Venice

Venice. I was even turned on recently by visiting an ersatz Venice in Las Vegas - so i can just imagine how fabulous the real the real thing must be ! Enjoy !

The New York Times
May 31, 2006
Frugal Traveler
In Venice (Thanks to a Cheap Flight) on My Trip Around the World
By MATT GROSS

I never wanted to visit Venice, the most clichéd of Italian cities. The flooded streets, the tourist-mobbed piazzas, the extortionate hotel rates. Plus, I was afraid that if I wandered this sinking city, I would be chased by a red-caped dwarf welding a long knife, as Donald Sutherland was in the 1973 thriller "Don't Look Now."

Yet I came to Venice anyway, for one simple reason: It was the cheapest flight out of Barcelona, 9.99 euros on the Italian carrier www.myair.com (51.35 euros after the inevitable taxes and surcharges).

My detour is increasingly common today, as low-cost airlines transform not only European travel, but traveling in Southeast Asia and Latin America as well. For my journey around the world, I expected to make extensive use of them, from well-known carriers like www.easyjet.com, to lesser-known upstarts like Alpi Eagles, Blue and HLX. (For an extensive guide, see www.attitudetravel.com.)

But in Barcelona, I'd run into a problem. Most low-cost carriers are set up to shuttle people from busy hubs like London and Venice, to cheaper spots like Tallinn or Bari, Italy. To get from Barcelona to the Adriatic Coast, where I wanted to go next, the discount airlines required me to zig-zag across the Continent, with stopovers in well-traveled cities.

So, to Venice I went. But not before reserving a cheap room in a city where hotels rarely dip below 200 euros a night. Many readers had recommended going to Lido, an island a few minutes east of Venice proper, as a cheap and less touristy alternative. So the morning of my flight, I logged on to lastminute.com, a European travel site that specializes in last-minute deals, and booked a night at the Windsor Hotel (Viale Venezia, 1; 39-0421-380870, www.hotelwindsorjesolo.it) for 39 euros a night.

When I arrived on Lido, however, the Windsor was nowhere to be found. After wheeling my suitcase up and down the posh street for half an hour, I realized my mistake. My hotel wasn't on Lido, but on Lido di Jesolo, a completely different island 20 kilometers to the north. In my rush, I had neglected that crucial distinction. Two hours later, which included several boat rides, a bus and a taxi, I checked into the Windsor. I ate bad pizza, drank worse wine and went to sleep. Venice was worse than I had expected.

Luckily, the nice thing about Italy — and the beauty of low-cost carriers in Europe — is that no matter where you've been deposited, it's an inexpensive bus or train ride to someplace else. I could, for example, go to Padua, known for its ancient piazzas, or to the busy trading port of Verona. But I was traveling frugally, and I figured that if anyone knew how, it would be college students.

So the next morning, I left Venice for Bologna, Italy's archetypal college town —the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is the oldest in Europe. The train ride (7.90 euros, no surcharges) took me through luminous green farmland and I arrived two hours later, with nowhere to stay.

But not for long. Since it was the end of the semester, the old campus was plastered with homemade flyers offering rooms for rent. I saw one for 17 euros a day and made arrangements in shaky Italian to inspect the apartment.

It was too far to walk, so I waited for a bus in the Piazza Maggiore, with the enormous Basilica of Saint Petronius behind me and raindrops making the cobblestones slippery. Out of nowhere, a procession of priests and the faithful paraded across the piazza, carrying an image of the Madonna to the basilica. It also suspended my bus line for two hours. Just when I was about to look for another place, my phone rang: Sarah, a graduate student from the United States whom I had never met, called with an offer I couldn't refuse: a room in central Bologna.

As it turns out, my alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, has a graduate studies program at Bologna University. Many large American universities, in fact, have programs abroad — an invaluable resource for budget travelers looking for like-minded and friendly faces. Before I arrived, I had sent an e-mail to the students, asking if anyone would like to grab an espresso with a passing alumnus. Coffee had turned into lodging.

(To avoid getting special treatment, I did not mention my job as the Frugal Traveler. Indeed, The New York Times' ethics guidelines forbids accepting freebies offered because of the Times association. I welcome advice that readers post to this site, but I cannot accept offers of rooms or meals.)

Sarah's apartment, which she shared with five other students, was dorm-like in décor, with unadorned bedrooms and a kitchen doubling as a living room. My room, previously occupied by a student who'd left to travel Spain, was basic — bed, sheets, towel, desk — but that was all I needed.

For the next four days, I indulged in all the perquisites of student life. I woke up late and ate pizza; I browsed the library at the Sala Borsa, the old stock exchange whose Roman foundations are visible through clear plastic floors; I marched uphill through 666 arches to the hilltop Sanctuario di San Luca; I took a day trip to nearby Modena to see how balsamic vinegar is made; and at night I met an ever-growing circle of students for aperitivi.

Aperitivi are the key to an affordable stay in Bologna. Essentially, these are bars that offer free spreads to drinking customers: pastas, veggies, bread, cheese. Some bars have buffets to shame Las Vegas casinos; others put out nothing but olives and potato chips. Either way, you can feast for the price of a Peroni. One of the best is Caffe Maxim (Via Majani 1/a; 39-51-272452).

Several days of aperitivi, however, left me hungry for more. Besides its university, Bologna is renowned for its cuisine, reputed to be the best in Italy. Its most famous dish is arguably tagliatelle al ragù, otherwise known as spaghetti bolognese. And now here I was, in the city that invented it, with my nose against the glass.

The students had one word for me: Quindici, an osteria known for its belly-filling gourmet meals at prices that won't empty your wallet (via Mirasole 15; 051-331806). On my last night in Bologna, three students and I managed to consume an impressive antipasti spread there — ricotta with syrupy balsamic vinegar, marinated olives and artichokes, a tub of squaccherone cheese, and a platter of prosciutto, mortadella and salami — plus a liter of the house Montepulciano.

For my main course, I ordered the tagliatelle al ragù. It was the best I've had in a long, long time: meaty, with an intense tomato flavor and perfectly chewy noodles. The bill was 22 euros each, by far my highest expense in Bologna, but worth every cent.

It was exactly the right fuel, psychic as much as physical, for my obligatory return to Venice. The city had beat me in Round One, but last Sunday I returned for a rematch, armed with a hundred reader suggestions, from intriguing cheap hotels and pizzerias, to wine shops where I can bring my own jug to fill. And this time, I'm staying in the proper Lido.

Tell that murderous dwarf I'm ready for him — and check back next Wednesday to see who wins Round Two.

Next stop: Venice, followed by Croatia - any cheap hotel or restaurant recommendations?

Have you been to Croatia? Share your tips with the Frugal Traveler. | Read comments.
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The Martini

I have a lovely friend - let's call her Roberta - who introduced me, after a lifetime of avoiding them, to the martini.

She was so persuasive about me trying a martini that i abandoned this misplaced avoidance and indulged. Yum.

But heed this caveat: if you have never tried one, have someone who truly loves them - like my friend Roberta - fix one for you.

Only a person who really loves this concoction will fix one with the love and focus necessary to bring you to the edge of nirvana.

Enjoy.

P.S. I miss Roberta. A lot. She left my life recently and is in recovery now (but not from alcohol - there are other demons with which she must do battle). I hope to toast her one day with one of her beautiful martinis that she makes for me - but i fear that day will never come. God Bless and Keep you Roberta ! Thanks for the memories . . .

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

May 28, 2006
Shaken and Stirred
Design for Drinking
By JONATHAN MILES

BEFORE you balk at the idea of a $28 martini, shaken with a vodka bearing the name and Euro-chic aura of the Italian designer Roberto Cavalli, please refer to your closet, or wherever you keep your jeans. If the jeans cost roughly the same as the martini — say, a basic pair of jeans from Sears — then you have every right to grumble and curse and wonder aloud where this silly, glitzed, lux-obsessed world is headed.

But if the labels sewn to that denim read True Religion or Earnest Sewn or Hudson or Dolce & Gabbana or any other brand of denim requiring a second mortgage to afford, then perhaps you're vulnerable to the allure of designer labels. If so, belly up to the bar. Brian Matzkow and Adam Jacobs have a martini for you.

Mr. Matzkow is the owner of Sapa, a stylish French-Vietnamese restaurant and lounge in the Flatiron district, and Mr. Jacobs is his beverage director. Together they are the proud parents of the Roberto Cavalli Martini, which originally cost $125, back when it came with a side of osetra caviar. (New regulations on imported caviar nipped that in the bud, eliciting a sigh from Mr. Jacobs: "It was great with the caviar.")

As the current generation of martinis go, this is a no-fuss affair. It's nothing more than vodka nude in a glass. So it's not mixological labor you're paying for. What's behind this martini, and its price tag, is the confluence of couture and cocktails distilled in the Italian Alps by Mr. Cavalli.

Cavalli vodka — which is just now being sold in select American cities, most recently with a celeb-spattered party in Bel Air, Calif., this month — delivers a new twist to the overcrowded vodka market. (How overcrowded? Ed McMahon has his own brand.) Like denim, vodka is a plain-spoken product with hardscrabble roots. When refined, stylized and imbued with designer cred, however, anything — and any price — goes. This is a vodka that seeks to infiltrate the gilded territory staked out by Cristal, Dom and Courvoisier, and in that regard it has already made strides: Cavalli vodka earned a shout-out on "Gimme That Remix," a single released last month by the R&B singer Chris Brown and the rapper Lil' Wayne.

Whether Cavalli ushers in a liquid wave of couture liquors remains to be seen, though the question is ripe for delicious speculation. "That could either be really cool or really bad," Mr. Matzkow said. ("Ralph Lauren gin," I offered. "Purple Label!" he replied.) "But there's a difference between couture and extreme couture. You're not going to go into Century 21 and find Cavalli. It's part of an elite group."

Mr. Jacobs added: "There's a mystique about it. The Cavalli martini is for the right person, someone looking for something more exclusive. We didn't want to do a $28 cocktail just to have a $28 cocktail. We don't like seeing $15 cocktails when we go out. I mean, a $15 Tanqueray and tonic? I don't see the value there. But this is special. This is our one gluttony."

ROBERTO CAVALLI MARTINI

Adapted from Sapa

6 ounces Roberto Cavalli vodka

Lemon twist or green olive

Chill a martini glass by filling it with ice and water. Fill a cocktail shaker with large ice cubes, add vodka and shake until well chilled. Empty martini glass and strain contents of shaker into it. Garnish with lemon twist or olive, as desired.
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Classical Music

Photo LEFT: Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall at its opening in 1962.

