut that will go under the Hudson River. It also plans to install six pumping stations to pressurize the pipeline. The total cost projected by Spectra is $971 million, to be paid for by gas companies.

In a statement, Spectra said it was pleased with the commission’s decision but would not say more until it had fully reviewed the 66-page document. The company has said it hopes to complete construction by November 2016.

Summary: The Algonquin Incremental Market project, which would increase the capacity of New England’s largest natural gas pipeline and cut through the neighborhood of West Roxbury, has been approved by the feds but will face legal opposition.


Success, it seems, is all in the eye of the beholder.

For most of us, Silver Lake Partners would fit the bill. Since being founded in 1999, the tech-focused private equity firm has amassed $14 billion in assets under management, opened offices around the globe, produced strong returns for investors and diversified its investment strategy. For Silver Lake co-founder Roger McNamee, however, Silver Lake is about opportunity lost.

McNamee was one of several contributors to something called “The Failure Chronicles,” a series of first-person articles included in next month’s issue of Harvard Business Review.

At first glance, I assumed that McNamee would be detailing the struggles of Elevation Partners, the firm he launched after breaking up with Silver Lake in 2003. Kind of a harsh analysis — Elevation actually may produce decent returns thanks to a well-timed Facebook investment — but clearly Elevation hasn’t lived up to its extraordinary hype (and the chances of it raising another fund are remote).

So imagine my surprise when I actually read the piece, and realized that McNamee was talking about Silver Lake. His lead:

Nearly 30 years of investing in technology companies has exposed me to more kinds of failure than I ever knew existed. For me, the most frustrating is when a company (or person) fails to reach full potential. EBay could have been 10 times as big and 100 times as important as it is today, but shortsighted business plans relegated the company to a very profitable niche.

I was part of a failure like that. In 1997, I realized that the internet bubble was going to end badly for technology investors. I decided to create a new kind of fund that might withstand a market collapse. I began the project, which became Silver Lake Partners, in collaboration with a close friend from the investment banking world. Like eBay, Silver Lake is a very successful firm. And like eBay, we blew our opportunity to change the world.

To be sure, McNamee is sure to slip in that Silver Lake “is a very successful firm.” But his larger critique is that Silver Lake strayed from its founding principles, and became just another giant leveraged buyout firm. It’s an unforgivable sin to McNamee, and is reflective of the schism that caused his departure in the first place.

McNamee is basically a next-generation version of Ted Forstmann, in that he abhors financial engineering. Instead, McNamee wants his investments to succeed due to operational improvements, even if that means smaller funds, larger staffs and longer time horizons. He writes:

“[Silver Lake] made trailblazing investments, including the buyout of Seagate STX , the market leader in the hard-drive business, and a large commitment to the online brokerage firm Datek. After our investment, Seagate and Datek embarked on transformational product strategies that led to exceptional financial returns. Their success made Silver Lake a major institution overnight.”

McNamee certainly is correct that both Seagate and Datek made major changes while under Silver Lake’s ownership. But he neglects to mention that Seagate was acquired using a hearty amount of leveraged financing ($1.3 billion of the $2.3 billion deal was financed via junk bonds). He also seems to have little patience for evolving strategies — or pivoting, in the current lingo — even though his current firm has done deals that clearly are outside of its original investment strategy (such as buying a minority stake in Forbes Media).

It certainly is possible that Silver Lake may have been something very different were it to have followed McNamee’s advice over that of its other partners. But there is no guarantee that the result would have been any more, or less, successful. In fact, it might have been more of a failure.

Summary: Success, it seems, is all in the eye of the beholder. For most of us, Silver Lake Partners would fit the bill. Since being founded in 1999, the tech-focused private equity firm has amassed $14 billion in assets under management, opened offices around the globe, produced strong returns for investors and diversified its investment strategy.…


There aren’t very many American originals left. Michael Hurley is one of them.

You probably haven’t heard of Hurley, but it’s not like he hasn’t been out there for more than 50 years, playing his odd, eternal strain of folk music and recording when he gets a mind to. Although he currently lives in Astoria, Ore., he put in a lot of time in the Boston area back in the day, and he’s swinging by the Somerville Armory Wednesday for an extremely rare gig. Attention must be paid, if only because you may not get a second chance.

