Op-Ed Contributor - A Deadly Wave, a Lucky Star - NYTimes.comOp-Ed Contributor
A Deadly Wave, a Lucky Star
By JOHN BEMELMANS MARCIANO
Published: December 27, 2008
ONE hundred years ago this morning, the life of my grandfather Lorenzo took a tragic and extraordinary turn.
Dec. 28 marks the Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents on the Catholic calendar. Once the final day of the Christmas season, it instead signaled, by 1908, a return to normal life, as children were headed back to school and parents to work for the first time in weeks.
Alarm clocks were set the night before, at the end of a Sunday that had been uncommonly cold and gloomy across southern Italy, so much so that people forsook the traditional visits to friends and family and stayed home.
My grandfather’s family would not have ventured out in any event, because that night they welcomed a new addition, another sister for 10-year-old Lorenzo — his sixth — to go along with his little brother, Giuseppe.
My grandfather lived in Pellaro, a small town just south of Reggio di Calabria on the Strait of Messina. His family lived alongside that of his uncle, aunt and five cousins in the Via Madonella, a road that dead-ended into a sandy beach. His childhood was idyllic: the sea right outside his door to play in, Mount Etna rising fantastically across the blue-black waters.
That late-December morning, Pellaro smelled strongly of perfume; it was harvest time for the bergamot, the small citrus fruit that is the principal ingredient in all manner of cologne and grown only on this narrow strip of the Calabrian coast.
Lorenzo was awakened shortly before the dawn, not by his alarm but by the loud low rumble of the earth and the awful crashing that followed. Living in an area recently wracked by earthquakes, most people immediately knew what was happening. During seismic events the majority of deaths are caused by people’s homes collapsing in on them — a fate suffered by few in Pellaro, which was a sparsely built farming community.
People gathered near the water, thinking it the safest place to be, but 10 minutes after the main shock the sea began to recede from shore. Boats at anchor tottered and hit bottom. There were two words in Italian to describe what was happening, one native (maremoto) the other borrowed from Japanese (tsunami).
There was no time to outrun the water, but someone pushed my grandfather up into an olive tree along with his little brother, whom Lorenzo held onto with all his strength. The roar of the sea was deafening — the tidal wave crested at more than 40 feet — and fight though Lorenzo did, the impact broke his clutch on Giuseppe.
No one will ever know how long my grandfather wandered the ruined coast, calling out the names of his brother, of his family. Everything Lorenzo had ever known was destroyed. The land beneath his neighborhood collapsed and fell, Atlantis-like, into the sea. The Church of the Madonella was open to the sky, a boat docked in its altar. Farther up the beach, a crack in the earth revealed ancient Greco-Roman tombs, still intact.
Across the straits, Messina — one of the most ancient cities in Europe — had been annihilated. More than 50,000 were dead. It took only a few hours for civilization to break down among the survivors. Looting ran rampant; thieves cut fingers from the dead rather than waste time prying their rings off. Marconi’s new radio transmitter at the mouth of the strait had gone silent, and many believed themselves to be the only people left alive, anywhere.
The 1908 earthquake stands as the most lethal natural disaster in recorded European history. (And only the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 has dwarfed it recently.) Nearly 100,000 people perished, including all 16 of my grandfather’s relatives in Via Madonella.
The response of the royal Italian government makes FEMA’s effort in New Orleans look like a model of efficiency. Most disgracefully, the shacks built as temporary shelter for the homeless would remain occupied for 30 years while the reconstruction dragged on. My grandfather himself was shuffled among relatives in Calabria before boarding the steamer Europa in 1921 to seek a better life in America.
Grampa, who died in 1990, always said he had been born under a lucky star. I assumed this belief was the sign of an earlier, more stoic generation. In fact, it was not. People went insane with grief over the events of Dec. 28, 1908. But a few survivors came away from the experience with the knowledge that they had stared apocalypse in the face and found the strength to come through it. And, having done so, they could endure anything — including arriving in America with little money and even less English, and raising eight children through a Depression and a war against their home country.
Grampa’s lucky star was in fact mine, and my brothers’, and all our cousins’.
John Bemelmans Marciano is the author and illustrator of “Madeline and the Cats of Rome.”
Will Elder - b. 1921 - His Mad World - The Lives They Lived - Obituaries - NYTimes.comWill Elder | b. 1921
His Mad World
By DAVID HAJDU
Published: December 24, 2008
’Twas a week before Christmas in 1953 when the artwork of Will Elder stirred the attorney general of Massachusetts to ban a comic-book adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s treasured piece of holiday piffle, “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The outlawed comic, titled Panic, was a spinoff of Mad, the wild and wildly successful year-old magazine for 14-year-old minds. Panic’s crime was having published Moore’s much-reprinted public-domain text, verbatim, to the accompaniment of outrageous, incongruous, stream-of-consciousness illustrations by Elder. None of the four-legged creatures that Elder drew in the opening panels were stirring, because all of them were dead — half-butchered carcasses of hogs, a goat, a baby elephant, a lion and the requisite mouse, all dangling from meat hooks, gushing blood. One of the animals, a small lamb, was still alive but stewed — that is, drunk from guzzling moonshine out of a jug nestled between its hooves. The sugarplums dancing in the children’s heads were Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and when the narrator of the tale settled down for his nap, he did so with a tall iced nightcap and six bottles of hooch scattered around his bed, alongside a sexy mama kerchiefed like a belly dancer.
“I had a good time thinking of every kind of wild way to interpret all the words of the poem,” Elder recalled a few years before he died. “I thought it was funny, but it happened that some other people didn’t agree. There were people out there who really didn’t like the idea that we were doing something for kids . . . [that] made fun of things that were supposed to be sacred, like Santa Claus.” The people who disagreed with Elder included not only Massachusetts state officials but also members of the New York City Police Department. A few days after that Christmas, cops entered the offices of Panic’s publisher, EC Comics, asked to buy a copy of Panic and arrested the receptionist for being willing to sell them one. The charges were unclear and dubious, but the transgression indisputable: the aesthetic lawlessness of Will Elder’s cartooning.
Elder was a master of an art beloved by kids and despised by their parents for its almost-criminal juvenility. Along with his childhood lunchroom buddy Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad, Elder was a primary creator of the gleefully rude, perennially adolescent, unaffected smart-aleck humor that would forever be thought of as the sensibility of American youth. With his art for Mad, for Panic, for lesser-known humor magazines like Trump and Help! and, finally, for Playboy, Elder found a window to the junior-high-school soul and chucked rocks through it, exposing that teen spirit in all its confused, hyperactive, self-absorbed glory and scariness. Earlier comic-book artists like Joe Shuster and Bob Kane may have invented the superhero, but Will Elder made possible “Superbad.”
“Will was the one who gave Mad magazine its look and style, which were different from any comic book that had been created before,” Kurtzman wrote in his memoir, “My Life as a Cartoonist.” “He was the one who started filling the margins of every page with hundreds of tiny cartoons. They had nothing to do with the story on the page.”
Connoisseurs of Elder’s style call it “chicken fat,” so named by its inventor for “the part of the soup that is bad for you yet gives the soup its delicious flavor.” Elder’s art was one of perilous excess. Elder was the funny pages’ answer to Charlie Parker and Allen Ginsberg and Lord Buckley, and he served as inspiration not only to the comix artists of the underground movement, like Robert Crumb, but also to rock musicians in their aesthetic neighborhood, like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Indeed, Garcia, who idolized Elder, once sought him out and invited him to a concert (at which Elder wore earplugs) and commissioned his idol to paint his portrait in oils. “I always liked that thing of overdoing it,” Garcia explained in an interview about Elder, “and here’s a guy who really understands what overdoing it is all about.”
The sleek, hyperrealistic portrait Elder did of Garcia, along with further evidence of his range and prolificacy in and out of comics, appears in the first of two books of Elder’s art: “The Mad Playboy of Art” and “Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles.” Both books reveal a craftsman of stunning ability, which Elder applied with cheerful randomness. He had the skill to render anything he saw so realistically that he left one early portfolio painting (a portrait of the old character actor John Carradine) unfinished, so it would not be mistaken for a photograph. Raised in poverty in the Bronx during the Depression, Elder had as much pride in his professionalism as he had in his artistry, and he always took the work he got, providing unfailingly meticulous and unexpectedly funny illustrations for slick magazines like Pageant.
“I had a family to feed,” he explained not long before he died. “But I always wanted to try to do a good job, and I always took the job seriously, and it was very important to me to be as silly as I possibly could be. I was very serious about that.”
As he grew older, his cartoons never lost their breathtaking immaturity. Indeed, the same impulses to excess and abandon that made his early comics feel like dizzying playground fun made much of his later work seem miraculously, sometimes maddeningly, infantile.
Elder spent the last decades of his professional life applying his extraordinary technical facility, his appetite for juvenility and his indiscrimination to the service of Playboy magazine. He wasted a quarter of a century collaborating with Kurtzman to produce the Little Annie Fanny comic strip, which has earned a place in pop-culture history as the most painstakingly executed piece of garbage ever to disgrace the names of comics and sex. Creatively, Will Elder died, at midlife, from too much chicken fat. n
Italian Makers of Prosecco Seek Recognition - NYTimes.com
By AMY CORTESE
Published: December 26, 2008
IN 1984, Fabio Zardetto, chief winemaker at his family-run vineyard in northern Italy, leapt at the chance to become one of the first bottlers to export prosecco, the sparkling wine, to the United States
At first, his efforts on behalf of his bubbly fizzled. “I had to push people to taste the prosecco,” recalled Mr. Zardetto, now 50. “I would run behind them with a glass saying, ‘Please, taste this.’ ”
When they did try it, he said, they were pleasantly surprised. Sales of Zardetto prosecco grew to 100,000 cases in the United States in 2007, from 50 cases in 1984.
With its fresh flavor, pleasing bubbles and gentle price tag — it typically sells for $10 to $20 a bottle — prosecco has gained many fans worldwide. Global sales have been growing by double-digit percentages for 10 years, to more than 150 million bottles last year. And with consumers in an economizing mood this holiday season, prosecco is an increasingly popular alternative to Champagne, which has been soaring in price.
