stmichaeladelphi.org

By JIM FUSILLI

Austin

With some 2,000 acts at the South by Southwest Festival held here last week, there was room for all sorts of rock and pop, even Ari Picker’s Lost in the Trees, a North Carolina-based chamber-pop ensemble that features strings, choral voices, a rock rhythm section and Mr. Picker’s guitar.

Mr. Picker composes stunningly intimate songs that deserve unmitigated attention, the kind in short supply at most beer-soaked venues. On “A Church That Fits Our Needs” (Anti), out this week, Mr. Picker writes of the suicide of his mother, the artist Karen Shelton. On the ensemble’s prior album, “All Alone in an Empty House,” he revisited his parents’ acrimonious marriage and bitter divorce. Music for mind and spirit, it’s ill suited to a frenzied, densely populated festival.

“There’s a danger of cheapening it,” Mr. Picker said of his work during a phone interview prior to SXSW. Speaking of the festival’s harried pace, Mr. Picker continued: “You get thrown into the wind. There’s so much going on, I think everyone just assumes it’s not going to work out.”

After a quick trip to Britain to play a festival, Mr. Picker and Lost in the Trees arrived here aware that the band was unlikely to garner much notice. And as the five-day event unfolded, it didn’t. Big names and old-timers stole the buzz: Bruce Springsteen, who gave the keynote address, invited Jimmy Cliff, the Animals’ Eric Burdon, Garland Jeffreys and Joe Ely to sing with him. Lionel Richie brought Kenny Rogers to the stage. Jack White dropped by to pump up his record label. Eminem joined 50 Cent for a couple of numbers at an event curated by Lil Wayne.

With a blend of talent and dogged determination, a few young newcomers shone through, including the much-hyped Alabama Shakes, a band at risk of going from unknown to overrated. Kimbra performed nine times, building on the global popularity of “Somebody I Used to Know,” her duet with Gotye. This year’s Best Solo Male Artist and Best Breakthrough Act at the Brit Awards, folk singer Ed Sheeran, did seven sets. (Kimbra and Mr. Sheeran are both 21 years old.) LP, the big voice behind “Into the Wild,” the soaring “somebody left the gate open” song in an oft-repeated bank commercial, appeared six times.

Lost in the Trees played five shows, including one at 7 a.m. Two days later, the band performed thrice; its 1 a.m. show at Antone’s, a cavernous club best suited to wailing electric blues, had Mr. Picker and associates on stage at about the same time as the more highly touted Balkan Beat Box, Blitzen Trapper, Girl in a Coma and Skrillex at other venues.

Playing highly personal songs in a highly impersonal environment, Mr. Picker and the band pressed on with little time to set up their equipment. “It was a little more punk rock than I might’ve wanted,” he said, following one hurried late-morning set at a multiartist event.

“If a show’s pulled off at all, it’s a miracle,” Mr. Picker said. “At least you’re with friends on a stage. You do see a few scattered people singing along and that feels cool.”

Mr. Picker studied composition at the Berklee School of Music, and his songs are structured to bear the emotional heft of his lyrics while highlighting his sweet voice. “Orchestral texture is what I took away from Berklee,” he said after repairing to a hotel lobby well off raucous Sixth Street, the festival’s main strip. “It was always about the song and the arrangement.”

With the new album, Mr. Picker wanted to pay tribute to his mother. “It would be cheating her not to do so,” he said. “I was raised by an artist mother. I learned you have art on your side.”

In 2009, Ms. Shelton, who had led a troubled life, suffered a breakdown at Mr. Picker’s wedding. “I told her it was all right.” But soon thereafter, “I got a message from my mom: ‘Goodbye.’ The next message was from the police.”

In the song “Icy River,” Mr. Picker sings of the aftermath of his mother’s death and cremation. “Don’t you ever dare think she was weak hearted / She led me to the woods where our church was started / Like a ribbon of silver, I poured her body in the river.”

As the SXSW crowd rushed toward other gigs, Mr. Picker said: “I was spinning the tragedy in a positive light and embracing the memories of my mom. There are beautiful angelic things about her.”

Lost in the Trees left here to begin a lengthy international tour. Mr. Picker said he understood SXSW wasn’t ideal for his music, but it’s important to be counted where so many industry insiders congregate to gauge the state of rock and pop.

“The promotion and concert universes are different than the writing-the-record universe,” he said. “At South by, I don’t know who I’m reaching. But it might be whoever got through the door.”

