URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT

1086 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 10, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Underground Man
BYLINE: By WILL BLYTHE.

Will Blythe is the author of ''To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever.''

SECTION: Section BR; Column 0; Book Review Desk; POLITICS ISSUE; Pg. 12
LENGTH: 1331 words
MY REVOLUTIONS

By Hari Kunzru.

280 pp. Dutton. $25.95.

History may be written by the winners -- the winners of tenure anyway -- but the best fiction tends to be composed by and about losers. Consider: A gloomy retired seaman imagines a shipwrecked sailor bobbing about the Pacific in a coffin. Or a tubercular insurance agent, spooked by marriage, scared of his father, dreams up a man-turned-bug. What hagiographies can compare with such portraits of loss by such intimates of failure? As the Buddhists like to point out, life is suffering, and it is to fellow sufferers that readers in their innermost selves relate. Add to this the contemporary novelist's lot as cultural wallflower, lacking even the evanescent glamour of an also-ran on ''American Idol,'' and it is easy to see why a fiction writer's sympathies are likely to affix themselves to outliers, losers and superfluous men.

This brings us to the British writer Hari Kunzru's third novel, ''My Revolutions,'' an extraordinary autumnal depiction of a failed '60s radical. Imagine a former member of the Weather Underground, still in hiding, looking back on his macrobiotic salad days as a subversive, when the revolution, always the revolution, seemed around the corner, as close as a pop song blasting from a car radio. In assuming this persona (or the British equivalent of it, based on the so-called Angry Brigade), Kunzru, born in 1969, gives an amazingly convincing account of a period he never witnessed. And by treating the millenarian aspirations of his characters with respect, he rejects the popular view of such revolutionaries as delusional adolescents, playing at revolt. He reveals the yearning behind the dreadful agitprop, the abiding message inside the Molotov cocktail bottle. In doing so, Kunzru redeems a '60s sort of daring in the same way Tom Stoppard does in his recent play, ''Rock 'n' Roll.''

Early in the novel, which shuttles back and forth between 1998 and the previous three decades, we see a British couple on holiday in the South of France. The heat is oppressive, the temperature between them cool. They are having refreshments in the afternoon in a village. The man spots a woman strolling up the hill, and there is something familiar in her motions. He stands in wonder. His mate hasn't finished her mineral water. ''Can't you wait two minutes?'' she asks.

The woman walking up the hill vanishes. Her name, the man believes, is Anna Addison, his old comrade-in-arms, his lover even if love then was only a bourgeois relic. She is supposed to be dead, killed in 1975 while taking over the West German Embassy in Copenhagen.

Until seeing Anna, the man rising in astonishment has been dead himself, or only half-alive, though the woman finishing her mineral water does not know that. Nor does she does know his real name, this reticent fellow who shares her bed and helps raise her daughter.

For the nearly two decades they've lived together, he's been marooned in a counterfeit life among -- irony of ironies! -- the capitalists he once sought to overthrow. Miranda Martin, the woman with whom he lives, is a ''thrusting entrepreneur of the type celebrated in the glossy magazines''; her talent has led her to money, ''like an ant following a pheromone trail.'' He works in an antiquarian bookstore, playing with the cat during the long spells between customers. He is known as Michael Frame; his real name is Chris Carver.

After their vacation, the couple return to England, where the past continues to intrude on Carver -- a nightmare return not of the repressed, but the oppressor. Miles Bridgeman, a mysterious figure who shadowed demonstrations back in the '60s, filming the participants for a putative documentary, turns up for the first time in nearly three decades, bumping into Carver on the street. (He appears to be photographing the local cathedral.) He wants a large favor, and if it isn't freely given, he'll have to take it. At stake is Carver's carefully constructed identity, now crumbling from inside and out.

In his student days, he is a braver sort, which is where his troubles begin. His idealism makes him intolerant of compromise, and he falls in with a loose collective of radicals squatting in a poor London neighborhood. He encounters Anna as she rails against ''atomized workers.'' Not necessarily the stuff of romantic poetry, but then this is the late '60s. Soon afterward, he runs into her at a posh party where he feels out of place. Anna taunts Carver, challenging him to overcome his middle-class proprieties, his aversion to confrontation. Together, they berate guests (''pigs'' being the epithet of choice), fling wine at them and escape laughing into the London night. Having vetted each other's revolutionary sternness, they kiss.

Romance, however, is hard to maintain in squats where the personal and political are melded. Residents are required to criticize themselves and one another. Privacy is derided. The bathroom door is ripped off its hinges. Mattresses are jammed together; the inhabitants watch one another make love. Everyone is experimenting with limits, trying to achieve escape velocity from their backgrounds.

