News Archives

Upcoming.org, to be Flicalendr

Upcoming.org, which Yahoo bought and has since upgraded substantially, is a wonderful and visionary concept of Local + RSS + User-created + Social. I love it! Now if I could plug it more intimatley into my calendar/world somehow...though the hooks into Y! Cal, My Y!, etc are pretty decent.

If I were free tonight

I would do this:
DJ
Ian Svenonius and Calvin Johnson
Tue 8.22 (9pm) SubTonic (107 Norfolk St, 212.358.7501) map

Event Info
Ian Svenonius started Nation of Ulysses and now fronts psyched-up glam band Weird War. Calvin Johnson invented "twee" with Beat Happening and founded K Records so his like-minded wimpster buddies could play, too. Best celebrity DJ set ever. (TG)
--
But I'm not free tonight. So I'm not going. :(

"Save My Hard Drive"

See that little link on the right? It says "save my hard drive". You might wonder why it's there.

It's a spam blog. I posted a bunch of random, other people's comments on hard drive data recovery. There are some Yahoo! ads on there - and they generated $1-2 per day in revenue! I get about $30 per month from Yahoo for that collection of crap.

Now, it's not a lot. But it pays the cable bill. It's really amazing. Imagine if you spent all your time pursuing these little ideas that appear occasionally. That spam blog to 30 min to make a few months back. If I kept creating things like that, keep multiplying them, kept creating new ideas...surely it would be worth a lot more than the day job. Unless the day job is itself such a big idea!

Tom Sanford's new blog

Formerly

Caught up with an old chum today. Over the years, I have not just grown apart from longtime, oldtime friends - I have positively separated from them. Childhood, high school, college companions. In every group I have a few "do not touch" types.

It's too bad since it does spoil the water it sits in, so to speak, and when you decide someone in particular is out, then you end up leaving out a few others.

But it's good to catch up with folks from time to time and see how it all has gone.

I realize that things have gone quite surprisingly for me too, and that there are now big distances between me and my natural peers.

My "second" line

I have two phones, one of which is Cingular because I roam a lot. I'm about to reconfigure this arrangement and thought I'd reflect for a moment on the crazy bills I pay for this service.

05/25/2006 $181.54
04/30/2006 $470.15
03/25/2006 $212.92
02/12/2006 $485.90
01/25/2006 $260.57
12/25/2005 $274.62
11/25/2005 $296.88
10/25/2005 $288.98

Remember the neediest

I gave my $. Give yours.

With $4 Billion, Columbia Raises Fund-Drive Ante - New York Times

Though they mention Columbia's endowment is "only" worth $5.2 (vs. Stanford's 12 and Harvard's 25), I would note that the real estate must be worth a ton.

Colbert kills

YouTube - Stephen Colbert goes to Washington, and kills it.

My 4.8 mi journey

The weather is picking up and it feels OK to be on long runs again.

See the route

Iceland!

Believe it. I just got back from a weekend in wintry Iceland.

Reykjavik is actually quite nice this time of year. Never quite as cold as NY can be, but that way for longer. They eat puffins. The city is heated by underground hot water geysers. People sell their friends toilet paper to raise money for charity.

Above, one of the "Bjork bars" where the kids flaunt progressive dance and wait for her. More pictures

Tom Sanford's new show at Leo Koenig

We're proud of little T-top!

Amp'd, Virgin

It's fun to hear the latest gossip in the MVNO world. Apparently Virgin is suing Nokia (for their own failings...a strategy that led to huge transshipments last year, and losses). And Amp'd is a hothouse.

Supposedly an email that was sent by the CFO to absolutely everyone associated with Amp'd (including Verizon...VCs...etc)

Subject: Amp'd Mobile Confessions

Hi all,

After much thought and soul searching, I've decided to share
with you some sensitive information about our company and
myself. The reason I am doing this, is because I am
concerned many of our business practices to date have been
highly unethical and in some cases even illegal.

We have misrepresented information to the press, investors
and all of you. And as a result I fear the senior management
of Amp'd Mobile has put the company (all of you) at risk.

First let me begin by confessing that Lyn Tran and I had an
ongoing relationship together while she was employed at the
company. I am guilty of taking advantage of my position and
forcing it upon her to be in an intimate and sexual
relationship with me. I have lied to her, used her,
manipulated her, and threatened her. And I am now done. I
have decided to move on and be with a new girl I met during
my trip to the CES show in Las Vegas, Ana Martires. So I
decided to manipulate and lie to Lyn, which ultimately
resulted in her leaving Amp'd. She is planning a large
lawsuit against Amp'd and myself. Unfortunately, my plan to
be with her did not work out, and that is one of the reasons
I am writing this letter of confession.

Secondly, we have not been equally fair to all of the
investors that we have been working with. We've been
inconsistent with regard to ROI across each investor. There
are so many details, I don't know where to begin. Let's move
on to the important topics though. I can't help but think
that Peter Adderton is getting way too much equity in the
company for his over rated management skills and lack of
strategy and guidance. Clearly his motivation is to cash out
when we sell the company or get bought (as am I). I will be
walking away with a measly $3.8 mill.
That does not nearly satisfy me. Further, Bill Stone's
$400k salary is absurd! As is Adrian Hunter's $160k salary.
Adrian does not deserve that level salary, especially after
having left the company. He went back to Australia to chase
his wife after she discovered he was having an affair with
his best friend's wife! Loser. Larry Mattera is definitely
overpaid for what he contributes to the company. Geoff
Fishman, you really don't deserve to be here! I mean you
can't even close the Best Buy deal by yourself and you call
yourself a Senior Vice President?! Doug Molyneux, why should
I walk across the entire building to see our in house
counsel, when I have a lawyer just a finger and a button
away on my speed dial? I don't think you need to be here.
You are just a waste of space.

Everyone should learn from my mistakes. Including you Julie
Dodd Thomas, what in the world were you thinking when you
asked Chris Houston back to your room in Las Vegas?! You're
married with kids for Christ's sake!
This company is full of lying, deceiving, manipulating, and
womanizing men. I am ashamed that I can relate to all of
that. Not to mention the financial antics... kind of reminds
me of the Enron disaster.

I would like to say it's been a pleasure working with each
and every one of you. And I wish you all the best in the
future, and with any luck we'll get through this.

Derek Andersen
CFO

Movie trailer remixes

The new thing, for the next 5 minutes.

Myspace.biz

Use LinkedIn. It's just like Friendster circa 2003. Small but growing fast...and very closed. Lots of uptight "need to be linked" to add a friend. Why? Who really cares? Nobody puts their credit card number on there anyway.

Reverse the model. Let everyone connect to everyone. A la Myspace. Make linking easy, common, open.

You might just get the Craigslist of jobs. Good bye recruiters... You'd be making the world a better place. Unlike Myspace.

ESPN Mobile to die?

It takes time for complex products to catch on, so the forecast of death for this thing are premature. (Though someone should have mentioned to the ESPN Superbowl media buyers that this was the case, i.e. that big splashy ads were essentially wasted on niche, high-touch sale products.)

I wonder just how much negative publicity will pile on this thing and crush any chance it might have had -- Mossberg's review has been interpreted as a "slam" by most people I've talked to, the price tag is universally breathtaking, here is this very negative attitude (and a mirror image one in Gizmodo)....what does it take to send something into the tailspin (of things like New Coke).

The issue, at bottom, is whether even sports nuts want the damn thing.

One Guy Has An ESPN Phone (And It Doesn't Even Work) - Deadspin

One Guy Has An ESPN Phone (And It Doesn't Even Work)

Click logs - a test

I am trying something out. The links on this page (possibly from this point down, but I'm not sure) should show you how often they have been clicked today.

Use these buttons

Use these buttons for a good time.

Music "windowing"

The movie guys have exploited new media to push release "windowing" in a highly efficient scheme of price discrimination: suckers pay $10 per head to see it in theaters, enthusiasts pay $10 per copy to see it on DVD, and all the way down to cheapskates who suffer ads to see the Broadcast Premiere.

Music: the time is nigh. CDs, tapes, records used to all appear at once at vaguely similar prices. Well, online-burn vs. online subscription vs. CD is the first meaningful separation. Now you'll be able to buy the album in stores for $17, buy at track for 0.99 per track around that same time, and wait a bit to get it on your unlimited subscription service.

The subscription services are like "cable TV" for music.

My music lately

Let's see how this embedded Google Video works

Funny?

Wow! Unobtrusive. Friendly even. Made for bloggers...

Argentina

Just got back from a great trip to Buenos Aires and Punta del Este, Uruguay (the favorite beach destination from BA). Summer in January is pretty great!

Pictures

When you go to BA, do this:
* a drink at the bar in the Faena Hotel and dinner at the Brasserie (or perhaps the unicorn room)
* steak at Cabana Las Lilas is pretty great
* shop in Palermo Soho (Felix is a great store for men's clothes)
* drinks in Palermo Soho (Bar 6), snack at Mark's Deli
* lunch in Palermo Hollywood (e.g., supercool Olsen)
* walk around the Buenos Aires Design center and the next-door Recoleta cemetry
* if you come at the right time (not in January...), watch soccer or polo
* go to the clubs sometime after 2:30am (e.g., Opera Bay is a big represenative one)
* the big antique/second-hand fair in San Telmo (esp. Sunday)
* dance the tango (lesson) at Cafeteria Ideal in downtown
* eat a churro (yummy like a donut)
* stay at a cool design hotel (not an international brand) and pay only ~$100/night (for a suite...)
* 1 hour flight to Punta for a great beach fun (other options too)
* apparently, if you have time, things like the mammoth Iguazu Falls, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, etc are great too. But we passed on all that for some relaxation in BA

At Punta

Our Southern Summer holiday in BsAs has been great, and we are currently on a little shore excursion to Punta, where the glamorous apparently go. Unbelievably beautiful weather and a great coast. The people...well, they'll change your impressions of Miami as temple of sun- and silcone-worshipping excess.