Now 74, Hurley’s one of the last survivors of the Greenwich Village folk boom of the early 1960s. He’s more than that, though — more deeply rooted. With his cracked voice, skewed comic vision, and a ragtag musical sensibility that seems to span centuries, Hurley’s a vestige of the “old, weird America.” That’s the phrase that critic Greil Marcus used to describe the universe of folk, blues, country, gospel, and mountain music that Bob Dylan and all the other hairy young rebels of the counterculture tapped into in an effort to find common ground. Hurley is part of that response, for sure, but he’s part of an earlier, more primal urge, too.

His music, performed solo on acoustic guitar or with small bands of like-minded individuals, can be crazy funny at times. Alternately, it can haunt a listener beyond words. Hurley’s most well-known tune may be “Werewolf,” which he has recorded three times over the years and which is sung from the point of view of a sociopathic supernatural creature that roams the night. It may be the loneliest song I’ve ever heard.

“Werewolf” is an outlier compared to Hurley’s usual fare, which mines a unique vein of American surrealism. His songs are full of talking pork chops, monkeys on the interstate, fractious little Martians, and demonic swine. The last is from “Hog of the Forsaken,” a stand-out on the soundtrack to HBO’s “Deadwood” a while back. On occasion, the mainstream has seen fit to embrace this strange, original man.

In fact, Hurley’s career got a boost about 10 years ago, when he was discovered by a new generation of lo-fi misfits. Cat Power covered “Werewolf” on 2003’s “You Are Free,” and alt-folkie Devendra Banhart released a 2007 Hurley album on his Gnomonsong label. Hurley has toured with the likes of Lucinda Williams and Son Volt. He could be, you know, big.

He’s bigger than that, though, in part because he’s so comfortably small. It’s in his aw-hell rustic minimalism that Hurley is precious; the world is his front porch. When I called him up earlier this week for a chat, it was like conversing with an acoustic Zen Yoda, his half of the conversation coming after long pauses, as through streaming across the galaxy from Planet Hurley.

I asked him about “snock,” which is a recurrent word and vague philosophical concept in his album titles and songs. I’d always thought it had something in common with “slack,” a sort of live-and-let-live pothead mellowness. Turns out it’s just his nickname, born of a vision he had in his youth of a symphony of claves and other percussion instruments clacking away. “I said, well, this is me,” Hurley recalls. “It was a kind of a hallucination. An auditory one.” Pharmaceuticals may have been involved.

He originally came out of Bucks County, Penn., with an interest in old-timey music, a way with a guitar, and not much of a work ethic. After recording a 1965 solo album on Folkways — a long-time rarity, it was re-released on CD as “First Songs” in 2010 — Hurley neglected to follow it up with a tour. Basically, he just forgot. “It never occurred to me that I should go out and start pumping it,” he says. He went to Mexico instead, and, when he returned, discovered he’d been booked into a folk festival at Carnegie Hall. That was his first real gig.

He let the momentum slip, though, and wandered up to Harvard Square. In six or so years in the Greater Boston area, Hurley held down a series of odd jobs: punching out venetian blinds in a factory, putting cookie dough on a conveyor belt, working as a janitor at the old Paris Cinema. What he didn’t do was perform. “I was married and ended up having three children,” he says, “so that keeps you on the stick. You gotta make hay.”

But an old friend named Perry Miller had changed his name to Jesse Colin Young, formed a band called the Youngbloods, and had a 1969 Top 10 hit with “Get Together.” (“Come on people now, smile on your brother” — that one.) Young found himself with his own label, Raccoon Records, and put out Hurley’s next two albums, “Armchair Boogie” (1971) and “Hi Fi Snock Uptown” (1972).

“I said, well, if he’s going to do this, I might as well get out and get in front of some of these clubs,” Hurley says. “It was the advent of the hippie bar. There were two of them, one of them was in Somerville — maybe both of them were. I forget the names. One of them was The Apple, I think. Before that, there were no hippie bars. I didn’t like bars much, because I was a hippie.” Meaning you could get beaten up? “If you had a few drinks, maybe, and you got mouthy, like I tend to do.”

Hurley took part in “Have Moicy!,” a legendary 1976 meeting of damaged minds with the Unholy Modal Rounders and Jeffrey Frederick and the Clamtones that longhairs used for years to delight and terrify their children. And then it was off to four decades of wandering in the unplugged wilderness, pausing every so often to record. A newcomer might want to start with 1984’s “Blue Navigator,” which includes a spectral version of “Werewolf”; only 1,000 copies were pressed and the master was later destroyed in a studio fire, but you can get it from Amazon in an MP3 version copied from a vinyl survivor. Somehow the pops and hiss make it sound better.

