Washed It!

GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman paints rival Jerry Brown as a machine Democrat who as governor decades ago spent big and coddled liberal interests while pursuing an expansive role for government. Brown says he was a deficit hawk who deftly managed the state’s finances and a world-class educational system.

Neither of the conflicting portrayals, featured in the battle the two have been waging on California’s airwaves, is exactly how those eight years went.

Brown disdained political convention and protocol and refused to govern as a run-of-the-mill liberal. He tangled with the Legislature constantly, though it was controlled by fellow Democrats: Lawmakers overrode his vetoes 12 times. And although his early approval rating hit 85% — higher than Ronald Reagan’s had reached — Brown ultimately tripped over his famous frugality, irritating voters by squeezing local schools, delaying road construction and neglecting the growing state university system.

“He had his own ideology, and it was one we had never seen before,” said Paul Priolo, who was the Assembly Republican leader during part of Brown’s governorship. “He was different.”

Brown had many successes, and several of his ideas — carpool lanes, satellite communications for California, computers in classrooms —- are commonplace now. He was the skilled dealmaker who, at 37, negotiated the landmark farm labor agreement that ended the nationwide produce boycotts. He protected some of the state’s most pristine lands and crafted energy policies that sowed the seeds of a green economy long before it was stylish.

But he was also the distracted intellectual who dawdled as soaring property taxes began to crush homeowners, spurring a ballot box revolt. He was paralyzed by the Medfly crisis and criticized for being inattentive to schools.

He recruited a dynamic group of Californians to run the government, spurning the usual insiders and filling many prominent positions with women and minorities for the first time. Some of them helped usher in such pioneering policies as a 25% reduction in air pollution and pressured Detroit for more environmentally friendly cars.

Others flailed. Rose Bird, the ardent death penalty opponent with no judicial experience whom Brown appointed as chief justice of the Supreme Court, was ultimately rejected by a 2-1 margin in a regularly scheduled retention vote.

Lawmakers were inclined to dislike Brown from the start. He came into office on the heels of a successful initiative campaign to ban lavish gifts from lobbyists to politicians. Lawmakers had earlier rejected Brown’s “two hamburgers and a Coke” proposal, inspired by his view that that’s about all a lobbyist should be allowed to buy a lawmaker.

The state Senate leader once ordered the sergeant-at-arms to halt an impromptu Brown press conference in Senate chambers and threatened to have state police forcibly evict him. By Brown’s second term, his bill vetoes were overridden so often that it appeared lawmakers were doing it for sport. No governor since has been overridden.

Sometimes it seemed like Brown was winging it — as he appears to be these days on the stump. His distaste for plans and pamphlets, policy agendas and schedules dates back decades.

“Often we have to just let things emerge,” Brown said in an interview with Playboy in 1976. “If you’re interested in agendas, you might read the inaugural speeches of the last five governors. They say much the same thing: Down with crime, unemployment and taxes.”

Brown had kept his inaugural speech to seven minutes. He talked about unemployment. Then he took a group to Man Fook Lo, a Chinese restaurant in the produce district of Los Angeles. No inaugural ball.

But liberals attracted by Brown’s progressive outlook and family legacy of big projects — his governor father, Pat Brown, built universities and freeways — were disappointed. Brown’s frugality went beyond his rented apartment with a mattress on the floor; he declared an “era of limits” and tightened the state belt even as a record state surplus mounted.

Former Gov. Gray Davis, Brown’s first chief of staff, said Brown suggested senior government staffers save taxpayers money by staying with friends when traveling instead of in hotels.

“His Department of Finance would hide money from us,” said Richard Robinson, a Democrat who represented the Santa Ana area in the Assembly. “It was a major source of frustration.”

Some programs suffered. California slipped from 18th to 31st in the nation, by some measures, in per-pupil school spending. Brown suggested that cutting off some funds for schools would inspire reform. Instead, the school day was shortened, classrooms grew crowded and teachers’ salaries fell behind those in other states.

At the state’s universities, faculty salaries were frozen. Brown said highly compensated state employees such as university professors were deriving “psychic income” from the interesting nature of their work. He vetoed raises for other state employees and curbed spending on transportation, leaving much of the freeway system, a Pat Brown legacy, to deteriorate.

