Express Cellular Phones

By GABRIELE MARCOTTI

Doncaster Rovers drew 0-0 at home with Watford Saturday in the Championship, the second tier of English professional soccer. Something – even a single point – is better than nothing for a last-place team like Doncaster. And when that something comes about with five of 11 starters who aren’t actually your players, well, some would say it’s an efficient use of resources.

Associated Press

Doncaster’s El-Hadji Diouf celebrates his goal with teammates during a Nov. 5 match.

Unlike American sports, soccer has long had a loan system. But never before has a club made it such an explicit part of its modus operandi. Those five Rovers starters technically belong to other teams.

“We put them in the shop window, we give them the opportunity to play, then, if another club comes in for them, we split the revenue, 40% to us, 60% to the selling club,” Willie McKay told the Guardian. McKay, a Monaco-based agent, is acting as a consultant to Doncaster and is responsible for arranging a number of the loan agreements, with more to come in January, when the transfer window re-opens.

When a club loans out a player, he joins another team for a fixed period of time, usually anwhere from a few months to a whole season. Terms vary. The clubs have to agree whether a loan fee is due to the parent club and who picks up the tab for the player’s salary. Specific clauses can be inserted into the deal, like the fact that the on-loan player can’t play against his parent club. (The most prominent example U.S. fans may recall happened when the Los Angeles Galaxy loaned David Beckham to AC Milan.)

Generally, loanees come in two categories (though Beckham, not for the first time, can’t really be categorized). Most are promising youngsters who are unlikely to get much playing time at their current club. Instead, they head to a smaller team or one that may have a specific need at that position. Imagine a baseball team with a veteran All-Star first baseman and a hot 22-year-old who has been tearing it up in Triple-A. They want to get their young prospect some playing time, but don’t believe he’ll really benefit much from another season facing Triple-A pitching. If loans were part of the baseball landscape, the team might choose to loan the up-and-comer to another team in the majors for a single season. That team gets an exciting hotshot for a year, the parent club saves money on his salary and the prize prospect gets a year to develop in the bigs.

The other category of loans is the vein McKay and Doncaster are trying to tap. These are players with guaranteed contracts who aren’t likely to get on the pitch much, usually because the manager doesn’t like them or they simply aren’t very good. They’re mistakes who can’t be erased. Usually clubs will try to sell them, even at a loss. But sometimes this is simply impossible because the player doesn’t want to take a pay cut, preferring instead to collect his paycheck and count down the days until he becomes a free agent. And so, if they can reach a deal, the parent club will loan the player out, usually to a smaller club that pays a portion of his salary.

When it works, it’s a win-win-win scenario. The loan club gets a player it could not otherwise afford. The parent club saves some money on salaries and, if the player does well and showcases his ability, has a greater chance of selling him. And the player gets to actually play and prove that he’s not a dud.

In Doncaster’s case, the club is getting the players for free and only paying some 10% of their salaries, with the parent club on the hook for the rest. One example is leftback Herita Ilunga, who had two years remaining on a $1.5 million-a-year deal at West Ham. Doncaster took him on loan in August and will only have to pay him around $150,000. If he plays well enough that someone wants to buy him at the end of the season, the club will get a 40% cut of the fee. If nobody makes an offer for him, hey, at least they got the services of a top-flight leftback at 10 pence on the pound.

What makes some uncomfortable is that this strategy turns Doncaster’s season into a giant exercise in window shopping. They say it’s no longer about building a team and trying to compete. It’s about bringing in assets who could appreciate in value and marketing them. Basically it’s a season-long combine.

The club responds to this by pointing to the bottom line. Doncaster played in the semi-professional Football Conference as recently as 2003. Since then, it has punched way above its weight, winning promotion to the Championship in 2008 and, miraculously, staying there on a shoestring budget. But with an average attendance of less than 10,000 and two historically big clubs like Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday some 20 miles away, making it work financially is difficult, and the club has lost money in the past two seasons.

“Let’s face it. We have trouble filling the stadium, the fans don’t turn up every week and we are losing money … so the bare facts are disturbing and we need a new financial model to help us survive – even prosper – with this new approach,” Doncaster chairman John Ryan said in a Q & A session with fans earlier this month.

Looking at the players the club has acquired thus far, it’s hard to see how Doncaster will actually make money via the “shop window” approach. Many – like Ilunga, former Aston Villa rightback Habib Beye or West Bromwich Albion striker Marc-Antoine Fortune – have contracts that expire at the end of this season or next. So even if they turn into worldbeaters overnight, they won’t fetch much of a transfer fee. McKay, however, maintains the real impact will be felt come January, in the next transfer window, when he’ll be able to bring in younger players from foreign clubs. (Championship teams are only allowed to make foreign loan signings during the summer and winter transfer windows, but they can take players on loan from other English clubs at any time.)

That said, even if Doncaster never gets any kind of revenue split for offering its shop window services, manager Dean Saunders still gets the benefit of guys he would never otherwise be able to afford. Many lower-division clubs elsewhere in Europe have survived – even thrived – with just such an approach, though for Doncaster fans it will take some getting used to.

Ultimately, what will really matter is performance. Doncaster is dead-last. If it gets relegated, fans will grumble. But if the McKay project works, then maybe supporters will get the hang of rooting for the shirt rather than the guy wearing it. Because their guy is not their guy at all. He’s just a ringer on a short-term lease.

Gabriele Marcotti is the world soccer columnist for The Times of London and a regular broadcaster for the BBC. His column appears on Sundays.

By NANCY DEWOLF SMITH

Apart from the beautiful horses, racing can be an ugly business, and because of the beautiful horses no sport is more heartbreaking. So be warned: HBO’s addictive new drama, set at and around the Santa Anita racetrack near Los Angeles, is designed to pull you into this tortured world and hold you there until you see the light. It’s hard to look away.

