Aloe Blacc has a rich, soulful voice and a knack for making hits.

The 35-year-old Californian’s 2010 single I Need a Dollar was not only a massive seller, but also was featured as the theme for the HBO series How to Make it in America. His soaring vocal on Swedish DJ Avicii’s smash Wake Me Up was as ubiquitous last summer as sunshine.

Since then, apart from releasing new album Lift Your Spirit and advising Adam Levine’s team on the hit US television series The Voice, Blacc has worked as a brand collaborator with the Lincoln Motor Company, creating original videos and lending the Ford subsidiary some of his suave, urbane cool. During a visit to New York, Blacc sat to discuss his musical inspirations, his uncannily reserved vehicular tastes and his tips for getting out of traffic tickets.

Brett Berk: You’ve mentioned Sly and the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix among the greatest influences on your work. Who else is in heavy rotation on your headphones?

Aloe Blacc: There's an artist by the name of Eugene McDaniels who put out two fantastic albums in the early ‘70s, and I listen to those pretty religiously, because the lyrics are very heavy. Very political – I think to the point where the Nixon administration banned his album.

There's another fantastic soul gospel artist from that same era, early ‘70s, named DJ Rogers, who released, in my opinion, his seminal work, It's Good to Be Alive. And that was a very happy, uplifting, joyful album. That inspired what I'm doing with Lift Your Spirit, an album that really speaks to the positivity in life, despite the challenges and obstacles.

You grew up in southern California. When did you learn to drive?

When I turned 16, I inherited the family minivan. And I drove that to school, and trips up to LA with friends to go to clubs. My dad enjoyed having cars, and I can count about 13 different vehicles we had through my childhood. To this day, he still owns four different vehicles: a minivan, an SUV, an RV and an ‘80s sports car.

Did you buy something special when you signed your first contract?

I've always been conscious of having something that felt right for me, but also, like my dad, finding the right price. So when I signed to an indie label back in 2005, I was able to find myself a nice, used Infiniti coupe. But I parked it in the wrong neighborhood one night, and when I returned it was gone. And when the police found it, it was pretty much stripped and useless at that point.

The wheels on those cars are a popular target, for some reason.

That's actually what they took! After that, I ended up getting a Volvo 850. A sedan. And I still own that. I kept it. And my wife kept saying, “Well, we signed a major recording deal, we have money to spend. Why don't you get a new car that's comfortable?” That's really what it's about for us, comfort, and quality, and knowing that you're going to arrive safely. So I said “Well, why don't I get you a car?” And we picked the Ford Fusion Hybrid. And we're really happy with that.

Then, working with Interscope, I had the opportunity to partner with Lincoln, and I thought, beautiful. I'm familiar with the Ford family, I like the vehicles, let's do something that's crafted correctly for my art and my presentation. The character I've presented is largely thanks to my dad, who always said to look nice, to always dress well. So you'll find most of my photos in a suit, or a blazer and tie. You can't really knock something that's classy.

What form has your Lincoln relationship taken so far?

We put together this beautiful music video for the song Love Is the Answer – for me, the most important message on my album. We had this awesome location in Los Angeles, where we shot a video that allows the viewer to choose one of four different points of view, four different story lines, as I sing and dance through this building from the rooftop down to the bottom floor, and get inside my Lincoln [MKZ sedan] and drive away.

Is it safe to assume you are driving a Lincoln these days?

I'll be in the MKC when I finish this tour with Bruno Mars.

What’s the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you in a car?

I was driving through Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, and I mistakenly ran a red light. It was an honest mistake. But a cop pulled me over, and he came up to the window and he said, “Did you know you ran a red light?” And I said, “Yeah. I was afraid that the car behind me was going to hit me.” Which… could have been true. And he said, “OK, well, you know, just be careful next time.” And he let me go.

As I'm on my way home, I got on the 101 freeway. I have some friends who are graffiti artists. And they're really good graffiti artists – they've actually graduated from street graffiti to MoMA and MoCA and all these big museums. And they’d painted a billboard for me, of my likeness, to promote my album, and you could only see it from the 101. So, I decided that I was going to stop and take a photo of this billboard. I pulled over to the side of the freeway, cars were buzzing by. And as I was opening my door, a cop pulled up behind me. And I was thinking, “Oh, no. For sure I'm going to get a ticket this time.” There’s no way you can be pulled over twice within the same 10-minute span.

So I got out of the car, and the cop walked up. And it's the same exact police officer. And he's like, “What are you doing now?” And I looked at him like, there's no way I can really talk myself out of this one. So I said, “You know what, I just wanted to take a picture of that billboard over there.” And I pointed at it, and he looked at the billboard, and he looked back at me, and he said, “Hurry up and take your picture and get off the freeway!” And so, since then, I've had tremendous respect for LA police officers.

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Summary: The R ânâ B hit-maker talks music, cars and tips for getting out of traffic tickets.


Francesca Grillo and Sharrine Scholtz do a sweet line in awkward evasiveness. Coy references to their "previous employers" abound. And when I first ask about one of those ex-bosses – a certain Charles Saatchi – Grillo demurs: "I'd rather not talk about him, if you don't mind."

We meet at an "art ball" in a private members' club above a Fulham pub, but all three of us are keen to avoid a cha-cha-cha tutorial, so we retire downstairs to waltz around two elephants in the room instead.

Grillo, along with her older sister Elisabetta, was unceremoniously sacked as Nigella Lawson's personal assistant after being accused of £685,000 of credit-card fraud. Both Italians were found not guilty last year following a sensational trial. Scholtz, meanwhile, who appeared as a defence witness for the Grillos, testified that she was "forced out" of Saatchi's office, where she had worked for up to 19 hours a day as an accounts assistant, after accusations (strongly denied) of stealing from petty cash and taking unauthorised taxis. She described her decision to give evidence as "career suicide".

You might think the pair would be seeking new lives in a world far away from Saatchi's – as teachers, perhaps, or maybe civil servants. Instead they've chosen to launch their own art company.

"I've always been interested in art," Grillo, 35, insists. "It's nothing to do with my previous employer. It's just a coincidence." They came up with the idea in 2011, having made friends in Saatchi and Lawson's Belgravia mansion – Grillo based in the kitchen, Scholtz in the art collector's basement office, where she worked for five years until 2009.

The pair's new venture ("like an abstract Factory – a bit like what Warhol did") will see them put on pop-up exhibitions, art sales and "collaborations with other creative forces, including music dance and theatre" across London when they launch later this year.

They have struggled to woo artists, who are terrified of crossing Saatchi. But Scholtz says there are "more people who are supportive than those who are running scared". And they have achieved a coup in recruiting Tessa Farmer, whose insect-carcass creations – as their website subtly points out – are in the Saatchi Gallery's collection.

They won't be representing artists, merely collaborating, but other names already signed up include Canadian Natasha Bailey, who uses performance to explore her symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder "in a humorous and light-hearted way"; sculptor, painter, print-maker and photographer Wayne Chisnall; Pierluigi Catilli, who has created an immersive theatre piece for their first exhibition; and taxidermist Adele Morse.

The outfit's name, Laissez Faire Art, is "all about the idea of not being confined or dictated to", says Scholtz. "Artists having the freedom to be themselves."They describe themselves on Twitter as "trouble-makers with a splash of colour".

Grillo's barrister said in court that she and her sister had been "lambs in the centre of two more devouring animals". After the mauling they got in the tabloids, does she want to set the record straight?

Well, actually, no. "To be honest," Grillo says, "once the rumours are out there, they don't change their minds. People will have to meet me. And I can't go out and meet every single human that reads the Daily Mail or any of the gossip columns. Some people will see I'm sincere and that I was innocent, – I am innocent – and some people will maybe think I'm an opportunist social climber. But at least I provoke feelings! People either love me or hate me – I'm like Marmite."

Elisabetta Grillo collapsed several times during the trial and suffered from constant panic attacks. Her sister reveals she is still having treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, but is now taking after Lawson in pursuing cookery (she is "a natural", apparently, and never needs to rely on a recipe).

"Whereas you need Nigella's cookbooks?" I ask, cheekily.

There is a dramatic pause, before she responds with a straight face. "Er, I kind of like Jamie Oliver. I like his 15-minute recipes – they're so easy to follow and not too expensive." Grillo says she has to watch the pennies because she has no job besides establishing the yet-to-launch art company. So how is she surviving financially? "It's very challenging, but I manage," she says. "You can live on very little, to be honest."

Really? In London? "From Monday to Friday, I don't do lunches," she claims. What about rent? "Oh, I share with my sister, so it's fine." She has recently "upgraded to a bed" after two years on the sofa. "When I had to leave – you know, when all this started – my sister only had that to give to me."

It's a far cry from her ex-bosses' luxurious lifestyle. But Grillo (described by Lawson as "the cleaner who never had to clean") is "excited about normality. I remember the first time I started taking the tube – I got lost. I like that, I never used to meet normal people. Lots of people want an exciting and an exclusive life – but the truth is you are so much better off being normal.

"The only challenge is if you go for a job interview: obviously Google doesn't forgive. There's no way to escape that."

Grillo has a keen sense of humour. When she mentions that, like her sister, she has been suffering from PTSD, I wonder if she's joking. But she isn't. She says the trauma has manifested itself in an aversion to ice cream, which triggers memories of the painful period when she was evicted from Team Cupcake. "Nigella was working on her book and had just made a salted caramel dressing for her ice cream. I think about that. Ice cream? No, thank you."