Pictures to come later, but for now check out PuntaDigital.com

Sprint EVDO

Using this for about a week now. Just took it roundtrip to DC on the Acela train as well.

Fast! Claims about 1Mbps up and down most of the time. And the bandwidth tests online seem to substantiate it.

Pretty great for web browsing and email. The images get slightly compressed (which is fine with me - I wish they had that as an option at home on my cable broadband actually).

Tried to stream music from Yahoo! (per the above image), and boy that was terrible. Was worse than being on dial-up. Of course, I didn't tell Y!'s music engine to downshift the bitrates. Maybe that would improve the quality. But it kept buffering and then losing synch. Oh well. But I'm on the way to not needing cable broadband anymore...watch out you DSL vs. Cable myopics. The nuclear option is starting to hit: wireless broadband. And that's even without WiMAX on the scene.

When to drink a French 75

When to drink a French 75


Originally uploaded by asarva.

Gin and... Champagne. With a bit of lemon. Refreshing summer drink. A bit funny and lacking character in winter.

The makings of disaster

Amp'd creating original content

Lots of $$$ invested, few reasons to buy

Imagine if HBO had to sell you a $500 device to get you to watch

This old blog, its new feed

Announcing: the modernified xml feed for this blog. (Also for the Yahoo tech blog.)

Watching movies on the go

You can watch movies (any kind really, esp if you use PocketDivxEncoder) on your Treo. Here is Twin Peaks.

See a video of how it works

Kehinde 2

I never realized that Kehinde Wiley is only 28 -- and already with a solo Brooklyn Museum show, a cover of Art in America, VH1 award show commissions, and so on. I also think the very recent look of Yankee hats with fleur de lys and other decorative patterns has a lot to do with his stuff.

The next president of...

Saw Joe Biden at Nello's on Madison and 62nd tonight

Solution to an annoying Palm Treo problem

Problems with bluetooth, hotsync, treo. Finally found a solution.

Main lesson: after all these years, Microsoft operating systems still suck. Add something slightly new, unanticipated, and all hell breaks loose and mysteries abound. In the lawless MS world, there is no decisive authority...no solution to ultimately turn too. There are unreliable vendors, MS guys, discussion boards, hardware guys. It sucks.

Here is one hint:

Thank you for contacting Palm Technical Support. My name is Rocely and I will be assisting you on this issue. I understand that you are not able to perform a HotSync® operation and receive an error message displaying 'Unable to initiate HotSync operation because the port is in use by another application’.

This issue might be caused by some other applications that is currently been using the same port with your handheld. To resolve this issue, we advise you to first disconnect the HotSync cable, reboot your computer and perform a soft reset with your handheld. Please proceed below for the detailed procedures to perform a soft reset and creating a new connection on your handheld.

Windows 2000/XP
Click Start, point to Settings, click Control Panel, and then double-click System.
On the Hardware tab, click Device Manager.
Double-click Ports (COM & LPT).
Double-click the appropriate COM port.
Click the Port Settings tab.
Click Advanced.
Make sure that the FIFO Enabled box is NOT selected.
Exit the Control Panel and reboot your system.
Perform another HotSync operation.
In addition, ensure the following:

The correct COM port is free on the PC through the device manager.
The Cradle is securely plugged into the correct COM port.
Local is selected in the HotSync Manager.
The correct port is selected in the HotSync Manager.
PERFORM A SOFT RESET OF YOUR HANDHELD
Important information:

Always attempt a HotSync® operation prior to resetting the device.
When performing any of the resets listed below, a 'Reset Tool' will be required. Use the tip of an unfolded paper clip, unscrew the top end of the stylus, or use a similar object without a sharp tip.
If using a Palm handheld that includes the slider feature, opening this will reveal the reset hole.
Performing a soft reset

A soft reset tells your Palm to stop what it's doing and start over again. All records and entries stored in your handheld are retained with a soft reset. After a soft reset, the Palm logo screen appears, followed by the 'Preferences' screen.

To perform a soft reset:

Use the reset tool (described above) to gently press the reset button located inside the hole on the back panel of your handheld.
If after performing a Soft Reset, you still encounter the same error, you may need to create a new connection for your handheld.

CREATE A NEW CONNECTION

To create a new connection:

1. Tap on the “Home” icon of your handheld.

2. On the upper right hand corner of your screen, make sure that “All” is selected.

3. Look for the “Prefs” icon and tap on it.

4. On the Prefs application, choose “Connection”.

5. Click on the “New” button near the bottom of the screen.

6. On the “Name field”, type PALMTOPC as the name of the connection.

7. On the “Connect to” field, select PC.

8. On the “Via” field, select CABLE.

9. Tap on the “OK” button.

10. On the HotSync window of your handheld, below the HotSync icon, tap on the pull down arrow and choose the name that you have just created

If the problems persist after performing the steps above, proceed with the steps below.

1. Delete the ConnectionMgr50DB.pdb,

q The default path would be “C:\ProgramFiles\Palm\\Backup”

2. Reboot computer.

Here is another hint:

The first problem that I ran into was getting my BT adapter to work; I kept getting the error message “Bluetooth device could not be found.” I do a lot of removing this and installing that so I though I had screwed up my COM ports bad enough that I couldn’t get the D-Link 120 adapter I have to install right. It turns out, and I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear this, it was a Microsoft issue! Today I just happened to come across this link (http://mytreo.net/forum/index.php/topic,18729.msg158400.html#msg158400) (thanks Tekara!) and the rest was downhill from there. Turns out there’s some issues with the Service Pack 2 BT stack and (insert technical mumbo jumbo here)… Long story short, if you’re having trouble getting your BT device to install or work properly and you haven’t done this yet, give it a shot.

And some of the other links I used on my quest:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=840635
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=8&TopicId=2200
http://shadowmite.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Oh it was painful.

3. Perform a HotSync operation.

Tom Sanford, Kelli, and Leo in the New Yorker

The New Yorker: Fact

SALESMAN
Days and nights in Leo Koenig’s gallery.
by NICK PAUMGARTEN
Issue of 2005-10-17
Posted 2005-10-10

Of the many moments that may have moved Leo Koenig to become an art dealer, the one he’d choose, if he had to choose one, is an encounter he had eight years ago, when he was twenty and living with three roommates—two Lithuanians and a German—in an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He’d come to New York from Munich a few months earlier, in part to avoid military service in Germany. One night, another Lithuanian stopped in, an artist named Aidas Bareikis. They had dinner and then began drinking vodka. After a while, Koenig suggested that they try snorting the vodka instead, which can be rough on the nasal passages but in this instance had the desired effect of fostering an atmosphere conducive to the telling of life stories.

Bareikis, who was twenty-nine, had a good one. In 1985, as an art-school student in Vilnius, he’d been drafted into the Soviet Army. After two months, a Soviet general paid his unit a visit. There was a uniform inspection, and Bareikis was found to be wearing an undershirt on which he’d painted the Lithuanian flag. He was sent to the brig—solitary confinement in a pitch-black cistern buried in the ground—and then to a mental hospital, where doctors could not find evidence that his affection for his native republic had anything to do with madness. He was shipped off to Afghanistan, to fight the mujahideen. At first, he didn’t see combat, but he did see, while loading trains bound for Russia, some of its results: caskets, quadriplegics, amputees. He came across a mangled helicopter covered in soldiers’ blood. Later, his convoy was ambushed, and he spent three days and nights behind a rock, pinned down by enemy fire. He told himself, “I’ve got to go back to art school.”

Bareikis and a few other Baltic draftees began scrounging for pencils and grinding the graphite into powder, which they inhaled through their noses in an effort to poison themselves. They also tried rolling fingernail parings into their cigarettes and depriving themselves of sleep. After a couple of weeks of this, Bareikis, delirious and suffering from high blood pressure, was ordered to see the unit’s medical officer, who was instantly suspicious. “Are you faking it or not?” he asked Bareikis. Bareikis decided to tell the truth, and the officer decided to help him. Bareikis was hospitalized and declared unfit for combat. Eventually, he returned to Vilnius, finished school, won a Fulbright, and, in 1992, made his way to New York, to pursue an M.F.A. He spoke almost no English. For money, he did construction and demolition work. He was often homeless. He found that if he slept in a tree in Central Park no one would bother him. For a while, he squatted in a loft in SoHo; on the same day he got evicted, he learned that he’d won a green card in the State Department’s immigration lottery—an experience that became the inspiration for a piece titled “You Have Fifteen Minutes to Leave,” which, like most of his work, was a gaudy and monstrous sculptural installation of found or shoplifted materials. In general, his work was hard to sell, and even harder to look at, but in some circles he acquired a reputation as a sort of a beacon—the genuine article.