The cast is large and the show drops us into the stream of each character’s life without much explanation. Go with the flow until it begins to make sense. It will.

One main story revolves around “Ace” Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), a crime boss just out of prison; his chauffeur of many talents, Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina); and the Irish-bred horse Ace has stabled at the track with trainer Turo Escalante (John Ortiz).

Ace is bent on revenge against former associates, and his plan includes an investment in the track. The rest is left murky, however, so that when Ace hires the young financial whiz Nathan Israel (Patrick J. Adams), we cannot anticipate the young man’s real purpose in the story. Ditto the shy woman (Joan Allen) looking to start a center where prison inmates help rehabilitate sick or injured horses. Is that all she is?

The other central character in “Luck” is trainer-owner and breeder Walter Smith (Nick Nolte), who has poured all his hope and plenty of fear into a big, fast colt who is linked to Smith’s clouded past. This is a great role for Mr. Nolte, who gets to put a different spin on a character he portrayed in the movie “Affliction” and show us a battered man whose soul and capacity for love, or at least kindness, are still intact.

But the glory of “Luck” is that almost everyone in it has dramatic appeal. Usually, this is because we can see into their hearts. Take the novice jockey Leon. Played by Tom Payne, he’s a gentle innocent whose happiness only requires the opportunity to ride. Yet nature has given him a body that is bigger than it should be. The agony of his weight-loss running sessions in the California sun is so pitiable that it plays like tragedy.

On the upside is cheerful Rosie (Kerry Condon), an Irish workout rider who has a magical rapport with horses but is still struggling to get mounts as a race jockey. Her grace even in disappointment is more touching because her competition for a coveted job is Ronnie (real star jockey Gary Stevens), an alcoholic and drug-snorting former champ now trying to make a comeback.

Racing is still a man’s world, and track veterinarian Jo (Jill Hennessy) must be strong to stay honest in a business where a lot of people will do anything for an edge. Her job also means delivering bad news, a constant reality in thoroughbred racing, about a horse’s health. Jo is so tough, in fact, that when she does cry, we can hardly watch. And then there is jockeys-agent Joey, played to perfection by Richard Kind as a Pagliacci whose depression makes him seem pathetic but also sinister.

One of the series’ most remarkable achievements comes with the four characters who function as racing’s typical degenerate gamblers. Four men who live for the track, for the bet, and without hope of escape from the degrading boom and mostly bust nature of their addiction. At first, they appear in broad outline: the bitter and mean wheelchair-bound Marcus; the excitable and slow-witted Renzo; the ambitious and frustrated Lonnie; and the formerly handsome Jerry (Jason Gedrick), a masterful handicapper whose gambling addiction is terrible to behold.

As “Luck” progresses, however, this bedraggled gang, almost Shakespearean in its dramatic form and function, reveals a key to the entire series. The revelation begins when the men, watching a race, see an unfamiliar horse gallop to the finish with the strides and speed of a true champion. Such an animal is the miracle, the holy grail of the sport. All at once, the hard-core gamblers smile, their ravaged faces transformed by the joy of the moment. Watching a thing of beauty, able to appreciate its majesty, they themselves look beautiful.

There are many more moments of humanity discovered or restored in “Luck.” The most bizarre incident involves a suicide attempt gone wrong that rekindles a lust for life in a person who barely seemed worth saving. In another instance, a man compelled to commit murder signals regret with a redemptive flicker of his eyes.

There is much in this series that is gorgeous, like the sight of steam rising from a horse’s back while it is being soaped and washed after an early morning workout. There is a lot that is not pretty. After one scene of stunning violence, the possibility of more can’t be forgotten.

Strong writing and acting ensure that we soon become so sensitive to the characters that we feel for them the way they feel for their horses. This is a predictably searing experience in a venue like racing, where big dreams must usually be followed by crushing disappointment. When Nick Nolte’s character is watching his beloved colt run, Mr. Nolte’s body rises and sinks with the rhythm of its hoofbeats, and we are moved by the sight but filled with worry.

Yet most everybody keeps going. They rise every morning and, as one gamblers says, “step up to the plate” in the hope that one day will be better than the last. That is what “Luck” is really about. When all is said and done, the series is an invitation to play the game of life.

***

Take five perky and pink-clad sorority sisters from America (think “Legally Blonde”). Send them to England to recruit members of the first-ever sorority in the U.K. from among the denizens of a grimy industrial city and…. “Sorority Girls” is what reality television was made for. The setting helped guarantee a number of applicants with inelegant accents, heavy makeup and hard-drinking habits. Leeds is a site of the proverbial 19th-century dark, satanic mills of “Chariots of Fire” fame.

As rush interviews begin, the Americans can barely conceal their horror, for instance when a prospective new member of Sigma Gamma turns out to be a human pin cushion, with piercings on one hip, two nipples and various other parts. But they give other applicants high marks for trying: “Normally I’m not a fan of someone’s bra showing,” one American sister says. “But hers was cute and it did match her shirt.”

By LEE ROSENBAUM

Salem, Mass.

The paradigm-shifting “Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art,” at the Peabody Essex Museum, begins with a rude surprise: The first wall text that visitors encounter is a parental warning—breaking the mold of customarily child-friendly displays of totem poles and headdresses.

The eye-popping introductory work that “may not be suitable for young children” is Cree artist Kent Monkman’s fiercely satirical, homoerotic “Théâtre de Cristal” (2007), occupying the entire first gallery. It features a 14-foot-high “tipi,” fashioned from delicate strands of crystal beads, accompanied by an artist-written wall text parodying Caucasian ethnographers’ condescending descriptions of “noble savages.” Visitors entering the glitzy enclosure will be confronted by a fleetingly full-frontal silent movie in which the artist’s drag-queen alter ego, “Miss Chief Eagle Testickle” (sic), has “her” way with two white men—drunken hunks clothed (and unclothed) in loincloths. This heavy-handed, jejune exercise in score-settling, which resonates with the literal meaning of “shapeshifting” in Indian cultures (the ability to transform into other beings), is a jarring start to a thought-provoking show.

