And the read option putteth away.

A week after a read-option call went horribly awry in an overtime loss to the Rams, the 49ers used a tamer version of the play to seal a 27-13 win over the Dolphins on Sunday at Candlestick Park.

Clinging to a seven-point lead with less than three minutes left, quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a shotgun snap from the pistol formation, faked a handoff to running back Frank Gore and dashed, untouched, 50 yards around left end for a that-will-do-it touchdown.

The previous Sunday, Kaepernick's airmailed read-option pitch resulted in a St. Louis touchdown and a barrage of criticism for offensive coordinator Greg Roman. That mistake hardly deterred San Francisco on Sunday. With the game in the balance, Roman called a series of read options.

"It was a totally different play, but a similar concept," left tackle Joe Staley said. "We actually ran that play three times in a row. The final one, we stuck with it, we got the right look. We got what we needed, and Kaep took it to the house."

Asked about the play, head coach Jim Harbaugh began by praising his scrutinized assistant: "Yeah," he said, "great call by Greg."

Kaepernick's dash provided a bit of flash, but the grind-it-out victory had all the elements of a San Francisco win circa 2011 under the direction of supplanted quarterback Alex Smith.

The defense limited to Miami to 227 yards, special-teams ace C.J. Spillman recovered a muffed punt that led to a 9-yard touchdown "drive," and Kaepernick was coolly efficient. In his fourth career start, he completed 78 percent of his passes (18-for-23) for 185 yards with no touchdowns and no interceptions. He was sacked four times and completed only one pass of more than 20 yards.

So does this: "I thought he managed the game well," Harbaugh said.

With the 49ers leading 13-6 late in the third quarter, it was actually Gore who highlighted their most impressive drive, a 13-play, 83-yard march capped by Anthony Dixon's 1-yard run with 14:30 left in the game. Dixon's plunge was preceded by Gore's 19-yard run up the middle on the first play of the fourth quarter.

Earlier in the drive, on 2nd-and-20 at San Francisco's 43, Gore caught a short pass in the left flat and began zig-zagging through defenders en route to a 19-yard gain that featured five broken tackles. After he was finally brought down, several 49ers were jumping exuberantly on the sideline and right guard Alex Boone was apologizing for being the man to finally flatten Gore.

After the game, Gore, smiling, said Boone also put him on the ground against the Seahawks and Vikings.

"Frank can break any tackle," Staley said, "but he can't break a tackle by Boone."

Cracked Boone: "Better I hit him than someone else."

The levity was short-lived, however.

Trailing 20-6, the Dolphins responded with a 75-yard drive capped by rookie quarterback Ryan Tannehill's 3-yard pass to tight end Anthony Fasano on 4th-and-goal with 7:55 left.

After a San Francisco three-and-out, the Dolphins regained possession and quickly had a first down at the 49ers' 35-yard line. Against a 5-7 team, memories of the 16-13 overtime loss in St. Louis were unearthed for the 49ers.

"It doesn't matter who we play," safety Donte Whitner said. "We're getting everybody's best effort each and every Sunday, and they use us to measure themselves. St. Louis did the same thing."

On Sunday, though, the defense stiffened with Miami driving for the potential game-tying score. Tannehill threw four straight incompletions from San Francisco's 35. The 49ers gained possession on downs, and moments later came Kaepernick's game-sealing touchdown, which began with a fake to Gore.

"Kaep made a big play," Gore said. "He read it real good. Everyone came to me, and Mr. Everything did his thing."

Actually, on Sunday, Kaepernick didn't do it all, but he did enough to win.

Colin Kaepernick's 50-yard touchdown run sealed the 49ers' 27-13 win over Miami on Sunday. It was his fifth running TD of the season. That quintet:

Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch

Summary: 49ERS 27, DOLPHINS 13 Quarterback seals victory with 50-yard TD on read option  A week after a read-option call went horribly awry in an overtime loss to the Rams, the 49ers used a tamer version of the play to seal a 27-13 win over the Dolphins on Sunday at Candlestick Park.  Clinging to a seven-point lead with less than three minutes left, quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a shotgun snap from the pistol formation, faked a handoff to running back Frank Gore and dashed, untouched, 50 yards around left end for a that-will-do-it touchdown.  The previous Sunday, Kaepernick's airmailed read-option pitch resulted in a St. Louis touchdown and a barrage of criticism for offensive coordinator Greg Roman.  Asked about the play, head coach Jim Harbaugh began by praising his scrutinized assistant: "Yeah," he said, "great call by Greg."  The defense limited to Miami to 227 yards, special-teams ace C.J. Spillman recovered a muffed punt that led to a 9-yard touchdown "drive," and Kaepernick was coolly efficient.  In his fourth career start, he completed 78 percent of his passes (18-for-23) for 185 yards with no touchdowns and no interceptions.  Earlier in the drive, on 2nd-and-20 at San Francisco's 43, Gore caught a short pass in the left flat and began zig-zagging through defenders en route to a 19-yard gain that featured five broken tackles.  After he was finally brought down, several 49ers were jumping exuberantly on the sideline and right guard Alex Boone was apologizing for being the man to finally flatten Gore.  [...] on Sunday, Kaepernick didn't do it all, but he did enough to win.  QB's run TDs Colin Kaepernick's 50-yard touchdown run sealed the 49ers' 27-13 win over Miami on Sunday.


Two years ago, Kara Walker came across a news story in an edition of the 19th-century Atlanta newspaper the Daily Constitution. The year was 1878; the piece described, in excruciating detail, the recent lynching of a black woman. The mob had tugged down the branch of a blackjack tree, tied the woman's neck to it, and then released the branch, flinging her body high into the air.

This terrible fragment of the past has made its way into a large graphite drawing, now hanging inside the Camden Arts Centre, London, where Walker is about to have her first major UK solo show. Like much of her work, the drawing is both beautiful and disturbing: here, in grotesque, cartoonish monochrome, is the blackjack tree, the lynched woman spilling blood, her assailants laughing as she dies. As I stand and stare, Walker tells me why she was so drawn to the story. "It's this completely absurd, extreme, violent situation that required so much perverse ingenuity."

Her London show is not large – just three rooms, with 11 recent works – but it is significant and overdue. Walker is one of the most uncompromising contemporary American artists, not just for the quality of her work – which comprises drawing, film, and her signature medium, silhouettes – but for the fact that her art engages with what many would rather forget: the appalling violence meted out to the black population before and after the American civil war and the abolition of slavery, and the legacy of racism that still shapes the US political agenda.

Another drawing, Urban Relocator, shows a hooded, Klan-like figure next to a bare cotton tree: this is, Walker says, partly inspired by the boll weevil cotton plague that – along with the violence many freed slaves endured – led many black families, including Walker's, to abandon their land in the south for a better life in the northern states. "My own family were once given a piece of land," she says. "I started thinking about what happened to that land; about what made so many people leave the south, whether it was social violence, or domestic terrorism, or economic strife."

Walker is at her most provocative when interrogating the stereotyping that defined race relations in the antebellum south, and still exists today. The largest room in her show is lined with "wall samplers": the cut-out silhouettes that show figures engaged in violent or exaggerated acts: a man bending down to fellate an oversized phallus; a woman in a wide-skirted dress holding a severed head. The effect is to make us question not only the cultural representations of black people (there is, as Walker points out, a whiff of "minstrels and blackface" about some of the figures) but also our assumptions about how skin colour defines anyone's physical characteristics and behaviour.

Walker has exhibited widely in the US, and at 27 (she's now 43) became the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious MacArthur Foundation's "genius grant" scholarship. But she has also caused controversy. Exhibitions of her work often provoke strong feelings: staff at a library in Newark, New Jersey, recently reacted with outrage when one of her drawings was displayed there, prompting the head librarian to cover it up. And back when she received the MacArthur grant, she was lambasted by several older African-American artists, including Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell. "There were two strains of criticism," Walker says. "One was about the work, and who was looking at it, and me feeding into the viewing audience's preconceived ideas about black people. And the other was that I was just some highfalutin so-and-so."

Her father, the artist Larry Walker, published a letter in her defence. It was under his tutelage that she had first decided to become an artist: she started drawing and painting when she was three. She says neither of her parents has ever felt completely comfortable with her work – her mother walked out of a screening of Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale, a sexually explicit shadow-puppet film that features in the London show – but her father argued that his generation of black artists had fought to give future generations the right to make art of any sort. "He was saying, basically, that I should be able to do whatever the hell I want. I think that's what I'm always battling against with my work – part of me wants to resist the pull to be doing what's expected of me as a black artist."

It was while studying art as an undergraduate in Atlanta that Walker first felt this pull: an expectation, from her professors and fellow students alike, that as a black artist she should be striving to represent the "black experience" positively. "I was making big paintings, with mythological themes. When I started painting black figures, the white professors were relieved, and the black students were like, 'She's on our side'. These are the kinds of issues that a white male artist just doesn't have to deal with."

A key moment came when Walker discovered Adrian Piper, the conceptual artist and philosopher who, in the 1970s, made a series of performance works featuring herself as an androgynous, racially indeterminate young man. "It was the first voice that resonated with me, in talking about race with objectivity and sternness," she says. "Until then, I only knew 'black art' in the romantic sense – that it was only about positive representations of African American life."

