The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 106

F10 THE BOSTON GLOBE WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14, 2000 Some styles, like summer, just keep returning FASHION NOTES Continued from Page Fl fine, and has stocked the racks with the favorite label of Connecticut coast debs, Lilly Pulitzer (Saks carries this line, too). The shop also has canvas tote bags, peach linen pants covered in oversize Lacoste-style yi rv: 'if- sale, which registers in the "cheap" category, according to curator Carol Krute, is scheduled for June 24 at a warehouse down the street from the museum. During this year's May kickoff of the Brimfield antiques fair, we noticed more vintage-clothing peddlers than ever. Spotted: decades-old Lilly Pulitzer. The next Brimfield dates are July 11-16.

Looking for some Choos? Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" describes how epidemics are born: "One, contagiousness; two, the fact that lit-tie causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment." His thesis embodies the launching of fashion trends, like the reemergence of Hush Puppies in the mid-90s. A similar Tipping Point moment seems to have arrived quite suddenly, of course for London footwear designer Jimmy Choo, who, for the record, has his shoes made in the same northern Italian factory where Manolo Blahniks are crafted. alligators, thong espadrilles (priced at more than $300), grosgrain headbands, and, if you need to be hit over the head with the theme, a bubble-gum-pink T-shirt that says "Preppy" on the front. A few blocks away, Kate Spade has a more refined version of the canvas tote and matching slides. 1 If you want to stay out of the stores, here are a couple of options.

The "Charlie's Angels" 100 percent cotton T-shirt with the trademark "fireburst silhouette" of the three mystery-solving women was sold out on the show's official Web site, www.spe.sony.comstorescreen gems, the last time we checked. We were sucked in by this sales pitch: "Comfortable enough to wear year-round and sturdy enough to deliver paralyzing kicks as necessary." But other styles are available, including one that has "This is a bust" written across the back. Why the back? Also, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford is selling off some "not quite posh" vintage clothing it has collected. The Sarah Jessica Parker, when not traipsing around Staten Island in gold lame boots in HBO's "Sex and the City," is maxing out her credit cards buying the high-fashion footwear. But they're not easy to find in Boston.

We know of only two shops, both on Newbury Street, where they can be snapped up: Alois and Serenella, where you must ring the doorbell to be allowed in. The former has several pairs of pumps with an '80s look in the $300 range. The latter had black beaded slingbacks and leopard, round-toe slip-on flats. But these are leftovers from the spring line, and the boutique reports it is phasing out Choos because it is too small to stock many styles. Brookline High School graduate Sally Tseng ('97) won an award for her intimate apparel designs at the Fashion Institute of Technology's spring fashion show last month.

Her chartreuse brocade bustier and fuchsia polka dot organza bed jacket were described as "18th-century corsetry meets bohemian 1970s." GLOBE STAFF PHOTO DAVID RYAN Jaime Freilich sports a prep look with Lilly Pulitzer dress and thong sandals. I Sculpture park at UMass still stalled I' 4 3 PERSPECTIVES Continued from Page Fl big time, saying the UMass land tfas their neighborhood and they deserved a say in what went on it. Tjhen, someone sledgehammered the concrete and lead footings designed to support a sculpture by the lite Tony Smith; the Smith, which Was to have been installed by now, remains in extremely expensive storage in New Jersey until there's some resolution between neighborhood and university. Instead of njoving ahead with acquiring and installing sculptures, Tucker is spending his time talking to local residents and politicians. At the moment, "we're in limbo," he says.

1 The big issue isn't the desirability of a sculpture park filled with millions of dollars' worth of work th at would go a long way toward improving Boston's current reputation as a completely dysfunctional city when it comes to public art. The issue is town-gown friction, a vari ation on what happens every time Harvard Wants to expand its art museums, world-class institutions that enrich not just the university community, but tfte community 4t large. In the case of the neighborhoods near UMass (which fo'j? primarily cut off from the Campus by Mor- 1' Paul Hayes sculpture park bLUBt Si AH- KMUlU bUZANNE KRElTEfi Mathew Williams (left) and CP McBee are designing a 3-D role-playing game on a shoestring budget These gamespeople play out their dreams I- 4.. I PC games, although Irrational Games is currently creating The Lost for the Playstation.) Creating video games involves what Jonathan Adams calls the Cool Factor. Adams, a freelance game designer and developer who teaches interactive design at Boston University, talks about the response he gets from folks when they learn he creates games and gets paid for it: "Ahhhhhhhhh, that's cooooooool." It's definitely not like telling someone that you cook up word processing programs for a living.

"People are passionate about this stuff," mmmmmm Adams says. They'd better be. Making games for small screens involves more than long hours, plastic bottles of Jolt and window shades drawn to prevent screen glare. The chances of becoming the next Sid Meiers or John Carmack respectively, the creators Making games for screens more than hours, bottles of and window shades prevent glare. doesn't work, because this isn't a place where people think about an exit strategy.