No newcomer to major exhibitions of Indian art, the PEM owns one of the most venerable (since 1799) and largest (15,000 objects) such collections, and is particularly strong in Northwest Coast art. Displaying 73 works from an international group of lenders, “Shapeshifting” drew many of its most important historical pieces from the PEM’s own trove. Two of its great treasures are a boldly patterned, finely woven fringed Chilkat blanket (c. 1832) and a subtly modeled, vibrantly painted Kaigani Haida female wooden mask, c. 1827, which the PEM received that same year from a seafaring captain.

“Shapeshifting” dutifully includes works by the traditional and contemporary artists who are regulars in Indian installations, including the celebrated potters Maria and Julian Martinez, from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, and Hopi artist Nampeyo, as well as the obligatory photo-bedecked Bently Spang contemporary take on the traditional Cheyenne warshirt. But the PEM has also unearthed some rarely displayed pieces, including (from the National Museum of Natural History) a painted hide shield cover from the Upper Missouri River (c. 1820) recording a Plains Indian’s trancelike vision of grizzly bear claws and (possibly) a rain of bullets.

Another seldom-displayed object is a peculiar pine-and-plaster “Sphinx” (c. 1875) by Simeon Stilthda, hauled out of storage at the British Museum for this show. This hybrid has an Egyptian-inspired headdress and forelegs, but a Haida-style face. It exemplifies one of the show’s underemphasized strengths—revealing the effect of cross-cultural influences on American Indian artists.

“Shapeshifting” shakes things up by eschewing the usual organizational principles of Indian displays—region, tribe, chronology, medium. Curator Karen Kramer Russell has instead opted for a thematic approach, mixing up pieces according to amorphous, overlapping rubrics: “Changing” (imaginative innovation); “Knowing” (beliefs and worldview); “Locating” (identity and place); and “Voicing” (self-expression, sometimes politically charged). This casts a new light on objects that have typically been admired more for their beauty, technical accomplishment and function than for the concepts, preoccupations and beliefs that they embody.

For example, one of the smallest but most ravishing works in the show—a Northeastern artist’s rare drawstring deerskin pouch from the late 1600s to mid-1700s—wasn’t merely a repository for tobacco. Its delicate porcupine-quill embroidery invested it with the power to “ensure the survival of [a hunter's] family and community,” as its label explains. The show’s catalog further elucidates the cosmic and spiritual symbolism of the design and decoration of the pouch, which regrettably is displayed so only one side can be savored.

The show’s strong video installations give it a fresh feel, illuminating how some Indians have reconciled their split identity, rooted in tribal traditions and the wider contemporary world.

Dance fans will delight in the ingenuity and artistry of “We Will Again Open This Container of Wisdom That Has Been Left in Our Care” (2006) by Tlingit/Aleut artist Nicholas Galanin. He orchestrates the convergence of two cultures, in two consecutive video clips—one showing David Elsewhere, a loose-limbed modern dancer, moving fluidly in his stark studio to a tribal song; the other showing Tlingit dancer Dan Littlefield, in mask and traditional raiment, stepping with rhythmic deliberation to a contemporary electronic score. Mr. Littlefield’s backdrop is a tribal community house’s traditional wooden wall screen, which Mr. Galanin helped to carve more than a decade ago.

Also riveting is Kevin Lee Burton’s “Nikamowin (song)” (2007), a syncopated paean to the beauty of the fading Cree language, accompanied by evocative video images that career through rural and urban landscapes. For me, the most moving work was by Iñupiaq/Athabaskan artist Erica Lord. This two-channel video meditation, “Binary Selves” (2007), ricochets between her alcoholic father’s frozen Alaskan hometown and the world beyond. Ms. Lord finds strength through traditional music, in a virtuosic throat-singing contest with herself.

Pigeonholing such richly nuanced works according to preconceived themes diminishes them. Ms. Russell chose monumental installations that embody all four of her themes to introduce and conclude the show—Mr. Monkman’s “Théâtre de Cristal” and, in the final gallery, Dunne-Za Nation artist Brian Jungen’s endearing yet conceptually complex “Cetology” (2002), a ceiling-suspended, 41-foot whale skeleton, uncannily constructed from plastic pieces of common lawn chairs and intended to evoke not only natural-history displays but also contemporary ecological concerns.

In fact, most of the PEM show’s offerings—not just its high-profile bookends—are open to multiple layers of interpretation. The achievement of “Shapeshifting” is to shift our notions of pots and pouches from alluring and useful objects to conveyors of personal and metaphysical wisdom.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes for the Journal on art and museums and blogs as CultureGrrl on ArtsJournal.com.

By JULIE V. IOVINE

New York

This city’s zoning codes regulating the size, use and location of buildings could sap the life force out of all but the most zealous urban enthusiasts. Their technical language is intelligible only to initiated bureaucrats—probably with pocket protectors—and a handful of canny developers, certainly with a gleam in their eye.

Or so it is believed. But times have changed and so has the New York City Zoning Resolution, which just passed its 50th anniversary last month. Once regarded with frustration and loathing, zoning in middle age is hot, the cougar of urban regulatory devices: more flexible and dynamic than ever. Actually, urban planners are more likely to invoke a thermostat metaphor—noting that zoning can raise or lower the habitability of the city by degrees. The layperson might also think of it as planning’s magic wand—an implementation technique, not an avoid-at-all-costs, manipulate-as-possible rule or regulation.

Chad Crowe

And in the Bloomberg administration, as wielded by the New York City Planning Commission and its director, Amanda Burden, zoning has assumed a more activist role than ever before. It not only shapes the blocks and writes the skyline, but also aims to curb obesity by offering incentives for fresh-food markets in low-income neighborhoods; buck up the mom-and-pop store; and promote an astonishing range of other quality-of-life benefits.