Photo RIGHT: Carnegie Hall, with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, January 2006.


Classical music. What a gift to the ear, the mind, the soul. Mostly the soul. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 28, 2006
Check the Numbers: Rumors of Classical Music's Demise Are Dead Wrong
By ALLAN KOZINN

EVERYONE has heard the requiems sung for classical music or at least the reports of its failing health: that its audience is graying, record sales have shriveled and the cost of live performance is rising as ticket sales decline. Music education has virtually disappeared from public schools. Classical programming has (all but) disappeared from television and radio. And 17 orchestras have closed in the last 20 years.

All this has of late become the subject of countless blogs, news reports, books and symposiums, with classical music partisans furrowing their brows and debating what went wrong, what can still go wrong and whether it's too late to save this once-exalted industry. Moaning about the state of classical music has itself become an industry. But as pervasive as the conventional wisdom is, much of it is based on sketchy data incorrectly interpreted. Were things better in the old days? Has American culture given up on classical music?

The numbers tell a very different story: for all the hand-wringing, there is immensely more classical music on offer now, both in concerts and on recordings than there was in what nostalgists think of as the golden era of classics in America.

In the record business, for example, it can be depressing to compare the purely classical output of the major labels now with what the industry cranked out from 1950 to 1975. But focusing on the majors is beside the point: the real action has moved to dozens of adventurous smaller companies, ranging from musician-run labels like Bridge, Oxingale and Cantaloupe to ambitious mass marketers like the midprice, repertory-spanning Naxos.

Similarly, someone shopping anywhere but in huge chains like Tower or Virgin might conclude that classical discs are no longer sold. In reality the business model has changed. Internet deep-catalog shops like arkivmusic.com offer virtually any CD in print, something no physical store can do today. The Internet has become a primary resource for classical music: the music itself as well as information about it.

On Apple's iTunes, which sold a billion tracks in its first three years, classical music reportedly accounts for 12 percent of sales, four times its share of the CD market. Both Sony-BMG and Universal say that as their download sales have increased, CD sales have remained steady, suggesting that downloaders are a new market, not simply the same consumers switching formats.

In their first six weeks on iTunes, the New York Philharmonic's download-only Mozart concert sold 2,000 complete copies and about 1,000 individual tracks, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's two Minimalist concerts, combined, sold 900 copies and about 400 individual tracks. Those numbers, though small by pop standards, exceed what might be expected from sales of orchestral music on standard CD's.

Other orchestras are catching on: the Milwaukee Symphony and Philharmonia Baroque in San Francisco offer downloads on their own Web sites. And the major labels are planning to sell downloads of archival recordings that will not be reissued on CD.

In concert halls, season subscriptions have plummeted in favor of last-minute ticket sales. That doesn't mean the business is tanking, however, just that audiences have shifted their habits. As two-income families have grown busier, potential ticket buyers are less inclined to commit to performances months in advance (or as ticket prices climb, to accept predetermined concert packages). But as much as orchestras and concert presenters would prefer to sell their tickets before the season starts, the seats are hardly empty.

Neither are the stages. The American Symphony Orchestra League puts the number of orchestras in the United States at 1,800 (350 of them professional). The 1,800 ensembles give about 36,000 concerts a year, 30 percent more than in 1994. And in the most recent season for which the league has published figures, 2003-4, orchestras reported an 8 percent increase in operating revenues against a 7 percent increase in expenses, with deficits dropping to 1.1 percent from 2.7 percent of their annual budgets from the previous season.

Meanwhile corners of the field generally ignored in discussions of classical music's mortality — most notably, early music and new music — are true growth industries. When Lincoln Center presented a 10-concert celebration of the composer Osvaldo Golijov this season, there wasn't a spare ticket to be found. The Miller Theater's Gyorgy Ligeti series packed them in as well. And though the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Minimalist Jukebox festival sold slightly fewer tickets than its regular programming, it drew a younger crowd: 25 percent of the audience was said to be under 45 (compared with 15 percent normally), and 10 percent was 25 to 34 (compared with 2 percent).

By relying heavily on contemporary programs and concerts of Renaissance and Baroque works, Miller has achieved an 84 percent increase in ticket sales since 2002, and this season's box office receipts have exceeded last season's by $100,000.

Zankel Hall, the newly built, high-tech, adventurously programmed addition to Carnegie Hall, has produced a steady increase in sold-out houses, from 57 percent of its concerts in 2003-4 (its first season) to 63 percent in the first third of the current season. At Carnegie's main hall and its smaller Weill Recital Hall, ticket sales have been fairly steady since 1982, with 565,000 tickets sold in a slow year and 635,000 in an exceptional one (most recently 2003).

The classical music world has even found a silver lining in the reports about its imminent death. Fund-raising letters now allude to classical music's parlous state as a way of shaking larger donations from supporters. And when EMI needed a marketing hook for Plácido Domingo's "Tristan und Isolde," it jumped on predictions that it would be the last studio recording of an opera.

Finally, concert halls are sprouting like mushrooms. New symphony halls are about to open in Miami, Nashville and Costa Mesa, Calif. (not far from the newly opened Disney Hall in Los Angeles), and Toronto is opening a new opera house in September. Clearly, someone sees a future for this music.

UNDERLYING many of the jeremiads is what might be called golden ageism: the belief, bordering on an article of faith, that everything was better, both artistically and commercially, in the relatively recent past.

To a degree, the golden ageists have a point. From the 1920's through the 70's, classical music was plentiful on the radio and on nascent television. Variety shows like "The Bell Telephone Hour" and "The Ed Sullivan Show" presented both top names and newcomers, and networks offered symphony concerts, opera and seductive introductory shows like Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" in prime time.

There was a vogue for films built around classical music and musicians as well: "100 Men and a Girl," with Leopold Stokowski (1937), and "They Shall Have Music," with Jascha Heifetz (1939); "Humoresque," with Isaac Stern on its soundtrack (1946); biographical films like "Rhapsody in Blue" (1945); and extravaganzas like "Fantasia" (1940).

All this made classical music's reigning stars — from Toscanini to Bernstein, from Heifetz to Stern, from Horowitz to Van Cliburn — household names in a way that only Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and Yo-Yo Ma are now.

But the disappearance of this exposure is hardly a lethal wound. Though classical radio stations have become scarce in most cities, the Internet offers a global radio dial. The Internet radio audience is said to be small at the moment, but people who want it will find it. When the BBC offered a Beethoven symphony cycle as a free download last year, 1.4 million people took up the offer. And if classical music is now scarce on television, with even PBS cutting back, DVD labels are pouring out everything from long-forgotten TV performances to newly produced symphonic, chamber and recital discs.

The golden age of concertgoing, meanwhile, is at least partly a matter of idealized memory. Organizations did not collect demographic information then, but musicians and critics who attended concerts during those years remember the audience as always middle-aged (and concert videos bear out those memories). And despite the music's greater visibility in daily life, it was a niche market even then. The pianist Gary Graffman said recently that when he began attending New York Philharmonic concerts at Carnegie Hall in the 1940's and 50's empty seats were plentiful. And among the great soloists, he added, only Heifetz, Rubinstein and Horowitz could expect to sell out Carnegie Hall.

At the time Carnegie was undisputedly the city's premier hall, with Town Hall, Hunter College and the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the principal chamber music and recital halls. Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill) and the Frick Collection offered chamber concerts as well, and McMillin (now Miller) Theater at Columbia University was a hot spot for new music. When Lincoln Center was planned in the late 1950's, Carnegie Hall narrowly escaped the wrecker's ball. It was thought, however briefly, that two large halls were an extravagance New York didn't need and couldn't sustain.

Consider how things have changed since Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall opened in 1962. Carnegie, until then a rental hall, began doing its own presentations, and it now offers about 200 concerts a year. Lincoln Center — with its two opera houses, Avery Fisher Hall for orchestras and star-turn recitals and Alice Tully Hall (opened in 1969) for chamber music — quickly undertook its own presentations as well: some 400 annually now, extending to halls and churches beyond its campus.

The 92nd Street Y revived its long-dormant concert series in 1974, and Merkin Concert Hall went up in 1978. Carnegie added Zankel Hall in 2003, and Lincoln Center opened the Rose Theater and the Allen Room — intended mostly for jazz but sometimes used for new-music concerts — in 2004.

Meanwhile the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection remained committed to classical concerts. Small- to medium-size halls at the French Institute/Alliance Française, Scandinavia House and the Austrian Cultural Forum have opened since the late 1980's. And the Morgan Library and Museum opened a new chamber music hall this month.

That's in Manhattan. Just across the rivers, the same period brought a revival of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the construction of the Tilles Center on Long Island and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark and the advent of small but successful enterprises like Bargemusic.

In the deficit column? Town Hall and Hunter College have largely abandoned classical music, although each offers a handful of concerts. But apart from the old Metropolitan Opera House, demolished when the Met moved to Lincoln Center, no halls have closed in New York since Lincoln Center opened.

The concert world has expanded in other ways too. Through the 1950's the music season ran less than 30 weeks. But in 1964 the New York Philharmonic negotiated a 52-week contract with its players. Other orchestras quickly followed suit, and the season grew longer. The Mostly Mozart Festival cropped up in 1966 and spawned similar series around the country. And in 1967 the Ford Foundation began giving orchestras grants for even greater expansion, in most cases, more concerts each week.

The nightly offerings in classical music are immensely more plentiful and varied now than during the supposed golden age. The wonder isn't that audiences fluctuate from night to night or that empty seats can be spotted. It's that so much competition can be sustained in a field usually portrayed as moribund.

One way to keep the gloomy reports in perspective is to understand that the rumored death of classical music has been with us for a very long time.

The Metropolitan Opera was in almost constant financial peril between 1929 and 1944, and there were dicey moments in the 70's. The orchestra world's 1960's expansion caused anxiety as well. In an essay in The New York Times on Sept. 3, 1967, "Do We Have Too Much Music in America?," John O. Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, worried that the audience was insufficient to support the blossoming 52-week orchestra contracts.