Walker began to think about what she really wanted to say. She was born in Stockton, California, and moved to an Atlanta suburb at the age of 13, when her father took a job there. After liberal California, the racial tensions of the south came as a shock. "I just didn't get the rules," she says. "I didn't know what the story was that made people behave in very particular ways that I thought were prescripted and unnatural. I started looking for my own point of origin: maybe the point of origin was being American, or being black, or being a woman. I thought, 'I'll start with the foundation of this idea of a place, of America, and then work my way forward.'"

Walker sees a direct line between the racist historical attitudes she examines in her work and current events. She took a road trip last year with her daughter from Brooklyn, where she lives, to the southern states. They visited diners where the heads of old white men turned to give them "the 20-second stare". They swam in a motel pool, watching the other (white) bathers suddenly vanish; Walker heard a small girl say to her father: "I thought there were no niggers here."

Then there is the rise of the Tea Party movement, and the distasteful obsession with Barack Obama's skin colour. "There's so much suspicion around having a biracial president," she says, "around Obama's presence on the world stage – the fact that the Tea Party gets coverage as anything other than a fringe group. There's nothing Obama can say or do as a black man that they're [willing] to hear."

Walker is by now used to viewers being discomfited not only by the fact that her work dares to speak openly about race and identity, but that it may even be making fun of such viewers. "It makes people queasy," she says. "And I like that queasy feeling."

Summary: Kara Walker's racially charged art provokes strong feelings – not least from other black American artists. Laura Barnett meets her


Ben Fowlie launched the Camden International Film Festival in 2005 to showcase the bounty of stellar documentary films from New England and beyond. The Maine festival is now recognized as one of the top 25 international documentary festivals, and one of the 12 best small-town film festivals in the United States. Running Sept. 26-29, this year’s CIFF presents more than 70 features and shorts. “All use a myriad of both new and old techniques to do one thing: share a compelling story,” says Fowlie, who also programs The DocYard series at the Brattle Theatre.

Director Zachary Heinzerling will be at the CIFF with the opening-night film, “Cutie and the Boxer,” a revealing portrait of famed boxing painter Ushio Shinohara and artist Noriko Shinohara, who many years ago left Japan for New York and still struggle to make a living, stay true to their creative voices, and juggle their 40-year marriage and careers.

A highlight of the CIFF is Then and Now, with filmmakers presenting classic and new documentaries. Barbara Kopple will be on hand with her latest, “Running From Crazy,” about actress Mariel Hemingway coming to terms with the legacy of mental illness and suicide in her famous family (she’s the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway), as well as Kopple’s Oscar winner from 1977, “Harlan County, USA.” Peter Davis will attend with his 1974 Oscar-winning documentary, “Hearts and Minds,” about the war in Vietnam.

Other highlights include a new film from Maine filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, whose “Down East,” from 2012, depicted efforts to revive a Maine fish-packing plant. This year the directors will present “Night Labor,” which follows a 46-year-old Downeaster during his transition from independent clam digger by day to laborer on a factory night shift.

Jillian Schlesinger’s “Maidentrip” chronicles 14-year-old Laura Dekker’s pursuit to be the youngest person to sail around the world alone, an effort that included a yearlong battle with Dutch authorities. “Moon Rider,” from Denmark’s Daniel Dencik, is a coming-of-age story about Rasmus Quaade’s struggles to become a professional bike rider. Timely subject matter is evident in “Town Hall,” as directors Sierra Pettengill and Jamila Wig-not offer an inside look into the lives of two Tea Party activists from Pennsylvania. Cullen Hoback’s “Terms and Conditions May Apply” examines the things that can happen to Internet users once they click on “I Agree.” The screening will be followed by a panel talk with Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, Shahid Buttar, of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and Amie Stepanovich, from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“It’s exciting to us that almost all of our films are represented by their filmmakers, both national and international, who wish to share their work with such a smart, engaged local audience and the top industry who come out for our festival year after year,” says Caroline von Kuhn, CIFF managing director. She comes to Camden from the Film Society of Lincoln Center and has produced industry panels for the Tribeca Film Festival.

A unique component of the CIFF is the Points North Documentary Forum. Now in its fifth year, the three-day event runs Sept. 27-29 and offers filmmakers a conference within the larger festival. For the first time this year, the fest hosts an Engagement Summit for filmmakers and Maine-based nonprofits with the goal of using documentaries to advance social and community issues. The inaugural event is on Aging in Maine, featuring a daylong closed-door strategic summit between filmmakers and professionals on Sept. 28. During the festival, there will also be an Aging in Maine sidebar of film screenings, including Banker White and Anna Fitch’s “The Genius of Marian.” White, who’ll attend, follows his mother, Pam White, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease as she struggles to retain a sense of self.

French movies for free outdoors? No, not in Paris but at MIT, on Kresge Lawn. Christophe Honoré’s “Love Songs” (“Les Chansons d’amour”), starring Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, and Clotilde Hesme, screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Get there early; Snap Four, a jazz manouche group, will be performing at 6:45 p.m.

“Letters to Jackie: Remembering President Kennedy,” from Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Bill Couturie (“Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt”), will have its Boston premiere Tuesday at the John F. Kennedy Library. Based on Ellen Fitzpatrick’s book “Letters to Jackie: Condolences of a Grieving Nation,” the film features 20 celebrities, including Viola Davis, Channing Tatum, Laura Linney, and Anne Hathaway, reading letters sent to Jacqueline Kennedy in the two months after President Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. The JFK Library houses the letters in its archives and provided Fitzpatrick access to them. A discussion with letter writers and others involved with the film follows the screening.

Summary: Ben Fowlie launched the Camden International Film Festival in 2005 to showcase the bounty of stellar documentary films from New England and beyond. It’s now recognized as one of the top 25 international documentary festivals, and one of the 12 best small-town film festivals in the United States. Running Sept. 26-29, this year’s CIFF presents more than 70 features and shorts. “All use a myriad of both new and old techniques to do one thing — share a compelling story,” says Fowlie, who also programs The DocYard series at the Brattle Theatre.


After unveiling the design for a new $700 million glass tower that will replace 7 World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein confessed there's one small hitch. He has no tenants. But Silverstein - who controlled 7 WTC as well as the twin towers - insisted he isn't worried about finding companies to fill the building. "Three years is too much of a lead time," he said, referring to the projected 2005 completion date. "We have a few years to go" before he must begin looking for tenants. Under normal circumstances, New York developers try to lease about half of a new office tower before beginning construction. But yesterday was far from ordinary. Public officials like Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki flocked to the site just north of Ground Zero and spoke of the new 7 WTC as a symbol of the rebuilding effort more than a reflection of current demand for office space, which is low. "For those that say we aren't going fast enough, just take a look at the digging here," said Bloomberg, standing just north of the pit at Ground Zero. The original 7 World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, nearly eight hours after burning debris from the twin towers rained on it. No one inside 7 WTC died. The new building, designed by architect David Childs of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, will be taller and narrower than the original so Greenwich Street can be reopened. At a sacrifice of 300,000 rentable square feet from the old design, Childs called this concession "a gift back to the city" from Silverstein. The new building's site is bounded by Barclay, Greenwich, Vesey and Washington streets. The former building reached as far east as West Broadway, blocking Greenwich Street. The new building will feature twice the required fireproofing on its steel frame and reinforced concrete walls around its structural core. Its stairways also will be 20% wider than required - to allow for a more rapid evacuation. Like its forerunner, it will house a Con Edison substation in its base. The substation will take up the first 10 stories, and a new park will sit across Greenwich Street. Foundation work already has started on the 1.

6 million-square-foot tower. "This building, 7 World Trade Center, is an important symbol. But more than that, it's a concrete step," Pataki said. Silverstein's $800 million insurance policy on 7 WTC will cover most of the construction costs, the developer said. If more financing is needed, he will use tax-exempt Liberty Bonds. Silverstein and a group of insurers are battling in court over his coverage for the twin towers. He will receive between $3.

7 billion, which he has vowed to use to rebuild about 10 million square feet of office space. The Port Authority could become the lead tenant of the new 7 WTC, though the agency and Silverstein have not reached an agreement, sources said. The PA had its headquarters in the twin towers, leasing about 800,000 square feet there. The agency has short-term offices near Union Square, but still needs a permanent home. GRAPHIC TALE OF 7 WTC TAPE. OLD. Height 47 Stories, 616 feet. Total square footage 1.

9 million. Floor size 48,000 square feet. Notable tenants Salomon Smith Barney, Naic Securities, Standard Chartered Bank, ITT Hartford Insurance Group, Mayor's Office of Emergency Management. Completion date March 1997. Architect Emery Roth & Sons. NEW. Height 52 stories, 750 feet. Total square footage 1.

66 million. Floor size 39,750 square feet. Notable Tenants none. Completion date end of 2005 (projected). Architect Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Summary:
By ERIC HERMAN and GREG GITTRICH
   DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
   After unveiling the design for a new $700 million glass tower that will replace 7 World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein confessed there's one small hitch. He has no tenants.
   But Silverstein - who controlled 7 WTC as well as the twin towers - insisted he isn't worried about finding companies to fill the building.
   "Three years is too


FRAMINGHAM — Many people plugged into the Boston cultural world in the last 50 or 60 years will want to see “Barbara Swan: Reflected Self” at Danforth Art because Swan, a portraitist, painted family and friends.