They do this for the product not to figure out how and when the company is going to be sold." For love of the game Mathew Williams say he's doing this "to create the job I want for the rest of my life." The 24-year-old Harvard College alumnus and his 23-year-old partner, Babson College grad CP McBee, are holed up in Williams's Somerville apartment with a half-dozen like-minded denizens. They are living in no small part on home-cooked Mexican food and takeout Dunkin' Donuts while working on Prelude to Darkness, a 3-D role-playing game they hope to release via the Internet this fall. Williams grew up on a cattle ranch in west Texas, while McBee, the son of jazz bassist Cecil McBee, was raised in New York City. The two former kid gamers met three years ago while working at Cambridge-based Impressions Software Inc. "A lot of the games we were testing there, we thought they were awful," says McBee, singing a familiar song.

Solution: Start up Zero Sum Software, a shoestring operation that nevertheless belies its name via the $100,000 invested in the company by what McBee describes as "the rich father of a high school friend." No one at Zero Sum is over 25. One employee hails from India, another from South Africa, another from Canada. "Sometimes we sleep, and sometimes we don't," says Williams. "Sometimes we play Starcraft all night," he adds, referring to the hugely successful alien-versus-alien game that was published two years ago. Less than two miles away in Cambridge, near the banks of the Charles River, 38-year-old Rick Goodman and 40-year-old Dara-Lynn Pelechatz operate in a different kind of environment.

Stainless Steel Studios was founded by the pair three years ago after Goodwin and his brother, Tony, had collaborated on the hit strategy game Age of Empires (more than 3 million copies sold.) Now SSS is spending three years developing Empire Earth a fledgling civilization through 500,000 years of human for the PC via a seven-figure budget Goodman and Pelechatz have landed a top publisher in Sierra Studios, espouse a highly disciplined approach to their craft, and employ a couple of dozen young te-chies who work in a comfortable space on the fringe of MIT. "There are lots and lots of stories about game developers starting in garages, but that's getting harder and harder to do," says Goodman, a former board-gamer-cum-PC-gamer who is the company's lead designer. "When Civilization came out in 1991, it cost $175,000 to produce. Now we're talking games that easily cost 10 times that amount But I think everyone who's a gamer still thinks of himself as a potential game developer." And everyone who's a game developer thinks of himself as a gamer. Consider Levesque, who spent hours upon hours playing video games as an urban teenager.

Today he's married, has two kids, lives in the suburbs, and is Blue Fang Games' CEO and head creative honcho. Much has changed, but one thing hasn't. "I still buy every game that comes out," muses the once and future gameboy. Tucker conceived the four years ago. sus in the community." Works by Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Magdalena Abakanowicz -there are no bigger names in contemporary public sculpture are also on hold.

What excites internationally celebrated artists about working at UMass is the scale of both the site and Tucker's vision for it "This site can actually advance artists' work," he says, using von Rydingsvard as an example. "The piece for us will be her biggest ever," he adds. It will be one of her trademark rough-cut cedar vessels, this one 17 feet tall, with a mechanical element on the exterior that will make the interior rise and fall, a process Tucker compares to the churning of butter. The work would be nestled in a slope near the campus's perimeter walkway. Abakanowicz's proposal is for seven dancing figures silhouetted against sea and sky; she calls it her "Midsummer Night's Dream" piece, and, Tucker says, it will draw the artist in a direction different from her typically somber, even tortured, tone.

Because Tucker is so respected in the art community, he has been able to pay for his park with major donations from local patrons, notably Bar bara Fish Lee, Ellen Poss, and Nancy Tieken, and he has serious prospects for fund-raising from as far afield as Japan. But fund-raising is currently taking a back seat to politicking. Tucker is victim to one of the most vigorous debates in public art just now, over the role of the community. Not long ago, the very phrase "community input" drew a knee-jerk sanction. Now, artists and art experts increasingly feel that while the community must be drawn in, educated, and engaged all of which Tucker endorses enthusiastically it shouldn't play a determining role.

Some of the world's most beloved pieces of public art were initially loathed by communities that eventually grew into them, and were retroactively grateful they hadn't had veto power. Tucker, meanwhile, says he has no regrets about entering the public art arena. He has a whole other identity, of course, as one of the world's most important curators of the world's most popular art Impressionism. He has organized some of the best-attended exhibitions in history. He's the curator of "The Impressionists at Argen-teuil," which just opened at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

He's working on a huge Renoir showto open in Japan next year. But Renoir, he says, will be his curatorial swan song. He's determined to devote himself to creating a significant sculpture park on the grounds of a public university for the benefit of the public at large. As for the current stumbling block, "all big projects of lasting importance," he says, "are always going to have difficulties along the way." meanwhile, run into millions of dollars. Development involves programmers, designers, artists, and sound engineers.

With so much money at stake, hit-driven video game publishers think of them as being like book publishers, while game developers are like authors -are reluctant to invest in developers who don't have a track record. Meanwhile, the sands are shifting beneath an emerging generation of console games and the expected increase of computer gaming on the Internet CogniToy is the child they also have two of the flesh-and-blood variety of Kent and Kim Quirk, a pair of Dartmouth graduates who originally hit it off when they discovered that they each owned a programmable calculator on which games could be written. Some two decades later, they hired their babysitter, a high school student, to help develop a prototype of MindRover. The Quirks can't yet afford such luxuries as paying themselves salaries. "We draw some cash," Kent Quirk says, "but basically just enough to pay for the mortgage and groceries." Says Blue Fang's Levesque: "If you really look at this, you'd say that we're all crazy." Small wonder that Boston's subculture of start-up game developers is a kind of loose community.

Many of them along with a few wannabes even meet once a month via an informal group known as Post Mortem, downing beer and burgers in Back Bay while fluently speaking the language of games. (Sims, RPGs, maps, deathmatch levels, expansion packs, etc.) It's a gathering wherein Meiers is an idol because he made a great game, not because he made great money. "What functions in this is passion," Levine contends. "You have to love games. The dot-com model ideo small involves long plastic Jolt, drawn to screen JOYSTUCK Continued from Page Fl Eager gamer spends youth jockeying Atari, Nintendo, family computer, etc.

Teaches self computer programming. Continues gaming in college, graduates (maybe), latches on with game company as tester. Eventually becomes game designer, meets kindred worker who shares view that employer's games suck. Pair decides to make games that rule. Jump-start own development company, land contract with game publisher (maybe), spend three years producing their first game.

Survive mainly on caffeine and pizza. Joystick genes Adam Levesque, at 33, knows the scenario well. When Levesque was a teenager growing up in Cambridge, his grandfather took a personal loan to buy him a Commodore 64 computer. He also cut his gaming chops on Atari and Nintendo, dropped out of Boston College after less than a year, and eventually found his way to Papyrus Design Group in Somerville, a local hothouse for game developers that has made its name producing auto-racing titles. It was there that Levesque met 31-year-old Princeton graduate John Wheeler, a programmer with whom he would later form Blue Fang Games in his Sudbury basement.

One attempt to produce a game never got off the ground, but Blue Fang recently moved its growing cadre of nine employees into spiffy honest-to-God office space in Lexington -leaving their backyard touch-football games behind and Levesque says the company is very close to cutting a deal with a major publisher for a computer strategy game. "There's a kind of game gene in us that just kind of takes off," Levesque says of game players who grow up to be game makers. (There are two types of video games. PC games are played on computers and tend to attract a somewhat older audience than console games, which are played on hardware such as the Sony Playstation. Local developers tend to make rissey Boulevard anyway), we're not exactly Calking about sculpture spoiling un-trammeled nature.

The UMass site ys as bleak and windy as a Yorkshire moor, and what Tucker has already managed to put there has brightened it considerably. In addition to that huge, muscular di Su-yero, which turned a non-place into sojneplace, there's Luis Jimenez's i2-foot "The Steelworker," a reminder of the blue-collar world in thje midst of academe; a series of ftthropomorphic bronzes by William Tucker; Dennis Oppenheim's ''Black," a largish pot-and-kettle grouping; and an indoor series of Ghanaian coffins whose shapes include a lobster and an ear of corn. (They're all courtesy of Tucker's college roommate, Los Angeles gallery owner Ernie Wolfe, who sells the coffins as sculpture.) There was, until recently, also a major Alexander Calder sculpture Jr the UMass library, on loan from FJeetBank, which abruptly decided sell it off. It now resides in Switzerland. "It was perfect for the space," Tucker laments.

"It was pne of the largest Calders in the Northeast, 27 feet long. The students were so proud to have it there. And conceptually it fit beautifully with another Dennis Oppen-heim piece we're getting, an outdoor work that looks like a 20-foot steel and wire-mesh UFO flying right toward the library." 'r- "-The Oppenheim languishes in forage. Although the nighttime Mghting that would turn the di Su-vero into a beacon is all set, Tucker Vh't turn it on "because that would iadicate we're moving ahead with the park without having a consen- of the mega-hits Civilization and Doom, and thereby major heroes within the genre are computer-chip slim. Most games lose money, and many game ideas never see a screen.

Last month, local developers were startled to learn of the shuttering of Cambridge-based Looking Glass Studios, which had 60 employees, produced the popular System Shock series of action games, and was considered an area role model. Reason given: out of money. And money is what's needed. The multimedia complexity of today's games means that an outfit such as CogniToy, literally a mom-and-pop enterprise located in a small wooden 19th-century building in Acton, is considered to be operating largely on a prayer. After all, only $500,000 was put into the six-person company's first game, MindRover, which CogniToy has self-published on the Internet since November.

Most game budgets,.