It could be said that hockey is a very Canadian sport. It embodies the Canadian values of humility, camaraderie, sportsmanship, egalitarianism, subtlety, respect for tradition, and conservatism. Inside the confines of the rink, hockey players are larger-than-life: aggressive, assertive, and spectacular. Outside the rink? Not so much.

This is one of the overriding problems that plague the NHL. The personalities of the players, still mostly Canadian, make the sport hard to market because the culture of hockey players eschews taking the spotlight, grandstanding, or boasting. Players tend to walk softly when not carrying their big sticks, and this League of Unextraordinary Gentlemen makes for a lack of players with true celebrity potential.

It is an understatement to suggest that the NHL has a marketing problem. And while this blog is awfully hard on Gary Bettman (justifiably so) it’s not all his fault. Consider the story of David Beckham vs. Wayne Gretzky.

When David Beckham was imported to Los Angeles he brought more than just a bendy shot to Major League Soccer. He and Victoria Becks were soon spotted among the elite, embraced by the celebrity culture that dominates Los Angeles. This made it much easier to market the LA Galaxy and Major League Soccer in general, as each appearance in People magazine, on Entertainment Tonight, or gracing the red carpet at premieres served as a stealth advertisement for the game. This drew fans from unlikely sources. Beckham built his fame in front of the global futbol audience, transcended sport and celebrity by marrying one of the Spice Girls, and managed to remain dignified while making himself into a global brand.

Canadians still love Wayne Gretzky. Arguably the greatest player to ever grace the arenas of the NHL, his jersey number is so hallowed it is verboten to wear it — officially retired throughout the league. No player bears comparison, and his infamous move from Edmonton to Los Angeles was heralded as a break-through for the game. In fact, it was. The Kings, a basement-dwelling team before his arrival, began building a dynasty which, though it never returned a cup to LA, remained competitive and entertaining throughout his stay there. They drew in new fans, and the spillover helped the league to add teams in San Jose and Anaheim.

But Wayne is as much an admirable personality as he is a uniquely modest, humble guy. He shuns the limelight. He doesn’t want to attend glitzy parties, isn’t a trendy dresser, avoids controversy. He married a modestly successful actress, not a megastar. And as Canada’s favoured son, he carries the hopes and limitations of a nation wherever he travels. It’s an enormous burden, one he clearly feels, and one which has ultimately kept him from becoming a global transcendent brand. In many ways this is an opportunity lost. Both for Wayne and for the game he so clearly loves.

What the league needs is a cadre of players that can move the puck like Wayne — casually chucking in 50 or 60 goals a year, let’s say — while simultaneously engaging the popular media.

Sean Avery is no Wayne Gretzky. His style of play is better suited to the beer leagues than the beautiful game. But Sean has engaged the popular media and celebrity culture in a way that no player in recent memory has — and he is poised to drive interest in the NHL because of it. Within the league he’s a constant source of news and controversy, both for on-ice antics and off the ice. Within the game a great source of controversy and intrigue, and a pattern that sees shades of Brett Hull, Claude Lemieux, Shanahan, and Roenick.

But outside the arena he’s raised his game to a whole other level. Avery has had relationships or been linked romantically to a growing list of celebutantes including an Olsen twin, Elisha Cuthbert and Rachel Hunter; has made People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” list; has appeared on MTV Cribs (bragging about your bling is very non-Canadian!); was weirdly an intern at Vogue Magazine this summer; is poised to star in a fashion reality TV show; can frequently be seen amongst the glitterati at fashion shows and premieres; and is even the subject of a movie presently under development at New Line. He’s even been profiled in the New Yorker. This among a growing list of exploits studiously documented in fan magazines like People and Us, and on TV on shows like TRL and Entertainment Tonight.

Avery recently arrived to a Hollywood party and asked a reporter if The Hills’ resident prick Spencer Pratt was there yet, because he wanted to “kick his ass.” All of this behaviour is very-much outside the norm for your cookie-cutter Canadian hockey player. And in many respects it’s preserving interest in his career as a grinder long after the pace of the game in the NHL has moved past players of his ilk. It’s even conceivable that (female) fans in Dallas this season, where he recently signed another one-year contract, might turn up just to see a glamourous NHL star — not Mike Modano, mind you, but Sean Avery.

In any event, if you believe that half of good marketing is just being seen, he engages the popular media with the NHL in a way that is hugely constructive to its image as a major sport with dynamic, cool, exciting players. The revelation here is that what makes a hockey player exciting in this multimedia world is not limited to what he does on the ice. What the die-hards among us will need to accept if we expect the league to grow and flourish is a lot more guys like Sean Avery.

September 21, 2003

Waiting For Spielberg By MATTHEW ROSE

Unlike most urban legends, the one about the Iranian exile stuck at the Paris airport for 15 years is true. Surrounded by a mountain of his possessions near the Paris Bye Bye lounge at Terminal 1 in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Merhan Karimi Nasseri is still there after all these years — a celebrity homeless person.

Planted on the 1970’s red plastic bench he calls home, and surrounded by stacks of newspapers and magazines, Nasseri, also known as Alfred or ”Sir, Alfred” (title and comma appropriated from a mistake in a letter from British immigration), has organized his life’s belongings into a half-dozen Lufthansa cargo boxes, various suitcases and unused carry-on luggage. On a nearby coffee table spotted with aluminum ashtrays, Nasseri’s universe includes a pair of alarm clocks, an electric shaver, a hand mirror and a collection of press clippings and photographs to establish his present and his recent past. He seems both settled — and ready to go.

To the pilots, airport staff, fast-food merchants and millions who have passed through the terminal on their way to somewhere else, the 58-year-old Nasseri has become a postmodern icon — a traveler whom no one will claim. Little do they know that he is on his way to becoming a Hollywood icon, too. Inspired by Nasseri’s intriguing tale of lost identity, bureaucratic limbo and persistence, Steven Spielberg has bought the rights to his life story as the basis for the new Tom Hanks vehicle, ”The Terminal.”

”I realize I am famous,” Nasseri says in his soft, almost giggly voice, a gravelly mix of his native Persian, the airport French he’s picked up from the loudspeakers and the cigarettes he’s always smoking. As if to prove his fame, he pats a briefcase stuffed with his press clippings. ”I wasn’t interesting until I came here.”

Nasseri’s story is difficult to piece together. Over the years, he has claimed many things about his origins. At one time his mother was Swedish, another time English. Nasseri’s effectively reinvented himself in the Charles de Gaulle airport and denies these days that he’s Iranian, deflecting any conversation about his childhood in Tehran. (”He pretends he doesn’t speak Persian,” his longtime lawyer, Christian Bourguet, says. ”He was interviewed by Iranian journalists and made believe he didn’t understand.”) When we first met two years ago, he insisted that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was attempting to locate his parents in order to establish his identity. But a spokeswoman for the agency dismissed the assertion as ”pure folly.”

Early on in his saga, Nasseri maintained that he was expelled from his homeland for antigovernment activity in 1977. According to a number of reports, Nasseri protested against the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi while a student in England, and when he returned to Iran, found himself imprisoned, and shortly thereafter exiled.

He bounced around Europe for a few years with temporary refugee papers, alighting finally in Belgium, where he was awarded official refugee status in 1981. He traveled to Britain and France without difficulty until 1988, when he landed at Charles de Gaulle airport after being denied entry into Britain, because, he contends, his passport and refugee certificate were stolen in a mugging on a Paris subway. Nasseri could not prove who he was, nor offer proof of his refugee status. So he moved into the Zone d’attente, a holding area for travelers without papers.

