Don't Believe Facebook; You Only Have 150 Friends

(By NPR Staff, NPR.com, June 4, 2011)

According to "Dunbar's Number," human beings can maintain a network of only about 150 close friends.  GORE-TEX, the company that makes wetsuits, hiking boots and ponchos, is the subject of a famous anecdote in the world of sociology. It centers on the guy who founded the company, Bill Gore.  "When Bill Gore set the company up, he set it up in his backyard," Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, tells NPR's Rachel Martin.  From its modest beginnings, GORE-TEX grew and grew, Dunbar says, until Gore opened up a large factory. That, too, continued to grow.  Then one day, Dunbar says, Gore walked into his factory.  "And he simply didn't know who everybody was."

Gore wondered why this was. "It was his gut instinct," Dunbar says, "that the bigger a company got, people working for the company were much less likely to work hard and help each other out."  Gore did some counting, and realized that after putting about 150 people in the same building, things at GORE-TEX just did not run smoothly. People couldn't keep track of each other. Any sense of community was gone.  So Gore made the decision to cap his factories at 150 employees.  "Whenever they needed to expand the company," Dunbar says, "he would just build a new factory. Sometimes right on the parking lot next door."

Things ran better this way, Gore realized. In smaller factories, Dunbar says, "everybody knew who was who. Who was the manager, who was the accountant, who made the sandwiches for lunch."  Business was never better. One-hundred fifty, it seemed, was a magic number.  Most of Dunbar's research has focused on why the GORE-TEX model was a success. That model is based on the idea that human beings can hold only about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched the idea so deeply, the number 150 has been dubbed "Dunbar's Number."  Ironically, the term was coined on Facebook, where 150 friends may seem like precious few.  "There was a discussion by people saying 'I've got too many friends — I don't know who half these people are,'" Dunbar says. "Somebody apparently said, 'Look, there's this guy in England who says you can't have more than 150.'"

Dunbar has found 150 to be the sweet spot for hunter-gatherer societies all over the world. From the Bushmen of Southern Africa to Native American tribes, a typical community is about 150 people. Amish and Hutterite communities — even most military companies around the world — seem to follow the same rule.  The reason 150 is the optimal number for a community comes from our primate ancestors, Dunbar says. In smaller groups, primates could work together to solve problems and evade predators. Today, 150 seems to be the number at which our brains just max out on memory.  But what does this all mean if you're not Amish — or the CEO of GORE-TEX?

"We developed this 150 limit at a time when most of those people lived geographically close to you," says David Dobbs, who blogs for Wired magazine. His own network of relationships is an example of how Dunbar's Number is facing modern-day complications.  Dobbs has a father in Texas, a sister in California and close friends in New Hampshire and Illinois. Plus, he's got business contacts all over the world.  It all adds up, Dunbar says, to a very fragmented 150-member network.  "You grow up somewhere, you go to school on the other side of the country, you get a job, you go to Europe for a bit — it's much harder for us to keep those relationships working and good when they're that distributed," Dunbar says.  Dobbs offers another modern challenge: What happens when your work relationships have elements of social relationships as well? Who has the time for both?

For workers in smaller companies, Dunbar says, that problem is often solved for them. In companies smaller than 500 people, his research has shown, "there's a very strong tendency for colleagues also to be your friends."  How about if you're employed by a larger corporation, upwards of several thousand people? You're more likely to venture outside your vocational network in your social life.  Dunbar says there are some neurological mechanisms in place to help us cope with the ever-growing amount of social connections life seems to require. Humans have the ability, for example, to facially recognize about 1,500 people. Now that would be an impressive number of Facebook friends.

Yet the problem with such a large number of "friends," Dunbar says, is that "relationships involved across very big units then become very casual — and don't have that deep meaning and sense of obligation and reciprocity that you have with your close friends."  One solution to that problem, he adds, can be seen in the modern military. Even as they create "supergroups" — battalions, regiments, divisions — most militaries are nonetheless able to maintain the sense of community felt at the 150-person company level. 

The answer has to come out of that," Dunbar says, "trying to create a greater sense of community.  "In a way, Americans are lucky in that respect," he adds. "There's this long tradition of commitment to ideals that binds Americans together. That isn't always true elsewhere."  While modern society does make it hard to hang on to friends who aren't geographically close, Dunbar says, his research shows family is different.  "Friends, if you don't see them, will gradually cease to be interested in you," he says. "Family relationships seem to be very stable. No matter how far away you go, they love you when you come back."

 

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/04/136723316/dont-believe-facebook-you-only-have-150-friends

3-D Movies

A Battle In The Third Dimension: Studios Vs. Theater Owners

(By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY, 2009)

 These should be ebullient times for those in the movie business.  Patrons are flocking to theaters in numbers not seen since the advent of television. Ticket sales are on pace to hit $10 billion this year, an all-time high. And with a recession that shows no sign of slowing, theater owners, along with fast-food chains and discount retailers, find themselves in boom times they could not have predicted a year ago.  But a rift is growing between the people who make movies and the people who show them, a dispute that could grow as heated as when exhibitors weighed featuring "talkies" nine decades ago. 

At the center of the debate: the cheap plastic glasses that render films in three dimensions.  They would seem a throwaway item, if not a throwaway issue. Last year saw fewer than a dozen 3-D films, and several made little impact on the box office. This year's anticipated Jonas Brothers: 3D Concert Experience was one of the few flops in an otherwise stellar year.  But as the ShoWest convention of theater owners nears its conclusion tonight, it's clear that Hollywood's most powerful brokers are growing more impatient with multiplex owners slow to spend the millions on 3-D technology, digital equipment and other improvements.  The revolution in image and sound is coming, they say, and movie houses that aren't on board will go the way of the eight-track.

Some theater owners argue their profit margins don't come close to those of major studios. They wonder whether audiences will see 3-D as a fad similar to the "Sensurround" effects of shaking floors and blaring speakers for films such as Earthquake in the mid-1970s. Studios and theaters are even feuding over who should pay for the glasses.  At stake is millions, perhaps billions, in revenues for studios, filmmakers and theater owners. Some exhibitors, though, worry that the gamble could cost them their multiplexes if it fails.  "We've been waiting for 30 years for an opportunity like this," says Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation, which just had a monster hit in the animated film Monsters vs. Aliens. "We're seeing business pick up in a way it isn't even for Wal-Mart or McDonald's. The time to move is now."

It isn't that simple, says Robert Kern, owner of the four-screen Sayville Theaters in Long Island.  "Us doing better business isn't exactly the same as them doing better business," Kern says. "Business is up lately. But we're not just rolling in money."  The 3-D revolution got its early push from a Tom Hanks animated Christmas film.  In 2004, Katzenberg went to see The Polar Express in part for entertainment, in part to check out the competition. He says he came out a changed man.  "I remember walking out of that thinking, 'This is the future of movies,' " Katzenberg says. "I haven't thought twice about it since."

He helped raise $165 million for Monsters vs. Aliens, which he saw as a lab experiment for America's appetite for 3-D.  "There aren't 10 movies made in Hollywood a year for that kind of money," he says with some pride. "We were going to do this right, tell the best possible story, and see how people liked it."  They turned out in droves. The film, playing in both 2-D and 3-D, took in $59.3 million — almost $10 million more than most analysts had projected.  More important to Katzenberg and executives at DreamWorks were the audience survey results from some of the most extensive polling in the studio's history: Though they made up only 28% of the theaters, 3-D-equipped movie houses made up 56% of business.  About 38% of the audience said they saw the movie in 2-D because they couldn't find a 3-D screen.  "Imagine what those numbers would have been like if we had the number of 3-D screens we should have," Katzenberg says.