But prosecco is also encountering some growing pains. From its traditional home in northern Italy, it is now waging a war against outsiders, just as Champagne, its more elite cousin in France, has done for so many years.
A host of producers elsewhere in Italy and as far away as Brazil are trying to cash in on the drink’s newfound popularity. Because prosecco is the name of a grape, like chardonnay or cabernet, anyone can use the name.
Today, about 60 percent of all prosecco — some eight million cases — comes from producers outside the traditional prosecco-growing region of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, a cluster of villages about a half-hour’s drive north of Venice. The newcomers are not held to the same strict production standards as the traditional producers, which are tightly governed under Italian wine laws.
One product, Rich Prosecco, is made by an Austrian company whose ads feature Paris Hilton. In some, she is naked and spray-painted gold. What’s worse to some producers, the product is sold in a 6.8-ounce can, in gas stations as well as stores, for around $3.
“It’s absolutely vulgar,” says Vittorio Zoppi, marketing manager for the prosecco consortium.
Claus Jahnke, a sales and marketing executive at Rich, says he is puzzled by the reaction to the product, which uses Italian grapes. “We have invested a lot of money in advertising and P.R. to launch Rich and promote prosecco,” he says. “We gave this famous grape a helping hand in conquering the world.”
The Italian winemakers worry that upstarts will weaken prosecco’s image just as it is taking off.
“If everyone around the world plants prosecco, we will lose the value of the name,” says Ludovico Giustiniani, vice president of a consortium that represents about 150 wineries in the traditional prosecco-producing region.
Over months of discussions, the consortium, along with a broader group of growers and producers, has hammered out a plan that would create an official prosecco production zone tied exclusively to northern Italy. Only wine produced in that region could be labeled as prosecco. If the plan is approved by the Italian government — a decision is expected by early 2009 — prosecco would then be eligible for “protected designation of origin” status under European laws intended to protect regional products from Champagne and port to Serrano ham.
“It will let prosecco be an Italian product — and nothing else,” says Giancarlo Moretti Polegato, the owner of Villa Sandi, one of the area’s prominent wineries.
That is the theory, at least. Protection from the European Union would extend only across its 27 member countries, and, as Champagne producers have discovered, a lot of policing is still required.
The Champagne region of France has been officially designated since 1927 as the authentic home of the wine that bears its name, but its trade organization still spends millions of dollars battling producers of items as varied as sparkling wine, bubble bath and bottled water that also use the word.
“We have to spend a lot of money and energy protecting our product,” says Sam Heitner, director of the Office of Champagne USA, a trade group that represents the interests of Champagne producers.
That spending is on display in Times Square, where a giant screen flashes an ad by Mr. Heitner’s group for holiday revelers. A bottle, labeled “American Champagne,” is covered by a red, Venetian-style carnival mask. It’s part of the group’s “Unmask the truth” campaign, which notes its opposition to the name’s use by United States producers.
Producers of prosecco may also be in for a long fight.
PROSECCO’S success can be seen in the steep-hilled villages surrounding Conegliano and Valdobbiadene.
The area has grown from a sleepy agricultural area to one of Italy’s wealthiest enclaves, dotted with shiny new wineries and farmhouses that have been transformed into rustic inns to support a growing wine tourism trade.
Prosecco sales from this area alone were 370 million euros last year. And a hectare (2.47 acres) of vineyard in the most coveted spots, like Cartizze, sells for more than $1 million. Prosecco from Cartizze, a panettone-shaped hill in Valdobbiadene where 140 growers farm about 250 acres, fetches about $40 a bottle.
The vines are tended and harvested by hand. Machines cannot navigate the vertical angles, although helicopters are occasionally used when a vineyard needs to be sprayed. The soil and the mix of warm days and cool nights make for an especially flavorful prosecco — an affinity given official weight in 1969, when the region was awarded the status of denominazione di origine controllata, or D.O.C., Italy’s version of a wine appellation.
The region’s turn of fortunes, though, is relatively recent. Although prosecco grapes have been cultivated here for three centuries, in the early days they were made mostly into still wine for local consumption. The vines shared the steep hillsides with more valuable cows and sheep.
It was only after a new method for producing sparkling wine became widespread in the mid-1900s that things began to change.
Champagne and other sparkling wines typically get their bubbles when they are fermented a second time, with added sugar and yeast. The yeast feeds on the sugar and converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide. When the bottle is opened, the escaping gas gives the wine its bubbles and characteristic “pop.”
Champagne re-ferments in bottles, an expensive and labor-intensive process. But the new production methods allowed prosecco makers to re-ferment their wine in large tanks, a process that kept prices down. That, and prosecco’s light, delicate flavor and low alcohol content, made it an especially versatile wine.
IN Italy, prosecco is enjoyed year-round — and practically around the clock. “The only moment we don’t drink it is for breakfast,” Mr. Giustiniani says.
That approachability has helped propel the popularity of prosecco — in the 1960s throughout Italy, in the ’80s in Germany and neighboring countries and in the ’90s in the United States, which today is prosecco’s No. 1 market outside of Italy.
Perhaps no one pushed harder to establish prosecco in the United States than Mionetto, a winery founded in Valdobbiadene in 1886 and now one of the area’s largest, with sales of 40 million euros a year.
Seeing the tremendous growth potential in the 1990s, this winery began expanding aggressively. It established Mionetto USA to control distribution in North America and has spent millions of dollars promoting prosecco and the Mionetto brand. Today, the company has the leading market share, roughly 33 percent, in the United States, with 168,000 cases a year of its D.O.C. and non-D.O.C. prosecco.
Still, says Sergio Mionetto, who took over as chief winemaker from his grandfather in 1956, “we believe we’re just at the tip of the iceberg.”
At the bustling Union Square Cafe in Manhattan, where the house prosecco is Mr. Mionetto’s top-of-the-line Sergio (named after himself), prosecco by the glass outsells Champagne two to one, says Stephen Paul Mancini, director of wine and spirits at the restaurant. “Prosecco is an extremely popular product for us,” he adds. And some retailers report that prosecco is flying off shelves this holiday season.
Prosecco is also catching on in new markets, like China, India and Vietnam, causing producers to think even bigger.
“Prosecco can be the best-selling sparkling wine of the world,” says Gianluca Bisol, a 21st-generation winemaker and general manager of the Bisol winery, in Valdobbiadene. He figures that prosecco can overtake Champagne in sales volume in the next 25 years or so.
The problem is that others saw the potential, too. It started with the relative newcomers in the plains of northern Italy. Growers there are less regulated than their D.O.C. kin; they were granted the Italian wine system’s least-stringent designation, known as I.G.T., in 1995. They can produce almost double the volume of wine per hectare, and quality can vary.
In the flatlands, winemakers can use machines to harvest and tend to their vines, at about a tenth of the cost, Mr. Bisol and others say. “For these reasons,” Mr. Bisol says, “this area that didn’t exist 25 years ago now accounts for 60 percent of prosecco production.”
A more recent worry for the consortium and newer growers is that countries like Brazil, Romania, Argentina and Australia have begun to plant prosecco. Brazil, in particular, has embraced the grape, perhaps not surprisingly, given that its main wine region is populated by northern Italian immigrants.
Close to 2,000 acres of prosecco are planted in Brazil, Mr. Bisol says.
“The Brazilians like parties,” Mr. Bisol says. “They drink a lot of prosecco.” The homegrown prosecco could cut into Italian sales there: Brazil is already the fifth-largest export market for Italian prosecco.
Closer to home, German and Austrian producers have taken to buying tanks of Italian prosecco produced in the plains and shipping it to their countries to be bottled. Or canned, in the case of Rich Prosecco.
When Ms. Hilton traveled to northern Italy to promote Rich Prosecco two years ago, “it was a big scandal for the area,” Mr. Bisol says. “The winegrowers were very angry.” She has not returned, he says.
Günther Aloys, a hotelier and entrepreneur in the Austrian resort town of Ischgl who introduced Rich Prosecco in 2006, plans to take it to the United States next year. And Mr. Jahnke, the sales and marketing executive at Rich, said the company was following the developments with the Italian producers’ proposal to the Italian government.
THE threat of foreign-brand prosecco has prompted northern Italian producers, of both D.O.C. and I.G.T. prosecco, to work together to protect their turf. They say they believe that their proposal will raise quality and prevent others from calling their products prosecco.
The plan would create a broad new D.O.C. designation to govern the hundreds of I.G.T. prosecco producers that have sprung up across eight northern Italian provinces in the plains from Treviso to Trieste. The producers would have to comply with strict quality controls, including lower yields per hectare and stronger oversight.
The region of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, meanwhile, would be elevated to Italy’s highest designation for wine regions, known as D.O.C.G.
The key is to link prosecco to its traditional home.
“We don’t want to end up with something like pinot grigio,” says Primo Franco, owner of the Nino Franco winery in Valdobbiadene, referring to another white wine grape from the Veneto region that today is grown around the world.
Because prosecco is also the name of a northern Italian village where the grape is believed to have originated, the consortium can make an argument, too, that prosecco is a place name that can be protected just like Chianti, Champagne and others.
By bringing all of northern Italy’s prosecco makers into the fold, the winemakers hope to do more than give prosecco a territorial identity. They also want the muscle power to meet growing demand and achieve their goal of matching or even besting Champagne, which today produces some 300 million bottles a year. About 150 million bottles of Italian prosecco are produced a year.
Prosecco producers say they believe that with the new plan, they can double their output to 300 million or even 400 million bottles a year, while providing consumers with a guarantee of quality.
“Champagne is the king of the bubble,” Mr. Bisol says. “But prosecco maybe can be considered the small prince.”
In recent weeks, the winemakers have been scrambling to nail down a final proposal to the Italian government before a year-end deadline. The producers hope to be eligible for a streamlined European Union system that goes into effect in August. If all goes well, the new prosecco protections will be in place for the 2009 harvest.
But that is just a start. European Union regulations are valid only for members, and deals have to be struck with countries outside of the union, like the United States or Brazil, on an, ahem, case-by-case basis. For now, says Mr. Moretti Polegato of Villa Sandi, “everybody involved in prosecco production is happy.”
You can almost hear the corks popping.