He stayed for days, then weeks — then months, then years. As his bizarre odyssey stretched on, Bourguet, the noted French human rights lawyer, took on the case, and the news media piled on. Articles appeared around the world, and Nasseri became the subject of three documentary films. (Oddly, apparently none of his friends or relatives have attempted to contact him.)

ike any number of Samuel Beckett characters, Nasseri has redefined the concept of waiting. But he remains busy, and during office hours when he’s not meeting filmmakers or members of the press, he collects McDonald’s soda tops and endlessly considers his situation in a sprawling, 1,000-plus-page diary that chronicles his journey to nowhere. These rambling handwritten notes recount his encounters with just about everyone he’s met, reporting faithfully everything from the details of his paper chase to some of the witty things he’s said (”I’m not Henry Kissinger”). Nasseri also asks most visitors to sign his journal.

An effete, balding man, Nasseri is well groomed (he washes daily in the men’s room and sends his donated Marks & Spencer clothes to the dry cleaners) with finely manicured fingernails. He smokes compulsively and is forever reaching for his pouch of Pall Mall rolling tobacco. At one point during our interview he coughs, adding with his characteristic sly humor, ”Maybe I caught SARS here in the airport.”

In an eerily Warholian relationship, Nasseri’s closest neighbors at the airport are a photo booth and a photocopy machine. Unlike most movie types, Nasseri does not have a cell phone, and he eats regularly at the McDonald’s in the food court 100 feet away. (”I like the fish,” he says.) The only green in his immediate environment is, ironically, the Sortie (Exit) sign.

In the Spielberg film, which begins shooting this month, Hanks is transformed into a refugee whose country disappears in a diplomatic wink of an eye. As chaos ravages his homeland, Hanks is rendered stateless, his passport turned into an eBay collectible. He’s grounded: a stranger in a strange New York airport. But Hanks is cured of his airport disease and soars to new heights (and, who knows, perhaps another Oscar), thanks to the Hollywood bombshell Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plays Hanks’s love interest, a flight attendant. Nasseri has had no such luck with the ladies and complains that there are no nightclubs in his airport. ”There’s no pleasure,” he says.

While Bourguet confirms that Spielberg’s company, DreamWorks, has in fact bought the rights to his client’s life story, Spielberg himself would not discuss ”The Terminal,” its plot nor Nasseri’s contract. Marvin Levy, a DreamWorks spokesman, confirms that a financial agreement was signed. However, he cautions, ”Mr. Nasseri’s story was an inspiration for the original treatment for ‘The Terminal.’ The film is not his story.”

Rumors of a $275,000 fee for the rights to Nasseri’s life story and certain consulting duties have circulated. ”It’s less than $1 million,” Bourguet says, adding that the money hasn’t changed the predicament of his client. ”While he became a bit richer, Alfred is extremely paranoid and confused.”

Certainly, Nasseri may well be one of the only people on the planet not to have seen a Spielberg production. Asked what he thinks of Hanks, Nasseri replies straight-faced, ”Is he Japanese?”

Regardless of whether Hanks manages to capture the refugee’s deadpan delivery, the Hollywood retelling of Nasseri’s odyssey will undoubtedly include a first-class ticket to the American dream.

Nasseri’s real-life ending, however, is still up in the air.

”Alfred himself will have trouble leaving the airport,” says Glen Luchford, a fashion photographer cum director whose 2001 mockumentary, ”Here to Where,” attempted just such a scenario, with the director, played by Paul Berczeller, failing to tempt Nasseri beyond the concrete gardens of Charles de Gaulle.

”Alfred has to accept that he’s free,” Luchford says sadly. ”But with freedom comes responsibility. He represents people’s worst fears — the idea they might be procrastinating all their lives and end up being rooted to the spot.”

asseri cannot be forcibly moved or repatriated. He is protected by a number of international refugee statutes. According to Bourguet, he is legally free to leave the airport. All Nasseri has to do is sign the identity papers the French provided him in 1999. But the papers identify him as Iranian and don’t recognize his adopted name of Sir, Alfred. And so he can’t — or won’t- sign them: a testament to either patience, or madness.

Nasseri is doubtful about attending the premiere of ”The Terminal,” although his face lights up at the prospect. ”I would probably have technical problems with my papers in Los Angeles,” he says, before adding that he’ll likely leave the airport ”in September or October.”

If he does decide to finally exit the departure lounge, Nasseri could go to any number of places in the world. He says Florida has invited him, and, yes, why not New York, when ”I take over DreamWorks”? (The company is based in California.) And what of the plastic red bench, which has served as his de facto home for the last 15 years and must by now be a collector’s item?

”I’ll take it to DreamWorks,” he says with a smile. ”And send it by FedEx .”

Matthew Rose is a writer and artist living in Paris.

The New York Times June 29, 2003 Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com By AMY HARMON

Of the 120 men she traded messages with online in her first four months of Internet dating, Kristen Costello, 33, talked to 20 on the telephone at least once and met 11 in person. Of those, Ms. Costello dated four several times before realizing she had not found “the one.”

It is one of the first lessons learned by many in the swelling ranks of subscribers to Internet dating sites: soul mates are harder to come by than dinner and a movie. But like a growing number of single adults, Ms. Costello, a fourth-grade teacher in Florham Park, N.J., remains convinced that the chances of finding her life partner are better online than off.

“The difference is there’s a huge number of people to draw from,” said Ms. Costello, who is getting divorced and tried Kiss.com on the advice of a friend who met her current boyfriend through the site. “I just haven’t found the right one.”

Online dating, once viewed as a refuge for the socially inept and as a faintly disrespectable way to meet other people, is rapidly becoming a fixture of single life for adults of all ages, backgrounds and interests. More than 45 million Americans visited online dating sites last month, up from about 35 million at the end of 2002, according to comScore Media Metrix, a Web tracking service. Spending by subscribers on Web dating sites has soared, rising to a projected $100 million or more a quarter this year from under $10 million a quarter at the beginning of 2001, according to the Online Publishers Association.

And despite the Web’s reputation as a meeting ground for casual sex, a majority of the leading sites’ paying subscribers now say that what they are looking for is a relationship.

Stories of deception persist. Many online daters turn out to be married, and it is taken for granted that everybody lies a little. But they are more often trumped by a pervasive dissatisfaction with singles bars, dates set up by friends and other accepted ways of meeting prospective mates.

“My brother told me to join a canoeing club or something stupid like that,” said Dan Eddy, 28, who met his fiancée, Sherry Sivik, 27, of North Ridgeville, Ohio, on Match.com.

Ms. Sivik sent an e-mail message to Mr. Eddy when she saw a picture of him with a shaved head. She refused to meet him for weeks, afraid he would be “some kind of lunatic.” But after hearing that Mr. Eddy drove a Jeep, Ms. Sivik’s friends, who had a long-running joke about trying to find her a bald guy with a Jeep, knew it was all over.

As word spreads of successful matches, the stigma of advertising for a romantic partner online rather than waiting for friends and fate to conjure one is fading. “I really don’t think there’s anyone under 35 who would think twice about it,” said Sascha Segan, 29, who has persuaded several friends to try online dating since meeting his fiancée, Leontine Greenberg, on Nerve.com.

Not prepared to cede the potential of a better love life to youth, older singles are also logging on to dating sites in growing numbers.

“We’re at a time of life where nothing’s structured where you can mingle,” said Judith Carrington, a public relations executive who lists herself on Match.com as in her late-50’s. “And as you get older it’s hard to find a deep bond with people because you’ve had rich lives and you haven’t lived them together.”

After a few unremarkable dates, Ms. Carrington, whose husband died several years ago, said she recently had dinner with an investment adviser she met through the service and felt drawn to him because of a shared experience with a family member’s mental illness.