Many moviegoers are already converts. Jessica Kay of Northridge, Calif., drove her two boys 25 miles to see the film in 3-D at Universal Studio's high-tech Citywalk Stadium theaters.  "Kids expect things to look as good as their video games," says Kay, 47. "It's worth the drive, even if traffic is a pain."  For other movie fans, though, the hullabaloo is a mystery.  "Personally, I don't see the fuss," says James Ballantine of Culver City, Calif. "I don't like the glasses. It's too gimmicky."

The sentiment won't slow big 3-D projects, including James Cameron's Avatar, due Dec. 18, and Shrek Goes Fourth, slated for May 21, 2010.  Among industry professionals, there's little debating the advantage of 3-D and the digital movie experience. The 3-D films of today are worlds beyond the gimmicky trend of the '50s, with such titles as Gorilla at Large and Cat Women of the Moon.  Digital projectors eliminate the worry over film degradation because movies are held on a hard drive, and they allow theaters to simulcast concerts and sporting events.  But both remain nascent and expensive technologies. A digital projector alone can cost $75,000, and the cost is more than double for 3-D equipment. So far, about 6,000 of the nation's 39,000 movie screens are digital, and 2,000 are 3-D capable.  The numbers are growing, but the push to get theater owners in line has gotten testy. Katzenberg has been outspoken in his criticism of those reluctant to join the revolution.

Earlier this week, John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theater Owners, shot back. "With all due respect to my friend Jeffrey Katzenberg, who keeps bashing the cinema experience," Fithian said, "moviegoing has never been as exciting, as comfortable and convenient as it is today."  Still, he acknowledges that 3-D is a force all theater owners will eventually face. "This is a game changer," he says. "And there aren't too many of those in our business."  The last one?  "Sound."

Indeed, the debate over 3-D harks back to the battle over movies with sound in the late 1920s. Purists, including Charlie Chaplin, believed that sound would rob films of their imaginative quality. He refused to use dialogue in his 1931 classic City Lights as a protest to the movement, even though talkies had become the norm by then.  Lynne McQuaker of the seven-theater Studio Movie Grill company in Dallas doubts the battle will ever be that pitched again. If anything, she says, theater owners will be the agents of change.  Her theater chain, for instance, has not only gone digital, but also grills dinner to order for customers. When Sex and the City made its debut last year, the chain mixed 30 gallons of the show's signature drink, Cosmopolitans, and sold every last drop, she says.  "You have to be willing to do just about anything," she says. "We're competing with too many alternatives to stand still. Even if it costs some money."

Jeff Brein of Seattle's nine-house Far Away Entertainment Theater Group isn't so sure the 3-D uprising is a sure bet. Yet.  "I know, at some point, the movie industry is going to have to upgrade to hard drives and digital screens and all that," he says.  But his fear is that "people will see 3-D as some craze that's going to pass," he says. "The last thing you want is to spend all this money and have people roll their eyes when they hear another 3-D animated movie is coming."  Ultimately, Brein and McQuaker agree, the fate of the film industry lies in something basic.  "All of these advancements are great," Brein says. "But it's still going to come down to the movies themselves. If the stories are good, people are going to come to see it, regardless of how it looks. If the stories are good, we'll be fine. If they're not, we're in trouble."

Cameron Thinks In Another Dimension

(Associated Press, July, 2009)

 When James Cameron directed his first 3-D film, "Terminator 2: 3-D," for Universal Studios theme parks more than a decade ago, the bulky camera equipment made some shots awkward or impossible.  The 450-pound contraption -- which had two film cameras mounted on a metal frame -- was so heavy that producers had to jury-rig construction equipment to lift it off the ground for shots from above. The cameras, slightly set apart, had to be mechanically pointed together at the subject, then locked into place like an unwieldy set of eyes to help create the 3-D effect.  At $60 million, the 12-minute film was the most expensive frame-for-frame production ever.

Now, five months from its release, Cameron's "Avatar," the first feature film he has directed since "Titanic" (1997), promises to take 3-D cinematography to an unrivaled level, using a more nimble 3-D camera system that he helped invent.  Cameron's heavily hyped return also marks Hollywood's biggest bet yet that 3-D can bolster box office returns. Twentieth Century Fox has budgeted $237 million for the production of "Avatar."  The movie uses digital 3-D technology, which requires audience members to wear polarized glasses. It is a vast improvement on the sometimes headache-inducing techniques that relied on cardboard cutout glasses with red and blue lenses and rose and fell in popularity in the 1950s.  "Avatar" also raises the bar on "performance capture" technology, which creates computerized images from real human action. The movie depicts an ex-soldier's interactions with 10-foot-tall aliens on the luminous planet of Pandora.

"If you know Jim Cameron, it's all about pushing the envelope," said Vince Pace, who helped him develop the 3-D camera system used in "Avatar."  In some of the "Avatar" footage released at Comic-Con, humans filmed with his 3-D camera rig are mixed with the computer-generated images of the movie's avatars -- beings created with mixed human and alien DNA.  Cameron was behind the lens in many scenes that were framed using a "virtual camera" -- a handheld monitor that lets the director walk through the computer-enhanced 3-D scene and record it as if he were the cameraman. The effect on screen is a "shaky cam" effect that makes action sequences seem up close and sometimes focuses the audience's gaze at something in particular.  "It allows Jim to approach this process with the same sensibilities that he would have approached live-action filming," producer Jon Landau said.

The ability to capture human emotions in computerized 3-D has also advanced.  Unlike past methods that captured dots placed on human faces to trace movements that are reconstructed digitally, now each frame is analyzed for facial details such as pores and wrinkles that help re-create a moving computerized image.  "It's all going to advance the whole concept of 3-D one leap higher," said Marty Shindler, a filmmaking consultant with the Shindler Perspective.  Yet even with four years of preparation and the attention surrounding "Avatar," there will not be enough U.S. screens adapted to the technology for a wide release only in 3-D.  Of the 38,800 movie screens in the United States, about 2,500 are capable of showing digital 3-D movies. Theater chains have been adding about 90 to 100 per month this year, but they're still short of the 4,000-plus screens that have been used for major-event movies.

With the conversion costing $100,000, theater owners are wary of moving too quickly, said Patrick Corcoran, director of media and research for the National Association of Theatre Owners.  "The successes of 'Monsters vs. Aliens' and 'Ice Age (Dawn of the Dinosaurs)' in 3-D aside, this is still really early days for this format," he said.  Studios are pushing theater owners to convert more screens, partly because people pay about $2 more per ticket and cram theaters for 3-D releases. Revenue per screen is up to three times higher than for the same movie's 2-D version.  Walt Disney's chief executive, Bob Iger, said this week that his studio has 17 3-D films in development, including "A Christmas Carol." That movie, directed by Robert Zemeckis, adopted many of the same performance-capture techniques used in "Avatar" but comes out a month earlier, in November.  Jovan Cohn, a systems engineer from Newport Beach, Calif., watched the "Avatar" preview at Comic-Con and expects to line up with his son for another free look on Aug. 21, when some IMAX theaters will show 15 minutes of the film. Cohn, 43, also plans to catch the full movie's release Dec. 18.  "It takes you into a new world of movie-going and we really think that it's going to be a hit," he said. "No question on that. James Cameron just hit another home run."