The junior Brown did sign off on construction of the 105 Freeway. But mostly he focused on alternative transportation. He appointed Adriana Gianturco, a 36-year-old Bostonian with no background in highway engineering, to run Caltrans. She had opposed the 105 Freeway, rejected plans for another expressway and transformed the fast lanes on the Santa Monica Freeway into “diamond lanes” for carpoolers.

As young governor, Brown went his own way

An American and two Japanese scientists won the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing chemical methods widely used to make potential cancer drugs and other medicines, as well as slimmed-down computer screens.

Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki were honored for their development four decades ago of one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today, called palladium-catalyzed cross couplings.

It lets chemists join carbon atoms together, a key step in the process of building complex molecules. Their methods are now used worldwide in commercial production of pharmaceuticals and molecules used to make electronics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

Heck, 79, is a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware, now living in the Philippines. Negishi, 75, is a chemistry professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and 80-year-old Suzuki is a retired professor from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.

Negishi told reporters in Stockholm by telephone from Indiana that he was excited to be awakened by a call early Wednesday from the Nobel committee, saying he started dreaming about winning the prize “half a century ago.”

“The Nobel Prize became a realistic dream of mine when I was in my 20’s,” he said, adding he would use his third of the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award to continue doing research.

“I may have accomplished maybe half of my goals and I definitely would like to work for at least a couple of more years,” Negishi said.

Heck said from his home in the Philippines that the importance of his work wasn’t clear initially.

“It sort of grew as we worked on it,” he told The Associated Press. “As I worked on it longer it appeared it was pretty important and it has developed well since then.”

In a televised news conference from Hokkaido University, Suzuki said he was honored by the prize and hoped that it would inspire Japanese youngsters to explore chemistry.

“To my disappointment, not many young people seem to be interested in science, especially chemistry,” said Suzuki. “A resource-poor country like Japan can only rely on people’s endeavor and knowledge. I would like to continue my effort to provide help to younger people.”

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said he spoke to Suzuki on the phone and congratulated him.

“He told me that Japan’s science and technology is at the world’s top level and encouraged me to make good use of the resources,” Kan said.

The methods developed by the three scientists have been used to artificially produce cancer-killing substances first found in marine sponges, the academy said in its citation. It’s not yet clear whether they will turn out to be useful drugs.

They are also being used to create new antibiotics that work on resistant bacteria and a number of commercially available drugs, including the anti-inflammatory Naproxen, prize committee member Claes Gustafsson said.

“There have been calculations that no less than 25 percent of all chemical reactions in the pharmaceutical industry are actually based on these methods,” Gustafsson said.

Palladium-catalyzed cross coupling has also been used by the electronics industry to make light-emitting diodes used in the production of extremely thin monitors, the academy said.

The approach developed by the winners is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, in research labs and in commercial production of substances like plastics, said Joseph Francisco, president of the American Chemical Society and a colleague of Negishi’s in Purdue’s chemistry department.

“It’s truly quite fundamental work,” he said.

By using the metal palladium as a catalyst to make carbon atoms bond to each other, the approach makes those bonds happen “very easily, very cleanly,” he said. It requires fewer steps than previous methods and avoids having to clean up unwanted byproducts, he said.

Heck started experimenting with using palladium as a catalyst while working for an American chemical company in Delaware in the 1960’s. In 1977 Negishi developed a variant of the method and two years later Suzuki developed a third.

The academy said the chemistry award had a link to the research honored Tuesday by the Nobel Prize in physics, awarded to Russian-born Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for experiments with graphene, the thinnest and strongest material known to mankind.

“In spring 2010, scientists announced that they had attached palladium atoms to graphene, and the resulting solid material was used to carry out the Suzuki reaction in water,” the citation said.

The 2010 Nobel Prize announcements began Monday with the medicine award going to 85-year-old British professor Robert Edwards for fertility research that led to the first test tube baby.

The literature prize will be announced on Thursday, followed by the peace prize on Friday and economics on Monday, Oct. 11.

The awards were established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel — the inventor of dynamite — and are always handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of his death in 1896.
American, 2 Japanese share 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry

President Obama announced Friday that Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff and a fearsome White House operative, is resigning his post and would be replaced with another senior advisor.