Koenig considers the night he met Bareikis to be one of the best of his life. They stayed up past dawn and became fast friends. Months later, when Koenig mentioned to Bareikis that he was looking for something adventurous to do, a way to bring people together and have a little fun—he was thinking of opening a restaurant—Bareikis told him, “No, you should do a gallery.” Koenig did, and in his inaugural show he exhibited a work by Bareikis called “Embarkation for Cythera” (after Watteau). The gallery was in Williamsburg. Koenig and Bareikis transported the installation, disassembled and crammed into garbage bags, from Bareikis’s studio by bicycle. On the day of the opening, they sat alone in the gallery, waiting for people to show up. To allay their anxiety, they started in on the mountain of beer they’d stockpiled for the occasion and eventually sank into a stupor in a back room. Hours later, they came to and discovered that the gallery was full—some seven hundred guests, if Koenig recalls correctly. Art revellers spilled into the street. Among them was Klaus Biesenbach, the chief curator at P.S. 1, who liked the work enough to include Bareikis in an exhibition of emerging artists. Bareikis’s installation at P.S. 1, “Yellow Peril, Friendly Fire,” was purchased for thirteen thousand dollars by an eccentric collector from Berlin. It was Koenig’s first sale.

Koenig likes this version of his beginnings because it accentuates the wildness of the early days, the serendipity and the cheek. It also camouflages the significance of his birthright. Koenig’s father, Kasper, is the director of the Museum Ludwig, in Cologne, and is one of the most prominent curators in Europe. Koenig’s mother, Ilka, is a well-known purveyor of art books in Munich. His uncle Walter is one of Europe’s biggest publishers of art books. (There is also family wealth—a house-paint business going back several generations—but it has not accrued either to Kasper Koenig or to his children.) Leo Koenig grew up surrounded by artists and critics, steeped, if not fully engaged, in their work and conversation, and his surname has eased his entry into the art trade. It confers legitimacy, in a world where legitimacy is amorphous and highly coveted. Some people begrudge him his connections, and point out that making it in the art world is so easy for a Koenig that even Leo’s younger half brother Johann has a gallery, despite being almost blind. (When he was eleven, he was playing with fireworks and they exploded in his face.) Some skeptics also say that Koenig hasn’t done much with the head start, that he is merely a party boy—the Paris Hilton of Germany, as one art-world figure said to me, with an anonymous unkindness that seems typical of the trade. But others recognize that the advantage has as much to do with sensibility as with preferential treatment; his boyhood exposure to the art world, to its esoteric language of ideas, attitudes, and names, gave him an education that he would not have received in graduate school. Anyway, as far as the Paris Hilton problem is concerned, Koenig has mellowed, to the extent that these days he finds himself going through what he wistfully calls “a nostalgic phase.” He fears being seen as a sellout, a mere merchant among the creative and difficult souls who make the art, and the hard partying seems, by his reckoning, a kind of inoculation against that. Reputation, in this world, requires a delicate balance: being both a businessman and a rascal, without being seen as too much of one or the other, or even as either one at all, entails constant adjustment, whether you are an art prince or a self-made man.

The occasion for these anxieties was his gallery’s move, this summer, from the backwater of Centre Street, at the edge of Chinatown, to a big storefront space in Chelsea, as concentrated a district of art exhibition and commerce as exists anywhere. Chelsea attracts collectors, small buyers, browsers, consultants, advisers, curators, critics, and all kinds of “weirdo cats who make money off the art world in weird ways,” a curator / critic / consultant named David Hunt told me. Together, they are after some kind of consensus of taste, and the money and the acclaim—and even the transcendence—that come with it.

This pursuit has got a little out of hand in recent years. Art, like real estate, has been enjoying a long and durable speculative boom, attracting, as it did a century ago, in the days of Duveen, the obsessive and competitive attentions of an expanding class of people who are very, very rich and who, for reasons ranging from the noble to the crass, have chosen visual art as an instrument for their aspirations. The appetite for new work is such that little-known artists command outlandish prices—if the circumstances align, a first-timer might sell a painting for fifteen thousand dollars, and then see its price double inside of a year. There are more artists, more galleries, and more buyers, and as a result the art world has grown more diffuse. There is no era-defining dealer, as there was in the heyday of Leo Castelli or of Mary Boone. Larry Gagosian is a powerhouse; Marian Goodman is a doyenne. But there are dozens of gallery owners out there, many of them young, with artists who, to varying degrees, are critically celebrated, institutionally represented, and commercially successful. Thirty years from now, a few of these dealers will have some claim to permanence. This depends, of course, on their artists’ work, and it is the dealer’s role to persuade people to think highly of it. “I’m aware that if I do my job right I will be forgotten and the artists will never be forgotten,” Koenig told me one night. He likes to think that he is presiding over an incipient movement, citing as a model the community of German neo-expressionists who came to prominence three or four decades ago, some of whom are family friends. The correlation is as strained as it is personal, but it reflects his belief that, as he put it, “you create your own context.”

Koenig represents a dozen artists, most of them emerging artists. There are just two women: the painter Nicole Eisenman, who had a reputation and following before she joined Koenig, and Kelli Williams, who has made just six paintings and has never sold one. Mainly, Koenig’s enterprise is anchored by a group of hard-drinking New York men in their thirties, who have been with him more or less from the beginning. The artists hang out together, and Koenig hangs out with them. In this respect, the gallery is unusual, more fraternity than salon. “There is so much cheating and finagling in this business that a lot of dealers don’t want their artists even talking to each other,” Koenig told me. He rarely goes anywhere without at least one or two of his artists in tow. He hosts regular dinners in restaurants, arraying them around him like apostles. The artists call him Opa, the German for Grandpa, even though he is years younger than most of them. “You look for these surrogate fathers and then you play one,” he told me.

Koenig’s most striking attribute, besides his youth, is his height. He is six feet four inches tall—gangly, long-limbed, and baby-faced. These days, he has a beard and close-cropped hair. A few years ago, he abruptly put on sixty-five pounds, transforming himself into a startling caricature of a brau-and-bratwurst Münchner, but then he quit drinking for a spell and, with the aid of a treadmill, a rowing machine, and a sauna that he installed in his bedroom, reverted to form. Still, he can project a cartoonish persona: the way he allows his arms and legs to flap around and his eyes to bulge after he’s had a couple of pints suggests that he has a good sense of what it is about Germans—bossiness, buffoonery, clusters of consonants—that Americans find funny. He often wears suspenders. His accent is not overwhelming, but his malaprop rate is about two per hour: “Can you borrow me a pen?” “Let’s have a night drink.”

I often heard Koenig pass judgment on works of art (“fantastic,” “amazing,” “crap”), but he rarely explained himself, except to mention the work’s provenance or to point out a section of it and say, “Look at that,” as though taste, his and everyone else’s, were universal. It takes a certain amount of nerve to act as though one knows what is good or, more important, what will be deemed good in the future. It’s an article of faith in the art world that some people have an eye for it and some people don’t; the disagreement arises over which do or don’t.

“I am happy when people relate to my way of thinking,” Koenig told me one evening, over Pilsners in the back office at his gallery, Leo Koenig Inc. He was seated behind a big desk, hands clasped behind his head, a wall of art books to his left, a small neon sign that read “dealer” to his right. “And there is a monetary aspect to that. The more money you make, the more people are relating to it.” By that measure, people seem to be relating well to him. Still, he offers contradictory statements about his financial status, a reflection of the murkiness of the business he is in. To the art market, obfuscation is like oxygen. One moment, he would say, as he showed me his messy one-bedroom apartment, just upstairs from his old gallery on Centre Street, with its fairly slapdash and unceremoniously displayed collection of art work, “I can’t afford my own art.” Then, some other time, he would say, of his new gallery space, which he currently rents for fifteen thousand dollars a month, “I could buy this in a day if I wanted to,” suggesting that a couple of million dollars was a phone call away. His longtime girlfriend Debora Warner, an artist with whom he shares the apartment, told him, during a recent drunken 3 a.m. heart-to-heart, “I don’t understand your financial situation.”

The rudiments are this: He generally pockets fifty per cent of every sale—the industry standard. A few of his artists, such as the Austrian conceptual collective Gelatin and the versatile prankster Jonathan Meese, are based in Europe and have their primary dealers there. He handles their work in the United States, and usually kicks back ten per cent of each sale to the primary dealer. (He gets a similar cut when his artists show abroad.) Some of his artists receive money from him up front, which can result, essentially, in his owning their work. Not everyone is comfortable with this arrangement, as it implies a kind of indentured servitude; others require it. He does not have contracts with any of them. A dealer does not want to sell one of his artist’s pieces to someone who will turn around and resell it a month or a year later, because then the dealer can’t control who gets the artist’s work, in what context it will be exhibited, or at what price it will sell. If a work turns up at auction, the dealer often must be ready to bid on it himself. He may even buy work straight out of his own artist’s studio. “If I’m not happy with a particular piece of work, I might buy it and put it in storage, to keep it off the market,” Koenig told me. He says that he has a net worth of zero; the profits go back into the business. That may be so, but there are probably more zeros this year than last. He estimates that he will sell ten million dollars’ worth of art in 2005, many times more than he has sold before.

This has been possible because, in addition to selling his own artists’ work, he has been active in the secondary market—that is, buying and selling work that has already been sold at least once. With good contacts and a good eye, you can make a fine living at it. Sometimes this involves speculating, acquiring works in the expectation of reselling them for more later; sometimes it involves matching up a collector who covets a particular work with one who wants to part with it. The market is unregulated and inefficient. “I do well with my artists,” Koenig said. “But the secondary market puts me at ease.” Koenig spent months this year discussing a potential offshore enterprise, with a Danish dealer named Jens Faurschou and two anonymous investors, to deal in the secondary market. They talked about the venture during the Basel art fair, in June. To keep people at the fair from finding out who was involved, they met in a private room in a restaurant in a village across the border in France, arriving in separate cars. “It was super secret,” Koenig said. “A total spy thing.”