Other recommended starting points are “Long Journey” (1976), “Watertower” (1988), or “Ida Con Snock” (2009), which contains the hair-raisingly beautiful “Wildegeeses.” But there’s no such thing as a bad Michael Hurley record. In concert, he performs without a set list, pulling from the hundreds of tunes collected in the songbook of his mind.

Like your grandpa, Hurley collects and futzes around with antique radios. Unlike your grandpa, probably, he has a 5-year-old daughter. That’s partly why he’s touring without a new album to promote, although one is in the works. “I have to work more now,” Hurley laughs. “At least I can work with music. Something I love.”

Because his records come out on small labels and because he draws his own album covers, Hurley has been dubbed an outsider artist by some. But that’s not quite right; he’s pretty ambitious for an old hippie. But neither is he a music business insider. He occupies the gray zone between those ancient Harry Smith field recordings and the acoustic revisionism of youngsters like Banhart and Bon Iver. Hurley, in fact, may be what Bob Dylan always wanted to be when he was pretending he was an itinerant troubadour.

He’s the last folk artist. He is pure.

For more information about Hurley’s upcoming concert go towww.artsatthearmory.org/events/michael-hurley.

Summary: There aren’t very many American originals left. Michael Hurley is one of them. You probably haven’t heard of Hurley, but it’s not like he hasn’t been out there for more than 50 years, playing his odd, eternal strain of folk music and recording when he gets a mind to. Although he currently lives in Astoria, Oregon, he put in a lot of time in the Boston area back in the day, and he’s swinging by the Somerville Armory next Wednesday.


Living or travelling abroad offers a unique set of adventures, as well as challenges. Aside from new foods, languages, mores and etiquette, many people experiencing a new country also have to contend with driving in an unfamiliar environment â and sometimes on another side of the road.

Below you'll find some of the best anecdotes from Quora.com, the question and answer community, of drivers from across the world braving new roads, getting acquainted with reversed shift patterns and committing unfortunate lane changes.

Fake it 'till you make it

Rather than make a slow transition, some travellers would rather just learn their new driving environment on the fly. That's exactly what Quora user Sed Chapman did when he moved from the left-hand-drive US to right-hand-drive Japan. Chapman says he bought an old beater for a can of beer and a plate of yaki-soba, and then tried to drive his friend around town that same day.

"The light changes, and I pull out intending to turn right and my buddy suddenly says, 'Left, left.' I dutifully turn left into the worst of the four possible lane choices." After a near miss with a bus, Chapman's friend asked him to take several more left-hand turns… leading them straight back to his apartment to be dropped off. "We get to his corner and he says shakily, "This is good enough, I'll walk the rest of the way."

Other drivers, upon arrival in a new country, were effectively forced to learn in the moment. Bill Bell had to follow his friend down busy London streets to return a vehicle, just after arriving in the city. "I believe the first thing I did was to pass the passenger-side wheels over someone's lawn. No one seemed to notice and we carried on." Though Bell added that many London motorists "seemed to check the operation of their horns as I passed."

While on his honeymoon in Hawaii, Briton Dale Thomas quickly learned how to drive on the opposite side of the road, in addition to mustering the courage to let the vehicle do all the gear changes for him. "Not only was it was my first time driving on the right hand side, it was also my first time driving an automatic car. It was one of the most stressful times in my life. My brain kept screaming at me, 'Where the hell is the clutch, we're going to die! Arrgghh!!!’"

Retrain your brain Of course, the hardest part of all this is reconditioning the brain to control driving movements in a seemingly counterintuitive way. When driving in Japan, American Patrick Wallace had a difficult time with the stick shift, but his biggest problem was a bit more fundamental. "I was forever trying to get into the passenger side of the car," he writes.

And Briton Glyn Williams's wife found that driving in Spain offered its own set of difficulties. "She came to an intersection and needed to stop completely and pulled on the handbrake. Except the handbrake was on the other side, and she actually pulled on the seat release. Which promptly allowed her seat to hinge backwards so she was lying flat."

Other drivers take their learning curve to a wholly unexpected level. American John Harris says driving on the opposite side of the road was never really a problem for him – until he came back home. "It took me months to adjust back. I was constantly looking at parked cars to remember what side of the street I needed to be on, and having to say left [and] right to myself, while squeezing each hand, and saying to myself 'drive right, drive right'."

Fortunately, all of these Quora users made it through their opposite-side-of-the-road experiences unscathed. Here’s hoping that Harris finally learned how to stay on the right-hand side without mumbling to himself.