It’s like a reunion. There’s poet Anne Sexton! Luise Vosgerchian, beloved professor of music at Harvard! Painter Bernard Chaet! And there, as babies, are Swan’s children — Aaron Fink, now a successful painter himself, and Joanna Fink, director of Alpha Gallery, depicted with an intimacy and directness that seems loving yet pragmatic.

Swan, who died in 2003 at 80, deserves examination. In the 1940s, she studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with Karl Zerbe. The Museum School then was a hotbed of Boston Expressionism, a style known for its brilliant, brushy colors, its attention to matters of spirit and psyche, and its adherence to figuration even as abstraction swept the art world.

Because of her academic origins, early paint handling, concern with the figure, and tart color sense, we might categorize Swan as a Boston Expressionist. But her early work, from the 1950s, is less tortured, less concerned with the upheavals of life, than that of proponents of the style such as Zerbe and Jack Levine. As a portraitist, Swan focused on her subjects rather than her own neuroses or spiritual dilemmas. That came later.

The show, organized by Danforth Art’s assistant curator, Jessica Roscio, follows certain through-lines in Swan’s career, notably the concerns and negotiations of being a woman artist in the mid to late 20th century. Roscio suggests that feminine and domestic themes, though not discussed, were more accepted by the Boston Expressionists than by the generally more machismo Abstract Expressionists.

But the show hinges on the incisive portraits; Swan conveys a great deal with very few, graceful lines.

There’s a particularly telling early pair of the artist and her mother, on pages that faced each other in her sketchbook: “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (Clara Swan)” depicts a stern, solid older woman, arms crossed and head tilted. Her eyes penetrate. A smile — of satisfaction or triumph — begins to play on her lips. In her self-portrait, Swan’s shoulders slump, her eyes are weary. She looks defeated in her mother’s gaze.

Swan always began with the eyes — so her husband, Alan (Alpha Gallery’s president), told Roscio. You can see it in many portraits. The eyes anchor all else. Before feminists theorized about the gaze, Swan was already turning it back on the viewer through the astute eyes of the women she drew. Those who don’t directly appraise us turn inward — you can see it in a drawing, inventively composed from above, of artist Lois Tarlow.

In the painted portraits, Swan sometimes works too hard, as if she hasn’t found her element. Even vibrant colors feel muddy; forms, especially bodies, lack the crisp energy seen in her drawings.

But then we get to those baby pictures. In the drawing “Joanna and Aaron,” the exactness of detail eschews sentimentality. The painting “Baby (Aaron at 4 Months)” has the infant riding in his father’s upraised hand, eyes wide with that strange combination of alertness and total unknowing that characterizes a baby’s gaze. His skin is all reds and gray-blues, and the background like burnished copper. The painting glows and coheres.

Barbara Swan’s “The Nest’’ at Danforth Art.

There’s also a terrific overhead depiction of a babe nursing at his mother’s breast in “The Nest,” in both a sketch and a painting. Here the painting outdoes the drawing, as Swan jiggers the composition and repositions the mother’s hand.

Over time, Swan’s paintings grew less brushy, less expressionistic — but more succinct in execution, like her drawings. She took to working on still lifes. These, Roscio suggests, were a kind of self-portrait, in their investigation of the feminine and their use of objects that held intimate meaning for the artist. They’re also examinations of perception, as images reflect in and refract through glass bottles.

Those objects — art historical reproductions, images from pop culture, dolls — represent ways women have been depicted through time. The bottles bend and fracture these symbols of femininity.

In “A Doll Named Keturah,” Swan positions a treasured, Victorian-era doll and three bottles before a print of Edvard Munch’s “Girls on the Bridge.” We see one girl’s disaffected face, and the hallucinatory swirl of water and shore beyond. The doll looks stiff and overwhelmed, cloaked in black. Leaning against a bottle, she fractures and she doubles. She’s riveting, and yet somehow a throwaway, at the edge of the painting.

In the background, a hand holds a paintbrush to a canvas — as if the artist is looking in a mirror, painting a self-portrait. If so, she’s putting her inner life to paint, revisiting a strain of Boston Expressionism, and revealing some of her own twists, cracks, and vulnerabilities.

Swan painted “A Doll Named Keturah” in 1981. In the manner in which it unpacks images of femininity, it’s a relic of its era. Still, there are enough uncertainties in it — particularly in the haunted face and posture of that doll — that it’s no pat feminist palaver. It says something about the artist, and her understanding of art and herself. Looking at these things, she finds a hall of mirrors. And that, today, continues to compel.

Summary: Many people plugged into the Boston cultural world in the last 50 or 60 years will want to see “Barbara Swan: Reflected Self” at Danforth Art because Swan, a portraitist, painted family and friends. Swan, who died at 80 in 2003, deserves examination. In the 1940s, she studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with Karl Zerbe. The Museum School then was a hotbed of Boston Expressionism, a style known for its brilliant, brushy colors, its attention to matters of spirit and psyche, and its adherence to figuration even as abstraction swept the art world.


Detail from Henri Matisse: The Sheaf. Click to enlarge. Photograph: Henri Matisse/DACS 2014

I have vivid memories of the Matisse retrospective show that opened the Hayward Gallery in 1968. I had mostly seen only reproductions of the great paintings and cutouts, and it was astonishing, to discover what a brilliant colourist and draughtsman he was. I went to the Vence chapel in Provence in the mid‑70s and was similarly bowled over, as everyone is. Shortly afterwards I saw the catalogue for an American show of the cutouts that made me want to do a cutout show one day. Sometimes these ideas can sit at the back of your mind for a surprisingly long time and now, nearly 40 years later, we're doing it.

Colour was always fundamental to Matisse, but the originality of taking these sheets of coloured paper, using an almost childlike process of juxtaposition of flat surfaces to create schematic images, was really unprecedented in art. But while the cutouts are the great late flowering of his work, it did take quite a while for them to be appreciated. They were shown in the Salon de Paris in the early 50s and were largely dismissed as the wanderings of an old man. The first significant show, of a very limited number of pieces, was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, seven years after his death. The Tate bought The Snail in 1962, which at the time was a very bold move because there would have been plenty of people arguing that they should use the money to buy a classic painting from the 1930s. The Snail has been a cornerstone for the Tate ever since, but, in general, we didn't buy often enough or early enough. Normally, if you want to see Matisse you have to go to Paris or New York, but this show will be by far the most extensive and important exhibition of the cutouts since his death. All the important works will be there and will reveal the evolution of his ambition. He started using the cutouts as a way of making books and illustrations, and then they became independent works in their own right. He saw a potential in them that no one else had ever seen. And because he was by this time infirm, it gave him an opportunity to work on a much grander scale than he could as a painter. Suddenly they begin to occupy a wall and become almost environmental in scale.

It was through this work that Matisse realised his only great architectural, quasi-public and, in this case, religious commission: the chapel in Vence. He had always wanted to do a big decorative scheme, as is the tradition of painters in France, and he used the cutout as the means by which to achieve his ambition. It has to be one of the great works made anywhere at any time. The Sistine ceiling or the Vence chapel? I wouldn't want to choose between them.

It is not by chance that there hasn't been a substantial cutouts show for nearly 40 years. Our initial task as curators was persuading the owners of these relatively fragile works to allow them to travel and to part with them for many months. Technological progress has made the process of moving works of art round the world very much more secure than it once was, but you ultimately persuade people to lend by convincing them that the show itself is going to be sufficiently well done, and that by bringing these works together we will gain an understanding of Matisse's methods, and an appreciation of the beauty of the works themselves, that you simply couldn't get by going from museum to museum.

And that is what you will get. Matisse was working ahead of his time for most of his career and these late cutouts established a new language that artists have been working hard to digest ever since. They come close to work that might be made by a child in their sense of freshness and freedom, yet they are also very, very carefully composed and are works of art based on enormous restraint and experience of how colours fit together. A curator doesn't often say "once in a lifetime", but I don't think we'll ever again be able to assemble a cutouts show with such quantity and quality.

• Nicholas Serota is director of the Tate art museums and co-curator of the exhibition.

Summary: The co-curator of Henri Matisse: The Cutouts at Tate Modern on the great late flowering of the artist's work


In the latest in a series of stories about Apple’s partnership with GT Advanced Technologies GTAT , a leading producer of synthetic sapphire, the Wall Street Journal‘s Daisuke Wakabayashi quotes unnamed “people familiar with the matter” saying that Apple is considering using the material to replace Corning’s GLW Gorilla Glass on the screens of iPhones expected to released in September.

Mid August seems a little late for Apple to still be “considering” such a change.

But that’s not Wakabayashi’s point. His point, which he makes repeatedly, relentlessly, is that sapphire is expensive.