Is it true that Saatchi still has a pending civil case against Grillo and her sister?

"I can't talk about it, unfortunately," she says, before adding: "In a few months' time, I'll be able to talk more …"

Their launch party "hopefully won't be the last you hear from us," promises the art world's newest fixture. "In a positive way. Not involving lawyers."

Summary: Francesca Grillo kept 'supercollector' Charles Saatchi's home running smoothly – until her £685,000 fraud trial. Now, proved innocent, she's getting into the art business herself. She talks to Etan Smallman


Imagine a sequence of dream visions drawn by David Hockney, coloured by Howard Hodgkin and choreographed by Marc Chagall. That gives only the mildest taste of the rich masala of flavours flung into the pot by India's leading modern painter, Bhupen Khakhar.

There are examples of Khakhar's work in all of the world's major modern art museums, yet the artist, now in his late 60s, has never had a big solo exhibition in this country. The Lowry presents four decades of painting that plot a course from primitivism to Pop, mistily perceived through a haze of eroticism.

The bold, blocky organisations of Khakhar's early compositions resemble eastern homages to Henri Rousseau, while his industrial crowd scenes look like oriental Lowrys with the colour control turned up. Like a true faux-naive painter, Khakhar kept his day job. Even after gaining international recognition, he continued to work as a chartered accountant.

The tensions emanating from this split personality are closer to the surface of the paintings from the 1980s, when Khakhar began to expose himself - literally. In the pivotal masterpiece You Can't Please All, the artist depicts himself naked, bending over a balcony to survey episodes from a Hindu folk tale about two men selling their donkey. The animal, you cannot help but notice, has an enormous erection. This coded declaration of homosexuality unleashed a whole new priapic energy in Khakhar's work.

Khakhar came out in style - his post-1980s output is full of rejuvenated old men enjoying congress with mightily aroused angels or multiple-limbed Hindu gods. One of these features a squatting, guru-like figure with five penises. Some people have condemned this as obscene. I'd call him fortunate.

After all this fragrantly spiced eroticism, the final room, dark and violent, comes as a bit of a shock. Perhaps in response to treatment for cancer, Khakhar becomes hyper-aware of his own mortality. In one very black diptych, a figure shoots his companion at point-blank range: proof, if it were needed, that even chartered accountants can turn ugly.

Until January 5. Details: 0161-876 2000.

Summary: The Lowry, Salford


Name: Delta Air Lines Ranking: 81 Headquarters: Atlanta Employees: 80,000 Revenue: $37.7 billion (2013)

It’s a bitterly cold week in January, and a deep freeze has blanketed the U.S. Ferocious winds and subzero temperatures have grounded flights from coast to coast—it’s far too dangerous to fly, airlines reason—leaving thousands of flights canceled. At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the scene is understandably chaotic. Hundreds of confused customers clamor to speak with a mere handful of agents. You could call customer service instead. But a phone tree? Surely the process for booking a new flight must be better than this.

Knowing that travelers wouldn’t stand for an endless series of agents and repeated information—“I said, ‘Flight three-oh-six,’ for Pete’s sake”—Delta implemented speech-recognition technology so that when you place that call, the voice on the other end already knows who you are and where you were supposed to go.

Not that the female voice you hear is from a person on the other end. At the start of the call—and before you speak with a living, breathing agent—the software, made by Massachusetts-based Nuance Communications, pulls data from your SkyMiles profile so that before you say a word it can greet you by name and know that your flight has been canceled (and if you’re eligible for a seat upgrade on your way out of your sudden predicament). No SkyMiles account? The software will share the details you give it with every human agent along the way so you don’t have to repeat it. “We are able to make it a very personalized approach and get them directly where they need to go,” says George Edwards, a manager of reservations technology at Delta.

The system isn’t perfect: Only 30% of callers receive a fully personalized experience because most lack SkyMiles accounts. But Delta says the technology is helping it field the 40 million calls it receives each year faster and more accurately, freeing up agents to tackle more complex inquiries (and make more ticket sales). Edwards demurred when asked about how much the speech-recognition software has saved, saying only that Delta expects a “return in the first 12 months.” Good thing—the service celebrates its first anniversary next month.

Delta plans to expand its use of speech recognition to other parts of its business. Next year, for example, its flight attendants will begin using it to receive briefings for upcoming flights. But it’s not a silver bullet. It takes people time to become familiar with a voice-response system, Nuance says, and there is one group who’s always likely to be wary of voice-based interaction: millennials, who would rather receive text messages and push notifications instead. A long line because of the polar vortex? Unfortunate. Talking to someone on the phone? Why, that would be unbearable.

Like this story? Read “For the Airline Industry, Big Data Is Cleared for Takeoff”

This story is from the October 6, 2014 issue of Fortune.

Summary: With speech recognition, Delta Airlines can field customer service requests faster.


Callum Innes: From Memory Modern Art Oxford, until 15 April

Callum Innes was born in Scotland, where he still lives and works, and there are those, I gather, who look at his vast canvases and see the heather blazing. Not me. I look at his work and think, somewhat predictably, of the great American abstract painters: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Brice Marden. This has something to do with scale and style, the way that his pictures, like theirs, are at their best in big, white, loft-like rooms.

But it is mostly to do with the way they make me feel. Sit in front of one of Innes's Exposed Paintings and you feel meditative to the point of not quite being able to struggle to your feet. It occurs to you that you might easily stay put all day, thinking your own dark thoughts and, possibly, taking the odd nap. His work, like that of Rothko and Newman, seems almost to emit a bat-like hum, so subtle is it in its construction, so strangely intense in its effect. It is not exciting, then, so much as immobilising. But is this a good thing or bad? Is Innes's work a balm for the urban soul or the painterly equivalent of Mogadon? I only wish I could be certain.

My hunch is that a really huge gathering of his work would confirm the former view. But this show, in the upstairs galleries at Modern Art Oxford, is on a more boutique scale, making judgment just that little bit trickier. Time is on your side - you can walk the entire space in less than 15 minutes - but it's also difficult to know how representative a sample this collection is (which is why it is worth buying the beautiful book that accompanies the exhibition; it includes plates of many more pictures than you can see in the gallery and the effect is impressive).

Still, there is plenty to admire. The quality of the light in the gallery is fantastic and the space, midweek, never gets too crowded. Though there are notices everywhere warning you how fragile Innes's work is, telling you that it must not be touched, you can get pleasingly intimate with the paintings, scrutinising his technique. It involves the removal as well as the application of paint. And this is when it really starts to comes alive, when you realise how complex it is.

Innes, born in 1962, studied drawing and painting at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen, and then at Edinburgh College of Art. Then, he was immersed largely in figurative work. Since the late Eighties, however, his creative dynamic has been, as writer Richard Cork has put it, 'bound up with the need for subtraction'. What this means is that he pits paint against turpentine or shellac. But one does not cancel the other out entirely; rather, it leaves behind the memory of what was there before, hence the show's title. The work captures the transience of creativity even as it renders it permanent.

Innes has spoken of a crucial moment during the making of his work when the surface of the canvas starts to move and flow. Now, he might mean this literally: turps, after all, works on paint in a physical, chemical way, smudging it like dirt on a window. But it also, surely, refers to something more conceptual: the point at which the painting's emotional life begins. Perhaps this sounds pretentious. It is, a little. But once you understand what he's up to, the paintings have possibilities. They stop seeming so crowd-pleasingly decorative. His big blocks of colour, attacked by the turps, start to look like shadows, or sheets of rain, or mascara-heavy tears.

From Memory covers the last 15 years of Innes's career, in other words, from the time just before he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1993. The show kicks off with From Memory 1989, a sketchbook drawing of a leaf whose image has been sunk on to corrugated brown cardboard. This, you gather, was a breakthrough picture for Innes, but it now seems atypical; it's just a little prissy. There then follows a middle section, in which you can see the smaller shellac paintings - they remind me of old-fashioned flypaper, black paint stuck to them in the manner of marooned insects - and some vast black canvases with streaks of colour on them, like light appearing through a crack in a door.

But the exhibition's climax is to be found in the final gallery: a series of canvases entitled Exposed Painting, Dioxazine Violet. This is mature work; it has a real sense of authority and not only because Innes has used a paint colour that brings papal robes irresistibly to mind. I love the way these works talk to each other, each of them subtly different from the last. They form an echo chamber of colour and mood. One half of the painting shouts to another, but all that comes back - after Innes has set about it with his oily chemical - is a kind of ghostly cry. Stare at them for long enough and their murkiest corners start to resemble a shroud imprinted with the memory of what lay on it. Or perhaps this is just an over-the-top way of saying that their image stays with you long after you have left them.

· Laura Cumming is away

Summary: Art: Rachel Cooke on Callum Innes


The space in which we eat can have a powerful effect on what is on our plate. Of course, a meal in uncomfortable surroundings is never going to be entirely fulfilling, but it goes much further than that. The formality or informality of the setting, the colour of the walls, the way our seat faces, even the way the light falls on our plate will all have an effect on our meal. At home we have a choice whether we eat in cosy clutter or spartan simplicity or somewhere between the two. We can make our own mind up whether to close the blinds or lower the lights. But in public spaces, be they restaurants or airports, art galleries or simply corner caffs, it is up to someone else to make those decisions for us. Anyone who designs a public eating space has to consider what is going to please the majority of users. This could, and often does, result in the bland and boring, yet more and more public spaces are becoming a pleasure to eat in. For this we have to thank the vision of the architects and those who back their flights of fancy.

