Ruth Fremson/ The New York Times

Leonel Hernandez gets tea to prevent crying; it doesn't always work.

Is it indigestion? Gas? Nostalgia for the womb? Nobody really knows. So in this city where 6 of 10 babies have at least one foreign-born parent and pediatricians come from every corner of the world, a cornucopia of colic cures serves as a kind of Rorschach test of child-rearing culture in migration.

Doctors cheerfully define colic as more than three hours of "unexplained crying" three times a week in an otherwise healthy infant. It affects anywhere from 10 percent to half of all babies in the first three months, and leaves glassy-eyed parents ready to try almost anything.

"You would boil pork rinds if someone told you it worked," said Felina Rakowski-Gallagher, a mother of two whose Manhattan boutique, the Upper Breast Side, caters to nursing mothers and serves as a hot spot for rumors of remedies at the front lines of baby care.

So far, no one is touting pork rinds as a cure for colic. But little New Yorkers are being comforted with Colombian cinnamon tea, soothed with Egyptian recipes for rosewater and calmed with infusions of anise seed, fennel, chamomile, or "hierba buena," a kind of spearmint plant that Latin American mothers and baby sitters seek out in supermarkets. Others are dosed with "gripe water," the elixir once bootlegged from the former British Empire, and now sold over the Internet in nonalcoholic versions with names like "Colic-Ease" and "Baby's Bliss."

Sure, methods from the heyday of America's machine age are still popular: place the crying baby atop a vibrating washing machine; run the vacuum cleaner full blast near the cradle, or take the wakeful infant on a midnight ride (preferably on a route without stoplights).

But now, with more immigrants in the city than ever before, so too are there more ancient anticolic traditions practiced down the block: Chinese acupressure, Haitian belly binding, Mexican swaddling, Indian oil massage, African cowry shell bracelets. And just as exotic foods from distant cultures enter the city's culinary mainstream, these methods are being examined and tried by the city's natives and nonimmigrant transplants, desperate for any way to stop the screaming.

At St. John's Family Health Center in the Elmhurst area of Queens, Dr. Lolita Uy has seen almost every colic remedy known to woman. Her basic rule: "Anything outside the baby is fine. Anything internal, I have to know."

Dr. Uy, who grew up in the Philippines speaking Chinese and Spanish, tends toward tolerance for such old herbal remedies as the chamomile tea that Leonel Hernandez, a 2-month-old of Mexican, German, Scottish and Puerto Rican descent, gets twice a day.

"It's supposed to clear out your system of gas or constipation," said his mother, Krystina Hernandez, 18, who was using a constant hip-sway, football carry and back-rubbing technique to keep Leonel's fussing at a low simmer. "His Mexican grandmother told me about it."

But Dr. Uy takes a dim view of the old version of gripe water, though it typically contained safe spices and herbs like fennel, ginger, dill, or anise, and is particularly championed by mothers and baby nurses from places once under the influence of British nannies - the West Indies, India, Egypt, Canada.

"One patient had a master's degree in biology and she told me, 'It's wonderful, whenever they give the gripe-water, the baby sleeps,'" Dr. Uy recalled. "Turns out, it contains 8 percent alcohol."

In the 1980's and early 1990's, such concerns prompted the Food and Drug Administration to order customs agents to seize cases of the stuff at the border. Now nonalcoholic gripe waters have their own followings. Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher is a second-generation convert - and an example of how old remedies recycle through migration.

Perhaps the only retired New York City police officer who owns a breastfeeding boutique, she was born in Berlin 40 years ago. Though her own colic was dosed with British gripe water, as her mother tells it, she was resolved to give her babies nothing but breast milk for the first six months. Then her second, Jack, wailed for weeks, and her mother screamed, " 'Give your son some gripe water or I'll kill you now!' "

"I did use half a dose on my son and half a dose on me," Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher recalled, "and there was a miracle."

The riots began two weeks ago after the accidental deaths of two youths apparently fleeing police, but grew into protests by poor white youths and youngsters of North African and African origin against police treatment, racism and poor job prospects.