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A Higher Calling - NYTimes.com
By LYNN HIRSCHBERG
Published: December 19, 2008
WHEN HE WAS 12 YEARS OLD, PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN saw a local production of “All My Sons” near his home in Rochester, and it was, for him, one of those rare, life-altering events where, at an impressionable age, you catch a glimpse of another reality, a world that you never imagined possible.
“I literally thought, I can’t believe this exists,” Hoffman told me on a gray day in London early in the fall. He was sitting in the fifth row of the audience at Trafalgar Studios in the West End, where he was directing “Riflemind” (a play about an ’80s rock band that may or may not reunite after 20 years), dressed in long brown cargo shorts, a stretched-out polo shirt and Converse sneakers without socks. His blond hair, still damp from showering, was standing in soft peaks on his head, which gave him the look of a very intense, newly hatched chick. At times, especially when he is in or around or anywhere near a theater, Hoffman, who is 41, can seem like an eager college student — bounding from seat to stage to give direction, writing feverishly in a notebook about a feeling he wants an actor to convey, laughing at an in-joke regarding a prop that keeps disappearing — but when the conversation shifts to a discussion of his acting in movies like “Capote,” for which he deservedly won every award that’s been invented, or “Doubt,” out this month, he seems to turn inward and ages markedly. “The drama nerd comes out in me when I’m in a theater,” he explained now, as the actors rehearsed. “When I saw ‘All My Sons,’ I was changed — permanently changed — by that experience. It was like a miracle to me. But that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it’s torturous because you know it’s a beautiful thing. I was young once, and I said, That’s beautiful and I want that. Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great — well, that’s absolutely torturous.”
Hoffman took a gulp of coffee from a large cup that he was holding in a brown paper bag. He turned his attention to the stage, where two actors were rehearsing a sex scene. “Riflemind,” which unfolds over a weekend, is a self-conscious study in wounds: long-simmering battles are reignited and secrets are revealed. The play has a predictable middle-aged-angst narrative that is somewhat glamorized by its rock-star milieu: the drugs may be stronger, but the emotions are oddly detached. Hoffman’s fascination with “Riflemind” — he directed it in Sydney, Australia, last year and, when we met, had been in London for several weeks preparing this production — can be explained by both his commitment to theater and by the fact that the play is written by Andrew Upton, the husband of Cate Blanchett. Hoffman met Upton and Blanchett when he appeared with her in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” “On that movie, we shot only one or two days a week,” Hoffman recalled. “Much of the time, I was in Rome with Cate and Andrew. I have a hard time having fun, but that was heaven. And I must really like Andrew — my girlfriend, who is in New York, is about to have our third child, and I am here.” Hoffman paused. “I don’t get nervous when I’m directing a play. It’s not like acting. If this fails, I wouldn’t be as upset by it.”
Hoffman jumped out of his seat and ran to the stage. He proceeded to correct the sex scene. He bent the actress back over a couch and metamorphosed into a desperate character, the former manager of the band, driven by the hope of sudden riches and his lust for the guitar player’s wife. He played just enough of the scene and, then, he switched back to being Phil, the regular guy in the baggy shorts. It was stunning. “I don’t know how he does it,” Mike Nichols, who has directed Hoffman on the stage (“The Seagull”) and in movies (“Charlie Wilson’s War”), told me later. “Again and again, he can truly become someone I’ve not seen before but can still instantly recognize. Sometimes Phil loses some weight, and he may dye his hair but, really, it’s just the same Phil, and yet, he’s never the same person from part to part. Last year, he did three films — ‘The Savages,’ ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ and ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ — and in each one he was a distinct and entirely different human. It’s that humanity that is so striking — when you watch Phil work, his entire constitution seems to change. He may look like Phil, but there’s something different in his eyes. And that means he’s reconstituted himself from within, willfully rearranging his molecules to become another human being.”
FROM HIS FIRST ROLES in movies like “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played a villainous prep-school student, to the lovesick Scotty J. in “Boogie Nights,” to the passionate and ornery rock critic Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous,” Hoffman has imbued all his characters with a combination of the familiar and the unique. It’s not easy; it’s the sort of acting that requires enormous range, as well as a kind of stubborn determination and a profound lack of vanity. In the theater, Hoffman finds refuge in being part of a community. Theater presents considerable difficulties — Hoffman said his most challenging role for the stage was as Jamie Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” on Broadway (“That nearly killed me”). But when he speaks about his work in films, Hoffman’s struggles sound lonelier: his childhood dream was to be on the stage, and the fulfillment of that fantasy seems to mitigate some of the strain Hoffman experiences when he is acting.
“In my mid-20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”
For all of his struggles, Hoffman works a lot — he’s a very active co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theater Company, a multicultural collective in New York that specializes in new American plays. LAB mounted five productions last year, thanks in large part to Hoffman’s diligent involvement with every aspect of the process, from fund-raising to directing to acting. “I’ve seen him tear tickets and seat people at LAB productions,” said John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of “Doubt” and himself a LAB company member. In his 17-year-long career, Hoffman has also made more than 40 films, including “Doubt,” for which he has been nominated for a Golden Globe as best supporting actor, and “Synecdoche, New York,” which was also released this year. “Synecdoche,” which was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, is a hugely ambitious film that deals with death and art and how they come to inform one another. Hoffman plays a theater director, Caden Cotard, who wins a MacArthur and uses the prize money to begin an autobiographical play so enormous that it swallows his actual life. The movie is, as Manohla Dargis wrote in her glowing review in The Times, “about . . . the search for an authentic self in an unauthentic world.” The plot may get murky and the worlds within worlds (within worlds) are often confusing, but the film lingers in your memory, largely because of Hoffman’s performance. As he grows old, disintegrates, misses romantic connections and suffers loss after loss in pursuit of his artistic vision, Hoffman remains the emotional center of the film.
“There were days when I was three different ages,” Hoffman said while the cast of “Riflemind” took a break between the first act and the second. “I’d be married, and then two hours later my family would be dead. Charlie seemed to be interested in the idea of life moving faster as you age. And the fear of missed opportunities. In life, do you ever really know if you’re missing an opportunity? No, you really don’t. And you’re never really finished either, unless the finish is dying, and you don’t really want to think about that too much.” Hoffman paused. “Synecdoche” clearly had resonance for him. Hoffman is not a carefree person; he resolutely refuses to live lightly. “Phil is hard to know,” John Patrick Shanley said. “Phil and his longtime girlfriend, Mimi [O’Donnell], came to a party at my house, and he had on three coats and a hat. I said, ‘Take off one of your coats; it’s hot in here.’ His girlfriend said, ‘He’ll maybe take it off in a half-hour.’ It’s such an obvious metaphor, but Phil has a protective cocoon that he sheds very slowly. It takes him a while to make friends with his environment. And yet you know the men he plays the minute you meet them.”
Caden Cotard seems to echo many of Hoffman’s own internal debates and anxieties. “I took ‘Synecdoche’ on because I was turning 40, and I had two kids, and I was thinking about this stuff — death and loss — all the time,” Hoffman continued. “The workload was hard, but what made it really difficult was playing a character who is trying to incorporate the inevitable pull of death into his art. Somewhere, Philip Roth writes: ‘Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.’ And Charlie, like Roth, is quite aware of the fact that we’re all going to die.” Hoffman looked around the theater. The stage manager was arranging furniture; the actors were lolling on a sofa; Andrew Upton was chatting with an assistant. “In 80 years,” Hoffman went on, “no one I’m seeing now will be alive. Hopefully, the art will remain.”
Which is, of course, the perfect reason to make great movies. A single performance on stage is ephemeral, but films can still be watched 80 years after they are created. Hoffman would never say that out loud — it would sound too grand, too self-important, too movie-starish. Still, he knows he will not be remembered for his real-life persona but rather for the characters he has chosen to embody. In “Doubt,” for instance, which was originally a play, he is a Catholic priest who may or may not have been inappropriate with a young male student. He is suspected and accused by the principal of the parish school, a nun named Sister Aloysius, played by Meryl Streep. “If I asked 10 people on the subway who I should cast for the older nun, they’d all say Meryl,” Shanley told me. “But I didn’t know what Phil would do with the part of Father Flynn, and that intrigued me. I did know that he would make Meryl sweat, that she would be up against someone of equal intelligence. Meryl is a street fighter, and she schemes as an actress — she wants to win the scene. Phil won’t play that way. He won’t engage. Before their big confrontation scene, Meryl would be muttering ‘I’m going to kick his butt’ for the entire crew to hear. She’d look at him and say, ‘I know you did it.’ And Phil would just laugh and say, ‘Meryl’s always trying to get in my head.’ ”
As usual Hoffman struggled with the character. “On every film, you’ll have nights where you wake up at 2 in the morning and think, I’m awful in this,” he recalled. “You see how delicate it is — a little movement to the right or the left, and you’re hopelessly hokey.” The film revolves around the question of the priest’s culpability, but that is not what mattered to Hoffman. Hoffman plays the priest as a reformer, a man interested in a more philosophical and tolerant approach to religion. Shanley had given Hoffman a “back story” on Father Flynn, who is based, in part, on a teacher who had a profound impact on Shanley as a boy, but Hoffman added his own interpretation. “I did research by, among other things, going to church. As a kid, I was confirmed and I went to church, but I was bored. Now, I feel the opposite: A good sermon is just like theater. It combines the political scene and the Scriptures, and I thought, Hey, I could do it like that. It’s like a teacher getting up and saying, This is the school I come from.”
Since playing the role, Hoffman has been asked repeatedly if Flynn “did it.” He won’t answer. “I wouldn’t ever say whether the priest is innocent or guilty because I saw ‘Doubt’ as being about something larger,” Hoffman said. “What’s so essential about this movie is our desire to be certain about something and say, This is what I believe is right, wrong, black, white. That’s it. To feel confident that you can wake up and live your day and be proud instead of living in what’s really true, which is the whole mess that the world is. The world is hard, and John is saying that being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing.” Hoffman paused again. “And I, personally, am uncomfortable with that messiness, just as I acknowledge its absolute necessity. I find the need to play a part like Father Flynn inescapable, and I only want to do things I’m that passionate about. I know there are actors out there that present themselves as cool cats, but you better take your cool-cat suit off if you want to act. You can’t otherwise.”
