Chihuly Victimized by His Own Success

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Regina Hackett:

But at age 64, he’s where he never wanted to be, in court. He’s suing two glass blowers for copyright infringement, contending they’re imitating his work. They’re threatening to sue him back, questioning whether Chihuly is the creative intelligence behind the art bearing his signature. And a former dealer is attacking him with a gusto rare in the art world. If that’s not enough, his feet hurt.

Emotionally, he has been through the wringer.

Since 2001, a significant number of the people closest to him have died, some without warning. Partially because both his brother and father died in quick succession in his teens, he tends to experience each death as a blow to the body.

Last year he sank into a depression from which he is now recovering. Friends who haven’t seen him in many months are being invited over for dinner.

Chihuly’s work lights up the Kohl Center’s entrance – adding color to an emotionless sea of grey.

Steal this Newspaper

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David Carr:

ABOUT a month ago, The Star Tribune in Minneapolis let it be known that, as a cost-cutting effort, free copies of the newspaper would no longer be broadly available around the newsroom.

Instead, the staff was offered an electronic edition of the paper — “an exact digital reproduction of the printed version,” no less — that they could access online. Those who insisted on seeing the fruits of the their labors in its physical form were told that they could purchase copies for 25 cents, half the retail cost, from boxes around the office. (This change in policy was first reported by City Pages in Minneapolis.)

So far, so weird. Journalism is not jammed with perks — well, not at most newspapers, anyway — but it was always assumed that you could grab a gratis sports section on the way to lunch.

Judge Presses Companies that Cut Off Legal Fees

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Lynnley Browning:

Federal judges are beginning to question why companies are cutting off legal fees to their executives when they become caught up in criminal investigations.

The judge in the tax-shelter trial of former tax professionals at KPMG last week ordered a hearing to determine whether prosecutors had improperly put pressure on the accounting firm to stop paying the defendants’ legal bills. Last month, a federal judge in New Hampshire granted five former executives of Enterasys Networks a three-month reprieve in their trial after he questioned whether there was undue influence to cut off their legal payments. (The company has since restored them.)

The questions have emerged as other companies, including Symbol Technologies and HealthSouth, have stopped paying former executives’ bills for lawyers.

Low Payroll and High Hopes for the Brewers

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Murray Chass likes the Brewers chances:

TOM HICKS and Mark Attanasio have conducted business deals with each other, but it is a deal Hicks did on his own for which Attanasio owes Hicks a large thank-you. Hicks, the Texas Rangers’ owner, fired Doug Melvin as his general manager in 2001, three and a half years after Hicks bought the team. Melvin became the general manager of the Milwaukee Brewers in September 2002 and was in that position when Attanasio bought the Brewers in January 2005.

While Hicks’s Rangers continue to flail and founder in a sea of uncertain leadership, Attanasio’s Brewers are headed in the right direction. After a franchise-record 12 consecutive losing seasons, the Brewers last year won as many games as they lost. This season, they won their first five games before losing three of four.

“We’re more settled and we have more stability than we’ve had in the past,” Melvin said. “We know our players better. Two, three years ago, we weren’t sure. I think we have a club that has a chance to grow on the fans. I feel we have enough experience to contend.”

A City of Great Magnitude

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Janis Cooke Newman:

In April 1906, 70 years before my own first visit, Enrico Caruso also thought he was lucky to be here. The famed Italian tenor was supposed to be in Naples, but Mt. Vesuvius had erupted two weeks before, and Caruso thought he would be safer in San Francisco , where, after all, there are no volcanoes. “God has sent me here,” the singer declared before he went to bed the night of April 17. When he was shaken from that bed the following dawn, Caruso changed his opinion of the Almighty’s intent. “We are all doomed to die!” he shouted at his valet.

Jeanne Cooper chronicles the great quakes from 1906 to 2006.

Richard Davis’s Birthday Party: Audio / Video

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Often in life, the best things are free. Thanks, Richard and friends!

 Richard Davis’s Friday night Birthday Bash (Richard mentioned that his birthday is actually tax day, April 15) seemed an appropriate way to wrap up a beautiful Madison week, with temperatures reaching into the 70’s. The bash was held Friday night at Mills Hall and included participants from the Bass Conference Faculty.

Audio / Video:

Conference pictures are available here.

More on Richard: Wikipedia | Clusty | Google | Yahoo

Quarterly Google Earnings – Blodget

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Henry Blodget:

Okay, Google gamblers. This one’s going to be interesting.

On the one hand, Google’s modest deceleration last quarter suggests that the company is going to once again deliver (relatively) ho-hum results and disappoint investors conditioned to expect the astounding. It takes a long time for a supertanker to change speeds or course, and, last quarter, anyway, it did seem that the Google supertanker was finally beginning to slow down. This diagnosis seemed confirmed by possible canary-in-the-coalmine announcements from advertisers who were cutting back on search spending because prices had gotten out of hand. And then there was CFO George Reyes’ lucid mid-quarter explanation of why growth had slowed in Q4–because previous growth had been accelerated by a monetization program that had now run its course. This convincing explanation kneecapped the stock for the eight hours it took for the company to issue a press release that said, effectively, George was wrong.

The AMT Shell Game: Why Bush’s Tax “Cuts” Aren’t

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Scott Rosenberg:

Over at Slate, Daniel Gross is explaining, once more, the role the Alternative Minimum Tax continues to play in the Bush administration’s deceptive tax policies.

The AMT is a bizarre parallel-universe of taxation with its own set of complex rules that differ from the normal IRS system. It was passed decades ago as an effort to prevent gazillionaires from using elaborate tax shelters to reduce their tax bills to zero. For many years it was easily ignored by the vast majority of Americans, and as recently as a few years ago the only non-super-rich people who worried about it were tech-industry types who’d hit the stock-option jackpot but played their cards wrong.

But the AMT was designed with its very own time-bomb: It was never indexed for inflation, and so each year the rising tide of inflation — even the slow, relatively benign inflation the U.S. has experienced in the last decade — lifts more and more middle-class Americans into its maw. The obvious answer is to fix it, either by repeal or by indexing it for inflation so it continues to apply only to the gazillionaires who were its original target. Shouldn’t be so hard, right?