MING HSIEH IS like many successful entrepreneurs who are so grateful for their success that they reward their alma mater. Except that this alumnus is a Chinese-American businessman who grew up in poverty after his family was banished to a farm during the Cultural Revolution. And his gift of gratitude is $35 million, the largest gift to an engineering department in the nation and the largest ever to a department at USC.

Now it’s time for the USC Viterbi School of Engineering to show its gratitude by naming the electrical engineering department the USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering.

Born and raised in northern China, Hsieh (pronounced Shyeh) founded Cogent – the South Pasadena-based high-technology juggernaut – in 1990. The billion-dollar company supplies automated fingerprint and other identification systems to governments, law enforcement agencies and corporations around the world, including all 47 law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County. The company’s 20.7 million-share public offering was one of the most successful IPOs of 2004.

“Ming’s name adds luster to a department that is already highly distinguished,” says USC President Steven B. Sample, who, as an electrical engineer, is also a tenured faculty member in the department. “He is a great Trojan who cares deeply about educating future engineers, and we are grateful that he is investing not only in his alma mater but ultimately in this nation.”

“One hundred years ago, USC offered its first engineering courses in electrical engineering. It is only fitting that Ming Hsieh, an electrical engineering alumnus, is launching the second century of USC engineering with a magnificent gift,” adds Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of the Viterbi School.

Hsieh earned his bachelor’s of science in 1983 and his master’s of science in 1984 in electrical engineering, both from USC. In 1987, he founded AMAX Technology. He is currently president, CEO and chairman of the board of Cogent.

“I grew up in a very poor family,” Hsieh says. “My childhood was spent studying hard at school during the day and working on the family farm at night.”

In high school, he was given some old transistors and other electronics and began building primitive radios and television sets. With encouragement from an uncle, P.Y. Hsieh – who earned an M.S. in mechanical engineering from USC in 1952 – and an inheritance from his grandfather in Taiwan, Hsieh emigrated from China to the United States to attend USC.

“I will always be grateful for the engineering education I received from USC,” he says, “and I want to help others do the same thing.”

With 54 tenured or tenure-track faculty, the USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering is the USC Viterbi School’s largest department. It is distinguished by 11 members of the National Academy of Engineering, three members of the National Academy of Sciences, three members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and four winners of the prestigious Claude Shannon Award.

The department has been recognized for much of the fundamental research that laid the groundwork for the revolution in digital communications.

– Bob Calverley

Dream Monument

Tribute to a King

A family with deep Trojan ties has designs on paying homage to America’s civil rights legend.

Boris Dramov ’66 helped transform San Francisco’s waterfront and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. Now the graduate of the USC School of Architecture is watching his new project transform Washington D.C.’s Tidal Basin as the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial rises between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials.

Dramov, who is president of the San Francisco-based ROMA Design Group, attended last November’s groundbreaking for the memorial his firm designed. Dramov and his wife, ROMA partner and landscape architect Bonnie Fisher, landed the prestigious project in 2000 – winning an international competition that drew 870 entries.

The ROMA design of huge granite stones and waterfalls is largely based on King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The monument gives physical form to King’s metaphors of mountains and hope – with the goal of evoking the same emotional response as the civil rights leader’s poetic and expansive oratory.

“Entering the site is a processional experience, intended to reveal the role of Dr. King as a democratic leader and to engage the visitor in an unfolding discovery of meaning,” says Fisher. At the entrance, the view to the Jefferson Memorial is framed by huge portal stones symbolizing the “mountain of despair,” a recurring biblical theme in King’s speeches. The stones gradually take on the leader’s characteristics, and finally his image is fully revealed, as if he were an integral part of the “stone of hope” itself.

“One of the things we struggled with was to bring the image of Dr. King into it, but to not be so figurative and explicit,” Dramov says. “There is a participatory element to those who come to discover who he is.”

Both Dramov and Fisher have Trojan ties. She is a longtime USC supporter (USC Fisher Gallery is named for her family). Their daughter, Dana, is a fourth-year USC architecture student. And the couple recently endowed the Roma Design Prize, awarded to students who implement urban design elements that Dramov has spent his career developing.

– Cindy Chang

Capital CONNECTIONS

›› POLAR EXPRESS The International Polar Year begins in March 2007, and with that in mind, the Subcommittee on Research of the House Committee on Science recently heard testimony by Donal Manahan, an Antarctic biologist and professor of biological sciences in USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Stressing the importance of polar research and education, Manahan told the committee, “we need to develop innovative educational and training programs designed to bring young scientists at the Ph.D. level to these regions.”

›› STUMPING FOR OCEANS Wrapping up a two-year term as chair of the Advisory Committee for Environmental Science and Education at the National Science Foundation, Anthony Michaels recently met with experts to advocate for clean oceans and environmental research. Michaels, a professor of biological sciences in USC College and director of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, participated in Washington board meetings for the Joint Oceanographic Institutions and the Consortium for Ocean Research and Education.