Quoting from his piece (emphasis mine):

– New iPhone: A Sapphire Screen and a Higher Cost — Apple Considers Using Harder Material in Pricier Models — Manufacturing synthetic sapphire is costly — Analyst Mr. Virey estimates that a sapphire screen could cost $16 to produce, compared with about $3 for Gorilla Glass — Apple is considering using sapphire screens in more-expensive models of the two new, larger iPhones — Some analysts expect Apple to charge more for the phones than previous new models, because of increased component costs. — If the use of sapphire leads to fewer broken screens, Apple may save money in warranty costs. But Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi says those savings likely wouldn’t offset sapphire’s higher cost. — If Apple doesn’t raise prices, the higher cost could erode the iPhone’s profit margins — A few small smartphone manufacturers have already introduced handsets with sapphire screens. Britain’s Vertu Corp., which makes luxury phones costing more than $10,000

Wakabayashi waits until the penultimate paragraph to mention that Apple and GT might have found a way to reduce those costs:

“By forming boules more than 50% larger than produced by current machines, Apple and GT aim to drive down the price of sapphire and close the gap with glass.”

Thanks to the crew at Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity for spotting it.

LINK: New iPhone: A Sapphire Screen and a Higher Cost

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

Summary: If you're the Wall Street Journal and the subject is Apple, the answer is 11.


The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Saturday September 20 2003

In the article below, we said that Jonathan Miller's production of Der Rosenkavalier was revived at Covent Garden this spring, when it was, in fact, staged by ENO at the Coliseum between February 28 and April 6.

"I love getting stripped to my waist," says Jonathan Miller. "I love putting on a visor and letting the sparks fly with a great big welding torch. Then going off for a big rough breakfast with a handyman. It's undeniably a macho thing." Is it hard to weld? "No. The guy who taught me said: 'If you can light a cigarette without setting yourself on fire, you can weld.' I," says Miller, with a touch of pride, "can weld."

Of all Miller's incarnations - satirical young Turk in Beyond the Fringe, critically panned theatre director, critically panned opera director, endlessly revived opera director, critically re-evaluated theatre director, unwilling though knighted national treasure, winning defender of anglophone analytical philosophy, writer, doctor, photographer, painter, TV presenter and director, bloke who rolls his eyes when called a polymath and shakes his head when called a renaissance man - this latest, the rugged 69-year-old welder getting sunburned for his art, is the most unlikely.

And yet, when he's got the afternoon off from directing operas in Santa Fe or putting Christopher Plummer through his paces as King Lear in Ontario, this is precisely where Jonathan Miller's creative juices have been flowing for the past four years. He'll nip off to a scrapyard, return with a rusting haul of intriguing bits of metal, and then spend hours welding RSJs to other bits until the results please him. And soon, with a bit of luck, they will be pleasing other people: because they are to go on show in London. "That's a possibility," says Miller. "Though the greater possibility is that I'll get a mauling from the press. As usual."

Miller learned to weld while staying at the adobe Californian desert home of art dealers Claire and Eugene Thaw, a place fringed with sage brush and mesquite. It was these friends' handyman, Jim Johnson, who taught Miller to weld. It has become an unlikely passion.

He's not yet read Don DeLillo's novel, Underworld, with its storyline about an artist in the desert respraying rusting old B-52 aircraft as a post-cold war conceptual-art project, though when I tell him about it he looks eager enough to head off to the American desert with a spray can. That said, such an artistic project would would be too freighted with clunking symbolism for Miller's taste. His art, and that is what he calls it, is formalist, eschewing any overt symbolism. "I get a satisfaction from the formal play of shapes in all the visual art I've done, be it photographs, collages or sculpture or arranging objets trouvés at home," he explains.

He has had these rusting assemblages shipped back to his north London home, prior to having them exhibited in St John's Wood. As Miller stands in the impromptu sculpture park that is his front garden, he is surrounded by the fruits of his welding. There's a lovely cataclysm of panel beating gone wrong in the long grass, a seeming carburettor with twiddly bits on the other side of the path, and a plaque of artfully arranged metal pieces hanging in the porch. They are all rather beautiful. Do they have names? "This one's called Next One. And so's this." No, they don't have names.

Only a philistine would take these rusting lumps of metal for discarded car parts abandoned by some sociopath and phone the council. But there aren't many philistines round here. His old Beyond the Fringe chum Alan Bennett, who lives opposite, probably casts an appreciative eye over them during his strolls. Critically mauled Martin Amis may dream of hefting them at the man from the TLS. It's not hard to imagine neighbours Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin leaning over the wall and debating which piece bears the greater resemblance to Russian constructivist Kasimir Malevich's collages and which to English sculptor Anthony Caro's butch girder sculptures.

"I know your face," says a passing lady to whom Miller has given directions to Primrose Hill. "That's nice," he says, looking away and returning to the sculptures. Is his artistic quest for some kind of significant form? "I don't really hold with that Roger Fry bollocks," he says, not unpleasantly. But does he have some sort of goal when he puts these things together? How does he know when he's finished? "Quite simply when the results please me, and it would be hard to say when that happens." But he's a formalist artist. "Oh yes, I have a modernist sensibility in this."

As he talks, we walk into the house, the same graceful Victorian pile near Regent's Park that he bought in the early 60s for £8,000, with a mortgage offered on the basis of reviews he had received for Beyond the Fringe. There are more rusting assemblages in the hall. Someone's going to bruise themselves a treat in that hall before long. Bubble-wrapped, framed collages, also destined for exhibition, are propped up all over the place.

Lining the stairs are framed architectural drawings, including one done for Napoleon, that Miller claims are influential on his current work. "They're all unconscious influences, of course - as are Morandi, Schwitters, Italian futurists, the Russian constructivists, and lots of others artists I admire." Isn't that Freudian? "Oh no, it's the opposite of Freud," says Miller imperiously as he rounds the landing on the way to his studio. "These influences aren't repressed; rather, there isn't enough space on my hard drive to keep all the influences there, so I forget them. I've just been reading a biography of Coleridge, how the poet forgot what he had read but how these influences cropped up in Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner. But the writer found Coleridge's library records so that he could reconstruct these influences even though Coleridge had forgotten."

Something similar happens with Miller's work, and he loves reflecting on that role of forgetting in creation. He works on sculptures or collages with no thought as to which progenitors are influencing him, and then, when they're finished, he will see how they are influenced by his favourite artists or architectural draughtsmen. There's a box of bottles in his study, for instance, which Miller only realised owed a debt to Giorgio Morandi's etchings when it was done. "It's a 3D Morandi, I now see. I didn't know that while I was making it."

Most of the stuff Miller uses in his art is rubbish. He shows me a 40-year-old boxed assemblage featuring corks and a scrubbing brush without bristles. Four years ago, he produced a book of his photographs - ripped posters, stained walls, appealingly draped tarpaulins. He wanted to call it Absolute Rubbish. The publishers wouldn't let him, so he called it Nowhere in Particular instead.

"I'm interested in the overlooked and the negligible. That's where some of the most interesting breakthroughs in art and science come from. Until Freud, nobody thought about the significance of slips of the tongue. And now we think: how stupid not to have thought of that before. I make no grand claims for my work, but it seems to me to come from a similar noticing of the negligible.

"For 40 years I've been taking photographs with a cheap automatic camera, often of ripped-up posters. Sometimes, I whip out a Stanley knife and cut up posters from walls to make collages from later. I'll put them in plastic bags and hope I don't get too closely questioned at customs. I'm Jack the Stripper.

"One day, I was in Florence trimming a poster, and policeman came up to me: 'Che fai?' [What are you up to?] he asked. 'E arte!' [It's art] I replied, and he nodded and wandered off. I've always loved fragmented typography." The police round here probably wouldn't have deferred to such an artistic project so readily. "Probably not."

Sadly, Miller's appropriations of the negligible, his resuscitations of the abandoned and his recycling of decaying rubbish have so far been neglected. "The book Nowhere in Particular fell stillborn from the press. Nobody was interested," he says. His exhibitions of collages in 1991 was scarcely reviewed. What will be the critical fate of his looming exhibition? "I suspect Brian Sewell [the London Evening Standard's art critic] is hardly likely to go to such a remote place as St John's Wood. I don't have any great hopes of being reviewed for this. But then I do tend to get mauled in the press. I've said it many times that when I first directed operas I was regarded as a vandal, and now I'm seen as a fossil."

Miller now complains that he finds it hard to get work in British theatre or opera. "I got knighted last year, which was a mixed blessing. It was 'Take this and shut up'. I can't get work from the RSC, the National or ENO. Yet when my productions are revived - my Mikado is in its 18th year and is very popular - they get reviewed as classics." And there is some justice to his complaint: when, for instance, his production of Der Rosenkavalier was revived at Covent Garden in the spring, this originally derided production got a five-star review in the Guardian and was elsewhere hailed for being suggestively set at the time of its writing - just on the lip of the abyss of the first world war.

Is his metalwork a replacement for the theatre and operas he should have been directing here? "No, it's not that simple. And in any case I get work elsewhere. I'm off to Florence next week, after I've finished work on a TV series about atheism, to direct a revival of my production of Figaro. Later I'm directing Lear at the Lincoln Centre in New York. The metalwork is just something new for me, another interest. I am always filled with enthusiasms for new projects, like a little boy being asked to come out to play. It's hard to say no or not to yield to new projects."