In bed, Anna, a ferocious feminist, asks that Carver hit and humiliate her. ''Sex for Anna was always an assault -- on comfort, on the thing in herself she was trying to eradicate,'' he says. ''Me, I wanted to smash myself up, to get rid of structure altogether.'' What Carver would do to himself, he would also do to society.

He and his comrades steal food from the supermarket and deliver it to the community; they occupy and empty flats on behalf of the poor. But the new world does not arrive. The radicals feel as if they are ''shouting into a vacuum.'' Carver and Anna argue over rhetoric, unsure of whether they are writing for the people or their peers. They post broadsides exhorting the masses to ''SMASH THE STATE! OFF THE PIG!''

They come to suspect that ''nothing takes place ... unless it's electronically witnessed.'' They decide to mount a spectacle of bombings. They no longer care if society changes as long as it pays attention. At this point, the novel enters its death zone, where utopians make the surprisingly short transit to terrorists. ''We began to judge ourselves by our willingness to take risks,'' Carver says.

After a series of increasingly unnoticed bombings, several radicals, including Anna, form an alliance with a Marxist-Leninist Palestinian organization. Ambivalent about the prospect of political bloodshed, Carver considers divulging his comrades' plans. His revolution from then on becomes a series of painful turns on the karmic wheel: poverty, heroin addiction, anonymity. There is the suggestion that liberation may not be found in the political realm. In turn, Anna disappears into the terrorist underground, surfacing for the last time in the attack on the West German Embassy. ''You can't hate the world's imperfection so fiercely, so absolutely, without getting drawn toward death,'' Carver says of her.

Perhaps because of the novel's retrospective tack, Anna, for all her allure as a revolutionary pin-up girl, flaunting cropped hair and a hard hat for riot wear, remains more slogan wrapped in denim than full-fledged character. The aging Carver pines for her. But is it Anna he misses, or what she embodies: the past as that realm of prairielike openness and possibility? And not just any past -- the '60s.

The related question that hangs over ''My Revolutions'' like a cloud of tear gas is the one Miles asks Carver: What would freedom look like?

Carver and his fellow radicals may have lacked the winning answer, but the question at least fired their imaginations. The visionary aspirations for justice in our current epoch seem dull by comparison. It is a measure of how respectfully Kunzru treats his characters' yearning for a more generous time that ''My Revolutions'' feels less like an elegy for their era and more like a requiem for our own.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: BOOK REVIEWS (92%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (90%); WRITERS & WRITING (90%); POP & ROCK (73%); RELIGION (55%); EMBASSIES & CONSULATES (50%)
GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED KINGDOM (87%); UNITED STATES (79%); FRANCE (51%); GERMANY (50%)
TITLE: My Revolutions (Book)>; My Revolutions (Book)>
LOAD-DATE: February 10, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: DRAWINGS
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1087 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 10, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Gleaning the Tax Burden When You Own the Shop
BYLINE: By CONRAD DE AENLLE
SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 804 words
YOU'RE thinking of starting your own business. Maybe you've lost your job, maybe you've just lost interest in it and have decided to move on, or maybe you're just moonlighting.

Aside from giving you a more reasonable boss, self-employment can offer meaningful tax breaks. Experts in small-business taxation caution, however, that those breaks do not come cheap.

Self-employment involves filling two roles, as an employee (doing the work) and as an employer (doing the paperwork). People who are considering joining the 20 million others who have established so-called microbusinesses should be prepared to spend more time and money on preparing their taxes as entrepreneurs than they did as rank-and-file employees.

That is what Victoria McCargar found after she left her job as senior technology editor at The Los Angeles Times two years ago to set up shop as a consultant in digital preservation, helping corporations and other organizations prevent all those bits and bytes on computer drives and in cyberspace from vanishing, as they are prone to do.

''It was a big transition from working for an employer, where all the deductions were taken, to filing quarterly estimates,'' Ms. McCargar recalled. ''I had to hazard a guess as to what I would make. I didn't have much of a track record to go on.''

In addition to making estimated tax payments, she has several new schedules to file to the Internal Revenue Service with her Form 1040, as well as some additional state forms. Then there was the business license from the City of Los Angeles that she had to buy, and the notice she was required to place in two local newspapers saying that she was doing business as Victoria McCargar Consulting.

For her trouble, she has to pay a double portion of Social Security and Medicare taxes. She is on the hook for the employee's part, as she was in her old job, as well as the employer's share, for a total of 15.3 percent of her net income.

The payoff for the self-employed comes when expenses are accounted for, said Elda Di Re, a partner in personal financial services at Ernst & Young.