A year and a half ago, a collector named Andy Hall and his wife, Christine, walked into the gallery on Centre Street. Hall had bought, in London, a painting by Frank Nitsche, a Berlin abstractionist, and learned that Koenig was Nitsche’s New York dealer, so he came in looking for more. Koenig introduced himself, and he and Hall quickly established that they had similar enthusiasms, especially for German neo-expressionist painting, a category that includes Georg Baselitz, a close family friend of the Koenigs, as well as Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck. Hall had begun collecting their work. In Koenig, he found someone who, in spite of his youth, knew a great deal about these artists, and who could also claim a personal connection to a few of them.

Koenig sold Hall another Nitsche, then asked if he was interested in Penck. Hall brightened: Penck was an obsession. Koenig took Hall and his wife up to his apartment, where he had several Penck drawings that he’d purchased from his father. Hall bought these. Soon, Koenig had Hall collecting the work of some of his own artists as well.

Hall, a fifty-four-year-old Englishman who lives in Connecticut, is the chief executive of Phibro, a commodities firm. He has made a lot of money trading oil and gas. He is tall, meticulous, and extremely fit, a former president of the Oxford boat club who rowed competitively until two years ago, and he approaches art collecting with the fanatical dedication of an oarsman. He had his first New York gallery experience three years ago. “I hate shopping, I hate salespeople, and I had this feeling that gallerists were salespeople,” he told me. “Also there’s a whole in-ness, with regard to which galleries are hot, that I can’t stand.” Nonetheless, one Saturday morning he and Christine walked into Mary Boone’s gallery, on Fifth Avenue, where they took a liking to a piece by an artist named John McCracken. “One of the Stepford men, one of her gallery assistants, said, ‘Are you serious?’ I said I was. And he said, ‘Mary would like to talk to you.’ ” The Halls were led back into Mary Boone’s office and connected to her by phone. “What do I have to do to make you like it enough to buy it?” she asked.

“Make me an offer I can’t refuse,” Hall replied. She did, and Hall had a McCracken.

Koenig prefers to cultivate an air of fellowship and collaboration with his clients. “They can never tell whether I’m selling or just talking,” Koenig said. He has a way, when sitting with the Halls and flipping briskly through books in search of paintings for them to covet, of arousing fervor for works of art. (“Look at all those Pencks,” I heard Hall mutter once, as the pages flew by. “Somehow I thought that I had them all.”) Although the dealer represents the artist, Koenig also occasionally finds himself working on the collector’s behalf, becoming a kind of adviser—an agent working both sides. He spends a great deal of time with them, on the phone or in restaurants. His client list has two hundred names, but there is a handful to whom he turns most often, and who are the most supportive of his artists’ work.

Last fall, Koenig suggested that the Halls travel with him to Germany, to meet Georg Baselitz at his home, a renovated thirteenth-century castle in Derneburg. (Derneburg was familiar ground for Koenig; when he was a child, Baselitz would take him eel fishing after midnight in a river that runs near the castle.) At around the same time, Koenig got a call from his mother, who told him that Baselitz and his wife, Elke, were thinking of moving and were mulling what to do with their vast collection of contemporary German art—a hundred and twenty works, which occupied some twenty rooms on the castle’s third floor. “Huge works,” Koenig told me. “No itsy-fitsy stuff. Five or six real masterpieces.” Baselitz had wanted them in a museum, and had made overtures to the local government, but talks had fallen through. Koenig didn’t say anything about this to the Halls. He didn’t want to appear as if he were selling something.

Baselitz has a reputation for cantankerousness, but the Halls’ visit went well. “We were so excited to somehow have passed the test with Georg,” Christine Hall, a slim, fashionable, and slightly giddy Englishwoman, told me. “You’re always nervous that you’re going to be somehow gauche.” They were smitten by the collection, but the idea of buying it did not occur to them until months later, when, after several more trips of his own, Koenig floated the possibility. The Baselitzes thought of Koenig less as a dealer than as a kind of son—a boy, really—but, because he’d introduced the Halls to them, he was the obvious go-between. Eventually, Elke Baselitz called Koenig with a number.

“It was a big, big fucking figure,” Koenig told me. “This was a hundred times bigger than anything I’ve done.” He relayed the information to Hall, who had by now allowed the notion to take shape in his mind, and asked him not to tell anyone about it—Koenig had stopped discussing the matter even with his mother. “You would’ve had people trying to dip their fingers into the cake, so to say,” Koenig told me. Anton Kern, Baselitz’s son, who is a prominent dealer in New York, was not involved. Neither was Larry Gagosian, who is Baselitz’s dealer. In April, Hall bought the entire collection, for an estimated price of seven million dollars. (Neither Koenig nor Hall would confirm a figure.) Koenig said that his own cut, once you factor in some additional deals, was less than ten per cent. “There’s one person in the world who would or could buy that collection,” Koenig told me. “The whole deal was perfect, absolutely perfect. It was really beautiful.” Then he added, “It paid for the new gallery.”

Hall told Koenig recently, “I don’t know if I’m a complete idiot and you’re the best salesman in New York or if we are really onto something here.” That something involves amassing a collection that might one day be able to stand on its own in a private museum, either here or in Germany, perhaps even in Derneburg. Recently, the Halls, Koenig, and Baselitz have been discussing the prospect of the Halls’ buying the castle. It would house the Halls’ collection, and serve both as a monument to Baselitz and his contemporaries and as an exhibition space for new art. Koenig would have a role, although it’s not yet clear what that would be. This year, Hall also bought thirty new Kiefer paintings from a gallery in London, for around four million dollars, and an additional fifteen Baselitz paintings from the artist himself; again, Gagosian was not involved. Koenig was emboldened by the experience. He told me one evening, after several pints, “I’m going to be Georg Baselitz’s dealer. I’m going to be Anselm Kiefer’s dealer. If it’s thirty years from now, so be it. But I have a feeling.”

A dealer must often make studio visits—to find new artists or to check in with his own. Sometimes collectors come along, taking the opportunity to see the artist in his element and to buy work before it has been shown, or even finished. Sometimes the dealer goes alone, keeping collectors’ requests in mind. One day last spring, I accompanied Koenig as he made the rounds.

A livery car conveyed us to Brooklyn, to a windowless garage belonging to Erik Parker, whose street-waif manner and graffiti-imbued art work have earned him some attention, here and abroad. Parker, who is thirty-seven, elicits good prices—in the range of twenty to forty-five thousand dollars a painting. He seemed tongue-tied and anxious; the whine of an oil-tanker truck across the street was driving him mad. To drown it out, he’d put on a record of Hawaiian chants. The sonic mix suited the paintings, which were garish and psychedelic, with dyslexically rendered slogans about the art world and the global energy market.

“Out of this batch,” Koenig explained to me, “two paintings have to go to the Basel art fair. And one has to go to the next group show at the gallery.” He expected it to be sold to a couple from Long Island.

In the current overheated market, the laws of supply and demand do not necessarily apply: often, the more work an artist creates, the higher the prices he fetches. Each show presents an opportunity to charge more. Parker, for example, shows at galleries in Zurich, Berlin, Tokyo, and Milan, to say nothing of the art fairs, which have proliferated and become increasingly frenzied and lucrative. Consequently, Parker can have a show every few months. Each one leads to more critical appraisal, more talk, more buying, and higher prices. It keeps him very busy turning out product.

Parker gave Leo and me a lift to another Williamsburg garage, where Tony Matelli, a thirty-four-year old sculptor with a caustic and literate sense of humor, was applying plaster bandages to the shaved leg of an assistant, in order to make a cast for a new edition in a series called “Fucked.” Earlier versions had featured models of chimpanzees and humans impaled with various tools and weapons: axes, swords, chain saws. The new one would portray a couple, already impaled, being clobbered from above by a baby grand piano. The piano, in tatters, would be sculpted out of fibreglass, plastic, and wood. “Great piece, tricky sell,” Koenig said. It was destined for a show in Copenhagen. The gallery there was balking at giving Matelli an additional eight thousand dollars to finish the work, so Koenig had offered to put up the money, hoping to extract recompense later. There was a discussion about some collectors who wanted to borrow another of Matelli’s works to exhibit with their collection. “And now they want to show it in their piece-of-shit ghetto space?” Matelli said, as he worked. “Please. If they were better collectors, I’d say fine.”

Aidas Bareikis’s studio was a few blocks away, a small space on the ground floor of an old warehouse. It was taken up mostly by a sculpture called “Mugpuller,” based on a game Bareikis used to play as a child in Vilnius, to see who could make the strangest face. Bareikis must have been good at it. He had big, startled-looking eyes, an expansive mouth, a jutting jaw, and enviable bed head. He seemed dismayed to have company. There was no real business for Koenig to conduct here. The point was just to see Aidas.

“Mugpuller” consisted of a breathtaking arrangement of ghouls fashioned out of heaps of plastic toys and knickknacks, which Bareikis had partially melted on a grill and spray-painted gold. “I haven’t seen this one,” Koenig said.

“It isn’t finished yet,” Bareikis said.

“A collector from Zurich is interested,” Koenig explained. “It just needs a bit more . . . intensity.”

Bareikis gestured toward his ghouls. “Yeah, I need to fuck them up.”

The three of us walked a few doors down to Torben Giehler’s studio, a big, clean loft space hung with a few giant colorful canvases. An assistant was painting a wall white, and Giehler, a red-faced German whose shyness might be mistaken for hostility, was removing tape from a painting of a mountain composed of multicolored quadrilaterals. The assistant wheeled away a paint cart. The scene brought to mind an operating room after surgery. Giehler silently appraised his work.

“That’s fucking great,” Koenig said.

“That’s fucking great,” Giehler mimicked, in a mock-Cockney accent.