 

James Cameron Pushes Every Boundary For His 'Avatar' Vision

(By Scott Bowles, USA Today, December 11^th, 2009)

 
While shooting a tricky scene of his outer space opus Avatar, director James Cameron needed something to make his actors react as if they were getting pummeled by debris.  Hurling pillows at them wasn't working. Same with wadded paper, pencils, food cartons: Nothing gave his actors that urgent, terrified look he wanted. Cameron disappeared into a prop room and returned with a jousting pole, wrapped in padding. Then he whipped the daylights out of his stars as cameras rolled.  “He was loving it," says Zoe Saldana, the actress on the receiving end of Cameron's zeal. "If you'd walked on set, you would have thought he had gone nuts on us. But he was just a happy kid, playing with one of his toys."

He brings them all to bear in Avatar, Cameron's first feature film since Titanic in 1997. That became the highest-grossing film ever, taking in $1.8 billion worldwide and winning a record-tying 11 Oscars, including best picture.  When that was your last act, the filmmaker knows, your encore had better be impressive. And Avatar, which opens Dec. 18, comes freighted with all the hope andhand-wringing of a James Cameron film.  It's expensive (by some estimates, the priciest film ever made at $500 million, including marketing), a technological marvel (he designed every plant, animal, weapon and spaceship in the 3-D movie) and long (2½ hours).  Oh, and it might flop with critics.

"It's not really a review movie," Cameron says, not sounding too concerned. "Not like Titanic. It's a populist piece of science-fiction fantasy — not typically the kind of film the reviewers would embrace."  Add to that the secrecy with which Cameron has shrouded his film — there have been virtually no screenings and few trailers — and it's enough to make fans and industry experts apoplectic.  Fans want a Terminator- or Alien-style franchise. Twentieth Century Fox has launched an eponymous ad campaign to ensure the film doesn't become another Cleopatra, the Elizabeth Taylor epic that nearly sunk the studio in 1963. Perhaps most crucial: The film is seen as the best test yet for the public's appetite for 3-D.  "You can't really overestimate how much anticipation there is among people in the business," says Jeff Bock, analyst for the industry tracking Exhibitor Relations. "People have been watching to see what the so-called king of the world was going to do after Titanic. He's told people that this is the future of 3-D, that this is the reason you spend all that money to improve your theaters. If 3-D is supposed to be the savior of modern cinema, Avatar is seen as the Holy Grail."

That kind of hyperbole might unnerve other directors. But not when your films have raked in more than $3 billion worldwide.  "This is old hat," Cameron says. "They've been saying the same things about my movies —Terminator, Aliens, Titanic. Too expensive, too big, too crazy over little details. It doesn't bother me. Crazy is relative."  Maybe obsessive is closer to the point. Avatar, more than any film yet in the 55-year-old's canon, melds his nerd side with his artistic half. In addition to creating the exotic look of the alien world Pandora, Cameron teamed with linguists to create a real language used by the indigenous Na'vi warriors.  "We wanted to 'out-Klingon' Klingon," Cameron says of the fictitious Star Trek language fans have created, complete with grammar and syntax. "The best sci-fi movies immerse the audience in that world until it doesn't seem alien to them."

The film follows an ex-Marine (Sam Worthington) exploring an alien moon for resources to save a dying Earth. War soon breaks out between the humans and the 9-foot blue humanoids, known as Na'vi.  He has been working on Avatar for 4½ years, but the concept has been percolating in Cameron's mind since he was a boy obsessed with sci-fi and the end of the world. He never missed a Twilight Zone and was preoccupied by the Cold War-era pamphlets he found in his parents' Canada home on how to build fallout shelters.  "At least every other day, I was burning through a sci-fi book," he says. "I think the first time I put pen to paper, I was thinking about other worlds. You could say I've been thinking about this movie since I was 8."  It has been a long trip to Pandora. Cameron got his Hollywood break in 1980, when B-movie titan Roger Corman hired him to be a miniature-set builder for Beyond the Stars.

A year later, Cameron directed Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, the filmmaker's only unmitigated flop.  Three years later, he wrote and directed Terminator. His name, and reputation, were suddenly hot.  Sigourney Weaver remembers meeting the young director for Aliens and being impressed by his penchant for letting ordinary people — women, no less — save the day.  Characters such as Sarah Connor from Terminator and Ellen Ripley from Aliens could have been fumbled in another filmmaker's hands, she says.  "Jim is one of those men who sees how powerful women are," she says. "He notices real women in the real world doing powerful things."  He also could have a temper. "He throws a thunderbolt," Weaver says. "He's not a mean person, just demanding. He couldn't be more encouraging or supportive to actors."  Says Worthington: "He's known as the ultimate dictator, and he's not. He just knows everyone else's job better than any of us. He demands excellence. If you don't give it to him, you're going to get chewed out. And that's a good thing."

By the time Titanic collected $600 million in the USA in 1997, Cameron had entered a strata "with maybe only one other director there, Steven Spielberg," Bock says. "They both became known as directors who could turn any kind of story into a hit."  Spielberg stayed in movies. Cameron disappeared.  After doing research for The Abyss and Titanic, he became fascinated with deep-sea diving. He abandoned feature filmmaking to lead six underwater expeditions in the next five years.  "I was having a lot of fun doing hard, challenging work," says Cameron, who filmed several documentaries chronicling his dives.  But he wasn't fixated only on the sea. When he wasn't shooting shipwrecks, Cameron was tinkering with new cameras, software and digital equipment for his next film, still undecided.  "I was learning a craft and trade of 3-D production, gearing up" for his next film, still undecided. "Whatever movie I was going to make, it was going to be in 3-D."

That kind of forward thinking is rare even among filmmakers, says friend and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.  "He's simply ahead of everyone else," says Jackson, whose Weta Digital studio in New Zealand handled many of the special-effects shots in the film. "Sometimes, you just nod your head and pretend you understand everything he's saying so you can keep up."  Avatar is nothing if not testimony to Cameron's geekiness. It's filled with 2,500 special-effects shots; nearly two-thirds of Avatar is composed of computer-generated scenes.  For the director, difficulty was the point. "There aren't many examples of fully detailed worlds in the movies," Cameron says. "You've got the Tolkien universe, the Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek) universe, the Star Wars universe. You can't compete with that kind of lore, but what we can do is give the illusion that there's that kind of depth and detail."

Of course, there's detail and there's James Cameron detail. He just completed the "Pandora-pedia," a 350-page companion to the film that elaborates on the moon's botany, fauna, history and spacecraft technology.  Cameron's crowning achievement may be the software created for the film that allowed the director to see his actors as computer-rendered characters through his camera lens.

The cast wore bodysuits covered in markers that were captured by 102 cameras in the massive warehouse where Cameron shot the film (the same one where Howard Hughes built aircraft in the 1940s). So instead of seeing a person in a bodysuit, Cameron saw the actor as he or she would appear on screen: as a human-alien hybrid, or avatar.  All of which comes at a cost. The New York Times put the price tag at $500 million, including advertising and promotions. The Wall Street Journal estimated $300 million, without marketing.  Cameron and 20th Century Fox executives aren't saying. Of course, all that could become moot by the time the movie is out, Bock says.  "It's all going to come down to whether he delivers a big movie, and I believe he will," he says. "He's proven people wrong most of his career."  About Avatar's future, Cameron says: "The experience of the film is better than what you think it's going to be. As opposed to a lot of movies that you think are going to be better, but they're not. This film is not like that."