“Just to have someone in the running is nice,” she said.

As it did for book buying and auctioning used toys, the Internet reduces the transaction costs of meeting romantic prospects. With pictures, long essays, sometimes even videos — and a cut-to-the-chase etiquette that encourages pointed questions in e-mail messages — singles say they can learn far more about potential partners online than they can by sizing them up across a crowded room or wringing information from a friend.

“The traditional institutionalized means for getting people together are not working as well as they did previously,” said Norval Glenn, a sociology professor at the University of Texas. “There’s a need for something new and the Internet is filling that need.”

Two or three decades ago, most American couples met in high school or college, Professor Glenn said. But as more people choose to marry later in life, few social institutions have arisen to replace the role that local communities, families and schools once played.

Internet dating may finally be stepping into that breach.

“The Internet gives the impression, and it may or may not be truthful, that you can find someone who is more specifically tailored to your desires,” said David M. Buss, author of “The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating” (Revised edition, Basic Books, 2003). “So perhaps the sense that you don’t have to settle as much will bear out in more solid bonds.”

Along with large dating sites like Match.com, which boasts nearly 800,000 subscribers who pay $24.95 a month each, and 8 million separate profiles, numerous dating sites now exist for every imaginable group of people. Generally, there is no charge for posting a profile on a Web dating site, but to contact a prospective date, most sites require users to pay a subscription fee.

Lativish Gardner, 24, a Web designer in Valdosta, Ga., switched from Yahoo Personals to BlackPlanetLove.com last month, for instance, to better focus his search.

“I’m a black man and I’m using Black Planet to find a black queen,” said Mr. Gardner, who flew to Houston recently to meet a woman he found on the new site.

Web sites like TONY.com (Time Out New York), Nerve.com and Boston.com offer online dating services by pooling a collection of profiles submitted by their younger, more urban subscribers, through a template provided by their New York-based company, Spring Street Networks. In addition to the fundamentals, subscribers are asked to complete sentences like, “In my bedroom you’ll find,” and to cite their most humbling moment.

Greg Bush, 34, an emergency room doctor in Huntington Beach, Calif., swears by Eharmony, one of several sites that profess to take a more scientific approach to the matchmaking process. Prospective subscribers to Eharmony, founded by a psychologist, fill out a long questionnaire, and the service says they are rejected if it appears a match for them cannot be found.

“She’s gorgeous,” said Mr. Bush of the woman the service set him up with, a pharmaceutical representative he said he planned to propose to soon. “She’s the kind of girl I’d look at all night but never go up and talk to because I’d be too intimidated.”

The first trick to online dating is to narrow the search without inadvertently ruling out a perfect match. Helen Gaitanis, 35, of Los Angeles searches only for white men aged 33 to 43 who are at least 5-foot-9. She refrains from filtering out brown eyes, despite her strong preference for blue. Typically 600 profiles of men within 25 miles of her zip code show up in her Match results, Ms. Gaitanis said.

“You can kind of get a feel: Are they dorky, are they going to be a slick cheeseball party guy?” Ms. Gaitanis said. “I look at my profile and I think sometimes it’s more intense than others. It’s not as flirty or playful. But it says who I am.”

Indeed, for women, who have long been taught to search for a mate while scrupulously pretending not to, social historians say online dating may be making it more acceptable to openly signal what they are looking for.

But gender rules still apply. Men say women rarely send the first e-mail note. And like many women, Ms. Gaitanis found that when she did send an e-mail message to a man, he almost never responded. Instead, she is concentrating on refining her profile and updating it often enough that it does not get lost in search results, as profiles are generally ranked in order of the latest updated. She has also seized on Match’s new “wink” feature, which allows subscribers to indicate interest in someone’s profile simply by clicking a button, which sends them a prewritten message.

“It’s like saying, `Hey, look at me, what do you think?’ ” said Ms. Gaitanis, who received 6 winks back out of the first 10 she sent. “They can respond or not and at least you didn’t spend any time writing an e-mail.”

There are still plenty of holdouts. Ms. Gaitanis’s brother, John, 28, told her that online dating was “strictly for losers.”

And even those who embrace online dating acknowledge a major flaw: the frequent disconnect between who people say they are online and what they are really like. In one recent example, the Army said it was investigating accusations that a colonel, who is already married, duped dozens of women on tallpersonals.com into believing that he would be marrying them.

Most online dating deception is of the run-of-the-mill variety.

“It’s amazing how all women say they’re slender when a lot of them are overweight,” said one 79-year-old Manhattan man who lists himself as 69 on his Match.com profile.

A Culver City, Calif., woman who lists the adjacent, more upscale Santa Monica as her residence, said, “I swear every time they put 5-10 you have to deduct 3 inches.”

But what is most persistently frustrating, veteran online daters say, is not so much the obvious lies as the difficulty in judging physical chemistry through virtual communication.

“Certain things look really good on paper,” said Rebecca Hammond, a computer consultant in Manhattan who has met several boyfriends through Nerve.com. “Then in real life it’s a completely different story.”

After enough of such encounters, many online daters burn out.

Those who do find partners say they are often plagued by the insidious sense that they might find someone better — if only they paged through a few hundred more profiles.

“If you get unsolicited e-mails coming in it’s hard not to look,” said David Kleinbard, a researcher for a credit ratings agency in New York who has dated several women from JDate, a Jewish online dating service. “And if the person’s cute it’s hard not to give it some thought.”

But for Jonathan Gerstel, 40, a university fund-raiser who was looking for a Jewish woman in Durham, N.C., with a kind disposition and at least shoulder-length hair, JDate proved the perfect tool.

Amid the 20 matches he found Marta King, 38, an actress and teacher looking for a Jewish man who knew what he wanted in life, made at least as much money as she did, and liked to dance, or was at least willing to try. If the process lacked a certain romantic sweep that Ms. King once imagined, she said she had come to prefer reality.

“I just don’t think it matters how you meet,” Ms. King said.

Just this month, the two reached an online dating milestone: They removed their profiles from the JDate site.

APPLE Songs in the Key of Steve Steve Jobs may have just created the first great legal online music service. That’s got the record biz singing his praises. FORTUNE Monday, April 28, 2003 By Devin Leonard

Steve Jobs loves music. But as with a lot of geeks in Silicon Valley, his musical tastes are a little retro. He worships Bob Dylan and is the kind of obsessive Beatles fan who can talk your ear off about why Ringo is an underappreciated drummer.

So Dr. Dre, the rap-music Midas whose proteges include Snoop Dogg and Eminem, is the last person you’d expect to see huddled with Jobs, for hours on end, at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. No, they weren’t discussing whether John or Paul was the more talented Beatle. Rather, Steve had invited Dr. Dre up from Los Angeles for a private demonstration of Apple’s latest product. After checking it out, Dre had this to say: “Man, somebody finally got it right.”

The product that wowed him was the iTunes Music Store, a new digital service for Mac users offering songs from all five major music companies–Universal, Warner, EMI, Sony, and BMG. Though Apple had yet to sell a single song by the time FORTUNE went to press, Jobs is already causing a stir in the record business. Forget about rumors that Apple is bidding for Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company. Jobs says he has absolutely no interest in buying a record company.

The real buzz in the music trade is that Steve has just created what is easily the most promising legal digital music service on the market. “I think it’s going to be amazing,” says Roger Ames, CEO of the Warner Music Group. Jobs, not surprisingly, is even more effusive. He claims his digital store will forever change not only how music is sold and distributed but also the way artists release and market songs and how they are bought and used by fans.