“Zoning has always concerned itself, for better or worse, with social matters, such as banishing noxious uses,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association. “What’s different now is that the planning commission is moving from zoning that’s negative on social issues to being positive, like mandating green markets and bike rooms. It’s reasonable for city government to encourage people to move in a beneficial direction. Whether zoning is the correct device is another matter. A market person might say it’s better to go with incentives than mandates.” As such, zoning is something of which every New Yorker and visitor ought to be aware.

It has all become very cosmopolitan. The city’s selective bus lanes were inspired by the rapid-transit bus system in Bogotá, Colombia; the newly accessible waterfront borrows its sociable seating arrangements from Sydney, Australia; even New York’s controversial bike lanes come by way of close attention to those in Copenhagen. By tweaking the number, type and location of everything from bus lanes to street benches, zoning makes places more welcoming to visit and inviting to use.

Last month, the planning commission submitted a new initiative to public review. Called Zone Green, it will promote energy efficiency by making it easier to add photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, greenhouses and shading devices to the roofs and sides of older buildings. On Jan. 3, Commissioner Burden introduced a zoning amendment that will preserve small shops on avenues with a residential character and force new banks on the Upper West Side to shift most of their services from extended street fronts to second-floor locations. “We want New York to be a walkable city,” Ms. Burden said, “with active, tree-lined streets and active retail frontages. This modest proposal will preserve that small-store character by allowing stores a maximum of 40 feet on the street.” Banks would have a tighter, 25-foot restriction.

Tom Angotti, an urban planner and director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning & Development, questions the significance of the planning-commission director’s emphasis on fine-grain maneuvers. “Amanda Burden brings a very personal touch because of her interest in design,” Mr. Angotti said. “But I would give greater weight to the directives coming from City Hall. Of the more than 100 rezonings in the past 10 years, most have been about creating opportunities for new real-estate development.”

As now practiced in New York, zoning and its achievements have become the envy of other cities, even Paris. For the first time in an almost 10-year run of urban design conferences held around the world, the French Minister of Sustainable Development selected New York and its zoning innovations for study. The event last July was subtitled “New York Reinvented,” and some 150 French and European mayors, urban planners, developers and architects toured such recent local triumphs as the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park and community regeneration projects in the Bronx.

“The resurrection of New York, hit in its very flesh and its pride by the September 11, 2001 attacks, is nothing short of astonishing,” wrote Jean-Louis Cohen in the program’s introduction. Mr. Cohen, a historian and one of the organizers of the event, added in an email that although zoning “was originally a German invention, it has been greatly perfected in New York City since 1916.” The elite European group, he noted, was especially keen on understanding New York’s sharp-cookie culture of negotiation and flexible regulation.

It wasn’t always such a success story. In 1916, New York City wrote into law the country’s first comprehensive Zoning Resolution. Designed to bring light and air down the street even as skyscrapers soared higher, the earliest zoning codes called for setbacks, and left it largely at that. More than 2,000 amendments followed, introducing such notions as superblocks in the 1940s—to limit density by spacing skyscrapers widely apart. In 1961, the Zoning Resolution was overhauled. Architect and historian Robert A.M. Stern recently called it “the pivotal postwar architectural event.”

Eighteen years in the making, the 1961 resolution almost immediately backfired with, among other missteps, its endorsement of the deadening tower-in-a-plaza motif that resulted in wide and windswept public spaces avoided by pedestrians, still in dreadful evidence along the Avenue of the Americas. Zoning in those days focused primarily on the bulk of individual buildings. It was not until the ’70s that it considered the larger context of whole neighborhoods by designating special districts—for theaters around Times Square; for retail on Fifth Avenue—and addressing more subtle issues such as economically diverse housing. At the same time, developers shrewdly learned how to swap public amenities for bigger buildings. Zucotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protestors gathered, was created in one such swap in 1968 but, unlike most other so-called privately owned public spaces, it was required to remain open 24 hours a day because its creation included absorbing an alley. Zoning became a game for poker sharks.

The current trend in moving zoning away from shaping big buildings toward how buildings and places are used and perform can already be seen at the recently opened East River Esplanade, where a balustrade as wide as a lunch counter and bar stools are mandated. While Mayor Michael Bloomberg is often portrayed as the developers’ friend, Ms. Burden has kept a steady eye on improving the public realm through the tools close to hand. “Zoning is not going to solve world peace,” she said in a recent interview. “But if we can figure out the issues now and address them, we can lay the foundations for the next administration so that what we start now will carry New York City into a better future.”

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

Corrections & Amplifications: An earlier version of this story indicated that both banks and retail stores on New York’s Upper West Side would have a store-front restriction of 25 feet.

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

New York

In the annals of American furniture before and after the Revolutionary War, the list of core names is brief and overwhelmingly English: Thomas Chippendale, the brothers Adam, Thomas Sheraton and George Hepplewhite are the designers whose work exerted the greatest influence on the American scene. But this pantheon also includes an American, the Scottish-born Duncan Phyfe (1770-1854), the young nation’s most celebrated and original cabinetmaker.

Phyfe and his design legacy represent the glory years of America’s post-Revolution expansion. And during the half-century of Phyfe’s career, New York City was at the center of that growth. This opulent and multifaceted oeuvre is the focus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Duncan Phyfe, Master Cabinetmaker.” Curated by Peter M. Kenny and Michael K. Brown, who are co-authors, with scholars Frances F. Bretter and Matthew A. Thurlow, of an exhibition catalog that is one of the handsomest in recent memory, the show is the first Phyfe retrospective in 90 years. And it offers a sumptuous visual cornucopia. Nearly 100 works from private and public collections—including pieces still owned by Phyfe’s descendants—document the craftsman’s mastery of evolving styles from Federal to Grecian to pillar-and-scroll Classical. Before retiring, Phyfe even put a reluctant toe into the Romantic atmosphere of Gothic revival and ebullient French rococo.