An Epic Year? Historians Debate 2008's Legacy

(By Rick Hampson, USA Today)

If you voted for president or saved for retirement or bought gas, if you were in Detroit or on Wall Street, if you were an Obamaniac or a hockey mom or a pit bull, a client of accused Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff or the guy who changed the price sign at the gas station, this was a year to remember.  Almost everyone agrees 2008 was one for the history books, including those who write them. The historians who eventually decide what's history and what's not- textbook authors, encyclopedia editors, museum curators- don't like tight deadlines, because history is only obvious long after it's happened, and at the moment the wheel's still in spin.  With that caveat out of the way, many of them would agree with Fran Kennelly, 52, a New York advertising salesman, whose verdict on 2008 is: "Unforgettable."  No wonder. He voted in the Democratic primary for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first woman with a serious shot at the presidency, and in the general election for Barack Obama, the first African American elected president.  Kennelly paid as much as $4.10 and as little as $1.75 for a gallon of gas; lost about one-third of the value of his retirement fund; bought a hybrid car; watched Tiger Woods win the U.S. Open playing with a double stress fracture in one leg, and saw China host the Olympics, where Michael Phelps won a record eight gold medals.

To the experts as well, 2008 looks like a keeper, largely because of the confluence of two related but distinct events: the election of Obama and the global financial crisis.  This year "probably is going to be one of those years like 1929, when the chapter ends and you take a breath before moving on to the Depression and the New Deal," says Paul Boyer, noted historian and editor of a U.S. history textbook, The Enduring Vision.  The election is a milestone- "in 50 years, a major fixture in the textbooks," says Brian DeLay, a University of Colorado history professor and co-author of Nation of Nations, a college text. "I think we're heading down a totally different road."  To Columbia University historian Eric Foner, Obama's election "changes the framework" of American politics, like Thomas Jefferson's in 1800, Abraham Lincoln's in 1860 and Ronald Reagan's in 1980.  Brent Glass, director of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History in Washington, is working on a timeline of American history for an exhibition. He's pretty sure this year will be on it.  He and other historians say, however, that despite their collective hunch that 2008 was a turning point, it's too early to be certain of the year's exact place in history, or even if it will have much of one.  "People always say at the end of a year, 'My goodness, this was it! This year will be remembered for generations.' And usually it's not," says Peter Stearns, George Mason University's provost. "Caution is warranted, because we're so close to it now."

Too close, says Larry Schweikart, a University of Dayton professor and co-author of A Patriot's History of the United States. "The danger is when people in the present think they have a big, sweeping view of history. It's really like writing a story about a football game at the half."  He cites an example of short-term myopia: "In 2004, with the way the Republicans were rolling, more than a few people were predicting the breakup of the Democratic Party. Look how that changed in two years." 

What's really historic?

Predicting history is notoriously tricky.  On July 3, 1776, John Adams wrote that the day before, July 2- when the Continental Congress declared independence from Britain- would be "celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty … with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other."  Adams was just unlucky that the eloquent Declaration of Independence was dated July 4, but there are many other pitfalls to writing instant history:

• A perfectly historic year can be obliterated by a more historic one. DeLay cites 1846, the first year of the Mexican War, a conflict that Lincoln and others at the time considered pivotal- to its critics a step from republic to empire, to its supporters a step toward Manifest Destiny. Fifteen years later, the Civil War made it comparatively inconsequential.

• Historians' political views can influence their take on current events.  Foner, a liberal, happily says 2008 marked "the end of the age of Reagan"- an era of deregulation, tax cuts and trickle-down economics. Schweikart suggests 2008 will be remembered as "the year Iraq was pacified" by U.S. and Iraqi army forces.

• A specific year's events become historic only if they lead to other historic events. The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the death of Elvis Presley in 1977- all in their way seemed momentous at the time but have faded in prominence.

No early bets are certain

A year is remembered over time not because of how vivid or terrifying or wonderful it seemed to those who lived through it. History is not about us; it's about those to come.  Over the long run, nothing is certain to live in memory, not even the landmark events of 2008: the financial crisis and the presidential election featuring Obama, Clinton, Republican Sen. John McCain and his vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin.  Stearns says Obama's election could be obscured by others to come that could result in the first female president, the first Hispanic president, the first gay president.  The ultimate significance of Obama's election depends on his presidency. His deeds, not his race, will determine whether he's another Franklin Roosevelt, another Franklin Pierce (president from 1853 to 1857) or something in between.  "Obama's election could be a turning point," Foner says, "but he has to make it a turning point."  Similarly, the economic meltdown, however unsettling with its hundreds of thousands of home foreclosures, has yet to produce many scenes of epic calamity- bread lines, bank panics, wheelbarrows of inflated currency.  The year 2008 eventually may be lumped with the many financial crises of the past 200 years, including a dozen major panics between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of World War I.  All but forgotten today, "they seemed to people then as the towering events of their lifetimes," DeLay says.  This recession, Stearns says, "may turn out to be just an unusually bad example of what we've seen every 15 years or so."

Pivotal years — or not

American history is filled with two kinds of years, each of which should give pause to those who'd rush to judgment on 2008: years that seemed more important at the time than they really were, and years that seemed less important than they really were. 

Among those overrated at the time:

• 1957: As the Soviet satellite Sputnik orbited overhead, it seemed Americans were perilously far behind their Cold War rival technologically. But the Soviet Union eventually turned out to be an economic, military and technological paper tiger.

• 1962: The Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, has "all but disappeared" from public memory, Lytle says.  Last year, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino acknowledged confusing the crisis with the Bay of Pigs, the ill-fated U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba one year earlier.

• 1976: The election of Jimmy Carter, a moralistic outsider who told Americans he would never lie to them, promised to bring a new politics to Washington. Instead, Boyer says, Carter's presidency "turned out to be an interlude" that Lytle says is "getting squeezed out of the texts."

Even 2001, that most jarring of years, is not guaranteed entry into the historical canon, Stearns says: "It's significant primarily because we overreacted" to unprecedented terror attacks by invading Iraq. "Over time, it's going to recede." 

 

Among years underrated at the time:

• 1912: Woodrow Wilson's election as president led to the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, the 16th Amendment (allowing the income tax) and the 17th Amendment (direct election of senators).

• 1970: U.S. domestic oil production peaked, Lytle says, meaning America would be increasingly dependent on foreign oil.

Some years identified with one event are more significant because of another.  Foner argues for 1960 not because John F. Kennedy was elected president but because of the first civil rights sit-ins at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C.  In two months, the movement spread to 15 cities in nine states, ushering in a decade of political protest.  A few years are immediately and correctly identified as historic- those that Schweikart says, "I tell my students, 'You have to know these' "- such as 1914, 1941 and 1945- the start of World War I, the year of Japan's sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, the end of World War II.  Forty years later, historians even debate the significance of 1968, which, with its riots, rebellions, assassinations and elections, would seem nothing if not memorable.  Foner, a Columbia graduate student during the campus protests there that year, recalls wondering, " 'What's going to happen next?' You got a sense of living through history."  Now, he calls 1968 "a turning point at which history failed to turn. It was tumultuous, but it did not produce the change people expected."  To the contrary, Boyer says, the year is notable mostly for the backlash it spurred, including electing President Nixon and the beginning of a culture war that continues today.  He calls it "the year of unintended consequences." 