One thing’s for sure: If ever there was an industry in need of transformation, it’s the music business. U.S. music sales plunged 8.2% last year, largely because songs are being distributed free on the Internet through illicit file-sharing destinations like KaZaA. Unlike Napster, KaZaA and its brethren have no central servers, making them tougher for the industry to shut down. The majors have tried to come up with legal alternatives. But none of those ventures have taken off because they are too pricey and user-hostile.

The iTunes Music Store, by contrast, is as simple and straightforward as anything Jobs has ever produced. Apple users get to the store by clicking a button on the iTunes 4 jukebox, available for download when the service made its debut on April 28. You can listen to a 30-second preview of any song and then, with one click, buy a high-quality audio copy for 99 cents. There’s no monthly subscription fee, and consumers have virtually unfettered ownership of the music they download. Jobs is rolling out the iTunes store with previously unreleased material by artists including Bob Dylan, U2, Missy Elliott, and Sheryl Crow. There will be music from bands like the Eagles, who have never before allowed their songs to be sold by a legal digital music service. And Jobs is personally lobbying other big-name holdouts, like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, to come aboard.

The iTunes Music Store may be just the thing to get Apple rocking again too. As everyone knows, it’s been a tough couple of years for the computer industry as well. Apple swung back into the black in the first quarter of 2003 after two quarterly losses, but its profits were only $14 million, compared with $40 million a year ago. And as popular as Apple’s iPod portable MP3 player may be, it contributed less than $25 million of Apple’s $1.48 billion in revenues last quarter. So Jobs is betting that by offering customers “Hotel California” for 99 cents, he can sell not just more iPods but more Macs too.

Apple’s competitors dismiss the iTunes Music Store as a niche product. How, they ask, can Apple have any impact on the music industry when its share of the global computer market is a minuscule 3%? “It’s a very positive thing for their community,” says Kevin Brangan, a marketing director at SonicBlue, which makes Rio MP3 players. “But their community is a very small percentage of the overall market.”

Jobs, however, isn’t targeting just Mac users. He plans to roll out a Windows version of iTunes by the end of the year. (Apple already sells a Windows-compatible version of the iPod, which accounts for about half of all units sold.) It is a dramatic departure for Steve, who has deliberately kept the Mac’s best features off the screens of the much larger Microsoft-dominated world.

Steve isn’t suggesting that his new service will lift the computer industry out of its funk. But he is 100% convinced that the Music Store will rejuvenate the ailing music business. “This will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry,” Jobs told FORTUNE. “This is landmark stuff. I can’t overestimate it!”

The idea that anybody from Silicon Valley can swoop in and save the music industry seems laughable at first. But by nearly every account, this is not just some Steve Jobs sales job. In fact, the Music Store is being copied by rivals even before it hits the market. The reason, as Dr. Dre noted, is that nobody has come up with a better plan to sell music online. So iTunes or something like it had better work. Otherwise, the music industry as we know it could soon disappear.

It’s a sunny afternoon in early April, and Jobs is rhapsodizing about his new music service at Apple headquarters. He is clad in the same outfit he dons nearly every morning so he doesn’t have to waste time choosing clothes: a black mock-turtleneck shirt, jeans, and New Balance sneakers. There’s been a slight change in his uniform, though. The 48-year-old Apple CEO now rolls up the cuffs of his jeans. (What would Dr. Dre think of that fashion statement?)

But Steve isn’t interested in talking about his new look on this day. (He later allowed that he just bought pants that were the wrong size.) He’s here to talk music. “It pained us to see the music companies and the technology companies basically threatening to take each other to court and all this other crazy stuff,” he explains. “So we thought that rather than sit around and throw stones, we’d actually do something about this.”

He was equally appalled by the music industry’s reluctance to satisfy the demand for Internet downloading that Napster had unleashed. Who could blame him? After bludgeoning Napster to death in court, record companies promised to launch paid services with the same limitless selection and ease of use.

They did just the opposite. Universal and Sony rolled out a joint venture called Pressplay. AOL Time Warner (the parent of both Warner and FORTUNE’s publisher), Bertelsmann (BMG’s owner), EMI, and RealNetworks launched MusicNet. But instead of trying to cooperate to attract customers, the two ventures competed to dominate the digital market. Pressplay wouldn’t license its songs to MusicNet, and MusicNet withheld its tunes from Pressplay.

The result: Neither service had enough songs to attract paying customers, who couldn’t care less which record company a particular song comes from. “It was strictly the greed and arrogance of the majors that screwed things up,” says Irving Azoff, who manages the Eagles and Christina Aguilera. “They wanted to control every step of the [Internet] distribution process.”

The record companies were also fearful about doing anything that might cannibalize CD sales. So they decided to “rent” people music through the Internet. You paid a monthly subscription fee for songs from MusicNet and Pressplay. But you could download MusicNet tunes onto only one computer, and they disappeared if you didn’t pay your bill. That may have protected the record companies from piracy, but it didn’t do much for consumers. Why fork over $10 a month for a subscription when you can’t do anything with your music but listen to it on your PC? Pressplay launched with CD burning but only for a limited number of songs.

At the end of last year, Pressplay and MusicNet licensed their catalogues to each other, ending their standoff. MusicNet also now permits subscribers to burn certain songs onto CDs. But MusicNet users still can’t download songs onto portable players. “These devices haven’t caught on yet,” insists MusicNet CEO Alan McGlade. Never mind that U.S. sales of portable MP3 players soared from 724,000 in 2001 to 1.6 million last year. Pressplay, for its part, lets subscribers download some songs onto devices, but only those that use Microsoft’s Windows Media software. That means no iPods.

Pressplay and MusicNet say it’s too early for anybody to dismiss them as failures, but it’s difficult to see them as anything else. The music industry has little to show for its investment–Sony and Universal are believed to have spent as much as $60 million so far on Pressplay. The two services don’t release their subscriber numbers, but Phil Leigh, an analyst at Raymond James, believes that together they have signed up only about 225,000 customers. “It was clear to me in my first 30 days on the job that Pressplay was a first effort and a work-in-progress,” says Andrew Lack, who took over as CEO of Sony Music Entertainment in February. “No one was saying, ‘This is it. We can’t sign up people fast enough.'”

Consequently, the five major record companies have had to slash costs in the face of declining sales. BMG laid off 1,400 people, EMI shed 1,800, and Sony Music recently announced it was reducing headcount by 1,000. Even with those cuts, average profit margins for the five majors have slipped to 5%, compared with 15% to 20% in the late 1980s when the CD came into vogue. “All the chickens are coming home to roost at the same time,” says media analyst Claire Enders. “This industry has never been faced with such cataclysmic conditions before. It has no roadmap on how to cope with them.”

The irony is that the music industry has always survived by introducing new formats–from the 78-rpm single to the 33-rpm vinyl LP album in the 1950s, to the cassette tape in the 1970s, to the compact disc, which sparked a rebirth of the industry in the 1980s. Now nearly everyone in the business admits that the only clear path to the future is to come up with a legal, online alternative to KaZaA and other illegal file-sharing services. This could be the mother of all format shifts, because it would largely eliminate manufacturing and distribution costs. But nobody in the music industry has been able to get there. “This new technology has swept by us,” laments Doug Morris, chairman of the Universal Music Group.

As long as people can get free music online, the music industry’s chances of recovery are dim. But stealing songs on the Internet isn’t as much fun as it used to be. For one thing, file-sharing services are teeming with viruses. The Recording Industry Association of America has also upped the ante with a new suit accusing four college students of operating piracy networks. That’s likely to put a damper on illicit computer activities in many dormitories. In addition, the record companies are planning to introduce new CDs with two sets of the same songs–one that can be played on your CD player and another that you can listen to on your computer but that can’t be uploaded onto KaZaA.