As he said this, Hoffman sounded more melancholy than strident. He looked up at the stage where the actors were reassembling, about to run through the entire first act. “We’re hitting the moments too much,” Hoffman said to no one in particular. What he seemed to mean is that the characterizations had little individuality, that the actors were spending too much time polishing the shiny surface of the play instead of exploring its nuances. “They have to get back to the simple act of doing something,” Hoffman said patiently. “With any character, you have to bring it back to the normal.”
But, as the director, Hoffman could only inspire them — he couldn’t jump onstage and play all the parts himself. Which may have been a relief. “During ‘Doubt,’ Phil seemed to be in a lot of pain,” Shanley remembered. “He’d smoke cigarette after cigarette and stare out the window. I was afraid to say anything to him. And now when we talk about the movie, he says how much fun he had. I’d say, ‘You looked like you were in hell.’ Phil just shrugs and sort of jokes: ‘Hell? That’s where I live.’ ”
“IT WAS PRETTY GOOD LAST NIGHT,” Hoffman said over lunch the next day at a hotel called One Aldwych, which was near the theater. “We were there until 11:30. I had to show tough support to the cast. I can’t do it for them, but I know how it goes: you open the play, and you’ll have a week that’s weird. And then you have a performance that’s really strong, and you’ll try to find that performance again, as if you’ve never done it before. Finally, you find it again, and you’re on and off for a little while, and then you reach a stretch for a couple of weeks where — wow! — you know how to do the play! And then you become stiff again. And so on. But I can’t tell them all that. They have to figure that out on their own. If I’m on them all the time, it’s never going to be theirs.”
Hoffman paused and studied the menu. He was wearing khaki pants and a windbreaker, and he was carrying a worn paperback copy of “Othello.” He will portray Iago in a new production of the play next year, directed by the avant-garde theater and opera director Peter Sellars. Othello will be played by John Ortiz, Hoffman’s friend and a founding member of LAB, which will be affiliated with the production. Often, when you connect the dots with Hoffman, you wind up at LAB.
“I’ve never been all that interested in playing Hamlet,” he said, after ordering corned beef hash and eggs. “Hamlet is a role most actors are supposed to want to play, which is probably why it’s never intrigued me that much. But Iago — I guess his demons interest me more. Iago is a military guy, and I like the idea of him being a general like Wesley Clark, who has accomplished so much in an arena where there’s death and, suddenly, he walks into a nonmilitary world, and he’s no longer the guy he thinks he deserves to be. To my mind, Iago actually loves Othello. And it’s hard not to think of Obama when you read ‘Othello’ now.” Hoffman took a sip of coffee. “It’s fun to think about the possibilities, but as always, I can’t believe I’m doing this. It seems impossible to me.”
When you sit across from him, it is difficult to imagine Hoffman playing anyone as angry and diabolical as Iago. With his pale, lightly freckled skin, blue eyes and solid build, he looks more like an avuncular scholar than a military man (or a priest or . . .). His demeanor and appearance are so fundamentally regular that it seems impossible that he has played such a vast array of anything-but-regular characters. “His physical form actually works to his advantage,” Meryl Streep told me. “Philip is not particularly any one way, which means he can be anybody at all. One of the most important keys to acting is curiosity. I am curious to the point of being nosy, and I think Philip is the same. What that means is you want to devour lives. You’re eager to put on their shoes and wear their clothes and have them become a part of you. All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.”
Hoffman’s approach may be less vampiric than Streep’s, but he is no less adept at getting beyond the merely physical embodiment of a role. He may put on his character’s shoes, but he also takes them off: in his work, Hoffman is willing to be ugly, pimpled, sexually scarred, miserably unhappy, fleshy and naked. He is never hesitant to reveal the soft underbelly — the insecurities, the (perhaps humiliating) desires, the longing. “I’m much more vain in my life than I am when I’m working,” he said as the food arrived. “I wish I looked different as Phil walking around or Phil waking up. I’m going to be 41, and I’ll go to the bathroom and get a good glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I’m like, What happened? All youth has left me for good. That fear that makes people crazy will strike me at those moments. But when I’m working, I’m grateful for the way I look. I’m grateful for the fact that I have a body with which I can do what I need to do and I can come off as . . . anybody.”
He started out as an athlete. The son of a Xerox employee (“My father did something a little spooky with computers all over the country”) and a lawyer (“My mother is crazy about my career — she goes to the festivals and comes to the play readings”), Hoffman was the second youngest of four kids. He was raised Catholic and played three sports until a neck injury during wrestling practice forced him, under doctor’s orders, to quit contact sports. “I thought, O.K., I’ll play baseball,” Hoffman said. “But I’m 14 with a neck brace. I’d see some girl from 10 blocks away, and I’d take it off until she passed me. I was this freckle-faced kid, and I perceived myself as not attractive. When the doctor asked me if I still had pain, I lied. My pact with God was that I would no longer play sports. So instead of trying out for baseball, I auditioned for a play.” Hoffman smiled. “And also there was this beautiful girl. I had a huge crush on her, and she acted. It seemed like something worth giving up baseball for.”
In 1984, when he was nearly 17, Hoffman auditioned and was chosen to attend the New York State Summer School of the Arts, a highly selective program in Saratoga Springs. “Phil stood out,” recalled Bennett Miller, who directed Hoffman in “Capote.” “We met then, along with Dan Futterman, who wrote ‘Capote.’ At the time, Phil was very popular: he won everybody over. It wasn’t really because he was a social animal. We were attracted to the fact that he was genuinely serious about what he was doing. Even then, he was passionate. Phil drank a lot of beer, and he could tell a story and light up a room. You wanted to be around him — he was like Truman Capote in that you wanted to sit at his table.”
Miller and Hoffman became great friends. When the summer ended, Hoffman stayed in touch, even flying from Rochester twice to visit Miller at his home in Westchester County. “Phil always had an exceptional interest in the outside world,” Miller said. “He wanted to go to Manhattan, to the Blue Note, to hang out in Times Square. In his high school, at 17, Phil was cast as Willie Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman.’ After the performance, he called me and said, ‘I got a standing ovation.’ One of the biggest regrets I have in life is I didn’t see Phil as Willie Loman.”
Hoffman auditioned to study theater at Syracuse University, Carnegie Mellon and N.Y.U., where Miller was also applying. They both got into N.Y.U. “Once we made a pact with another friend that if any of us ever won an Academy Award, the first person had to bark their acceptance speech like a dog,” Miller told me. “The deal was that until the producer fades you out, you have to bark instead of speaking. When Phil won for ‘Capote,’ we were hoping for at least one bark but, sadly, no.”
In 1991, when Hoffman was 24, he auditioned five times and was cast in the Al Pacino film “Scent of a Woman” as the prep-school student who betrays his classmate, the lead character. “That’s when I first noticed Phil,” Nichols said. “He summed up all the ways those boarding-school bullies were scary. There is something deeply ethical about Phil as an actor that was apparent even then — he has the integrity and commitment to represent his characters without any judgment.” At the time, Hoffman was living in Brooklyn (“with just a futon”) and working at a deli. “When I catch ‘Scent of a Woman’ on television now,” Hoffman said, “I’ll watch it, and I say, ‘Do less, Phil, less, less!’ Now, I’m a little mortified by parts of my performance. But back then, it was huge! It was pure joy to get to do the work. The director, Marty Brest, told me to never call acting a ‘job.’ Even now, I’ll catch myself calling it a job, and I get angry at myself.”
Paul Thomas Anderson also admired Hoffman’s performance in “Scent of a Woman.” “It was one of those ridiculous moments where you call someone and say, ‘You’re my favorite actor,’ ” Anderson told me recently. Anderson then wrote a part for Hoffman in “Boogie Nights” and, later, in “Magnolia” and cast him in “Punch-Drunk Love.” Those supporting roles — a repressed film-crew member in love with a porn star, a saintly hospice nurse, a menacing proprietor of a phone-sex operation — became part of Hoffman’s collection of precisely drawn, scene-stealing characters. “I remember seeing Philip in ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ ” Streep told me. “He played a rich, spoiled snob, and I sat up straight in my seat and said, ‘Who is that?’ I thought to myself: My God, this actor is fearless. He’s done what we all strive for — he’s given this awful character the respect he deserves, and he’s made him fascinating.”
Hoffman’s role in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was Freddie Miles, a close friend of the golden-boy protagonist, whom Hoffman played as a somewhat boorish, future captain of industry living in a constant state of plush pleasure. “He’s existing in a ‘just about to take the beautiful woman’s clothes off’ world,” Hoffman told me. “And he doesn’t like anything interfering with that mood.” Unlike Freddie, however, most of Hoffman’s characters have been profoundly vulnerable, often disenfranchised misfits. In Todd Solondz’s “Happiness,” he played Allen, an insecure man who masturbates while making obscene phone calls. “That wasn’t easy,” Hoffman said now. “It’s hard to sit in your boxers and jerk off in front of people for three hours. I was pretty heavy, and I was afraid that people would laugh at me. Todd said they might laugh, but they won’t laugh at you. He saw what we were working for, which was the pathos of the moment.” Hoffman paused. “Sometimes, acting is a really private thing that you do for the world.”
“AROUND 2004,” BENNETT MILLER SAID, “Phil was where Truman Capote was in his life before he wrote ‘In Cold Blood.’ He was respected by everyone, but he hadn’t fulfilled his true potential on film. And yet Phil regarded playing Capote with absolute dread. Phil told me, I’m too big and physically too different. I said: ‘That’s not what this movie is about. Who cares if Capote was short and you’re not — that’s not the point.’ I knew that Phil, like Capote, had the charm, the ambition and the talent to both be great and self-destructive. I told Phil to lose weight and the rest would be my problem. And then he showed up, and I thought: What did I promise? He’s 5-foot-10 and 230 pounds? What have I done?”
Capote was a dramatic departure for Hoffman. Not only is he in nearly every frame of the movie, but the man was entirely contradictory — he was charismatic but an outsider; always watchful but loved a party; inordinately talented but competitive to a fault. Capote was seductive, manipulative, insecure, dishonest and ruthless. It intrigued Hoffman that Capote was very successful but a bit lost and, like him, wasn’t sure which path to take. Strangely, “Capote” was Hoffman’s “In Cold Blood,” the project that changed everything.