What's your other-side-of-the-road story? Share it with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Summary: Quora members relive the perils and pleasures of learning how to get down the road â on the other side.


Four Massachusetts health care organizations saved nearly $150 million in Medicare costs by coordinating care for patients and working to keep them healthy and out of hospitals, according to a federal report.

Those organizations — Beth Israel Deaconess Care Organization, Steward Health Care System, the doctors group Atrius Health, and the Mount Auburn Hospital doctors association — accounted for more than one-third of the nearly $400 million in Medicare savings nationwide under a pilot program that is testing a new system for delivering and paying for services.

A fifth Massachusetts health system participated in the pilot, but Partners HealthCare, instead of saving Medicare money, cost the program $17 million, according to the report.

The pilot program, launched in 2012, aims to lower the costs of Medicare, the government insurance program for the elderly, by providing more effective care. The program allows health systems to create pools of patients and doctors, known as Pioneer Accountable Care Organizations, and pays providers based on set budgets, instead of simply reimbursing them for every medical service and procedure.

Health care providers earn extra money for achieving high-quality outcomes. Those that fail to stay within their budgets and score low on quality measures must pay penalties.

Thirty-two health and hospital systems nationwide participated in the program, though several dropped out. Federal officials on Monday heralded the $384 million savings in 2012 and 2013 as proof the program is a success.

They said they have decided to expand it beyond the 600,000 patients it now covers — a fraction of the millions of Americans covered by Medicare.

The best performer in Massachusetts was the Beth Israel Deaconess Care Organization, a group of doctors and hospitals affiliated with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; it saved $53 million for Medicare.

The for-profit hospital chain Steward Health Care System saved about $48 million.

Atrius Health saved $36 million, and the Mount Auburn doctors saved $10 million.

The analysis, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, found that the savings came largely from a decline in hospital stays.

Emily Brower, executive director of accountable care programs at Atrius, said the Newton-based doctors group spent a lot of time trying to prevent hospital stays for high-risk patients by deploying doctors, nurses, and others to care for them before their conditions worsened.

Partners performed poorly in the new report, reversing a savings in 2012 to a loss in 2013.

Dr. Timothy Ferris, Partners’ senior vice president of population health management, said that he was puzzled by the report because it showed very different results than what federal officials released last year. The earlier report used a different method of analysis.

“We’re committed to this path of signing up for alternative payment systems,” Ferris said. “We’re going to have some wins and we’re going to have some losses, but we’re not going to give up trying.”

Federal officials have said they plan by 2018 to link half of all Medicare payments to alternative payment models that reward the quality of care.

Commercial insurers, including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, also offer quality-based payments.

Dr. Sanjay Shetty, president of the Steward doctors network, said the federal report is “a great reflection of the power of these alternative payment models.”

Shetty said Steward has moved rapidly to care for all of its patients under such models, which require intense coordination of care.

“We’re doing it because it’s critical to delivering value, ” he said.

Summary: Four organizations accounted for more than one-third of the nearly $400 million in Medicare savings nationwide under a pilot program.


Advocates of private cars, taxis, horse-drawn cabs, bicycles, roller skates and running shoes have reached a truce on the roads of Central Park.

After years of battling over who should rule the six miles of roads that loop through the park, they have agreed to stay out of each other's way - as long as they occasionally get their own way.

''It's been a matter of juggling competing interests,'' said Gordon J. Davis, the city's Commissioner of Parks and Recreation. The juggling has led to two modifications on the park drives: the designation of a year-round lane above 72d Street for recreational use and the opening of a ''safety valve'' through the park from 59th Street and the Avenue of Americas to 72d Street and Fifth Avenue to help relieve midday traffic.

Almost everyone involved, from the Roadrunners Club to the Automobile Club, has expressed satisfaction with the compromise. The mood of harmony is a far cry from the rancor of two years ago when recreation groups held a rally demanding a traffic-free Central Park.

Despite the modifications, the rules of the road are essentially the same: During the morning and evening rush hours, cars are allowed throughout the drives. On weekends all year round and during the nonrush hours for the six warmer months of the year - May through October - cars are kept out. When the roads are automobile-free, runners keep to the left, cyclists to the right and everyone else stays in the middle - or off the roads altogether.