›› ORGAN MASTER Kelvin J. A. Davies has been named to the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. Davies is associate dean for research in the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, where he holds the James Birren Chair in Gerontology. The advisors evaluate intramural and extramural research programs for the institute. “I hope to be able to have a positive impact on the future of heart, lung and blood research in this country,” Davies says.

›› ART OF THE STATE A longtime supporter of California arts and artists, USC gerontologist Jon Pynoos has been named one of four Golden State representatives serving as councilors to the newly renovated Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Pynoos was raised in the world of art and architecture: his father worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and A. Quincy Jones; his mother is a distinguished member of the Smithsonian American Art Commission. The USC professor’s personal collection contains works by Sandy Walker, Joe Goode and David Hockney.

For the latest on USC faculty and administrative news, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/

Milestones

For a complete list of USC trustees, senior officers and deans, visit www.usc.edu/about/administration

People Watch

Starr Humanist of the Nation

California historian Kevin Starr is presented with the National Humanities Medal at the White House.

USC historian Kevin Starr was honored by President George W. Bush with the prestigious 2006 National Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House Nov. 9.

Considered the nation’s leading expert on California history, Starr was credited for his lifetime of work chronicling the state as a scholar, journalist and historian.

“University Professor Kevin Starr is California’s living archive, and he is also one of this nation’s greatest treasures,” USC President Steven B. Sample said. “He has distinguished himself as a gifted writer, professor and historian whose vibrant and penetrating examination of the Golden State – and those who have shaped it – is unparalleled.”

President Bush presented the award to Starr and other distinguished scholars in an Oval Office ceremony. Starr was accompanied by his wife Sheila, their daughter Marian Imperatore and USC Provost C. L. Max Nikias.

Reached by phone in Washington, D.C., Starr said he invited Nikias as a guest because the university where he has worked for nearly 18 years provides a supportive environment that helps him to excel.

“I’m very grateful for this honor,” he said, “and I also want to thank USC, which gave me the set-up and the self-confidence as a professor” – referring to his rise to national prominence as an academic. “I share this humanities medal with USC.”

First awarded in 1989 as the Charles Frankel Prize, the National Humanities Medal honors individuals and organizations whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities or helped to preserve and expand America’s access to important humanities resources.

Starr joined the USC faculty in 1989 as a professor of urban and regional planning. He was designated University Professor in 1998 and currently teaches in the history department of USC College.

He served for 10 years as California State Librarian. Upon retiring in 2004, he was named California State Librarian Emeritus by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He also has been a daily columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and director of his own communications consulting firm.

Starr is the author of nine books about California, about half of them written while on faculty at the university, he said. His most recent is the one-volume California: A History (Random House, 2005).

Currently, he’s working on the last of his seven-volume history series Americans and the California Dream, published by Oxford University Press. The Atlantic Monthly and others have called the nearly 10,000 pages “a breathtaking scope” of California’s history. Starr also is writing Lift Up Your Hearts, about the history of Catholicism in America.

His numerous publications have earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the Society of American Historians, the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California, USC’s Presidential Medallion and the Centennial Medal of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

He has been lauded for his efforts to fund and found the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, for his support of Proposition 14, garnering $350 million for libraries throughout California and for his role as author, teacher and all-around public believer in California.

A fourth-generation San Franciscan, Starr graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1962 and went on to earn a master’s in history and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard, as well as a master’s of library science from UC Berkeley.

He lives in San Francisco with his wife Sheila. They have two daughters and six grandchildren.

– Orli Belman and Pamela J. Johnson

A Conversation with Gail Eichenthal

First Lady of Classical Radio

The veteran broadcaster returns to KUSC on a cultural mission: to spotlight the arts in Los Angeles.

Gail Eichenthal is known to many Angelenos as the voice of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but recently she has been carrying her tape recorder and keen questions to arts institutions all over the Southland. After a 16-year absence, she returned to KUSC in 2005 as director of arts programming. Her “Spotlight on the Arts” features tell listeners about must-experience events, people and developments in visual arts, theater, film, dance, architecture and, of course, music. USC Trojan Family Magazine’s Allison Engel spoke with this well-connected broadcast journalist last fall – as it happened, on the 60th anniversary of Classical FM 91.5.

How did you prepare to work at a classical music station? At UCLA (there, I said it!), where I majored in music and English, I was fortunate to receive the Abram Chasins Internship in Classical Music Radio at KUSC. I learned the ropes of music programming, writing for broadcast and some announcing. I fell in love with KUSC instantaneously, and they couldn’t get rid of me.