Salaried employees can deduct only unreimbursed work-related expenses above 2 percent of adjusted gross income, she noted, while the self-employed can write off virtually every penny spent on running their businesses. They are also permitted to contribute far more money to a retirement plan, like a 401(k), than ordinary employees can.

Ms. McCargar decided to go into business as a sole proprietor, which for tax purposes makes no distinction between her business and herself. She could have instead established a corporation, which is a separate legal entity, but she decided to keep things as simple as possible after consulting with professionals.

Being incorporated means paying additional, often arcane federal, state and local taxes and filling out the forms that go with them. Record-keeping must also be more rigorous, with business and personal accounts well segregated. For some small businesses, it may be more trouble than it's worth.

''Being a corporation forces you to act more like a business,'' said Benjamin A. Tobias, a financial planner in Plantation, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale. ''If you incorporate, you have to have a separate set of books, and there are all sorts of extra taxes that might not have been there for sole proprietors. It probably isn't necessary.''

The complications and expenses can start mounting even before the corporation exists, Mr. Tobias said.

''The actual incorporation papers cost next to nothing, but if you want to do it right, you need to hire an accountant,'' he advised. ''It could be anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars.''

But incorporating may be worthwhile for any business that hires employees or owns real estate, and the legal status can protect an owner's personal assets in a business-related lawsuit. There is an important tax benefit, too, that often compensates, and more, for the myriad extra expenditures.

Sole proprietors must pay Social Security and Medicare tax on net income, while self-employed corporate moguls pay only on the portion of income taken as salary. That amount is left to their discretion, within broad I.R.S. guidelines.

If you think that incorporating seems to be the right choice, tax advisers often suggest using one of the legal structures reserved for small businesses, like a limited-liability company or a Subchapter S corporation. They stress that there is no single correct form that a self-employed person's business should take, only that it should be formed correctly, with forethought and with tax reduction just one consideration among many.

''Somebody just starting out should have a business plan, but most do not,'' Mr. Tobias said. ''The most common thing missing is common sense.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: TAXES & TAXATION (94%); SELF EMPLOYMENT (91%); TAX DEDUCTIONS (89%); SMALL BUSINESS (89%); INCOME TAX (89%); EMPLOYMENT (89%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); 401K PLANS (77%); PENSION & RETIREMENT PLANS (77%); SOCIAL SECURITY (77%); PERSONAL FINANCE (77%); CONSULTING SERVICES (76%); CORPORATE TAX (76%); ACCOUNTING & AUDITING FIRMS (72%); TAX AUTHORITIES (72%); COMPANY EARNINGS (70%); MEDICARE (68%); BANKING & FINANCE (64%); SOLE PROPRIETORSHIPS (77%)
COMPANY: LOS ANGELES TIMES (83%); ERNST & YOUNG (58%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (94%)
GEOGRAPHIC: LOS ANGELES, CA, USA (77%) CALIFORNIA, USA (77%) UNITED STATES (77%)
LOAD-DATE: February 10, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1088 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 10, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Paid Notice: Deaths BURDEN, WILLIAM DOUGLAS, JR., ''DOUG''
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Classified; Pg. 35
LENGTH: 173 words
BURDEN--William Douglas, Jr., ''Doug''. Aged 76, of Aspen, CO, died Saturday, January 26, 2008 of terminal cancer. He was born August 13, 1931 in NYC, son of William Douglas Burden, and Katharine Curtin White. Doug grew up in Bedford Village and NYC. He attended North Country School in Lake Placid, Eaglebrook School, Proctor Academy, and Middlebury College where he captained the ski teams. He became one of America's top ski Racers and competed internationally until a near fatal ski racing accident in Italy in 1954 ended his career. Despite his injury, he was a beautiful, natural athlete who played superb tennis and golf and became ''coach'' to friends and family. Doug served in the Navy. He was a development entrepreneur. He is survived by his son James, brothers Andrew and Christopher, sister Wendy B. Morgan, stepmother Betsy, and devoted partner, Marilyn Hodges Wilmerding. A memorial is planned for spring. Contributions may be made to the Steadman Hawkins Research Foundation, 181 West Meadow Dr., Suite 1000, Vail, CO 81657.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: DEATHS & OBITUARIES (91%); STEPPARENTS (51%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (94%) NEW YORK, USA (94%); COLORADO, USA (90%) UNITED STATES (94%)
LOAD-DATE: February 10, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Paid Death Notice
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1089 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 9, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

Searching For Title, Suns Take A Chance
BYLINE: By HARVEY ARATON.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

SECTION: Section D; Column 0; Sports Desk; SPORTS OF THE TIMES; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 841 words
It wasn't Jerry Colangelo's money, any more than it was his call.