That the Met has not only assembled so many card tables, pier tables, worktables, sofas, chairs, mirrors and cabinet pieces but vividly placed them in their historical context is a curatorial triumph. For instance, a selection of pieces made for the wealthy New Yorkers Robert and Susan Donaldson is displayed with their portraits. Susan Donaldson is portrayed with her harp and one of a pair of Phyfe window seats. The actual pair of seats and the harp are displayed nearby. One of those seats bears Phyfe’s own label, dated July 4, 1826—not only the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but the day on which both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died and the composer Stephen Foster was born.

In addition, there are a number of surviving invoices for specific objects, as well as such related documents as Phyfe’s own surprisingly crude design sketches. By matching these with objects whose history is known, the exhibition and book strive to codify Phyfe’s evolving design traits to help scholars distinguish between the many unsigned Phyfe works and those by his imitators.

There is also Phyfe’s own chest of woodcarving tools, its beautifully veneered interior worthy of cabinetry for a front parlor, the elegantly beveled handle of each tool worn to mellow smoothness by years of use. The chest and its contents are effectively brought to life by a video of Phyfe’s workshop techniques, including veneering, carving and gilding.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A scroll-back armchair from 1807.

Classical proportion, balance and symmetry are Phyfe hallmarks. The delicate floral and cornucopia motifs carved on the crest rails of his earlier Federal period sofas and side chairs recall the work of the great woodcarver Samuel McIntyre of Salem, Mass. In Phyfe’s lyre-back chairs, the lyre features a key-ended tuning pin on the right side and a peg-shaped end on the left, suggesting an authentic musical instrument rather than a mere design motif.

Increasing pomp and opulence distinguish Phyfe’s work from 1815 to 1825, which features richly figured mahogany, kingwood, rosewood, white and colored marble, brass inlay, lavish gilding and finely cast mounts of ormolu (gilt metal). Stern-faced caryatids with gilded wings support card tables, above legs carved as muscular lions’ paws; gilded acanthus leaves curl around the pillars of center tables and sideboards. Several pieces by Phyfe are displayed near similar works by his chief rival, the French émigré Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1779-1819), possibly the only New York maker who could equal Phyfe’s finesse at carving and design. The exhibition shows these two artists dueling with ideas like fencing masters, influencing and sometimes even copying one another. Their competition prompted each to feats of virtuosity: On several tables made when the demand for exotic rosewood trumped Honduras mahogany, carved elements of solid mahogany are paint-grained to mimic rosewood. Only Lannuier’s premature death cut the tournament short.

In an age that lived precariously on credit, Phyfe always paid cash for his materials, laying in sufficient quantities of mahogany timber—known as “Phyfe logs”—to allow the sawed lumber to season far longer than was usual. Thus his tables rarely show cracks and loosened miter joints resulting from wood shrinkage over time. And as ornamentation grew more restrained in the later 1820s, Phyfe concentrated on the glories of large expanses of matched veneers. A notably restrained tilt-top center table is a masterpiece of veneering, the exquisite flame-grained figuration of the circular top achieved with a “book-matched” series of wedge-shaped veneer sections meticulously sliced from a single root crotch of a mahogany tree. This emphasis on veneer over carving characterizes much of Phyfe’s later output, and the inclusion of such veneered pieces as an imposing Grecian bedstead and monumental cheval mirror made in 1841 for an important South Carolina client also underscores Phyfe’s great popularity in the antebellum South.

Meanwhile, one of the lenders to the exhibition, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, has mounted a complementary show, “The World of Duncan Phyfe,” that features pieces lent by private collectors as well as works in the gallery’s own inventory. It was curated by two of the gallery’s principals, Elizabeth and Stuart Feld, who have written their own excellent catalog. The choice furniture is arranged among paintings, girandole mirrors, lamps, porcelain and silver that would once have been prized by the carriage trade knocking on Phyfe’s showroom door.

Because many pieces of so-called American Empire furniture were mass-produced by later, lesser makers than Phyfe and Lannuier, interest in collecting American Classical furnishings has been at a low ebb for several decades. As these refreshing shows reacquaint us with the dignified, sculptural beauty of the finest examples, they may help to reawaken delight in this important period of American design.

Mr. Scherer writes about the fine arts and music for the Journal.

By JEREMY HILDRETH

San Marino, Calif.

‘The people of America,” wrote the modernist architect Richard Neutra in 1948, “have found a new mode of living, and Southern California, the richest community in the world, is fostering the economical, colorful, casual California Way of Life that you may all enjoy.” One luminary of this postwar creative environment was Sam Maloof, the Chino, Calif.-born son of Lebanese immigrants who earned, within his own lifetime, a reputation as perhaps America’s greatest-ever furniture craftsman.

For six decades, Maloof toiled happily in his Alta Loma workshop, producing about 75 pieces of furniture a year. When he died in 2009, at age 93, he had a six-year backlog of orders. And while Maloof himself always affected an unflappable—and largely authentic—persona of the simple woodworker, his pieces became lauded as great art. One of his rocking chairs became the first piece of contemporary furniture in the White House; another sold for $75,000 in 2001, according to Ray Leier of del Mano gallery in West Los Angeles, a longtime friend and dealer of Maloof’s.

Alfreda Maloof/Maloof Foundation

Maloof’s furniture fused engineering and art through intuition and deathdefying technique.

“The House That Sam Built,” at San Marino’s venerable Huntington Library, includes 35 splendid examples of Maloof’s furniture. They’re arranged in domestic settings alongside paintings, sculptures, ceramics, enamels and other artworks by his Pomona Valley contemporaries, including his mentor, the painter Millard Sheets.