Speaking after talks with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Paris, Chirac said the government must do more to ensure all citizens received equal treatment.

``We will have to draw all the consequences of this crisis, once the time comes and order has been restored, and with a lot of courage and lucidity,'' Chirac, who has said little about the crisis in public, told a joint news conference with Zapatero.

``We need to respond in a strong and quick way to the unquestionable problems that many inhabitants of the deprived neighbourhoods surrounding our cities are facing,'' Chirac said.

Two weeks of unrest in poor suburbs around France have badly rattled the conservative government and prompted Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on Tuesday to invoke a 50-year-old law allowing local restrictions.

Although the move coincided with a sharp fall in violence, Paris police chief Pierre Mutz banned the transport and purchase of petrol in jerry cans, citing a string of arrests in the capital of people carrying firebombs. Riots so far in the Paris area have been mainly confined to its impoverished suburbs.

``Calls have been launched over the past few days on Internet sites and by SMS messages urging meetings within Paris and calling for 'violent actions', in the words of the authors of these messages,'' Mutz's office said in a statement.

Mutz ordered all Paris petrol stations to enforce the ban.

VIOLENCE SUBSIDING

Despite the overall drop in violence, there were overnight clashes in the southwestern city of Toulouse, where a burning car was rammed into a primary school.

Police said 482 vehicles had been torched overnight, down from 617 the previous night, with 203 arrests reported.

``It's calm. It's subsiding,'' said a spokesman for the Seine-et-Marne department east of Paris.

Only five prefects, the state's top officials in France's administrative districts, have invoked the emergency powers, imposing limited curfews in places ranging from Nice in the south to Amiens in the north.

A poll showed that 73 percent of French people welcomed the measures, which are available to authorities in 38 cities and suburban areas including Paris.

However, some critics say Villepin overreacted by reviving a measure dating from Algeria's war of independence against its colonial master France.

``Most elected officials on the ground appear to have been more embarrassed than relieved,'' the left-leaning newspaper Liberation said in an editorial. ``They fear this measure will further stir things up, or believe it to be either an overreaction or totally useless.''

Seeking to end the unrest, Villepin pledged on Monday to restore some 100 million euros in funding for grass roots associations working in tough neighbourhoods, and improve prospects in education, the labor market and housing.

Fears that riots might erupt in other European countries have helped push down the value of the euro currency and damaged France's image abroad, though Finance Minister Thierry Breton said the economy had been unscathed.

Sotheby's

David Smith's "CUBI XXVIII" sold for $23.8 million.

Being a big spender required some effort: Mr. Gagosian's competitors hung on well into the double-digit-millions. All were hoping to own "CUBI XXVIII" (1965), the last of the artist's renowned Cubi series. The catalog designated it as "Property of a Texas Foundation," but before the sale experts identified the foundation as that of the Texas oil heir and financier Sid Bass,.

The reason for the high price was plain to lovers of contemporary art: this elegantly composed melding of boxes and columns may be the last example of the series to come on the market for some time. Most of the others are in museums or collections where they will stay for generations. So this last-chance opportunity was irresistible, which is why the sculpture's final price was nearly double its high estimate, $12 million.

That price was by far the brightest spot in a successful but often lifeless sale, the third evening auction in a row. The audience seemed fatigued, although a few bidders came to life when desirable works appeared on the turntable at the front of the York Avenue salesroom.

The evening totaled $114.4 million, above its high estimate of $108 million. Of the 54 lots, only 6 went unsold. While the numbers are impressive, they can't compare to Christie's corresponding sale on Tuesday night, which totaled $157.4 million, above its high estimate, $145.6 million, and Christie's highest total for any sale of postwar and contemporary art.

(Prices of record include Sotheby's commission: 20 percent of the first $200,000 of the hammer price and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

Christie's had had two important collections, which Sotheby's lacked, but some of last night's offerings were already well known because they were being sold by dealers like Alberto Mugrabi and Anthony d'Offay. Moreover, Sotheby's had given some sellers guarantees - undisclosed minimum sums promised regardless of the sale's outcome.