In Miller's kitchen, there are some prints by his son Tom, a photographer, that seem to share the same formalist predilections as those of his father. What does Tom say about his work? Miller shrugs in imitation of Tom's response: "'S'all right, I suppose.' But," he adds fondly, "what is a son to say about his father's work?"

Good question. Miller is enthusiastic about his own father's art, some of which is displayed in another room. His dad was the founder of child psychiatry in Britain, and also produced likenesses of some of his patients. There's a red chalk drawing from 1921 of a patient undergoing hypnosis, and a bust of another patient who suffered wartime trauma.

"When I get called an intellectual or a renaissance man or a polymath I think about how my parents would have been embarrassed to be called such vulgar things. they were middle-class, cultivated people - my mother was a very good novelist - to whom knowing about books and art and speaking languages was normal, as well as taking an interest in science and philosophy. They were just educated people who had a lot of interests. It's normal. And so it is for me. I'm just normally sophisticated, like my dear old dad and my long-dead mother, but I'm increasingly ashamed of the vulgarity around me."

· Jonathan Miller's metal constructions and paper collages go on show at the Boundary Gallery, 98 Boundary Road, London NW8 on September 26. Tel: 020-7624 1126.

Summary: Jonathan Miller has directed plays and operas, written, acted, presented and painted. But what he really enjoys these days, he tells Stuart Jeffries, is welding together lumps of old junk.


Jean-Antoine Watteau's painting The Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717) is the most voluptuous paradise in European art. It hangs in the Louvre, and transports you from the Right Bank to a tropic of love. A crowd of people, perfumed and primped up, worship Venus; pink cupids float in the ether.

But what makes this utopia so utopian is the landscape, barely touched into existence. A ripe, Rubensian foreground, a melting Leonardo-esque background, misty water - Watteau's painted world is a dream just on the point of fading to oblivion.

It is the tenuousness of Watteau's vision, its exquisite painterly tension of fulfilment and loss, that holds us. Nothing is certain in this painting - it is both elegy and idyll. It may depict arrival or departure from the island; evening or dawn; or, to borrow the title of Hogarth's far less ethereal 18th-century portrayal of sex, Before or After.

Watteau's rococo fantasia dwells on a myth that has snared western artists for centuries: the island of love. Venus, or Aphrodite, lived on the isle of Cythera, or perhaps it was Cyprus. In the 15th century, Botticelli painted her arriving there in the work known as The Birth of Venus, floating over the green sea on a scallop shell, the air heady with pink blossoms, the sea warmly sensual, the island wooded and green.

Leonardo da Vinci imagined the island of love more disturbingly. It was a place where ships were shattered as sailors feasted their eyes on the beauty of Venus. "Many there have been who, impelled by her loveliness, have had their ships and rigging broken upon the rocks which lie amidst the seething waves."

They have good reason to be obsessed with this landscape of sensual delight: "Here the beauty of some pleasant hill invites the wandering mariners to take their ease among its flowery verdure, where the zephyrs continually come and go, filling with sweet odours the island and the encompassing sea. Alas! How many ships have foundered there!"

Watteau synthesises and restates the myth of Cythera in his great history painting. He expresses the conjunction of landscape and desire perfectly in the yielding softness of his painted space. When you look at the figures, they are firmly drawn, almost hatched like Hogarth etchings, but the world they inhabit is all hints.

In April 1768, the explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville discovered what he believed to be a living, real version of the isle of Venus: the southern pacific island of Tahiti. Bougainville was not the first European to land on Tahiti: the British sailor Samuel Wallis beat him by a few months. But it was the Frenchman who took imaginative possession of the island and its people. This place was paradise on earth, he reported. He named it New Cythera. Sailors' stories of uninhibited Tahitian women mingled with the myth of Cythera to create a paradise of the mind.

Denis Diderot, champion of reason and enlightenment, wrote in 1773 a Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, in which he portrays Tahiti as a utopia of libertarian sexuality. For Diderot, the Tahitians, free from Christian superstition, are able to take rational, healthy pleasure in one another's bodies. Far from driving them mad, or turning them into pox-ridden imbeciles, sex makes them happy. Pagan love was the Enlightenment's favourite fantasy. Watteau's Pilgrimage to Cythera stands near the beginning of this rococo revolution.

Tahiti was a place the Enlightenment would have had to invent if it had not existed - and the Enlightenment did invent this place as an exotic corner of the European imagination, as opposed to somewhere real people lived. It was a libertine paradise where love was flower-trimmed and natural: Don Giovanni with a happy ending, Justine without the pain. The reality of 18th-century sexual freedom was brothels, pox, foundlings. Tahiti or New Cythera was a much lovelier image, a fantasy the greatest intellectuals could share with the common British sailors who, in 1789, miserable to have to sail away after six months on the island, cast adrift their captain, William Bligh, and turned the Bounty back to Tahiti and love.

Watteau had painted the fantasy of Cythera; within years of the first European trespass, artists were portraying New Cythera. William Hodges sailed with Captain James Cook on his second Pacific voyage, as official artist of the Resolution, arriving at Tahiti in August 1773 - just six years after the first European saw it. He was sent there as a highly regarded artist, trained by the classical landscape painter Richard Wilson.

The paintings Hodges made throughout the Pacific and, later, in India can be seen in William Hodges 1744-1797: The Art of Exploration, about to open at the National Maritime Museum in London. In Tahiti, like everyone else, he found paradise. It was not unblemished. Cook visited when Tahiti was at war with neighbouring Moorea, and Hodges realistically painted massed war canoes heading out to sea. But this documentary painting contrasts with his significantly titled Tahiti Revisited, painted in England in 1776 and synthesising his memories of the island in a grandly conceived landscape, much as Richard Wilson painted scenes in Italy.

Tahiti Revisited is the first painting to locate paradise in the real landscape of this Polynesian island. Mountains rise ruggedly, caught in a golden light; tall, swaying trees shade a bubbling inlet, where people bathe naked. One lies face upward in the water, while friends dry themselves next to a Polynesian sacred stone carving, a tiki.

Hodges's accurate - or at least recognisable - depiction of a tiki should make us think twice about automatically dismissing his image as a European colonial wet dream. Tahiti was always stranger than that. It was associated with revolution and mutiny: Diderot's libertine version of the Noble Savage is part of the cultural origins of the French Revolution, and the Bounty mutineers proved there was something violent, something dangerous about this island's promise of a golden age. All this is in Hodges's painting. Tahiti Revisited suggests a memory of the island, a nostalgia; it possesses the same air of loss, of the fragility of dreams, that scents Watteau's Pilgrimage to Cythera.

Perhaps the idyll of Tahiti exists only in memory, which remakes it, adding a landscape sensibility formed by Claude and Wilson, abstracting experience into languid poetry. Perhaps the only people who ever truly tried to grasp this elusive image were the Bounty mutineers, and they ended up hanging from a gallows, or skulking in the rocky remoteness of Pitcairn Island - no paradise.

The startling thing about this 18th-century British painting is that its central elements - naked beauty, bathing, woods, Polynesian artefacts - are all iconographically identical to the themes of the paintings, drawings, writings and carvings made on Tahiti more than a century later by Paul Gauguin. Gauguin was the inheritor of an idyll fully formed before the French Revolution. Essentially, nothing had changed in the European fantasy of Tahiti when he sailed there in 1891.

Almost everything, however, had changed in Tahiti's reality. Readiness to trade with Europeans made Tahiti a favourite stopping place of whalers in the 19th century and opened its culture to the devastations of commerce and Christianity. Gauguin was shocked by the results. Instead of the happy, innocent pagan paradise he had been led to expect by popular literature directly descended from Enlightenment utopianism, he found corrupted, westernised victims of the missionaries, ruled by a puppet king.

His first paintings of Tahiti are realistic. The three boys in The Meal wear European clothes, as does his lover in Tehamana Has Many Ancestors. Gauguin is not the inventor of Tahiti's myth. He is its mourner. Arriving to indulge himself like a Bounty mutineer, he created instead shadowed, sinister paintings that grieve for the fall of innocence. Far from blandly erotic nudes, his Tahitian women are isolated, brooding figures. They are aware of being watched. They are haunted by the past.

Death infects Gauguin's paradise: he accepts his own death (which he found on the Marquesas, north east of Tahiti, in 1903) as the price of the greatest paintings about Eden since Watteau. In Nevermore, painted on Tahiti in 1897 and today in the Courtauld Gallery, a sinister blue and green bird watches a woman lying in a powerfully decorated room. Outside, two figures converse. She seems anxious about them, about the bird: her eyes are open, turning towards the uncomfortable personages. The foreground is dark. Paradise has turned out to be a difficult place. Can we return to Cythera? Nevermore.

· William Hodges 1744-1797: The Art of Exploration is at the National Maritime Museum, London SE10, from Tuesday until November 12. Details: 020-8858 4422.

Summary: With its golden light and naked beauties, Tahiti fitted Enlightenment ideas of paradise. No wonder painters were seduced by it, says Jonathan Jones.


On Tuesday, two linebackers tackled what has been a popular question this season: How do the 49ers feel about Jim Harbaugh?