In a world where CDs can’t be shared on the Internet and music pirates are hauled into court, there may be huge demand for a legitimate digital music service. But it’s going to have to be one that’s a lot better than what the music industry has offered so far. Apple’s timing, in other words, could hardly have been better.

Jobs didn’t set out to be the music industry’s savior. He was such a latecomer to the digital music world that some observers wondered if he’d lost his knack for spotting trends long before his competitors. Heck, Apple didn’t even include CD burners as standard equipment on its computers until two years ago. But once Jobs focused on music, he was consumed by it. He saw people ripping CD tracks and loading them onto their hard drives. So in 2001 Apple introduced the iTunes jukebox software, which lets users make their own playlists or have the computer select songs randomly.

What else might Mac users wish to do with their MP3 files? Apple engineers were certain they’d want to load them into a pocket-sized portable player with a voluminous hard drive. So they created the iPod, a device that works seamlessly with iTunes. Apple has sold almost a million iPods, even though the least expensive one costs $300.

Then Steve had an epiphany: Wouldn’t it be awesome if people could buy high-quality audio tracks via the Internet and load them directly into iTunes instead of going to the store to buy CDs to rip? It dawned on him that Apple had all the pieces in place to start such a business. For one thing, the company already had the Apple Store, an online operation selling more than $1 billion a year in computers and software, most of which can be purchased with a single mouse-click. It also runs the Internet’s largest movie-trailer downloading site.

The only thing missing was music. Until recently it would have been impossible for a major tech company like Apple to license tunes from Warner, EMI, Universal, Sony, and BMG. Executives at those companies simply didn’t trust their peers in the technology world. Many felt–not without some justification–that PC makers promoted piracy because it helped sell computers.

Apple, however, straddles the worlds of technology and entertainment like no other software or hardware maker. Along with running Apple, Jobs is CEO of Pixar, the digital-animation studio whose movies include Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. He also has plenty of admirers in the music world. Some of Apple’s most zealous fans are rock stars who use Macs, both at home and in the recording studio. “Musicians have always adopted Macs,” says Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame. Jobs is enough of a rock star himself–is anybody in the technology world as cool?–that he’s been able to get U2’s Bono on the phone to discuss the iTunes Music Store. He’s personally demonstrated it to Mick Jagger.

The iPod, too, has become a fetish item among musicians and notoriously technophobic music company executives. “I’m addicted to mine,” says Interscope Geffen A&M records chairman Jimmy Iovine. It made sense to Iovine and a lot of other record-company big shots that if Apple could transform a geeky device like the portable MP3 player into a sexy product with mass-market appeal, it might be able to work similar wonders with online digital music sales. It’s probably no coincidence that the most vocal boosters of the Apple store are Universal and Warner, whose debt-ridden parents–Vivendi and AOL Time Warner, respectively–are under pressure from investors to get out of the music business entirely.

The record companies were still leery enough of Apple that they would agree only to one-year deals with Jobs. Nevertheless, he was able to persuade Universal, EMI, Sony, BMG, and Warner to stop fixating on their subscription models and take a radically different approach to selling digital music. People want to own music, not rent it, Jobs says. “Nobody ever went out and asked users, ‘Would you like to keep paying us every month for music that you thought you already bought?'” he scoffs. “The record companies got this crazy idea from some finance person looking at AOL, and then rubbing his hands together and saying, ‘I’d sure like to get some of that recurring subscription revenue.’ ” He adds: “Just watch. We’ll have more people using the iTunes Music Store in the first day than Pressplay or MusicNet have even signed up as subscribers–probably in the first hour.” We’ll let you know in a future issue if that bold prediction proves accurate.

Record-company executives aren’t ready to dump the subscription model–yet. “I’m not sure subscriptions are going to work,” says David Munns, CEO of North American Recorded Music for EMI. “A mixed model where you can rent some music and download what you really like could work. Let’s keep an open mind.” But what really grabs music executives about iTunes is its sheer simplicity. “It’s a lot easier to get people to migrate from physical CDs to buying individual songs online than it is to jump-start a subscription service,” says Warner’s Ames.

Apple is trying to make that transition as easy as possible. With the iTunes Music Store, you can browse titles by artist, song title, or genre. Songs will be encoded in a new format called AAC, which offers sound quality superior to MP3s–even those “ripped” at a very high data rate. That means each AAC file takes up a lot less disc space, so you’ll be able to squeeze better-quality music, and more of it, onto your computer and iPod. Moreover, each song will have a digital image of the album artwork from the CD on which the track was originally sold. Says Sony’s Lack: “I don’t think it was more than a 15-second decision in my mind [to license music to Apple] once Steve started talking.”

Apple has also come up with a copy-protection scheme that satisfies the music industry but won’t alienate paying customers. You can burn individual songs onto an unlimited number of CDs. You can download them onto as many iPods as you might own. In other words, the music is pretty much yours to do with as you please. Casual music pirates, however, won’t like it. The iTunes jukebox software will allow a specific playlist of songs or an album to be burned onto a CD ten times. You can burn more than that only if you manually change the order of the songs in the playlist.

And anybody who tries to upload iTunes Music Store songs onto KaZaA will be shocked. Each song is encrypted with a digital key so that it can be played only on three authorized computers, and that prevents songs from being transferred online. Even if you burn the AAC songs onto a CD that a conventional CD player can read and then re-rip them back into standard MP3 files, the sound quality is awful.

The iTunes Music Store will initially offer 200,000 tunes, paying the record companies an average of 65 cents for each track it sells. Ultimately Jobs hopes to offer millions of songs, including older music that hasn’t yet made it to CD. “This industry has been in such a funk,” sighs singer Sheryl Crow. “It really needs something like this to get it going again.”

If the iTunes Music Store or something like it takes off, that could change how new music is released, marketed, and promoted. Until recently the chief fear in the music industry about letting people buy individual songs via the Internet was that it would kill the album by enabling consumers to cherry-pick their favorite tracks. Music company executives now bravely say that a singles-based business might actually revive sales.

Steve is doing everything he can to stoke their optimism. “Nobody thinks of albums anymore, anyway,” he argues, perhaps a little too blithely. “People think of playlists and mixes. We’ll still sell albums as artists put them out, but for most consumers of popular music, we think they’ll more likely buy single tracks that they like. And then they’ll organize them into customized playlists in their computers and on their iPods.”

The reality is that initially, at least, the record companies will probably sell less music if they shift to an Internet-based singles business model. For years they have been able to get away with releasing albums with two or three potential hits bundled with ho-hum filler cuts. That has been wonderful for the industry, but it has made a generation of consumers who pay $18.99 for CDs very cynical. “People are sick and tired of that,” says singer-songwriter Seal. “That’s why people are stealing music.”

For some artists, the idea of a singles-driven business is anathema. “There’s a flow to a good album,” says Nine Inch Nails’ Reznor. “The songs support each other. That’s the way I like to make music.” But Crow says it would be a relief to put out singles instead of producing an entire album every time she wants to reach fans. “It would be nice to have a mechanism to release a song or two or three or four on their own,” she says.

A renewed emphasis on individual songs could well improve the quality of music and lead to a reordering of the entire industry. It won’t happen overnight, but the record companies had better get used to this new model. Now that Apple has gotten the music industry to support its pay-per-download store, nearly all of its Wintel PC-based rivals say they will augment their subscription businesses with similar offerings. “Steve’s pushing the ball forward here,” concedes Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks, which owns nearly 40% of MusicNet and plans to purchase Listen.com’s well-regarded Rhapsody subscription service.