I have always wondered how those who are paid to consider the aesthetics of our public eating spaces eat and cook in their own homes. What are their kitchens like and how does their work relate to the home space? Once Richard Rogers had designed the River Café with his trademarks of space and light, and Frank Gehry had woven his sensuous minimalism on New York's Condé Nast staff canteen, it opened up a world of opportunity for architects to get involved in eating spaces. We asked a host of famous architects where they felt good food and aesthetics meet. Daniel Libeskind gives us a glimpse of his Manhattan kitchen, Thomas Heatherwick shows off his outstanding new beachfront café in Littlehampton and David Chipperfield welcomes us into his Galician villa.Nigel Slater

Lord Rogers of Riverside has previously worked alongside Norman Foster and Renzo Piano. In the last two years he has received the Pritzker and Stirling prizes. His previous projects include the Millennium Dome, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the National Assembly for Wales and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He is married to the Michelin-starred Ruth Rogers of the River Café.

Being the son of an Italian mother is a problem because Italian mothers don't allow their males to cook. Especially in my generation. I have five boys who cook, and I'm the only one that doesn't, I just eat. I'm the one let-down of the family.

I was born in Florence and, culturally, I am Italian. It's very much in my blood. I try to spend as much time in Italy as I can - about seven weeks in total each year. My mother was a really good cook, an Italian Triestine. Their kitchen in England was probably the first I ever designed. Young architects have to start somewhere and it's usually the kitchens that need modernising.

At our house, close to Pienza, there's an amazing wood oven and outdoor grill. We have competitions for pizza-making with any friends or family who happen to be staying. Just the decoration part, as long as Ruthie supplies the ingredients. All the sons, wives and grandchildren come and visit. There's often 20 for lunch.

I always work on holiday, early in the morning. I have various memories of looking out of my parents' house when I was about four or five and seeing a chair and a table put out for the local accountant. I thought, that's the idea, doing your business in a cafe, first thing in the day. I haven't quite got there but I'm pretty close to it. I probably eat, do business, or just come and taste things in the River Café every day. It's an extension of the community that I'm part of. The space outside even more so. I've been very fortunate. It was nothing to start off with. When the opportunity came up, the partnership bought the warehouses and we thought what a good idea to have a little restaurant. There were tremendous planning restrictions so it started as a canteen with sandwiches and came up from that. Ruthie's experience is purely domestic, that's why it's always been a hands-on, chef-led kitchen; and I've known Rose Gray [co-head chef at the River Café] since she was 18.

I don't choose the menus but we discuss food a lot. When we were completing the Pompidou and there was no other work coming in, Renzo Piano, Ruthie and I thought of writing a book called Sex, Food and Architecture. So it was very important to us, even then. We would often talk about the relationship between food and architecture. Food has the advantage of being more immediate. But they are both about a better quality of life. France in the Seventies was leading the way with its markets and atmosphere. Things have moved on to Spain and Italy because they offer simpler food and ways of cooking it. Renzo is my closest friend. I'll see him in 10 days' time for his 70th birthday, and a week later in Genoa. We do a lot of talking.

I think Britain has changed radically in the last 20 years. It was very behind in terms of its food and now it's as good as anywhere, especially London. I'm a chief adviser to the mayor and we are on the way to giving London the best public spaces of any city. The street is the heart of the public domain and it's very much anchored by restaurants, cafes and benches, which you enjoy on a sunny day. I'm all for not having an urban sprawl. I like places you can walk to. Cities are for the meeting of people, that's what it should be about. A friendly environment.

David Chipperfield (CBE) went solo in 1984 after working for Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. Most of his work is in Germany, America and the Far East, but he has also designed a restaurant for Wagamama and the British Film Institute. Two new UK projects include art galleries in Wakefield and Margate.

People have different attitudes to cooking, and when you do a kitchen you have to design for the way they live. Now it is accepted that you spend a lot of time in the kitchen so you can give it as much attention as other rooms. It's no longer about being at the back of house. I like a kitchen in the middle of the house, whereas some people like to tuck them away.

At the house in Spain it was fundamental that the kitchen was in the living space. I cook every night at 10 o'clock for seven or eight weeks in the summer. Normally it's for about 20 and I do a pot of something using shells like crab or mussels. Galicia is famous for shells. I have about eight recipes that I use when cooking for large numbers. Many recipes started with Ruthie Rogers at the River Cafe and then got adapted for a large group of people. Galicia is famous in Spain for its fish and as the largest consumer of octopus in the world. In the old days we used to buy the fish straight off the boats. The fishermen give us things now and again but they're not really allowed to any more. It's all got to be taken to the market to be regulated. It's a very primitive part of the country and the weather is unpredictable, like a very warm Cornwall but without all the people. We invite lots - clients, and people from the office.

Positioning kitchens in galleries and museums isn't really about cooking; it's about commercial criteria and whether they want the restaurants to be accessed independently to operate beyond the hours of the museum. In Germany there's an anxiety that the restaurant shouldn't be the first thing you see, whereas in England there's this commercial fear that if you don't see the restaurant you won't know it's there.

You have to create an atmosphere in restaurants with a bit of complexity. The Ivy is a good example but I wouldn't necessarily have done it that way. I designed a Wagamama on Lexington Street in Soho for Alan Yau - I'm a big fan of his, I like Busaba Eathai. Most people tend to stick to four or five restaurants and I'm loyal to Jeremy King and Alan Yau. I also did a Nobu in Miami, Circus in Soho, and the restaurant in the Bryant Park Hotel in New York.

I'm doing a museum in Anchorage, Alaska. We were fishing once and a guy caught a salmon, grilled it there and then, but covered it in barbecue sauce and ruined it. In America they have a tendency to smother things. I do a lot of travelling and if I'm in St Louis or Barcelona it's inevitable you end up going to dinner with a client. I've become slightly jaded because when you go to lots of nice restaurants you get spoilt and you can't savour it in the same way. I don't think that the best food I ever tasted was in a restaurant.

Will Alsop (OBE) is the founder of SMC Alsop. In 2000 he won the Stirling Prize for the Peckham Library. He has practices in Beijing, London, Shanghai and Singapore.

Architects don't build many buildings. When you have a commission you're going to have a relationship with that client for up to five years, so you've got to be able to sit at a table together. I'm obsessed with tables in one way or another. There are things that you'd say and do around a table that you wouldn't do if it wasn't there: it's the function that interests me. I've been thinking about a table with a sculpted surface so you can actually serve the food straight on to the table. Then you'd have a slit down the middle where you can fit the waste sack and wipe food over it. I have designed it, but it would be extremely expensive to make. Many ideas stick in the back of my mind and when the time is right they'll come out. Maybe in a better form.

I don't deal with names but many of my buildings are given them, which is fine. A new housing project in Manchester is called Chips because it looks like three chips on top of each other. It's in three chips because it's a nine-storey building and if you do it as a slab it just looks like a nine-storey slab. I often get accused of being too fun but what's wrong with that? There's no intellectual basis for trying to dismiss something as being merely fun. The converse of fun is boredom, misery or sadness. Will that make the world a better place? I don't think so, but there's a lot of it about. I like unlikely combinations and the element of surprise is vastly underrated in architecture. People like to turn a corner and go, What on earths that?

What I like about Baltic is walking through a pair of curtains into a very mysterious dark space which opens up into a very light space. It's not over-designed and at the same time not austerely minimal, which would get on my nerves. I'm austerely maximal. It was a genuine discovery for me when I was doing the Palestra building opposite. Ill usually order borscht, and they do very good liver. Its a winter cuisine really because in the Baltic they have a long winter. Magical summers, but they are short.

I'm a die-hard smoker. In Toronto, where I work regularly, smoking has been banned for a lot longer than here. Each year it gets more and more draconian. When I first went there you were only allowed to smoke on what they called the patio. Then they decided even if the patio has a protective roof over it of less than 4.5 metres, which is quite high, you're still not allowed to smoke there either. So, the enlightened restaurants raise their roofs if they can, but that's not always possible. In Manchester there's a bar called Dukes 92 and they've got a huge patio with awnings and heaters which could probably seat 500 people. Now that's a response to the smoking ban.

· Baltic Restaurant, 74 Blackfriars Road, London SE1; 020 7928 1111; www.balticrestaurant.co.uk

Amanda Levete worked for Richard Rogers and Will Alsop in the Eighties. In 1989 she became one half of Future Systems whose most notable projects include Selfridges, Birmingham, and the NatWest Media Centre at Lord's Cricket Ground, which won the Stirling Prize in 1999.

An architect can get a lot of work done in a restaurant. I bring my team from the office here if we have something to celebrate, or I bring a client, or I just come with my boyfriend. Eating is all about communication and exchanging ideas. There's a big blurring in my life between work and pleasure. It all merges into one and the restaurant is the venue for that.