For some works, the investment paid off. "Jackie Frieze" (1964), one of the many paintings that were guaranteed, was one of two extant works in which Andy Warhol assembled portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy in a frieze format.Three telephone bidders wanted it, but no one went crazy. The hammer price was $8.2 million, just over the $8 million low estimate (with commission, $9.2 million).

There was less interest in "Untitled (New York City)," from 1968, one of Cy Twombly's gray blackboard canvases. The seller was Francis Dittmer, the Chicago collector. The sole bidder paid $8.6 million, a record for the artist.

Mr. Gagosian had Damien Hirst's "Most Beautiful Thing in the World" for sale last year. This 2003 work, a luminous roundel filled with butterfly wings, was estimated at $950,000 to $1.2 million. A telephone bidder paid $1.3 million.

Prices for Francis Bacon's works have soared this season. Last night "Three Studies for Self-Portrait," a 1976 triptych being sold by Robert Shaye, the chairman and chief executive of New Line Cinema, was estimated at $4 million to $6 million. Four bidders went for the painting, which sold to Andrew Fabricant, the Manhattan dealer, for $5.1 million.

At Christie's on Tuesday night, a photograph by Richard Prince broke two records: for his works at auction, and for any photograph at auction. Last night's sale featured three works by the artist, all from Mr. Mugrabi. "Untitled (Cowboys)," from 1993, one of Mr. Prince's images of the Marlboro Man, was expected to sell for $600,000 to $800,000. What a difference four years - and 24 hours - can make. While an an 1989 cowboy photograph set the records at Christie's, selling for $1.2 mllion, there was no bid in sight for last night's cowboys. A 1980 fashion photograph also failed to sell.

Mr. Prince fared better with one of his paintings of naughty nurses. Aby Rosen, the real estate developer, bought "Mountain Nurse" (2003) for $744,000, in the middle of its $600,00 to $800,000 estimate.

Last night Calder's "Haverford Monster (Maquette)," a standing mobile, was sold to a telephone bidder for $1.4 million, far above its high estimate, $800,000. Sotheby's sold the monumental version in 1994 for what then seemed like a huge price: $1.08 million.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Construction began last week on a $2.2 billion PATH commuter train terminal and transportation hub at the World Trade Center site.

"We look forward to working ourselves out of business," said Stefan Pryor, the president of the corporation, which was never envisioned as a permanent agency. "But we don't think we've accomplished that goal yet."

It is not clear how the corporation will fit with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's plan to become more involved at ground zero. He is entitled to appoint eight of the corporation's 16 directors but now has only three appointees on the board, though he pledged to fill the vacancies after the election.

Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff, who is not a director but represents the mayor at board meetings, said, "With the exception of what's going to happen with the commercial buildings, the truth is the vast, vast majority of decisions have basically been made."

"So naturally," he added, "the role of the L.M.D.C. declines as the responsibility for actually building things devolves to the respective agencies."

Governor Pataki still views the corporation as "central to the rebuilding efforts," a spokeswoman said last month, citing its responsibility for designing the 9/11 memorial and memorial museum, championing a performing arts center on the World Trade Center site and allocating the remaining federal redevelopment grants.

On Sept. 28, the governor seemed to undermine the corporation when he declared - while the board was reviewing the matter - that the International Freedom Center museum could not be placed in the memorial area. (State officials note that Mr. Pataki told the corporation to look for an alternative place for the museum, a search that might have succeeded had the Freedom Center executives not pulled the plug on their own project.)

As a result, Roland W. Betts, one of Mr. Pataki's original appointees and a business partner of a Freedom Center co-founder, Tom A. Bernstein, resigned from the board, saying the corporation's "ongoing role has been severely marginalized." Other directors also considered resigning, though none are known to have done so.

That is not the only way in which influence and power have shifted recently. John P. Cahill, the governor's chief of staff - not the corporation chairman or president - has emerged as the top downtown development official. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation has asserted itself in the construction process. And the Alliance for Downtown New York and Community Board 1 have lost representation on the board.

Supporters still see the corporation as a vital intermediary among the many groups with a stake at ground zero. They contend that it is reaching a critical point in designing the memorial. And they point out that it must oversee demolition of the former Deutsche Bank building, which it owns, a process that will last until 2007.