During all hours when the park drives are closed to automobiles, vehicles with handicapped permits are permitted in the park. In addition to the six miles of roads inside the park, its 840 acres include countless miles of walkways, a 1.7-mile bicycle path south of 72d Street and automobile transverses at 65th, 81st, 86th and 97th Streets. The transverse roads, which are largely below grade, are always open to cars.

Unlike the relatively straight east-west transverse roads, the rambling park drives, which go north-south, were intended to have a more casual, country character. The drives maintained that character from the late 1800's until the automobile gained popularity and the right-of-way in the early 1900's.

Banning autos from the park drives on a regular basis dates back to the mayoral administration of John V. Lindsay, who was intent in ''giving the park back to the people.'' In 1966, the park was closed on summer weekends for the first time. The following year, the weekend closings went into effect year round and weekday closings were tried.

In those Lindsay days of park ''happenings,'' the demand for the roads came primarily from bicyle riders. In the years that followed, the joggers, skate-board riders and roller skaters surpassed the cylists in number.

''New York is an ever-changing scene,'' Commissioner Davis said. ''Every year we look at the closing data again.'' According to a parks department study, as many as 1,500 cars heading south on the park drive pass the Tavern on Green, at 67th Street, during the morning rush hour. It is more difficult to assess how many pedestrians use the roads, since this number would include the jogger training for the marathon, the business executive walking to work and the kindergarten class on its way to a nature walk.

During the midday period when the park is closed for the most part to traffic, Mr. Davis said, for every one passenger that might have traveled through in an automobile, there are two or three recreational users.

The exclusive recreational lane above 72d Street won the praise of Fred Lebow, the president of the New York Roadrunners Club. ''We were afraid traffic would spill over, but it really does stay off,'' he said. ''It gives us a fine, uninterrupted running lane around the park.'' Auto Club Sees Improvement

The creation of the lane a year ago, he said, in many ways lessened the impact of the city's decision to experiment with the 59th to 72d Street opening from 10 A.M. to 3 P.M. ''The running lane is our consolation,'' he said.

Peter Hahn, a spokesman for the Automobile Club of New York, said that opening the northbound drive at 59th Street last month to midday traffic has meant ''significant improvement in average vehicle speeds'' on the Avenue of the Americas, compared to last year, when the park drive was closed.

The increase was 51 percent, raising average midday speed to 14.5 miles per hour from last year's 9.6. At the same time, he said, the club had no objections to the closing of the roads on weekends or to the exclusive recreational lane.

The changes also won approval from the Independent Taxi Owners Council. Howard Fogel, the group's president, said: ''This is a big metropolitan city. Everybody has got to give a little and take a litte.'' The New York Times/June 11, 1980 Weekdays, May-October: Park drives are closed to traffic from 10 A.M. until 3 P.M. and from 7 P.M. until 10 P.M. The ''safety valve'' (A), open from 10 A.M. until 3 P.M., takes uptown traffic from the Avenue of the Americas and 59th Street to Fifth Avenue and 72d Street. One ''recreation lane'' is always closed to cars on park drives north of 72d Street (B). Weekdays, November-April: Drives are open all day. Weekends, year-round: Drives are closed from 7 P.M. Friday until 6 A.M. Monday. Transverses: Below-grade roads crossing the park at 65th, 81st, 86th and 97th Streets are always open. Note Motor-vehicle traffic is allowed at all times on drives that transverse park at 65th, 81st, 86th and 97th Streets.

Illustrations: photo of cyclists, strollers, and horse carriages sharing the West


WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court engaged last week in a time-honored and mysterious exercise: reading the mind of Congress. In one of the most important sex discrimination cases of the term, a 5-to-4 majority decided that the 88th Congress, which enacted the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and drew only a tenuous connection between them, intended the second law to be broader than the first. That ruling will allow women to bring discrimination suits on the basis of low pay even if they cannot cite male coworkers who are getting more money for performing the same jobs.

The Court reached its result by the process of statutory construction, deciding what Congress meant to accomplish and then interpreting the law to best achieve that purpose. As in most decisions construing Congressional acts, the majority opinion, by Associate Justice William J. Brennan Jr., offered copious footnotes to discussions on the floor of Congress, memorandums in the Congressional Record, and interpretations by administrative agencies. The losers, this time in a 24-page dissent by Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, produced footnotes to much of the same material and accused the majority of ignoring ''traditional canons of statutory construction and relevant legislative history.'' The case, County of Washington v. Gunther, in which jail matrons sued the county for paying them less than the male sheriffs who did similar work at the same jail, is thus a fitting example of how the Court approaches its task.