However perilous it is to turn current events into history, someone has to do it-  the historian who writes the textbook's last chapter. Lytle calls it "a bit of crapshoot."  Several texts were scheduled for revisions or new editions this year, including Nation of Nations and The Enduring Vision.  Boyer is the closer on the latter, in its seventh edition. This year it's been tough, he says, and not just because of "the sort of distortion that creeps in when the most recent events loom very large."  The problem is that he likes to end on a positive note "not to be a Pollyanna, but to have some hopefulness."  Given the challenges of 2008, he says- everything from a continuing war to a deepening recession to a warming planet- "it's an ominous year to be facing that task."  Students of history like to say it's unfair to expect people to anticipate the future when they can't even agree on what happened in the past.  The communist Chinese leader Chou En-lai once made that point when asked what he thought of the French Revolution.  Chou died in 1976, but his reply lives on: "It's still too soon to tell."

 

 

Welcome To The Club- The 9:30 Club History

An Oral History Of the 9:30 Club On Its 30th Anniversary

(By J. Freedom du Lac, Washington Post, April 18, 2010)

On May 31, 1980, a Worcester, Mass., jazz-punk band known as the Lounge Lizards performed at 930 F St. NW, in decaying downtown Washington. The opening act was Tiny Desk Unit, a local new wave group. Don't worry if the names don't ring a bell. Just know that they made a little bit of history that night in the sweaty, peculiarly shaped, black-walled club on the ground floor of the century-old Atlantic Building: It was the very first concert at the 9:30 club, which would become one of the most famous, successful and celebrated live-music clubs in the United States.

The 9:30 club instantly became Washington's primary venue for alternative music, just as alternative was beginning to blossom. R.E.M., Simple Minds, Modern English, A Flock of Seagulls, the Go-Go's, Violent Femmes, Cyndi Lauper and 10,000 Maniacs played there, as did seminal bands from Washington's hard-core punk and go-go scenes. The funky club in a forgotten section of town became a station of the cross for ascending bands working outside of music's mainstream. Let the Bayou in Georgetown have the spawn of REO Speedwagon; the 9:30 club's bookings included the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and Nine Inch Nails, making for a pretty impressive alt-rock yearbook.

The 9:30 operated in the 1880s-vintage building at 930 F until it moved, at the beginning of 1996, to an exponentially larger space at 815 V St. NW. Since then, its following and reputation have continued to grow: The landmark venue has been named Nightclub of the Year four times by Pollstar, and it regularly tops that industry journal's annual list of the top ticket-selling U.S. clubs.  With the 9:30 turning 30 next month, here's the tale of the storied club's roots, told by some of the people who lived it.

Dody DiSanto, 9:30 club founder:

In 1979, my husband, Jon Bowers, was buying property downtown, and the Richardsonian architecture of the Atlantic Building really struck him. It was primarily an investment in a style that really tickled him. He was also an enormous music enthusiast, and there'd been a club there called the Atlantis. He and his brother, Henry, got excited about opening a club in that space, and they asked me if I would consider booking it. I got drafted to go to a meeting with John Paige and Mark Holmes, who had been producing shows with new bands on independent labels, and there was this spontaneous explosion.

John Paige, former concert promoter: At that time, the major promoters like Cellar Door considered all the new music -- new wave, punk, no wave -- a joke. These groups were really good, and nobody was bringing them to town. They thought nobody liked the music. I didn't intend to be a promoter, but I wanted to see these bands. So we started setting up new wave concerts anyplace we could, like Gaston Hall at Georgetown University. We brought XTC, Devo, groups like that. I compare it to the Renaissance. There was this huge energy waiting to break through. It was looking for a focus and a place, and Jon and Dody had the building that had housed the Atlantis back in the [late '70s].

Ian MacKaye, D.C. punk-rock icon: The Atlantis was a legendary place. The Bad Brains have a song called "At the Atlantis" -- it's them talking about their ambition to play there.

Robert Goldstein, guitarist for local new wave stars the Urban Verbs: Paul Parsons owned the Atlantic Building [before Jon Bowers] and had opened the Atlantis in a space that used to be a used-furniture store. But the only bands he was getting were glam-rock bands you could see anywhere in the suburbs; nobody was coming downtown to see them. The club wasn't going anywhere. I knew there were a number of new bands that had a ready audience but no place to play, and in very early '78, we needed a place to rehearse. So I offered to book them at the Atlantis in exchange for practice space. Parsons let us have the basement to rehearse, and I booked the club for a couple of months.

Roddy Frantz, Urban Verbs singer: There was clearly something starting to happen. I lived in the Atlantic Building on the seventh floor, and I remember looking out my windows at F Street and seeing a big old Ford LTD station wagon and these blond guys getting out and loading their equipment by themselves into the Atlantis. It turned out it was The Police.

Paige: But the whole punk/new wave community boycotted the Atlantis because they were treating musicians and the audience very poorly.

Goldstein: We'd already gone to New York to record when the boycott thing happened. The club closed and the building got sold, and that's when Dody and her husband got involved.

DiSanto: Opening the 9:30 club was not something I wanted to do. I'd studied in Europe, and I was living in New York and was in a small theater company. But it was just meant to be. Bill Warrell, who was housing some of the new music at d.c. space [at Seventh and E streets NW], was the main alternative-music person downtown at that time and lived in the Atlantic Building; he was super-enthusiastic about the prospect of the club.

Bill Warrell, d.c. space founder and 9:30 club consultant: I remember meeting with a design firm for about four days, trying to come up with a name for the club. One name that almost stuck, which was absurd, was Chair Dancing Nightly. Tuba Dancing was another one.

Paige: There were a lot of different names. Two I remember -- and I don't think they got too far -- were Aerosol and Cool Whip.

Warrell: The 9:30 club was the only name everybody could agree on. Everybody got all excited: It'll be a time, it'll be a place! We'd open at 9:30, it'll be at 930 F.

DiSanto: That's how we got the digital 9:30 logo, which was really cool.

Warrell: But in Washington, D.C., you're losing half your business opening at 9:30. This isn't New York, where you start your night at 10 o'clock. The show's gotta be on by 8. It took about six months to realize that.

DiSanto: Before we opened, we painted the walls and bought a sound system. But the space was the space, and the budget was not much. This electrician who worked for the building kept coming into the office, and would say: "You know, they're tearing down the Elk's Lodge. You gotta go up there and see what they have. I know the guard." It was right up 10th Street. We finally went and our minds were blown. It was filled with tables and chairs and leather couches.

Warrell: We took everything we could get into a couple of little pickup trucks. And there was a gorgeous old wooden bar that ran the length of the hall downstairs. You couldn't pay to get a bar like that. Jon called somebody to bring a chainsaw, and we cut out probably 16 feet of the bar and some sections of the mirror behind it. We put it on the back of this Toyota, and it was twice the length of the bed. The rest was sticking out, with four of us holding it. All of the sudden, police come out of nowhere, lights flashing. But they let us go. That bar is downstairs now at the new 9:30 club.

DiSanto: The first show was amazing, packed, sold out, awesome. It was instantly a scene.

Bob Boilen, Tiny Desk Unit synthesizer player and now host of NPR's "All Songs Considered": Dody knew how to throw a party. She was, like, the greatest host in the world.

Natasha Reatig, clubgoer: It looked beautiful, even though it was a black box in grungy, forgotten downtown Washington. The back bar had flowers and a fish tank, and everybody looked elegantly underground. The costuming and makeup and the effort that went into presentation was fully 30 percent of the fun.

Larry Wallace, clubgoer: The music was the big draw. But a lot of my friends were equally drawn by fashion, and that wore off on me. You wanted to differentiate yourself, and the look was a way to do it. I remember these elaborate scarf-like things and blousy shirts, hats. The hair goes without saying. How it was styled was big.

