Ang Lee breaks every rule in new ‘Life of Pi’ film
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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2012
This image is an artist’s rendering of a proposed 625-foot Ferris wheel, billed as the world’s largest, planned as part of a retail and hotel complex along the Staten Island waterfront in New York —AP
NYC Ferris wheel project has big backers he Ferris wheel may be a steam-age invention, but it is back in vogue in New York, which this week joined a long list of cities where urban planners or developers have bet that massive, modern versions of the old ride can serve as economic engines. After the towering London Eye debuted in early 2000, it seemed as if there was no end to the number of cities dreaming about stimulating tourism by building their own giant observation wheel, modeled after the one drawing 3.5 million riders per year in Britain. Re-creating London’s success has proved to be daunting, with failed or postponed projects in a number of world-class cities. But the concept still has luster. Work is being done on two new massive wheels in Las Vegas. Seattle saw a smaller version open on its waterfront last spring. Now, the biggest test yet will come in New York, where city officials announced Thursday that a private development group had been given
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approval to build the world’s tallest Ferris wheel, at 625 feet, on the waterfront in Staten Island. The proposal, with a $230 million price tag, is audacious. Its success would rely on people being willing to travel by miles by ferry across New York Harbor to a remote, mostly suburban part of the city that has always been an afterthought to visitors. Yet the people behind the project, led by a newly formed company, New York Wheel, include some heavy hitters. The primary financial backers include Lloyd Goldman, a real estate baron who is part of the partnership redeveloping the World Trade Center site, and Joseph Nakash, a co-founder of the Jordache apparel company who now chairs an investment group that also owns airlines and real estate. The third primary investor is The Feil Organization, a real estate powerhouse that owns or manages commercial and residential properties across the country. New York Wheel CEO Richard Marin spent decades as an execu-
tive at Bankers Trust Company, then led a subsidiary at Bear Stearns until some black eyes related to bad bets on mortgage securities led to his departure in 2007. After that, he had a job turning around a distressed real estate portfolio as CEO of Africa Israel Investments. Now, though those real estate connections, he’s found himself in the carnival business - or at least the venture capital version of it. “It’s a short trip from Wall Street to P.T. Barnum,” Marin joked in a phone interview Friday. Marin said the heft in the investment group shows it isn’t just blindly following a trendy tourism gimmick. While the London wheel was “wildly successful,” he isn’t naive about the challenge in replicating its success. Marin said the company spent a year and a half in discussions with city officials about a possible site before agreeing on Staten Island. Under the deal announced Thursday, New York Wheel will pay the city $1 million per year on a 99-year lease for a waterfront location with-
in walking distance of the Staten Island Ferry terminal. Simultaneously, another development group will be building a 350,000-square-foot shopping mall and hotel on the opposite side of the terminal. The neighborhood is already home to a minor league baseball stadium. “It’s a location and a site that I have come to love,” Marin said. Having the wheel next to the ferry, which is already ridden by an estimated 2 million tourists annually, will save the developers about $100 million in transportation infrastructure costs, he said. And, despite the distance from other tourist sites, the view of New York harbor will be thrilling and unique enough, he predicted, to draw the millions of riders needed to earn back the ride’s high cost. Several other giant Ferris wheels built in the past decade have been successful. China’s 525 foot-tall Star of Nanchang and Singapore’s 541foot Singapore Flyer have both been a hit with tourists. In other places, planned wheels never
Mayans prophesized, but not end of world A s the clock winds down to Dec 21, experts on the Mayan calendar have been racing to convince people that the Mayans didn’t predict an apocalypse for the end of this year. Some experts are now saying the Mayans
Mayan Long Count calendar, which is made up of 394-year periods called baktuns. Experts estimate the system starts counting at 3114 BC, and will have run through 13 baktuns, or 5,125 years, around Dec. 21. Experts say 13 was a signif-
A Mayan priestess prays during a ceremony marking the Mayan solar new year in Guatemala City in this file photo. Archaeologists and experts in Mayan culture are racing against time to prove that despite the approaching end of that civilization's calendar, the end of the world is not coming. —AP may indeed have made prophecies, just not about the end of the world. Archaeologists, anthropologists and other experts met Friday in the southern Mexico city of Merida to discuss the implications of the
icant number for the Mayans, and the end of that cycle would be a milestone - but not an end. Fears that the calendar does point to the end have circulated in recent years. People in that camp