But Glaser insists that Apple is ignoring a significant part of the digital music market by offering just downloading. He says Rhapsody users spend 72% of their time listening to streaming music. Only 13% pay $1 to burn cuts onto CDs. “If you make a really cool playlist of 200 songs on Rhapsody, you pay only $9.95 a month,” he says. “If you use Apple, it’s $200. Maybe guys like Steve and me can afford that, but I’m trying to run a service for everyone else too.”

No matter what happens, Jobs will likely sell more Macs. But that’s not all he’s after with music. The Music Store is his latest effort to diversify Apple’s sources of revenue beyond Macs. With Apple’s share of the desktop computer market stuck at less than 5% in the U.S. and less than 3% worldwide for several years, the iPod is the most obvious new line of business, steering Apple onto the home turf of consumer-electronics giants like Sony and Matsushita. Now Apple makes almost as much operating profit on each iPod it sells as it does on each iMac, even though the iPod costs a fraction as much to manufacture. So it should come as no surprise that Jobs is releasing three new versions of the iPod in conjunction with the Music Store (for more on that, see Gifts for the Grad: Apple iPod.)

Jobs has been very shrewd about the way he moved the iPod into the PC universe. Anyone who has tried the iPod with both systems will tell you it’s a lot more fun to use if you plug it into a Mac running Apple’s OS X than into a Dell with Windows XP. “The Windows iPod sucks” is Seal’s appraisal. “But what they are really doing is trying to get people to wonder, ‘Hmm, should I switch over?'” Jobs is betting that the iTunes Music Store, like the iPod, could be just such a Trojan horse.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. How many Windows iPod owners know what they’re missing by not using OS X? Do any of them really care? Perhaps that’s why Jobs is rolling out iTunes for Windows too. In fact, Warner’s Roger Ames is trying to broker a deal in which AOL would adopt iTunes as its music-manage-ment software. “Steve was resistant at first,” Ames says. “But now I understand that he’s decided to go that way.” AOL has been trying to develop its own music store to go along with its subscription service but hasn’t figured out a billing system for individual tracks as Apple has. A deal with AOL would land the iTunes Music Store on the desktops of AOL’s 26 million subscribers. That could quickly make Apple the dominant seller of digital music on the Internet. AOL would neither confirm nor deny a possible deal.

A big play for Windows users would be a huge shift for a man who has largely created a product–the Mac–that exists in a walled garden cut off from the much vaster PC world. Clearly, Apple will benefit enormously if it boosts its share of the computer market by even 1%–such a gain would lift its revenues by nearly a third and increase profits even more. In the meantime, if the iTunes Music Store takes off–and computer users of all stripes start buying millions of songs online each month–that will translate into tens of millions of dollars in new revenues per month for Apple.

His adventures in the music business have led to other changes in Jobs’ thinking. During the photo shoot with Sheryl Crow for this article, he acknowledged to the singer that he had never really understood what rap music was all about. But while playing with a prototype of the iTunes Music Store on his Mac at home in recent weeks, he had started downloading some of Eminem’s tracks.

“You know, he really is a great poet,” Crow said.

To which Steve replied, “Yeah, he’s starting to kind of grow on me.”

Feedback: dleonard [at] fortunemail [dot] com

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030411/wr_nm/ iraq_minister_website_dc

Web Site for Iraqi Minister Rocks Cyberspace Thu Apr 10, 8:30 PM ET Add Technology – Reuters Internet Report to My Yahoo!

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A member of Saddam Hussein (news – web sites)’s vanquished regime has sprung up as an unlikely hero in cyberspace on a Web site embraced by both supporters and foes of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (news – web sites).

Television news junkies transfixed by daily briefings by Iraqi Minister of Information Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf are now logging onto a day-old Web site featuring his finest invective against U.S. and British “infidels.”

The site, (http:/www.WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com), is a “coalition effort of bloodthirsty hawks and ineffectual doves” united in their admiration for al-Sahaf and his pronouncements, such as: “I now inform you that you are too far from reality.”

Among al-Sahaf’s now-famous declarations was: “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!”

Writer and former Greenpeace activist Kieran Mulvaney, a Briton living in Alaska, said he and friends got the idea for the site while watching cable news coverage of the three-week-old war.

“I mentioned to one of my friends that the best part is watching this guy,” Mulvaney told Reuters on Thursday. “He is so brazen that I could almost admire him.”

Mulvaney and his friends designed, built and put up the site in three days. Within hours of going live on the Internet, the site “has exploded,” Mulvaney said. The same day, U.S. troops marched into Baghdad and al-Sahaf disappeared, or in the view of his new Web site, went on “administrative leave.”

“I hope he is alive somewhere so he knows how famous he has become,” Mulvaney said. “We’ve had all kinds of e-mail from literally all over the world. We even had a few e-mails from within the Pentagon (news – web sites) saying, ‘We really like this guy and we miss him.”‘

The site already is offering T-shirts and mugs bearing al-Sahaf’s best-loved statements (“My feelings — as usual — we will slaughter them all!”) and has selected actor and director Sydney Pollack to play the information minister in the Hollywood version of the war.

In the meantime, Mulvaney said he will appeal for sightings of al-Sahaf, and there are plans to poll fans about what the beret-wearing minister should do after the war.

One fan has advocated an urgent campaign to spare al-Sahaf if he is found: “He is too much of a global asset to be murdered/shot/stabbed or otherwise wasted.”

——— http://216.239.35.120/ translate_c?hl=en&ie=ASCII&oe=ASCII&langpairÞ%7Cen&u=http:// www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,244270,00.html

Apple obviously offers for universal Music

For universal Music, the largest disk company of the world, obviously was an unexpected prospective customer. Apple boss Steve job is to have called a purchase price for the music section of the maroden medium conglomerate Vivendi.

Los Angeles – round six billion dollar wants to pay jobs for universal, reports the “Los Angeles Times” with reference to anonymous sources. It already gave secret discussions with the computer manufacturer for months. It nevertheless is still possible that it does not come at all to a formal requirement, is called it in the report. There is to be several unresolved questions in the executive committee of Apple still. Neither jobs nor representatives of Apple, universal or Vivendi wanted to commentate the report.

With such Deal jobs would be at one blow the most powerful figure in the international music business. The disk company comes with musicians such as U2 or Luciano Pavarotti in the year on a world-wide conversion of approximately six billion dollar.

An entrance into the music business would fit the strategy of the Computerbauers. Apple brought lately ever more hard and software on the market, with which downloading, working on and playing digitized music pieces were highly simplified. The commitment and above all the pertinent werbekampagne was however rather a challenge to the music companies. With the slogan “rip, mix, burn” (ribs, mix, burn) encouraged jobs according to opinion of the industry almost to procure itself music pieces free of charge and illegaly over the InterNet.

Unclear is however, as wants to apply jobs the purchase price for the music giant. In the last quarter Apple made a loss of approximately eight million dollar, the conversion of the last yearly reached straight once 5.74 billion dollar. According to own data the enterprise has however cash reserves at a value of 4.4 billion dollar.

Want to find out about the anti-war movement in America? Forget network news and tune in to Jerry Springer, says Duncan Campbell

Tuesday December 10, 2002

Tom Hayden was one of the main figures in the anti-Vietnam movement in the Sixties, arrested in 1968 during the anti-war demonstrations in Chicago and charged as a member of the Chicago Eight.

So it was interesting to see him addressing a gathering at the Westwood United Methodist Church in Los Angeles last weekend, called “Beyond the Battlefield – the Real Costs of War” and comparing the national mood then and now.

Opposition to the war on Iraq was far greater, he said, than the opposition to the war in Vietnam at a similar stage. But he did not feel that this was reflected by the media. “The anti-war movement does not have a voice in the national debate equal to our numbers,” he told 1,400-strong gathering at the church. “The corporate media has ignored or trivialised the movement … the talk shows are filled with right-wing pundits or failed military officials.”