After you left KUSC in 1989, people knew you as a radio news reporter and film critic on KNX, the local CBS affiliate. What was the re-entry like, coming back to classical music? Well, they don’t check my car for planted bombs when I pull into the parking lot at KUSC! Everything’s different, really. In news, I would be sent to a breaking story at 6:30 a.m. and by 7:11 a.m., they’d want the story on the air, with all the facts straight and some interview clips. I got used to working on my feet, running a lot and talking much faster to squeeze all that news into a 45-second report. Mozart and Beethoven require a more relaxed tempo. Sometimes I still find myself talking too fast.

What is the “Spotlight on the Arts” series? We do five to six 90-second features a week that cycle throughout the day at 6, 7 and 8 a.m. and 4, 5 and 6 p.m. We try to make them timely, and the topics can range from the new opera Grendel, an Actors’ Gang performance, a playwriting workshop in Palm Springs, an opening at the USC Fisher Gallery or a student ballet company at the Ford Amphitheatre. I voice most of them, with Brian Lauritzen co-producing, and the great ABC Radio anchor Gil Gross stepping in for me from time to time.

The range of subjects you cover truly is astonishing, from Music Man Murray’s rare record store to a mural restoration on Olvera Street. What’s been the reaction? Classical personalities, small theaters and fledgling chamber groups often don’t get mentioned in the Los Angeles Times or Orange County Register and don’t have much money for promotion. So they tend to be excited about our features. It’s my hope these features help strengthen KUSC’s ties to the wider arts communities.

What about symphonic coverage? In the last few years, L.A. has become the symphonic capital of the country. Disney Hall really galvanized the arts scene. It’s a fabulous time to be making negotiations with American Public Media to broadcast a lot of these concerts nationally. We are doing the entire 2006-07 seasons of concerts by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and a 13-week series of local broadcasts of the L.A. Philharmonic, plus many special concerts. We’re also finalizing plans for some major opera broadcasts – a first.

You mentioned that the cultural spirit these days is similar to what you felt at the 1984 Olympics. What do you mean by that? I covered the amazing Olympic Arts Festival for KUSC that year. The caliber of international talent that was here really changed the way L.A. views the world of arts, and vice versa. We had the most adventurous companies and artists and musicians from Europe, Asia, everywhere. It turned all of our heads around. And it’s the same feeling I’m getting now.

To hear Gail Eichenthal’s arts reports at www.kusc.org, click on “podcasts” and go to “Spotlight on the Arts”

Drums of Peace

On the Road to Oxford

USC senior Colin Koproske will study political theory at the elite British university as a 2007 Marshall Scholar.

Colin Koproske, a multi-talented senior majoring in political science and music performance, has been named a 2007 Marshall Scholar. This highly competitive scholarship, one of the most prestigious awards a graduating American undergraduate can receive, will take Koproske to the University of Oxford next fall to earn a master of philosophy in political theory.

Koproske, 22, who is from Fenton, Missouri, joins four other USC students who have won Marshall Scholarships in recent years: Jacob Chacko (2000), Paul Miller (2002), David Chacko (2004) and Nilay Vora (2004).

“I received ‘the call’ from an official at the British Consulate the night after my interview,” recalled Koproske. “Her voice lacked any emotion either way, so my immediate reaction was ‘O.K., you probably didn’t get it.’” After his initial disbelief, “then came the screaming and dancing,” he said.

The Marshall Scholarships were established by the British government in 1953, as thanks for assistance received after World War II under the Marshall Plan. The scholarships provide two fully funded years of study, with a possible third year extension, at any university in the United Kingdom, and carry an estimated value of $60,000. At least 40 Marshall Scholarships are awarded each year to exceptional young Americans studying a range of subjects.

Koproske’s research interests are secularism and the relationship between religion, science and political thought. While at USC, he co-founded a nonprofit called the BrainTrust Project to better connect academic experts with policymakers and the public to improve political discourse. BrainTrust combines newspaper-style op-ed pieces from academics with a wiki that allows experts to collaborate on policy recommendations. Koproske and his co-founder, Mat Morgan, a senior in international relations, created the project as a bridge between academia and the public and as an alternative to the polemics and non-issues that dominate current political debate.

USC’s newest Marshall Scholar is also a classically trained percussionist and pianist and currently holds the drumset chair in the USC Thornton Jazz Orchestra, as well as playing in several smaller jazz groups and a hip-hop/R&B band around Los Angeles. “My drums and keyboard will make the trip with me to Oxford,” Koproske confirmed.

– Allison Engel

[ COURTLY LOVE ] Jim’s Floor

Every day, basketball and volleyball players at USC’s new Galen Center bounce off the legacy of a remarkable Trojan. His name is Jim Sterkel, a member of the basketball team for two seasons in the mid-1950s – hardly a standout. Yet on the basketball floor, which is some of the most visible square footage at USC, the words “Jim Sterkel Court” stand out boldly on two sides.