They envision the corporation as the defender of Daniel Libeskind's master site plan; as the advocate of a performing arts center, for which the board committed $50 million, and of cultural institutions generally downtown; and as the partner in redevelopment projects in Chinatown, at the Hudson River Park, on Fulton and Greenwich Streets and along the East River waterfront.

Robert P. Balachandran, the former president and chief executive of the Hudson River Park Trust, whom Mr. Pataki appointed to the board in 2004, said, "Our role is even more crystalline and important now than it ever was before."

The Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation, as it was first called, was created Nov. 5, 2001, as a subsidiary of the state's Urban Development Corporation. Charles A. Gargano, the chairman of the parent corporation, said it would "oversee all aspects of revitalizing and rebuilding Lower Manhattan."

Faced with the possibility that Mark Green, a Democrat, would be elected mayor, the Republican administration in Albany allocated six of nine board seats to the governor and three to the mayor. In April 2002, with a Republican mayor in office, the board was expanded to 16 members. The mayor and governor were each given eight appointees.

That sounds like city-state parity, but the Urban Development Corporation owns all the shares in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which was incorporated in December 2001. It was granted "all purposes, powers and functions entrusted to the U.D.C.," including property condemnation, and charged with the "implementation and management" of redevelopment south of Houston Street."

The stakes were particularly high for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which will get half the money. It has committed to completing the first segment of the Second Avenue subway, from East 96th to East 63rd Streets, jump-starting a project that was abandoned during the city's fiscal crisis of the mid-1970's.

The authority's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, had warned that the bond measure would "make or break" the Second Avenue subway and the project to link the Long Island Rail Road and Grand Central. Each of the two projects will receive $450 million under the bond measure.

The measure, Proposition 2, was winning by 55 percent to 45 percent, with 97 percent of the state's 16,274 polling precincts reporting, according to unofficial returns reported by The Associated Press.

"The voters want the best transit system in the world, and they are willing to do whatever needs to be done to make it happen," Mr. Kalikow said last night. "Now it's up to us complete the job."

The other half of the $2.9 billion will go to the State Department of Transportation, whose acting commissioner, Thomas J. Madison Jr., campaigned across the state. In New York City, major arteries to be repaired or upgraded under the bond act include the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan and the West Shore Expressway in Staten Island.

The state's last transportation bond act, a $3.9 billion measure, was narrowly defeated, 52 percent to 48 percent, in 2000. That measure was approved in New York City, 73 percent to 27 percent, but was resoundingly rejected upstate, 60 percent to 40 percent.

Proponents of this year's bond act hoped that a strong turnout for the New York City mayoral race would overcome opposition elsewhere, although several upstate communities also had mayoral elections yesterday, including Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester and Albany.

This year's measure was endorsed by Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his Democratic opponent, Fernando Ferrer. The state and city comptrollers, the leaders of both chambers of the Legislature, and dozens of lawmakers also supported it.

Vote Yes for Transportation, a coalition of business, labor, environmental and transportation groups, raised more than $1.8 million for advertisements, flyers and mailings.

"We had, for a shoestring budget, an incredibly robust field operation," the campaign's top field organizer, Edward Draves, said by telephone last night from Buffalo. "We distributed literature, manned polling sites and were on the palm cards of both Ferrer and Bloomberg."

Mr. Kalikow said he was given a campaign card endorsing the bond act on his way to vote at Public School 6 on the East Side, the same polling precinct where Mayor Bloomberg voted.

There was little organized opposition. Groups that opposed the bond act - including the Automobile Club of New York, the Conservative Party of New York State and the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog - relied on press releases and messages to their members.

In addition to the bond act, and a state constitutional amendment that would shift budget-making powers from the governor to the Legislature, two other questions were on the New York City ballot.

Neither question attracted significant opposition, and both were approved by 3-to-1 margins.

Question 3 will change the City Charter to establish a code of professional conduct for administrative law judges and hearing officers.