Out for the visitor to look at (but not to sit on, alas) are Maloof’s first sofa and some early chairs—flagrantly Danish in inspiration, but lithe and lovely in walnut, maple and the occasional exotic hardwood—and the prototype home-office furniture he fashioned for industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss created the Princess and Trimline telephones, among other renowned 20th-century designs; he was Maloof’s second customer. There are also coffee tables, side tables, music stands, bassinets, settees and barstools. (If Maloof ever made a bed, none is in evidence here.)

The piece that draws a crowd, though, is an armchair with a sign: “Please be seated,” an offer few visitors refused. Beholding folks settling into the spindle-backed number revealed Maloof’s genius. “Oooooh, it’s really comfortable,” said a pregnant lady, slumping into the seat with a sigh. A thin, short woman was equally appreciative: “It hits your back in just the right place. And my feet touch the ground.” A taller fellow agreed: “It’s amazing. It works no matter who you are. How did he do it?”

When an object is handmade, you can’t help but commune with its maker, a phenomenon Maloof reveled in. He wrote in “Sam Maloof: Woodworker” (1989), “Each time a person sits in one of my chairs, or at one of my tables, or opens one of my cabinets, I want him to feel that particular piece was made especially for him to use. Knowing this, there is enjoyment for both of us: maker and user.”

Moreover, he explained, “I try to make each of my pieces beautiful and pleasing; yet no matter how well designed and crafted, I want each piece to be useful. . . . I once tried a rocking chair in a New York museum and slid right out of it. I commented on this to the museum director, who chastened me, ‘Oh, Sam, you’re not supposed to sit on it. It’s just to look at.’”

Maloof’s philosophy harked back to a bygone age, according to Jonathan L. Fairbanks, a curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, when “the artist’s and the craftsman’s work formed the basic material matrix in the community. In general that does not happen today; buyers almost never meet producers.”

An exception to this, I realized, might be Apple. For when you buy an Apple product—and maybe this will change with Steve Jobs no longer the obvious animating spirit of the company—you feel like you know the guy who made it; this gives the product tangible humanity and enhances its appeal.

Like Jobs, Maloof aimed to imbue everyday objects with beauty and practicality, and recognized the role of intuition in achieving this. If an experimental product just didn’t feel right to use, or didn’t look good, Jobs would kill it off. When making a chair, said Maloof, “I do it all by eye. I do it by feel. I use the measure of my hand rather than a rule. . . . People have asked me how I go about developing a design. There are three things that I emphasize: eye, hand, and heart.”

And a fourth thing, too, I believe: guts. Watching a video of Maloof cutting compound curves freehand into blocks of wood with a band saw is like watching Jimi Hendrix play guitar or Evel Knievel jump fountains. His technique is convention-shattering, death-defying, mesmerizing. “I don’t recommend doing it this way,” he says in an old television documentary as he twists the wood into the saw, his fingers millimeters away from the relentless blade. (I wish a 60-second loop of that were on view at the Huntington.)

In this realm of craft, where engineering and art fuse together, a healthy perfectionism arises to keep the maker honest. “A chair leg may suddenly look a little heavy or a tabletop a little thick,” Maloof explained. “When they do, I change them.” Likewise, he said, “it does not matter how much work I have and how much pressure the client puts on me I maintain a steady pace. Not one piece of furniture leaves my workshop that I would be ashamed of.”

Would that we all managed to bring such care, pride and soulfulness to our work, and such excellence to our living spaces. That is the paramount lesson and inspiration of Sam Maloof’s life and woodwork, plainly visible in this Huntington exhibition.

Mr. Hildreth is an identity consultant to cities, countries and companies.

By JIM FUSILLI

San Francisco

After sound check at the Herbst Theater last month, Ryan Adams hurried to a nearby restaurant for a quick preshow dinner. Countless fans strolling toward the venue for his concert greeted him as if he were an old friend. One complimented him on his leather jacket, an Iron Maiden icon painted on its back, and Mr. Adams stopped for a brief chat. At the restaurant, the tables were filled with Adams fans. He sent one couple a bottle of champagne; their love blossomed, they had told him, while following him from city to city in the U.S. and overseas. Two women approached the table; all but blathering, they confessed their passion for his work as his coq au vin cooled.

Soon, Mr. Adams was back onstage, and a different side of his fans’ affection was revealed as they sat in reverent silence while he sang and played a lengthy solo set that leaned on “Ashes & Fire” (Capitol). The new album is a triumphant return to the quality standard the singer-songwriter set for himself earlier in his career.

Recorded with Mr. Adams playing his trademark Buck Owens red-white-and-blue acoustic guitar, surrounded by a sympathetic rhythm section and guests Norah Jones and Benmont Tench on keys, the easy-going album flows with smart, sensitive songs, which Mr. Adams delivered onstage with appealing ease.

For Mr. Adams, who turns 37 on Saturday, it has been a rocky journey to what seems a place of tranquility. When he emerged in 1994 as one of the founders of the alt-country band Whiskeytown, he seemed a legend-in-waiting—a successor to the late Gram Parsons, the former member of the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers. Mr. Adams’s fine solo debut in 2000, “Heartbreaker,” featured the talents of former Parsons partner Emmylou Harris as well as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Though the follow-up album, “Gold,” received a boost from the video for “New York, New York,” filmed four days before 9/11 and with the World Trade Center as backdrop, Mr. Adams grew unhappy with his label’s strategy for his career. Quarrels ensued. Meanwhile, Mr. Adams began a recording frenzy, cutting more tracks than the marketplace could absorb. In 2005 he released three albums, including two with his new band, the Cardinals. He then worked with Ms. Jones, the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh and Willie Nelson; issued heavy-metal recordings under the name Werewolph; wrote and published novels; and toured, recorded some more with, then folded the Cardinals. On occasion, his music was still rich. His gift remained undeniable.