Nancy Purcell, clubgoer: Bands were bubbling up all the time, and we were insatiable. If you knew who it was, fine. But most of the time, you'd just go and hear something new, and it would rock your world. There was also a thriving local scene. So you'd go for the Urban Verbs or Tiny Desk Unit and whoever was opening for them. You didn't want to miss an opening band that was great, long before they broke out nationally. I remember going one weekend, and R.E.M. was one of the bands.

Mike Mills, R.E.M. bass player: I liked that the club was dark and wasn't a big open space. It was actually pretty highend, compared to some of the places we were playing at the time.

Bertis Downs, R.E.M. attorney and manager: It was very oddly shaped. There was that long hallway and it was an L-shape, like a bunch of walls had been knocked out, and there was a tiny little stage in the corner. And I always thought the sound system was really good. The word "special" gets thrown around a lot, but it was. Even if you hadn't heard of the band, they were probably going to be pretty good if they were playing there.

Paige: We were almost purists about it; we didn't book things into the club if we didn't think they were good -- even if they were going to make money. The Police wanted to play the 9:30 club, and I knew they'd make money. But I said no, because I didn't really like "Roxanne." The lineups were all over the map. We put a lot of different stuff in there: funk, punk, new wave, jazz. One night, Prince wanted to do a show. But we already had somebody lined up. Dody turned Prince down because she wanted the other group to be able to play.

Seth Hurwitz, co-owner of concert promoter It's My Party (I.M.P.), which launched days before the 9:30 club opened, and current owner of the 9:30 club: I'd started doing shows at the Ontario Theatre at 17th and Columbia -- it's still there, but it's a CVS-- and I realized that the agents I was dealing with, to really become their guy here and compete with Cellar Door [Washington's dominant concert promoter in the '80s], I had to do their littlest bands. The 9:30 had just started, and we talked and realized we were of the same ilk. So the Fleshtones were the first band I did at the club.

Peter Zaremba, Fleshtones singer: We started playing there when it was still the Atlantis, but the 9:30 club was completely different. It was like somebody pressed the fun button or something. Every time I went there, I felt like it was my birthday.

Purcell: One of the craziest things about it was that, for this punk club, they had really nice champagne at the back bar. You could get a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. So you had the weird juxtaposition of that punk aesthetic, these people drinking Rolling Rock, and ones dressed to the nines, drinking champagne. Everybody got along.

MacKaye: When Minor Threat started in 1981, Dody was really up for having gigs with us. We did three bands [for $3] that summer, and the line went down the hall, out the door, and down the block. The show sold right out, so Dody said: "Do you want to do another show?" We told everybody to come back in an hour. The second show also sold out.

DiSanto: The legal capacity of the club was only 199. But we made it work.

Warrell: If something from one of our clubs was a pick in The Post, the fire marshals knew too many people were probably going to be there, so they'd inevitably show up and shut us down.

Frantz: I know for a fact the Verbs got 800 people in there on more than one occasion. You saw the receipts and did the math. Henry Rollins used to sneak in through the back door. Our roadie would let him in because he knew him from high school. He let Dave Grohl in too, when he was some 15-year-old kid. I would've been nicer to him if I knew who he was going to be.

Dave Grohl, former Nirvana and Scream drummer, and current frontman for the Foo Fighters: I went to the 9:30 club hundreds of times. I was always so excited to get there, and I was always bummed when it closed. I spent my teenage years at the club and saw some shows that changed my life. The first time I played there was with my band Dain Bramage, when I was 15 or 16. I scored my first record deal that night, with Fartblossom Records. It was already the greatest night of my life -- as a kid growing up in the D.C. punkrock scene, your first show at the 9:30 club might as well have been Royal Albert Hall or Madison Square Garden. Scream played there a few times, and then Nirvana played there just as "Nevermind" came out and we were starting to get popular.

Steve Ferguson, booking agent: The 9:30 club became the place in Washington where the misfits could go and nobody would judge them. The scene became bigger as MTV opened the doors to this kind of music. But the 9:30 club was on the ground floor.

DiSanto: It was a great period of music, before the corporate record companies moved in and it got mainstream. The Einstuerzende Neubauten show was pretty infamous. I had to rent all this crazy construction equipment as part of the rider, like a jumping jack tamper. They were in there with Skilsaws against flanks of steel, sparks flying into the faces of people at the front of the stage.

Reatig: I loved the way many of the bands were pushing the envelope and trying to be outrageous. As outrageous as one could be was a way of saying no to the limousines and fur coats and diamonds that were suddenly seen on the streets near the White House, with Reagan in office.

MacKaye: It was sort of a no man's land around the 9:30 club. It was liquor stores, wig shops, and Ninth Street at the time was largely populated by porno stores and porno movie theaters. But parking was easy.

Ferguson: The fans who wanted to see that kind of music would go into what was the crap area of town, because they didn't care. The music was edgy, and they were being edgy by going there.

Mark Hall, former 9:30 club bar manager: Everything kind of fit in there. We'd have these special events where the whole place would change to an underwater theme or a Japanese theme. We had William Burroughs doing a reading.

DiSanto: It wasn't just live music. People also danced to DJs, who were playing cutting-edge music, dropping new records to see if they'd work. And we were one of the fi rst clubs to take a Rock America subscription and do a TV installation. We were showing videos before there was an MTV.

MacKaye: Dody started doing these Sunday hard-core matinees. At the beginning, one of the big issues was: You can't go against the Redskins. The kids want to watch football. So during our shows, the 9:30 had the Redskins on the TV screens in the club.

Warrell: Yellowman played when there was a drug war in D.C., and there was a hit. The concert was over, and I was in the back bar, and you heard this pop pop pop pop pop and all this screaming. People came running back into the club. This guy shot him five or six times. Witnesses told police that there was a car out front and the guy had a shotgun. It's an absolute miracle that nobody else was hurt. There was also a New Year's Eve concert when the club was sold out, just packed, and some kids climbed up the fire escape in back to the top of the building. There was a peaked roof over the top of the elevator shaft, and it was glass. One of them stepped on it, dropped through and was killed.

Zaremba: I never failed to be amazed that the 9:30 shared a load-in alley with Ford's Theatre -- the same alley where John Wilkes Booth's horses were kept waiting and that he escaped from after he shot Lincoln. The club also had that infamous column right in front of the stage. But that wound up being perfect. I could semi-disappear for a while and come out from behind it. You could sing behind it, you could put your arms around it. It became a prop.

Ferguson: And they had these legendary rats. You'd go to the tour meeting and say, "We're going to start this tour at the 9:30 club in D.C." And the tour manager would say [in a British accent]: "Oh, is that the place with the rats? Right."

Donna Westmoreland, longtime 9:30 club employee, now an executive at I.M.P.: We just coexisted with them. When I think about it in retrospect, it was disgusting. You would leave a packet of duck sauce on your desk from having had Chinese food for lunch, and you'd come in, and it had been destroyed -- and there was a calling card next to it. How did we not run screaming?

Rich Heinecke, co-owner (with Hurwitz) of the 9:30 club and I.M.P.: Every night, we would give the act a pizza. It was really bad pizza, but it was something. This rat was stumbling on the pipes above the dressing room -- we had just gassed the rats -- and it falls from the pipe, face up in the pizza, feet up, tail up. We had some Three Mile Island rats.