Question 4 will extend fiscal mandates that were enacted during the 1975 fiscal crisis. It will require a balanced budget and a four-year financial plan to be prepared each year, and impose conditions relating to short-term debt limits and auditing standards.

Courtesy of Patricia Maurice

Edward Beauclerk Maurice, 1935.

"The Last Gentleman Adventurer" is the enthralling account of Mr. Maurice's stay among the Inuit of the Far North, and his evolution from the callow, accident-prone youth the local Inuit called "the Boy" into the skilled hunter, amateur doctor and trader they renamed Issumatak, "One Who Thinks."

Mr. Maurice waited more than half a century to tell his tale. After serving in the New Zealand Navy during World War II, he settled into the quiet life of a bookseller in a small English village and died in 2003, as his only book was being readied for publication in Britain. Time and distance lend the narrative a peculiar charm. It is an old man's backward look at the young man he once was, and at a world that has all but vanished, and is all the more precious for that.

The Boy started off badly. Almost immediately after landing on Baffin Island, he managed to strand himself on a cliff face, and thereafter he showed an uncanny knack for falling into ice holes. Fortunately, his expectations were low and powers of endurance impressive. The local diet of seal stew, lumps of seal or deer fat, and meatballs made of mashed beans, corned beef and deer meat did not seem all that bad compared with English boarding-school fare. Deer fat, he found, "had a most palatable, nutty flavor."

Mr. Maurice flinched only once, after being served chunks of seal meat from a pot in the tent of a hunter and realizing, soon after, that the cooking vessel also served as a chamber pot for the baby of the family. "I lay awake considering the implications of this discovery for a long time," he writes, "but finally fell asleep, taking cold comfort from the thought that it is only possible to die once."

The sense of isolation was profound. There were 15 Europeans, and only one doctor, on a territory many times the size of England. Once a year, a ship from the Canadian mainland dropped off supplies, and unreliable radio signals transmitted fitful news of the outside world. Searching for reading material at his first post, Mr. Maurice faced a stark set of choices. The offerings ranged from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" to a thriller titled "Blood Ran Down the Bishop's Face."

Rather than brooding, Mr. Maurice threw himself into his new life. Sensitive and curious, he observed the local people, worked hard to understand their customs and gained fluency in the Inuit language. He fell in love with his natural surroundings and became an enthusiastic hunter. In one rousing episode, he even strikes out on the open sea in pursuit of a whale.

The overall approach is antiheroic. Hunting is treated less as an adventure than as an occupation (although there's no mistaking the exhilaration of skimming over the snow in a dogsled and bagging three or four caribou). Rarely does Mr. Maurice even mention the cold. Most of his attention is directed toward the Inuit and their culture, to the life inside their tents and igloos, and to the network of social relations that sustains them.

Command of the language and a gossipy fascination with local disputes take him a long way. Mr. Maurice quickly discovers that the patronizing Europeans are, unknown to them, patronized in turn, satirized in song and story. "She opens her mouth like/ A fish out of water/ To show off her tooth/ Like a walrus tusk...," runs one ditty describing a female visitor from the Canadian south. On long winter nights, he listens to native storytellers, and when invited to speak, holds his audience spellbound with "Snow White" and "Aladdin and the Lamp." The author paints these scenes with a quiet, understated charm.

There is high drama, too. In his final posting, on Frobisher Bay, Mr. Maurice confronts a mysterious epidemic that kills many of the people's best hunters. With only a small medicine kit, he assumes the role of doctor and finds himself locked in a political battle with the wily local shaman, who sees One Who Thinks and his strange aspirins as a threat.

Mr. Maurice must also deal with an emotional crisis as Innuk, the widow of a hunter, encourages him to make their friendship something deeper and more permanent. Temperatures run high when he forms a sled team with Innuk and her good friend, an Inuit version of Annie Oakley. Together, they speed across the snow on expedition after expedition, one of the most improbable hunting partnerships ever seen in the Arctic.

Mr. Maurice draws the curtain discreetly on his relationship with Innuk. But his feelings for her, for the Inuit and for the harsh, unforgiving land they call home radiate a steady warmth more than 50 years later. His memories remained clear and powerful. It would be interesting to know whether the reverse is true, and whether anyone on Baffin Island tells a tale or two about a stranger known as One Who Thinks.