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock.

A version of this article appeared March 20, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Overshadowed by the Boss and Eminem.

By RICHARD B. WOODWARD

Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-Garde In the 1970s

Through July 8

Buffalo, N.Y.

‘Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-Garde in the 1970s,” at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, is an act of civic boosterism couched within an adventurous historical survey.

Directed at outsiders for whom this corner of New York state may be known chiefly for its curbside mountains of winter slush, the exhibition adopts the mocking words in its title from a sunny-colored, postcard-shaped painting by Diane Bertolo done for the 1977 “Snowshow,” a response by Buffalo artists to the crippling blizzard of that year.

The curator Heather Pesanti and her team from the Albright-Knox have tried to maintain that same defiant, can-do spirit by chronicling, in more than 300 pieces, all kinds of experimental art made or seen in Buffalo during that decade. The work of students (paintings and drawings by Robert Longo, photographs by Cindy Sherman) and teachers (films by Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton) receives equal billing. Even artists from elsewhere (Merce Cunningham’s dance company) are counted among the “Buffalo Avant-Garde.”

This whirlwind of activity is organized around its local sponsors. The Albright-Knox is touted along with institutions founded in the 1970s: the alternative spaces Hallwalls and Artpark; the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts (or CEPA); and the Center for Media Study (CMS) at SUNY Buffalo. Rooms are dedicated to SUNY Buffalo’s English department (its stellar faculty at the time included critic Leslie Fiedler, novelist John Barth and poet Robert Creeley) and to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, then under the dynamic leadership of conductors Lukas Foss and Michael Tilson Thomas.

The problem with such inclusiveness begins on the first floor with “Pursuit,” a 1975 video by Bruce Nauman and Frank Owen. Although a fine early example of Mr. Nauman’s anxiety-producing art, featuring a series of runners tirelessly going nowhere, as if in the annual Samuel Beckett marathon, it provokes the question: Does he belong in a retrospective about artists in Buffalo?

The same might be asked about the many works here on the second floor by others (Dan Flavin, Jasper Johns, Alfred Jensen, Hannah Wilke, Gordon Matta-Clark) who exhibited in or near the city during the 1970s but were not based here. One suspects their presence is self-congratulatory, a reminder that Buffalo has opened its doors to many innovators, not only the Abstract Expressionist painters with whom the Albright-Knox is closely associated.

The concept of a regional avant-garde is more justified in the installation by Sharits. Brought to teach at SUNY Buffalo by Gerald O’Grady, a disciple of Marshall McLuhan who also recruited Frampton, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Tony Conrad, Sharits helped to turn the school into a headquarters for experimental film.

His “Dream Displacement” from 1976 employs four film projectors to cast lozenge-shaped red images that go in and out of phase in a loop, like four animated Rothkos. A loud soundtrack of breaking glass—a Sharits film is invariably aggressive—seems intended to ensure an audience won’t linger.

Another work grown in Buffalo’s soil, specifically the emotional hothouse of art school, is Ms. Sherman’s seldom exhibited “A Play of Selves.” Dating from 1976, when she was a student at Buffalo State College, it’s composed of more than 150 tiny black-and-white paper-doll-like silhouettes that she has grouped around a room into scenes for a psychodrama in four acts.

The artist in disguise plays all 16 characters, identified in a handbill with names such as “The Broken Woman,” “The Male Lover,” “A Female Friend” and “The Character as Others See Her.” Perhaps her most ambitious and primal work, “A Play of Selves”—along with a series of self-portraits she made of bus riders (some in black face) for a CEPA project—reveals an artist who was fully confident, if personally insecure, before the age of 25.

The central gallery showcases Artpark, where visiting artists could do pretty much what they wanted on 172 acres in Lewiston, N.Y., close to the Niagara River. Founded in 1974 as a memorial for earth artist Robert Smithson, the place inspired such acts of “marvelous madness” (critic Lucy Lippard’s words) as “The Amazing Bow Wow,” a video performance about a talking dog with an enormous penis, by Lynda Benglis and Stanton Kaye; and Charles Simonds’s “Landscape/Body/Dwelling,” a film in which the recumbent artist built tiny clay-brick walls on his stomach. An anomaly is a simple drawing by Martin Puryear for “Box and Pole,” his first major sculpture (a 52-inch cube next to a 100-foot needle, both carved in wood), installed at Artpark in 1977.