He suffered physical setbacks: A broken wrist forced him to relearn the guitar, and his progressive hearing loss—the result of Ménière’s disease—is a real threat to his career. His physicians gave him pamphlets on reading lips. “I’m going deaf that fast,” he said, pointing to his right ear. Thus far, it hasn’t affected his ability to perform or record.

Still, throughout the conversation over dinner Mr. Adams remained in good cheer. In 2009 he married the actress and singer Mandy Moore, who appears on the new album. Walking back to the Herbst Theater, he said, “It’s nice to have someone to kick back the covers with.”

Though rich with love songs, “Ashes & Fire” was written without an overarching concept. “I wasn’t in the mindset of writing an album. I was just writing tunes,” Mr. Adams said. “I started to get a gaggle of them.” He played them for producer Glyn Johns. “I wasn’t sure where I was at.”

Mr. Johns, who has worked with the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, knew what the writer had. “Glyn said: ‘I’ll make it so you just sing and play the guitar,’” Mr. Adams recalled. The album was cut live; the only overdubs are Mr. Adams’s electric-guitar parts and a string section.

While Mr. Adams warned against viewing “Ashes & Rain” as autobiography, he acknowledged he was writing without anger. The ameliorating presence of Ms. Moore in his life, the ease with which he created the new album and his fans’ fervor have given him a sense of contentment.

As a writer, he said, “I couldn’t say the things I used to say anymore. That doesn’t cut it. I can’t lock in on the darker side of my psyche. I’ve got this beautiful stupidity since all this sunshine came into my life.”

Now, when darkness appears in a new lyric, it doesn’t mean he’s down. “I’m writing songs saying I’m walking through all these places I’m describing and it’s not touching me.”

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock

By DAVID LITTLEJOHN

Berkeley, Calif.

There are three things to keep in mind about “Desdemona,” a collaboration of writer Toni Morrison, Malian composer/singer Rokia Traoré and director Peter Sellars that had its U.S. premiere here last week and begins its two-night New York run on Wednesday.

First, this project, which opened in a suburb of Paris last month, after previews in Vienna and Brussels, has very little to do with Shakespeare’s “Othello,” although it borrows names, events and lines from the original.

Second, Ms. Morrison and Mr. Sellars have transformed the maid of Desdemona’s mother in Shakespeare’s play into Desdemona’s nurse, nanny and closest childhood friend—and a black African slave. What Mr. Sellars calls a “little-known fact”—that Desdemona was raised by a black African slave, which helped pave the way for her marriage to Othello—is simply not justified by Shakespeare’s text. The claim is based on the word “Barbary,” the name the woman is given in some modern texts of or references to “Othello.” But centuries of scholars and readers have assumed that the character’s name is just a variant of Barbara, and many editions call her just that. In the First Folio (of 1623), when the editors want to refer to Africa they use the word “Barbary” (Iago calls Othello a “Barbary horse”). But when they refer to the maid of Desdemona’s mother, the text reads “Barbarie”—a nickname, like Barb’ry (or, in Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Barbary) Allen, of the old Scottish folksong.

Third, Ms. Morrison’s text is highly polemical, in ways that Shakespeare never dreamed. (Such a twist is almost universal in Mr. Sellars’s productions of classic plays and operas.) It is single-mindedly feminist, even antimale, throughout. Mild, innocent, docile Desdemona comes off as an angrier Gloria Steinem or Susan Faludi. The text is also, of course, antiracist and (toward the end) heavily, abstractly antiwar, with the blame for these evils placed squarely on men. One of the stories with which Othello won Desdemona’s heart, we are told, was that of the Amazons. An Amazon must remain a virgin until she kills her man. Then she washes her face in his blood, makes a belt of his intestines and a throne of his bones. Desdemona longs to be one of them.

The stage is bare, except for five little floor altars made of bars of white light surrounded by empty bottles and glasses. On the black backdrop (along with colored lines of neon) appear large, white supertitles for some (but not all) of the songs sung in Bambara by Ms. Traoré and her backup trio—three sleek African Supremes who writhe and chant in unison. On this screen are also projected—needlessly, distractingly—the lines clearly and eloquently read by Tina Benko, the blond American actress who plays Desdemona, recalling her life from the Afterlife, when “I can speak at last.” Two men sit off to the left playing African stringed instruments. Everyone is dressed in white, the five women in identical shoulder-and-arm-baring long gowns of woven Malian cloth.

Desdemona spends the first half hour of the unbroken two-hour show filling in the back-story of her life before she met Othello. She despised her upper-class, convention-bound Venetian upbringing, and could escape only in the fantastic stories that her beloved Barbary told her of exotic places and other gods, unruled by men and custom. After Barbary died—the victim of a broken heart—Desdemona’s father plied his child with local suitors. Desdemona rejected them all. She longed for “a wider world, seas beyond our canals.” One evening Othello, the new African commander, came to dinner, and she saw in his eyes “a gleam like Barbary’s.” They danced, and she felt “we had known each other all our lives.” Ms. Traoré and her trio respond like a wild Greek chorus: Only your anger, your rage, your fury, they warn Othello, can destroy the one you love. In a moving meeting in the Afterlife, Desdemona and Barbary (now acted as well as sung by Ms. Traoré) thrash out the truth. (“You were my best friend.” “I was your slave.”) Barbary ends by singing the melancholy “Willow Song” that she taught Desdemona as a girl.

Ms. Morrison’s version goes off the tracks when she tries to explain Desdemona’s and Othello’s marriage, and its tragic end. Othello never believed Iago’s lies for a minute, we are told (there goes Shakespeare’s plot), but killed his wife because it was his nature to kill—he took pleasure in rape and destruction, and he could not bear the false image of himself with which Desdemona had fallen in love. I see no way to make this reconception credible, but the creative team could have dropped 15 minutes of the droning, repetitive music from the second half and the entire offstage (and uncredited) speech of Cassio near the end.

