The New York Times >Growing Up Denatured
By BRADFORD McKEE
April 28, 2005 New York Times

WERE it not for the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Neil Figler said, his sons, 7 and 11, might never peel themselves away from the Xbox to go outside and play.

“My kids want to finish their homework so they can play video games,” said Mr. Figler, 47, a salesman and Cubmaster in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. In Scouting his sons have learned to light fires, handle knives and build sleds for trekking through the woods. But even those occasional encounters with nature are planned and supervised by adults.

Nonetheless, the outings seem wilder than most anything else going on in kidland these days. Mr. Figler said his sons find life easier and more familiar in front of a computer screen. Among the Scouts, he said, “that’s more the norm than the exception.”

The days of free-range childhood seem to be over. And parents can now add a new worry to the list of things that make them feel inept: increasingly their children, as Woody Allen might say, are at two with nature.

Doctors, teachers, therapists and even coaches have been saying for years that children spend too much time staring at video screens, booked up for sports or lessons or sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction.

But a new front is opening in the campaign against children’s indolence. Experts are speculating, without empirical evidence, that a variety of cultural pressures have pushed children too far from the natural world. The disconnection bodes ill, they say, both for children and for nature.

The author Richard Louv calls the problem “nature-deficit disorder.” He came up with the term, he said, to describe an environmental ennui flowing from children’s fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders. Those who are obsessed with computer games or are driven from sport to sport, he maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilization.

Parents will probably encounter Mr. Louv in appearances and articles leading up to the publication next month of his seventh book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” (Algonquin Books). The book is an inch-thick caution against raising the fully automated child.

“I worked really hard to make this book not too depressing,” Mr. Louv (pronounced “loov”) said last week from his home in San Diego. He urges parents to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that they may remember from their own youth but that few promote in their offspring. “It’s society’s whole attitude that nature isn’t important anymore,” said Mr. Louv, 56, who has two sons age 17 and 23.

Dr. Donald Shifrin, a pediatrician in Bellevue, Wash., and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he sees the signs every day of the syndrome Mr. Louv describes in his book. His patients now arrive with fewer broken arms from falling out of trees (soccer and lacrosse injuries are most common) and more video games, cellphones and hand-held computers.

“We have mobile couch potatoes,” Dr. Shifrin said. “The question is, Are we going to turn this around with more opportunities for kids to interact with nature?”

Even if parents think their children get too much screen time and not enough safari time, many have no idea what to do about it. “It’s absolutely a phenomenon that nobody knows how to break,” said Mark Fillipitch, 40, a manager for a Caterpillar dealer and the father of four children – 10-year-old triplets (two boys and a girl) and a 6-year-old boy- in Acworth, Ga. “It is stronger than we are.”

When Mr. Fillipitch was growing up he and his friends played baseball in a big field. “And if there weren’t enough kids, you’d close right field,” he said. His own children have bicycles, skateboards and a swing set, he said. But “there’s this magnet pulling them into the house.” It is the Nintendo GameCube. “I have to throw them outside.”

Tracy Herzog, 42, a hospital fitness director and the mother of boys age 7 and 12 in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in effect banishes her children outdoors, she said, by not allowing them near the television, the Game Boy or the PlayStation until after dark. And only if their homework is done.

“As parents we have to make it uncomfortable for them to be sedentary,” Ms. Herzog said. “The temptation is to let the TV or PlayStation baby-sit them.”

Playing on parental anxieties has become an industry unto itself, but substantive data are almost nonexistent on the presumably growing distance between children and bugs, flowers and seashells. Mr. Louv, who is also a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, has studied the topic as much as anyone. He interviewed about 3,000 children nationwide and many of their parents for his book.

Few if any scientific studies exist showing that children now spend less time exploring nature or describing the ways they benefit from being where the wild things are.

“Who’s going to pay for that research?” Mr. Louv asked. “What toy can we sell for natural play?”

Stephen R. Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale whose book “Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection” (Island Press) is to be published this summer, said that he had not seen Mr. Louv’s book but that ample anecdotal evidence exists to support its argument.

“When you look for the hard data, it’s hard to find,” Dr. Kellert said. “And people talk about children’s contact with nature often in a very indiscriminate way.”

Children, he said, experience nature in many settings, often indirectly. If the Internet or television prevents a child from looking for four-leaf clovers, it may also provide vicarious ways to discover Amazonian rain forests. But, he added, the passive watching of a video screen does not simulate the uncertainty and risk, however minor, that make natural exploration bracing.

The risk part, assuming that children do just want to wander or waste time outdoors, is perhaps never low enough for parents.