Often that task is difficult because the Congressional purpose is obscure; sometimes because Congress fails to reconcile a law with subsequent legislation or changing circumstances. Whether the written record is sparse or abundant, the majority is inevitably selective and the dissent inevitably finds uncited evidence with which to challenge majority conclusions. Thus, decisions interpreting statutes are frequently unpersuasive. Worse, some legal scholars contend, the rulings find the Court using the ''canons of construction'' to put an intellectually respectable gloss on decisions that are basically arbitrary choices among competing policies.

The canons of construction to which Justice Rehnquist referred last week are essentially common-sense guidelines whose frequent citation in Latin lends them an air of scientific principle. In pari materia, for example, means that when a court interprets one law in light of another, it should not regard a generally worded statute as nullifying one that specifically addresses a particular issue.

Several such maxims are contradictory, leaving judges free to choose one that best suits their purpose. In 1869, for example, the Supreme Court declared that ''all laws should receive a sensible construction.'' If a literal reading of the statute would lead to an ''absurd consequence,'' the Court said, ''the reason of the law ... should prevail over its letter.'' But the letter of the law can find refuge in the ''clear statement'' rule, which maintains that if Congress wanted to set off in a new direction, it should have said so explicitly. The Dog That Didn't Bark

In this matter, the Justices have apparently found counsel in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mystery ''The Silver Blaze.'' Writing for the Court last year in a case involving challenges to Federal environmental regulations, Associate Justice Potter Stewart said that in ascertaining a statute's meaning, ''the Court cannot, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, pursue the theory of the dog that did not bark.'' He meant that the Court should not draw conclusions from what Congress fails to say. Two weeks later, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens drew the opposite lesson. In a concurring opinion on a criminal matter, he observed that ''a dog's failure to bark may be probative, whether or not he has been trained as a watchdog.''

Last week's decision typified the Court's dilemma in deciphering Congressional intent. The dispute between Justice Brennan and Justice Rehnquist focused on the Bennett Amendment in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that ''it shall not be an unlawful employment practice'' for an employer to pay different wages on the basis of sex ''if such differentiation is authorized'' by the Equal Pay Act. The act specifies four defenses that excuse wage differentials based on seniority, merit or other sex-neutral criteria. Implicitly, however, it authorizes any sex discrimination that does not violate the standard of equal pay for equal work. The amendment's sponsor, then Senator Wallace Bennett of Utah, gave as its purpose ''to provide that in the event of conflicts, the provisions of the Equal Pay Act shall not be nullified.''

To Justice Brennan, that explanation meant that the Civil Rights Act incorporated the four defenses of the Equal Pay Act. It did not mean that the Civil Rights Act was governed by the ''equal pay for equal work'' standard. Such a narrow reading, Justice Brennan said, would conflict with the ''broad approach'' to equal employment opportunity that Congress adopted in the Civil Rights Act as a whole.

To Justice Rehnquist, the provision of the Equal Pay Act that concerned Senator Bennett was the ''equal pay for equal work'' standard itself. If the Civil Rights Act meant something broader, he said, it would be an implicit repeal of the Equal Pay Act. And the implied repeal of a specific statute by a more general one would violate the in pari materia doctrine. If Congress had meant to repeal a year-old statute, he said, it would have said so. The votes this time were Justice Brennan's. Next time, the wheel of fortune that is statutory construction might stop at a different number.

Summary: MIND By LINDA GREENHOUSE   WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court engaged last week in a time-honored and mysterious exercise: reading the mind of Congress. In one of the most important sex discrimination cases of the term, a 5-to-4 majority decided that the 88th Congress, which enacted the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and drew only a tenuous connection between them, intended the second law to be broader than the first. That ruling will allow women to bring discrimination suits on the basis of low pay even if they cannot cite male coworkers who are getting more money for performing the same jobs.


A Canadian company's move to raise newsprint prices is expected to be followed by other major producers, but analysts say that future price increases will be more difficult to get because of additional new capacity and flat demand from the publishing industry.

Consolidated-Bathurst Ltd. recently informed United States customers of a 6 percent rise, effective July 1. That would bring Bathurst's price to $454 a ton, up from the industrywide $426 that took hold late last year.

Several analysts, including John Morton, vice president of John Muir & Company, predicted that the latest price increase would be followed by other producers, although no other company has apparently matched Bathurst's new level.

The only surprise about the increase, Mr. Morton said at a meeting of the American Paper Institute in New York, was the timing. He said it was anticipated the industry would wait until September before trying to push through a 6 percent rise.