Those worries were soon born out. In "Dip in Concert Audiences Troubles Impresarios" (Dec. 21, 1968), The Times reported that classical music ticket sales had dropped as much as 40 percent. The reasons included everything from the distractions of television and recordings to street crime, parking difficulties and high ticket prices, meaning a $15 top at the Met and "as much as $8.80" for "other prestige events." Young people reading these reports would have had little reason to expect the classical music world to exist in 2006. But now that those same people have begun "graying," are they joining it? Demographic information over the couple of decades institutions have been collecting it suggests that they are. For whatever reasons — changes in taste, a desire to expand their musical experiences, a lack of interest in current pop — middle-aged listeners continue to join the audience. And the generational shift is coloring both programming and performance.

Listeners now in their 50's — the core classical audience — were the baby boomers who grew up in the 1960's and 70's. For those already interested in classical music during their student years, Shostakovich, Ives and Mahler were musical obsessions, and the early-music boom was a campus phenomenon. All that music, marginal in the 70's, joined the mainstream as those listeners became performers and ticket buyers.

Classically inclined boomers were also new-music agnostics, at home with the rigorous atonality of the previous generation but also open to a trippy avant-garde scene that ran from Cage to the Minimalists. That has had a telling effect too: witness the standing ovations Elliott Carter's music now gets at symphony concerts and the rock-star popularity of John Adams and Philip Glass.

At the same time this generation's fascination with pop has influenced its composers (and younger ones), who draw on the energy of rock. They have also left behind their elders' bias against amplification and sound processing, which they use not simply to increase the volume but also to expand their palettes of timbre. A fascination with world music, which also has roots in the 1960's, has stretched those palettes further.

All this is changing the classical repertory, and to judge from the comparatively young audiences to be seen at concerts by daring groups like the Kronos Quartet and Alarm Will Sound, it is more likely to rejuvenate classical music than kill it.

Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" observation about relationships and sharks — that both must either move forward or die — also works for culture. In classical music, lots of people really just want the dead shark. They pine for the days when Bernstein, Reiner, Szell and Toscanini stood on the podium, with Heifetz fiddling, Horowitz at the piano and Callas and Tebaldi locked in a perpetual diva war. Most of all they want their repertory dials set between 1785 and 1920.

You can send those people your condolences.

For the rest of us, the shark is still moving. We're getting our revivals of Machaut and Rameau along with vigorous reconsiderations of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler and a varied gallery of contemporary composers. We may be hearing much of this in small, high-tech halls instead of cavernous temples of the arts or finding it online instead of in shops or on the radio. But it's all there, constantly renewing itself. You just have to grab onto the dorsal fin.
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Cyberworld

Having access to the Internet is now part of living the good life. And now - getting access to the Internet is easier and cheaper than ever before. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 27, 2006
Your Money
Timing the Electronics Market for the Best Deal on a New PC
By DAMON DARLIN

Lower prices are part of the natural order in the world of electronics. Sometimes, though, the slow but relentless drop in price turns into a torrent. That's happening now in personal computers.

Prices are falling fast on notebook computers, as much as 18.5 percent so far this year, according to statistics compiled by Current Analysis, a market research firm. The bulk of notebooks now sell for less than $1,000.

The lower-priced notebooks are pushing desktop prices down, too. "I would expect even more intense price competition," said Charles Smulders, an analyst with Gartner, another market research firm.

The pace of price cuts has accelerated because a price war has broken out that offers great benefits to anyone in the market for a PC. And that could be a pretty large market. Forrester Research estimates that 70 percent of PC's in use are more than two years old and 90 percent of second, third and fourth computers are even older. The wars started quietly a year ago this week when Acer, a PC maker in Taiwan, re-entered the American market. The strategy was to get into the top tier of PC vendors as quickly as possible, which meant it would grab market share by keeping prices low.

Acer and other makers took business from Dell, which began to look less like the growth company that its investors were accustomed to. Dell's response came earlier this year as it cut prices.

Intel, meanwhile, was losing a significant portion of the microprocessor market to Advanced Micro Devices. Intel's share dropped to 77.9 percent from 81.5 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner, while A.M.D.'s market share grew to 20.4 percent from 16.6 percent two years ago. Intel is fighting to win back share, which means PC makers use the rivalry to get a price break.

Apple switched its processor to an Intel chip. Apple also makes running Windows applications on a Mac very easy. Owners of iPods are beginning to notice that Apple does more than sell music.

At the same time, Microsoft has pushed back the release of Vista, its new operating system, from before Christmas to early next year. Normally that would slow PC sales. But Microsoft is considering whether to offer incentives for consumers to buy PC's before Vista's release.

Some analysts had expected coming into the year that prices would actually go up slightly. Instead, the average price of a notebook computer dropped to $963 in April, an 18.5 percent decrease from a year ago, according to Current Analysis, which is based in Sterling, Va.

When an electronic device breaks through the $1,000 psychological barrier, sales take off. Samir Bhavnani, director for research at Current Analysis, said 37 percent more notebooks have been sold so far this year. About 60 percent of all notebook computers sold last month were priced below $1,000. He credits Dell, saying, "They love getting down in the mud."

Dell is running a promotion, which it bills as a celebration of its 22nd anniversary, with a $400 discount on PC's, plus a free monitor and free shipping.

Another statistic will tell you just how good consumers have it. While the number of notebooks sold is up 37 percent, revenue growth in the period is up only 15.5 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Companies are making less money on each notebook. Desktop computers are literally being given away. Retailers sold 14.8 percent more of them in the first five months of the year, but revenue declined 4 percent, Mr. Bhavnani said. Half of the computers sold for less than $500.

Consider the Hewlett-Packard Compaq Presario desktop offered this week at Office Depot. For $300 you get a PC with 512 megabytes of RAM and a 100-gigabyte hard drive. Office Depot tossed in a 17-inch CRT monitor and a printer.

"The material cost, before the printer, was around $400," estimated Mark Hill, Acer's vice president for sales in the United States. "It's crazy." Not that he's complaining. Acer has gained one point of market share this year by artful pricing.

So how does a consumer play this? As always with electronics, it is worth waiting. Expect even better deals around the Christmas season. But if you need to get one now, you certainly won't suffer. Deals will abound during the back-to-school season, which starts in June just as the school year ends.

Many consumers will end up waiting for Vista, Microsoft's new operating system. Some analysts expect that to keep computer sales from flagging during the year-end holidays, manufacturers will pressure Microsoft to offer a free upgrade to Vista to anyone buying a new PC.

Decide on the particular features you want on the computer. A notebook with one gigabyte of random access memory and an 80-gigabyte hard drive is recommended. Don't worry about the processor. Unless you are using the computer for designing nuclear power plants or playing video games professionally, any one of them on the market will serve you well.

Why a notebook, rather than a desktop? Convenience, mostly. Desktop models are becoming a relic of a bygone era as the artificial price difference between notebooks and desktops collapse. Notebooks now outsell desktops in stores. IDC estimates that by the middle of next year, more than half of all PC's sold will be notebooks.

Decide on a size. The computers that weigh less than four pounds are considered ultra portables, the kind you take on business trips. Anything heavier is a desktop replacement, perfect for moving from room to room or on a jaunt to the coffee shop. Go to a store to test the heft.

Reflect on how much style you want. As this category matures, manufacturers differentiate their products by making some notebooks look prettier than others. They charge more for anything on the color wheel besides gray and anything that glows.

Then watch the prices at retailers and at the manufacturers' Web sites. The last time you bought a PC, the best deals were probably online. That's not necessarily true anymore. The best deals can be inside the stores because those retailers are using PC's and notebooks in particular as loss leaders to drive traffic.

Here is another business trend that is helping consumers. As the prices of PC's drop, even if retailers sell more units their year-on-year revenue comparisons may drop. Investors closely watch that figure. So stores need to bolster revenue by selling even more of them. They do that by offering even better deals on notebooks because notebook buyers tend to buy other gear like bags and home networking equipment.

The brand you pick will depend on which one gives you the most computer for the price. Current Analysis compiles a "competitive value index" that measures the price of PC's against the features offered. When it looks at computers sold in all channels, the top berths go to Acer, Gateway, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

Columns providing advice on buying a computer usually have a paragraph or two where the writer pauses and briefly genuflects at Apple. Great computer, they'll say, but — there is always that but — they carry a premium of 20 percent to 30 percent over a similarly configured computer running Windows.

Here comes those paragraphs. However, that required "but" may soon be retired. Gene Munster, a senior research analyst with Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis, compared Mac notebooks with similarly equipped notebook computers running Windows and discovered that the premium for a Mac is now only about 10 percent. "I don't think consumers go through this exercise," he said. The premium shrank, not because Apple cut its prices, Mr. Munster said, but because Apple, in switching to an Intel processor, increased the performance of its Macs, and then didn't raise prices.

A few more consumers may notice. Apple's market share, which climbed as high as 2.5 percent last year before the switch to Intel, has grown from 1.8 percent. Macs compete at the high end of the PC market, where the machines costing more than $1,500 are loaded with multimedia features like TV tuners and bigger hard drives to store photos, videos and music. Some have special chips designed to enhance the performance of video games. Price cuts have not been as deep up there, which is one reason Mr. Munster thinks the premium won't go back to 30 percent.

He said that the media viewing and editing software that comes with the Mac compensates for much of the remaining premium. "Apples are always going to be at a premium," he said.

E-mail: yourmoney@nytimes.com
###

Three's NOT a crowd

We cajuns were way ahead of this curve too. Three generations living in the same home was the DEFAULT position for most Cajun families until just recently ! Enjoy.

May 25, 2006
Families Add 3rd Generation to Households
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Tess Crescini keeps trying to limit her roommates to her fiancé and her dog, but so far she has failed miserably.

At the moment, Ms. Crescini, 51, and her fiancé are sharing her four-bedroom house in San Jose, Calif., with two of her three adult sons, a daughter-in-law, a 3-year-old granddaughter and a brother who comes and goes. Exorbitant housing costs, layoffs and children who yearn for family togetherness have coalesced to make her the head of a multigenerational household.

In a society where the most common type of household is led by those who live alone and where the scattered family is almost a cultural institution, many grandparents, adult children and grandchildren are gathering to live under the same roof.

The last census showed these "multigenerational households" — defined as those of three or more generations — growing faster than any other type of housing arrangement.

The number of multigenerational households is still relatively small: 4.2 million, or 4 percent of all types. But they grew by 38 percent from 1990 to 2000, and professionals in real estate and the building industry say the trend has accelerated since then.

Architects, developers and others in the industry are responding with home designs and planned communities that offer features suited for the different generations. At builder trade shows this year, model homes with names like Reality House have for the first time specifically catered to multigenerational living. Bedroom suites are designed with private entrances and porches, halls are wider to accommodate wheelchairs, and light switches are lower so they can be reached both by those in the wheelchairs and by children.