Sterkel’s name was placed there by his USC roommate and lifelong friend, a Trojan philanthropist who prefers to remain anonymous. As recounted in a poignant article by Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Plaschke, what made Sterkel, who died in 1997, remarkable was his innate goodness. He lived a modest life, filled with faith and family. Even in the late stages of terminal cancer, Sterkel reached out to his former roommate to help him deal with a tragedy of his own. When “Anonymous” was approached for a $10 million donation to name the floor, he floored university officials by choosing his friend’s name for the honor. As Plaschke summed it up in his Nov. 5, 2006 column: “A most amazing story in this city of stars, a sports centerpiece decorated in average, laced in ordinary, painted in a nobody. Gosh, it’s beautiful.”

– Allison Engel

To read Bill Plaschke’s article on Jim Sterkel, visit http://uscnews.usc.edu/Sterkel

Lab Work

Drug Bust

Antipsychotic medications may do more harm than good in Alzheimer’s patients, a new study shows.

A highly anticipated study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that antipsychotic meds prescribed for Alzheimer’s patients with delusions, agitation or aggression may be no better than a placebo.

The reason? Most patients drop the drugs because of serious side effects.

The study, funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, provides the first long-term comparative look at the three major antipsychotic drugs now used “off label” to treat difficult symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

“We thought overall the drugs would show their effectiveness,” says lead author Lon Schneider, a professor of psychiatry, neurology and gerontology based at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “The answer is: yes, they are somewhat effective, but overall the efficacy is offset by adverse events that resulted in discontinuing the medication.”

The findings were surprising, Schneider notes, because the expert opinion that drove this study had deemed these drugs particularly useful in treating difficult symptoms.

The study’s 421 participants at 42 sites nationwide all had Alzheimer’s disease and were experiencing delusions, hallucinations, aggression or agitation that disrupted their daily functioning. Almost all Alzheimer’s patients develop such psychological problems, Schneider says, which makes their care particularly difficult.

“The findings look at the time to discontinuation for the antipsychotics versus the placebo, and that time difference reflects the overall effectiveness of the medication. By that measure, the medications were not better than placebo,” he says. “Patients on the medications were more likely to discontinue because of the side effects, offsetting the efficacy.”

Side effects from the three antipsychotic medications – olanzapine, quetiapine and risperidone – ranged from sedation, weight gain and confusion to worsening psychosis. Almost a quarter of those taking olanzapine quit because of adverse events, as did 18 percent on risperidone and 16 percent on quetiapine. Those on all three medications were significantly more likely to discontinue treatment than those who received a placebo.

Ultimately, between 77 to 85 percent of study participants discontinued their medication either because of adverse side effects or no improvement.

“The results suggest antipsychotic drugs should be prescribed only with some deliberation,” Schneider says.

This research represents only phase one of the $16.9 million Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness Alzheimer’s disease study. In the study, designed to resemble real-world prescribing patterns, patients were allowed to switch double-blindly to a second antipsychotic medication or the antidepressant citalopram if they discontinued the first. Future results will show which treatments, if any, are cost effective and will help improve symptoms, quality of life and functioning, as well as caregiver burden, thereby delaying nursing-home placement.

– Monika Guttman

Inquiring MINDS

›› GOOD OLD MOM Women who give birth past the half-century mark do not have reduced parenting capacity compared to younger mothers, according to a study led by USC’s Richard Paulson and University of North Carolina’s Anne Z. Steiner. The study is the first to evaluate parenting in women who conceive after 50 and is the latest installment in a series of studies of women over 50 pioneered by Paulson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the Keck School of Medicine.

›› IN THE ZONE A USC study of enterprise zones found that compared to the rest of the state, enterprise zones experienced a 7.35 percent drop in poverty rates, a 7.1 percent increase in household incomes and a 3.5 percent increase in salaries. Before USC Marshall School of Business professors Ayse Imrohoroglu and Chuck Swenson undertook their study, little evidence existed either in favor of or against the zones. Their work was cited by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

›› DOGS AND SMOG Kids with asthma are harder-hit by air pollution when there’s a dog in the home than when the home is pooch-free, according to a Keck School study. The research examined the relationship between chronic coughs, phlegm production or bronchitis and dog and cat ownership among asthmatic children. Cats didn’t seem to make a difference. Rob McConnell, the study’s lead author and a professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School, speculates that the reaction may be due to increased levels of endotoxin, which is more common in homes with a dog.

›› HORMONE HYPOTHSIS Funded by an $8 million NIH grant, 12 USC researchers from four schools are joining forces to see if they can prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in women. The project, spearheaded by Roberta Diaz Brinton of USC’s School of Pharmacy, hypothesizes that progesterone reduces a woman’s vulnerability to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. “Our ultimate goal is to identify the conditions in the female brain that benefit from hormone therapy and those conditions that lead to adverse outcomes,” Brinton says. “So far, the answers to these questions are ambiguous.”