Emanuel, who is planning to run for mayor of Chicago, departs 20 months into Obama’s presidency and leaves as one part of a staff shuffle that will bring a significant turnover at the top levels of the White House policy and economic team.

Senior presidential advisor David Axelrod is planning to leave the White House next year to begin preparations for Obama’s 2012 reelection drive, and economic advisor Lawrence Summers is quitting the White House to return to Harvard University.

Obama named senior advisor Pete Rouse to serve as Emanuel’s replacement, at least for now.

Emanuel’s departure had been expected since Mayor Richard Daley announced in September that he would not run for reelection. Obama lavished praise on Emanuel for his work at the White House.

“He just brings an unmatched level of energy and commitment to every single thing he does,” Obama said after embracing Emanuel before a cheering White House assembly.

Possible candidates for the permanent job include Thomas E. Donilon, a deputy national security advisor; Robert Bauer, White House counsel; Tom Daschle, a former Senate Democratic leader; and John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton.

cparsons@latimes.com
Obama makes it official, sends off top aide Emanuel

The Border Patrol wants its leaders to talk to one another, and the agency is willing to pay some former government employees nearly half a million dollars to help make that happen.

In an example of how common it has become for government agencies to outsource seemingly routine tasks to former officials, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has awarded a “strategic consulting” contract worth up to $481,000 over five years to a small firm staffed by former agency insiders.

One of the three major tasks outlined in the deal is to “facilitate discussions among senior Border Patrol leaders” at conferences near the agency headquarters in Washington, according to the contract documents. The fees work out to about $240 an hour — not including travel expenses or the cost of the conferences.

Among those who will benefit from the contract are the agency’s former commissioner and the husband of a current agency spokeswoman. It’s legal as long as the officials observe a one-year ban on landing work from their former agency.

“It really is just contracting as usual,” said Allison Stanger, a Middlebury College professor who detailed the explosive growth of government contracting in her 2009 book “One Nation Under Contract.” “When contractors are doing so much of the work of government, these sorts of private companies are seen as extensions of government. When former agency employees are involved, the lines are blurred even further.”

In a statement, Homeland Security Department spokesman Rafael Lemaitre said the contract was intended to “solicit independent, expert input for CBP’s ongoing efforts to design a 21st century border security strategic framework,” and that the agency “will not utilize this or any other contracts to organize conferences for CBP officials.”

The contract documents say the consultants will facilitate discussions at the conferences, not organize them.

In July, the agency requested proposals for strategic consulting. The request sought three senior consultants for a total of 389 hours a year, with four years of renewable options.

The consultants’ role is to help Border Patrol leaders “discuss strategy, policy, outreach, development and the delivery of a unified corporate direction and message,” the documents said.

After a competition, the contract was awarded to Sentinel HS Group, a 12-person company that includes Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of U.S. Customs and then U.S. Customs and Border Protection from September 2001 to November 2005.

The firm, which reported annual revenue of $3.2 million in contract documents signed last week, was founded by one of Bonner’s top aides and includes three other former agency officials.

Among the firm’s “senior consultants” is Michael Ivahnenko, who worked at the border agency from November 2003 to January 2008. He is the husband of Kelly Ivahnenko, a Customs and Border Protection public affairs officer based in Washington.

Kelly Ivahnenko said in an e-mail that she played no role in the contract award and did not speak to any agency decision-makers about it.

In addition to Michael Ivahnenko, Sentinel Chief Executive Brian Goebel said he would work as one of the agency’s other two senior consultants, along with Joshua Kussman, a former senior policy advisor at the agency.

Goebel, who said he was speaking for all members of the firm, said Sentinel won the contract through “fair and open competition.”

“There are circumstances in which the government needs outside assistance,” he said. “From our vantage point, there are people who bring specialized knowledge. … Sometimes it’s a question of extra arms and legs, to help people who have to do their day job.”

Goebel said he worked as an advisor to Bonner at the agency in 2001.

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

Border Patrol gives contract to firm stocked with former insiders

California pension officials are investigating the pay received by former top officials of Bell with an eye toward excluding large chunks of their salaries from retirement calculations.

A ruling against former City Manager Robert Rizzo and his colleagues could affect other officials across California who receive salaries from several government agencies simultaneously.