There are also bigger kitchens for social networking, as well as extra storage space for belongings that now range from toys to grandma's china.

"You see a lot more people dedicating a portion of their homes to loved ones," said Carlos Elenes of EBTA Architects in Irvine, Calif., who specializes in high-end homes and has worked on projects for adult children housing their parents and for grandparents sharing their home with children and grandchildren.

But fancy, multimillion-dollar homes are not the norm when generations choose to live together. Census officials say multigenerational families are most common in states like California, where the high cost of housing forces families to double up, and in states where high rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing lead to home sharing by the mother, her children and her parents.

A variety of cultural factors also draw and keep relatives together. Multigenerational living, especially those in which grandparents care for their grandchildren, have long been common in Asian and Hispanic countries, and the arrangement is popular among immigrants from those nations. Also driving the trend are — who else? — active baby boomers who want to be involved in the lives of their offspring and who see little appeal in flying off to a Sun Belt retirement in isolation.

"There's a financial aspect, but also people are realizing the importance of staying connected to their roots," said Donna M. Butts, executive director of Generations United, which promotes interaction among generations. "Families have been scattered for so many years, and there's a reversal of that trend."

Sixty-two percent of multigenerational households are led by the first generation — that is, the grandparents.

At a time when she would otherwise have been downsizing, Ann Bristow, 66, bought a two-bedroom condo in downtown Seattle in 2004 so she could share it with her 36-year-old daughter and 20-month-old granddaughter.

Ms. Bristow, who is divorced, said she had been retiring from her job as a university librarian in Indiana just as her youngest daughter became a single mother. They moved to Seattle, where Ms. Bristow's other daughter lives with her own family. Ending up together in one apartment, the multigen grandmother said, "was just a very natural move for me."

Ms. Bristow takes care of the baby part of the week while her daughter works as a teacher. "I love small children," she said. "I absolutely enjoy taking care of her. It's not a sacrifice."

The arrangement is also driven by finances: she is helping her daughter, who has gone back to school for a second master's degree and is saving money to settle down on her own.

Ms. Bristow said many of her contemporaries did not seem to understand. They view retirement as a time to pamper themselves, not to take on new responsibilities.

"Playing golf was not my vision," she said. "I envisioned myself very involved with family."

For those who have decided to regroup, family togetherness can create strains, prompting a need to navigate old relationships in a new way. It means establishing ground rules for cooking and cleaning, adapting to one another's tastes in movies and music, and being mindful not to usurp roles. In Ms. Bristow's case, mother and daughter seem to have fallen into their routines smoothly, and Ms. Bristow says her main concern is that her granddaughter knows who her mother is.

"That's a very important thing, that the emotional attachments and the authority are as clear as one can make them," she said.

Each household has its own tensions and rewards. Ms. Crescini, a real estate agent in San Jose, said she had forfeited two bedrooms, including one she had planned to use as a workout room, to her sons. And she misses "alone time" to write poetry and enjoy privacy with her fiancé, whom she plans to marry next month. "Try having a wild night with a house full of people," she said.

On the plus side, Ms. Crescini said, the family eats meals and watches movies together, her daughter-in-law is helping her coordinate her wedding, and her sons and brother have been busy building her a gazebo, a deck and an island grill station in the backyard.

"I go to Curves in the mornings," she said, "and I tell the ladies about my daily grind, and they say: 'You should count your blessings. Some children don't even visit for Thanksgiving' "

But "ideally," she said, "I'd like my sons to be independent."

Her oldest son, Michael Hovland, 29, has a slightly different wish. "Ideally," he said, "I'd like to buy a house right next to hers."

Mr. Hovland said he was glad that his daughter was growing up with her extended family and that he could benefit from the wisdom of "an elder who's been there and done that" in day-to-day matters.

"Family is, like, everything," he said. "If I had millions and millions of dollars, I'd buy land and have everybody live on it."

That would be a return to the custom of the 19th century, before the decline of farming and the exodus of adult children from their parents' homes to follow jobs, said Steven Ruggles, a historian who studies changes in the American family and directs the Minnesota Population Center, a research organization at the University of Minnesota.

Many social scientists, Dr. Ruggles said, also argue that Social Security contributed to the erosion of the multigenerational household, by enabling the elderly to afford living independently. He said the percentage of people over 65 living with their children dropped steadily from 1850 to 1990, when it began inching up.

Now, although multigenerational households are more common among low-income families, architects and builders are designing multimillion-dollar homes that cater to the more wealthy among this niche market, and owners of existing homes are adding 5,000 to 6,000 square feet to accommodate relatives.

In the market below $1 million, some real estate agents are seeing families with multiple wage-earners combining incomes and down payments to get the bigger house.

"When you show these homes, you have this large caravan" of up to 10 people, said Yvonne Rosas-Petty, a sales associate with Century 21 in Arcadia, Calif., a city with a large Asian population where multigenerational homes sell for $700,000 and up.

In some multigenerational households, the parent-child roles have been reversed.

Julie Kroloff, a 49-year-old head of household, moved her multigenerational family — a daughter, 8; a son, 7; and her 84-year-old mother — to a five-bedroom house in Four Corners, a new development in Dutchess County, N.Y., with planned amenities suited to more than one generation, including a general store, a pool, a gym and a meeting center.

Her mother helped take care of the children and opened up a whole new world to them, said Ms. Kroloff, who does management consulting for public works programs. Thanks to her, she said, they have watched old movies like "Arsenic and Old Lace" and learned to make popcorn the old-fashioned way, in corn oil in a pot.

But Ms. Kroloff also had to ask her mother to refrain from eating junk food in front of the children, to turn down the television when she watches past their bedtime and to give her space to spend time with her children and with friends who visit.

"You don't want her to tell stories about how constipated you were as a child," she said.

Since late last year, when her mother was found to have Alzheimer's disease, a home care attendant has taken care of grandmother and grandchildren alike.

Many of the arrangements are by nature temporary. Children grow up, grandparents die. In Seattle, Ms. Bristow said she and her daughter expected that they would probably part ways by the time her granddaughter begins school.

But, then again, they may end up back together.

"If I'm ill or unable to take care of myself," Ms. Bristow said, "she might invite me to move in with her."
###

Dog Whisperer

I love animals, especially dogs. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 23, 2006
From the 'Dog Whisperer,' a Howl of Triumph
By EDWARD WYATT

In his journey from illegal immigrant to television star, Cesar Millan, a best-selling author and dog trainer to the Hollywood elite better known as television's "Dog Whisperer," has not forgotten the little people who helped him along the way.

They are thanked, right up front, in "Cesar's Way," his guide to understanding and correcting common dog problems: Jada Pinkett Smith, Oprah Winfrey, Anthony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Phil McGraw.

Also, "the women who ran a grooming parlor in San Diego and who hired me when I first came to the United States. Forgive me for not recalling your names."

It is an unusual example of Mr. Millan's forgetfulness, explainable perhaps by understanding that the Dog Whisperer rarely looks back. In his dog-training methodology, in his business and elsewhere, he is the pack leader.

Evidence of the primacy of Mr. Millan in all his efforts comes with today's release of the DVD collection "Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan: The Complete First Season." Though "Dog Whisperer" is the top-rated show on the National Geographic Channel, National Geographic's name and familiar logo are nowhere on the DVD's front cover.

Instead, Cesar Millan is the brand.

"This is not a flash-in-the-pan sort of thing," said Jim Milio, one of the three founders of MPH Entertainment, which produces Mr. Millan's show along with Emery/Sumner Productions, and who has helped to guide Mr. Millan's efforts to build an ambitious business enterprise. "This is not one year and he's gone. We're making him into a long-lasting brand," with more books and videos and dog-training aids and, well, who knows?

It was thanks to the efforts of his producers, for example, that Mr. Millan kept all the home video and foreign syndication rights to his television show. That has allowed him to create, in addition to the 10-hour complete collections, which retails for nearly $50, several shorter collections that will be widely available for less than $10 each. Wal-Mart and Sam's Club are expected to feature them at the front of their stores.

Mr. Millan's fame has grown to the point where he was recently parodied on an episode of "South Park," the Comedy Central staple.

To hear Mr. Millan tell it, he planned it all exactly this way. Even as he evaded border patrols while following a paid guide from Tijuana into Southern California, he said recently, "my goal was just to become the best dog trainer in the world." Now a legal immigrant, he is married to an American citizen and planning to apply for citizenship himself.

"And my goal was always Hollywood," he added. "Where I'm from, the only thing you hear is Hollywood and Disneyland. You don't hear Texas, you don't hear Ohio, you don't even hear New York. My target was Hollywood because that was the only thing I knew."

Mr. Millan, 36, started by working in the early 1990's in a San Diego dog-grooming studio, where he gained a reputation for working well with the hard-to-handle cases. He asked neighbors to let him walk their dogs. People noticed how he could calm even the fiercest creatures, and word of mouth, the most effective form of advertising and promotion, followed him north to Los Angeles.

Working with Americans and their dogs, he said, "I was surprised and a little confused by what I saw." Where he grew up, in Culiacan, Sinaloa, in Northwest Mexico, "everybody walks dogs," Mr. Millan said during a recent visit to New York. "But where I am from, the dog is always behind. Here the dog is always in front. I thought maybe you guys were doing it right and we were doing it wrong. Because to me America is the country where everybody is always doing it right. I thought you knew and we were wrong."

He quickly discovered: no. Americans were letting the dogs, rather than the humans, be the pack leaders, in almost every respect. "Americans work against Mother Nature, and that's why dogs don't listen to the general population of America," he said. "Why are dogs growing up on a farm much happier than a dog living in the city? Because on a farm, it gets to be a dog. And in the city they become a child, they become a husband, they become a soul mate. They become something the human wants before they are willing to do what is best for them."

That, in turn, translates to dogs behaving badly. At Mr. Millan's Dog Psychology Center in Los Angeles, he works with dozens of dogs at a time. He first drew attention for his walks through Los Angeles with his packs — he on in-line skates, the dogs on leashes — or his runs along the beach or through the Santa Monica Mountains with them. Always, Mr. Millan is at the head of the pack.

"It's like cowboys," he said. "They grow up around the horse and the cow; they are not afraid of them. You can be a huge dog lover, you can have a passion for it, but that doesn't mean you can develop the strong assertive state of mind that is required to be around hard-core cases. These cases I work with, they are coming after me. But I don't develop fear. Like the people who work around cobras — they don't have fear in their mind. What makes you become a pack leader is being in a calm, assertive state 100 percent of the time."