Adjoining rooms contain projects by the great Hollis Frampton—including his motion studies inspired by Eadweard Muybridge, and his film “Gloria,” a portrait of Frampton’s Irish grandmother. It is not likely, alas, to win him many new fans.

At the risk of sounding ungrateful for the labor required to organize so many kinds of art, this comprehensive show might easily have been improved. A chronology of events and a map (were these artists and venues neighborhoods apart or synergistically close?) would help out-of-towners to better evaluate the time and area.

A curious fact, uncommented on in any of the catalog texts, is that almost none of the work here refers to Buffalo. Even the two feature-length documentary films by James Blue take as their subjects Houston’s housing crisis in the 1970s rather than Buffalo’s own broken downtown and ethnic strife.

“Wish You Were Here” charts the rise of an international avant-garde as much as it does a local one. The museums and alternative spaces that sprang up in this period sponsored artists around the U.S. and Europe. Many of these figures were just passing through on their way to the next stop on the circuit. To twist a phrase of Gertrude Stein’s about Oakland, there’s precious little here in “Wish You Were Here.”

“The thing I realized about Buffalo was incredibly important is that there was nothing interesting there except to make your own stuff,” says Mr. Longo in an interview for the catalog. “There wasn’t night life, there weren’t clubs, there wasn’t, you know, there wasn’t anything.”

Much more was going on than Mr. Longo cared to notice at the time, as Ms. Pesanti richly demonstrates. But his point is well taken. Artists only want the opportunity to make and exhibit and be with like-minded souls. Home is anywhere that allows that to happen. Give them inexpensive housing and lots of bars, and they’ll make their own weather.

Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: They Shuffled Off to Buffalo.

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

A growing band of brewers is turning to the complex, earthy spice of rye for a new take on the strong flavors craft-beer drinkers have grown to love.

THE RYE REVIVAL IS HERE. Bakers are returning to the hearty grain for rich, dark breads. Cocktail heads demand rye whiskey in their Manhattans. And now, a growing band of brewers is turning to the complex, earthy spice of rye for a new take on the strong flavors craft-beer drinkers have grown to love.

Rye whiskey may be old—America’s first, they say, was distilled at Mount Vernon in the 1790s—but rye beer, at least in this country, is a new idea. In the European rye belt, above the 50th parallel, give or take, where the rugged grass flourishes, rye beers are more common. Germany has its roggenbier (imagine a muskier hefeweizen); Russia has weak, beer-like kvass, made from stale rye bread (look for it peddled in soda bottles in Russian enclaves like Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach).

We don’t have such history here. In American brewing’s early days, a barrel of whiskey brought more at market than the same of beer, so for farmers liquefying their assets, so to speak, stronger stuff made more sense. Plus, as any baker knows, rye makes a soupy dough. The grain has no husk, unlike barley, and it has plenty of oily proteins. It’s a chore to brew. Bear Republic’s Hop Rod Rye takes about a quarter more time to make than their other beers. “It’s a labor of love,” said the company’s head brewer Peter Kruger.

Thankfully, a little rye goes a long way. Nutty and spicy, with undertones of light but juicy fruit—some taste apples, or even Calvados—rye works best as an accent, a dash of spice to add kick to standard styles. Great Divide uses it to punch up a classic German märzen. Upright’s Six and the Bruery’s Rugbrød are brown-bread dark. Jolly Pumpkin used rye to give a tannic bite to a Belgian tripel; Devil’s Canyon dosed a saison.

But more often, rye hones the edge of hoppy IPAs. So-called “rye-p-a-s” are a burgeoning category. Bear Republic’s brewers thought up Hop Rod Rye over post-work shots of Wild Turkey Rye. It was one of the first of its kind when it came out in 2000—rye beer wasn’t even an official category yet at the Great American Beer Festival, the country’s major beer competition. “We were going off the grid,” said Mr. Kruger. Now beer store shelves are stocked with rye beers, and their all-too-easy puns (Bear Republic’s Ryevalry comes out this fall), as this stalwart grain, makes a new tradition of its own.

—William Bostwick

A version of this article appeared March 10, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Rye Time for a New Beer Style.

By DAN NEIL

The future is so bright for the Chinese car industry you have to wear shades. Literally.

Chinese car buyers adore cars with chrome grilles, the more garish and gothic the better. A stroll down the aisles of the Beijing International Automotive show, now through May 2, is to be confronted at every corner with a Chinese domestic automobile jeering at you with a mouthful of bling.