Rizzo is set to receive a pension of about $600,000 a year, which would make him the highest-paid pensioner in the California Public Employees’ Retirement fund. That amount is calculated from a salary of nearly $800,000.

His most recent contract split up his compensation so that his pay came not only for his work as city manager but as executive director of Bell’s Surplus Property Authority, Community Housing Authority, Public Financing Authority and Solid Waste and Recycling Authority.

The pay arrangement made it difficult for outsiders to determine Rizzo’s full salary, and it might come back to haunt him.

Brad Pacheco, a spokesman for CalPERS, said the fund is investigating whether pay that Rizzo received for jobs other than city administrator should count toward his pension. CalPERS is also looking at compensation for former Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia and former Police Chief Randy Adams, he said.

If CalPERS rules that pay drawn from other agencies cannot be counted for retirement calculations, it could reduce pensions received by retired Bell council members. For example, former Councilman George Cole, who during some of his tenure received pay from various agencies, is receiving a pension of nearly $50,000 a year for the part-time job.

A Times survey of city managers’ pay last month turned up officials in several cities who had been receiving payments for more than one municipal job.

Rizzo’s salary and pension benefits have prompted widespread outrage and legislation that limits the raises of local government officials.

Rizzo’s attorney, James Spertus, said he would fight efforts to reduce his client’s pension.

“Mr. Rizzo never agreed to accept less compensation or to do anything that would impact his retirement,” Spertus said.

Rizzo’s latest contracts were signed by himself and Mayor Oscar Hernandez. Former City Atty. Edward Lee said he neither prepared the contract nor approved it. Hernandez did not return calls Friday.

CalPERS itself has been sharply criticized because it knew about the high salaries paid to Rizzo and Spaccia four years ago and did nothing to stop them.

Pedro Carrillo, Bell’s interim administrative officer, said CalPERS officials recently spent about three weeks at city offices going through records. He said he expected to receive a draft report identifying any problems within 10 days.

“The salaries and pensions of certain individuals are certainly a concern of myself, the city attorney and most folks in the city of Bell,” he said.

Along with the CalPERS audit, the Los Angeles County district attorney and state attorney general have launched wide-ranging investigations in Bell that include the high salaries city officials received and allegations of voter fraud and improper business dealings. The state controller is also conducting an investigation.

A review of records by The Times showed that City Council members were paid for their work on commissions that rarely met or did so for only a few minutes.

Questions about Rizzo’s pension may be the result of five new contracts he signed in September 2008, two months after his previous one went into effect. Old contracts paid him for being city manager. The new contracts paid him as city manager and as executive director of the four city commissions.

His total compensation remained the same. He received about $221,460 a year to run the city, and the remaining $566,177 was split among the authorities.

This final contract was not provided to The Times in its original request for Rizzo’s contract in June, a violation of the California Public Records Act.

In addition, Bell’s City Council on Friday announced plans to sue former city administrators, consultants and attorneys for actions that led to the city’s crisis.

City leaders said they suspect Rizzo conducted city business using his personal e-mail account and issued a subpoena to obtain copies of messages and computer files going back five years

The decision to subpoena the e-mails came after The Times reported that Rizzo had given city loans of nearly $400,000 to two businesses without public notice or council approval.

Rizzo was ordered to appear in person and produce copies of the e-mails by the next City Council meeting, which is scheduled for Sept. 20.

Spertus said his client wants the facts to come out, but the city has refused to talk to him.

“It would not surprise me if the city of Bell or other agencies in this political time … tried to pursue criminal or civil actions against Mr. Rizzo that are unfounded,” Spertus said.

jeff.gottlieb@latimes.com

ruben.vives@latimes.com
In wake of Bell scandal, CalPERS may change pension calculation rules

Although Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom” came out only on Tuesday, it has been the subject of impassioned debate for the better part of a month now, both in the review pages of most major media outlets — he is the first living writer to appear on the cover of Time magazine in a decade — and in the more ethereal corridors of the digital world.

Well before publication, novelist Jennifer Weiner organized a Twitter campaign, under the hashtag “franzenfreude,” to gather negative reaction to the book, which tells the story of a middle-American family in slow collapse.