Whether he can remain calm and assertive in the wake of his fame and growing fortune will be interesting to watch; in addition to those, Mr. Millan is starting to draw the scrutiny that in America inevitably follows — that is, lawsuits. Earlier this year, Flody Suarez, a television producer and former NBC executive, filed suit in state court charging that his dog, Gator, was severely injured and abused at the Dog Psychology Center. A former publicist for Mr. Millan, Makeda Smith, and a partner also sued Mr. Millan and the National Geographic Channel, contending that they helped to create the idea for a "Dog Whisperer" television series.

Mr. Millan would not comment on the lawsuits. In a statement, a spokesman for the National Geographic Channel also declined to comment on the litigation, adding that the Suarez dog's injuries were not related to the production of the show and that Mr. Millan was not at the center when the dog was there.

Still, Mr. Millan is hard to ruffle, something he says is essential to his training methods.

"It's a ripple effect," he said. "I believe in the golden rule — do good things and good things will happen to you. I know I help dogs all the time. And because you help Mother Nature, Mother Nature is going to help you back. There's no other way around. It's the law of the universe."
###

A Good Death

I have been a Hospice of Acadiana volunteer now for about four months. I love this work , and will specialize, after more training, in that service this article describes. Please look inot volunteering at your local Hospice soon. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 20, 2006
For the Families of the Dying, Coaching as the Hours Wane
By JANE GROSS

Greg Torso's death announced itself with a long exhale and then silence, as the breath literally left his body. His mother had been told to expect this, so she was not scared.

Ms. Torso had worried that an undertaker would barge in moments after her 42-year-old son died, before she had had time to say goodbye. She had been assured she could spend as much time with the body as she wanted.

Could she bathe and dress him? Save a lock of his hair? Commemorate his passing with wine and reminiscence at the bedside? All of that was fine, she had been told, setting the stage for a death that she later said had left her "on the edge of euphoria."

Ms. Torso was coached and consoled through the final days and hours of her son's life, a rarity even under the umbrella of hospice, which for three decades has promised Americans a good death, pain-free, peaceful and shared with loved ones at home.

But there is a growing realization that hospice has its limitations. Doctors, nurses, social workers, clerics and volunteers are rarely there for the final hours, known as active dying, when a family may need their comforts the most.

Now those final moments are a focus of new attention as hospices broaden their range of services, inspired by a growing body of research on the very end of life. More are encouraging the calming properties of music, meditation, aromatherapy and massage for both patients and families. Some are increasing the training for so-called 11th-hour companions who families can request be with them.

Holding a dying person's hand may be frightening for a loved one alone at the bedside. Relatives and friends may not know that hearing is the last sense to go, and neglect to soothe the patient with a steady, reassuring murmur. Leaving the room briefly may mean missing the moment of passing and always carrying that regret.

"These final moments matter, but often, when families and patients need us most — to explain the process, calm the situation, take away the negative energy and allow them to be more present — we aren't there," said Henry Fersko-Weiss, vice president for counseling services at Continuum Hospice Care in New York City, which has a new program that has been keeping vigil with the dying and their families.

The American hospice movement has grown from one program in 1974 to 3,650 in 2004, serving eight million Americans, according to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. And more people are expected to choose hospice care as it extends its reach into hospitals and nursing homes, where palliative care is not routinely available. At the same time, those who seek aggressive treatment up to the end are welcome at hospice programs that once turned them away but that are now "open access."

Despite all these changes, most people, in fear or denial, wait until the last minute to enroll. That robs them of the preparation that was so vital to Greg Torso's mother, Carol, and that hospice leaders, like Andy Duncan of the national organization, say should be routine.

"Actually coaching and counseling people through the time of active dying," Mr. Duncan said, "is something we hope to convince every hospice in the nation to do."

Preparing

The Torsos were the first to use Continuum's vigil program, which has coached and consoled a dozen families in its first year.

Greg had survived 15 years with AIDS and related cancers. When his doctor said further treatment would be useless, Mr. Torso enrolled in hospice, and welcomed extra help from Mr. Fersko-Weiss and 29 specially trained volunteers who call themselves doulas.

That is a Greek term for women who serve, more commonly at home births to assist both midwife and mother. But the guiding philosophy is the same and borrows from Eastern religions: to honor the end of life as well as the beginning.

Mr. Fersko-Weiss is a gentle man who insinuates himself slowly. When he first described the dying process to Ms. Torso, she found it hard to listen. So they shifted gears, talking about Greg's life and looking at photos of him in better days.

On a subsequent visit, Ms. Torso sought reassurance that she would not "just fall apart." On another, Mr. Fersko-Weiss told her there might come a moment when she would have to give her son explicit permission to die. She did — "You can go, Greggy. You can go whenever you want" — toward the end of what would be a 68-hour vigil, involving 10 doulas (pronounced DOO-lehs).

Gwen Lee's needs were different as she prepared for the passing of her eldest sister, Vivienne, who died at 60 after a 10-year battle with brain cancer.

Years of pretending that all was fine had given way, for both of them, flight attendants from Ireland, to acceptance. As Gwen put it, "We were prepared for the end of her life, but no one else was." Some friends and relatives began second-guessing the decisions, arguing at Viv's bedside, arriving uninvited and creating a "soap opera," Gwen said, "where we were left trying to keep them happy."

It is not uncommon, hospice workers say, for those not involved in day-to-day care to bring their own fears and conflict to the deathbed and inadvertently become a burden. Into the tumult came Mr. Fersko-Weiss, a Buddhist whose religion says that "what happens to the soul is partly determined by how it leaves this life." The scene of death, he said, is a "sacred space," and the doula's job is to protect it.

To that end, he and Gwen, 51, considered moving Vivienne, and her two beloved cats, to an in-patient hospice where they could control who visited. Just knowing there was a fallback position reassured them.

"It made all the difference," Gwen said. "Henry pulled me out of the chaos and kept my head on the goal."

The Vigil

Chloe Tartaglia, a pre-med student, yoga teacher and former birth doula, had never seen anyone die when she volunteered for the vigil program.

She learned the signs of imminent death in her 16-hour training program, how to match her breathing to the patient's and use visualization and aromatherapy to calm everyone in the room. On the subway, headed to her first case, Ms. Tartaglia, whose father was a hospice physician, concentrated on her goal: to be "like water and flow to the place where there's need."

She found herself in a shabby apartment near New York University. A tiny woman lay in bed, wasting away from "failure to thrive," Ms. Tartaglia had been told. The woman's husband was terrified, venturing into the room only to give her morphine, as he had been instructed by hospice nurses.

The woman's daughter, none too fond of her stepfather, was at work, having left behind a phone number. Ms. Tartaglia pulled a chair to the bedside.

For five hours, Ms. Tartaglia said, she sat beside the woman and held her hand "with intention," as she had been taught, enclosing it between her own. She had no sense of time passing until her shift was about to end.

"I told her I'd be leaving soon but that someone else was coming and she wouldn't be alone," Ms. Tartaglia said.

Five minutes later the woman died.

Ms. Tartaglia called the daughter, who arrived calm and efficient, ready for the logistics that follow death. "I can't deal with him," she told Ms. Tartaglia as the old man keened.

Ms. Tartaglia guided him into the kitchen and fixed tea. "You deal with yourself and your mom," she told the daughter. Ms. Tartaglia followed her heart and suggested a deathbed ritual. As she slipped from the apartment, the daughter was combing her mother's hair.

There would be more vigils for Ms. Tartaglia. One of the most memorable, she said, included the chance to hear Gwen Lee take her sister on whispered journeys to places Vivienne had most loved in the days when being a stewardess was glamorous.

With one of Vivienne's cats at her head and the other draped over her legs, Gwen would set the scene: An overnight flight to Africa. Glaring sun as the cabin doors open. Days between flights to romp at the beach with captain and crew.

While Gwen soothed her sister, Ms. Tartaglia lighted candles. She massaged Gwen's feet, helped choose the music for Vivienne's grand exit, Sarah Brightman singing "Time to Say Goodbye."

Ms. Tartaglia's shift ended three hours before Vivienne died. As she left, Ms. Tartaglia removed the oxygen mask that was intended to make Vivienne more comfortable but was chafing her face.

The Aftermath

A month to the day after Dominggus Pasalbessy died, Mr. Fersko-Weiss visited the three daughters who had cared for him. This was a formal opportunity for Pat Jolly, 62, Helen Santiago, 58, and Anita Pasalbessy, 55, to review their experience. After a death, Mr. Fersko-Weiss told them, "something said or not said, something you wish you had done differently, can stick inside you like a splinter."

The lights were low in Ms. Pasalbessy's Riverside Drive apartment, and Mr. Fersko-Weiss suggested a CD their father had loved, music from the South Moluccan islands, now part of Indonesia, the native land he had left as a teenager on a tramp steamer. The sisters sat for a brief meditation, letting the bustle of their day be replaced with images of their father, who died of lung cancer in the same bed where his wife had died a dozen years earlier.

All three described feeling peaceful and reverent at the time of his passing. It was like being "inside a cocoon," Ms. Pasalbessy said, "just me and my sisters, and Daddy, all together, in a place where nothing bad could touch us."

Only when pressed did each recall her particular moment of distress.

Ms. Pasalbessy agonized that she had compromised the independence of a man who "never wanted to be fussed over." Mr. Fersko-Weiss reminded her that eventually her father had stopped resisting his daughters' ministrations and had told them, "You're good girls, such good girls."

Ms. Jolly's concern was whether they had adequately medicated him. But her father's mantra had been "mind over matter." Perhaps, Mr. Fersko-Weiss suggested, he chose a measure of pain, rather than unawareness, as an assertion of strength.

Ms. Santiago had trouble forgetting the sisters' squabbling as they tried to dress him, three strong-willed women each with her own idea of how to get his arm through a pajama sleeve. "He had to have felt our tension, our nervousness," she said. "But that's when you guys walked in and everything fell into place."

Three doulas were with the family, in shifts, from dusk on April 9 until late afternoon on April 11. At 3:10 p.m., after a telltale rattling in his chest, Mr. Pasalbessy let out a breath. Then another, as two tears trickled down his cheek.