Since the fall of 1979 the price of newsprint has risen by about 13.6 percent, not including the latest Bathurst increase. Bathurst also raised the prices for its Canadian customers. They will pay $500 (Canadian) a metric ton. It may be more difficult, however, for Canadian producers to put through further price increases as capacity in the United States expands. By 1983, according to the American Paper Institute, American capacity is expected to increase by 930,000 tons, and that would be on top of 900,000 tons of new capacity added last year. By 1983, United States annual capacity is expected to total about 5.68 million tons. 'Overcapacity' Predicted

Last fall, Ross Haye-Roe, vice president-forest products for Pemberton Securities Ltd. of Vancouver, British Columbia, concluded in a survey of capacity growth that the upcoming increases in capacity would outrun the growth in demand. ''There will be overcapacity,'' he predicted, which will force the producers to be more moderate in their pricing.

For a time, Mr. Haye-Roe said, the United States companies will have a competitive advantage with newer capacity coming in faster than that of the Candadian producers, many of whom have older mills.

The surge in expansion by United States producers was bolstered by the entry into the field by major concerns such as Dow Jones & Company and the Bato Company, which opened a mill in West Virginia last year.

Compared with 1968, when Canadian producers supplied 68 percent of newsprint consumed in the United States, the 1980 level dropped to 63 percent.

The Canadians are also trying to sharply increase capacity, but the big surge will not come until 1982 and 1983. Abitibi-Price Inc., the world's largest newsprint producer, is scheduled to bring on line a 150,000-metric-ton newsprint machine on May 1, and MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. is scheduled to start up a 160,000-metric-ton machine at about the same time. Consumption Levels Off

Meanwhile, consumption of newsprint in the United States this year is expected to be at about the same level as last year's 11.1 million tons, which was down 1 percent from 1979.

Chuck Carpenter, newsprint manager for the Weyerhaeuser Company, emerging from a newsprint meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, said: ''If you look at the numbers, there's no way that U.S. consumption will absorb the projected capacity growth. There's going to be plenty of newsprint for the next few years.''

He predicted that fears of shortages and tight supplies, which were widespread the last few years, will soon disappear. Inventory of newsprint, according to a survey by the American Paper Institute in January, stood at a 43-day supply, compared with a 34-day supply in January 1980, when publishers worried whether it would meet their needs.

Weyerhaeuser entered the newsprint business in 1979 in a joint venture with the Oji Paper Company, a Japanese producer. The 200,000-ton mill that was opened, Mr. Carpenter said, was now being expanded to double its capacity.

John B. Fery, the chairman and chief executive officer of the Boise Cascade Corporation, said the added capacity the United States had increasingly prompted the industry to look at world markets rather than just concentrating on filling domestic needs as in the past. American Exports Up

Last year, for example, the American paper industry increased its exports of newsprint sharply to 178,000 tons from 71,000 tons in 1979.

The closing of old mills by European producers has helped absorb some of the increased North American output. The Reed Paper and Board Company U.K. Ltd. recently announced that it was closing a major paper mill at Gravesend in southern England. British newsprint capacity has shrunk severely from about 800,000 metric tons in the 1960's to about 105,000 metric tons recently. This has particularly helped Canadian producers, who have had the advantage of a weak Canadian dollar in relation to other major currencies.

Illustrations: Photo of a reel room Graph of newsprint prices


''That's called bad luck,'' a voice yells from the sand trap. ''The ball wasn't heading for the tree - the tree just reached out and grabbed it.'' A click, a splash of sand, and a small white ball sails from the direction of the voice and rolls to within a foot of the pin. ''Once that ball leaves the club, you have no control over it,'' the voice mutters. Now a balding pate peers over the brow of the trap like a newly hatched bird, followed by a body, short and stocky, in a red Lacoste shirt turned maroon with sweat. A pair of clear blue eyes surveys the green: a growl slips into a smile. But Mickey Rooney never stops at a smile - he grins, he beams, he exults. ''Great shot,'' calls a friend, ''How d'ya do it?'' Rooney leans on his putter like a swashbuckler on his sword. ''How did I do it?'' he wonders. ''When you've been in the sand as often as I have, you learn how to do it!''