For the latest USC faculty research updates, visit www.usc.edu/research

TOOTH DELAY

Special Smiles

For patients with physical or mental impairments, USC’s dental school delivers extraordinary care.

ROOM 135C at the USC School of Dentistry is only 15-by-20 feet, but the learning and clinical care taking place there is outsized.

Each Thursday morning, patients with developmental disorders, dementia or other problems that preclude their receiving regular dental exams receive the treatment they need here – under full anesthesia or IV sedation.

On average, these patients have not seen a dentist for five years. Many have little or no dental hygiene at home. X-rays are often difficult to obtain, so a diagnosis can be made only after anesthesia kicks in – scant minutes before treatment must begin.

There are only a handful of facilities in Southern California that will take such patients. USC’s Special Patients Operating Room Care is one of them.

Those who come here get state-of-the-art outpatient care at the hands of USC dental students and residents.

Presiding over the clinic is Veronica Greene, an assistant professor of clinical dentistry, whom staff members describe as a “saint.”

Anesthesiologist James Tom manages patients’ anesthesia while providing instruction to students about sedation.

Tom’s and Greene’s considerable patient-handling skills were on display when Ahed Dagher, a 22-year-old man with autism, arrived with his parents. The Burbank man had not seen a dentist in four years. He was in pain, his father reported, and had been digging at his gums with toothpicks.

Dagher walked into the operating room under his own steam – something few of these patients can accomplish due to physical or mental impairments.

The X-rays revealed two retained primary teeth that needed to be extracted. One was abscessed, the likely cause of Dagher’s discomfort. The USC dentists were pleased to find only one cavity needing to be filled.

It was a tableau of treatment: Greene and students poring over X-rays, a resident and assistant doing subgingival cleaning and Tom watching the monitors.

Dagher was a cooperative patient with a good level of comprehension, but the unit often sees adolescents and child-like adults who are severely impaired from a cognitive standpoint. Many have spastic involuntary movements, are disoriented or simply terrified. HIV/AIDS patients and patients with psychiatric or psychotic disorders also are commonly seen.

Greene calls her patients “an appreciative and deserving population. It’s a group that has such difficulty with access to care.”

She adds: “This service is a tremendous benefit to caregivers, because the patients can’t articulate their pain.”

It’s invaluable to Greene’s and Tom’s student dentists as well, who benefit from an unparalleled learning experience.

– Allison Engel

[ BREAST CANCER ] Hormones in Hawaiians

Menopause ushers in hormonal changes for women, and differences in hormone levels by ethnic group may affect breast cancer rates. That’s according to a new USC study published last fall in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. V. Wendy Setiawan, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and her colleagues found the natural levels of estrogens in post-menopausal women varies by ethnicity and race, and may explain the differences in the two groups’ breast cancer rates. The research team determined that of the five primary ethnicities/races in the cohort, native Hawaiians have the highest risk of breast cancer – 65 percent greater than whites. They also have some of the highest levels of circulating estrogens. “We had observed that some groups, such as native Hawaiians, have higher breast cancer rates compared to white women. We knew hormones are a factor, so we decided to test them,” says Setiawan. “The research seems to support that idea.” The study is the largest analysis of hormone levels by ethnic group, and the first large study of native Hawaiians and Latinas.

– Kathleen O’Neil

For more information on this study, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/12897.html

Shelf Life

All About Uncle Walt

Critic and cultural historian Neil Gabler was given the keys to the vault for this long-awaited biography.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
By Neal Gabler
ALFRED A. KNOPF, $35

It took Neil Gabler two years to obtain approval from the Disney organization for his proposed biography of its founding father. But once he got it, Gabler says, he was given free reign in the archives. “I was never asked to submit my manuscript, and there was no editorial interference and no chilling effect,” says Gabler. “I came with no agenda, and I left the book with neutrality. I loved his life, and that’s all biography should care about.”

A senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center in USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, Gabler spent seven years researching and writing this well-received biography. His earlier writings include an award-winning biography of Walter Winchell and two Hollywood cultural histories: An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988) and Life, the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998).

The visual sensibilities of Walt Disney and Pablo Picasso are arguably the two most important worldwide in the last century, Gabler contends. Yet, he notes, while “Picasso has received dozens of biographies, Walt Disney had, when I began, not received a single full-scale, fully-annotated biography.”

A strange omission. In 1966, the year of his death (which, by the way, was followed by cremation, not cryogenics), one estimate put 240 million people in theaters watching Disney movies, a weekly audience of 100 million tuning in to Disney television shows, 80 million reading Disney books, 50 million listening to Disney records, 80 million buying Disney merchandise, 150 million reading Disney comic strips, 80 million viewing Disney educational films, and nearly 7 million visiting Disneyland.

In a well-documented, lively 851-page book, Gabler sketches the great man’s legacy, which he sees as the power of wish fulfillment. “That’s what Disney did all his life,” Gabler writes. “He managed to replace reality with his illusions.”