Hurwitz: We had some bands come in and walk out, like: You're [expletive] kidding me. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince -- Will Smith -- looked at it and said it wasn't a real club. Two sold-out shows and he wouldn't get back off the bus because he felt it was beneath him. It was cramped, it was too hot and it smelled.

Boilen: That rancid smell was awful, especially in the summertime when they couldn't keep it cool.

Zaremba: It was hot even in the winter. But in the summer, it was dump-a-pitcher- of-ice-water-on-your-head hot.

Westmoreland: At the end of a really hot show, the walls would sweat brown nicotine. The smell was the combination of all that smoke, the sweat, the rats, the occasional patchouli, the plaster of that building being 100 years old, probably the garbage in the alley coming through the back doors. And the beer kegs leaked and saturated the subfloor. I have a vial of the smell somewhere. But I don't want to open it. The vial is vile.

Hurwitz: There was no way for Dody to make money in a club that tiny.  If a band got big, we'd do the show somewhere else, like R.E.M. at the Cap Centre. But Dody didn't make any of that. If she kept the losses to 100 grand, it was a good year. She said she was getting out and we had first dibs. We didn't really want to buy it. It was more work and responsibility. But I told Rich: "We've gotta do it, or she's calling Cellar Door." She sold it to us in '86.

DiSanto: "Sold" is a generous term. I practically gave it away, for what I owed other people. I was in debt to loan sharks for video installations and bathroom renovations, stuff like that. Jon funded it when it wasn't working financially, but in 1983-84, we separated and divorced, and I was on my own. And I didn't like being a bar owner. I went back to Paris and did a graduate fellowship where I got my pedagogic chops. I've been teaching ever since.

Warrell: When Seth and Rich bought us out, I didn't see a lot out of it except for the fact that I can pick up the phone whenever I want to see a show. It was an extremely modest price, even for its day.

Hurwitz: It seems to me it was in the 100-grand range or less. I did things that made business sense. The club was started by people who weren't looking at the bottom line. I did. I'm a music fan who wants to do shows and make money on music. But changing the club would be like buying Wrigley Field and starting to tinker with it. You just don't want to do that. I think we preserved the magic. The sensibility and the staff didn't change.

Westmoreland: When I started in 1990 as bar manager, I was pretty straitlaced. It was the pre-grunge, post-punk world -- lots of leather, lots of tattoos before they were trendy. But it was appearances. They were the most gentle, family group of people I'd ever worked with. We just looked different. I evolved a little, but I never got a tattoo. It's one of my crowning achievements that I made it through the '90s at the 9:30 club without getting a tattoo.

Josh Burdette, current night manager and an iconic 9:30 figure, at 6-3, 350 pounds, with a shaved head and plentiful tattoos and facial piercings: I went to the old club as a kid; my first show was Shudder to Think, and I remember seeing L7 and White Zombie there. A lot of us work there because we love music and grew up going to shows at the 9:30 club and wanted to be a part of it.

Heinecke: The entire time we were in that F Street location, we were looking for something bigger, better, more user-friendly.

Neal Duncan, architect of the new 9:30 club: I was going to the old 9:30 club four or five nights a week. The rumor got around that they were losing the lease and were going to have to move. I had started my own practice and said: "This is the perfect job for me. If you need any help, I'll do it for free." I got a call from Seth, and we literally spent the next six years looking at different spaces around the city. Obviously, they didn't lose the lease. They stayed until Dec. 31, 1995.

Hurwitz: What changed everything was when the Black Cat opened [in 1993]. I started being looked at by young punk rockers as the establishment, the bad guy. We'd always been the cool club that got most of the cool bands. The Bayou was the uncool club.

Jack Boyle, former Bayou owner whose Cellar Door Productions (now owned by Live Nation) has long competed with Hurwitz: I'll say two things: Seth and his partner Rich saw a great opportunity and developed [the 9:30 club] beautifully. And Seth is a good promoter and a nice man. That's about the extent of it.

Hurwitz: The original Black Cat was a little bigger than the old 9:30 club, had a little nicer dressing room -- everything was just a little better -- and had a celebrity investor in Dave Grohl. When it opened, all these bands I thought were loyal started a mass exodus. I remember one agent said to me: "Nobody plays the 9:30 anymore. It's dead." I had to prove them wrong.

Grohl: That club had a special place in everybody's heart. But it was difficult for local bands to get shows there, and some of the tickets were a little too expensive for some people to afford. The idea with the Black Cat was to open up a bigger room that wouldn't have to have a high ticket price. It would be for local bands, rather than national touring acts, and it would be a little more musician-friendly. There were lot of good things about the old 9:30 club, but there were some bad things about it, too. Load-in was a bitch, the dressing room was small, and it had that [expletive] pole and those rats. Then Seth went and opened the new club. Ask any band that's toured the country more than once what their favorite venue to play is, and nine out of 10 will say the new 9:30 club.

Heinecke: We looked at a lot of buildings. But when Seth and I walked into WUST Radio Music Hall [at 815 V St. NW], we knew it was the place.

Hurwitz: It was perfect. But the Jewish cousins who owned it didn't want to sell.  We started renting it and doing shows there -- Live, Hole, Oasis -- and looking around for another space. We found one on 14th Street, Mattos Pro Finishes, and made a deal for a lease. We were about to start construction, and I got a call from the real estate guy; the cousins agreed to sell WUST. I told Mr. Mattos the place we've always wanted is for sale, and I'd really rather do that. He let me out of the lease. The ironic thing is that the Black Cat ended up moving there.

MacKaye: WUST was this cavernous building where punk kids were doing shows. It was really terrible-sounding cement madness. When Seth decided to go into that room, I remember thinking: "They're crazy." But the new 9:30 club is one of the premier concert venues in the country. They didn't just throw up a building on the cheap.

Hurwitz: We paid $700,000 for the new 9:30, and it cost about $1.3 million to build. We set out to design the greatest venue ever. We wanted to have the best big club, but also the best small club so we could still get bands at the very start and then cash in when they got bigger. That was the challenge.

Heinecke: The key to the new 9:30 club is the idea [former I.M.P. employee] Chad Housenick had to put the stage on wheels. Everything moves, according to ticket sales. If there's 300 people in there, it looks full. And if there's 1,200 people, the stage rolls back to the wall and it's definitely full.

Hurwitz: It wasn't about the audience; we wanted to make sure bands were happy and absolutely wanted to play here. We would have meetings about every inch of the place: Now let's discuss this hallway; now let's discuss this bar. Acoustically, the place sucked, so we found this guy to put baffles in the ceiling. And I said I wanted so much air conditioning that I'll never hear anybody tell me it was too hot at the 9:30 club again. Did you notice the subtle difference in the logo? The old logo slanted right, and when we moved, the logo slanted left. I thought we had to change it somehow. A new slant, because there was a new slant on the 9:30 club.

Wallace: The closing party at the old 9:30 club [on Dec. 31, 1995] was fun. People came from all over the world. On one level, it was sad to see it go. But at the same time, I think everyone knew it was probably a good thing that it wasn't going to go on. It would just become a parody of itself.

"Big Tony" Fisher, founder of go-go band Trouble Funk: We played the very last show. I had my van parked in the back, and this guitar player got drunk and ran his car into my van and kept going.

Hurwitz: I had a hangover the next day that woke the neighbors. I think I played [drums] with Trouble Funk that night, but I don't remember. People were walking out with pieces of the club. Someone had the idea to put in the ad: "Take away a piece of the club." I don't think they meant it literally, but everybody thought it was. There were people carrying toilets out. I never went back.