"It was like we could hear you talking to us," Ms. Jolly told Mr. Fersko-Weiss. " 'You'll see this. You'll hear a certain breathing pattern.' This dying was such a wonderful experience, if death can be that. And it's because there was no fear of the unknown."###

A Room of Our Own

Fuller Cowles tracks weather from his cupola, 24 feet from his living room, straight up.

Being the eldest in a family of 12, I never did get a room of my own. One day . . . (enjoy)

The New York Times
May 18, 2006
A Hideout of His Own
By FINN-OLAF JONES

ALL those flowers and designs," said Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. It's no wonder men aren't comfortable at home, with the overdesigned, "feminized spaces that are being imposed on them" by the women in their lives, she said. "They're going to want to push back."

It may be an unpopular opinion, but Ms. Sommers, who is well known for her critiques of feminism, may have a point.

According to James B. Twitchell, professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida in Gainesville, men are increasingly creating small private domains in and around their houses — in sheds, basements, attics and closets — as a way of retreating from everyday life. Professor Twitchell, author of "Where Men Hide," published this month by Columbia University Press, does not agree that women are to blame for this phenomenon, or that it's a matter of blame at all. He sees it as a positive development, and has built a shed of his own. He uses it as an office and calls it his hidey-hole. It sits on a site near his summer house in Vermont once dedicated to an above-ground septic tank.

He has plenty of company. Although the Home Depot would not release sales figures, Kathryn Gallagher, a company spokeswoman, said there was a growing trend of men putting prefab sheds to various recreational uses in a quest for "a little place to get away." Haroula Battista, marketing manager for Summerwood Products, a shed manufacturer in Toronto that mainly sells to American customers, described "a tremendous upsurge in demand," in particular for the company's larger sheds. "They're turning them into everything from workout rooms to their personal bars," she said.

Tuff Shed, a company in Denver, now makes 50,000 sheds a year, up from 20,000 in 2003, and sells them through its own stores in 21 states and stores like the Home Depot. Phil Worth, the company's director of marketing, estimates that as much as 15 percent of Tuff Shed's sales are now for "male-driven spaces like workshops, poker rooms and the like."

"Guys are looking for their special spaces, and I'm telling my salesmen to find opportunities there," said Randy Morrow, Tuff Shed's Southwest region sales manager. Gail Andrews, one of his salesman, has taken his advice. "Used to be when a guy ordered a garage, it was for a car," Mr. Andrews said. "Now they're positioning them to be used as workshops and pool rooms. I've had musicians who use them as low-rent recording studios."

Even before Richard Warner, a retired history professor, and his wife, Judy, a retired teacher, moved into their Spanish-style stucco-sided house in Asheville, N.C., two years ago, he had his own special space in mind: a 10-by-16-foot prefab barnyard utility building that would serve as his second home.

He bought a kit for $2,600 from Blue Ridge Builders, set it up in the long, narrow backyard, and fitted it with heating, air-conditioning, drywall and a stucco facade for an additional $3,400.

He was soon happily ensconced, surrounded by a desk, a sofa and an extensive collection of military memorabilia, and working on what he calls an "action-adventure historical novel about a shipwreck off the coast of Maine, and cannibalism."

"Every man ought to have one of these," said Mr. Warner, 70, describing the building as "a place where I can do what I want to do." His wife knows to stay away, he said, adding, "She won't even bring a meal in there for me."

"I just stay out of there," Mrs. Warner, 69, confirmed, adding that when her husband proposed the building, she wholeheartedly agreed with the idea. "Our house is very small," she said. "I'm just doing my own thing here. It's his space out there."

A century ago, instead of retreating into his shed alone, Mr. Warner might have belonged to some kind of fraternal order, as one in three American men did, according to Professor Twitchell; 50 years ago he might have spent time socializing with other men at a barbershop, of which there were six times as many as there are today. It is the loss of these kinds of communal retreats — which the Robert Bly-inspired vogue for men's encounter groups and drumming circles in the early 90's did little to stem — that has left many men to their own devices when it comes to decompressing.

But decompressing at home is not always easy, said David Halle, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of "America's Working Man." Classically, "men hide from the 'honey-do' list" of demands made by their wives, he said, but now that men are spending more time at home, they may also have to contend with a sense of being unwelcome. "Women like alone time even more than men do," and they "don't necessarily want to share their space," Professor Halle said. Men are faced with "the problem of carving out a space in what has, for many of them, become foreign territory."

Vince Jones, a 33-year-old real estate salesman in Rocklin, Calif., took on the challenge with gusto, turning a $10,000 prefab shed into his personal fight studio. "I practice Shoshu kung fu and Brazilian jujitsu," said Mr. Jones, who stages regular bouts in his backyard retreat with other men. "I originally wanted a Shaolin Temple with a curved roof, but that proved to be too difficult." Once the drywall goes up, he plans to decorate with martial arts swords.

"It's definitely a masculine space I've made," he said, acknowledging that there was no way his wife would let the main house be used for a restaging of "Fight Club."

"This has worked out well for both of us," Teri Jones said of her husband's backyard project. "I was not at all weirded out by it."

Other men may be less adamant about asserting their masculinity, but at a time when many homes reflect an almost obsessive concern with design, they are grateful to find spaces that are not as self-consciously decorated as the rest of the house. When Fuller Cowles, 44, a sculptor, built his 4,000-square-foot post-and-beam house on an old farmstead an hour north of Minneapolis in 1985, "it was a kind of bachelor pad with studios," said his wife, Connee, 57, a ceramist. It was only after they married that the house began to feel finished, as she put it.

And it was just last year, in the final stage of the 15-year renovation, that Mrs. Cowles's home improvement efforts reached the cupola — her husband's own version of a hidey-hole, a tiny perch at the top of a 24-foot ladder leading up from the living room. But after designing the rest of the house, Mrs. Cowles intentionally did not decorate the cupola. "I feel it's Fuller's space," she said. "It shouldn't be cute."

The contractor, taken with Mr. Cowles's love for the little room, which he uses for meditation, watching the weather and taking naps in the sun, surprised him with an expansion that added a third more space. It is now 8 feet by 8 feet and has a built-in window seat. "That was totally a guy-to-guy thing," Mrs. Cowles said. "I was just rolling my eyes and going, 'Boys and their toys.' "

The urge to escape the tyranny of someone else's design sensibility, of course, is not limited to men in heterosexual relationships. After moving in 1999 into his partner's apartment in San Francisco, furnished in the Arts and Crafts style, Dave Monks, a 43-year-old lawyer, decided he needed a less refined spot in which to unwind. "I like his things, but his tastes aren't mine," Mr. Monks said. "He's practically a designer, very finicky about his stuff. I'm more the laundry-on-the-floor guy."

Mr. Monks laid claim to a 5-by-6-foot closet. "It's literally a cave," he said. But it allows him his own space in an apartment he describes as a Luddite's paradise (the only technology more advanced than a telephone is in Mr. Monk's closet). "I moved in a desk, my computer and my movie memorabilia," he said, "and I can be in there for hours at a time."

There are those who may wonder if all this time spent alone in sheds, closets and other cramped spaces is really healthy for the male psyche. Although Thoreau in his bucolic cabin runs deep in America's cultural consciousness, so too does another hermit in the woods, Theodore J. Kaczynski. And as Robert D. Putnam famously argued in his 2000 book, "Bowling Alone," Americans' withdrawal from social organizations in the last 40 years may have contributed to a severe sense of collective and individual anomie.

Professor Twitchell is more optimistic: hidey-holes, he argues, fulfill an intrinsic male need and are fundamentally gratifying places to spend time.

And not all of them are about isolation. Ralph Balzano, 67, a retired New York Department of Parks and Recreation worker, turned an uncle's old garage down the street from his home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, into a rough-and-ready gathering place for neighborhood men. On summer afternoons they gather around the open hood of Mr. Balzano's El Camino or Buick convertible. The walls are plastered with Coke ads and posters from gangster movies.

"Sometimes we just sit around and drink beer and barbecue," Mr. Balzano said. "It's my space. It's my therapy."

His girlfriend, Lorraine Barnett, 52, lives with him, but generally leaves the garage to him.

"I work for a living" — as a receptionist for Boar's Head Provisions — "and I don't have time to hang out," she said.

"Everyone goes gaga over his space," she added. "I have no idea why."

Ms. Sommers, the critic of feminism, says she is familiar with this enigma. "Women can't fully understand why men need to be alone and separate," she said. But out of "affection and respect for manliness," she added, "we tolerate it."
###

Hawaii

Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times.

At the end of Chain of Craters Road, looking for volcanic activity.

Hawaii has been in the hopes and dreams of my famioly for many generations, and a few of us have even been there. Enjoy.

The New York Times
May 14, 2006
Mark Twain's Hawaii
By LAWRENCE DOWNES

LIKE any paradise, Hawaii walks the fine line between blissful and boring. David Lodge noted this in his satirical novel "Paradise News," imagining the predicament of tourists in fanny packs walking up and down the sidewalks of Waikiki like heavenly pilgrims with no place left to go. They seem contented, but a half-formed question lingers in their eyes:

"Well, this is nice, but is this all there is? Is this it?"

Actually, it's not. Hawaii's blandly sunny face hides a turbulent history, an extra dimension of sadness and beauty. This is what separates Hawaii from the beach-and-beer nowheres like Fort Lauderdale and Cancún: a complicated soul.

Finding it means getting out of Waikiki, peeling back layers to uncover the stories behind the scenery. It means having the right guide, a writer to annotate the loveliness.

Hawaii has seen its share of famous storytellers. Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London and Herman Melville passed through on their way to other frontiers. But what little they wrote about Hawaii was fictionalized, heavily metaphorical and is now mostly forgotten. James Michener, on the other hand, wrote way too much: His 1959 novel "Hawaii" covers nearly the whole thing, from the volcanoes to the missionaries, a span of 40 million years, or maybe pages, it's hard to tell. ("And then one day," one typically fizzy passage goes, "at the northwest end of the subocean rupture, an eruption of liquid rock occurred that was different from any others.")

That book is a brick, and so is the movie, even if it does have Julie Andrews, that pearly shell, playing a missionary's wife. Neither is what you want if you're looking for something to enrich your visit.

What you want is Mark Twain.

Twain spent four months in the islands in 1866, when he was 31 and working on becoming famous. His 25 letters from the Sandwich Islands, written on assignment for The Sacramento Union, are still fresh and rudely funny after almost a century and a half — a foretaste of genius and the best travel writing about Hawaii, my home state, I have ever read.