When I started working for Richard Rogers, the River Café was like our canteen. At first I'd take my mum there for a cheap bowl of soup but within months it had completely taken off. As it became more successful they'd do special deals for those who worked there and then you'd have to eat at slightly odd times. I've got all Ruth's cookbooks and use them a lot. Richard's a lovely man.

In most of the restaurants I frequent, there's a design/work connection. The director of Scott's, Mark Hix asked us to do a number of pieces: the crustacean holder, the champagne trolley and buckets, and the washbasins. With product design there's always a specific function: it's very exact. Other issues are its sculptural presence and ergonomic function. With a trolley, it has to be something that you can manipulate easily between tables and not take up too much room. Originally, Jeremy King commissioned us to do the trolley for the Ivy and the buckets for Le Caprice. With design you can explore the geometries and push the aesthetic in a way that you're not always able to with a building, because of the technical and functional constraints. Also, the return on your investment is four months. A building takes a long, painful, but rewarding, four years.

The ground floor of Selfridges has got an oyster bar, a patisserie and a deli counter, and it has very much become the place to meet. Eating in a shop is very different from eating in a restaurant. You don't want to dwell. It was really important for us to provide a space in which you could feel equally comfortable with a small group or by yourself. Therefore we designed these petals that mean you can sit alone, or opposite one another. The ethos of the food hall was that it had a market feel. There aren't shelves. Everything is casually laid out, and low-slung, like a Moroccan market. The design is totally open and fluid.

I'm doing a private house in Dublin where the couple entertain on quite a large scale. We're doing all the furniture and cutlery so it's almost like a restaurant: it's about creating a quality and a presence that's comfortable but at the same time architecturally exciting. I've always wanted to design a restaurant and you bet I'd do the interior. For me I don't understand how you can separate the inside from the outside.

Once we did a proposal with restaurateur Alan Yau for Battersea Power Station before it was sold. Alan had this great idea to cross a nightclub with a restaurant and brothel. It was going to be a 24-hour operation where you could rent booths by the hour. It was a wild brief and that extracted a wild proposal from us.

I have favourite dishes at Scott's. The stone-bass ceviche served with deep-fried plantain, the Dover sole and the sea bream. There used to be a cod's tongue starter, and I should ask Mark why they took it off. I don't feel guilty about eating anything. I love dark chocolate, but prefer to have a starter and a main, and then a chocolate truffle with a coffee. I never get sick of eating out but I'm not adventurous. I like to be introduced to places but I'll naturally go to ones I know.

· Scott's, 20 Mount Street, London W1; 020 7495 7309; www.scotts-restaurant.com

Sir Terry Farrell has had his own practice for over 40 years. His London projects include Embankment Place, the MI6 headquarters, and the Greenwich Peninsula masterplan, currently under way. In 2004 he was made the 'design champion' for Edinburgh to advise on future development of the city.

Nicknames for buildings is a new thing and a lot are connected to food: the 'gherkin', the 'cheese-grater'. A pair of tall buildings in Chicago which have circular balconies going around were very quickly called the 'corncobs'. The only nicknames buildings used to have were derogatory ones. You could have easily called the gherkin the 'cruise missile'.

I believe a lot of architects invent the names at the time of design because an association with a smaller, familiar object makes it instantly cuddly and loveable. When I did Embankment Place it could never be given a simple name because it's a more complex kind of building. Whereas today, buildings look more like one-liners: they can be technologically much more sophisticated but there's a slight dumbing-down of the language.

As design champion for Edinburgh, I've had catered dinners in our apartment on York Place with MSPs, council leaders and other senior people. I do like to approve the menu in advance but not as much as my secretaries. They get terribly excited and worked-up about these things. And there's all sorts of protocol these days. Are they vegetarian? Any nut allergies? Once upon a time you were grateful for whatever you were given.

Delikatesn is a tiny corner place down some stairs in New Town and, if it weren't for the menu they left us, I don't think I'd ever have found it. It's like a home from home because I live next to a great Portuguese deli in London. My home is above the office in an old furniture factory on Lisson Grove, NW1. I once had a party for 150 people and the Spanish restaurant across the road brought in big pans of paella. It's called Don Pepe's but we call it the canteen. I subsidise a happy hour for the staff there on Friday nights. I like local businesses. Particularly in my area, which always needs a bit of support.

In the course of an architectural career there are kitchens of all kinds. The conference centre in Edinburgh I designed takes 1,000 people, so the kitchen's right next to the dining area for a fast turnaround. I once did an extension to Rules restaurant in Covent Garden. I think it's the oldest restaurant in London. We almost doubled its size by extending into next door, matching the old building so it was seamless. I'm involved in putting a restaurant in the library of the Royal Institution where they hold the Christmas science lectures. I've argued that we should have carpets, tablecloths and curtains but, from the managerial side, this means stains on the floor, food smells in the curtains and tablecloths you have to clean. One of the recent revolutions of restaurant taste is the rise of what would be café style. Hard surfaces and sharp acoustics have become upmarket. That would never have been good taste even 10 years ago.

· Delikatesn, 1a York Place, Edinburgh EH1; 0131 556 1133; www.delikatesn.com

Rafael Viñoly was born in Uruguay, educated in Argentina and emigrated to New York in 1978. His projects include 20 Fenchurch Street in London, the Vdara Condo Hotel in Las Vegas, and the City College of New York's School of Architecture.

Food is definitely not one of my passions. I don't know any of the fashionable restaurants. I don't need overly complicated experiences. I have a short temper for stupidity and I have an enormous counter-reaction to pomposity. My business is conducted in one place, Mezzogiorno, in the office or wherever the client wants to take me. It's like ballet: I know ballet is a wonderful thing to see but I'm not cultivated enough for it, like I'm not cultivated enough for food. I'm sure I've missed something.

Mezzogiorno is three blocks from the office. It is the most unremarkable place but it has this warmth and sense of purpose. It has a good Italian cook, early-Eighties decor, drawings and sculptures from Florence, and an atmosphere created by incredible, sympathetic owners. They know what I eat and suggest things. I'm not fussy.

We have an extremely good young Brazilian cook at home in downtown New York. My wife, Diana, helped her through one of the best cooking schools in New York. When we travel we take food on the plane prepared by her. She surprises us every night. You don't need to choose; you just sit down and there is something prepared. It's very Japanese in a way. There are some restaurants in Japan I've been lucky enough to go to that are not even advertised - just a kitchen and six chairs. And you get no choice: you eat whatever the guy gives you. It is a completely different every time and costs more than the Hotel Bel-Air.

I'm doing a huge hotel in Las Vegas, with 14 restaurants. It is interesting that people in this industry, with an eye on the consumer, build with the idea that in six months' time they will change again. I don't think that is a good thing - why change if it's working? But they change it simply to regenerate the image. It's very dangerous territory. In order to achieve excellence, things ought not to be on a seasonal cycle. You couldn't write Shakespeare on that basis.

· Mezzogiorno, 195 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012; (212) 334 2112; www.mezzogiorno.com

Thomas Heatherwick is a designer, self-taught architect, artist and all-round visionary whose eclectic body of work includes the Rolling Bridge in London's Paddington Basin, the UK's tallest public sculpture, Manchester's 'B of the Bang', and the dramatic East Beach Cafe in Littlehampton.

I'm interested in things being particular to their location. For something to be sustainable, it has to be specific to its location, because the idea is to have a building that will never need to be recycled. The East Beach Cafe isn't a council project, and there's no additional funding. It's essentially funded by a Mr Whippy machine and we had an enormous responsibility to make that achievable.

I met the owner Jane Wood at a party. She told me about her dream of having a beach café and was very open to what it might be. We both agreed we didn't want anything that would hook on to sea cliches like sails or yachts. The site is closer to the sea than the buildings around it, so it didn't need to be caught in the tyranny of being 'in-keeping', so no polite reworking of Regency buildings. We asked ourselves: what is the character of the sea? We decided it's all the bits and bobs you find among the rocks and pebbles on the beach. The building didn't need to be pretty, but to be tough to cope with kids, sand and seagulls' poo.

There were practical constraints, like the site has a long promenade that we couldn't build on, and a high-pressure sewage line at the back, which meant it had to be long and thin. We didn't want windows at the back because it was a car park and so we played on the feel of being in a cave. We put diagonals going through to give it a stepped profile.

Our work is mainly buildings now and it's progressed from Konstam [a restaurant in London's King's Cross] last year, which was just the interior, to this, a whole building. We're now working on a restaurant in Hong Kong.

A restaurant is only as good as its food and its service. The design is third on the list. I admire chefs. They have to be brilliant all the time. That is terrifying for me because I am a slow thinker. As a designer of buildings you need time to immerse yourself. A chef has to produce his best work every day.

I get my best ideas through discussion. I'm trying to make a way we can all ricochet thoughts off each other; in the new studio there is a long, open kitchen and dining area. Meetings will take place virtually in the kitchen. The main reason is to have as many different groups bumping into each other as possible. In the studio there is a big group of architects but also people with diverse backgrounds like theatre design.

I've been interested in designing buildings since I was tiny. Buildings are fascinating because they need so many different forms of expertise.

· East Beach Cafe, Littlehampton, West Sussex; 01903 731903; www.eastbeachcafe.co.uk

Summary: Where the design gurus eat.


Harvey J. Berger is Ariad’s chairman and CEO.

Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc. said they are restructuring their licensing pact for Ariad’s cellsignaling technology, a move that calls for Ariad to receive $50 million. Under the revised deal, Ariad will receive funds in three installments: $15 million upon signing, $20 million by June 30, 2015, and $15 million by June 30, 2016, the companies said. Bellicum, based in Texas, is developing cell therapies to treat cancers and other chronic diseases.

Summary: Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc.and Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc. said they are restructuring their license pact for Ariad’s cell signaling technology, a move that calls for Ariad to receive $50 million. Under the revised deal, Ariad will receive funds in three installments: $15 million upon signing, $20 million by June 30, 2015, and $15 million by June 30, 2016, the companies said. Ariad shares, however, fell on the news. Bellicum is developing cell therapies to treat cancers and other chronic diseases.


Updated OCT 15, 2014 5:22p ET

PHOENIX -- Grand Canyon has named Mike Vaught to replace Keith Baker as vice president of athletics.

The 53-year-old Vaught spent six years as the deputy athletic director at Southern Methodist and was an assistant AD at Rice.

He's worked the past two years as director of corporate sponsorships for AdvoCare International, a health and wellness company that has brokered sponsorship deals with the Independence and Texas bowls, Roush Fenway Racing and FC Dallas of Major League Soccer.

Vaught also was an assistant football coach at Arkansas, Missouri State and Navy, where he served as offensive coordinator.

Baker was Grand Canyon's athletic director for 20 years before moving into another role at the school in August.

Grand Canyon is in its second year of transitioning to Division I athletics.

Summary: Grand Canyon tabs Mike Vaught as new AD


In recent media interviews, the best available legal minds have predictably disagreed on the merits of potential legal challenges to certain state Ebola quarantine policies that are more aggressive than those being recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The issue seems on the cusp of being litigated in Maine, where symptomless nurse Kaci Hickox, who recently returned from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, has been jockeying with the governor of Maine and, before that, New Jersey, over these issues. Related issues have been raised in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Ikeoluwa Opayemi, a Milford, Conn. third-grader, who was ordered to stay home from school this month after having accompanied her parents to Nigeria for a wedding. Nigeria—more than 1,500 miles from the epidemic’s epicenter in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—has not had a confirmed Ebola case since August, and is not currently the subject of any Ebola-related CDC travel precautions.

While there is no question that rational, scientifically based quarantines are proper and enforceable, there is inherent ambiguity in what is rational and scientifically based. The experts’ disagreements with one another stem in part from their different understandings of the precise facts posed by each potential challenge, but also from the absence of recent case law on the subject—a fact for which we should actually be profoundly grateful. The miracles of modern medicine have largely spared us these wrenching dilemmas for more than a century.

The key U.S. Supreme Court precedent is Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 ruling by Justice John Marshall Harlan. (Harlan may be best known for his lone, heroic dissent in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, where he refused to endorse the majority’s “separate but equal” doctrine, which blessed apartheid policies in the American South).

Jacobson was decided in the wake of a smallpox outbreak in Boston that comprised 1,596 cases and led to 270 deaths, according to a 2005 analysis of the case in the American Journal of Public Health by Lawrence O. Gostin, an authority on law and public health issues at Georgetown University Law Center.

Jacobson was actually a vaccine case. The 7-2 majority upheld Massachusetts’ right to sanction Jacobson for refusing to undergo the smallpox vaccine.

Under the state’s general “police” powers, the Court held, the State may invest local officials or commissions with “authority in some appropriate way to safeguard the public health and the public safety.”

While health-related edicts sometimes restrict individual liberties—as vaccine and quarantine laws unquestionably do—and therefore implicate federal Due Process concerns, “the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States … does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint,” Justice Harlan wrote. “Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”

As an example, he continued: “An American citizen, arriving at an American port on a vessel in which, during the voyage, there had been cases of yellow fever or Asiatic cholera, although apparently free from disease himself, may yet, in some circumstances, be held in quarantine against his will on board of such vessel or in a quarantine station, until it be ascertained … that the danger of the spread of the disease among the community at large has disappeared.”

But while those portions of the decision seem to grant broad discretion to health authorities, other passages impose clear restrictions on their powers even in this context, potentially favoring the legal positions of people like Hickox or Opayemi.

“It might be,” Justice Harlan cautioned, for instance, “that an acknowledged power of a local community to protect itself against an epidemic threatening the safety of all, might be exercised in particular circumstances and in reference to particular persons in such an arbitrary, unreasonable manner, or might go so far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public, as to authorize or compel the courts to interfere for the protection of such persons.”

Professor Gostin, in his 2005 article, distilled from that ruling four standards that he believes must be met by health regulations if they are avoid impinging fundamental, federally protected individual liberties:

Against this framework, the devil is then in the details. In the case of Hickox, for instance, it appeared at first as if governors Mario Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, who called a joint press conference to announce their tough new stance, had made a fundamentally political decision to start systematically quarantining any health care worker who had worked with Ebola patients, even if symptomless.

“When political figures start grandstanding,” says Charles Sims in an interview, “and haven’t even consulted health commissioners, courts will be very reluctant to uphold deprivations of liberty.” A litigation partner at the Proskauer law firm in New York, Sims spent nine years as staff counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in an earlier life.

On the other hand, it appears that there was evidence that Hickox initially showed at least a slight fever when she was individually screened at Newark Airport, which might have justified preliminary quarantining. The question then becomes whether her accommodations in the plastic tent provided for her there were adequate and appropriate.

After she tested negative for the disease and was allowed to return to her home in Maine, the question shifts to whether the conditions of her home confinement there are scientifically necessary and reasonable. Can the state stop her from biking in the country? Can it stop her from going to a crowded movie theater? If she visits New York, could Governor Cuomo stop her from coming to Grand Central?

In an email, I asked Gostin if state and city officials might also lawfully take into account the public’s irrational fears about the disease—because it appears to me that that’s the crux of what politicians are being tempted to do. In New York, for instance, could a politician take into account the fact that someone who comes down with Ebola shortly after having used a subway—though he was still asymptomatic at the time of the ride—might cause thousands of people to fear using the subway, even if scientists say the subway remains perfectly safe?

Gostin’s answer was refreshingly unamibiguous. “The answer is no,” he wrote. “Government cannot use public fear as a rationale for depriving a person of liberty. Indeed the rule of law stands precisely to prevent that kind of injustice. The only basis for lawful quarantine is significant risk based on science.”

Summary: Legal challenges to aggressive Ebola quarantines, like the one imposed on nurse Kaci Hickox, will hinge on a 1905 court case


Updated NOV 14, 2014 2:32a ET

CALGARY, Alberta -- Paul Byron finally scored a goal for the first time since opening night, and then he added another.

Byron scored twice to break out of a 16-game scoring funk, and the Calgary Flames beat the Arizona Coyotes 5-3 on Thursday night.

Playing in career game No. 99, Byron had his first two-goal game in the NHL.

"It felt good. It was a lot of work coming, a lot of time shooting pucks in practice with the coaching staff and stuff like that," Byron said. "The chances have been coming and I've been extremely happy with that. It was just a matter of time, I thought, before they started going in."

Since beating Ryan Miller for Calgary's first goal of the season back on Oct. 8, Byron has had at least a half-dozen breakaways that he has failed to convert.

"We just don't want him to get any more breakaways," teammate Mark Giordano said with a chuckle. "He gets breakaways, he doesn't bury them. But 2-on-1s, 3-on-2s, he's money. We'll just let him pull up or something next time he gets a break."

David Jones, Giordano and Sean Monahan also scored for Calgary (10-6-2), while Sven Baertschi added two assists, his first points of the season. The Flames, who have won five of their last seven, began a five-game homestand that will continue Saturday night against the Ottawa Senators.

Shane Doan, Antoine Vermette and Joe Vitale scored for Arizona (6-9-1), which has lost three straight. The Coyotes will continue their three-game road swing through western Canada with a game Friday night in Vancouver.

"Way too many opportunities for them and gave up too many chances and we have to be better," Doan said. "We had opportunities to win the game but we made dumb mental mistakes."

Byron gave the Flames a 1-0 lead 11:06 into the first period, then scored early in the second to stake Calgary to a 2-1 lead.

"It certainly changes your confidence going forward in the game," he said. "It gets a little mojo in your game and it feels like the rest of the game, pucks seem to follow your stick a little bit. Hopefully, I can keep that going."

Trailing 3-1, Arizona stormed back to tie it on goals by Vermette and Vitale, whose wrist shot from the corner slid inside the goalpost on Jonas Hiller.

The Flames took the lead for a third time at 16:23 of the second period on Giordano's sixth goal. The Calgary captain was set up neatly by TJ Brodie, who faked a shot at the point, moved in and, after freezing goaltender Mike Smith, slid the puck down low to Giordano, who one-timed it just under the crossbar to make it 4-3.

Nursing that one-goal lead, Calgary got some insurance at 12:23 of the third when Jones shot the puck toward the front of the net and it banked in off of the leg of Connor Murphy. It was the third goal of the season and third in as many games for Jones.

Starting for the seventh time in eight games, Hiller finished with 20 saves to improve to 8-4-1.

Smith, who has gotten off to a shaky start this season, had 20 saves and saw his record fall to 4-9-0.