In so doing, Disney reinvented animation, turning it into an art form emphasizing character, narrative and emotion. He reconceptualized amusement parks as theme parks that have heavily influenced urban design. His nostalgic vision of rugged heroes in Davy Crockett and Johnny Tremain made him, along with Norman Rockwell, “the leading avatar of small-town, flag-waving America,” Gabler writes.

Disney’s interests in space exploration, conservation and wildlife reverberated across America. As an entrepreneur, by bundling his various creative endeavors under one shingle, he created the first modern multimedia corporation.

Yet for all his success and technological innovation, Disney was continually in financial straits – at least until the opening of Disneyland in 1955. Despite producing successful films, his studio lost money for years because Disney cared only about quality and not how much it would cost. To finance Snow White, he famously admitted, “I had to mortgage everything I owned, including Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.”

A cartoonists’ strike in 1941 fueled Disney’s political conservatism. Thereafter, he aligned himself with red-baiting anti-communists and the most reactionary elements of the Republican Party. “Whispered accusations of anti-Semitism and racism clearly eroded his image,” Gabler writes.

For all the sunny flavor of his films, associates found him “deeply private, complex, often moody, and finally opaque.” In 1931, the workaholic Walt had suffered a nervous breakdown. Throughout his life, he would retreat into his studio or a workshop where he made model trains. “While Walt promoted community,” writes Gabler, “quite possibly the most famous man in American may also have been among the loneliest.”

Although he had created the studio that bears his name, over the years the studio turned Walt Disney himself into a commodity. His personality – genial, plainspoken and childishly enthusiastic – became oversimplified, like his signature, into an image and a brand.

Still, his achievements – from his never-equaled 32 Oscars to the founding of a major art school, CalArts – loom large. Forty years after his death, the concert hall that bears his name is spurring a cultural renaissance in downtown Los Angeles.

“In sum,” concludes Gabler, “Walt Disney had been not so much a master of fun or irreverence or innocence or even wholesomeness. He had been a master of order.”

– Allison Engel

[ IN PRINT ] First White, Now Black

Since the success of her debut novel, White Oleander (1999), adapted into a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer, fans of Janet Fitch have breathlessly waited for more. Her just-released second novel, Paint It Black (Little, Brown and Co., $24.99) delivers with a metaphorical story set in the 1980s Los Angeles punk-rock scene. Fitch, who for years has been teaching in the Master of Professional Writing Program of USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, took the title of her new novel from a haunting sitar melody that the Rolling Stones turned into a psychedelic ’60s rant grieving over the sudden death of a lover. Fitch’s novel deals with the suicide of an art student and, like White Oleander, explores a complicated female dynamic. “The mother-daughter relationship is such an interesting one,” she says. “It’s a relationship that nothing else prepares you for.”

For more information on this book and author, visit www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/12740.html

New RELEASES

This “bold, expansive and lyrical” look at the relationship between American identity and popular music won a 2006 American Book Award for Josh Kun, associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Kun skillfully explains how the history of race can be studied through musicians as varied as The Weavers, Café Tacuba and Ozomatli, with styles that range from klezmer to hip hop to Latin rock. America is comprised of many republics of sound, he contends, representing racial and ethnic differences.

Within You Without You
D’Drum with Jim Walker
ARANDAS PUBLISHING, BMI $15

Jim Walker, a senior lecturer in flute at the USC Thornton School, along with the Dallas-based acoustic percussion group D’Drum, improvised seven of the eight tracks on this CD, the group’s second. The title track is a cover of a George Harrison song. Instruments used in this lyrical, compelling disc include Tenganese tambour, didgeridoo, vibes, Balinese prayer ball, gongs, piccolo, tin whistle and five types of flute. Available through www.ddrumdallas.com

Sweet Temptations
By Melvin F. Baron, Gregory Molina, Josefina Lopez, et al
USC SCHOOL OF PHARMACY

The fotonovela, a captioned photo book punctuated with soap opera themes, is a format familiar to the Latino community. So “Sweet Temptations,” a booklet produced in Spanish and English by the USC School of Pharmacy to educate the Spanish-speaking community about diabetes, uses this popular format to dispel myths about the disease and promote healthy lifestyles. The booklets are distributed free of charge through clinics and pharmacies. Contact <mbaron@usc.edu> for information.

Faculty books can be purchased at Trojan Bookstore. Call 213-740-9030 or visit www.uscbookstore.com

Annus Horribilis

French Trauma

Literary critic Peter Starr reassesses the Paris Commune of 1871, vis-à-vis its legacy in film and fiction.

Commemorating Trauma: The Paris Commune & Its Cultural Aftermath
By Peter Starr
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS, $55

Ideologues have long vilified the Paris Commune of 1871 as a hotbed of madness, anarchy and confusion. The Communards – who overtook the government and ruled France for a brief 70 days before dying in a blaze of fire and blood – have been dismissed as barbarians, monsters, animals, bandits, alcoholics, hysterics and even perverts.