“I knew that it would be great, but I still took the role kicking and screaming,” Hoffman said now, as he ordered sticky pudding for desert. “Playing Capote took a lot of concentration. I prepared for four and a half months. I read and listened to his voice and watched videos of him on TV. Sometimes being an actor is like being some kind of detective where you’re on the search for a secret that will unlock the character. With Capote, the part required me to be a little unbalanced, and that wasn’t really good for my mental health. It was also a technically difficult part. Because I was holding my body in a way it doesn’t want to be held and because I was speaking in a voice that my vocal cords did not want to do, I had to stay in character all day. Otherwise, I would give my body the chance to bail on me.”
There was nothing easy about the shoot. Winnipeg, Canada, doubled for Kansas, and it was freezing; money was short and Hoffman’s company, Cooperstown, was a producer of the movie. “That may have been crazy to take on,” Hoffman said, “but as much as I hated spending Sundays — which was my day off — attending production meetings, it took me away from the obsession of acting the part. Putting that obsession somewhere else is rejuvenating.”
By the end, all the relationships were strained. “It was a very happy thing to have something that you suffered over be embraced,” Miller said. “A few weeks before the Oscars, we were at the Berlin film festival, and we were completely fatigued and longing for the finish line. Phil said, ‘I’m going to go in the theater and watch the end of the movie.’ He came out afterward, and his face was wet with tears. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said. Phil, at that moment, was just an audience member. He wasn’t Capote anymore.”
THREE MONTHS AFTER HOFFMAN returned from London, on a freezing Friday night in early December, he was standing in front of the Public Theater in the East Village of Manhattan smoking a cigarette. He was there to see an early staging — “it’s only the third time all these words have been said in a row,” Hoffman told me — of “Philip Roth in Khartoum,” a new play by David Bar Katz that LAByrinth is producing. LAB has a long-standing relationship with the Public Theater, which often makes its auditoriums available to the company. Hoffman, wearing a baseball hat and bundled in a heavy twill jacket that looked as if it was designed with farming in mind, cradled a pair of large headphones around his neck. “I’m playing a character who always listens to headphones,” Hoffman explained. “So tonight I thought, I’ll use them — I’ll be that guy who always has headphones on. And I put on the Cat Stevens song, ‘Trouble.’ You know, ‘Trouble set me free.’ What a great song! I had forgotten. A lot of times, a song will let you down halfway through, but that song is great to the very end.”
The part Hoffman was rehearsing on his way to meet me was a part he hoped never to play: one of the lead roles in a screen adaptation of “Jack Goes Boating,” a play about four pot-smoking friends and their quest for love, which was first staged at LAB in 2007 and which he plans to direct as a film next year. In London, he had been adamant about not wanting to direct himself. But none of the actors he hoped to cast were available, and the shoot had already been scheduled for February.
“I’m in denial about this,” Hoffman said as he finished his cigarette. “Complete denial. I have no idea about what I’m doing. I was in the play, but I don’t remember what I did. That was a year and a half ago, and even then, I was kind of unsure about the character. But if I don’t direct the movie now, I’m not going to do it, and it’s an extension of the theater company. And that’s why I got into this whole acting thing to begin with — to be part of a theater company, to do new plays. Making this movie is about being loyal to that somehow.”
Hoffman’s loyalty to work keeps him very busy: in September, “Riflemind” opened in London to stinging reviews (The Independent called it “mortifyingly bad”; The Sunday Times chided, “nearly three grueling hours of stifling your yawns”), even if Hoffman’s direction was noted with less vitriol. He then returned to New York, where he lives downtown with Mimi O’Donnell and their son, Cooper, and daughter, Tallulah, in time for the birth of their third child — a girl named Willa — in late October. “It’s three kids now and I’m very tired,” Hoffman said. “I’m a little lost in my brain.” He has a movie coming out next spring, “The Boat That Rocked,” in which he plays a D.J., and he lent his voice to “Mary and Max,” which has just been chosen to open the Sundance Film Festival. In November, Hoffman found two weeks to do a workshop of “Othello” with Sellars, before it is performed in Vienna and perhaps New York next fall. He made a trip to Austin, Tex., in search of funds for LAB, and he flew to Los Angeles to promote “Doubt” for a few days. In the last week, after screenings of the film for Academy Award voters, he had three question-and-answer sessions with the cast and director of “Doubt”; he attended the Gotham Independent Film Awards, which were held at Cipriani on Wall Street, where “Synecdoche, New York” shared the prize for “Best Ensemble” with “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”; and he looked at photographs of pools for scenes in his new film, talked to cinematographers and imagined the movie he would soon direct. “It’s a lot,” Hoffman said, as David Bar Katz, the author of “Philip Roth in Khartoum,” bounded over to greet him.
Hoffman has always been attracted to the idea of an artistic community, particularly in the theater, which is part of why he is so attached to LAB. He met Mimi, a costume designer who has recently begun directing, at LAB (“I hired her,” Hoffman joked), and the company members are some of his closest friends. When he began his film career, he worked in a similar way, joining what you might call the Paul Thomas Anderson repertory company, which included John C. Reilly and Julianne Moore, among others. Hoffman appeared in all of Anderson’s movies until last year’s “There Will Be Blood.” The members of that group have gone on to have big careers independently, and the work they do is no longer as collective. “We had a ball then,” he said in London. “It was everyone at the right time. It was very strange not to be in ‘There Will Be Blood.’ Paul kept asking me to come to Texas where they were filming and hang out. I said I’d come, but I wanted to dress in period costume and throw stones at the oil well. I wanted the audience to say, ‘Who’s that guy chucking stones at the well?’ ”
While movies typically require an elaborate and expensive mechanism, plays can be relatively simple to produce. Every year, LAB has a two-week “summer intensive” workshop during which 35 to 40 plays are rehearsed and read. Company members — there are about 100 — offer their critiques and the artistic directors then select the 10 or 15 plays they would like to see go to the next step. “Most of us liked ‘Philip Roth in Khartoum,’ ” Hoffman said. “Some of the women had problems with it, but I asked my mother to come to a reading, and she thought the female characters rang true.” Hoffman lit another cigarette. “People only want to invest in a play that they think will do well. They are not interested in risky theater. But even more traditional theater is pure risk, which is what I love about it. You roll the dice for the thrill of rolling the dice.”
As we spoke outside the Public, Katz, clearly excited and nervous about that night’s performance, leaped into view again. Hoffman stamped out his cigarette and gave him a bear hug. Katz, who was wearing a complicated gray overcoat that looked a little more Hollywood screenwriter than downtown playwright, has worked extensively with John Leguizamo and has some of his frenetic energy. He clearly saw this production as a big opportunity; Stephen Adly Guirgis’s play, “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” directed by Hoffman in 2000, cemented LAB’s reputation as a theater company committed to significant new voices. “I used to think I was Catholic until I met Stephen,” Hoffman joked. “But I am not Catholic the way he is. He is tortured and haunted by that religion, and you see it in his work.”
We headed inside, veering left toward a room that had been outfitted with a hundred seats on four-tier bleachers. The stage was not raised, and there wasn’t much of a set — just some nondescript tables, stools and couches. The room was very wide, and it was hard to tell where the set stopped — often the characters appeared to be offstage when they weren’t: it was meant to evoke a TriBeCa loft that never ends.
“Philip Roth in Khartoum,” like most LAB plays, is designed to be something of a commentary on our times. “It’s about a dinner party that goes bad,” Hoffman said quietly as we took our seats in the top row. The play began with four men discussing their wives’ lack of carnal interest in them. The dialogue was funny and a little sad, but the characters were indistinct — somewhat stereotypical aging yuppies who longed for the days of easy sex. When the action moved to their spouses, the play became more engaging. But as the conflicts emerged — a severely autistic child, a wife with a more successful career than her husband’s, an interracial marriage — the play, which was two and a half hours long, began to verge on soap opera.
Hoffman seemed to love it. His attention was entirely focused, a perfect audience of one. At moments like this, it is easy to forget that Hoffman is a major movie star with an Oscar on his mantel. He appears not to have a trace of ego. “That’s why I wrote the character of the saintly nurse Phil Parma in ‘Magnolia’ for Phil,” said Paul Thomas Anderson. “Phil is that good — he’s committed to art and not in a phony, grandstanding way. He really wants to live a life in the arts that means something.” There are few other Academy Award-winning actors who have devoted themselves to the full-time running of a theater company. “It sounds noble, but it’s really not,” Hoffman said. “I do this because it gives me a home, a place where I can come and work. The movies are great, but they require a different kind of concentration, and then they’re over. Theater was my first love, and it’s been the biggest influence on my life. The theater is why I got into acting and why I’m still in acting.”
When the audience cleared out, Hoffman went backstage to talk to the actors about the performance. It felt strangely like a moment from a simpler time and place: Hoffman and his buddies putting on a show. Later that night, Hoffman would walk home in the cold listening to “Trouble” over and over on his headphones, imagining his soon-to-be-played character projected onto the big screen, but right now he was like an enthralled kid. “I’m happy here,” he said, sounding surprised at his glee. “You never forget your first love.”
“SOMETIMES WHEN I SEE a great movie or a great play I think, Being human means you’re really alone,” Hoffman told me on another cold winter night. We had just seen “Gran Torino,” the new Clint Eastwood film in which he directs himself. Eastwood plays a racist, cantankerous curmudgeon named Walt Kowalski who befriends the Hmong boy who lives next door. Kowalski is a symbol of a dying America — blue collar, militaristic, practical, afraid, proud. There’s a stylistic link between “Doubt” and “Gran Torino” — both films are rich in character and take place in a time of change. “Doubt” is set in 1964, before the upheaval of the late ’60s, and there is only one black student at the parish school in the Bronx. Similarly, “Gran Torino” depicts the last breaths of a certain kind of man: Kowalski is a former autoworker who lives his life according to strict beliefs and rules. Both films begin and end in the Catholic Church; both suggest an uncertain future. “And they are both filled with regret,” Hoffman said. We were having some pasta at an Italian restaurant near the movie theater where we had seen “Gran Torino.” “So many things I’m interested in come down to the subject of regret,” he continued as he ate his spaghetti. “That’s Capote alone on the plane at the end of ‘Capote,’ the priest and the nun in “Doubt” who make judgments they may wish they hadn’t and Clint Eastwood tonight. I try to live my life in such a way that I don’t have profound regrets. That’s probably why I work so much. I don’t want to feel I missed something important.”