Koenig’s core artists are prolific. Nearly all of them are painters, which leaves him out of step with the current curatorial enthusiasm for photography and video art. As unadventurous as painting can sometimes be, it makes for good business, because paintings last a long time, and they fit well into an existing tradition of visual art. Owing to the decorative aspect of painting, there is a broader base of possible buyers than there is for video art or sculpture or installation. Bareikis, for example, has a hard time selling his work, though it does find its way into museums. To make ends meet, he continues to do construction and demolition work. Giehler, on the other hand, can make twenty paintings a year and sell them for between twenty and fifty thousand each. (It seemed telling that while we were at Giehler’s studio Koenig sent Bareikis out to get beer.)

“I just don’t care if people think that painting is past,” Koenig told me. “I feel comfortable with painting. It’s what I know. I’ve tried with photography, for example, and I’ve failed miserably. Photography just doesn’t do it for me. It’s so easy to make a photograph visually compelling.”

Some of the other artists converged on Giehler’s studio, and then everyone trooped a few blocks down the street to a place they call May’s, a nondescript Chinese restaurant that used to be a hangout for the Koenig crew. Twenty people—the artists and their mates—gathered around a few tables near the window, over heaps of moo-shu pork and bottles of beer (Koenig’s favorite, Reissdorf, from Cologne, which he had arranged to have imported to May’s). People wandered outside to smoke. An argument sprouted up, out of Koenig’s earshot, when one artist’s wife suggested that all Germans were Nazis. After a while, I found myself sitting across from Bareikis, who, with a grim and transfixing gaze, began to tell me about Afghanistan.

Koenig was born in New York in 1977, and though he spent less than a year here, he told me he has memories of it—ambient memories, SoHo in the lizard brain. He was Kasper and Ilka’s third child. They were already separated when she became pregnant with him. “Leo was my present to Kasper, to try to make it work again,” she told me. It didn’t. The Koenigs moved to Munich and the marriage ended. Leo, throughout his childhood, saw little of his father, for whom he substituted various male friends of his mother’s, among them Penck and Baselitz; Penck helped him learn how to draw. His mother called Leo der Rattenfänger, after the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because other children used to follow him around. He told me that he was “first terrible in school, then brilliant—kind of figured it out.” For his final project in high school, he interviewed Baselitz. His interest in art really took shape in the summer of 1997, when his father got him a job as an assistant on the Münster Sculpture project, a once-a-decade exhibition throughout the city of Münster, north of Cologne. His father took care to treat him no better than the other assistants. They stayed together in Leo’s grandmother’s mansion. They got into a big argument one night, when the elder Koenig returned to the house ready for his evening bath and found that his son had filled the tub with bottles of beer.

When Leo moved to New York at the end of that summer, his mother arranged for him to stay in the SoHo loft of her old friend Hiroko Kawahara and her husband, the reclusive conceptual artist On Kawara, who is famous for writing telegrams to friends saying simply, “I’m still alive.” (“I remember him, of course, but I’ve never been to his gallery,” On Kawara said, when I unexpectedly got him on the phone this summer. This doesn’t say much: Kawara has never even been to an opening for one of his own shows.) Meanwhile, Koenig’s father had given Leo a list of names, which he used to secure three internships: with the gallery owner Paula Cooper, the art dealer and publisher Brooke Alexander, and the German dealer David Zwirner, the son of the gallery owner Rudolf Zwirner, with whom, incidentally, Kasper Koenig had got his start, decades earlier. Leo was working for Zwirner when he decided to go off on his own. Koenig says that to raise money for the Williamsburg gallery he bought a half-dozen Raymond Pettibon drawings from Zwirner and sold them, at a markup, to Zwirner’s clients—an end run that did not endear Koenig to his boss. “Be careful,” Koenig recalls Zwirner telling him. “You’re starting to be clever. Don’t be clever.”

Amid a burgeoning Williamsburg art scene, Koenig put cleverness aside and instead played the heedless impresario. His gallery became known not so much for art as for art parties. There were benders, at home and abroad. Often when I spent time with Koenig and his artists, he tried to get them to tell me stories about the wild times. Usually, he’d wind up telling them himself. “Shall we talk about Copenhagen?” Leo prompted them, one evening.

“There should be a movie,” Giehler said.

“What happened in Copenhagen?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Giehler said.

What happened is that in 2000 a group of them went there for a show, and, because of a blizzard in New York, their art failed to arrive. To the astonishment of their hosts, they spent two sleepless days and nights prior to the opening in the gallery getting drunk and making new art. There was bad behavior all around. In the end, the original art work was found, but the legend of the young ruffians from New York had spread and the show was a rousing success.

“Nobody was thinking about the future, what role we were playing, how we were being perceived,” Koenig recalled. “We were just doing whatever we wanted. It was as extravagant as can be.” Nonetheless, he managed to turn decadence into something of a business proposition. In 2001, he left Brooklyn for Manhattan, moving to a space on lower Broadway that earned him a flash of new-kid renown but which was rendered unviable, almost as soon as it opened, by the attack on the World Trade Center, a few blocks away. At the end of that year, he relocated to Centre Street.

Koenig was determined to demonstrate independence. When he visited Cologne, he’d stay in a hotel room instead of at his father’s house. When Kasper came to New York, Leo picked him up at the airport in a limousine. “He was like a kid in a movie,” Kasper told me. “I said to him, ‘Come on, now, it’s a nice gesture, but once is a enough.’ It had a naïve childishness to it, in a positive sense. It was almost depression of some kind, I guess.”

“I was in a bad phase,” Koenig says. He and the artists fancied themselves a kind of gang—part Cedar Tavern, part “Sopranos”—an aggressive interpretation of the old bohemian cliché. They had their own Mafia-style social club in Brooklyn, with shag carpeting, poker tables, and a painting of a horse. One night in 2002, in a Williamsburg night club after the opening of a show by the painter Lisa Ruyter (the show was called “Follow the Boys” and consisted of paintings of Koenig and his artists, among others, hanging out in night clubs), Debora Warner, Leo’s girlfriend, complained to the d.j.s about the music. One of them called her a bitch and may or may not have shoved her away. Koenig punched him, and Erik Parker’s brother smashed a bottle of beer in his face. A week later, Koenig was arrested in his gallery and jailed for several hours. Though the charge of assault wasn’t pursued, the d.j. sued Koenig and the Parkers, asking for eight million dollars. They settled for a tiny fraction of that. Parker gave Leo a painting to sell in order to cover his brother’s share. Ruyter left the gallery. Inevitably, the incident inspired a work of art: Tom Sanford, a young Koenig artist, who usually depicts African-American hip-hop stars and basketball players (he is white), is making a painting of it, with a composition based loosely on Poussin’s “Rape of the Sabine Women.”

It also prompted introspection, on Koenig’s part. “I felt obnoxious,” Koenig told me. “My father called me a fat cat and a sneaker entrepreneur. I thought, That’s not me.” He went sober and arranged for an off-duty policeman to keep him out of trouble, or at least to keep trouble away from him. He learned, as he put it, “when to leave.” He had his first drink—several drinks—eighteen months later at his father’s wedding, in Germany, to Barbara Weiss, an art dealer. The next day, he missed his flight home and spent the morning in the airport, throwing up.

One of Koenig’s newer and better-known artists is Alexis Rockman, who enjoyed some success in the eighties and nineties with his colorful and ecologically precise paintings of habitats altered by global warming. Rockman is forty-three, a fitness buff, a Democratic activist, a square with a crewcut. He grew up on the Upper East Side and spends his summers in Sag Harbor. He does not drink. He leaves early. But his sales had flagged, and earlier this year his gallery closed.

“I needed to find a youthful exuberance to put me back in the mix,” Rockman told me. Sanford, his former studio assistant, introduced him to Koenig. Rockman was impressed by Koenig’s ability to connect his artists with European collectors. “If he could do that with me, I’d be so psyched,” he said. Within a few months, Koenig had sold an inventory of about a dozen of Rockman’s older paintings. “His job is to sell art,” Rockman said. “That’s what he’s done incredibly well.”

Two months before the opening of the new gallery in Chelsea, Koenig took Tony Matelli, Torben Giehler, and a painter named Les Rogers to see the new space. Koenig was dressed in a worn light-gray chalk-striped suit, a purple shirt, and square-toed cream-colored loafers. Giehler had come from Brooklyn by bicycle. Koenig held open a sheaf of blueprints and surveyed the space: aluminum wall frames, sprayed-concrete walls, a poured-concrete floor. It is in a brand-new building, on a freshly anodyne stretch of streetfront, and is flanked, mallishly, by other galleries, to the east and west. Idiosyncrasy will be the art’s job. The blueprints called for a large front room, a smaller back room, and, behind a pair of huge oak doors, a vast office for Koenig.

Koenig’s movements were brisk, exaggeratedly optimistic. “This floor is awesome,” he observed. He was especially proud of the gut work he’d had done in the ceiling. “I paid up the wazoo to run the shit pipes through that beam.”

“Well, it feels like a gallery,” Matelli said.

Giehler and Rogers expressed some misgivings about the proportions of the front room. They stood near the door and imagined their paintings on the opposite wall. “I think this is narrow,” Giehler said.

“It’s twice the size of the old gallery,” Koenig said.

The perception of narrowness derived, in part, from the placement, across from the big wall, of a long, chest-high counter just inside the door, where the gallery’s staff would sit. “Why not put the desk here?” Giehler said, indicating a sort of crawl space that would soon be closed off by sheetrock.

“You can’t have your employees behind a wall,” Koenig said.

“Why not?” Giehler said.