Eclectic museum plans serious fun as it turns 10

Today's pointy-head quiz: What binds together the Miami Beach Veterans Day Parade and the New World Symphony, Morris Lapidus and the Biltmore Hotel, Thomas Edison and mambo king Cachao?

Painfully unobvious answer: The Wolfsonian-FIU, dummkopf, the museum that knows how to have serious fun.

Find out how it all jells this weekend, when the Wolfsonian -- recently called ''one of America's most remarkable museums'' by The New York Times -- marks its 10th anniversary with a three-day celebration as eclectic as its category-busting collection.

There will be events exclusive and inclusive, from the formal gala at the Biltmore -- Peter Duchin! Cachao! Fireworks! -- to a family fun day on Sunday and the Veterans Day parade, which will end at the museum's Art Deco District home on Friday with the premiere of the Wolfsonian Fanfare, its new musical theme, performed by members of the New World Symphony.

The museum will also unveil its new café and shop, featuring at its portal a rare and arresting Edison Bipolar Dynamo, polished and mounted on a pedestal like a gleaming industrial sculpture. Beyond it is a banned-books section, a 60-inch plasma screen for film showings, and a new line of uniquely Wolfsonian merchandise designed by cheeky Miami ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, all of it displayed on a 19th-century modular book-stacking shelf system, the first ever created.

As in everything the Wolfsonian administrators mount, there is a sober purpose to these goings-on: not only to raise money, but to highlight the museum's singular mission -- illuminating the political and social history of the 60 years before the end of World War II, a period that gave birth to our modern world, through objects of art and everyday use, furniture, architectural fragments, books, examples of commercial and political propaganda, and ephemera such as postcards and travel brochures. And more.

''We try to combine interesting history or historical references in keeping with the whole motivation of the Wolfsonian, and not have just another party,'' said museum founder and eminence grise Mitchell ''Micky'' Wolfson Jr.

LIVELY REPUTATION

Erudition aside, the Wolfsonian's parties and public events have gained renown as some of the wittiest and liveliest in Miami.

Wolfson, heir to the Wometco movie-theater fortune, amassed the 100,000 objects that form the basis for the collection during world travels. To house them, he acquired,renovated and expanded the 1927 Washington Storage Building, then donated everything to Florida International University.

The museum opened to the public on Veterans Day, 1995, to acclaim from critics and connoisseurs. But the hard-to-describe collection has made it hard for the museum to catch on with the broader public, even though the objects it displays are not generally fine or high art, but once-commonplace stuff that Wolfsonian directors believe should be interesting and accessible even to people who do not frequent museums.

''We're trying to make it part of the town civic fabric, and that you don't do overnight,'' said Wolfson, the museum's chairman. ``But people aren't sure what to make of it. We present narratives to the public, but they're always changing. It's always a surprise. It's stimulating and provocative, but difficult to pin down.''

MUSEUM OF THINKISM

Thus, a new slogan -- The Museum of Thinkism -- to pique interest, and the Dynamo Café, to drive traffic and, so administrators hope, turn their block into a hot spot on Washington Avenue, which has been up and down and is again looking for a way up. The café is housed in an annex to the main building that formerly presented a blank facade to the street.

''Things are starting to happen on Washington Avenue, and we're hoping the café makes a real contribution to what can be done in terms of renovations on the block,'' Wolfsonian director Cathy Leff said.

Ultimately, though, it's the main business of the Wolfsonian -- exhibits -- that will draw the crowds, Leff said.

THE AMERICAN HOTEL

And for the Very Wolfsonian Weekend, as the anniversary celebration has been dubbed, the museum will launch a show and two publications firmly anchored in hometown history: the development and elaboration of the American hotel, which gave rise to and shaped modern Miami and Miami Beach.

For the first time, the Wolfsonian will put on view selections from the archives of Schultze & Weaver, the architecture firm famously responsible for South Florida landmarks such as the Freedom Tower, the Coral Gables Biltmore and the Breakers in Palm Beach, as well as the Pierre and the Waldorf-Astoria hotels, Jazz Age stalwarts in New York City, and the Sevilla Biltmore in Havana.