“It is all about face,” said David Goggins, an executive with FAW-Volkswagen, one of the larger joint ventures between Western car makers and the Chinese. “It is about how you show off.”

“It is purely about status,” agreed Anthony Williams-Kenny, the British global design director for auto maker Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. “It is about telling people ‘I’m important, I’m successful, I’m at the top rung.’”

One-upping your fellow motorists may have practical advantages in China, where the rules of the road are negotiated in real time, at real speeds—particularly at unregulated intersections. Studies have shown that drivers world-wide tend to yield to the driver of the more expensive, prestigious automobile. The hauntingly overlarge grilles of Chinese vehicles may be a kind of defensive driving technique.

For American car enthusiasts schooled in the chromic excesses of General Motors

designer Harley Earl and Chrysler’s Virgil Exner, the Chinese love of big grilles resonates. Like America in the 1950s, China—or at least the Eastern part—is swimming in new wealth after a period of scarcity. “Suddenly, people can buy stuff,” said Mr. Goggins. “And no one is quite sure how long all that is going to last, so it is a kind of feeding frenzy.”

The results may strike Western auto connoisseurs as ridiculous. The most egregious example could be Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd.’s

Geely GE sedan, which the company describes as the “perfect interpretation of Chinese classical aesthetics.” The Geely’s grille is somewhere between an evaporative cooler and an enormous Norelco shaver, with huge semicircles of vertical chrome pushing—crowning, if you like—through the sheet metal. Should the grille, and the six-meter car behind it, leave any doubt, there is a sculptured hood ornament as big as a man’s fist.

The Chinese love of big, declarative grilles could be, for Western luxury car makers scrambling for market share, auspicious. Cadillac, Audi, Buick and Bentley, among others, have front-ends design language that emphasizes status and recognizability. Cadillac’s Ciel concept car, and Bentley’s EXP9 concept SUV, both have brilliant, gloriously graphic faces.

And Western designers aren’t above pandering. “When we went to [Bentley Chairman Wolfgang Dürheimer] with the design choices for the SUV,” says Bentley designer Robin Page, “We said, ‘It can be more British country utility or more Shanghai limo.’

“He said, ‘Yes, please.’ “

Write to Dan Neil at dan.neil@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 26, 2012, on page B4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: In China, Car Grilles Bloom.

By TREVOR CLARK

Trevor Clark

Mountain biking on the Tequila Trail near Oaxaca, Mexico

IT WAS EARLY. Hours from sunrise kind of early. My wimpy headlamp struggled to break through the predawn drizzle, and I could barely see my front tire or the trail ahead. Roots, rocks and stumps all seemed to be in cahoots, working together to upend me.

I tried to become one with the bike. I tried to feel out the trail with my other senses. I tried to anticipate obstacles, but I am no Zen master. My mountain biking skills are rough under the best conditions, and I was in the jungle in the dark.

My mate’s more powerful headlamp suddenly provided a snapshot of a sharp turn and a wooden footbridge ahead. Then, lights out. I made an educated guess, went straight and took a hit that emptied my lungs: “Huhhhhh!” Cold water rushed into my clothes and pack as I lay in the stream, bike still on my feet, straight up in the air.

For a few moments, I laughed hysterically at my predicament and the fact that I was OK after missing the bridge. Then I picked myself up and kept moving.

We made it to the peak of Piedra Larga, a 10,761-foot-high lookout, for breakfast, corn-based hot chocolate and sunrise. As the sun slowly emerged from a thick layer of fog, we found ourselves hovering above a golden sea of clouds. The scenery was worth every blind pedal stroke.

Seven of us had come to the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico, a forested mountain range in the northern part of the state. Oaxaca is known as the country’s culinary and cultural center, and many visitors experience it through cooking classes and gallery walks in the capital city. We, instead, were mountain-biking part of an ancient Zapotec network of walking trails that have connected eight villages to each other and the rest of the world for eons.

Mountain biking is fairly new to Mexico and few people, even in the biking world, have explored its potential. But for the past 15 years, those eight villages have been working to create an environment where adventure tourism can thrive, sharing responsibility for and income from the efforts. Considering the fact that they had to breed their own mountain-bike guide, it is little surprise that things have taken a while to get off the ground.

“What followed was perhaps the best mountain biking I have ever done. There was no backing out, no second-guessing and no stopping.”