Notes: Calgary improves to 5-0-1 in games after a regulation loss. ... Not dressed for Arizona was C Brandon McMillan, who sat out his first game of the year, D Chris Summers and D Brandon Gormley. ... Healthy scratches for Calgary were LW Brandon Bollig and RW Devin Setoguchi. Including last year's playoffs with Chicago, Bollig hasn't scored in his last 50 games and Setoguchi has no points in 10 games this season. Both players were acquired during the summer. ... The Flames improved to 7-1-2 when scoring first. ... It was the first of five meetings between the teams this season.

Summary: Arizona opened its three-game Canadian road swing with a 5-3 loss as Calgary's Paul Byron scored twice to break out of a scoring funk.


PARK CITY, Utah — Because independent cinema is — in theory, anyway — more open to a diversity of voices than are mainstream movies, female filmmakers, characters, and issues have always been well represented at the Sundance Film Festival. (Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that half of all humanity is the mainstream.)

This year’s festival, however, seems more focused than usual on what women are doing behind the camera and in front of it. Sundance can be as much of a boys’ club as Hollywood, but starting with the opening-night offerings — a documentary about singer Nina Simone (Liz Garbus’s “What Happened, Miss Simone?”) and “The Bronze,” a raunchy comedy about a has-been gymnast co-written by its star, a dynamo named Melissa Rauch — Sundance 2015 has been celebrating and contemplating what it means to be part of the girls’ club.

The topic turned explicit during the festival’s most in-demand panel discussion, “ Power of Story: Serious Ladies,” in which Mindy Kaling (“The Mindy Project”), Lena Dunham (HBO’s “Girls”), Jenji Kohan (creator of Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black”), and actress-comedian Kristen Wiig mixed it up on the stage of Main Street’s Egyptian Theatre, under prompting from Emily Nussbaum, TV critic for The New Yorker.

The free-ranging conversation covered the limits of public persona (Wiig: “I go to a dinner and people say, ‘Do a funny voice.’ Like I walk around New York in a funny wig punching people in the stomach”), personal confidence (Kaling: “I have this personality defect where I’m unable to see myself as the underdog. My parents raised me with the entitlement of a tall, blonde, white man”) to the importance of building an industry network of women creators (Dunham: “We stalk every woman who works in television and force them to have long dinners with us. Actually, that would be nice, if guys complained, ‘It’s so hard to break into Hollywood, there’s such an old girls’ network’ ”).

Elsewhere, issues faced by women in the larger society were raised in films that demanded responses from audiences. “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (”The Secret War,” 2012) about the epidemic of campus rape, premiered to a standing-ovation Park City crowd that included US Senators Barbara Boxer and Kirsten Gillibrand. The film amasses stories and statistics to devastating effect, relying on on-camera testimonies from women in dozens of colleges across the country (including many in the Boston area), and building a shameful portrait of administrators and police departments systematically blaming the victim. A CNN Films coproduction, “The Hunting Ground” will air on TV after a possible theatrical release; it needs to be seen.

Boston-bred writer-producer-actress Mindy Kaling hung out at an Eddie Bauer-sponsored party with writer-director-actor Eli Roth, who’s from Newton.

There are, of course, plenty of boy movies at Sundance, and good ones too. “The End of the Tour” succeeds at the unlikely mission of dramatizing a 1996 road trip involving Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) and legendary author David Foster Wallace (a surprisingly moving Jason Segel). The unstoppable James Franco has two movies at the festival; the buzz on “True Story” is strong, but “I Am Michael,” in which the actor plays a gay activist turned anti-gay Christian pastor is muddled and turgid. The Duplass brothers, Jay and Mark, are usually here with projects they’ve directed and/or are acting in; this year, they’re just content to have produced three festival entries, “The Bronze,” “The Overnight,” and “Tangerine” — and then have topped things off by announcing a four-picture deal with Netflix.

But the excited word-of-mouth that always starts circulating by day two or three of the festival has mostly to do with actresses, women directors, and feminist themes, some of them arriving in genre clothing. “The Witch,” a horror-suspense film that takes place in 1630 New England among a Puritan family riven by paranoia, has been the buzz of early Sundance, with packed screenings, hourlong wait-lines, and praise for the central performance by Anya Taylor-Joy as the daughter accused of sorcery. (The film sold to the adventurous distributor A24 for $1.5 million on the third day of the festival.)

Another hot ticket is “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 graphic novel and featuring a raw, funny, and risk-taking lead performance by British actress Bel Powley as a 15-year-old cartoonist coming of sexual and emotional age in 1976 San Francisco. The film costars Wiig as the heroine’s mother (perhaps the actress’s most successful serious role to date) and Alexander Skarsgard as her much older lover, but the film’s primarily a triumph for first-time writer-director Marielle Heller and for Powley, whose face eerily evokes Gloeckner’s wide-eyed drawing style and who portrays youthful female passion and sexuality with a blunt honesty rarely seen onscreen.

Rauch has now landed in the indie consciousness with the cheerfully rude farce “The Bronze,” in which she plays a onetime Olympic gymnast experiencing the after-burn of fame. (Think of it as “Tonya Harding: The Later Years.”) It’s a hit-or-miss affair, with a few indelible moments (a sex scene that would earn a 10 from the Romanian judge, for one) and the lingering sensation that we’ll be hearing more, and better, from Rauch in the future.

After “Bachelorette” divided Sundance audiences in 2012 with its caustic comedy of gal-pal dysfunction — it was like “Bridesmaids,” only meaner — some were wondering if we’d ever hear from writer-director Leslye Headland again. “Sleeping With Other People” brought this ribald talent back to the festival with a vengeance: an acridly charming (and at times very dirty) romantic comedy about a friendship between two serial cheaters (Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie of “Community” and “Mad Men”), “Sleeping” subverts the cliches of Hollywood rom-coms with edginess and unexpected warmth. In the post-screening Q & A, Headland described the film as “‘When Harry Met Sally. . .’ with [jerks],” which both encapsulates her sense of humor and the marketing challenge her movie faces.

On the other hand, the woman sitting next to me at the screening was crying happy tears at the film’s conclusion, a testimony to Headland’s successful reinvigoration of a tired genre. She seems to have heeded the words of the women on the Serious Ladies panel when asked what advice they’d give to the young women coming up behind them. The answers were unanimous and they apply not just to women: Do it yourself. Keep working. Trust your voice. In the words of Dunham, “Tell the story you want to tell. We’re all so less weird than we think we are.”

Summary: Women are prominent at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.


The Corona del Sol coronation is nearly complete -- again.

The Aztecs boys basketball team made its fourth straight state championship game with a 79-70 win over Chaparral in the Division I semifinals on Saturday at Grand Canyon Arena. Corona is one win away from matching history.

Only one program won four straight big-school state titles -- Phoenix Union from 1958 to 1961 -- and Monday night Corona gets its chance to join the defunct school in such a long run of excellence.

"It's made us stronger and made us mentally tough. I am so proud of our guys getting back to the four straight state champions," said Corona coach Sam Duane Jr., who would be the first coach to win four in a row. "I don't think anyone realizes how hard it is to do. You take everyone's best shot and it isn't easy. We can never have a letdown."

The Aztecs, who are led by freshman Marvin Bagley Jr. and sophomore Alex Barcello, will face Desert Vista in the 8 p.m. title game from Gila River Arena on FOX Sports Arizona Plus. The Thunder beat Mountain View 49-41 behind the trio of Caleb Simmons, Brandon Clarke and Tarik Cool.

"It's all about proving what kind of team we are and how strong our family is," Desert Vista coach Tony Darden said. "I think people are starting to realize what kind of team we are. We've known it all year, but hopefully now everyone sees it, too."

2 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona

Defending champion Seton Catholic will play for its fifth championship in six seasons. The Sentinels will face upset-minded Maricopa at 2 p.m. on FOX Sports Arizona.

"Our kids come in with more composure thanks to the past experience," said Seton coach Karen Self, whose team is anchored by sophomore twins LeeAnne and Jenn Wirth and freshman Sarah Barcello. "I want to give our seniors a great memory on their way out."

Maricopa, the tournaments No. 12 seed, earned its way to the title game with upset wins over No. 5 Tucson, No. 4 Flagstaff and No. 9 Ironwood Ridge. Do the Rams have one more upset in them?

"People haven't really seen what we can do," Maricopa coach Kati Burrows said. "I think now we're showing people what we can do.

"One more. We can't stop now."

4 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona Plus

Dobson earned its spot in the title game with a 59-52 victory over Liberty in the semifinals, while Millennium upset top seed and defending state champion Desert Vista 52-43 in the semifinals.

"The game was a big win but it didn't meet a goal for us," Millennium coach Courtland Rojeck said. "Beating Desert Vista in the semifinals was never a goal. We have one more ahead of us."

Said Dobson coach Tony Dumas: "They don't ever stop believing, and they have a great mental toughness about them. That's what got us to this point."

6 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona Plus

Gilbert Christian trotted onto the floor in its semifinals game sporting shirts that said "finish the journey." The Knights are one with from doing so.

They will face Arcadia at 6 p.m. on FOX Sports Arizona Plus.

"We didn't approach this game as a state championship," Gilbert Christian coach Kurt Keener said after his team's 87-74 win over defending champion Shadow Mountain. "We approached this as a game we needed to get to the state championship."