Weiner’s label is a variation on “schadenfreude,” or pleasure taken in the misfortune of others: “Franzenfreude,” she told NPR late last month, “is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.”

Yet in an irony noted by several Twitter commentators, Weiner tangled up the reference. “Franzenfreude,” one Tweet suggests, “would translate to pleasure in Franzen”; apparently, it would have been more accurate to call it “schadenfranzen.”

Word games aside, Weiner is incensed about what she perceives as the engrained sexism of mainstream media, especially the New York Times, which showers coverage on male writers such as Franzen while leaving women out.

That’s a valid concern; this week, Slate reported that, of 545 works of fiction reviewed in the Times between June 29, 2008, and Aug. 27, 2010, only 207, or 38%, were written by women. Even more, of the 101 books to receive two reviews during that stretch (one in the daily paper and the other in Sunday), just 29 were by female writers.

The numbers are probably similar at most major newspapers, including this one. It’s exactly the kind of issue we should be discussing. But none of this, really, is what the uproar over “Freedom” has been about.

With 300,000 copies in print, “Freedom” is No. 1 at Amazon.com; it has received critical raves and even the president is said to be reading it. The furor over its success smacks of gossip, envy, a mean-spirited approach to literary life. It’s personal, people reacting to a writer they don’t like.

An Aug. 26 Newsweek piece made that point explicitly, calling Franzen “the writer we love to hate.” For writer Jennie Yabroff, the issue isn’t Franzen’s writing, which she acknowledges is, at best, “fantastic,” but his position in the culture, his “peevishness,” which, she believes, “undermines the humanistic intentions of his work.”

In the age of the Internet, Yabroff insists, it is “difficult to separate how you feel about an author’s personal life from how you respond to his work, despite your best efforts to read the writing, not the writer.”

She continues: ” ‘Freedom’ comes from the man who dissed Oprah, complained that the Tony-winning musical ‘Spring Awakening’ was a bastardization of the 1891 Frank Wedekind play (which Franzen himself had recently translated from the German), called [New York Times] book critic Michiko Kakutani ‘the stupidest person in New York,’ and claimed such affectations as writing in an earmuff-and-blindfold-equipped sensory-deprivation chamber.”

Really? Is that where we are now, framing the discussion over literature in terms of public image rather than language and narrative? What does this have to do with the quality of Franzen’s work?

Writers have always been eccentric, outspoken, unpleasant, even dangerous — it’s an inevitable side effect of a profession that requires you, to steal a line from sportswriter Red Smith, to “sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

Norman Mailer brawled and bragged his way to literary celebrity, stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales, at a party, and writing about himself in mock-heroic terms.

Hemingway was unbearable, Celine a Nazi sympathizer, Dorothy Parker a maudlin drunk. It’s all irrelevant to their writing, which sings and screams with a music of its own.

This is true of Franzen’s work as well. He is the most ambitious novelist of our moment — not for who he is, but for how he writes, his willingness to explore the emotional depths and complexities of the most apparently mundane lives.

At heart, the tempest over “Freedom” reveals a fundamental immaturity in our collective thinking, a child’s eye view of the way art and culture works. This is not a new thing, but it’s distressing to see it so widespread.

Rather than a discussion of what gets covered and how, we have a campaign of personal invective, turned against a single author. Rather than a consideration of the book, we have a conversation about the writer’s image, as if that matters in our reading of the work.

In his 1968 book “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” Mailer described his ambivalence about a youth culture that seemed to him as much of a threat as the conservative status quo. He did not want “to lose even the America he had had” because “it had allowed him to write…. He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine.”

Had Twitter existed then, Mailer probably would have been pilloried for his counter-revolutionary sentiments, but all these years later, his observation rings with the weight of truth.

What he is talking about is the difficulty of being a grown-up, the necessity of looking inward, at our contradictions, and reconciling them as best we can.

That’s the message of “Freedom” also, as it was of Franzen’s previous novel “The Corrections,” and it stands as a powerful rebuke to those who judge the novel — or any novel — on terms other than its own.

david.ulin@latimes.com

Critic’s Notebook: With Jonathan Franzen, judge the novel, not the man

“Chefs-d’Oeuvre?”

The question — “Masterpieces?” — posed by the inaugural exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz is a matter of many opinions.