Despite my objections to the radically altered premise—that the story of Othello has nothing to do with deception and jealousy, and everything to do with the cruel nature of men—there is much to admire in “Desdemona,” notably the performances of the two leads. Stick-thin, her spine rigid, her hair close-cropped, Ms. Traoré has a voice that can leap from a low, keening wail to a high warbling cry. Ms. Benko’s voice is slow and controlled, whisper-soft (except when she is angry) but always audible. She does justice to the author’s often richly poetic text, and plays many characters well—Desdemona, Othello, both their mothers and Desdemona’s lady-in-waiting, Emilia—often in conversations with one another in the Afterlife.

Mr. Littlejohn writes for the Journal on West Coast events.

By LARRY BLUMENFELD

Los Angeles

In 1977, violinist Leroy Jenkins asked Wadada Leo Smith to compose a piece for his group. Already a daring trumpeter who used silence as much as sound to communicate ideas, Mr. Smith had by then also laid the groundwork for the personalized language that defines his compositions today—informed but not constrained by jazz, and distinguished most starkly by a flexible approach to rhythm. He named the piece he handed Mr. Jenkins “Medgar Evers,” after the slain civil-rights activist. In 1998, a commission from Southwest Chamber Music, based in Pasadena, Calif., inspired Mr. Smith to compose a string quartet. Again, his title paid tribute to a significant figure in the civil-rights struggle: “Rosa Parks.”

That string quartet was a riveting highlight on Friday during Mr. Smith’s “Ten Freedom Summers,” a 21-piece work that spanned three nights in premiere at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Redcat) in Los Angeles. Halfway though Saturday’s program, “Medgar Evers,” now scored for chamber ensemble, signaled a mood shift, from tense to triumphant. “Ten Freedom Summers” is named for a 10-year stretch, from the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional to the “freedom summer” voter-registration drive and Civil Rights Act of 1964. It also traces Mr. Smith’s life as a composer through 34 years—from “Medgar Evers” to his tribute to John F. Kennedy, written just last month—to form a personal reflection on the legacy of the civil-rights movement from a musician, born in Leland, Miss., in 1941, who came of age as that history took shape.

It can also be heard as a statement of artistic empowerment. Like his colleagues formatively affiliated with Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, Mr. Smith blends improvisation and form in ways that elude genre categorization. At the Redcat, his Golden Quartet, one of several groups he regularly leads, was assembled stage right, the nine-member Southwest Chamber Music ensemble stage left. In between might have stood the forbidding divide that damns most supposed “jazz-meets-classical” endeavors. Here, several pieces were played by one ensemble while the other sat silent, which could have invited uneasy tension or a dissociation of parts.

No such thing occurred, owing largely to Mr. Smith’s Golden Quartet, which adheres to jazz convention only through instrumentation. Drummer Susie Ibarra, bassist John Lindberg and pianist Anthony Davis played mere fragments of anything resembling jazz’s swinging pulse; rather, they embodied Mr. Smith’s concept of “rhythm units,” which can at first sound undefined but eventually—especially through such an expansive program—prove elastic enough to convey finely calibrated tensions and releases. The Southwest ensemble’s familiarity with Mr. Smith’s approach—it returned to his 1998 piece, “Rosa Parks,” for a 2009 recording—and music director Jeff von der Schmidt’s longstanding embrace of adventurous repertoire afforded both common purpose and shared literacy.

Mr. Smith’s Golden Quartet is a wondrous vehicle for his intent: Its performance of “America, Parts 1 & 2″ within Sunday night’s program would have anchored a satisfying club engagement. The sections combining ensembles—as a double quartet, or all 13 musicians—brought novel pleasures, such as the way the strings responded to Ms. Ibarra’s staggered beats. Saturday night ended with a breathtaking moment, when an extended passage from Ms. Ibarra and percussionist Lynn Vartan, playing timpani, abruptly stopped and the sound dissolved into a soft wash of strings. Occasionally, violin glissandi referenced both contemporary classical technique and the bent tones of the blues. Mr. Smith suggested jazz in subtler ways; his music, built on cells of melody and harmony that combine in ever-shifting fashion, created the feel of improvisation through notated parts while also sneaking the chamber musicians out of any strict sense of meter. There were impressive solo passages, especially by Messrs. Davis and Lindberg, and violinist Shalini Vijayan. But mostly this was communal music, with interlocking parts, contrasting timbres and harmonic convergences that lent weight and meaning.

Mr. Smith will celebrate his 70th birthday in December with a two-night stand featuring six different ensembles at Roulette in Brooklyn, N.Y. “Ten Freedom Summers” was as striking a display of his expansive vision and his vitality. He still plays trumpet as he always has: with little vibrato and a tone that can be either boldly declarative or soft to the point of breaking. His phrases range from skittering leaps of intervals to single notes repeated as long tones. In a work dedicated to nonviolent struggle, his most emphatic moments were often his softest. Which is not to say he lacked fire. During Sunday night’s performance, when a succession of slow and broken phrases threatened to deflate the mood, his playing grew fierce. As if summoned, his Golden Quartet quickly matched that intensity.

“Ten Freedom Summers” had a visual component too. Brief avant-gardish black-and-white films preceded each concert to bracing effect. Documentary photographs—Malcolm X, a protest march—were occasionally projected on a screen above the musicians; these seemed overly literal. During other stretches, abstract shapes morphing in real time to the music posed an opposite problem, an absence of meaning. After Sunday’s final piece, a recorded snippet of Martin Luther King Jr. was played, from his 1968 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Mr. Smith needn’t—shouldn’t—have included this. However inspirational is King’s voice, however elemental his message, Mr. Smith had made his own statement through instrumental music. And it sounded complete.

Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal.