Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ART & ARTISTS (91%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (90%); PAINTING (90%); HISTORY (78%); EXHIBITIONS (78%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (78%); ART HISTORY (78%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (78%); CLASSICAL MUSIC (73%); WEALTHY PEOPLE (50%)
ORGANIZATION: METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART (91%); NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART (83%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (53%)
GEOGRAPHIC: LONDON, ENGLAND (93%) ENGLAND (93%); UNITED KINGDOM (93%)
LOAD-DATE: July 4, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: From ''J. M. W. Turner,'' a major retrospective at the Metropolitan: above, ''Mortlake Terrace'' (1827)

right, ''Shields, on the River Tyne'' (1823), a watercolor.(PHOTOGRAPHS BY ABOVE, NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON

BELOW, TATE, LONDON) (pg. E26)

J. M. W. TURNER: ''Snow Storm -- Steam Boat Off a Harbor's Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water'' (1842), from a retrospective at the Met. (PHOTOGRAPH BY TATE, LONDON) (pg. E23)

DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

619 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 4, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

Some Shows for Escape, Some for Introspection
BYLINE: By KEN JOHNSON
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; ART REVIEW; Pg. 30
LENGTH: 1404 words
When the dog days arrive, many New York art galleries put their solo acts on ice and turn their exhibition spaces into pluralistic laboratories to test new talent and experiment with cool ideas. If you can stand the heat, it is a great time to be out looking at contemporary art.

An unscientific and incomplete survey of group shows already open -- more openings will follow after the holiday weekend -- finds a retiring, introspective mood. It looks as if the art world had gone into retreat from the endless barrage of bad news coming from the world at large.

The one politically motivated exhibition, at Zwirner & Wirth, is tellingly called ''Quiet Politics.'' Elsewhere, titles like ''I Won't Grow Up'' (at Cheim & Read) and ''Deep Comedy'' (Marian Goodman) suggest escapist urges. Shows with enigmatic titles like ''Not So Subtle Subtitle'' (Casey Kaplan) and ''Crop Rotation'' (Marianne Boesky) reflect the obscurely personal tastes of their curators. ''Retrospective'' (Gagosian) takes an art historical turn, and ''The Stranger'' (Yvon Lambert) finds its inspiration in the nihilistic novel by Albert Camus.

ZWIRNER & WIRTH More elegant than inflammatory, ''Quiet Politics'' presents works expressing political impulses in understated ways. '' 'Untitled' Fear'' by Felix Gonzalez-Torres is an inscrutable Minimalist box made of blue-tinted mirrors. David Hammons's sumptuous rendition of the African-American flag -- the United States flag but in black, red and green -- is as laconic as it is suggestive. Among other possibilities, it might be a slyly subversive rejoinder to Jasper Johns's flag paintings.

Walid Raad's fictitious video showing sunsets supposedly recorded by a Lebanese surveillance-camera operator has an affecting, elegiac feeling, and Michael Brown's stainless-steel simulation of a cracked mirror freezes an act of anarchic rage into a lovely, spidery web.

CHEIM & READ Organized by the collector Beth Rudin DeWoody and the artist Donald Baechler, ''I Won't Grow Up'' presents almost 60 pieces that look as if they were made by or for children, created by more than 30 artists. Why so many artists these days -- including, here, Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Takashi Murakami, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Mike Kelley -- should be so preoccupied by child-likeness remains unexplained, but it is an entertaining show.

Mark Fox's video ''Nutzilla,'' in which a giant Mr. Peanut violently attacks the Cincinnati Art Museum, is hilarious. George Stoll's hand-made, child-size costumes, one a skeleton and the other a clown, are delicately evocative. And Tim Liddy's painted simulation of an old Twister game box is an extraordinary feat of trompe l'oeil realism.

MARION GOODMAN ''Deep Comedy,'' which was organized by the artist Dan Graham and the curator Sylvia Chivaratanond, does not quite live up to its title's promise. ''Sophisticated Wit'' would be more accurate for this exhibition, which includes works by John Baldessari, Fischli & Weiss and Rodney Graham. But there are some instances of fairly profound humor.

John Wesley's cartoon-style painting of Donald Duck giving birth and Vija Celmins's painting of a steaming electric frying pan are both mysteriously funny. A video by Michael Smith and Joshua White about a fabricated wellness center is a dead-on spoof of New Age entrepreneurship. Christian Jankowski's mock-documentary in which nonprofessional child actors play famous artists discussing their works satirizes art-world language and customs to surprisingly touching effect.

(Comedy lovers, by the way, might consider a side trip to the Adam Baumgold Gallery where ''Road Works'' offers a rich selection of comic drawings, paintings and sculptures about life on the road by more than two dozen artists, including H. C. Westermann, Saul Steinberg and Joseph Yoakum.)

CASEY KAPLAN Matthew Brannon's selection of mostly small works on paper by 24 other artists has an insiderish feel. It includes Christopher Williams's photograph of the blank white back of an art book from 1969; collages by John Stezaker in which postcards depicting rocks are pasted over film stills of lovers; small abstractions by Nick Mauss made by scratching through aluminum leaf into a black gesso ground; and two posters for a Wade Guyton exhibition in London illustrated by photographs of a muscular man's torso.

What holds it all together is an exquisite aliveness to form and materials, and an acute alertness to conventions of style and representation. It is absorbing and often puzzlingly abstruse.

MARIANNE BOESKY Organized by the independent curator Clarissa Dalrymple, ''Crop Rotation'' is almost as perplexing as Mr. Brannon's show, but it is more theatrically engaging.

The words ''walk'' and ''talk'' printed in yellow on black on a length of plastic stuck to the floor -- a piece first made in 1970 by Ferdinand Kriwet -- lead to a room where a rickety wooden structure by Marc Bijl holds up three horizontal mirrors reflecting words spray-painted in reverse on the wall. They read, ''The construction of life is at present in the power of facts.''

In a corner of the main gallery two enormous black circles painted on each wall by Neil Campbell give the momentarily thrilling illusion of openings into infinite space. But a poetic tableau by Marlo Pascual involving old photographs under glass, a seashell, a large rock, electric lights, an antique telephone and a much enlarged page from Walker Percy's novel ''The Moviegoer'' is portentously heavy-handed.

Don't miss Jeffrey Wells's video projection of an almost invisible line wavering in one corner of the gallery or Mr. Kriwet's video montage of television clips from the 1972 presidential race between Richard M. Nixon and George McGovern.

GAGOSIAN At a certain point in their careers some artists become custodians of their own histories. Marcel Duchamp had his works reproduced in miniature and neatly installed in portable boxes. One of them is the centerpiece of ''Retrospective,'' which presents works that function as compendiums of their maker's earlier efforts.

Along with pieces on paper by Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, there's ''Red,'' a terrific, mostly gray canvas by Andy Warhol that has images of Mao, Marilyn, a car crash, a tomato soup can, a cow and a big red flower silkscreened on it.

One fascinating room presents written and photographic documentation of all the performances Chris Burden did from 1971 to 1973. Another has all the films and videos that Douglas Gordon has produced since 1992, running in the dark on 50 monitors.

YVON LAMBERT An enigmatic array of seven sculptures by seven artists, ''The Stranger'' might be a meditation on the absurdity of the human condition. Richard Jackson's ''Big Baby,'' a large, yellow smiley face made of shiny plastic with pudgy, humanoid limbs and male genitalia attached, lies on its pedestal like a helpless infant. Berlinde de Bruyckere's wax torso in an old vitrine looks like the remnant of a medieval sculpture of a tortured saint crossed with a slab of fatty meat.

And ''The Long Awaited'' by Patricia Piccinini, in which a sleeping boy cradles in his lap the head of a sleeping, grandmotherly mermaid, could be a scene from a new Steven Spielberg fantasy. Meanwhile, in a nod to the show's title, George Segal's blue woman at a cafe table reads from a real copy of that tale of existential malaise by Camus.

An Art Lover's Summer Guide

ADAM BAUMGOLD ''Road Works,'' through Aug. 15 at 74 East 79th Street, Manhattan, [phone], adambaumgoldgallery.com.

MARIANNE BOESKY ''Crop Rotation,'' through Aug. 15 at 509 West 24th Street, Chelsea, [phone], marianneboeskygallery.com.

CHEIM & READ ''I Won't Grow Up,'' through Aug. 29 at 547 West 25th Street, Chelsea, [phone], cheimread.com.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY ''Retrospective,'' through Aug. 22 at 522 West 21st Street, Chelsea, [phone], gagosian.com.

MARIAN GOODMAN ''Deep Comedy,'' through July 30 at 24 West 57th Street, Manhattan, [phone], mariangoodman.com.

CASEY KAPLAN ''Not So Subtle Subtitle,'' through July 31 at 525 West 21st Street, Chelsea, [phone], caseykaplangallery.com.

YVON LAMBERT ''The Stranger,'' through July 31 at 550 West 21st Street, Chelsea, [phone], yvon-lambert.com.

ZWIRNER & WIRTH ''Quiet Politics,'' through Aug. 29 at 32 East 69th Street, Manhattan, [phone], zwirnerandwirth.com.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: EXHIBITIONS (90%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (90%); ART & ARTISTS (90%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (89%); VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS (78%); PAINTING (78%); AFRICAN AMERICANS (78%); ART HISTORY (73%); NOVELS & SHORT STORIES (68%)
GEOGRAPHIC: CINCINNATI, OH, USA (68%) OHIO, USA (68%) UNITED STATES (90%)
LOAD-DATE: July 4, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: ''Red,'' by Andy Warhol, part of a show at the Gagosian Gallery. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDY WARHOL ESTATE/PRIVATE COLLECTION, GAGOSIAN GALLERY, NEW YORK)

Ferdinand Kriwet's ''Walk Talk,'' from the show ''Crop Rotation.'' (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY, NEW YORK)

DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

620 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 4, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

'Untouchables' Enjoy a Night of Fashion
BYLINE: By C. J. HUGHES
SECTION: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 849 words
Tabla drums warbled and lights beat down as the woman glided down the runway, her sari billowing loosely and her hair pulled tight. As fashion shows go, the sashay-spin-repeat sequence was fairly routine.

But the background of many of the models at this event on Wednesday evening, held in a fourth-floor dining room at the United Nations, was anything but.

Known as Dalits, or ''untouchables,'' the women have such a low social standing in their native India that they are below the lowest rung of the officially banned but still-present caste system.

In fact, this particular group of women -- 17 on stage, an additional 20 or so in the audience, all with dresses that were pool blue, to honor the official shade of the United Nations -- once cleaned septic systems for a living.

But for those who imagine that the indelicate task can somehow be pulled off by sticking a hose from a truck into a tank in the ground, guess again.

Using straw brushes, these women, called scavengers, would hand-sweep the contents of often-dry latrines into bamboo baskets, then cart away the results on their heads.

Reviled to the point where others would let them die in the streets rather than brush their skin, according to event organizers, theirs was a grimy and dangerous existence that would make a Dickensian lifestyle, in contrast, an improvement.

''Gandhi had a wish to make a scavenger the president of India,'' said Bindeshwar Pathak, a New Delhi businessman, at a panel discussion that took place before the event in an auditorium lined with ash wood.

Mr. Pathak, who is the head of an international company that manufactures flush-style private and public toilets, has also built four clinics across India to teach scavengers -- there are an estimated 500,000 among the 160 million Dalits who make up 16 percent of the country's population -- basic hygiene, literacy and job skills, to better their fates.

Indeed, Wednesday's fashion show was partly a tribute to Mr. Pathak from the United Nations Development Program, which in a 156-page report released on Tuesday praised his for-profit, private-sector solution to an intractable social problem.

''Giving them this opportunity shows the world that scavengers are equal to everybody else,'' Mr. Pathak said.

The former scavengers, none of whom had traveled outside India before, also seemed to help publicize what the United Nations has decreed the International Year of Sanitation.

This effort (earlier ones focused on peace and on microcredit) is to reduce by half the 2.4 billion people who drink and bathe in dirty water by 2015, though with just 300,000 aided so far, progress has admittedly been slow.

''It's a huge undertaking,'' said Vijay Nambiar, chief of staff to Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, at the panel discussion. ''But we must raise awareness of sanitation with special attention to the privacy, dignity and security of women.''

Though the message was somber, the mood turned light after guests adjourned to the Delegates Dining Room, which provided views of a twinkling Queens.

Waiters in tuxedos balanced platters of wedge-shaped samosas by tables of saffron chicken and lentil salad.

On the nearby 50-foot runway, the former scavengers strutted side by side with more conventional models, whose bobbed hairdos and heavy makeup balanced bright gold, pink and green chiffon gowns.

Some in the 175-person crowd leaped at the chance to meet Mr. Pathak, whose social service may be as admired as his entrepreneurial talent.

Although his net worth has not been widely reported, his company, Sulabh International, made a profit of $5 million in 2005, according to the United Nations report, which is a Bill Gates-level sum in an impoverished nation.

Much of that revenue presumably came from Sulabh's numerous public pay toilets, which are also found in Ethiopia, Madagascar and Afghanistan; Mr. Pathak also runs a popular New Delhi toilet museum.

''I'm here because I think what he's done is remarkable,'' said Anjali Sud, 24, of the Upper West Side, who works for a magazine publishing company but volunteers at the United Nations in her spare time. As she spoke, her sister Anisha Sud, 21, passed a pen to Mr. Pathak for an autograph.

Fawning, too, was Virender Yadav, 54, a New Delhi native who now lives in Richmond Hill, Queens, and whose arms were piled high with free brochures and books.

''This is very unusual,'' Mr. Yadav said, adding, ''I was very surprised'' to learn that former scavengers would be in New York City.

''I am so glad they are bringing them up in the world,'' he said.

The culture shock was not lost on the former scavengers, either, such as Usha Chaumar, 34, who wore bangles on her wrists and a glittering bindi on her forehead. Like her fellow travelers, Ms. Chaumar comes from Alwar, a city in Gujarat State, and like the others, she was married young, at 14, though her husband is now dead.

''All my friends and relatives need to get better jobs,'' she said through a Hindi interpreter, ''so they can come into the mainstream.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: FASHION & APPAREL (90%); FASHION DESIGNERS (90%); UNITED NATIONS INSTITUTIONS (89%); SPECIAL EVENT PLANNING (77%); INTERNATIONAL ASSISTANCE (71%); POPULATION SIZE (67%); POPULATION & DEMOGRAPHICS (67%); FASHION SHOWS (90%)
ORGANIZATION: UNITED NATIONS (91%)
GEOGRAPHIC: NEW DELHI, INDIA (72%) INDIA (94%)
LOAD-DATE: July 4, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Women who once cleaned septic systems waiting to step onto the runway at the United Nations. (PHOTOGRAPH BY BEATRICE DE GEA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

621 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 4, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

Larry Harmon, 83; Popularized Bozo
BYLINE: By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 17
LENGTH: 633 words
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
Larry Harmon, who bought the rights to the character Bozo the Clown and turned him into a show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died Thursday at his home here. He was 83.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Jerry Digney, his publicist.

Although he was not the original Bozo, Mr. Harmon portrayed the clown in countless appearances and, as an entrepreneur, licensed the character to others, particularly dozens of television stations around the country. The stations in turn hired actors to be their local Bozos.

''You might say, in a way, I was cloning BTC,'' he told The Associated Press in 1996, referring to Bozo the Clown, ''before anybody else out there got around to cloning DNA.''

Pinto Colvig, who also provided the voice for Walt Disney's Goofy, first portrayed Bozo the Clown when Capitol Records introduced a series of children's records in 1946. The writer and producer Alan W. Livingston created the character.

Mr. Harmon later met the original Bozo while answering a casting call to make personal appearances as a clown to promote the records. He got that job and eventually bought the rights to Bozo. Along the way, he embellished the clown's distinctive look: orange-tufted hair, a bulbous nose and an outlandish red, white and blue costume.

''I felt if I could plant my size 83AAA shoes on this planet,'' he said, people ''would never be able to forget those footprints.''

Susan Harmon, his wife of 29 years, said that Mr. Harmon ''was the most optimistic man I ever met. He always saw a bright side; he always had something good to say about everybody.''

Besides his wife, Mr. Harmon is survived by his son, Jeff Harmon, and his daughters, Lori Harmon, Marci Breth-Carabet and Leslie Breth.

The business -- combining animation, licensing of the character and personal appearances -- made millions, as Mr. Harmon trained more than 200 Bozos over the years for local markets. The Chicago version of Bozo, portrayed for many years by Bob Bell, ran on WGN-TV for 40 years and was so popular that the waiting list for tickets to a TV show with him once stretched to a decade, prompting the station to suspend taking reservations. By the time the show ended in Chicago, in 2001, it was the last locally produced version.

Mr. Harmon became caught up in a minor controversy in 2004 when the International Clown Hall of Fame in Milwaukee took down a plaque honoring him as Bozo and formally cited Mr. Colvig with creating the role. Mr. Harmon denied ever misrepresenting Bozo's history. He said he was claiming credit only for what he added to the character -- ''What I sound like, what I look like, what I walk like,'' he said -- and what he did to popularize Bozo.

Mr. Harmon protected Bozo's reputation with a vengeance while embracing those who poked good-natured fun at the clown, whose influence spread through popular culture.

''It takes a lot of effort and energy to keep a character that old fresh so kids today still know about him and want to buy the products,'' Karen Raugust, executive editor of The Licensing Letter, a trade publication, said in 1996. A normal character runs its course in three to five years, she said. ''Harmon's is a classic character. It's been around 50 years.''

On New Year's Day 1996, Mr. Harmon dressed up as Bozo for the first time in 10 years, appearing in the Rose Parade in Pasadena. The crowd's reaction, he recalled, ''was deafening.''

''They kept yelling, 'Bozo, Bozo, love you, love you,' '' he said.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, Mr. Harmon became interested in theater while studying at the University of Southern California.

''Bozo is a star, an entertainer, bigger than life,'' Mr. Harmon once said. ''People see him as Mr. Bozo, somebody you can relate to, touch and laugh with.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: DEATHS & OBITUARIES (90%); TELEVISION INDUSTRY (76%); CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE (72%); CLONING (70%); ACTORS & ACTRESSES (76%)
COMPANY: WALT DISNEY CO (56%)
TICKER: DIS (NYSE) (56%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS713110 AMUSEMENT & THEME PARKS (56%); NAICS515112 RADIO STATIONS (56%); NAICS512110 MOTION PICTURE & VIDEO PRODUCTION (56%); NAICS453220 GIFT, NOVELTY & SOUVENIR STORES (56%)
GEOGRAPHIC: MILWAUKEE, WI, USA (51%) WISCONSIN, USA (51%) UNITED STATES (51%)
CATEGORY: Popular Entertainers
PERSON: Larry Harmon
LOAD-DATE: July 4, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Larry Harmon, left, with one of the many Bozos, in 1995. Mr. Harmon licensed and trained more than 200 Bozos. (PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

622 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
July 3, 2008 Thursday

Late Edition - Final

Early Retirees In New Ventures, Mostly for Fun
BYLINE: By BRENT BOWERS
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; IN THE HUNT; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 1077 words
RISK-AVERSE? Clueless as to what P.&.L means? You, too, can be an entrepreneur.

Not the hard-driving type who makes the business news pages. Rather, the laid-back, come-what-may variety. Many of them are part of the first wave of America's 76 million baby boomers who are taking early retirement and turning their hobbies into small businesses. Very small businesses.

They say their microbusinesses are a way to give focus to a favorite pastime, get more zest out of life and make a little money. The best part is they do not care if the ventures fail.

For all their insouciance, these quasi-entrepreneurs display some of the symptoms that drive their mainstream brethren. Their compulsion to escape the restraints of the workplace before they turn 65, for example, reflects their desire to run their own show.

Carl Boast, owner of Peaceable Kingdom Photos in Moneta, Va., was making a hefty salary in New Jersey as a neuroscientist in the pharmaceutical industry when he decided he ''wasn't a fan of working for a living'' and began plotting his departure.

Against the advice of his financial adviser, who worried about how much money he was letting slip away, he quit his job five years ago at age 55 and moved to a five-acre property on Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia that now includes a 2,700-square-foot home, a guesthouse, a pontoon boat, a canoe, a tandem kayak, three single kayaks, two one-person sailboats and a jet ski.

He says he is too busy hiking, boating, reading, writing songs and traveling to fit the definition of an entrepreneur. ''I've put very little effort into marketing,'' he said. ''I'm not out to make money or change the world.'' He has created a Web site, he says, but it is ''buried in Earthlink somewhere'' and is out of date.

What really motivates him, he said, is ''sharing my pictures to convey the idea, 'Wasn't this a neat moment?' ''

And yet, he displays entrepreneurial traits. He had that a-ha moment many entrepreneurs describe when his wife, Linda, asked what he planned to do in retirement and he blurted out, ''nature photographer.''

Soon after, he bought photography equipment, learned to cut mats and read guides like ''The Business of Nature Photography.'' He marketed his products at craft shows held by his employer, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. He felt the jubilation of making his first sale.

''Somebody paid me $12 for an 8-by-10 photo of a squirrel,'' he said. ''I way underpriced the photo, but still. It was such a rush, actually selling what I had produced, instead of giving it away. Over two days, I made $200. Since then, I've given this woman several other squirrel photos.''

He gave himself a crash course in business basics, like registering his venture so he could collect sales taxes, filling out business tax forms and ordering business cards. After moving south, he bought a digital single-lens reflex camera and a seven-ink printer. And he created an office and studio in his basement, with display board, halogen lights, pull-down screen, projector and table for cutting mat boards.

His sales usually run a few hundred dollars a year, he said, though they peaked in 2003 at more than $1,000 after an insurance company bought 20 photos to put on its walls. He also makes and sells calendars displaying his artwork, and he sees possibilities in the 2,600 photos he and Linda took on a recent trip to Australia and New Zealand.

Other opportunities have been coming his way, including small honorariums for speeches to bird clubs and nature clubs. ''I haven't been beating the market bushes,'' he said. But if he could find the time, he said, he might start going to art shows and submitting his photos to magazines.

Jan Oudemool of Harwich, Mass., is, if anything, even more relaxed than Mr. Boast about his venture. Mr. Oudemool, 65, retired five years ago from a job as a special-education teacher and not long after began making decorative mobiles in his home.

Last year, he sold about 35 for close to $4,000, more than double the revenue of his company, Cape Cod Art Mobiles, in its first full year. He is delighted by the growth -- not because he needs the money, but because he does not want his creations to gather dust in his basement.

He, too, shows the trappings of the entrepreneurial personality. He calls himself the chief executive, and has named his wife, Sharon, who does much of the painting, the ''creative director.'' He has a Web site and business cards. And his smart choice of a niche market -- ''nobody else makes mobiles'' -- gives him easy access to craft shows, his main outlet for sales.

But he says he knows next to nothing about business, did no research or planning for his company and does not want it to grow. When told that the images of his mobiles on www.capecodartmobiles.com, a Web site built by a technology-minded friend, do not include the promised dimensions or prices, he replied: ''You know more about what's on the Web site than I do. I'll have to take a look.''

Exhibit No. 3 for my thesis is me. A former New York Times editor, I took early retirement two years ago and redirected my creative juices at freelance writing projects and, twice, giving speeches.

I do not know a whole lot more about the mechanics of running a business than Mr. Boast or Mr. Oudemool. But I guess I'm a quasi-entrepreneur like them. I'm doing this for the fun, not the money. I love being (mostly) my own boss and I am even tempted by the delusion that I may make it big some day.

Ty Freyvogel, a small-business consultant and investor in Pittsburgh, predicts that the ranks of early retirement dabblers will swell as they discover they have too much time and not quite enough money. ''If they do the proper research and can get started without putting a significant amount of capital behind them initially, these types of small start-ups can get going with little risk,'' he said.

Mr. Freyvogel advised such entrepreneurs to consult an accountant or tax lawyer about the latest rules and regulations. ''You should do this no matter how small you think your operation is,'' he said.

(P.&L., by the way, means profit and loss statement, for you would-be entrepreneurs.)

Mr. Boast said he started his little business just to have fun. And yet, there was the sale of that first picture. ''There's no better way to have somebody tell you they like what you are doing than to buy it,'' he said, ''especially if it's a perfect stranger.''