“I think this locker room respects him,” MichaelWilhoite said. “I think his attitude is the attitude we take. His toughness, that grind, that grit. It’s been bred in us since I first got here.”

Said NaVorro Bowman: “Everything’s great. We play. He (coaches). We can’t really control anything else.”

The question is relevant this week, of course, after NFL Network analyst Deion Sanders said the 49ers no longer want to play for their head coach.

Sanders is reportedly close with Michael Crabtree, but said, via Twitter on Monday, that Crabtree wasn’t his source. On Tuesday, Crabtree used his Twitter account to distance himself from Sanders’ report: “I don't know what people are talking about with Mr Deion ... But we good over here!”

Harbaugh has said his players have not taken advantage of his open-door policy to voice issues about his leadership. On Monday, he didn’t answer directly when asked if he thought sources within the organization are fueling reports of locker-room discontent.

On Tuesday, Harbaugh addressed the issue on KNBR.

“As far as the noise that’s coming on the outside, I’ve always said that I hate to be defended in a newspaper,” he said. “As long as all that’s said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success.…

“When it comes to a football team, if there’s people that want to divide, divide, divide on the outside, then our response is unite, unite, unite.”

Injury report: Tight end Vernon Davis (back) and right tackle Anthony Davis (knee) didn’t finish Sunday’s 26-21 win over the Eagles and their status is in doubt for Sunday’s game against the visiting Chiefs.

“We’ll see,” Harbaugh said. “I don’t know if they’ll be back this week or not, to be honest with you.”

Anthony Davis was walking with a limp in the locker room, but was not using crutches. On Sunday, Vernon Davis said he left the game with back spasms and expressed confidence he’d play against Kansas City.

James lands in Miami: Running back LaMichael James signed with the Dolphins’ practice squad, just over three weeks after he was granted his release by the 49ers.

James, a 2012 second-round pick, was seeking a bigger role elsewhere after he had 41 carries in 15 games with the 49ers. In Miami, he is one of six running backs under contract. The other five are on the 53-man roster.

Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.

Summary: The question is relevant this week, of course, after NFL Network analyst Deion Sanders said the 49ers no longer want to play for their head coach.  Harbaugh has said his players have not taken advantage of his open-door policy to voice issues about his leadership.  Tight end Vernon Davis (back) and right tackle Anthony Davis (knee) didnât finish Sundayâs 26-21 win over the Eagles and their status is in doubt for Sundayâs game against the visiting Chiefs.  Running back LaMichael James signed with the Dolphinsâ practice squad, just over three weeks after he was granted his release by the 49ers.  James, a 2012 second-round pick, was seeking a bigger role elsewhere after he had 41 carries in 15 games with the 49ers.


New varieties have made the old-fashioned weigela popular again.

What to do this week: Keep mowing as long as your lawn continues to grow but lower the blade height to 1½ inches to make fall leaf raking easier. Run the gas tank empty before storing the mower for the winter. Collect desirable seeds for plants you want to grow next year such as poppies and columbine, while bagging undesirable weed seeds such as purple pokeweed for the garbage before they disperse.

Q. I recently bought three weigela bushes (potted) in May and today they have doubled in size and are now blooming for the second time and the leaves are beginning to turn brown. Could you give me some advice as to their care? I’ve heard they should be cut back every year but I don’t know how far back that might mean, vertically and horizontally.

A. The weigela (rhymes with tequila) is an Asian ornamental shrub once popular in old-fashioned gardens because it is tough and is covered with bright pink or red flowers in spring. Its biggest drawback has been its large size. But like Japanese spirea, weigelas are becoming popular again thanks to breeders who have developed new varieties that are much smaller, boast colored foliage and in some cases rebloom throughout the season.

I assume you bought some of these new “minis” such as Midnight Wine, which are being heavily marketed. They may be turning brown from the drought unless you water them frequently, or they may just be going dormant. In any case, they will survive winter more easily in the ground than in a pot, so I suggest you plant them in a sunny spot about 5 feet wide to accommodate future growth, if you haven’t already done so. If the roots are growing in a circle when you pull them from the pot, tease them outward and make the planting hole twice the size of the pot. Water them every week we don’t get rain until the ground freezes to promote root establishment.

As for pruning, the best time is right after their big show in the spring, before they start making more flowers, so you will not prune those off accidentally. I can’t tell you the dimensions for cutting because the new varieties grow to different sizes. But you can cut any branch off by a third. Cut it back to the point where two branches connect so you don’t leave a dead end stub that could become diseased. You will get a fuller bush if you use hand clippers instead of pruning shears and cut branches back individually instead of shearing. But in any case, hard pruning in the spring soon after bloom ends will result in a better looking, more heavily flowering bush. Older weigelas also respond to thinning, where you cut one in every three branches back all the way.

Q. I have a large yard but, unlike my neighbors, no automated in-ground irrigation. With this drought everything is looking bad. But we got some rain this week. Do I still need to water?

A. Yes, if your plants are wilting. September is usually one of the rainiest months. But the Blue Hills Observatory in Milton just recorded the driest September in its records, which go back to 1835. Sounds like climate change to me. While it is still warm, concentrate on watering fall vegetables, flowering annuals, and, most of all, plantings in containers. You should also water any trees or shrubs you have planted in the previous 12 months or that look distressed. But don’t water established woodies until after they have dropped their leaves. Don’t prune or fertilize them either, because you don’t want to stimulate new growth when they need to slow down and prepare for dormancy. In late fall, after the leaves have dropped, resume watering both deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs. You want to saturate the soil so that they have a water reserve for coming out of dormancy. And the evergreens will need to draw on this soil moisture to protect themselves from desiccating winter winds. Young trees can be watered by a dripping hose placed near the trunk, but older trees like a sprinkler covering the entire area of their drip line. Don’t water your lawn unless you are starting grass seed or new turf. Grass that looks like it’s dying is only going dormant.

Field trip: Discover the region’s best antique apple collection at the gorgeous Tower Hill Botanic Garden, 11 French Drive, Boylston (508-869-6111; towerhillbg.org). The harvest festival from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday includes crafters, a Johnny Appleseed story walk for kids, a cooking demo at 10 a.m., and apple sampling at 12:30 p.m.


FORTUNE — Dan Loeb, the $11 billion hedge fund titan, says he is betting on a Japanese rebound.

Speaking on Thursday at the annual SALT hedge fund conference, Loeb named Japan as the investment he is most excited about right now.

“We are extremely focused on Japan,” says Loeb, who runs the Third Point hedge fund.

In a recent investing letter, Loeb mentioned that he was betting against the yen and had bought shares of a few Japanese companies. But on Thursday, Loeb made the case for buying Japanese stocks in general.

MORE: Did private equity hurt Heinz?

Loeb said that he has seen a massive improvement in the Japanese economy since he started looking at it a year ago. While many people are focused on the fact that the Bank of Japan has embarked on a more aggressive version of the Federal Reserve’s bond buying effort, nicknamed QE, Loeb said that’s not the only reason to like Japan. He says the country’s new political leadership is making changes that will make their economy more efficient and spur growth. Loeb believes that Japan’s new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will follow through on promises to make reforms that will change wages and bring more women into the workforce.

“It’s the structural reform that we see that will be the big game changer,” says Loeb.

Loeb said if value of the yen, which has been dropping lately, were to fall by another 10% that would provide a huge boost to Japanese corporate profits. What’s more, Loeb said the Japanese market is cheap, trading at 13 times earnings, compared to about 18 for U.S. stocks.

“There’s a possibility of a big rally, and it’s not a bet you have to pay up for,” says Loeb.

MORE: A Davos grows in the desert

And Loeb isn’t the only noted investment manager who is talking up Japan. On Wednesday at the SALT conference, Bill Novogratz of Fortress Investment Group said he liked Japanese stocks because the Bank of Japan is doing “QE times four.” Also on Wednesday, hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller speaking in New York at the Ira Sohn investment conference also made the case for Japanese stocks.

Japan has been a frequent topic for global hedge funds managers this year. Not everyone is bullish. Late last year, hedge fund manager Kyle Bass, who became famous for betting against the housing market, has said that he is betting against Japan. He said he thinks the Bank of Japan’s stimulus efforts will fail.

Along with Japan, Loeb said he was buying up mortgages and other bonds based on consumer credits.

Summary: Hedge fund manager Dan Loeb says Japanese stocks are cheap.


Instead of following 2012’s erratic “18 Months” with music exploring new dimensions, superstar DJ Calvin Harris’s fourth record is mostly bereft of real invention. Harris has mainstreamed his sound so much that it barely maintains his fingerprints anymore. Collaborations with guest vocalists fail to maximize their talents or cast them in new light. The best tracks come via work with other producers, especially R3hab on the aptly titled “Burnin” and “It Was You” with Dutch duo Firebeatz. Most of the drops on the 15-track disc disappoint; too many songs never truly take off. There are some very unholy alliances with guest vocalists, who are poorly served. Gwen Stefani barely registers over standard issue EDM tropes on “Together,” stranded with a track that fails to accentuate her playful charm. The previously released instrumental “C.U.B.A” is recycled for a dispiritingly primitive Big Sean getting spiteful on “Open Wide.” “Pray to God,” featuring Haim, is a nice change of pace and by far the best pairing. (Out Tuesday)

Summary: His distinctive musical fingerprint barely evident, superstar DJ Calvin Harris turns in a mostly disappointing fourth album.