He criticised both the New York Times and the public television network PBS for underestimating the numbers at the recent anti-war demonstrations in Washington.

So does the media deliberately ignore the opponents of a war in Iraq? Two journalists, one from the New York Times and one from the LA Times, addressed this issue in a lunchtime meeting at the day-long conference.

The NY Times journalist, Bernie Weinraub, acknowledged – as did the paper itself at the time – that a mistake had been made in under-reporting the demonstration. A long article covering the anti-war movement appeared shortly afterwards. But he said that people could not expect that every small demonstration was worthy of a new story.

The LA Times journalist, Robin Abearian, said her paper had already set up a war desk and she had asked them who had been assigned to cover the peace movement, which had now been taken on board. Regarding the lack of coverage of 80,000 people marching against the war in San Francisco that same weekend, she said, “sometimes bad calls are made”.

Many in a sometimes hostile audience clearly believed that the mainstream media has been deliberately under-reporting the extent of the anti-war movement. This is delicate territory for the media. The Guardian has often been criticised over the years for not covering marches and demonstrations or for not giving them the weight they deserve. The issue has been the subject of more than one article by our readers’ editor.

But what is noticeable about the television news in the US at the moment is a lack of any of the voices to which Tom Hayden referred. The war is now covered almost as a given with whole segments devoted to scaring everyone to death with talk of smallpox or anthrax and retired military and diplomatic gents speculating endlessly at third or fourth hand.

It took Jerry Springer, of all people, to say the unsayable – that most ordinary Americans are very keen on tackling Osama bin Laden and al Qaida, but have no great interest in extending the war to Iraq. All a war would achieve, he said, would be to create a whole new generation of people who hated Americans and it was thus patriotic to oppose the war.

This week, dozens of well-known actors will sign a letter to President Bush expressing their opposition to the war. Last week, hundreds of clerics of all faiths did the same in a full page advertisement in the New York Times. It will be interesting to see whether all this now starts to get as much coverage as all the military hardware and smallpox.

Email duncan.campbell [at] guardian.co [dot] uk

———–

November 11, 2002 By CHARLIE LeDUFF

HOLLYWOOD, Nov. 10 – It is commonly said at cocktail parties and on the street corners of New York that Los Angeles is an insipid backwater, a lukewarm bath.

But for those East Coast jingoists who do not believe that Los Angeles is a tough town, consider the life of John Peterson, the one-legged star polisher on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

About once a year, the ragged punks along Hollywood Boulevard steal his crutches while his attention is focused down on the brass monuments of stars long forgotten. The punks apparently do this for kicks, and Mr. Peterson is left to drag himself along on his knuckles and stump, a bag of Brasso and rags and Windex in tow.

“What can I say?” asks Mr. Peterson, who calls himself a believer in the superiority of New York and its citizens. “Los Angeles is a decadent town.”

His is an essential job, classified in the “somebody’s got to do it” category. About 12 million tourists come every year to see the Walk of Fame and the footprints at Mann’s Chinese Theater. Tarnished, shabby stars would never do. They would only contribute to the already lackluster reputation of Hollywood Boulevard, the neglected stepsister of Times Square.

“It’s not my fault,” Mr. Peterson says to the interested observer, his face as wet as a boiled egg, the neon from a lingerie shop giving him a red hue. “It’s not your fault. Maybe it’s the San Andreas Fault.”

Rim shot.

There are other unknown and under-appreciated keepers of America’s landmarks, people like Mr. Peterson who toil away in anonymity, working either free or for a modest hourly wage. Charlie DeLeo, the caretaker who was once Lady Liberty’s official Keeper of the Flame. Tony Palli, who keeps the pigeons from eating away the walls of the Corn Palace in South Dakota.

Their jobs are never done. For Mr. Peterson, it is akin to painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Finish one side, turn around and start all over again.

“A monkey could do this,” he says baldly. “But a monkey can’t give directions.”

He was raised in a small West Virginia town. As for the leg, it was bad at birth and amputated at 4. Don’t feel bad, he says. It kept him out of Vietnam. He made a first career as a television repairman. His first boss died, his second boss sold and the third boss did not see things his way.

He flopped out on the Hollywood Boulevard about four years ago. One of his coziest places to sleep was next to the star of Guy Lombardo, the man synonymous with Times Square. It made him feel good to be there, he said, remembering Lombardo saying, “Goodbye, goodbye, wherever you are.” It took him back to his boyhood in West Virginia and the memories of sitting around the parlor with dear old Mother.

“And actually, there is a shelter over his star in case it rained.”

He took to polishing the stars for spare change. One day, Kerri Harrington Morrison saw him. Instead of change, Ms. Morrison, the director of the Hollywood Entertainment District, bought him lunch and arranged the job. About $9 an hour plus benefits.

The lonely man is now off the streets. He keeps a lonely apartment on the east side of this lonely town, takes the bus to work and dreams of adventures on Broadway, New York, N.Y.

Unprompted, he adds it all up.

“They read books in New York,” he said. “They can’t even read traffic signs in L.A.”

The leaves are falling in Central Park, he knows. In the Hollywood Hills, the eucalyptus trees are beginning to stink like tomcats.

He improved on a Woody Allen line: “The only cultural advantage to L.A. is that you can turn right on red,” he said. “But you can do that in South Carolina. So what? You ever been to South Carolina? So what.”

One worries about Mr. Peterson’s health. He is 63 and worn. He wears a cap made greasy by polishing solvents, scalp oils and bus fumes. His mustache is overgrown and neglected, his knuckles are black and support calluses the size of brussels sprouts. He covers maybe a mile a day on his hands and knee and stump, and it appears that the good leg is starting to wear out.

The dirtiest star of them all, according to the star polisher, is that of Ronald Reagan. It is often stained with bodily fluids, gum, vegetable byproducts and snack cakes. “I don’t know why. People just seem to hate him,” Mr. Peterson says. “But I think he was one of the best governors we ever had.”

Low blood sugar, cleaning fumes and staring into the sidewalk day after day, hour after hour have strange effects on the mind. He begins to lose the lightning, so to speak. Any flaws in the terrazzo stars that surround the bronze plaques, Mr. Peterson takes as a personal attack. He insults the drag queens who question his ability, and the bubbleheads who step on his fingers. Usually by a quarter past 3, he is a crank.

As the sun is growing dark, a tourist notices a crack in a star and points it out to Mr. Peterson. “Look,” he says with a disgusted toss of his rag. “I’m not the engineer here.”

There are 2,207 stars on the Walk of Fame from Gower Street to La Brea Avenue, and none of them read “John Peterson.”

And he does not want one. “Just another plaque to clean,” he says.

———–

Next door to Yale, the bastion of privilege that turns out the land’s leaders, lies a tent city of America’s poor, huddled masses. Ed Vulliamy reports on the rise in inequality as the nation prepares to vote

Sunday November 3, 2002 The Observer

The north wind cuts cold and sudden across the historic green of New Haven. It blows through the ‘tent city’ where the homeless huddle. And it blows round the spires and quadrangles of Yale University, one of America’s richest Ivy League colleges.

The contrast is stark: Charlene Johnson, three months pregnant, emerges from her bivouac, worrying about the winter that lies between her and her due date. And all around are Yale’s stone walls, elegant colonial churches and smart people walking past boutiques and coffee shops, carrying their course books.

‘You know what’s underneath you?’ challenges Rod Cleary, who was released from prison in Los Angeles after a conviction for gang fighting, found but lost a job in New Haven, and has now been evicted. ‘I’ll tell ya: bones. This green was a cemetery once; you’re sitting on a pauper’s grave. And, man, that’s what it’s going to be again if we ain’t careful.’