The Breakers lent furniture for the show, and the Waldorf disassembled a gate and shipped it to the Wolfsonian. Museum doormen will wear uniforms lent by the Waldorf during opening weekend.

The archive, acquired by Wolfson from the architects' heirs, is also the basis for a new book from Princeton Architectural Press, Grand Hotels of the Jazz Age. An accompanying issue of the Wolfsonian's Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts traces the history of American hotels from the Gilded Age to Morris Lapidus' modern rococo Miami Beach concoctions, the Eden Roc and Fontainebleau.

Fittingly, the exhibition also gave the Wolfsonian the perfect theme for its anniversary celebration. Hence the Biltmore gala with the Duchin orchestra playing music of the Jazz Age, and Cachao, aka Israel Lopez, playing the mambo of Havana's golden '50s. Not incidentally, the exhibit and its offshoots also embrace the long-standing connections between New York and Miami and Miami Beach, where both Lapidus and Schultze & Weaver did their best-known work, Leff noted.

''Because there are people here who might not have been fully exposed to what we have to offer, we wanted to do an exhibition that connects to the culture of this community, and hotels and tourism is certainly a big theme here,'' Leff said.

``The whole idea is to celebrate this community.''

The frivolity, she noted, will be balanced with the solemnity of the Veterans Day event. The Armistice Day that gave rise to the veterans holiday marked the end of World War I, a cataclysm amply documented in the Wolfsonian's collection.

So on Armistice Day, the philharmonic will play, not the shuffling brown tunes of Paul Simon's song but composer Michael Ruszcynski's new Fanfare, at once honoring the Wolfsonian and American vets.

''We validate and perpetuate a history, and we connect it to now,'' Leff said, finally and aptly summing up the Wolfsonian.

Marina Abramovic, in "Nude With Skeleton."

In many ways Ms. Abramovic's redux would have been the perfect illustration of the strange obsession, nurtured for more than a decade, that is bringing her to the Guggenheim: "covering" famous performance art pieces, much in the way one rock band covers another's hit, adoringly but in a different voice, with new riffs and rhythms.

In music, it's a time-honored tradition. It even happens occasionally in the visual arts with artists like Richard Pettibone, who has made a career of painting teeny copies of Warhols, Duchamps and Stellas. But in the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960's and 70's, the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.

And so when Ms. Abramovic - herself a groundbreaking performance artist - started going around seeking permission from artists or their estates, even offering to pay for the privilege of re-enacting the works, she was not always well received. She recounted going to Düsseldorf with her sights on one of Joseph Beuys's seminal pieces from 1965 - "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" - but his widow, Eva, "opened the door and said: 'Frau Abramovic, I got letter from Guggenheim. My answer is no ... but you can have coffee.' " " 'Mrs. Beuys, but I don't drink coffee - can I have a tea?' " Ms. Abramovic replied, as she recalled in a recent interview, grinning slyly at her attempt to draw out the conversation. (It worked; the piece will be one of the seven at the Guggenheim.)

Mr. Burden - who long ago retired from performance but in his prime was almost drowned and once shot in the arm for the sake of art - was not so agreeable. "I don't even know the reasons why - he didn't answer," said Ms. Abramovic, who planned to replace the Volkswagen with a Chaika, a kind of Russian-made limousine she remembered from her youth in Yugoslavia.

"He only had a secretary answer in a letter saying, 'Mr. Burden is not talking publicly these days, and he doesn't give permission to repeat this piece or any other pieces.' I can't tell you how disappointed I was."

She could not claim to be surprised, though. In her early days of performing in Belgrade in the 1970's, Ms. Abramovic (pronounced ah-BRAH-moe-vitch) would have agreed with him. "It was supposed to be that event, in that moment, and that was it," she said. But, along with some other artists, she began to chafe at these strictures, feeling that a video of a performance or written instructions for how a performance should be undertaken could be works of art themselves. "Plus, I am Russian," she said. "We love archives."