“Because they work for you and you want them to work well.”

The artists walked in various directions, pacing off the dimensions. “What’s the typeface on the door going to be?” Matelli asked. “Everyone in Chelsea uses the same sans-serif we’re-a-fucking-business typeface. It’s pretentious.”

Koenig didn’t answer him. He got on Giehler’s bike and started riding in circles, circumscribing the space with big Butch Cassidy swoops. “This isn’t one of the monster galleries of Chelsea,” he observed cheerfully, “but that’s a big wall.” Another lap. “I think this is great,” he said. His cell phone rang. “You get a good cell-phone signal in here, too—five bars, full coverage.”

In March, at a time when Koenig was having trouble finding new artists to add to his stable, Tom Sanford recommended a friend named Kelli Williams. She was thirty-two and worked as a teller at a Citibank branch in SoHo. She had spent five years working on her six paintings. She was shy and a little strange. Koenig said that when he went to see the paintings he was flabbergasted. “They’re like jewels,” he told me. “I’ve brought collectors there, and they are foaming, just foaming. No one knows her, but there’s a myth building.” He began paying her to paint, so that she could quit her day job, pick up the pace, and build the myth.

“Once she’s done these six paintings, we’ll have a show,” Koenig said. “She has never shown anywhere, which is great. The slate is clean for me. Now I can really go to work.”

When I visited Williams’s studio with Koenig, in an apartment in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, the six paintings hung on three walls, in various stages of near-completion. They were small and painstaking—she uses a three-haired brush—surreal Boschean pornography in Renaissance landscapes. Williams has dyed-red hair, in a sort of wedged pageboy cut, and a wide-eyed look that somehow simultaneously conveys apprehension and assurance. Koenig went from painting to painting, inspecting each up close, pointing with a long finger at elements he did or did not like. Standing before one that was all but done, he suggested that she add a layer of varnish to it, to bring out the colors and give it a classical sheen.

“I tend to agree with you,” she said. “But Tom’s friend said don’t varnish it. It’ll look too retro.”

“He’s full of shit,” Koenig said. Talk turned to deadlines and the timing of a solo show. “I think you should take as long as you need.”

“I had a hard time getting work done in April,” she explained, defensively. “I was upset in April.” She told him that a French billionaire had offered to put her on salary and pay for health insurance in exchange for her work. She sent the collector an e-mail with legal disclaimers in it, which scared him off. Koenig told her that she’d done the right thing. “I’m O.K. being poor,” Williams said. “I just don’t want to be a failure.”

Two months later, one of her paintings was hanging in the group show that opened Koenig’s new gallery. It was seventeen inches by eighteen inches and depicted a contorted female figure whose breasts were where her buttocks should be. Koenig pronounced it a “masterpiece.” He said, “The miniaturist style, the craft, the obsessive-compulsiveness is something I respond to.” He told me that he had ten buyers who were interested in it, but that he could not bring himself to sell it. “I’m not there yet. It’s not ready. It’s my painting, anyway—I’ve been paying her for a year—and I want to own it for a little bit longer.” As he said this he ran a finger along the top edge of it, a caress that ended with a flick at an imaginary bit of dust. “But she’s going to want me to sell it, and Hubert Neumann is probably going to get it, just because I like him so much, and because he wants it the baddest. We’re at twenty-five thousand dollars now, but I won’t be comfortable until it’s at fifty thousand.”

When a dealer maintains a waiting list for an artist’s work, it is not first come, first served. Collectors with whom the dealer has a standing relationship often take precedence. Surreptitious deals are cut; the sports term “future considerations” would be appropriate here. Dealers also prefer buyers whose ownership will burnish the artist’s credentials; primacy generally goes to institutions, or to those who have private museums, and then to those whose collections are virtually museums unto themselves. When Koenig got a call about a Kelli Williams this summer from an adviser to the Los Angeles collector and television executive Dean Valentine, he said, “Straight to the top of the list!” He did the same for Steven Cohen, a publicity-shy hedge-fund billionaire who, in the past several years, has become a voracious collector of blue-chip art. Cohen’s reputation is such that when he came calling, asking, as Koenig recalled, “if he was allowed to buy, I was thinking, Is this actually him or am I being set up here?” Eventually, Cohen bought a painting by a twenty-five-year-old Koenig painter named Justin Faunce, who had his first show in February, for twenty-five thousand dollars. “I generally buy only established artists,” Cohen told Koenig.

In Koenig’s case, the collector who best embodies the key attributes of familiarity and prominence is probably Hubert Neumann. Neumann lives on the Upper West Side, amid Picassos and Matisses that his father, Morton Neumann, a Chicago mail-order magnate (he made a fortune on beauty products), began collecting in 1948. Morton Neumann was dismissed early on by the art world as a coarse and gullible enthusiast, but in time he amassed one of the country’s great collections of twentieth-century art. He died in 1985. Hubert Neumann, who is seventy-four, has been an avid collector for more than fifty years, having learned the same lesson his father did: that, when it comes to appraising art, other people are often wrong. Of Koenig’s artists, he collects Tom Sanford, Erik Parker, and Christian Schumann. He is an unpretentious but argumentative man with a mustache and a Cheshire-cat grin who dresses in golf shirts and says “man” a lot. He doesn’t let many people into his house to see his art. When I tried to invite myself over, Neumann told me to buy a book instead—“A Passion for Art,” which has pictures of his collection. And when I asked him about the business of contemporary art, he delivered a mild scolding in the form of an hour-long lecture.

“There are as many stories about it as there are people involved,” Neumann said. “It’s a personal thing for me. If artists are emerging, it’s got to be a personal experience with the work and the artist, and then with the dealer.” He went on, “Leo’s a special guy in his field. What makes him special, if you hang around this world and compare him to others, is—he’s Leo. Leo is not interesting because of his father or his uncle or whatever. Basically, I think his father is a jerk. The reason Leo’s interesting is that he’s in a position to advance the cause of emerging art. Emerging art needs that kind of support. It’s a flower that needs nourishment. It’s a delicate and wonderful thing.

“The art world hasn’t changed,” he went on. “There will always be five or six great artists in a generation. The rest of them are just going to become dust, or different degrees of dust.” Neumann objects to cynicism, and he made sure to point out, as we talked on the phone, that he was surrounded at that moment by works that had been dismissed by the world as peripheral at one point or another and that were now regarded as important. “It’s a lot of baloney to be a dealer or a collector unless the art has a chance of being profound,” he said. “And if the art work is profound, then the art market is irrelevant. That’s what makes it magical.” He cited the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his contention that civilization is defined by three things: science, philosophy, and art. Of these, visual art is the only one that you can own or acquire. “That’s why it’s so special,” Neumann said. “That’s why you have all these people running around like ants in the art world. They’re all running around thinking they understand what’s profound. But they can’t, because it’s ephemeral.” He went on, “What happens is people like to create myths. And they’ll make a myth about Leo. And it may even have a substantial element of truth to it.”

The bulk of the Baselitz collection arrived on these shores by air in August. It was moved to an art-storage facility on Eleventh Avenue, where the Halls maintain a fourteen-hundred-square-foot climate-controlled private space. On the last day of the month, the Halls came into town, from their home in Southport, Connecticut, to conduct some business with Koenig, and then the three of them went to check on the shipment. They were greeted at the storage facility by Oliver Stebich, an art shipper and storer, who led them into a windowless white room skirted by thirteen paintings, which had been unpacked and propped against the wall. Stebich, Koenig, and an assistant donned white gloves and began delicately removing the thin layer of foam that protected each painting. Gradually, the room filled with angry color. The paintings—Penck, Polke, Kiefer, Immendorff, Lüpertz—were grim, crude, almost primitive, many of them featuring iconography relating to postwar Germany. A number of the Pencks had been smuggled from East Germany; one had been painted on an old woollen blanket. Hall and Koenig moved from painting to painting, elucidating motifs peculiar to each artist’s oeuvre: painter’s palettes in the Kiefers, eagles in the Immendorfs.

“I’m dazed,” Koenig said.

“It’s reassuring that (a), it all got here safely, and (b), it looks even better than it did at Derneburg,” Andy Hall said. He drifted around the room, with a queasy grin that seemed to blend reverence for the work, pride of possession, and the anxiety of appreciating objects for which one has paid dearly. “They look better here,” he said again.

“Every single one of them has a story,” Koenig said to me. “They have significance.”

“Four or five of these we’ll bring to Southport,” Hall said. “The Polke, that Penck, maybe this Penck, the Palermo, and one of those Kiefers.”

After they had lingered awhile, they rode the elevator to another floor, to visit the Halls’ storage room. It contained, in addition to mousetraps, a thousand or so works in crates or in partial paper wrappings, on which the artists’ names were written in ink: Beuys, Warhol, Twombly, Clemente, Fischl, Hockney, Rivers, Hirst. Also, some from Koenig: Giehler, Parker, Nitsche, Rogers, Faunce.

“This is criminal, keeping all this in storage,” Christine said, with a sigh.

“Wow, we have great stuff,” Hall said, mostly to himself.

On the Friday after Labor Day, Koenig had an opening at his new gallery: eight paintings by Frank Nitsche. It was a grand opening, of a kind, since the first show there, a group exhibition featuring most of his artists, had débuted in the middle of the summer, at a time when the art world, true to its European roots and aspirations, had cleared out of the city. At 5 P.M., an hour before the Nitsche opening, the town cars started pulling up, one after the other, fifteen minutes apart, as though by prior arrangement. For Koenig, the paintings already had names attached. “I had certain people in mind, even if they didn’t know it,” he said. By seven, most of the big buyers had come and gone, and six of the eight paintings were sold. Koenig hoped to sell one of the remaining two to a museum. A young dot-com entrepreneur named James Healy, a regular customer whom Koenig referred to as a “triggerman,” took a liking to the other. Healy overheard a few collectors asking Koenig if he’d hold it in reserve for them. Koenig would not. Healy stepped in and pulled the trigger. The preliminary enthusiasm of others, tepid or insincere as it may have been, was affirmation enough.