2 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona -- Division II Girls Championship game: Maricopa vs. Seton Catholic

4 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona Plus -- Division I Girls Championship game: Millennium vs. Dobson

6 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona Plus -- Division II Boys Championship game: Gilbert Christian vs. Arcadia

8 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona Plus -- Division I Boys Championship game: Corona del Sol vs. Desert Vista

10 a.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division III Boys championship

Noon, FOX Sports Arizona: Division III Girls championship

9 p.m. FOX Sports Arizona: Division I Girls championship

11 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division II Boys championship

1:30 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division I Boys championship

9 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division III Boys championship

1:30 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division III Girls championship

4:30 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division II Girls Championship

7 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division I Girls championship

2:30 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division II Boys championship

4:30 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division I Boys championship

8:30 p.m., FOX Sports Arizona: Division III Boys championship

Summary: Division I and II championship matchups on FOX Sports Arizona set for Monday.


03/17/2015 AT 02:10 AM EDT

on Friday after trashing a hotel room was caused by his ongoing battle with depression and difficulty dealing with memories of being molested when he was a child.

In an interview with the

star admitted that he'd stopped taking his meds a while ago, "which was a mistake that culminated into my taking some sleeping pills and then going into a blackout."

The actor had been in Tallahassee to attend the ALT*Con convention when he called police at about 11 p.m. on Friday night, complaining that his phone and wallet had been stolen from his hotel room.

But when an officer arrived at the hotel, the manager said that Brendon, 43, had taken pills and alcohol and was walking around with blood on him and "his clothes torn and wet from a toilet overflow he created [in a hotel room]," according to the police report.

He was arrested after flipping a bed, smashing a porcelain figure, pulling the phone out of the wall and clogging the toilet, which caused water to spill out onto the room's carpet, causing up to $1,000 damage.

"I hate this. I hate the way I feel right now. I hate how I've come off," Brendon told the newspaper. "This isn't who I am."

He said that he was trying to come to terms with "a lot of the stuff I'm having to deal with in my life, inside of my head, which is not fun and it's not funny."

Saying that it wasn't an excuse for his behavior, Brendon explained that one of the issues he was dealing with was being sexually abused as a child.

"When I was a kid I was molested for two years by a teacher," he said, explaining that he'd never spoken publicly about it before. "From that moment my life changed immensely and I haven't talked about it because I didn't want to use it as a crutch, but I'm seeing as I get older that it did have a huge effect on me."

"I just thought that I could brush it aside," he added, getting emotional.

Brendon – who's previously gone to rehab for substance abuse issues and was arrested earlier this year for allegedly trashing a hotel room in Fort Lauderdale – later talked about the abuse with

, explaining that the perpetrator had been jailed for five years.

"If something good can come out of this, if I can talk about it and help people out, and change my behavior, that'd be great," he added.

Summary: The Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor says he trashed a hotel room in Florida on Saturday after going off his meds


Boston Children’s Hospital is extending its reach to patients far outside Boston, with a deal to acquire a large and growing group of doctors in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

The nonprofit hospital plans to complete the acquisition of Children’s and Women’s Physicians of Westchester LLP, a for-profit group of 276 doctors, this summer. Terms were not disclosed.

The hospital already treats many patients from other states and countries, but this is its first acquisition outside Massachusetts. The deal will add thousands of patients to the Children’s network and advance the hospital’s out-of-state expansion strategy; last year Children’s earnings rose on increased business from international patients.

“Children’s wants to be more and more a regional hospital,” said Ruselle W. Robinson, a health care lawyer at the Boston firm Posternak Blankstein & Lund LLP. “It already has a national reputation, but now they want to extend their reach for patients.”

The addition of hundreds of doctors and thousands of patients is not expected to have any direct impact on patients from the Boston area — other than perhaps strengthening the hospital’s finances by providing a new source of revenue and more referrals.

Children’s is the dominant pediatric hospital in Massachusetts and New England. It is one of the highest-cost providers in the state, but known for treating the sickest and smallest of patients.

The idea, said Dr. Kevin Churchwell, the chief operating officer at Children’s, is to create a pediatric health care network across the Northeast in which doctors coordinate care online and through electronic health records.

“What is coming from health care reform, and what we see as the future of health care, is the continuum of care is going to be profoundly important,” Churchwell said. “In order to do that, we have to have alliances, we have to have partnerships, and we have to have practices that we control, that are part of us.”

Because Children’s is acquiring a company based outside of Massachusetts, it was not immediately clear whether the deal would be reviewed by the Health Policy Commission, a state agency that studies health care mergers and acquisitions. A hospital spokesman said a review is not necessary, but a commission spokesman said the commission is requesting more information from Children’s before making such a determination.

The Westchester practice is spread across 57 locations in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Dr. Leonard Newman, president of the Valhalla, N.Y.-based doctors group, said that despite its reach across three states, the group needs to be part of a larger system.

“In this health care market, to provide the best care for children, we need to have a partner that has stature,” Newman said, “and Boston Children’s Hospital has that reputation here in New York and New Jersey and Connecticut.”

The group has grown every year since it was formed in 2000, and Newman said it is likely to attract even more doctors after joining the Children’s Hospital network.

Children’s is unlike most acute-care hospitals because its competition is not just local institutions, but also pediatric centers around the world. The hospital’s move into New York and New Jersey puts it in the back yard of another premier pediatric hospital, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“Parents are willing to travel when it’s their children’s health in question,” said Robert S. Huckman, a Harvard Business School professor.

Executives at Boston Children’s and the Westchester group said that the merger will allow for better coordination of care for the many New York- area patients who already see doctors at Children’s.

The deal also has the potential to improve care for other patients in the tri-state area by giving them better access to pediatric specialists, executives said. The distance between the two health care organizations will not get in the way of coordinating care, they added.

“It seems like it’s a long way, Boston to New York,” Newman said. “But now with the Internet, immediate assistance can go back and forth. Even evaluation of patients can be done online.”

Children’s has about 1,300 physicians. It had more than 551,000 patient visits and discharged more than 24,000 patients from its hospital during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. It earned $113 million on operations in that year, a 28 percent increase from the previous year. The jump in profits was driven by a surge in patients from outside of Massachusetts, especially from the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.

Robert Mechanic, a health care specialist at Brandeis University, called the acquisition a smart strategic move for Children’s.

“They have a reputation,” he said. “They can draw people from outside the region, and they probably should take advantage of it.”

Summary: The deal represents a continuation of the hospital’s strategy to increase business outside of Boston and Massachusetts.


New York City distinguished itself from the rest of the country in two important housing categories in the 1980 census - one of them indicating poverty and the other, wealth. Government and private analysts say that taken together, the findings show that the city has some serious housing problems, including a growing gap between housing for the poor and housing for the rich.

''There really are two cities in New York,'' said George Sternlieb, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University. ''We've always had a city of contrasts, but never have they been so sharp as now, because now there is no middle.''

One category in which the city showed results far different from the rest of the country was in the number of housing units lost to abandonment and demolition; the Bronx and Brooklyn led the nation's counties.

The other was the average number of people in each household. Manhattan had 1.96 persons - the lowest figure in the country, except for the 1.46 in a Hawaiian county that is said to contain only a leper colony.

In the first category, Bronx County had a net loss of 56,459 houses and apartments, or 11.1 percent of its 1970 total of 508,789 units. Kings County, or Brooklyn, had a net loss of 22,428 units, or 2.5 percent of its 1970 total of 902,622. Only 55 of the 3,098 other counties in the country showed losses, and those losses totaled only 7,200 units.

Over the decade, the Bronx's population declined from 1,471,701 to 1,169,115. Brooklyn's declined from 2,602,012 to 2,230,936. Most of the 55 counties outside the city showing a loss of housing units were rural areas in the South and Middle West. Arthur Young, chief of the Census Bureau's housing division, pointed out that it was significant that the statistics were compiled on the county level. One must be careful, he said, when comparing New York with other cities because each of New York's five boroughs is a separate county, whereas most other cities make up only part of a single county.

Thus, he noted that despite the losses in the Bronx and Brooklyn, New York City as a whole registered a slight increase in the number of housing units, from 2,924,281 to 2,946,098. Manhattan gained about 40,000 units, Queens, 31,000, and Staten Island, 30,000. Other Cities Lost Housing Units

Moreover, some other large cities actually had net losses of housing. Detroit lost more than 60,000 units, Chicago more than 41,000, St. Louis more than 37,000 and Cleveland more than 24,000. Each of those cities, however, is part of a county that, over all, gained housing units.

Large losses of housing units have traditionally been unusual, Mr. Young said, primarily because young people leave their parents to set up their own households and because the Census Bureau counts vacant units that it considers habitable, as well as all occupied units. Those factors have traditionally enabled many places simultaneously to lose population and gain housing units.

For example, despite gaining a small number of housing units, the city lost population, declining from 7.89 million to 7.07 million, according to the census. The city has challenged the population total in court, contending that upward of 750,000 New Yorkers were not counted.

The losses in the Bronx and Brooklyn, then, reflected the severe economic troubles in those boroughs, according to Mr. Young, local landlords and private demographers. 158,000 Vacant Units in City

''The figures are startling when you consider that it means we've lost that many places where people lived,'' said Ruben Klein, a landlord, who is president of the Bronx Realty Advisory Board. He said the actual losses might be somewhat higher because the Census Bureau might have counted as habitable some vacant apartments that were, in fact, permanently abandoned.