By the 1980's, many of the pioneering performance artists of her generation began to burn out or change gears. Mr. Burden moved on to installation pieces and sculpture. Vito Acconci - one of whose more infamous pieces Ms. Abramovic will recreate at the Guggenheim - also stopped performing. But Ms. Abramovic, while also moving into making objects and films, continued to perform grueling pieces with her longtime partner in life and art, the German artist Ulay. After their split in 1988, she returned to performing alone.

As she grew older - she will be 60 next year - she says she felt the strong need to preserve the memory of performances that influenced her as an artist. "There's nobody to keep the history straight," she said. "I felt almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it." And this sense only grew stronger when she began to see ideas behind many important performances borrowed with no credit given, or appropriated by advertising and fashion.

The Ripple Effect of Google

In Google, Wal-Mart sees both a technology pioneer and the seed of a threat, said Mr. Breyer, who is also a partner in a venture capital firm. The worry is that by making information available everywhere, Google might soon be able to tell Wal-Mart shoppers if better bargains are available nearby.

Wal-Mart is scarcely alone in its concern. As Google increasingly becomes the starting point for finding information and buying products and services, companies that even a year ago did not see themselves as competing with Google are beginning to view the company with some angst - mixed with admiration.

Google's recent moves have stirred concern in industries from book publishing to telecommunications. Businesses already feeling the Google effect include advertising, software and the news media. Apart from retailing, Google's disruptive presence may soon be felt in real estate and auto sales.

Google, the reigning giant of Web search, could extend its economic reach in the next few years as more people get high-speed Internet service and cellphones become full-fledged search tools, according to analysts. And ever-smarter software, they say, will cull and organize larger and larger digital storehouses of news, images, real estate listings and traffic reports, delivering results that are more like the advice of a trusted human expert.

Such advances, predicts Esther Dyson, a technology consultant, will bring "a huge reduction in inefficiency everywhere." That, in turn, would be an unsettling force for all sorts of industries and workers. But it would also reward consumers with lower prices and open up opportunities for new companies.

Google, then, may turn out to have a more far-reaching impact than earlier Web winners like Amazon and eBay. "Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be about but really wasn't until Google," said David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Google, to be sure, is but one company at the forefront of the continuing spread of Internet technology. It has many competitors, and it could stumble. In the search market alone, Google faces formidable rivals like Microsoft and Yahoo.

Microsoft, in particular, is pushing hard to catch Google in Internet search. "This is hyper-competition, make no mistake," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief executive. "The magic moment will come when our search is demonstrably better than Google's," he said, suggesting that this could happen in a year or so.

Still, apart from its front-runner status, Google is also remarkable for its pace of innovation and for how broadly it seems to interpret its mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

The company's current lineup of offerings includes: software for searching personal computer files; an e-mail service; maps; satellite images; instant messaging; blogging tools; a service for posting and sharing digital photos; and specialized searches for news, video, shopping and local information. Google's most controversial venture, Google Print, is a project to copy and catalog millions of books; it faces lawsuits by some publishers and authors who say it violates copyright law.

Google, which tends to keep its plans secret, certainly has the wealth to fund ambitious ventures. Its revenues are growing by nearly 100 percent a year, and its profits are rising even faster. Its executives speak of the company's outlook only in broad strokes, but they suggest all but unlimited horizons. "We believe that search networks as industries remain in their nascent stages of growth with great forward potential," Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, told analysts last month.

Among the many projects being developed and debated inside Google is a real estate service, according to a person who has attended meetings on the proposal. The concept, the person said, would be to improve the capabilities of its satellite imaging, maps and local search and combine them with property listings.

The service, this person said, could make house hunting far more efficient, requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses. If successful, it would be another magnet for the text ads that appear next to search results, the source of most of Google's revenue.

In telecommunications, the company has made a number of moves that have grabbed the attention of industry executives. It has been buying fiber-optic cable capacity in the United States and has invested in a company delivering high-speed Internet access over power lines. And it is participating in an experiment to provide free wireless Internet access in San Francisco.

Sydney SchwartzColumbia News Service
Mar. 24, 2005 12:00 AM