It seemed that most of the people in the gallery at this point were artists, including Matelli, recently returned from Copenhagen, where he’d sold his baby-grand “Fucked” for a hundred and ten thousand dollars, and Bareikis, recently returned from Zurich, where his installation “Straight to the Top I’ll Take . . .” had sold for sixty thousand dollars. Bareikis’s time abroad had been miserable. He had got four tick bites in Germany, and had been put on a course of antibiotics and forbidden to drink alcohol. “It was a nightmare,” he said, looking a little shaky.

A celebratory dinner was held at Arqua, an Italian restaurant in Tribeca—an odd choice, in these frothy times, because during the art boom of the eighties it had been a sort of headquarters for the likes of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, whose declining reputations, fairly or not, have become cautionary tales. Koenig had reserved five tables of eight in back, mostly for his artists, though a few collectors, such as the Halls, who’d bought two of the Nitsches, and Hubert Neumann, who’d bought nothing, were there, too. Koenig stood to toast Nitsche. Andy Hall stood to toast the gallery. Finally, Nicole Eisenman paid tribute to Koenig, with a few remarks about how the gallery felt like a family and how grateful the artists were for that. Koenig started crying but recovered himself quickly. It was eleven, and the night was looking long. Six hours later, he was in Williamsburg, at May’s, watching five women dance on top of a bar.

DARPA race

Looks like Stanford put in a pretty good time.

DARPA Grand Challenge 2005

I am falling behind

I used to be totally totally up on tech stuff. I knew and could use everything internet-related for the first long period -- I installed Trumpet Winsock, wrote in Coldfusion, did DHTML, configured Apache, etc all the way to...well, recently. Now I don't really know what stuff is. Like AJAX - I hear it is cool and I like Google Maps and Yahoo Instant Search....but what the heck is it.

More important, I don't really care anymore. I'm more "mobile" than "web" now.

Now we build

I've finally crossed of a big item from that "to do" list on the right side of this page. Property 2. It's done and Property 3 too. Now build a big building.

My clickstream

You can see what I'm searching for and saving if you click here

We closed!

The property is ours. Now for the other one...?

Yahoo music for 5 bucks

I have re-subscribed to the Yahoo! Unlimited music service. I tried it out for a bit and it's really great. $5 or $6 a month for everything you can possibly imagine. It really is a lot better than searching for p2p music and eventually hearing what you want. In fact, it makes me use both. I sample lots of stuff on the Yahoo service and things I really like for a while, I decide to search for and store on my iTunes machine (a machine where the Yahoo service doesn't even work). So I have two music worlds: the Yahoo "Music Engine" that plays through my main laptop and the attached stereo, and the iTunes/iPod/Mac Mini world that connects to my other stereos and portable players and car.

Still the $5 is worth it - it's like Netflix for music (convenient, unlimited selection, not a replacement for your "collection")

Valbonne this summer

Back from India

Just spent the last 5 weeks in France and India. France was a short holiday on the coast and India was something else altogether.

Building 2

Nearing completion on building 2 (and maybe 3)

On my trip

I may not have mentioned that I'm on my multi-week trip to Europe and India. The good part, a week in France, is over and I'm about a week into the bad part: 3 weeks in Ahemdebad. Hot as hell. Looking forward to that tail week in Mumbai, where the quality of accomodations will improve.

I realize now why I felt so strongly, as a lad, when I was melting away here, that I would never return here of my own free choice.

Strange set of circumstances that have caused me to reconsider! Let's see why my post hoc view is. I'll let you know all about it when I am post of the hoc.

Alan Schaefer, sex offender

The old music teacher (apparently still there after all these years) at my Junior High was arrested for preying on little girls. About Mr. Schaefer

Now for a few weeks

Few weeks of holiday coming up.

Everything is a bubble

The learning from the stock market bubble (to everyone) was that "bubble's happen." Everything's a bubble these days -- startups are all dot-bombs, real estate is "irrational exuberance", etc. The learning might be oversold!

Two killer new business models

#1: Yahoo! Unlimited. $7/month for all the music I want? It's cool. I am trying it out right now and it's almost worth it for just the at-the-PC listening (including at home where it goes through a stereo)

#2: Morrissey's new label Attack/Sanctuary. They are releasing shit all over the place, little EPs, live stuff. It's exactly the right way to sell to a fanatic fan base. I am listening.

LinkedIn math

Math - 10% of my address book is in LinkedIn. That's fast.

Share your wifi

Check out my friend's new thing: Radiuz

They fixed my Shuffle

The iPod Shuffle I got was a bum - the buttons would stick. I put up with it for a month. And then, suddenly, my iTunes downloaded a refresh and my iPod works. Apple pushed out a button fix quietly. I love it.

At PS1

At PS1, originally uploaded by asarva.

My Yahoo 360 page

When they have RSS, I will post my moblog here too.

Amo's Yahoo 360 page

We are back and buying

Tell George Bush not to worry about reelection. Consumer confidence is up.

We bought the wheels last weekend and are waiting for "delivery" (really just waiting for Geico/DMV to sort out the registration) this next few days. The gas-guzzling darling we have on the way? Don't ask.

Now we are on the shop for outdoor materials. We are spiffing up the dining out there with some of this pictured stuff from Room & Board.

The other topic is flooring. Stuff like this:

Consumerism as personal expression

In modern times you don't make your own stuff, you buy it. So personal expression is constrained by the limits of economics: what can be produced at a economical price. You cannot have custom made to the specifications of your whim (yet), so you must be you but off the rack.

One way to dodge the Sears or J.C. Penney conundrum is to go vintage. Travel through time to find a world where your taste ruled (the Mesozoic?).

In cars it's even more extreme. There are about 100 models fielded by the about 10 car companies.

So imagine my surprise, tonight, chatting with friends with whom we had never discussed cars, that they listed:
the Volvo wagon
the Mercedes wagon (from the 80s)
and the Jetta wagon

Exactly the cars we spent hours poring over last month.

Now, the fact that we did not buy some such car is the force of the market. It constrains us as it does them. They are getting an SUV anyway...and so are we.

Peer-to-peer radio

Or, Skypecasts. This idea already exists online, but my guess is that it is fixin' to blow up in the media world. Shoutcast is pretty much a personal, private broadcasting system. Not sure why narrowcast would make so much difference.

Skype: VoIP Calls Become iPod Radio Broadcasts

March 29, 2005
CNET News

Calling all iPods.
There's a growing number of people sharing their iPod digital music using freely available software and Skype, a free Internet phone service.

The enthusiasts are borrowing heavily from another personal broadcasting phenomenon called podcasting, in which digital recordings are posted on a Web site for download to Apple's popular digital music players. Skypecasters, as they call themselves, use Skype's peer-to-peer telephone network to distribute recordings over the Internet directly to each other for free.

Anectdotal evidence suggests Skypecasters are becoming more widespread, although one user wisecracks that the level amount of required technical know-how makes it "not for mere mortals." Yet the "implications are very disruptive," writes the SkypeJournal, a well-known Web community that provides Skypecast instructions. "Many Skypers want to record their Skype conversations and turn them into podcasts."

Skype is the largest of the new breed of companies offering voice over Internet Protocol, which lets Internet connections double as telephone lines by treating calls no differently than e-mail, Web pages or other common Internet travelers. Skype gives away its VoIP software, and phone calls that stay on the Internet are free. Skype also has premium services that charge about two cents a minute to call cell or landline phones.

The Luxembourg-based upstart has so far signed up 29 million registered users for its free PC-to-PC Net phone calling service. Earlier this month, the company reported that its SkypeOut service, which connects PC calls to traditional phone lines for a fee, reached 1 million customers since launching in July 2004. To some extent, Skype competes against Vonage, which at 550,000 plus subscribers is among the world's largest commercial VoIP providers, as well as some cable companies, which have commercial VoIP services of their own.

It's Skype's peer-to-peer infrastructure--similar in construct to Kazaa, Morpheus and other file-swapping programs--that makes it well-suited for turning Net phones into a broadcasting system, as Skypecasters now do.

Other possibilities discussed by Skypecasters at Unbound Spiral or Moodle are to turn your iPod into a radio station for any of Skype's 29 million registered users to dial up using their Skype line. There's also instructions available on how to record your own soap opera and use Skype to distribute it en masse. Even more ominously, some Skypecasters record Skype calls and post them on the Internet.

All of the work is being done without Skype's active input. But it has made some of its source code public so developers can tinker with new applications, such as Skypecasting, said a Skype spokeswoman. "We're aware of this and encourage developers to help facilitate it," said spokeswoman Kelly Larrabee.

"It's a relatively complicated set-up that requires some technical sophistication and awareness of ones entire hardware/ software environment," she added.

From Australia

Back from Oz.

See the gallery

Fun time. Reflective too. The property deal blown up, the latest work project wrapped, new ideas getting appealing, some time to read a long book and think what life would be like if this were Paris 2002 again.