Westmoreland: The Smashing Pumpkins opened the new club, on the 5th and 6th of January, 1996. There was such a great buzz.

Hurwitz: I spent 16 years apologizing for the old place, and now bands come in and tell me how much they love the place. I never get tired of hearing that.

Marc Roberge, Wootton High graduate,singer for O.A.R.: If you come from the D.C. area, the 9:30 club is it. It's the white whale. The first time we went in there to play, I felt like a rock star. We were just kids, but they treated us right. We never got that treatment from anybody else, until we started making them money. It's not your typical club.

Kevin Griffin, singer for Better Than Ezra: It makes you feel good about what you're doing for a living. Every touring band will tell you that it's one of the best venues in the country, without a doubt. Pollstar, the bible of the [touring] world, names it best club pretty often.

Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar: The nominations are made by a select group of about 200 industry professionals, from road managers and booking agents to other promoters. Because so much of the industry is concentrated in New York, Los Angeles and Nashville, it gives an immediate advantage to venues based in those cities. The fact that the 9:30 club has been able to get around that by having such a great reputation is really a tribute to the job that entire organization does. It also helps that Seth is a boisterous personality.

Ferguson: Seth's a character, and there aren't many in our business. Everyone else is vanilla/white bread/Applebee's, and he's Indian food or Thai food. But that's the reason he's successful. He's sold more tickets than anybody and earned a lot of accolades. He's doing something right.

Hurwitz: I never thought we'd sell out more than one or two shows a month. We just wanted to keep the bands and maybe break even. The new 9:30 doesn't make as much money as most people would think, but the club does pretty well. But the bulk of our money is now at Merriweather [Post Pavilion, which I.M.P. books].

Zaremba: For the Fleshtones, the new 9:30 club doesn't have the same feeling of home that the original did. It's a really fine, fine place to play, and they still treat bands really well. But it's a different scene, a different audience. It's just not 1980 anymore. But that's a good thing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/16/AR2010041602110.html

Health Insurance Is For Everyone

(By Fareed Zakaria, Time Magazine, Monday, Mar. 26, 2012)

Two years ago, Barack Obama signed into law the most comprehensive reform of American health care since Medicare. Most of its provisions haven't been implemented yet. But the debate about it rages on at every level. Twenty-six states have filed legal challenges to it. And this month the Supreme Court will hear arguments about its constitutionality.  The centerpiece of the case against Obamacare is the requirement that everyone buy some kind of health insurance or face stiff penalties--the so-called individual mandate. It is a way of moving toward universal coverage without a government-run or single-payer system. It might surprise Americans to learn that another advanced industrial country, one with a totally private health care system, made precisely the same choice nearly 20 years ago: Switzerland. The lessons from Switzerland and other countries can't resolve the constitutional issues, but they suggest the inevitability of some version of Obamacare.

Switzerland is not your typical European welfare-state society. It is extremely business-friendly and has always gone its own way, shunning the euro and charting its own course on health care. The country ranks higher than the U.S. on the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom.  Twenty years ago, Switzerland had a system very similar to America's--private insurers, private providers--with very similar problems. People didn't buy insurance but ended up in emergency rooms, insurers screened out people with pre-existing conditions, and costs were rising fast. The country came to the conclusion that to make health care work, everyone had to buy insurance. So the Swiss passed an individual mandate and reformed their system along lines very similar to Obamacare. The reform law passed by referendum, narrowly. The result two decades later: quality of care remains very high, everyone has access, and costs have moderated. Switzerland spends 11% of its GDP on health care, compared with 17% in the U.S. Its 8 million people have health care that is not tied to their employers, they can choose among many plans, and they can switch plans every year. Overall satisfaction with the system is high.

When Taiwan--another country with a strong free-market economy--decided to create a new health care system in the mid-1990s, it studied every existing model. It too chose a model of universal access and universal insurance but decided against having several private insurers, as Switzerland and the U.S. do. Instead it created a single insurer, basically a version of Medicare. The result: universal access and high-quality care at stunningly low costs. Taiwan spends only 7% of its GDP on health care.

The most striking aspect of America's medical system remains how much of an outlier it is in the advanced industrial world. No other nation spends more than 12% of its total economy on health care. We do worse than most other countries on almost every measure of health outcomes: healthy-life expectancy, infant mortality and--crucially--patient satisfaction. Put simply, we have the most expensive, least efficient system of any rich country on the planet. Costs remain high on every level. Recently, the International Federation of Health Plans released a report comparing the prices in various countries of 23 medical services, from a routine checkup to an MRI to a dose of Lipitor. The U.S. had the highest costs in 22 of the 23 cases. An MRI costs $1,080 here; it costs $281 in France.  In 1963, Nobel Prize--winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote an academic paper explaining why markets don't work well in health care. He argued that unlike with most goods and services, people don't know when they will need health care. And when they do need it--say, in the case of heart failure--the cost is often prohibitive. That means you need some kind of insurance or government-run system.

Now, we could decide as a society that it is O.K. for people who suddenly need health care to get it only if they can pay for it. The market would work just as it works for BMWs: anyone who can afford one can buy one. That would mean that the vast majority of Americans wouldn't be able to pay for a triple bypass or a hip replacement when they needed it. But every rich country in the world--and many not-so-rich ones--has decided that its people should have access to basic health care. Given that value, a pure free-market model simply cannot work.  The Swiss and Taiwanese found that if you're going to have an insurance model, you need a general one in which everyone is covered. Otherwise, healthy people don't buy insurance and sick ones get gamed out of it. Catastrophic insurance--covering trauma and serious illnesses--isn't a solution, because it's chronically ill patients, just 5% of the total, who account for 50% of American health care costs. That's why the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, came up with the idea of an individual mandate in the 1980s, proposing that people buy health insurance in exactly the same way that people are required to buy car insurance. That's why Mitt Romney chose this model as a market-friendly system for Massachusetts when he was governor. And that's why Newt Gingrich praised the Massachusetts model as the most important step forward in health care in years. They have all changed their minds, but that is about politics, not economics.

The Obama health care plan is not perfect by any measure. It maintains the connection between employment and health care, which is massively inefficient and a huge burden on American business. While companies often talk about the need to reduce regulations to be competitive globally--which is true and important--they rarely talk about their single biggest handicap against global competitors. American companies have to pay tens of billions of dollars to provide health care for their employees and former employees, while their German, Canadian, Japanese and British counterparts pay next to nothing in health care costs in comparison.  The Obama bill expands access to 30 million Americans. That's good economics and also the right thing to do. But it does little in the way of controlling costs. Medicare's costs have stopped rising as fast as in the past. But for broader costs to decline, there is no alternative to having some kind of board that decides what is covered by insurance and what is not--as exists in every other advanced country. This has been demagogued as creating "death panels" when it is really the only sensible way to make the system work.

When listening to the debate about American health care, I find that many of the most fervent critics of government involvement argue almost entirely from abstract theoretical propositions about free markets. One can and should reason from principles. But one must also reason from reality, from facts on the ground. And the fact is that about 20 foreign countries provide health care for their citizens in some way or other. All of them--including free-market havens like Switzerland and Taiwan--have found that they need to use an insurance or government-sponsored model. All of them provide universal health care at much, much lower costs than we do and with better results.  Maybe there's a theoretical pure free-market model out there that would work. But in the world we know and live in, the task is not to abolish our system for a utopia that has never actually existed anywhere but rather to accept the messy, mixed-up reality that we have and try to improve it to allow people to have access to decent health care at an affordable price--something every other rich country in the world already does.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109128,00.html