Twain's Hawaii teemed with ship captains, whalers, missionaries, mosquitoes, fragrant thickets of flowers and thousands of cats. France, Britain and the United States were competing for influence, making the usual colonial mischief. The population and ancient ways of native Hawaiians, the Kanaka Maoli, were in catastrophic decline, beset by disease and cultural pressures. But Hawaii was still in its sovereign glory, with an elected legislature and a 35-year-old king: stately, plump Kamehameha V, the last of his family dynasty. It was a land of royal pageantry, tropical splendor and a fair amount of squalor.

Determined to "ransack the islands" for his dispatches, Twain rented a horse and rode until he was laid up with saddle sores. He rode by moonlight through a ghostly plain of sand strewn with human bones, the remains of an ancient battlefield. He scaled the summit of Kilauea during an eruption, standing at the crater's edge on a foggy night, his face made crimson by lava-glow. He hiked through misty valleys. He surfed.

You heard right, Huck: America's greatest writer took a wooden surfboard and paddled out to wait, as he had seen naked locals do, "for a particularly prodigious billow to come along," upon which billow he prodigiously wiped out.

"None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly," he wrote.

He also tried swimming with nude native women, but when he got into the surf, they got out.

He might have tasted poi, eaten with the fingers in those days from a communal calabash, but after reading this passage, I suspect not: "Many a different finger goes into the same bowl and many a different kind of dirt and shade and quality of flavor is added to the virtues of its contents. One tall gentleman, with nothing in the world on but a soiled and greasy shirt, thrust in his finger and tested the poi, shook his head, scratched it with the useful finger, made another test, prospected among his hair, caught something and ate it; tested the poi again, wiped the grimy perspiration from his brow with the universal hand, tested again, blew his nose — 'Let's move on, Brown,' said I, and we moved."

That passage is from "Mark Twain's Letters From Hawaii," which along with "Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands," is the starting point for tracing Twain's footsteps. The trail begins in downtown Honolulu:

"A good part of Honolulu turned out to welcome the steamer," Twain wrote. "It was Sunday morning, and about church time, and we steamed through the narrow channel to the music of six different church bells, which sent their mellow tones far and wide, over hills and valleys, which were peopled by naked, savage, thundering barbarians only 50 years ago!"

In this passage and others, readers should try to forgive Twain's culture-bound ethnic insensitivity and remember that his misanthropy is refreshingly all-inclusive. He also betrays a sympathy for Hawaiians that is pretty enlightened for a white guy from 19th-century Missouri.

Downtown Honolulu is far less savage than it was, but architectural traces of the kingdom survive among the groves of mirrored office towers. The grandest is Iolani Palace, a Victorian dollhouse of fluted columns and wrought iron that is the only royal residence in the United States, not counting Graceland.

Twain never saw it — it went up in 1882 — but on the palace lawn, now shaded by an immense kapok tree, he watched 2,000 Hawaiians grieving by torchlight for Princess Victoria Kamamalu, the king's sister, on the eve of her funeral.

"Every night, and all night long, for more than 30 days," he wrote, "multitudes of these strange mourners have burned their candle-nut torches in the royal inclosure, and sung their funeral dirges, and danced their hulahulas, and wailed their harrowing wail for the dead."

All you hear now is the droning of cars; the palace is in Honolulu's business district, next to the state Capitol. For a more haunting experience, go up the road into Nuuanu Valley, to the princess's burial place. On the day of her funeral, Twain galloped there to await the procession.

The Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii consists of several crypts and a coral-block chapel on a lawn lined with palms. It may be the most history-drenched place in the islands. The mausoleum's curator, or kahu, is William Kaiheekai Maioho, who lives in a cottage on the grounds and is the sixth in his family to hold the position. Answering my knock on a recent visit, he offered to show me the chapel. He opened its windows to the sun and sat in a pew to tell the story.

Speaking gently, he recited a long history of royal funerals and renovations, then took me to the family crypt of the Kalakauas, successors to the Kamehamehas. The gold inscriptions on its white marble walls are as familiar to Hawaii schoolchildren as those of presidents: Kalakaua, Kapiolani, Kaiulani, Kalanianaole and Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch.

Visiting their graves made me eager to plunge deeper into Hawaii's royal past, following Twain's footsteps to the Big Island, where Kamehameha the Great was born and where an eruption of Kilauea that began in 1983 is still sending lava down gentle slopes into the boiling sea.

Twain spent weeks covering the Big Island on horseback, but a rental car makes it possible to hit the highlights in two days or three. The highway to Kilauea's summit is a straight, slow climb out of Hilo, past tin-roofed frame houses in tidy yards planted with ti, banana and torch ginger, and a more recent development: gridlocked shopping-mall sprawl. That side of the island also has an end-of-the-road, Alaska feel, with lots of blond dreadlocks and holistic massage salons. One Adopt-a-Highway sponsor is the Raelians, the sect that promotes human cloning and believes the first humans were created by visiting space aliens.

If so, the upper slopes of Kilauea are a likely landing area. The lush, broad-leafed lowlands give way to scrubby ohia trees poking out of an understory thick with ginger and uluhe ferns. Soon you are in the chill and splendid desolation of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. At the visitor center, rangers give daily briefings on the air quality — the sulfurous fumes can be thick and dangerous — and the state of the lava flow.

Perched at the rim of the steaming caldera is the old Volcano House hotel. Twain stayed here, but when it was a primitive hostel, not this imposing structure with a large fireplace in a lobby lined with portraits of Hawaii's kings and queens.

The Volcano House has crater-view rooms at $225 a night, but if you want an experience closer to Twain's, stay in one of the hotel's tidy wooden cabins in the Namakani Paio campground, three miles away in a grove of towering koa, ohia and eucalyptus trees. They cost $50 a night and sleep four, with separate bathrooms and hot showers, and are a perfect base for a Twain-style expedition to the eruption.

For the last 23 years, the lava has been flowing not from Kilauea's summit but from Pu'u O'o vent, a crack in its southern slopes. The lava has buried miles of mountainside — as well as streets, subdivisions and beaches — in crunchy black lacquer. Chain of Craters Road winds down the mountain like a lazily draped ribbon on a pillow. Roadcuts through old lava flows are marked with dates, and even those from the 1950's are still desolate — just craggy, brownish-black rock, like strewn coffee grounds.

Night falls like an anvil in these latitudes. The flowing lava is invisible by day, but at night it becomes a shimmering strip of orange, running up the mountainside and coloring the clouds above. A steam plume rises at the ocean's edge. Tourists who wisely take walking sticks, boots and flashlights can clamber up to where the lava has overrun the road, for a long hike over cool lava to get closer to the glowing rock and steam.

BUT you can also stay put, since the view from the road — especially through the rangers' telescope — is excellent. It is a staggering sight, though not, sadly, as spectacular as the bubbling lava lake Twain lucked upon:

"The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it — imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!"

A long drive out of Volcanoes National Park winds down around the United States' southernmost point, then up the coast to Kailua-Kona. In Waiohinu, a roadside marker points out Mark Twain's monkeypod tree, planted by the man himself.

For a surreal plunge into deep history, visit Puuhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park, commonly called the City of Refuge, a centuries-old religious sanctuary. Twain marveled at its hulking stonework, which was built in the 1500's without mortar and stands to this day just as he described it, above tidal pools full of foraging sea turtles.

It's a short drive from there to Kealakekua Bay, where native Hawaiians brought Captain James Cook's celebrated career to a sudden halt. "Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide," wrote Twain, ever the provocative American. "Wherever he went among the islands he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment."

If you head from there to Kailua Kona, the Big Island's main tourist enclave, you may conclude that Cook's defeat was only a temporary setback. Twain described it as "the sleepiest, quietest, Sundayest looking place you can imagine." But today the main drag, Alii Drive, is a tacky cousin to Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki, a ruthlessly efficient operation for the concentration and extraction of tourist money.

It looks like a highly unlikely place for Hawaiian authenticity, but there it is at King Kamehameha's Kona Beach Hotel, the city's main hotel for locals — the one that caters to a mom-and-pop, wedding and luau crowd. Its 70's décor is pleasing, but even more so are the lobby and hall exhibits of old Hawaiian art and artifacts. It is a museum doubling as hotel, complete with portraits of royalty and a wooden bust of King Kamehameha I himself over the front desk.

The dinner buffet is a paradise of Hawaiian food: poi, kalua pig, rice and poke, a traditional dish of marinated raw fish. At the poolside bar the night I was there, a table of local guys in tank tops and sunglasses downed pitchers of beer and played ukuleles. I listened while floating on my back in the pool, staring up at Orion in the inky sky and thinking: it doesn't get much more Hawaiian than this.

But it does: There is a restored Hawaiian temple, or heiau, on the grounds. You can walk there after dark, as I did, following a row of gas torches to the water's edge, a grass hut and a lava-rock platform. The platform, a marker says, is the very one used by William Maioho's distant ancestor to prepare Kamehameha I for burial. Twain, quoting from an 1844 history volume, gives a detailed account of the events surrounding Kamehameha's death, which prompted, among other things, the sacrifice of 300 dogs "in lieu of human victims."

On a lawn beyond the platform an outdoor reception was breaking up. Musicians were packing up instruments, lingerers were chatting, the dark waters were rippling in the orange glow of torch light. There was a table with a guest book and photo album — this had been a baby luau, celebrating a child's first birthday. It was about as old and genuine as Hawaiian traditions get.

There's depth for you — two true stories of the real Hawaii, one nearly lost to time, the other just beginning, and both hidden in plain sight among the tiki torches of a tourist ground zero. Twain would have appreciated it.

If You Go

WHERE TO STAY

Volcano House (808-967-7321; www.volcanohousehotel.com), is in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on Crater Rim Drive. Doubles from $95.

Namakani Paio and Kulanaokuaiki campgrounds (808-985-6011), also in the park, are free for tent and car campers, with no reservations required — but they are spotless anyway. Cabins at Namakani Paio are $50; reserve at Volcano House and take extra blankets; it gets cold.

Shirakawa Motel (808-929-7462; www.shirakawamotel.com), which bills itself as the nation's southernmost motel, is 100 yards from Mark Twain's monkeypod tree (Highway 11 between mileposts 65 and 66). Clean, simple rooms on lush grounds among orange, papaya, mango, avocado and banana trees. Doubles from $45.

King Kamehameha's Kona Beach Hotel (800-367-6060; konabeachhotel.com). Doubles from $170. King Kamehameha the Great slept here, or on the grounds, anyway — it was his capital.