Tom Cara, 47, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Ill., said that he and his wife, Erin, take their son, 10, and daughter, 14, on bike trips and that he and his son, in particular, go camping and fishing in the Wisconsin wilderness. But it’s hard to let children roam too freely, he said, because the news media have spooked parents with reports of child abductions and murders. “We’ve been conditioned to live in fear,” he said.

That fear resounds for other parents, too. Mr. Figler, the Cubmaster, said that 12 rural acres lie behind his family’s home, and that he and his sons often explore them together. But the woods are off limits to his younger son if he is alone. His older son may explore them, but only with a two-way radio. “It’s more my wife than me” who worries, Mr. Figler said. But they both grew more concerned after their sons’ school notified them that two registered sex offenders live nearby.

“We’re in an awareness of safety now that may not have been as prevalent” in the past, Mr. Figler said. “You’re always thinking about child abductions. You see the stories on TV, and it gets you nervous.”

Like grim news stories, Amber Alerts, broadcast to help spot missing children, may also take a toll on parents’ nerves by playing up the risk of criminal harm to their children. Dr. Daniel D. Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a former chairman of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he understood the fear that parents have. But he said they need to balance that fear with reality and learn to create safe zones where their children can run around on their own.

“We definitely want kids to be able to go out and play,” Dr. Broughton said. “The sedentary lifestyle is a huge problem in my practice every single day. I haven’t gone a day where I don’t see a kid who’s too fat.”

Mr. Louv refers to parents’ abduction fears as “the bogeyman syndrome.” But he suggests that the more likely bogeymen are people who “criminalize” outdoor play through neighborhood associations and their covenants. His own neighborhood’s residents’ association, he said, is known to go around tearing down tree houses.

“If all these covenants and regulations were enforced, then playing outdoors would be illegal,” Mr. Louv said.

And to let a child loiter is almost unthinkable, said Hal Espen, the editor of Outside magazine in Santa Fe, N.M. “The ability to just wander around is a much more fraught and anxiety-prone proposition these days,” he said. “There’s a lot of social zoning to go along with the urban zoning.”

For Ms. Herzog, the fitness director, the local schoolyard has become the latest casualty. It was fenced off recently for security: a “lockdown,” she called it. “That doesn’t allow active play on the school grounds” during off hours, Ms. Herzog said. “It’s not getting any easier.”

Rock-a-billy artist Hasil Adkins dies
April 27, 2005 11:47 AM

MADISON, W.Va.
Rock-a-billy artist Hasil Adkins, a one-man band whose screaming vocals and freestyle approach to rhythm landed a cult following, has died.

He was 67.

Adkins’ body was found yesterday at his Madison home, where he lived alone. The cause of death has not been determined but it does not appear suspicious.

Guitar, harmonica, drums, foot-rhythm instruments — Adkins played them all.

Known to his fans as The Haze, Adkins struggled for decades to get noticed. In a 2002 interview, he said he mailed out thousands of tapes and records over a 30-year period while fishing for a record deal.

Adkins was the original star of Norton Records, a label built around the primal recordings he produced beginning in the Eisenhower era.

Adkins claimed to have written more than seven-thousand songs. He first emerged in the 1950s, only to disappear again. European fans kept the rock-a-billy rage alive, and when the Cramps did an early 1980s remake of “She Said,” Adkins’ records suddenly became hot again.

His other hits included “Poultry in Motion,” “Chicken Walk,” “The Hunch,” “Chocolate Milk Honeymoon,” and “Boo Boo The Cat.”

False alarm sends Bush to underground shelter – Apr 27, 2005

Johnny is a hyperactive, shape-shifting mutant child, kept locked away in a basement. With only his feverish imagination and his terrified dog for company, he finds ways to amuse himself in the dark.
Rubber Johnny is the latest creation from the UK’s most imaginative filmmaker, Chris Cunningham. Featuring music by legendary electronic composer, Aphex Twin, this nightmarish and hallucinatory experimental short film is accompanied by 42 pages of drawings and photographs – Cunningham’s first published book of original artwork.

A Jazz Discovery Adds a New Note to the Historical Record
By BEN RATLIFF , New York Times

You might reasonably think that the recorded past of American music has been mapped out – that after all the academic books and scholared-up CD reissues, we know what’s between A and Z. Of the important works, anyway. Ephemera will always keep rolling in, intensifying the reds and golds of the historical picture, broadening the context.

But now this: tapes bearing nearly a full hour of the Thelonious Monk quartet with John Coltrane, found at the Library of Congress in January. The library made the announcement this month.