Four months after the quirky museum with a swooping white fiberglass and Teflon roof, designed by Shigeru Ban of Japan and Jean de Gastines of France, opened its doors in this little-known town 175 miles east of Paris, visitors continue to ask if the strikingly modern building near the majestic old train station resembles a Chinese straw hat, a hut for the Smurfs or a manta ray in flight.

The masterpieces query is a weightier matter and it comes with lots of historical baggage. Composed of about 800 works, the sprawling show is a think piece about the ever-changing meaning of a term coined in the Middle Ages to judge the work of craftsmen in the European guild system but often dismissed as quaintly irrelevant these days.

“I have no definitive definition of a masterpiece,” Laurent Le Bon, director of the Metz museum and curator of the exhibition, states in a publication accompanying the show, “but, in my view, it is a work that permits diverse interpretations, indeed contradictions.”

Critical reactions to the show include proclamations that it’s the most impressive assembly of 20th century art in all of Europe and accusations that it’s so confusing and anti-hierarchical as to be meaningless. In art historical circles, the exhibition has revived a debate about the concept of masterpieces. Interviews with curators indicate that there’s hardly a consensus on the subject, with some saying it’s a valuable way of measuring quality and others pointing out the flaws of any such system.

The Pompidou Center, a Parisian cultural powerhouse that houses the French National Museum of Modern Art, built the satellite in Metz to share its 60,000-piece collection with a city of about 200,000 people. But visitors expecting the Pompidou’s greatest hits are in for a surprise. What they get is an eclectic array of paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, installations, architectural models, furniture and printed material.

An introductory section on the ground floor tracks the evolution of masterpieces “from Middle Ages to revolutionary genius” in works lent by various institutions. But the bulk of the show ending Oct. 25, which continues on three upper floors, is drawn from the Pompidou’s 20th century and 21st century holdings. The final display, “Masterpieces ad infinatum,” grapples with notions of uniqueness in an age of endless reproductions.

As the exhibition unfolds, major works by such stalwarts as Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois and Bruce Nauman share gallery space with examples by relatively little known European figures and a few sculptures from Africa, Asia and Oceana. The works on view rarely conform to conventional ideas about masterpieces as paragons of beauty or tours de force of skill and they aren’t necessarily the best examples of the artists’ output.

But pieces such as Bourgeois’ enormous installation “Precious Liquids” sum up essential themes — in her case, conflict between the artist and her father and bodily liquids that symbolize pleasure and pain. Other works mark zeitgeist moments that have influenced ideas about what a masterpiece might be.

Marcel Duchamp, who famously said that a masterpiece is created by the viewer, not the artist, is represented by his first “readymade,” a bicycle wheel mounted on a wood stool in 1913. Georgio De Chirico’s 1914 painting “Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire” is a Surrealist tribute to a leading avant-garde poet and critic, portrayed as a classical statue wearing sunglasses.

Alain Jacquet’s 1964 painting “Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” is part of his “Camouflages” series based on widely distributed reproductions of masterpieces from bygone times. His version of Edouard Manet’s celebrated Impressionist work recasts the luncheon on the grass as a poolside picnic obscured by a silk-screen pattern.

The most recently made pieces have yet to pass the test of time. A stunningly detailed photograph of commercial goods packed into a 99 Cents Only Store is a seminal image by Andreas Gursky. But it was made in 1999 by a German artist whose reputation and work continue to grow.

Experts’ views

Once upon a time, a masterpiece was a creation that met rigid standards of artistry and craftsmanship. These days, the term usually refers to the best work of an artist’s career or an example of outstanding creativity or skill, but there’s little agreement on the meaning and relevance of the term, particularly in modern and contemporary art.

Consider what a few Southern California authorities have to say in interviews and e-mail exchanges:

Douglas Fogle

Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, Hammer Museum

That word has so many heavy connotations with connoisseurship and a certain attitude about art history, that one masterpiece comes after the other. There are great works, absolutely. In contemporary art, there are seminal or building-block works that changed everything. You can point to a Rauschenberg combine painting. “Monogram” is a great work in that way. You can point to Jackson Pollock’s first drip paintings.