Charlene fell behind with her rent in June and took a bribe of $200 to move out of her digs, so the landlord could hike up the price. ‘It seemed like I had some money for once, and it was summer.’ Her son Nikolas was billeted with a friend and Charlene started looking for a place with her boyfriend, Scott, hopefully before the cold set in. Without success – Scott was laid off on Wednesday from a construction firm. ‘Not enough work,’ he says. ‘And once you’re out, you’re a speck of dirt on the ground, and they walk over you.’

New Haven’s tent city was established after the authorities closed down a homeless overflow shelter a few weeks ago. At sundown yesterday it was to be cleared by the police, with Charlene, Scott, Rod and 150 others sent on their way into what promises to be a vicious winter.

New Haven is a metaphor for the America which on Tuesday elects its Senate and House of Representatives. It is the country’s fourth poorest city, where the ghetto laps at the walls of a university worth $11 billion (¢G7bn) in tax-exempt endowments, educating America’s next generation of rulers. A sign at the freeway turn-off advertises New Haven as the birthplace of President George Bush.

It is a city with the same infant mortality rate as Malaysia and a terrifying rate of deaths from Aids – one day care centre alone commemorated the loss of 600 clients at a memorial service on Wednesday. But it is located in America’ richest state, Connecticut, which has, proportionally, more millionaires than any other.

This is the super-rich New York hinterland for those too wealthy even to feel the pinch on Wall Street. It is called the ‘Zebra Coast’, laid out in strips of black/white, black/white; poor/rich, poor/rich. And in New Haven the polarity is underpinned by the history of Yale University’s engagement in the slave trade – currently being excavated by some of its own students.

‘New Haven,’ says the Rev David Lee of Varick Church in the city’s northwestern ghetto, ‘is a microcosm of America. It’s the vicious cycle between rich and poor and the system of exploitation. The wealth is in your face all the time, something you can never aspire to. It’s like being a kid in a candy store, being told you can look but you can’t never have a lollipop.’

The mall downtown, on the ‘wrong’ side of the green, is a ghost mall; just a few ‘hoodrats’ hanging around Cross Flava records and security guards to keep them in order. ‘Folks who commute to work,’ says the boy behind the counter, ‘they spend where they live. And the people who live here don’t have anything to spend.’

Statistics released last month by the government census bureau show that for the first time in 10 years the number of people caught in the poverty trap has suddenly increased. Unemployment is up from 4.2 per cent in 2000 to 5.7 per cent last year. While the middle class shrinks, the numbers living below the official poverty line of $18,104 a year for a family of four has shot up to 33 million – from 11.3 to 11.7 per cent. That’s the first increase since 1992.

While President Bush’s windfall tax breaks to the super-rich breezed through Congress (with Democratic help), the proposed rise in the minimum wage is frozen.

The proportion of children without health cover has increased from 63.8 per cent to 67.1 per cent. The poverty rate for children in the US is worse than in 19 ‘rich’ countries, according to a study by the University of Michigan.

Income statistics showed the first significant decline in average income among blacks in two decades; the white average also fell, and only Hispanics maintained their level.

Statisticians are struck by differences between this dive and the usual downward turns that accompany recessions. ‘The poor are trailing further behind than in the past,’ says Robert Greenstein of the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. ‘The increase in poverty is likely to be larger in 2002.’

Such is the power of money in Connecticut and its neighbours that the North-East was the only region in the country in which the mean income did not decline. But the price was paid here where Elm Street, after skirting the mock-Oxbridge walls and towers of Yale, twists abruptly into New Haven’s own nightmare.

Students have been given special maps, and advice not to venture past the CITGO gas station, where the ghetto begins. Houses are boarded up and gas stations take cash only – payable up front – and have bullet-proof glass and bars at the pay point. Sandwich and gift card stores also deal in Western Union money transfers, like the one Carl Robbins is sending back to his family in Kingston, Jamaica – $150 out of the $650 he grossed this week as a hospital janitor.

At the gas station on Dixwell Avenue, Everton Mayne gets his money back on a pack of Newport cigarettes because he has found the same pack down the road four cents cheaper. ‘You got to think about these things,’ he cautions.

Monica Osborn works in the operating rooms at Yale and New Haven Hospital, and in 11 years has increased her wage from $8 to $13 an hour (Connecticut calculates that $17 is the ‘liveable wage’). Recently her son suffered concussion and, although she works at a hospital, health insurance comes extra and she was caught out. Her employer docked the cost of treatment from her wages, leaving her to manage for two months on $300 for a family of four. ‘I can feel it getting worse,’ she says. ‘Trying to feed the kids, we all have two, maybe three, jobs. I do hair braiding to get by.’

Wages at the university are a little better, says Mark Wilson, who for years worked on the ancillary workforce before becoming an officer of the hotel and catering workers’ union that fought to close what it calls the ‘casual pipeline’ whereby the university would lay off employees the day before it was obliged to take them on staff.

‘I don’t actually wipe their butts,’ says Wesley Smith, earning $11 an hour loading a trolley full of students’ dirty laundry, ‘but I got to get clean what they wipe off.’

Yale is exempt from paying city taxes, except on commercial property it owns. But a consortium of community groups asked the university to donate a single day’s interest on its invested endowment – that’s $5.2 million – to the city’s public schools. So far, no response.

‘We just wanted some kind of partnership,’ says the Rev David Lee, who – as a graduate of Yale Divinity School – this year harvested enough signatures to seek election to the university board. He was seen off by the architect Maya Li, in what was regarded as a brazen snub to what Lee’s church calls ‘the host community’.

Dixwell Avenue is where Lee tries ‘to put a bit of hope back in people’s eyes that’s just been taken away’. He says: ‘I can feel it, just over the past year; people is sinking back down. It’s hard to keep people off drugs. It’s hard to tell people not to go to crime, when they made that extra effort to straighten out, then got beaten back down again. I had a man in my congregation come to me on Sunday saying his daughter who is 13 was considering suicide.’

There is now a brutally simple barometer of poverty in modern America: HIV.

At the Immanuel Baptist Church on Chapel Street, a few blocks from fancy restaurants where the young elite go for dinner, there was a service with a difference on Wednesday. The Aids Interfaith Network was commemorating the lives of 600 of its clients who have died of the disease since it was established 15 years ago.

Some of the congregation were living with HIV, a couple in wheelchairs; others were those who work with and for them. The network was set up by a group of churches to fill the abyss between a dire need and the malfunctioning of America’ commercial healthcare system.

Project director Joyce Poole says: ‘Aids has become the disease of the poor – 80 to 90 per cent of our clients are living below the poverty level; 15 per cent are homeless; most have not worked in years. Half are dually diagnosed with HIV and hepatitis C. If you can’t support yourself, you do it by other means, and those means are often criminal. Most of our clients have had at least one encounter with the Department of Corrections.’

Yet Connecticut’s Aids prevention budget has just been cut by 30 per cent – due, says America’s richest state, to the economic downturn. ‘This is a discourse,’ says Poole, ‘about poverty.’ And as America prepares to go to the polls, the gap between rich and poor is widening by the day.

Hard times

¡P One in 11 families, one in nine Americans, and one in six children are officially poor.

¡P The most affluent fifth of the population received half of all household income last year. The poorest fifth got 3.5 per cent.

¡P The official poverty line is an income of $18,104 pa (¡Z570) for a family of four. A single parent of two working full-time for a minimum wage would make $10,712 (¡Z46).

¡P 40 per cent of homeless men are veterans.

¡P Up to a fifth of America’s food, worth $31bn, goes to waste each year, with 130lb of food per person ending up in landfills.

———–