Throughout his 61 years, 60 of which have been spent in show business, Mickey Rooney's facility for getting out of tight spots has been exceeded only by his facility for getting into them. His career is a string of comebacks that would make any Hollywood fight film seem monotonous. He's gone from number one box-office star in the world at 18 to bit parts in beach movies at 48. Forty years after playing Puck in the celebrated Max Reinhardt film of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream,'' Mr. Rooney was playing Bottom, the weaver-turneddonkey at a suburban New Jersey playhouse. Mickey Rooney's life offcamera has been no less histrionic. In a private life so wellchronicled it has become part of the public domain, he has survived eight wives, and flirtations or obsessions with gambling, alcohol, drugs and bankruptcy. In fact, the Mickey Rooney story is so improbable that it would make a great movie. It even has a happy ending - for now. In what may be his biggest comeback, Mr. Rooney has been starring on Broadway for almost two years in ''Sugar Babies'' (earning a 1980 Tony nomination), and his film career is in ascendance, thanks to his 1980 Oscar nominee performance in ''The Black Stallion.'' He has found similar stability off-screen: a bornagain Christian who no longer smokes or drinks, he recently celebrated his third wedding anniversary.

But if anyone ever decides to make a movie of Mickey Rooney's life, they'd better make certain he's available. For he is so versatile - and so complex - he may be the only actor capable of playing, and understanding, the title role.

''So which Mickey Rooney would you like to hear about - the one who's serious? The one who's sports-minded? The one with no patience? The one who's ecclesiastic? The one who's a man? The one who's a child? Well, they're all here.'' Mickey Rooney pats his stomach. ''I'm a good writer, too. I just wrote the first paragraph of your story: ''He leaps from the chair where he spent the morning, an ear to the phone, an eye on the television. His temporary home in a leafy New Jersey suburb is pleasantly messy. A putter leans on a brass spitoon under a van Gogh reproduction. Golf Digest competes with three Bibles for tablespace. On television, evangelist Pat Robinson, 'one of the men who points the way to my hysterical calm,' preaches above a Racing Form he cannot see.''

''Hysterical calm'' is putting it mildly. ''Mickey is the most peripatetic, hyperadrenalized creatures I've ever known,'' says a close friend and director Dick Quine. ''He's the only person I know who can get up, compose six songs, write a full-length play, dope out every racetrack in the country, start a couple of businesses, eat five enchiladas - and then start working.''

Mr. Rooney is always in a hurry -''like a machine gun,'' says ''Sugar Babies'' producer Harry Rigby. A seven handicapper who plays four times a week, Mr. Rooney has been known to fit in 36 holes before a matinee, driving a golf cart as if it were a chariot, rarely pausing to avoid the hummocks and holes he dismisses as ''the bumps of life.'' He has no time for what he disgustedly refers to as ''vascillating'' or ''aquiescing.'' Mr. Quine, Rooney's classmate at the old M-G-M studio school, recalls that the only way he could ever beat Mr. Rooney in tennis was to slow down the play. ''He'd get so annoyed, he'd drive the balls over the fence.''

In all things, Mr. Rooney is on the attack. He's adamant about starting ''Sugar Babies'' on time, yet it's not uncommon to see him at a quarter to eight scurrying up and downstairs in his jockey shorts to place bets with the doorman - or eating his fifth bowl of chili and phoning the West Coast as the overture begins. But suddenly, in one frenetic yet far from frantic motion, he tugs on his baggy-pants costume (he wears no makeup and the polo shirts are a Rooney staple because he can get in and out of them quickly), skips downstairs, waves to the stage crew, greets the cast while gabbing about a horse he's just bought, pulls back the curtain to peek at the house, then, as the overture ends, steps into position onstage in time for the spotlight - and the audience - to find him.

Summary: --------------------------------------------------------------------  By GEORGE COLT   ''That's called bad luck,'' a voice yells from the sand trap. ''The ball wasn't heading for the tree - the tree just reached out and grabbed it.'' A click, a splash of sand, and a small white ball sails from the direction of the voice and rolls to within a foot of the pin. ''Once that ball leaves the club, you have no control over it,'' the voice mutters. Now a balding pate peers over the brow of the trap like a newly hatched bird, followed by a body, short and stocky, in a red Lacoste shirt turned maroon with sweat. A pair of clear blue eyes surveys the green: a growl slips into a smile. But Mickey Rooney never stops at a smile - he grins, he beams, he exults.  ''Great shot,'' calls a friend, ''How d'ya do it?'' Rooney leans on his putter like a swashbuckler on his sword. ''How did I do it?'' he wonders. ''When you've been in the sand as often as I have, you learn how to do it!''