The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected BP’s challenge to a multi-billion settlement it reached related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the largest in U.S. history.

The oil giant had appealed the settlement, claiming that it let businesses collect despite being unable to prove their damages were linked to the spill. The company had lost previous appeals in lower courts.

The decision Monday marks a major setback for BP, which wanted to reduce amount of damages it would pay. Plaintiffs accused the company of merely trying to nullify a settlement it had already agreed to.

Here are 10 important numbers to know about settlement and the company’s legal challenge.

4.25: The amount of dollars in billions BP is expected to pay in claims to businesses and individuals affected by the oil spill, according to Bloomberg, and from statistics gathered by Patrick Juneau, the administrator in charge of handling the claims. So far, the company has paid about $2.3 billion.

5: The number of U.S. states affected by the spill, including Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

11: The number of lives lost as a result of the oil spill. Thousands of animals were killed too.

43: The number in billions that BP has set aside to resolve claims related to the spill. BP already settled U.S. criminal charges and agreed to pay $4.5 billion in fines related to that. In January, BP will go on trial for penalties associated with the U.S. Clean Water Act. It could pay as much as $18 billion for that, according to Reuters.

67: The percentage of the spill that BP was found to be at fault for, according to U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier. Transocean RIG was found to be responsible for 30% and Halliburton just 3% HAL , according to Bloomberg.

87: The number of days that passed before the well was capped in September 2010.

121: BP’s market capitalization as of 4pm EST. Shares of the company were trading over 2.7% lower for the day after the court’s decision was announced.

200: The gallons of oil spilled in millions. That’s also measured in 4.9 million barrels of oil, according to the Smithsonian.

2010: The year the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded which prompted the spill. The day was April 20.

2014: The year when a U.S. District court found that BP was responsible for the spill due to gross negligence and misconduct. The judge made the ruling in September.

Summary: Supreme Court justices rejected BP challenge to its multi-billion settlement for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010. Here's a look at some of the numbers related to the disaster.


President Obama’s loosening of the Cuban embargo after five decades came after a handful of Fortune 500 companies lobbied against sanctions on trade and business in the region.

Dump truck and tractor maker Caterpillar CAT (#49 on the Fortune 500), personal care product maker Colgate-Palmolive CL (#167) and insurance company Chubb CB (#208) all spent tens of thousands of dollars to lobby government officials this year about the Cuban embargo, according to regulatory documents.

Businesses have been pushing the federal government to lift trade restrictions with Cuba for some time. But those efforts seemed to ramp up in May when a number of political figures and corporate executives including Enrique Sosa, the former president of Dow Chemical North America, and George Weiksner, the vice chairman of Credit Suisse, signed an open letter to President Obama suggesting ways to “increase support for Cuban civil society.”

The companies that disclosed Cuba-related lobbying this year could all stand to gain from the embargo being lifted. But the White House’s decision Wednesday falls short of opening the doors to full trade, which requires Congressional approval. With the limited changes, companies will be able to peddle agricultural equipment, residential building materials and equipment for small businesses. Secretary of State John Kerry said that normalizing ties with Cuba means “greater regional stability and economic opportunities for American businesses.”

In its filing in April, Caterpillar said that it had spent $1.7 million on lobbying related to a broad range of issues including the Cuba Reconciliation Act, the Free Trade with Cuba Act, the United States-Cuba Normalization Act and the Promoting American Agricultural and Medical Exports to Cuba Act – all of which would increase trade with Cuba.

Bill Lane, a global government affairs director at Caterpillar, voiced support for the White House’s decision on Cuba. “We are pleased with the announcement today,” he told Fortune. “It’s a good step in the right direction.” He added that the company has funded lobbying efforts for “well over a decade” and that “engagement can be a powerful force.”

The legal firm Baker & Hostetler, meanwhile, filed two separate lobbying disclosures on behalf of Colgate-Palmolive with more vague and wide-reaching goals. In addition to work related to U.S.-India business relationship and economic development in Costa Rica, the lobbyists pushed for economic development in Cuba. The firm collected $160,000 for its work in the second quarter and $360,000 in the following quarter.

The third Fortune 500 company listed by the database, Chubb, filed three lobbying reports entirely related to Cuba and the embargo. It was paid $50,000 in the first quarter and $60,000 in the two following quarters.

Spokesmen for Colgate-Palmolive and Chubb were not immediately available for comment.

Other companies not listed in the Fortune 500, which disclosed lobbying on the issue of Cuba this year include alcoholic spirits maker Bacardi and General Cigar Company, which is part of an industry that hopes to profit from loosening of the embargo.

Summary: Three Fortune 500 companies lobbied government officials about Cuba this year, prior to the White House easing restrictions on trade.


Peter Santos comes across as a pretty mild-mannered executive, until he starts trying to come up with a metaphor for how crummy today’s cellular phones sound relative to how good he knows they could sound. “What we have in voice today is a 13-inch black-and-white TV set. We have an opportunity to have a 60-inch set with 1080p high-definition,” he says, his voice rising with a mixture of frustration and excitement. “It’s within our grasp.”

For seven years Santos has run Audience Inc, a chip-maker that specializes in translating the human voice into digital bits and back to voice again without garbling the conversation. Audience chips are now in over 40 million mobile phones, mainly to help to filter out the background noise. (That way, a bus going by doesn’t drown out your conversation.) Along the way Santos has learned a lot about why cell phones calls sound so bad to the human ear.

While noise suppression helps, there’s only so much Santos has been able to do given limitations of today’s cellular networks. Those networks have two glaring quality flaws. They’re slow, adding a noticeable lag between when one caller talks and the other hears their words, leading to overlapping talk. They are also short on capacity, encouraging wireless carriers to smoosh phone calls into tiny digital streams and in the process lose all the little audio nuances that make a conversation sound lifelike.

Now a new high-def era is finally dawning, says Santos. Verizon VZ and AT&T T have said this month that they plan on launching “Voice over LTE” in 2012 and 2013 respectively. LTE, the most popular “4G” standard, is capable of crystal-clear calls with no noticeable lag. “The joke in the industry used to be is that wideband cellular is two years away—and always has been,” says Santos. “Our view is that now that has changed.”

LTE systems will carry more digital bits at lower cost—and the more bits a phone call uses the better the call sounds. U.S. cellular system typically smush a call into 6 or 7 kilobits per second, leading to mediocre sound under the best of circumstances. (Looked at in terms of audible frequencies, today’s phones only pass along frequencies between 300 hertz and 3500 hertz, a fraction of the pitches the ear can detect. But by doubling or tripling the bits devoted to each call, new “wideband” phones could pass along all audible frequencies.)

Santos is already building chips for this new high-def world, including a new one released last week. He says that as we get the improved phones there will be even more need for clever noise-supression technologies. That’s because in the new, higher frequencies that LTE phones will carry, background noise is an relatively bigger problem.

In the meantime, Audience’s chips will help today’s cell phone sound better with new tricks to paper over the network problems. One example: the chip lets your phone fill in the missing frequencies in today’s networks, creating the illusion of greater bandwidth. But that’s only a short-term fix, until hi-def handsets take over.

Daniel Beringer, an industry consultant and expert in hi-def telephony, agrees that will happen faster than people expect. He says that companies like Google GOOG , Skype, Orange, Audience and others are laying the groundwork by creating HD capable technologies. Right now, most HD capable phones connect to regular phones and must default to the old quality standards.

As more people get HD capable phones, a feedback loop starts, and the number of HD conversations will soar, Beringer predicts. Once people hear what they are missing, demand will explode he predicts. “Each person that gets it becomes the salesperson for their family,” he says. “It’s just like putting on a pair of glasses for the first time. There’s a huge hearing impairment you didn’t really notice before.”

Adds Peter Santos: “There’s a tipping point. It’s very close.”

Summary: Peter Santos, the CEO of Audience Inc., says high-definition cellular service is about to take off.


FORTUNE — Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Conference (beginning today in Aspen, Colo.) regularly brings together the best and brightest minds in tech innovation. Each week, Fortune turns the spotlight on a different conference attendee to offer his or her own personal insight into business, tech, and entrepreneurship. This week, we asked Facebook Director of Design Kate Aronowitz to answer 10 questions about life outside of work, the company she admires most, and industry advice for young entrepreneurs. Her responses follow.

What is the best advice you ever received?

Show up to work with the energy and curiosity of your first day and the honesty of your last.

What would you say to a group of young people looking to enter the tough job market?

You’d be surprised at how many young people I meet who are ultra picky about what they will and won’t do. Don’t be that person! Be the one who jumps at the opportunity to try something new. Just being a positive and enthusiastic team member will set you apart from the pack.

What would you do if you weren’t working at your current job?

I’d love to have the experience of being an apprentice to an established fashion designer, just to get my hands dirty in their work and play a behind the scenes role in planning, designing, and launching a collection.

What is one startup you would have wanted to found?