WHERE TO EAT

Pavilion Cafe, at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (900 South Beretania Street, 808-532-8734; www.honoluluacademy.org). The academy has a fine gallery of Hawaiian art, including 19th-century paintings and drawings of Hawaii as Twain saw it. The courtyard cafe serves a classy lunch (try the feta, tapenade and Hauula tomato sandwich and lemon ginger tea, about $15).

Ka Ohelo Dining Room, in the Volcano House hotel, is the only restaurant in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and one of the weirder ones anywhere. The menu includes pan-seared foie gras and a $180 Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes, but the butter pats are foil-wrapped and the waiters have plastic nametags. Dinner for two with wine is about $80. Better for just an after-lava drink, like Pele's Fire ($7), a sort of flaming Irish coffee. Skip the guava mousse.

WHAT TO DO

The Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii (2261 Nu'uanu Avenue in Honolulu; 808-587-2590) is free, though closed on weekends. To enter the chapel or view the Kalakaua crypt, ask the curator, William Maioho. The little house is his; just knock.

Iolani Palace (364 South King Street, Honolulu; 808-522-0822; www.iolanipalace.org) has a "grand" ($20) and a self-guided ($6) tour of the gallery. The shady grounds are a popular picnic spot, especially during free concerts by the Royal Hawaiian Band, most Fridays from noon to 1.

Many of the Mark Twain stops on the Big Island of Hawaii are on Highway 11, which connects Kona and Hilo. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (www.nps.gov/havo) is 96 miles from Kona, 30 from Hilo, and open all hours, all year. Best lava viewing has been at night from the end of Chain of Craters Road, which descends 3,700 feet to ocean. Leave three or four hours and take water. Check with the park for latest lava activity.

Puuhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park (808-328-2326), is on Route 160 (off Highway 11, turn toward the ocean at Honaunau Post Office). Kealakekua Bay is five miles north on Route 160.

WHAT TO READ

"Mark Twain's Letters From Hawaii" (University of Hawaii Press) is easy to find in Hawaii bookstores, as is "Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands" (Mutual Publishing). Either volume will help you follow Twain's footsteps, but it's good to have both. The first one is the complete collection of newspaper dispatches; the second is more portable, consisting of relevant chapters from "Roughing It," Twain's book of Western travels. Those chapters are basically the Hawaii letters in polished form; Twain added some material and left out the cruder parts. You won't find the sniffly poi guy there.

LAWRENCE DOWNES is an editorial writer for The Times.
###

Walking / Hiking

I feel that walking / hiking is definitely part of the good life. Enjoy.

---

May 12, 2006

Good Times at a Backpackers' Paradise

By CHRISTOPHER PERCY COLLIER

ADAM BRIDGES is tearing through Damascus, Va. After weeks of hiking the Appalachian Trail and 10 days without seeing a town, he's back on the grid. He has just devoured a large pizza topped with broccoli, pepperoni and hunks of ricotta cheese, sharing it with his hiking partner, Plunger.

Now, sifting through the contents of a small brown box he picked up at the town post office — duct tape, cellphone charger, wallet-size picture of his two nieces — he asks Stumpjumper about the hikers' bug that's been going around. At the library across the street, he updates his online trail journal and waves to Bill E. Goat. Then? Beer, where he'll find Yield.

Having walked 460 miles, Mr. Bridges, a k a I'm Still Adam, has just descended on Damascus, which bills itself as the friendliest town on the Appalachian Trail — a place where beards grow long, women's legs go unshaven and just about everybody goes by a trail name.

From May 19 to 21, Damascus will stage what has become probably the largest single gathering of hikers anywhere: an annual festival called Trail Days. Last year, despite a steady rain, an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 people showed up for the celebration in a town with an official population of 1,094.

It is during Trail Days that Damascus, a place shaped by the walkabout spirit of the Appalachian Trail and all the nicknamed hikers who pass through, puts on its brightest display. The festival is a backpacker's Mardi Gras. It's an alumni reunion for anyone who has ever hiked the 2,159-mile Appalachian Trail, a moment in time when America's most famous long-distance footpath goes nonlinear.

It starts with a townwide yard sale. After that, there's the Trail Day Pageant. Then comes a tarp-raising contest; Appalachian Trail Jeopardy; presentations from the Whittling Club; a homemade gear contest, followed by a useless gear contest. Bands play. Gear manufacturers set up shop. Tents of all shapes, colors and sizes are erected a foot apart in a makeshift campground of 2,000 campers. The weekend culminates with the hiker parade, often consisting of more than a thousand participants marching through the center of town as onlookers soak them with squirt guns.

"There's really no equivalent on any other trail," said Demetri Coupouna, the chief executive of Golite, a manufacturer of ultralight camping and hiking gear, who often attends.

The first Trail Days took place in 1987 to celebrate the Appalachian Trail's 50th anniversary. Back then, there were no more than 10 vendors. "It was really just a reunion for Appalachian Trail hikers with a few workshops for the newbies," said Tom Davenport, a longtime backpacker and store manager for the locally based Mount Rogers Outfitters.

This year, however, there will be 150 vendors, 5 musical performances and more than 40 events. The number of visitors camped out in downtown Damascus along the river got so big a few years back that town officials had to tighten the reins and move the bulk of campers a half mile from the center of town.

"Locals couldn't get to the post office," said the Trail Days organizer, Bob Hayes, who has lived in Damascus for 32 years. "Any place they could put a tent they put a tent. Every year, it's grown and grown and grown. We're almost full."

Damascus is one of a few notable towns along the Appalachian Trail. Among the other high points are Harpers Ferry, W. Va., near the approximate halfway point of the trail; Hot Springs, N.C., where hikers can soak in hot tubs filled with geothermal spring water; and Hanover, N.H., which doubles as a raucous college town. But Damascus is the place mentioned most when hikers talk about towns on the trail.

Once there, if you've started at the trail's southern terminus on Springer Mountain in Georgia in early spring, you've cleared the often snow-covered Smoky Mountains and trekked approximately one quarter of the way. By then, some hikers are so eager to get to Damascus that they walk through the night on a hellish, blister-inducing jaunt known as the "40-mile challenge."

Upon arrival, many hikers do not know what town's next. "No one has really thought beyond Damascus," said Chris Takacs, a 33-year-old former financial services manager from Westchester, Pa., who goes by the trail name Glow Worm.

In Damascus, hiking boots can be traded for lighter trail-running shoes. Broken clips, straps and shoelaces can be replaced. Winter garments, like down jackets and gloves, can be mailed home. The nearly penniless can find odd jobs clearing land, cleaning rooms, driving shuttle buses.

Establishments cater to hikers, as a growing number of the town's merchants are hikers themselves. The Dancing Bear Inn, run by Bob Smith, who is known as Dancing Bear, offers a barrel of rags for cleaning gear and a clothesline out back for hanging tents and sleeping bags to dry. The Baja Cafe, owned by the former trail hikers Jared Yelton and Becky Pike, offers fish tacos and a chance to check e-mail free. Meanwhile, the more upscale Lazy Fox Inn may well offer the best breakfast on the Appalachian Trail: homemade doughnuts, hash browns, cheese grits, baked apples, bacon, eggs, apple butter and peach preserves.

Backpacking legends often roam the town's streets. There is Tennessee Jack, who, as the story goes, once slept with a dead groundhog stuffed in the backpack he uses as a pillow. There is Wee Willy, who wears a denim hat that reads Hiker Trash and may or may not have once used moonshine to light his backpacker's stove. There is Pirate, who sports tattoos of Vikings on both arms, smokes a pipe and walks around with a handheld global positioning system unit around his neck. And there is Lone Wolf, long-bearded and independently wealthy, who has hiked approximately 16,000 miles on the Appalachian Trail.

Damascus, surrounded on three sides by national forest, is on other trails as well as the Appalachian: the Crooked Road Musical Heritage Trail (a 250-mile trail through southwestern Virginia that taps into the roots of the region's music); the Virginia Creeper Trail (a 34-mile rail trail that gets an estimated 250,000 cyclists a year); the TransAmerica Trail (a 4,247-mile road cycling trail that goes from Yorktown, Va., to Astoria, Ore.); and the Iron Mountain Trail (a 43-mile hiking and mountain biking trail).

All this has made Damascus a town where the paths of hikers, bikers and road trippers converge. The chamber of commerce uses the nickname Trail Town, U.S.A. "There are so many trails around here that some hardly ever get used," said Dennet Dwyer, a mountain biker who lives in town and works at a nearby lumber company.

Plastic shamrocks hang like love beads from a walk-up window inside the Dairy King as Mr. Bridges joins the line of hikers, bikers and residents waiting to place breakfast orders. The line gets to be seven deep. "No 80's music," barks a hiker with the trail name Gumby at a fellow hiker standing at the jukebox. Raindrops pelt the hoods of cars in the parking lot as plates of French toast and hash browns are passed to waiting customers.

Two hikers, Teddy and Shenanigan, are heading out. "We heard it's easier to take the Creeper Trail out of town," one of them says. "Can you show us where it is?" They get directions and set out on the slick road heading north out of town. The next town of note: Pearisburg, Va., 150 miles away.

Adam Bridges will stay another day in Damascus before returning to the wilderness. Come Trail Days, however, if he can hitch a ride back, he'll join the masses in Damascus.

HITTING THE TRAIL

Trail Days runs from May 19 to 21. For more information, visit www.traildays.info.

Damascus is 130 miles southwest of Roanoke, Va. Once you've arrived, there is little need for a car as trails literally run right out of town. General information about the town is at www.damascus.org.

The town is largely surrounded by the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. For general information about this natural area, visit www.fs.fed.us/r8/gwj/mr.

The Place, a two-story hostel with bunk beds and no mattresses that asks for a donation of $4 a night, is a legendary overnight stop for hikers passing through Damascus. Backpackers looking to splurge check in at Dancing Bear Vacation Rentals (203 Laurel Avenue; 276-475-5900; www.dancingbearrentals.com; $55 to $78). The jump to more upscale lodgings puts you at the Lazy Fox Inn (133 Imboden Street; 276-475-5838; price $65 to $75).

Five outfitters rent bicycles in town: Adventure Damascus (www.adventuredamascus.com), Bike Station (www.thebike-station.com), Blue Blaze Bike & Shuttle (www.blueblazebikeandshuttle.com), Ole-Barn (www.ole-barn.com) and SunDog Outfitter (www.sundogoutfitter.com).

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