But the Phoenix Suns were the flagship of his long sports entrepreneurship, the desert seed planted 40 years ago. It stands to reason that any man whose franchise legacy is priceless has a vested interest in the future.

Colangelo was a 28-year-old general manager in the team's first year, 1968. He had a couple of coaching runs and wound up fronting an ownership group from 1987 until 2004, the year he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

''I maintain a title as chairman, and I am available to consult,'' Colangelo said Friday from Atlanta, on a different kind of road trip, accompanying his wife and daughter while they tend to an antiques business at various shows. ''For this deal, Steve Kerr and Mike D'Antoni did ask for my opinion. We talked about the pros and cons. At the end of the day, I was supportive of going forward.''

Who can say now that by the end of the season, or the two subsequent to this one, Kerr the team president, D'Antoni the coach and the owner Robert Sarver will have invested in a Suns championship or wasted tens of millions for an antiquated version of Shaquille O'Neal?

Given the pros, cons and likely consequences of doing nothing, how could they pass?

''We've had tremendous success over the years,'' Colangelo said, ''but we haven't won it all.''

Not with the team that pushed the Celtics hard in the 1976 N.B.A. finals or with the Charles Barkley-led group that was one stop away from forcing Michael Jordan's Bulls to a seventh game on the road in 1993 or with the contemporary eye candy assembled by Bryan Colangelo, the son of the franchise Supernova, now administratively relocated to Toronto.

Why would a team with the best record in the Western Conference sacrifice a core player, Shawn Marion, and compromise its intrinsic run-and-gun playing style to accommodate a soon-to-be 36-year-old and increasingly stationary or sidelined O'Neal?

Because the best record this week could become the fourth or fifth-best next week in a conference so stacked with quality that its 10th-place team, Portland, would be fourth in the East.

Because Tim Duncan and the defending champion Spurs -- who defeated the Knicks, 99-93, in overtime Friday night at Madison Square Garden-- are still in the way and because the Lakers keep getting bigger and better and because Steve Nash isn't getting any younger.

The best pair of point guard eyes west of Jason Kidd turned a youthful 34 Thursday but the legs tick to a different body clock. If this is about a closing window, why not add O'Neal's strength to make sure it doesn't slam shut?

As Jerry Colangelo said, you can marvel at Nash's nifty assists, the Suns' video-game scoring tabulation and their average of 59 victories over the past three seasons, and you still come away with zero titles.

''The biggest question in the playoffs was always about our halfcourt game,'' Colangelo said. ''And until someone wins in playing the Phoenix style, that was going to be a question.''

It was one already answered by the Suns the last three years, when they were welcome catalysts in reversing the trend of tedium that had overtaken N.B.A. offenses but, in the final analysis, not much more than a sexy marketing scheme.

A preferred style is one thing. A team limited to that style is another. One day back in the early 1980s, a coach of some renown, Red Holzman, eavesdropped on reporters covering his excitable young Knicks, arguing whether they should run or play half-court. He later sidled up to one and said, ''Don't write that stuff,'' though not that blandly.

He explained that championship basketball invariably had to be a compendium of styles and strategies, and a roll call of N.B.A. champions would bear that out, starting with the most recent. In their playoff series with the Suns last spring, the supposedly staid Spurs won games by scoring 114, 111 and 108 points.

With a presumably healthy if diminished O'Neal, the Suns, who defeated the SuperSonics, 103-99, on Friday night, can diversify their offense, and they will have someone to at least challenge Duncan, Yao Ming and the other conference giants, freeing Amare Stoudemire to terrorize power forwards.

O'Neal is still 7 feet 1 inch and 325 pounds of obstruction, a four-time champion and a locker-room presence. Coming from Miami, how can he not be re-energized by another chance to win and thwart Kobe Bryant in the process?

''Some people have already discarded the idea that Shaq can do for us what Kareem did for the Lakers at the end of his career, but we'll see,'' Colangelo said, speaking of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, without choking on the name.

He lost the 1969 coin flip that landed Kareem in Milwaukee and settled for a competent center named Neal Walk. But that's sports, the difference between good and great typically no more complicated than heads or tails, or playing a hunch.

The better option, in this case, than doing nothing, just running and running, until Steve Nash is on empty.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ENTREPRENEURSHIP (90%); BASKETBALL (90%); SPORTS (89%); SPORTS & RECREATION EVENTS (78%); STADIUMS & ARENAS (78%)
ORGANIZATION: PHOENIX SUNS (94%)
PERSON: SHAQUILLE O'NEAL (67%); MICHAEL JORDAN (53%)
GEOGRAPHIC: PHOENIX, AZ, USA (92%) ARIZONA, USA (92%); WEST USA (79%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: February 9, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

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