The number of vacant units in the city counted in the census was 158,000. In 1970, the number was 80,000. Frank Kristof, a former census official and now president of the Rent Stabilization Association, a New York landlord group, said most of the vacancies were in badly deteriorated neighborhoods. He said it was probably true that many of those units should not have been counted as available housing, and, thus, dropped from the total. Had that happened, the city would have had a net loss in housing.

In the second category in which the city distinguished itself, the average number of people in each household, all the other counties in the country had at least two persons per household except for Kalawao, Hawaii. Peter K. Francese, the publisher of American Demographics magazine, said that that county contained only 144 persons, all of them in the leper colony. Leper Colony Count Questioned

''There's some question about whether the census enumerators actually went there to count the people,'' Mr. Francese said. He added that, for all practical purposes, Kalawao was not really a county, and that therefore Manhattan had the lowest person-perhousehold figure of any county in the nation.

Mr. Francese said the 1.96 figure -down from 2.2 in 1970 - meant that ''it is likely that over half'' of the 704,000 occupied units in Manhattan had only one person living in them. Officials generally consider it a sign of economic well-being when a household contains only one or two people. That is especially true in Manhattan, they say, where housing costs are extremely high. The Census Bureau has not yet compiled statistics on the question of how much people pay for housing.

The national average is 2.8 persons per household. Nationally, only 23 percent of the households have one person in them. Mr. Sternlieb of the Rutgers research center said the movement toward fewer people per household in Manhattan, coupled with the rising abandonment rate in many parts of the city, did not bode well for the city's future. He said it meant that the only market for new housing was in the areas that could command the highest prices - Manhattan - where the wealthiest people live, most of whom do not have children.

At the same time, he said, housing was being lost in areas that the city needed to save if it wanted to keep middle-income families. He said the gap between housing for the rich and housing for the poor had grown in recent years and would continue to grow unless something could be done to stimulate new housing for the middle and lower classes.

''We lose housing from the bottom and replace it at the top,'' he said. ''Nobody is building any of the kind that's being lost.''


WASHINGTON, Feb. 17— Republican Party leaders have begun a series of daylong strategy sessions to develop a plan for becoming the nation's majority party within the next 10 years.

Richard Richards, the Republican national chairman, said that the purpose of the sessions was to anticipate changes in party roles and in the makeup of the electorate so that recent Republican gains could be maintained.

One participant in a session last week, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, said: ''It was a very un-Republican meeting. We kept talking about the future and new ideas.''

Mr. Richards, the Utah Republican who took over as national chairman last month, said that the five sessions would bring in state and county chairmen, Congressmen, poll-takers, producers of television commercials and other party activists. ''We're talking about how we achieve our majority status in the next 10,'' he said. Weakening of Parties

One key element in the discussions has been an attempt to gauge just what the role of political parties will be in the next decade. Mr. Richards remarked that single-issue politics and independent political expenditures were working against strong parties.

One topic on the agenda for all the sessions is ''What must happen during the 1980's in order for the trend away from parties to be reversed.'' Yesterday that issue was a major part of the discussions at a meeting involving Republican county chairman.

Joseph M. Margiotta, the Nassau County Republican leader, said, ''We agreed we have to start making the party more important and getting away from the candidate being the whole thing.'' One device urged at yesterday's meeting, he said, was a system of regular meetings that would bring county chairmen and state chairmen together.

Mr. Richards said that the focus of the meetings, which are to conclude Feb. 24 in Los Angeles, was not only to build upon the successes of the 1980 elections but also upon a trend of increasing Republican Party allegiance that was found in data compiled by Richard Wirthlin, President Reagan's poll-taker. Mr. Withlin confirmed today that his most recent data had found Republican gains among young voters and a significant narrowing of the gap between Republican and Democratic allegiances in the public. Findings of Survey

The most recent New York Times/CBS News Poll indicates that 37 percent of voting-age Americans identify themselves as Democrats and 26 percent as Republicans. Among individuals from 18 to 29 years old, the Democrats' lead was only 33 percent to 26 percent. A year ago, the margin in that age group was 36 percent to 18 percent.

Sharon Sharp, co-chairman of the Republican Party in Cook County, Ill., said that the meeting yesterday also focused on ways for the party to ''widen its base'' and to attract more young voters and members of ethnic groups and trade unions.

''We looked at issues that perhaps we should get more involved in, such as crime,'' she said, discussing how the party hoped to attract such groups.


IN the last decade, torrential rains have swollen and flooded its streams on three occasions required Westchester County to be declared a Federal disaster area. Flood damage following a June 1972 storm amounted to more than $20 million and flood stages were two feet higher in September 1975, when Yonkers, in one example, experienced what was called the most damaging flood in its history.

The Army Corps of Engineers has studied dozens of rivers and streams in the county since the mid-1950's and made 31 reports on flood-control investigations. Now it has concluded its research with a draft report on the Grassy Sprain Brook and the Bronx River.

The draft report recommends that no Federal action is warranted for the area. The decision, based on cost effectiveness, affects the lower stretches of those rivers where they meet in East Yonkers and Bronxville, south of Tuckahoe. A public hearing on the draft report will be held at the Westchester County Center in White Plains on Tuesday at 8 P.M.

Basements in apartment buildings along the Sprain Brook Parkway were flooded, and water inundated commercial buildings on Paxton Avenue in Bronxville in 1972, 1975 and during the third major flood in the summer of 1971. The Bronx River Parkway is often closed at Paxton Avenue and Pondfield Road in Bronxville when the Bronx River overflows its banks. Motorists trapped by rapidly rising waters have had to have been rescued from the roofs of their submerged cars.

Seven alternative plans were put forward by the engineers, involving estimated Federal costs ranging from $2.9 million to nearly $5.5 million. All were discarded. The corps' decision means, in effect, that no Federal money will be forthcoming for structural or nonstructural solutions to future flooding. But until the public hearing, at which Col. Walter M. Smith Jr., district engineer for New York, will preside, the issue is not yet formally sealed.

Reaction from Tuckahoe and Bronxville ranged from disappointment to resignation. Mayor Philip A. White of Tuckahoe said, ''We're disappointed that no Federal funds will be coming in for a job that really needs to be done. But we'll be at the hearing.'' He noted that plans to replace rusted sluice gates in several Bronx River dams would be a comparatively inexpensive way to reduce the impact of floods.

William J. Murphy, a Bronxville village trustee who has followed the corps studies for more than a year, said the corps ''prices itself out of doing the job.''

When it builds a levee or floodwall, Mr. Murphy said, the safety factor, or ''freeboard,'' is ''so super, super, it's out of proportion to the cost.''

''Their level of safety is beyond what NASA would need,'' he said. Guiding corps recommendations for action is a formula it calls a benefit/cost ratio. If the ratio falls below one, as it did for all seven improvement plans in the area, the corps concludes that its recommendations would cost more than the project would be worth.

Estimated annual costs for a project are divided into a figure estimated to be the cost of flood damage to an area if the improvements were not made, according to Stephen Fine, chief of the New York Planning Group of the corps.

A mix of solutions involving floodwalls, levees and channel modifications was considered by the corps engineers and rejected. They also studied various combinations of ''nonstructural'' suggestions that included raising residences so that the first floors were above what they call ''the expected 100-year flood level'' and allowing the basements to flood.

The ''100-year level,'' a standard used repeatedly in the draft report, refers to a flood condition so serious that the corps can envision it happening only once a century.

Four of the seven plans involved Bronxville and East Yonkers. Two of the remaining three affected Tuckahoe, and the seventh laid plans for modifying the ''slope and cross-sectional area'' of both streams.

All plans were predicated on the assumption by local authorities of various costs of easements, rights of way and maintenance incurred by Federal improvements. Those costs ranged from $225,000 in connection with some nonstructural changes in Tuckahoe to $2.8 million for the channel modifications that would have been borne by all three communities.

Floodwalls and levees up to 12 feet above existing ground elevation were planned for the east banks of both rivers between Kimball Avenue and the Bronx River Parkway along the Sprain Brook Parkway and from Palmer Road south to the bridge carrying Conrail tracks across the Bronx River.

Temporary movable ''closures'' to protect houses and apartment buildings such as the Brooklands and Winchester complexes along the Grassy Sprain Brook were studied. While the corps found such closures feasible for the Winchester apartments, they were not recommended for Brooklands, primarily because they ''would have to be installed to a height that would prevent natural light and ventilation from entering the 35 garden apartments.''

In Tuckahoe, the corps studied the idea of capping existing flume walls with a three- to four-foot extension on both sides of the Bronx River where it passes a pharmaceutical plant. It also looked at the possibility of raising 26 residential units ''in the vicinity of Yonkers Avenue, Armorvilla Avenue and Garrett Street a foot and a half higher and protecting other structures in the immediate area with temporary closures.''

Although it said Federal measures ''are not warranted at this time,'' the corps added that ''local officials and affected publics should carefully recognize the flood-damage potential in their communities and take appropriate action to prevent increase of flood-damage potential.''

Mr. Murphy, the Bronxville trustee, said his village was investigating the possibility that Westchester County might help it finance a berm, or earthen wall, along the Bronx River Parkway that would cost ''less than $300,000.''

Illustrations: photo of Bronx River Parkway flooded