Hoffman fell silent. “Gran Torino” is emotional, and he was clearly affected by the film. “I still get wide-eyed,” he said. “It’s true that I’ve made a lot of movies, and I know there’s a microphone over there and a camera back there, but when you see something great, you lose all that. I’m sitting forward, and I’m being moved, and I have no idea how he did it. I don’t know Clint Eastwood, but what’s amazing is that you have the sense that he’s doing exactly what he wants to be doing. He’s so committed. In this film, he keeps the action going, and the people don’t ever behave against their true nature. That’s what I look for in my work: when a writer can deftly describe the human experience in a way that you didn’t think could even be put into words. That doesn’t happen often, but it gives me something to play inside. Too much of the time our culture fears subtlety. They really want to make sure you get it. And when subtlety is lost, I get upset.”
When Hoffman talks about his need for emotional nuance, it’s easy to understand why he gravitates to the theater, where the great roles combine magnificent writing with intense feeling. “I’m sure Phil will do the great plays of O’Neill and Miller,” Nichols told me, “because he’s like a lion — he needs meat to feed on. And, God willing, he’ll do great movies. But those parts are harder to find in film. Movies, for me, need to be reborn. They can’t rely on the classics the way theater can.”
Hopefully, Hoffman will not give up his film career. “I heard that Eastwood is saying that this will be his last film as an actor,” Hoffman said. “There’s part of me that feels that way during almost every movie. On ‘Synecdoche,’ I paid a price. I went to the office and punched my card in, and I thought about a lot of things, and some of them involved losing myself. You try to be artful for the film, but it’s hard. I’d finish a scene, walk right off the set, go in the bathroom, close the door and just take some breaths to regain my composure. In the end, I’m grateful to feel something so deeply, and I’m also grateful that it’s over.” He smiled. “And that’s my life.”
Lynn Hirschberg is editor at large for the magazine.
:: Agência FAPESP :: Divulgação CientíficaGraças à uma rara conjunção de fatores, cientistas europeus captam sinal de água emitido há 11 bilhões de anos, muito antes de o Sistema Solar ter sido formado.
18/12/2008
Agência FAPESP
Água acaba de ser encontrada na maior distância da Terra de que se tem notícia. Tão longe que sua identificação, feita por um grupo de cientistas europeus, corresponde a um sinal que, tendo viajado pela velocidade da luz, levou 11,1 bilhões de anos para chegar ao radiotelescópio Effelsberg, na Alemanha.
O sinal de vapor de água pertenceu a um momento em que o Universo tinha cerca de um quinto de sua atual idade e ainda seriam precisos mais de 6 bilhões de anos para o surgimento do Sistema Solar. Sua identificação, descrita na edição desta quinta-feira (18/12) da revista Nature, mostra que condições para a formação e sobrevivência de moléculas de água já existiam apenas 2,5 bilhões de anos após o Big Bang.
O sinal foi descoberto no quasar MG J0414+0534. Os autores do estudo estimam que o vapor de água teria existido em nuvens de poeira e gás que alimentavam o buraco negro supermassivo no centro do distante quasar. A detecção foi confirmada por observações interferométricas (baseadas em fenômenos ópticos de interferência) de alta resolução com outro radiotelescópio, o Expanded Very Large Array, nos Estados Unidos.
A descoberta de água da infância do Universo foi possível somente por conta do alinhamento do quasar com uma galáxia à sua frente (em relação à Terra). Com o alinhamento, a galáxia atuou como uma espécie de lente de aumento cósmica, ampliando a luz emitida pelo quasar. Sem essa ajuda, seriam precisos 580 dias de contínua observação com o Effelsberg, que tem 100 metros de diâmetro, no lugar das meras 14 horas que permitiram a descoberta.
“Outros tentaram e falharam em sua busca por água e sabíamos que estávamos olhando para um sinal muito fraco. Decidimos aproveitar a chance de usar uma galáxia como lente de aumento para observar a uma distância muito maior do que seria possível e, como imaginávamos, a emissão de água surgiu”, disse Violette Impellizzeri, do Instituto Max Planck de Radiastronomia, primeira autora do artigo agora publicado.
Além do alinhamento providencial, os cientistas contaram com uma grande coincidência. O quasar está exatamente dentro do intervalo certo do desvio para o vermelho – ou redshift, a alteração na forma como a freqüência das ondas de luz é observada em função da velocidade relativa entre a fonte emissora e observador – para que a emissão do sinal da molécula de água passe de sua freqüência normal de 22 GHz para 6 GHz, entrando na faixa de alcance do receptor instalado no telescópio.
“É interessante que encontramos água no primeiro objeto aumentado gravitacionalmente que observamos no Universo distante. Isso sugere que a água pode ter sido muito mais abundante no início do Universo do que achávamos e é algo que poderemos usar em futuros estudos sobre buracos negros supermassivos e sobre evolução de galáxias”, disse outro autor do estudo, John McKean, também do Max Planck.
A emissão de água foi identificada na forma de um maser, uma radiação semelhante ao laser, mas na forma de microondas. O sinal corresponde a uma luminosidade de 10 mil vezes a do Sol.
O artigo A gravitationally lensed water maser in the early Universe, de Eudald Carbonell, de Violette Impellizzeri e outros, pode ser lido por assinantes da Nature em www.nature.com.
Computador e lápis são aliados para fazer animaçãoHardware & Software
Domingo, 30 de novembro de 2008, 11h48 Atualizada às 16h56
Computador e lápis são aliados para fazer animação
John Anderson
A 4,8 mil km de onde Feliz, Dunga e Mestre decoram as paredes dos estúdios Walt Disney em Burbank, está o escritório do animador Bill Plympton em um dos edifícios repletos de portas de aço anônimas no sul de Manhattan. Atrás delas podem existir tanto revendedoras de aspiradores quanto cartéis internacionais de narcóticos. Mas quem se importa? Claramente, coisas mais fantásticas estão surgindo no final do corredor no escritório de Plympton: casamentos alienígenas. Pêlos de nariz tão longos quanto o Nilo. Cães que sonham com hidrantes. E cinema criado a lápis. Muitos lápis.
Enquanto Bolt e Madagascar 2: a Grande Escapada continuam ocupando as salas de cinema, e Wall-E parece estar destinado a um Oscar de animação (e talvez até mesmo a uma indicação para melhor filme), os desenhos animados parecem ser a melhor aposta de Hollywood para uma vida longa e feliz - as animações em 3D parecem ser a última razão para o público sair de casa. A tecnologia de informática por trás disso pode ser comparada à da NASA.
Os enredos, sejam eles sobre cães iludidos, leões neuróticos ou pandas com golpes giratórios, são geralmente similares. Mas apesar do estilo bobalhão que influenciou a maior parte dos filmes animados americanos, um elemento insurgente continua fazendo animação para adultos. Nem tudo é desenhado à mão; alguns misturam ação real com animação, ou podem ser desenvolvidos por Flash ou PowerPoint.
Plympton, o mais conhecido desse quadro de animadores, cujos filmes incluem The Tune, I Married a Strange Person e, mais recentemente, o curta Hot Dog, usa a mesma técnica que a Disney usava em 1936. "Diria que foram necessários cerca de 25 mil desenhos para Idiots & Angels", contou de seu mais recente filme, sobre um homem mau que desenvolve asas que o levam a fazer boas ações. "Faço cerca de 100 desenhos por dia, algo como 10 por hora, e se conseguir ficar nisso por 250 ou 300 dias, então tenho um filme."
É como, ele disse, "uma coisa zen". "Você fica tão focado. Não respondo e-mails ou telefonemas. Acordo às 6h, não me barbeio nem tomo banho, só começo a desenhar. É como um percurso. Ouvi que os romancistas fazem isso também. Eles se focam tanto por um ano que depois desabam por duas ou três semanas. Vão dormir. Ou beber".
Outros artistas têm outras táticas. Henry Selick (O Estranho Mundo de Jack de Tim Burton) está atualmente passando pelo doloroso processo de modelagem do filme, que colocou em ação tipos como Gumby e Wallace & Gromit. Seu novo trabalho, Coraline, está previsto para ser lançado em fevereiro.
"Você quer colocar a mão na massa," Selick disse quando perguntado sobre o que motivava seu uso de modelos de barro e objetos reais em vez de imagens onipresentes de computador. "É esse o sentido para mim."
Outros, incluindo Don Hertzfeldt, Signe Baumane e Plympton, desenham tudo à mão. Mas o tema de seus filmes passa longe das peripécias de Piu-Piu e Frajola: sexo e arrependimento (A Letter to Colleen, de Andy e Carolyn London); um império de pássaros fascista que conquista Londres (Bathtime in Clerkenwell e Last Time in Clerkenwell, de Alex Budovsky); uma adolescente petrificada por uma gravidez (Baumane's "Birth). Ou as agonias da bolha Wrap, enquanto aguarda o inevitável estouro (Fantaisie in Bubblewrap, de Arthur Metcalf).
Animações sérias não são desconhecidas nos Estados Unidos, embora a situação do mercado possa se comparar à do vinho californiano, pré-1976. Waltz With Bashir, o lançamento da Sony Pictures Classics sobre a invasão israelense do Líbano nos anos 1980, é tão séria quanto um filme pode ser. Persépolis e As Bicicletas de Belleville foram grandes exemplos da abordagem pós-Turma do Pernalonga e de uma maturidade de temas, se não necessariamente técnica. Mas os três são importações. Para que seu trabalho seja visto, a maioria dos animadores nos Estados Unidos precisa fazer o caminho inverso.
Baumane chegou a Nova York em 1995 da Letônia e finalmente encontrou um produtor para seu trabalho na Itália. Seu filme Teat Beat of Sex é uma aventura de 15 capítulos semi-autobiográfica e quase filosófica sobre erotismo. Potencializadas pela narração excitante de Baumane, cada curta poderia ser um número humorístico nos palcos, embora ela goste da permanência que o filme proporcione e da oportunidade para provocar: "acredito que ao chocar as pessoas, expandimos suas percepções".