In Commemorating Trauma: The Paris Commune and Its Cultural Aftermath, French scholar Peter Starr offers a different take. “What if we read confusion not as a sign of cognitive weakness but rather as the metaphor for a generalized malaise characteristic of a traumatic moment in late 19th-century France?” asks the professor of French and comparative literature, who is also dean of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Scouring literary, cinematic and historical works, Starr follows the trope of confusion to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural trauma of 1870-1871 – a tumultuous period of French history that included the Franco-Prussian War, the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. “How,” he asks, “does confusion define that founding moment we have come to know as the Terrible Year?”

Starr searches the representation of confusion in various fictional works for hidden meanings. What can they tell us about the forces of social upheaval – such as democratization, an evolving revolutionism and the development of capitalist logics of commerce – that effectively shaped modern France?

The Communard insurrection against the French government occurred after the collapse of Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire and France’s defeat against Bismarck’s Prussia. Fearing that a conservative majority would restore the monarchy, revolutionaries formed a communal government. After fierce fighting, government forces crushed the Communards, leaving about 20,000 insurrectionists and 750 government troops dead.

Commemorating Trauma is Starr’s second book to delve into a key moment in French political and cultural history. His earlier Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ’68 (Stanford University Press, 1995) examined the cultural effect of the supposed failure of the revolutionary moment of May 1968 in France, when a series of student strikes briefly threatened to overturn the government of Charles de Gaulle.

In his next book, Starr says he will explore how paranoia continues to define the products of contemporary American culture.

– Pamela J. Johnson

Arts & Culture

Powder Her Face

The steamy chamber opera by Thomas Adès comes to full boil at USC Thornton.

It was an offer Ken Cazan couldn’t refuse. To stage virtuoso composer Thomas Adès’ chamber-opera sensation, Powder Her Face, right here at USC, as a co-production with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. With the British maestro himself conveniently at hand (he’s in residence at the Phil) not only to consult on the production but to guest conduct the Thornton Chamber Orchestra. And with guest artists from the Phil’s professional ranks to mentor the student players in music that Cazan calls “death-defyingly difficult.” (Violinist Mitchell Newman was concertmaster, and clarinetist David Howard and horn player Bruce Hudson chaired the wind and brass sections.)

The young composer (Adès is only 35) even got involved in casting decisions. “We chose about 10 students who we knew could handle the tessitura (vocal range) to sing for him,”says Cazan, stage director of USC Thornton Opera. The vocal parts are treacherous. The tenor (sung in the USC production by Timur Bekbosunov) and bass (sung by Joshua Hong) roles are in the double-octave ranges.

The female parts present other challenges: the soprano’s role (sung alternately by Erica Miller and Laura Parker) is studded with machine-gun rounds of brittle laughter, while the Duchess (sung by Joni Fukuda and Hannah Waldman) achieves an operatic climax (ahem) all by herself.

The opera itself is risqué, no doubt about it. (So much so that no one under 17 was admitted.) In revolves around an aristocratic sex scandal that riveted London in the 1950s. While little known in America, the name of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, is a byword across the pond. Her public divorce trial in 1955 featured Polaroid evidence of her many infidelities.

In Powder Her Face, Adès gives us not only a voyeuristic glimpse into Margaret’s boudoir, but “a front-row seat to the future of music,” wrote an enthusiastic reviewer of a production in Brisbane. In eight vignettes spanning six decades of the scandalous socialite’s life, Adès – with librettist Philip Hensher, a respected British novelist and critic – paints a portrait both tawdry and profoundly human.

Originally commissioned for London’s experimental Almeida Opera, the frugal scoring features just four vocalists – three of them assuming many parts. All are Margaret’s tormentors. The soprano, a succession of flighty young women, the Duchess’ mocking rivals; the lyric tenor, her sneering servants and lovers; the bass, a parade of dour authority figures – the Duke, the judge and the hotel manager who evicts her in the opera’s closing scene.

Titillating as the plot may be, the ear is ever drawn away from the stage to what is happening in the pit. Traces of Walton-esque tango, the songs of Cole Porter and George Gershwin, bits of Poulenc and Britten, and quotes from Berg’s Lulu and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress peek artfully from the score.