The tapes come from a concert at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957, a benefit for a community center. The concert was recorded by the Voice of America, the international broadcasting service, and the tapes also include sets by the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, Ray Charles with a backing sextet, the Zoot Sims Quartet with Chet Baker, and the Sonny Rollins Trio. (Newspaper accounts of the concert indicate that Billie Holiday appeared as well, though she is not on the Voice of America tapes.)

But it is Monk with Coltrane that constitutes the real find. That band existed for only six months in 1957, mostly through long and celebrated runs at the East Village club the Five Spot. During this period, Coltrane fully collected himself as an improviser, challenged by Monk and the discipline of his unusual harmonic sense. Thus began the 10-year sprint during which he changed jazz completely, before his death in 1967. The Monk quartet with Coltrane did record three numbers in a studio in 1957, but remarkably little material, and only with fairly low audience-tape fidelity, is known to exist from the Five Spot engagement.

The eight and a half Monk performances found at the Library of Congress, by contrast, are professionally recorded, strong and clear; you can hear the full dimensions of Shadow Wilson’s drum kit and Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s bass. It is certainly good enough for commercial release, though none has yet been negotiated.

On the tapes, Monk is Monk, his pianistic style basically formed at least 10 years before, with its sudden drawls and rhythmic hesitations. He lets Coltrane solo at length with very little accompaniment; the saxophonist plays rows and rows of original licks and runs, built with blizzards of 16th notes. The notable exception is Coltrane’s solo on “Blue Monk.” Through 10 blues choruses, he builds an even crescendo of logic, letting down his guard and relying less on his stock phrases. (The other songs on the tape, from the evening’s two sets, are “Monk’s Mood,” “Evidence,” “Crepuscule With Nellie,” “Nutty,” “Epistrophy,” “Bye-Ya,” “Sweet and Lovely” and a truncated second version of “Epistrophy.”)

The music was discovered by accident, during the routine practice of transferring tape from the Library of Congress’s Voice of America collection to digital sound files for preservation. Larry Appelbaum, a studio engineer, supervisor and jazz specialist at the library, said that he was given a batch of about 100 tapes for digitization one day in January and looked to see what was there; among them he noticed a brown cardboard box for a 7?-inch reel, marked in pencil “sp. Event 11/29/57 carnegie jazz concert (#1),” with no names on it. It piqued his interest, and one of the boxes holding the Carnegie tapes – there were eight in all – said “T. Monk.” “It got my heart racing,” Mr. Appelbaum said. (None of the tape boxes mentioned Coltrane.)

No bootleg recordings of the concert are known to exist, because even though it was recorded, it was not broadcast. The Coltrane specialist Lewis Porter knew of the tape’s possible existence and inquired about it years ago, but after an initial search yielded nothing, Mr. Appelbaum said, he forgot about it completely. He was surprised to finally find it, of course, but his sense of surprise has been worn down over the years.

“There’s always more,” Mr. Appelbaum said sagely, in a recent interview in his recording laboratory at the Library of Congress’s recorded sound division. He repeated the phrase so often during the afternoon that it became a mantra.

The Library of Congress holds the country’s largest collection of sound recordings, and jazz of course forms only a tiny part of it. The full extent of several essential collections is thoroughly cataloged; they include everything ever recorded at the library’s Coolidge Auditorium, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell reading their work, chamber music performances by the Budapest String Quartet, and Jelly Roll Morton singing and spieling for eight hours in 1938. All of John and Alan Lomax’s famous field recordings are kept there as well.

But among the collections still being cataloged are the 50,000 Voice of America tapes, which for 40 years have been housed in a dark, climate-controlled room. The tapes constitute a valuable history of radio, and of music in New York. (The Voice of America also recorded every Newport Jazz Festival from 1955, its second year, to 1976, four years after the festival relocated from Rhode Island to New York City.) The cataloging has proceeded gradually, with first priority given to the most historically important and most physically fragile material.

Michael Gray, librarian and archivist at the Voice of America, which still operates out of Washington, confirms that in 1957, and for a long time after that, the broadcast service had access to the Carnegie Hall Recording Company’s services. The Voice of America was allowed to record performances at Carnegie Hall free of charge, without paying the hall or the musicians, as long as it broadcast only overseas; this was regarded as public diplomacy through music. Of course, some musicians would not consent to be recorded, which is probably why there is no Billie Holiday on the tape.

Besides satisfying jazz fans, the discovery of the Monk tape has Gino Francesconi, Carnegie Hall’s archivist since 1986, excited by the idea that much more of the hall’s past may be preserved than he thought. “We knew that Voice of America recorded here,” he said. “But we didn’t have any formal documentation of it, and it’s fantastic to know that they’ve discovered this.” There’s always more.

Courtesy David Reeves!