"Meu trabalho é rejeitado por muitos festivais de animação porque eles não o consideram 'animado'", Baumane disse, explicando que usará quatro quadros por imagem, algo que dá menor fluidez de movimento ao filme projetado. (Filmes animados geralmente usam 24 quadros por segundo.) Essa atitude exclusivista é o tipo de coisa que provavelmente irritaria Hertzfeldt.
"Não sei por que essas coisas precisam ser classificadas em grandes e estúpidas gaiolas," disse Hertzfeldt, diretor indicado ao Oscar que divulga pelo país seu último curta, I Am So Proud of You, a seqüência de seu celebrado Everything Will Be OK. "Desenhos à mão contra computadores, película contra digital. Temos mais de 100 anos de uma incrível tecnologia de filmes para usar. Não sei a razão para qualquer artista dispensar qualquer uma dessas ferramentas."
"Muita gente supõe que, como gravo em película e trabalho com animação em papel, faço as coisas do 'jeito difícil', quando na verdade meus últimos quatro filmes teriam sido impossíveis de produzir digitalmente".
Despesas e tempo são os fatos pouco conhecidos da animação digital. Plympton, que gasta centenas de milhares de dólares em suas produções, disse que quando contratou alguém para criar um hotel digital para seu filme Shuteye Hotel, "foram seis meses de atraso e seis meses de estouro de orçamento."
Hertzfeldt, que usa uma rara e antiga câmera de 35 milímetros, disse: "muita gente parece supor que existe um botão 'fazer arte' no computador e tudo no mundo digital é mágico e fácil. Existe um sem fim de idéias erradas sobre como essas ferramentas funcionam e pouco conhecimento de que os animadores em computador precisam se esforçar tanto quanto os animadores tradicionais".
Apesar das exigências e penúrias, esses animadores continuam querendo mais - particularmente Plympton, que arrasta a teimosia a níveis olímpicos. "Produzir uma animação a cada seis meses, um longa a cada ano, uma só pessoa? Nunca foi feito," disse. "Seis longas-metragens sozinho? Não sei se isso alguém um dia vai conseguir repetir". Explode em gargalhadas. "Por que iria?"
Ultimamente, disse Hertzfeldt, os métodos são irrelevantes. "A única coisa que importa é o resultado na grande tela, não como você chegou a ele", disse. "Você pode fazer um desenho com giz de cera sobre um quadrado vermelho que sofre de um amor não correspondido por um círculo azul, e não deixar um só olho seco no recinto se souber como contar uma história".
Tradução: Amy Traduções
The New York Times
A New View of the Early Earth, Thanks to Australian Rocks - NYTimes.comBy KENNETH CHANG
Published: December 1, 2008
The first 700 million years of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year existence are known as the Hadean period, after Hades, or, to shed the ancient Greek name, Hell.
That name seemed to fit with the common perception that the young Earth was a hot, dry, desolate landscape interspersed with seas of magma and inhospitable for life. Even if some organism had somehow popped into existence, the old story went, surely it would soon have been extinguished in the firestorm of one of the giant meteorites that slammed into the Earth when the young solar system was still crowded with debris.
Scars on the surface of the Moon record a hail of impacts during what is called the Late Heavy Bombardment. The Earth would have received an even more intense bombardment, and the common thinking until recently was that life could not have emerged on Earth until the bombardment eased about 3.85 billion years ago.
Norman H. Sleep, a professor of geophysics at Stanford, recalled that in 1986 he submitted a paper that calculated the probability of life surviving one of the giant, early impacts. It was summarily rejected because a reviewer said that obviously nothing could have lived then.
That is no longer thought to be true.
“We thought we knew something we didn’t,” said T. Mark Harrison, a professor of geochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. In hindsight the evidence was just not there. And new evidence has suggested a new view of the early Earth.
Over the last decade, the mineralogical analysis of small hardy crystals known as zircons embedded in old Australian rocks has painted a picture of the Hadean period “completely inconsistent with this myth we made up,” Dr. Harrison said.
Geologists now almost universally agree that by 4.2 billion years ago, the Earth was a pretty placid place, with both land and oceans. Instead of hellishly hot, it may have frozen over. Because the young Sun put out 30 percent less energy than it does today, temperatures on Earth might have been cold enough for parts of the surface to have been covered by expanses of ice.
In a new analysis, published in the current issue of the journal Nature, the zircons, the only bits of earth older than 4 billion years definitively known to have survived, provide another tantalizing hint about the Hadean period. Dr. Harrison and two U.C.L.A. colleagues, Michelle Hopkins, a graduate student, and Craig Manning, a professor of geology and geochemistry, report that minerals trapped inside zircons offer evidence that the processes of plate tectonics — the forces that push around the planet’s outer crust, forming and shaping the continents and oceans — had already begun.
“The picture that’s emerging is a watery world with normal rock recycling processes,” said Stephen J. Mojzsis, a professor of geology at the University of Colorado who was not involved with the U.C.L.A. research. “And that’s a comforting thought for the origin of life.”
With the old views of the Hadean period, the origin of life on Earth posed a huge problem. The earliest, and still debated, evidence for life lies within rocks in Greenland dated at 3.83 billion years. The rocks show a shift in the relative amounts of carbon-12, the usual form of carbon, and carbon-13, a less common but stable form of carbon. That shift was attributed to the presence of microorganisms, which would tend to concentrate the lighter carbon.
What was surprising, perhaps unbelievable, in the old views was that life started immediately at the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, seemingly showing up the instant that it was possible.
In the new view of the early Earth, life could have emerged hundreds of millions of years earlier. “This means the door is open for a long, slow chemical evolution,” Dr. Mojzsis said. “The stage was set for life probably 4.4 billion years ago, but I don’t know if the actors were present.”
The revolution in early Earth studies comes largely from rocks in western Australia. The rocks are three billion years old, but they contain zircons that are older. Zircons, made primarily of the elements zirconium, oxygen and silicon, are extremely hard and durable and can survive conditions that erode, melt or otherwise transform the rock around them.
The zircons also contain enough uranium that they can be precisely dated by the decay of that uranium. In 2001, two groups, one led by Dr. Harrison and the other by John W. Valley of the University of Wisconsin, reported that the Australian zircons formed during the Hadean period as long ago as 4.4 billion years and were later embedded in the younger, 3-billion-year-old rocks.
The relative amounts of oxygen isotopes in the zircons points to the presence of water. Minerals like clays and carbonates that form in water prefer to incorporate oxygen-18 into their crystal structure, and the zircons contain relatively high levels of oxygen-18 compared to the more common oxygen-16.
In the U.C.L.A. study, the researchers studied tiny mineral grains trapped inside the zircons between 4 billion and 4.2 billion years ago as they were being formed. From the mix of elements they identified in the minerals, the scientists could calculate the depth and temperature at which the zircons crystallized — 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit at a depth of 15 miles — and the calculations showed a flow of heat coming out of that part of the Earth of 75 milliwatts per square meter.
That is too cool. The Earth during the Hadean period may not have been hellish, but it was hotter than today, and the heat flow should have been about three times the amount that was calculated.
That meant the zircons formed in a cool part of the crust. On Earth today, one such place is a subduction zone, where an ocean plate slides under a continental plate and is pushed into the mantle. The waterlogged ocean plate then melts at relatively low temperatures. The U.C.L.A. scientists believe that the high water content and the low temperatures inferred from the zircons thus point to the existence of such a subduction zone. And a subduction zone could not have existed unless some type of plate tectonics was already at work.
“It’s not a smoking gun,” Dr. Harrison said. “But we’re left without any other plausible explanation.”
Many geologists believe that the crust was too thin or the interior too hot for plate tectonics to occur back then. Neither Venus nor Mars shows obvious signs of plate tectonics, past or present, suggesting that only a limited range of planetary temperature and structure give rise to the phenomenon.
Dr. Sleep of Stanford said of the U.C.L.A. findings: “It may well be a subduction zone. It looks like a subduction zone.”
Dr. Valley has also concluded the Earth became cool and watery early in its history, but remains skeptical about the inferences about plate tectonics.
“To me, it’s not ruled out by anything,” he said, “but it’s far from proven with the certainty that Mark states it.” Dr. Valley said it was possible that some of the elements measured by the U.C.L.A. researchers might have infiltrated the zircons through tiny cracks.
If plate tectonics were overturning the Earth’s crust during the Hadean period, it would have shaped not just the land forms, but also the air and the climate.
In the 1980s, a climate model proposed a thick atmosphere of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, raising the average surface temperature to 185 degrees Fahrenheit, not quite boiling.
But if plate tectonics had already begun, much of the carbon dioxide would be trapped in carbonate rocks and then pushed into Earth’s interior. In 2001, a climate model by Dr. Sleep and Kevin Zahnle of the NASA Ames Research Center found that the late Hadean Earth then would have been somewhat chilly.
Neither near-boiling temperatures nor the chilly conditions make life impossible, but these factors could change ideas about how and when life started.
Earth, like the other planets, coalesced more than 4.5 billion years ago. It is commonly hypothesized that almost immediately, a Mars-size object about 4,000 miles wide hit it — a true cataclysm that vaporized much of the object and Earth. Some of the debris ejected into orbit became the Moon. The molten Earth cooled quickly, probably within a few million years, and nothing that large ever struck again.
Dr. Sleep said his calculations suggested that during the 700 million years of the Hadean period about 15 objects 100 miles wide or wider hit the Earth. About four of the objects were wider than 200 miles, and those collisions would have been violent enough to boil off most of the oceans. (By contrast, the more recent object that hit the Earth 65 million years ago and helped kill off the dinosaurs was about 6 miles wide.)
But in numerical simulations that will be presented this month at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, Dr. Mojzsis and Oleg Abramov, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, show that the Late Heavy Bombardment impacts were not quite as lethal as had been thought.
“Things are hurt really bad,” Dr. Mojzsis said. But the computer calculations indicated that even rocks up to 300 miles wide would not kill everything, that pockets would exist where organisms that thrive in high-temperature environments like hydrothermal vents could survive.