I’m somewhat biased here, as I know and work with the team, but I would have loved to have started Instagram. It’s so simple, visual, and engaging. I love the ability to see what’s going on in the world visually and have the power to take beautiful pictures.

What was the most important thing you learned in school?

When I was younger, I was often intimidated by people who just seemed to be naturally talented at things, like the kids who excelled in academics or were really great designers. But as I’ve grown up I’ve learned that talent and success are really just the product of hard work. You don’t see it, but behind the scenes the best people spend years perfecting their craft, and that’s often the real secret to success.

What has been your biggest failure?

There have been times when my team members have come to me with really big, outrageously creative ideas and I’ve shot them down too early. One of my strengths is my pragmatism, but sometimes I have to keep it in check (especially when running a design team).

What business or technology person do you admire most? Why?

Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry. Yes, she’s grown Burberry by leaps and bounds and that’s something to be admired. What’s special about her to me is the way she openly talks about the human side of business—the power of authenticity, positive energy, and inspiration. I love that she openly talks about being “50/50″, a balance of intuition and feeling with hardcore analysis and how that has contributed to her success. She embraces the people side of business and uses that as a strength to propel the company forward.

What technology sector excites you most?

I just moved into a new house and engaged with many contractors and other service providers, and I realized there is still a huge gap in access to honest ratings and reputation indicators. I was surprised at how difficult it was to find unfiltered, authentic reviews of companies—from cable to plumbing and so on.

What do you do to live a balanced life?

The biggest lesson I’ve learned in this area is that you have to set your own limits. No one else is going to tell you to leave in time to get home for a family dinner. Set the schedule that works for you and others will respect it.

What is one characteristic that every leader should possess?

Empathy. Great service comes from understanding others’ needs. Great management comes from leading through example and inspiring others. Neither can be done by someone who is out of touch.

Summary: Why leaders have to set their own limits.


The Supreme Court today affirmed the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. With that uncertainty behind us, I feel it’s crucial for entrepreneurs to focus their energies on uniting around a single healthcare reform that will create jobs and facilitate greater innovation in America.

As a young single person, I don’t have the same worries that many have taking the risk of starting a new company. So I can afford a reasonable individual health plan, without sacrificing my entrepreneurial spirit. But many older creative people, or those with families, cannot. Instead, they remain in stagnant positions because they need health insurance continuity, rather than starting their own companies or even simply joining smaller less secure ventures. When you factor in those individuals and/or their family members who may have chronic conditions – more restrictions are placed on those individuals seeking a better or more entrepreneurial opportunity. This restricts employees from becoming employers and reduces the velocity of our nation’s job creation.

So what needs to be done? At the core – we must fundamentally change how we pay for healthcare. By its very nature, the employer-provided health insurance system of today limits portability, and restricts employees from becoming entrepreneurs.

I believe the single most important reform needed is to provide true health insurance portability – and here’s why:

If employees “owned” their insurance they would have the ability to navigate jobs, start their own companies or simply join a start-up – and our economy would see rapid growth and accelerated innovation. Just think, somewhere, right now there may be a brilliant scientist who could invent a cure for cancer or a software engineer who could develop a company to prevent cyber attacks on our nation’s energy grid – but they are unable to pursue their business ideas, because their child may have a chronic disease.

Our current healthcare system prevents the needed “risk taking” required for entrepreneurship – and so ideas are stifled and dreams never become a reality. Regardless of your political persuasion entrepreneurs should unite around the common belief that everyone should control their own healthcare and own their health insurance and ultimately their own destiny.

Everyone should have the ability to pursue their dreams – and together we can make that happen.

Alex Meshkin (@alexmeshkin) is a co-founder of GroupMD, a patient care social network enabling healthcare providers to communicate, collaborate and coordinate care.

Summary: For startups, the big issue is health insurance portability.


Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures during his annual press conference in Moscow. (AAP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced he is cutting his salary by 10 percent as well as the earnings of several top government officials, as the country's economy reels from the collapse of the rouble.

The salaries of Putin, his Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Prosecutor General Yury Chaika and the president of the powerful Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin, will all be cut by 10 percent from March 1 to December 31, according to a decree signed by the president.

The wage reduction also applies to all of those employed by the presidency and the council of ministers.

The move comes less than a year after the Kremlin announced the tripling of Putin's salary. The president, who claims to live a frugal lifestyle, was earning less than his ministers in 2013.

Russia's economy has been hard hit by the western sanctions for the country's role in backing separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, which along with falling oil prices led to a dramatic crash of the rouble in December to half its value against the US dollar.

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Summary: Russian President Vladimir Putin and other top government officials will take a 10 per cent pay cut as the collapse of the rouble hits the economy.


Investing in tech startups is a risky business. But just as the MIT Blackjack team figured out how to beat the odds in Las Vegas, Y Combinator figured out how to beat the odds in tech investing.

Y Combinator, which started in Cambridge but now is in Silicon Valley, is the largest and most successful startup incubator in history. Over the past 10 years, Y Combinator provided seed funding and support to 842 companies. Nearly 80 percent of those companies are still operating — most early stage tech investors expect half their startups to fail — and 32 are worth more than $100 million each. All together, Y Combinator companies are worth a combined $30 billion.

Dropbox is one of the companies that went through Y Combinator’s Cambridge program. And it’s one that local investors missed. I remember the Demo Day in 2007 when Dropbox presented to about 30 Boston area investors. None invested, and Dropbox moved to Silicon Valley soon after.

Investors, including me, balked, largely because Microsoft, Google, and other big technology companies offered cloud storage and backup for free or very low cost. How could Dropbox possibly compete? Well, Y Combinator advised Dropbox to identify early adopters, focus on ease of use, and compete with the technology giants.

This year, Dropbox is expected to launch an initial public stock offering valued at more than $10 billion.

So, what is Y Combinator? It is a startup that creates more startups. Y Combinator attracts the best entrepreneurs, who in turn attract the best investors, which leads to the highest valuations, which attract the best advisers, who bring it full circle by attracting the best entrepreneurs.

For several years, Y Combinator held a summer session in Cambridge and a winter session in Mountain View, Calif. After comparing results, especially local investor participation, it became clear the program could be more successful holding both sessions in Silicon Valley. Despite deep local roots in Boston, Y Combinator moved west in 2009.

In Y Combinator’s early years, about 10 companies presented products and ideas to no more than 30 investors at the end of each session. The presentations at these “demo” days were folksy and unpolished. The companies were typically valued at around $3 million.

Recently, about 115 companies made pitches over two days to about 500 investors. Valuations have skyrocketed to $10 million, $20 million, or more. The hottest companies get funded very quickly.

Still, Y Combinator’s greatest legacy might be that it paved the way for many other startup incubators and accelerators. TechStars Boston and MassChallenge are doing a great job accelerating local startups. Bolt, Blade, UMass Venture Development Center, and several others are supporting the startup ecosystem.

For many years, Boston area investors have been more cautious than their West Coast counterparts. Mark Zuckerberg famously left here for Silicon Valley to find risk takers to help him build Facebook. Boston has great universities, experienced entrepreneurs, and plenty of venture capital. But we need a concerted effort from investors to step up, get involved, and put their money into local startups.

Summary: Y Combinator, started in Cambridge, but now in Silicon Valley, is the largest and most successful startup incubator in history.


This article is published in partnership with Time.com. The original version can be found here.

Americans filled 4.3 million prescriptions and doled out nearly $374 billion on medicine in 2014, according to new data from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

The data shows that nationwide pending on medicine hit the highest level since 2001, up 13% in 2014 from the year before.

In states that expanded Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act, patients filled 25.4% more prescriptions than in 2013; in states that did not expand eligibility, that rate was 2.8%. Overall, doctors’ office visits declined 3% and dispensed prescriptions increased 2.1% in 2014. “It is clear that the U.S. health care system is in a state of flux,” wrote IMS Health executive director Murray Aitken in the report. “The past year brought fundamental changes and heightened uncertainty to patients, payers, providers, government and lawmakers.”

The report authors also note that the impact of patent expirations also happened to be lower in 2014, so the drop in costs was smaller than drops experienced in other years. The report shows that the impact of patent expiries in 2014 was around $8 billion less than 2013 and $17 billion less than what it was in 2012.

The report suggests that specialty drugs and innovative medicines accounted for a large part of the medication spending, with specialty medicines making up a third of all medication spending. Some of these drugs were new treatments for diseases like hepatitis C, multiple sclerosis and cancer. New oral hepatitis C drugs, for example, have made treating the disorder easier than taking the daily injections that were previously required. However these new drugs can have a high price tag — around $1,000 for a single daily pill in some cases. The report says new treatments for hepatitis C increased spending by $11.3 billion.

“The number of patients seeking treatment for hepatitis C jumped nearly tenfold in 2014, from 17 to 161 thousand, owing to new treatments with cure rates over 90% and dramatically fewer side effects,” the report reads.

According to IMS Health, 18 orphan drugs — ones designed specifically to treat a rare disorder — were launched in 2014. The unprecedented high was likely due in part to the tax breaks and other financial incentives for developing them.

All of these factors made 2014 an especially notable year for medicine spending and new innovative medicine, IMS Health said.

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Summary: Medicine spending in the U.S. rose at the highest rate since 2001, a new report shows