It’s a masterpiece, whatever that means

Federal officials investigating conditions at the two Iowa mega-farms whose products have been at the center of the biggest egg recall in U.S. history found filthy conditions, including chickens and rodents crawling up massive manure piles and flies and maggots “too numerous to count.”

Water used to wash eggs at one of the producers tested positive for a strain of salmonella that appears to match the variety identified in eggs that have sickened at least 1,500 people, according to preliminary Food and Drug Administration reports of inspections at facilities operated by Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms of Iowa Inc.

FDA officials who briefed reporters on the findings in a telephone conference call declined to say how serious the violations were for facilities that house millions of birds. Between them, the two producers have 7.5 million hens. But FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods Michael Taylor said that “clearly the observations here reflect significant deviations from what’s expected.”

Food safety experts said conditions described in the reports are some of the worst they’ve seen in decades.

The reports offer clues to what may have caused the salmonella enteritidis outbreak that prompted the recall of half a billion eggs.

Investigators began examining conditions at the Wright County operation Aug. 12, the day before the company issued its first recall. Inspectors completed their work at that facility Aug. 30, according to documents released by the FDA.

They found:

•Barns with dozens of holes chewed by rodents that mice, insects and wild birds used to enter and live inside the barns;

•Flies on and around the egg belts and hen feeders;

•Manure built up in 4- to 8-foot-tall piles in pits below the hen houses, in such quantities that it pushed pit doors open, allowing rodents and other wild animals access to hen houses;

•Dozens of hens, which had escaped their cages, roaming freely, tracking manure from the pit to other caged parts of the barns;

•Hen houses with significant structural damage and improper air ventilation systems.

Investigators checked out the Hillandale site Aug. 19-26. Their tests of spent water from an egg wash station came up positive for salmonella, although it was not clear whether that contaminated water had been used to clean eggs, an FDA official said.

Wright County Egg recalled a total of 380 million eggs beginning Aug. 13, and Hillandale has since pulled 170 million eggs from the market. Last week, FDA officials said that salmonella tests taken at both operations came back positive.

In a statement, a Wright County Egg spokeswoman said that the company had fully cooperated with the FDA and that “to date, the vast majority of the concerns identified in the FDA report already have been addressed through repairs or other corrective measures.”

A spokeswoman for Hillandale said the company was “committed to taking the steps necessary to regain the full confidence of our customers and consumers.”

FDA officials declined to discuss what, if any, penalties the egg producers might face. Possible penalties include seizure of products, court orders requiring improvements in operations or criminal prosecution. Wright County Egg owner Austin DeCoster has a decades-long record of regulatory violations in at least three states and has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements.

The agency also announced that next month it would begin inspection of the nation’s 600 largest egg farms, which produce 80% of the nation’s eggs. Those inspections, industry officials say, are expected to include some of the industry’s smaller operations — those with as few as 50,000 laying hens — as well as mega-farms such as those operated by the DeCoster family in Iowa.

Many of the eggs consumers eat are being produced by a shrinking number of farmers. There are 192 large commercial egg producers in the U.S. that control 95% of all the laying hens, compared with 2,500 in 1987, according to the trade group United Egg Producers. The majority of those operations are based in six states, including California.

Filthy conditions found at egg producers

It’s a Wednesday morning, and Zenaida Tan is warming her students up with a little exercise in “Monster Math.”

That’s Tan’s name for math problems with monstrously big numbers. While most third-graders are learning to multiply two digits by two digits, Tan makes her class practice with 10 digits by two — just to show them it’s not so different.

On this spring day, her students pick apart the problem on the board — 7,850,437,826 x 56 — with the enthusiasm of game show contestants, shouting out answers before Tan can ask a question. When she accidentally blocks their view, several stand up with their notebooks and walk across the room to get a better look.

The answer comes minutes later in a singsong unison: “Four hundred and thirty-nine billion, six hundred and twenty-four million….”

Congratulations, Tan tells them, for solving it con ganas. That’s Spanish for “with gusto,” a phrase she picked up from watching “Stand and Deliver,” a favorite film of hers about the late Jaime Escalante, the remarkably successful math teacher at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has hundreds of Jaime Escalantes — teachers who preside over remarkable successes, year after year, often against incredible odds, according to a Times analysis. But nobody is making a film about them.