Genetic studies of current life support that notion, pointing to an organism that lived in a high-temperature environment as the last common ancestor. That does not mean that life started there, but that is almost certainly where survivors of the giant impacts would have huddled.
For the question of whether life existed during the Hadean period, researchers would like to find carbon and then perform an isotope analysis similar to what was done with the Greenland rocks. Despite analyzing 160,000 grain-size zircons, the U.C.L.A. researchers have not found carbon. (Another group has reported the presence of small diamonds, but that has not been confirmed.)
The search for more substantial amounts of Hadean rock also continues. Three months ago, researchers reported that a swath of bedrock in northern Quebec might be 4.28 billion years old, which would provide a mother lode of material to study. That bedrock includes intriguing structures known as banded iron formations, which are believed to occur only with the help of living organisms. But other scientists have questioned the age of the rocks, suggesting that they may really be 3.8 billion years old.
Dr. Mojzsis said “Hadean” might not be a misleading name for the earliest eon of Earth’s history, after all. The ancient Greek concept of hell was not one of fire and brimstone. “In Greek mythology, Hades was a dark, cold, mysterious place,” he said. “It seems to me the Hadean is living up to that moniker.”
A Whisper, Perhaps, From the Universe’s Dark Side - NYTimes.comBy DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: November 24, 2008
A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.
Maybe.
“Nobody really knows what’s going on,” said Gordon Kane, a theorist at the University of Michigan. Physicists caution that there could still be a relatively simple astronomical explanation for the recent observations.
But the nature of this dark matter is one of the burning issues of science. Identifying it would point the way to a deeper understanding of the laws of nature and the Einsteinian dream of a unified theory of physics.
The last few weeks have seen a blizzard of papers trying to explain the observations in terms of things like “minimal dark matter” or “exciting dark matter,” or “hidden valley” theory, and to suggest how to look for them in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, set to begin operation again outside Geneva next summer.
“It could be deliriously exciting, an incredibly cool story,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who has been churning out papers with his colleagues. “Anomalies in the sky tell you what to look for in the collider.”
On Thursday, a team of astrophysicists working on one of the experiments reported in the journal Nature that a cosmic ray detector onboard a balloon flying around the South Pole had recorded an excess number of high-energy electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, sailing through local space.
The particles, they conceded, could have been created by a previously undiscovered pulsar, the magnetized spinning remnant of a supernova explosion, blasting nearby space with electric and magnetic fields. But, they say, a better and more enticing explanation for the excess is that the particles are being spit out of the fireballs created by dark matter particles colliding and annihilating one another in space.
“We cannot disprove that the signal could come from an astrophysical object. We also cannot eliminate a dark matter annihilation explanation based upon current data,” said John P. Wefel of Louisiana State University, the leader of the team, adding, “Whichever way it goes, for us it is exciting.”
The results came on the heels of a report earlier this fall from Pamela, a satellite built by Italian, German, Russian and Swedish scientists to study cosmic rays. Pamela scientists reported in talks and a paper posted on the Internet that the satellite had recorded an excess of high-energy positrons. This, they said, “may constitute the first indirect evidence of dark matter particle annihilations,” or a nearby pulsar.
Antimatter is rare in the universe, and so looking for it is a good way of hunting for exotic phenomena like dark matter.
Another indication that something funny is happening on the dark side of the universe is evident in maps of the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Those maps, produced most recently this year by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite, show a haze of what seem to be charged particles hovering around the Milky Way galaxy, according to an analysis by Douglas Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Adding to the mix and mystery, the European Space Agency’s Integral satellite detected gamma rays emanating from the center of the Milky Way, suggesting the presence of positrons there, but with much lower energies than Pamela and Dr. Wefel’s experiments have seen.
What all this adds up to, or indeed whether it all adds up to anything at all, depends on which observations you trust and your theoretical presumptions about particle physics and the nature of dark matter. Moreover, efforts to calculate the background level of high-energy particles in the galaxy are beset with messy uncertainties. “The dark matter signal is easy to calculate,” Dr. Kane said. “The background is much harder.”
Dark matter has teased and obsessed astronomers since the 1930s, when the Caltech astronomer Fritz Zwicky deduced that some invisible “missing mass” was required to supply the gravitational glue to hold clusters of galaxies together. The idea became respectable in the 1970s when Vera C. Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and her collaborators found from studying the motions of stars that most galaxies seemed to be surrounded by halos of dark matter.
The stakes for dark matter go beyond cosmology. The most favored candidates for its identity come from a theory called supersymmetry, which unifies three of the four known forces of nature mathematically and posits the existence of a realm of as-yet-undiscovered particles. They would be so-called wimps — weakly interacting massive particles — which feel gravity and little else, and could drift through the Earth like wind through a screen door. Such particles left over from the Big Bang could form a shadow universe clumping together into dark clouds that then attract ordinary matter.
The discovery of a supersymmetric particle would also be a boost for string theory, the controversial “theory of everything,” and would explicate the nature of a quarter of the universe. But until now, the dark matter particles have mostly eluded direct detection in the laboratory, the exception being a controversial underground experiment called Dama/Libra, for Dark Matter/Large Sodium Iodide Bulk for Rare Processes, under the Italian Alps, where scientists claimed in April to have seen a seasonal effect of a “dark matter wind” as the Earth goes around its orbit.
The sky could be a different story. Dark matter particles floating in the halos around galaxies would occasionally collide and annihilate one another in tiny fireballs of radiation and lighter particles, theorists say.
Dr. Wefel and his colleagues have been chasing sparks in the sky since 2000, when they flew an instrument known as ATIC, for Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter, around Antarctica on a balloon at an altitude of 23 miles, looking for high-energy particles known as cosmic rays raining from space.
In all they have made three flights, requiring them to spend the winter at the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station, which Dr. Wefel described as very pleasant. “It’s not bad until a storm moves in. You put your hand out till you can’t see it. Then you go out and start shoveling snow,” he explained.
The Nature paper includes data from the first two balloon flights. It shows a bump, over theoretical calculations of cosmic ray intensities, at energies of 500 billion to 800 billion electron volts, a measure of both energy and mass in physics. One way to explain that energy bump would be by the disintegration or annihilation of a very massive dark particle. A proton by comparison is about one billion electron volts.
Dr. Wefel noted, however, that according to most models, a pulsar could generate particles with even more energy, up to trillions of volts, whereas the bump in the ATIC data seems to fall off at around 800 billion electron volts. The ATIC results, he said, dovetail nicely with those from Pamela, which recorded a rising number of positrons relative to electrons, but only up to energies of about 200 billion electron volts.
Reached in China, where he was attending a workshop, Neal Weiner of New York University, who is working with Dr. Arkani-Hamed on dark matter models, said he was plotting ATIC data gleaned from the Web and Pamela data on the same graph to see how they fit, which was apparently very well.
But Piergiorgio Picozza, a professor at the University of Rome and the Pamela spokesman, said in an e-mail message that it was too soon to say the experiments agreed. That will depend on more data now being analyzed to learn whether Pamela continues to see more positrons as the energy rises.
Moreover, as Dr. Kane pointed out, Pamela carries a magnet that allows it to distinguish electrons from positrons — being oppositely charged, they bend in opposite directions going through the magnetic field. But the ATIC instrument did not include a magnet and so cannot be sure that it was seeing any positrons at all: no antimatter, no exotic dark matter, at least at those high energies.
But if he is right, Dr. Wefel said that the ATIC data favored something even more exotic than supersymmetry, namely a particle that is lost in the fifth dimension. String theory predicts that there are at least six dimensions beyond our simple grasp, wrapped up so tightly we cannot see them or park in them. A particle in one of these dimensions would not appear to us directly.
You could think of it as a hamster running around on a wheel in its cage. We cannot see the hamster or the cage, but we can sort of feel the impact of the hamster running; according to Einsteinian relativity, its momentum in the extra dimension would register as mass in our own space-time.
Such particles are called Kaluza-Klein particles, after Theodor Kaluza and Oscar Klein, theorists who suggested such an extra-dimensional framework in the 1920s to unify Einstein’s general theory of relativity and electromagnetism.
Dr. Wefel’s particle would have a mass of around 620 billion electron volts. “That’s the one that seems to fit the best,” he said in an interview. The emergence of a sharp edge in the data, he said, “would be a smoking gun” for such a strange particle.
But Dr. Arkani-Hamed said that Kaluza-Klein particles would not annihilate one another at a fast enough rate to explain the strength of the ATIC signal, nor other anomalies like the microwave haze. He and his colleagues, including Dr. Weiner, Dr. Finkbeiner and Tracy Slatyer, also of Harvard, drawing on work by Matthew Strassler of Rutgers, have tried to connect all the dots with a new brand of dark matter, in which there are not only dark particles but also a “dark force” between them.
That theory was called “a delightful castle in the sky” by Dr. Kane, who said he was glad it kept Dr. Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues busy and diverted them from competing with him. Dr. Kane and his colleagues favor a 200 billion-electron-volt supersymmetric particle known as a wino as the dark matter culprit, in which case the Pamela bump would not extend to higher energies.
Dr. Wefel said he had not kept up with all the theorizing. “I’m just waiting for one of these modelers to say here is the data, here is the model,” he said. “Fit it out. I’m not sure I’ve seen it yet.”
Dr. Picozza said that it was the job of theorists to come up with models and that they were proliferating.
“At the end of the story only one will be accepted from the scientific community, but now it is too early,” he said in an e-mail message.
Sorting all this out will take time, but not forever.
Pamela is expected to come out with new results next year, and the first results from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched last summer, should also be out soon. Not to mention the Large Hadron Collider, which will eventually smash together protons of seven trillion electron volts. It is supposed to be running next summer.
“With so many experiments, we will soon know so much more about all of this,” Dr. Weiner said. “In a year or two, we’ll either not be talking about this idea at all, or it will be all we’re talking about.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 26, 2008
An article on Tuesday about dark matter in the cosmos misstated the energy of proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, a new particle accelerator at CERN, outside Geneva. When the machine is running at full strength, each colliding proton will have seven trillion electron volts of energy, not seven million.