– Diane Krieger

[ Fisher’s Finest ] Art and High Society

For a couple of months this winter, USC was abustle with aristocrats. A visit to Fisher Gallery brought you tête-à-tête with a roomful. You could pay a social call on the haughty Sir Patrick Blake, baronet, ogle the sultry Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland (everyone knows she was the king’s mistress...) or admire the doe-eyed Isabella Hunter, cradling to her porcelain bosom a dove with an olive branch in its beak. There they stood, gazing sweetly, arrogantly, sometimes sensuously from November 15 through January 20. More than a dozen exquisite examples of 18th-century British portraiture by the likes of Gainsborough, Reynolds, Lawrence and Lely. They were all part of the recent exhibition “Then and Now,” surveying the cream of USC Fisher’s permanent collection. Besides the aristos, there were landscapes of the 17th-century Dutch tradition, the French Barbizon School, the 19th-century Hudson River School, and a whole wing of contemporary American and European pieces. Few realize the Fisher – established in 1939 – was the first museum in the city devoted exclusively to the exhibition and collection of fine art. Built around 74 European masterworks donated by collector Elizabeth Holmes Fisher, the gallery’s holdings now number in the thousands.

– Diane Krieger

BEGGARS’ BALL

It’s Delightful, It’s De-Lurid

A large cast of student singer-actors brings the Brechtian gutters of London satirically to life at the Bing.

“Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear, and it shows them pearly white.” Who hasn’t heard that Bobby Darin hit or some variation thereof? Yet surprisingly few of us have heard the original “Ballad of Mack the Knife,” penned by the formidable Bertolt Brecht for Kurt Weill’s disturbing Threepenny Opera. Last October brought an opportunity to remedy this oversight, when the USC School of Theatre presented its lavish production of the original 1928 musical.

Director Andrew J. Robinson rendered the satirical masterpiece in loving detail. He was backed by theater professionals like Nadine Parkos, whose garish costumes drew inspiration from the paintings of German expressionist George Grosz; and scene designer Don Llewellyn, whose shambles of shifting wooden stairs, platforms and steel bars provided a fitting backdrop to denizens of anti-Bauhaus disharmony. A spare orchestration for piano and accordion struck the right discord behind the 23 singer-actors whose hard-edged voices, painted faces and grotesque movements – choreographed by Stephanie Shroyer – lent the show a neo-Dickensian nightmare aesthetic.

The Threepenny Opera is based on an earlier musical work, the 18th-century Beggar’s Opera by British dramatist John Gay. Both are set in the brothels, jails and back streets of London’s gritty Soho. Here, a thoroughly despicable yet strangely piquant cast of characters conducts business as usual. Brecht’s first stage direction reads: “Beggars beg, thieves steal, whores whore.”

The stage literally crawled with two-legged vermin: we meet the enterprising Mr. Peachum (Trevor Davis), dealer in human misery, a man of unctuous charm and winking hypocrisy. He is well paired with a perfect shrew of a helpmate, the terrifying Mrs. Peachum (Savannah Southern-Smith). Before long their winsome daughter Polly (Deborah Ann Woll) shows her true bloodlines in a mesmerizing transformation from blushing bride to the homicidal “Pirate Jenny.” And the bridegroom? The dapper Macheath (Beck Bennett) – murderer and thief, criminal boss and polygamist, a mock-gentleman hero with a heart of pure lead.

Socio-political satire and great songs to boot. Who could resist?

– Diane Krieger

Now PLAYING

›› HARLEM GOSPEL CHOIR presents an evening of foot-stomping and hand-clapping blues, jazz and gospel spirituals, as performed by the finest singers from the churches of Manhattan’s storied uptown neighborhood.
February 16, Bovard Auditorium.

›› MACHINAL Don’t miss the USC School of Theatre’s timely revival of the 1928 Broadway hit by playwright Sophie Treadwell. A study of dehumanization, this Industrial Age drama explores the downward spiral of a fragile young woman deadened, squeezed and crushed by the machine-like quality of her life.
February 22-25, Bing Theatre.

›› EAST MEETS WEST A week of cultural and musical exchange between students and faculty of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and the USC Thornton School of Music culminates in a joint concert on the theme of “East Meets West.”
March 27-29, Alfred Newman Hall.

›› BHARATA NATYAM Members of the acclaimed South Indian classical troupe, the Shakti Dance Company, participate in a series of events at USC – including a master class in the ancient art of Bharata Natyam dance, a screening and discussion of the film Dancing with Shakti and a live performance.
March 22-23, Bovard Auditorium.

›› FERNANDO’S HIDEAWAY Workplace conditions at the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory are uneasy as superintendent-boy meets shop-steward girl in USC’s song- and dance-filled production of The Pajama Game. When the battle between the sexes gets tangled up with a dispute between management and labor, the result can be, er, striking.
March 29-April 7, Bing Theatre.

›› MISS LONELYHEARTS Fresh from its world premiere in New York, composer Lowell Liebermann’s dark opera tackling life, death, God and sexuality makes its West Coast debut at USC. Based on Nathaniel West’s 1930s novel about a male newspaper columnist writing a women’s advice column, Miss Lonelyhearts is a collaborative project of Juilliard, USC Thornton and the University of Cincinnati.
April 20-22, Bing Theatre.

For daily updates on USC events and other campus happenings, visit www.usc.edu/calendar