How to buy a car (in New York)

Once you actually pick out the car from a private seller, here is what you need to get/do:
1. Title - seller and buyer must sign (also the declarations on reverse of the Title)
2. Bill of sale (can use DMV form) or create own
3. Certificate of Incorporation (certified copy) for Hollywood East if we are using that company as owner
4. Insurance card - applied already for one from Geico
5. Then get registration from NYS and license plate
- show title
- show bill of sale and pay sales tax
- show corporation form
- show Amol Sarva Driver's License
- show Insurance card
- pay fee TBD at DMV
6. Put on car and get safety inspection within 10 days
7. THEN pick up the car and drive away

In Oz

Having fun in Oz. Not so easy to post via Blackberry - I really should sort it out sometime to make it post by email. Until then!

LIC is going purple

All my indicators suggest that LIC is going nuclear. Brokers are emailing LICNYC to get ads or postings. The building pace is ridiculous. Prices are way up on listings I have seen. Volume of requests for LIC real estate onto the LICNYC pages are way up. It's all happening so fast.

Mac Mini changed my world

Music, media, elegant tininess. It's all I could want and more. Goodbye PC (except when I need a 3rd machine to do some dirty work)

My first linux installation

Now I have a Linux box. It's called my wifi router! I installed the Sveasoft firmware, which is essentially a *nix environment for the router. It even has command line access and I set up a cron job to reset the router ever 24 hours (it's been misbehaving).

See what it can do.

Mac Mini en route?

Nearly here

Search your life

Compare http://deli.cio.us to http://mysearch.yahoo.com/ (in particular the My Web feature which is basically deli.cio.us)

Truth in blogging

The truth is, this blog is a surface skim of what's really in the news for me.

See, with property projects, the sellers read the web. With consulting, the consultants and the clients read the web. With various other dealings like ventures in the offing, the same.

So this might as well be a surface skim of what going on for real, with lots of reporting on home entertainment technology. :(

Google hacks

Found a bunch of google-based hacks. Here are some to try. Accidental, really. Still trying to find a way to hack my linksys camera so I can get it to behave differently/better.

Holy crap does Netgear suck

I bought a Linksys 802.11g router to replace this buggered Netgear version I got in "kit" form from Amazon (card + router) . The Netgear was nothing but pain for 2 weeks. Signal constantly dropped. Was really hard to figure out why -- location, interference, the card, the Win XP driver, the router firmware, the Airtunes bridge interference, the cordless phone, the neighbor's wifi, the weather, the...???? Infuriating.

Plugged in the Linksys, got it going, and goodbye Netgear. So much for hip designed devices.

Jetta Wagon

Thinking the unthinkable about the Gray Ghost, I have been looking at a new car with the following features:
* rusty bits do not fall off of it from time to time
* starts in cold weather
* runs even when the gas tank is below 1/2 full
* room to keep and restrain the dog
* room for big bags of dog food
* power locks
* working A/C and heat
* gas pedal doesn't "stick" sometimes
* defrost works

Well, just about any car will meet these requirements. Other requirements:
* not $20,000+
* not $15,000+ if possible
* not a boring stupid American car
* can be parked in LIC and other places I go
* evokes cool Volvo Wagon 240DL I used to love so much
* wood paneling? OK maybe not
* handy for trips to Home Depot etc.
* not sporty, not family, not mainstream, not big, not small

At the moment, I am thinking (partly because of the Pavement song "Passat" and partly because this was the single most popular car on the roads of San Francisco/Bay Area) of a 2-3 year old Jetta Wagon which I will park on the street in front of our building the way I do now with the Gray Ghost who is ailing more and more these days. Reactions?

Wireless life, troubles

Airtunes, Netgear's WGR614 802.11G router, a faster card, a new laptop, a Mac Mini...technical upgrades all around the house.

The Netgear is not reliable! It seems to drop the connection every 2-3 minutes for a split second - so if you are streaming music the iTunes stream just dies, and if you are online in a Windows session it also drops out and has to go through the whole production of reconnecting. Yawn! I don't like it. I'm sending it back. I'm going to get a Linksys (the old 802.11B linksys I had never had these problems with continuity.

The Apple Mac Mini is taking forever to ship! Nearly a month. Typical Apple.

The one that shipped quickly was the iPod Shuffle - but even here there are flaws! The buttons seem to stick so it is constantly fast forwarding or reversing, and it's over-sensitive to changes, so I have to keep it in lock mode often. Sucks.

And while I'm complaining - the iTunes software is buggy for Win XP. It's heavy and crashes from time time (e.g., when the wireless connection to the Airtunes players drops).

The Airtunes player - why, it causes trouble too. Interface is clunky and doesn't play well with windows iTunes.

What else can I complain about? The new laptop is actually great -- Compaq Evo has great battery life, screen brightness, quiet, fast, big disk drive.

The other thing I love is Napster. But I already told you why I love that.

Semantic web, Search

You don't need search if the semantic web works. Meaning, if RSS output is out there synthesizing all the content on all the sites, with feeds going every which way, you don't need a crawler so bad anymore. You need a My Yahoo/Reader/Browser. Think how relevant Google News is when all the news sites have nice RSS feeds and your little reader learns from you.

Good for Apple?

The Napster "workaround" really works. Is it the death of Napster to go?

Someone I know

See the extended text to check out this person (or not, since my template seems to ruin it)

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Buzznet

Check out buzznet

Castries to market

My buddy David's creme liquer is marching to market. It just won "best cream liquer" for 2004 from the Beverage Tasting Institute. Approvals coming in and he's heading for market.

Map wars too

I mentioned the cool A9 photos of streetscapes. Well, maps.google.com has the new google mapping beta (with great pan-n-scan flash for the maps)

L&O Obsessions

I hate the show but there are these people out there who watch Law & Order the way I hit "reload" on the NYT.com site. Who are these people? Why do they do this?

My invention continues, three years later

I was part of making the Rescue Ring at Virgin, the most signature contribution I made since I really had a big part in the creation of the data services and specifically of the name of this thing. And I often like to say how you cannot read a piece of marketing crap from them without it mentioning Rescue Ring, even now, 3 years later. Well, see this excerpt from the latest press release, as they hit 3mm subs (about 1 month late, actually, when you consider it should have happened in Q4).

Virgin Mobile USA Attracts 3 Million Customers in 2.5 Years
Tuesday February 8, 8:09 am ET
Company Exceeds Customer Expectations and Drives Active Use of Data Services and Mobile Content Favored by Youth Market

WARREN, N.J., Feb. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Virgin Mobile USA, one of the nation's fastest growing wireless providers, today announced that it has surpassed the three million net customers mark nearly six months ahead of its third anniversary. Launched on July 24, 2002, the company has rapidly built its youth-relevant brand by offering a Pay As You Go wireless service with no long-term contracts or hidden fees, and a unique suite of mobile content.
"Achieving a three million customer milestone in less than three years since our launch drives home Virgin Mobile's position as a Pay As You Go pioneer," said Dan Schulman, CEO of Virgin Mobile USA. "Our continued growth confirms that we're making a powerful connection with the youth market."

Posting Powerful Results for Entertainment Services

Mobile phones are fast becoming lifestyle accessories used for more than talking, especially for teens and young adults. As these metrics demonstrate, Virgin Mobile customers are doing a lot more than just flapping their lips:

* In 2004, over 70% of Virgin Mobile customers sent or received text
messages.

* In 2004, over 60% of Virgin Mobile users used non-voice data services
such as MTV's Pimp My Ride, THangman, Comedy Central's Joke of the Day,
SongID, and Rescue Ring.

* Over half of its customers downloaded ringtones last year and Virgin
Mobile represents approximately 8% of the total US ringtone market -- a
number disproportionately larger than its total wireless market share.

Stellar Customer Service

Virgin Mobile also continues to provide outstanding service that exceeds the expectations of its customer base. Over 90% of Virgin Mobile customers say they'd recommend the service to a friend -- while more than eight-in-ten (83%) already have recommended Virgin Mobile to a friend or family member (Source: MSI Survey of current customers, 4Q 2004).

In addition to high marks for customer referrals, Virgin Mobile also keeps its gold-star status for customer satisfaction. Recent independent research among current customers gave Virgin Mobile a 92% satisfaction rate. "Customer service is our most important measure of success," Schulman said.

About Virgin Mobile USA, LLC:

Launched nationally in July of 2002, Virgin Mobile USA, LLC has redefined and set the pace for the entire prepaid wireless category. More than three million wireless users have chosen Virgin Mobile's Pay As You Go service with no long-term contracts and no hidden fees. In addition, J.D. Power and Associates has recognized Virgin Mobile for providing "An Outstanding Customer Service Experience" under its Certified Call Center Program(SM).

The nation's first mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), Virgin Mobile is a joint venture between Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Sprint, which operates one of the largest 100-percent digital, nationwide PCS wireless networks in the United States. It is the first wireless provider to focus exclusively on the needs and desires of the youth. All Virgin Mobile customers have access to VirginXtras -- a host of music, entertainment and fun lifestyle features, including exclusive content from strategic partner MTV: Music Television. Customers with 3G-enabled phones also have access to VirginXL -- the high-octane version of VirginXtras featuring picture messaging, downloadable games and more.

Virgin Mobile phones and Top-Up cards are available direct on the Web at http://www.virginmobileusa.com; at 888-322-1122; or, at more than 20,000 locations, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Coconuts, CompUSA, F.Y.E., Media Play, RadioShack, Rite Aid, Safeway, Sam Goody, Sprint Stores, Strawberries, Target Stores, Wal*Mart, Virgin Megastores and select college bookstores. Top- Up cards are also available at more than 57,000 locations, including Circle K, CVS and 7-Eleven stores.

A9.com + Doom

The pictures on A9's yellow pages are amazing. You could texture map them into a Doom-like game environment. Shoot-em up in Soho!