believe the Maya may have been privy to impending astronomical disasters that would coincide with 2012, ranging from explosive storms on the surface of the sun that could knock out power grids to a galactic alignment that could trigger a reversal in Earth’s magnetic field. Mexican government archaeologist Alfredo Barrera said Friday that the Mayans did prophesize, but perhaps about more humdrum events like droughts or disease outbreaks. “The Mayans did make prophecies, but not in a fatalistic sense, but rather about events that, in their cyclical conception of history, could be repeated in the future,” said Barrera, of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. Experts stressed that the ancient Mayans, whose “classic” culture of writing, astronomy and temple complexes flourished from AD 300 to 900, were extremely interested in future events, far beyond Dec. 21. “There are many ancient Maya monuments that discuss events far into the future from now,” wrote Geoffrey Braswell, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego. “The ancient Maya clearly believed things would happen far into the future from now.” “The king of Palenque, K’inich Hanaab Pakal, believed he would return to the Earth a couple of
thousand years from now in the future,” Braswell wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Moreover, other monuments discuss events even before the creation in 3114 BC.” Only a couple of references to the 2012 date equivalency have been found carved in stone at Mayan sites, and neither refers to an apocalypse, experts say. Such apocalyptic visions have been common for more than 1,000 years in Western, Christian thinking, and are not native to Mayan thought. “This is thinking that, in truth, has nothing to do with Mayan culture,” said Alexander Voss, an anthropologist at the University Of Quintana Roo, a state on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. “This thing about looking for end-times is not something that comes from Mayan culture.” Braswell compared the Mayan calendar, with its system of cycles within cycles, to the series of synchronized wheels contained in old, analogue car odometers. “The Maya long count system is like a car odometer,” Braswell wrote. “My first car (odometer) only had six wheels so it went up to 99,999.9 miles. That didn’t mean the car would explode after reaching 100,000 miles.” —AP
got off the ground. A 682-foot-tall wheel that was supposed to open in Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympics was never completed. An earlier pioneer in the business, the Great Wheel Corp., had projects in the works to build similar wheels in Dubai, Berlin, Orlando, Fla., and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but all were either suspended or collapsed. “These are expensive and difficult, big projects,” said Wil Armstrong, the North American representative for Starneth, a new company, formed by veterans of the London Eye design and engineering team, that is providing the designs for the New York wheel. “Every city, it seems, of any size, has thought about it. But wanting to do and actually doing it is a large step.” —AP
Americana revisited: Rockwell’s models reuniting on Trachte’s cowlick has been tamed. Mary Hall is no longer a towhead. Butch Corbett is still thin, but not the beanpole he once was. And Tom Paquin’s carrot top is thinner and grayer. Twenty or so people who were children when they posed in the 1940s and ‘50s for their neighbor Norman Rockwell in the Vermont town of Arlington are reuniting there to share their memories of the great American artist who once lived in their midst. Rockwell captured scenes of everyday life in his paintings and illustrations for covers of the Saturday Evening Post, for the Boy Scouts and for its publication Boys’ Life, art now considered the very definition of Americana. He would pay his neighbors $5 a pop to appear in Hallmark cards, in calendars and on magazine covers that ended up gracing the coffee tables and littering the tree houses of millions of magazine readers young and old. “The Saturday Evening Post came out weekly, and we couldn’t wait to get it to see what was on the cover,” said Hall, who posed for Rockwell four times. “You could always recognize who it was.” She appeared as a blond girl wrapped in a quilt and being carried out of a flood by a Boy Scout in an image that became a cover of Boys’ Life, and as a teenager in a skirt, white blouse, bobby socks and loafers on a Post cover from 1948. It was
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called “Christmas Homecoming” and showed people welcoming home a young man who’s carrying a suitcase full of dirty laundry. An estimated 300 people from the area modeled for Rockwell during his 14 years in the southern Vermont town. Of the 70 or so still living, the oldest is 93 (he can’t make it to the reunion). Many still live in and around Arlington. Among the models planning to join in is Mary Whalen, who posed for the popular image of a rugged-looking school girl with braids and a black eye, waiting outside a principal’s office. The former models have gotten together before, but this weekend is special. They have been invited to view a new gallery of Rockwell prints and memorabilia that is taking the place of a recently closed Rockwell museum. The new owners are treating them to a turkey lunch in honor of Rockwell’s famous painting of an excited family gathered for Thanksgiving dinner. “I think it’s important that the models keep the tradition of the image that Vermont, Arlington in particular, was important in Norman Rockwell’s biography. That while he lived in Arlington he did his best work, probably ... and his local models were Arlington people,” said James “Buddy” Edgerton, 82, who lived next door to Rockwell, his wife and three sons and modeled for him at least a dozen times. —AP