I was with a tour company looking into new mountain-biking trips. For five days, we wound our way through fields, along mountain ridges, up dirt roads and down steep, narrow corridors through thick forest. We dodged cows and plants with knuckle-piercing thorns, tipping our helmets with a big “Hola!” as we rolled through each village. The area offers more than 70 miles of one-lane trails (or singletrack, as it is known in mountain biking) stomped into perfect biking paths over countless years, and the opportunities seemed endless.

We arrived via van from the vibrant city of Oaxaca, riding along pothole-strewn arteries. We unloaded, a little carsick, in Benito Juárez, a pint-size village perched on the edge of the very steep road. The mountain air was crisp and refreshing, but the elevation made breathing laborious. A crowd of villagers quickly gathered around our wobbly group of Lycra-wearing gringos. We looked funny, but all that seemed to matter was that we were visitors, and were welcome.

We rolled our bikes out of the trailer; in short order chains were lubed, adjustments were made and we were clicking in. We sped into the woods for a two-hour ride to the village of Llano Grande, where we would be based for the rest of our visit. We cruised through the mountainous jungle, smiling, laughing and pointing out trees and plants that could have inspired Dr. Seuss’s books. We were so giggly that when we came across a carnivorous-looking cactus as big as our van, we all lost it and belly-laughed like little kids.

We rolled into Llano Grande as the sky turned dark, met up with our luggage-laden van and were shown to our accommodations. I was expecting a leaky hut, but a local ushered me into the warm, cedar-scented cabin and flipped on the light. There was a fire crackling in the fireplace; the water heater had already been primed.

Dinner was served in a small cinder-block building that doubled as the village store. Blue paint on the outside read, “Todo con medida.” Roughly translated: “Everything in moderation.” The cook’s young children raced an old tricycle in and out of doorways and around our bags, occasionally hitting our outstretched feet. Food filled the table—and our stomachs. Beans, chicken, salsa, corn tortillas, Oaxacan cheese and fiery mezcal. Todo con medida, not so much.

Our guide was José Luis Marco, the 19-year-old grandson of the village elder, Adelfo, who has been heading up the tourism project since its inception. Even with an inferior bike and slick tires, José had no problem smoking us like we were on training wheels. Each day he led us through new sections of trail, stopping in different villages for lunch and sometimes a little sightseeing. Each night, we hung out in the only spot in town.

Late one afternoon, we were working our way up to a ridge that promised the best downhill stretch of singletrack of the trip, maybe in all of Mexico. It had been hyped for days: steep, daring and unpredictable.

It was raining. No surprise, as it rained every afternoon, but on this day the rain fell without pause. As my legs pushed and my lungs strained for a decent breath, all I could think about was the hazardous Mexican practice of using tortillas as utensils. A post-lunch siesta would have been more appropriate for my starch-filled belly than a steep, soggy bike ride.

Stroke after gut-wrenching stroke, we reached the height of the climb. Relief, excitement and nervous anticipation emerged as we looked around into the eerie abyss of fog and leafless trees below. Though we couldn’t quite see it, we knew from the angle on each side of our bikes that the ground dropped off into nothingness. Before us a faint trail led into the same nothingness.

“Dropping in.”

The phrase pierced the silence in a serious, matter-of-fact monotone. The riders ahead of me disappeared one by one into the fog.

Minutes ticked on like hours as I waited in the lonely white silence for a sign that we weren’t going off a cliff. Then: “Aaaahhahahahaha, yeah!!!!”

The path ahead was steep, but it led somewhere—and that somewhere sounded fun.

“Dropping in!”

What followed was perhaps the best mountain biking I have ever done. The only word for it is “committed.” There was no backing out, no second-guessing and no stopping. Millimeters from losing my manhood to the teeth of my back tire while dodging low branches and threading through suspended fallen trees, I was on a magical tear down the mountain.

I had finally found The Force, that place where practice, physical conditioning, environmental awareness and mental stamina come together. It is a place where things just happen. You become the action, moving without thought or hesitation. For a grand instant, I was in sync with the environment I was passing through and it was in sync with me.

As we descended further into the fog and rainy saturation of lower elevation, the trail turned into really wet clay. It felt like a layer of Jell-O. Semi-controlled sliding became the name of the game, but nobody was backing off.

Our hard concentration turned into wide eyes and whooping grins. We wobbled around corners on the precipice of disaster. Giddy laughter turned into competitive jabs and before long, we were all flying like rag dolls into the woods. Lying in the mud having gone from out-of-control biking to uncontrollable laughter was the highlight of the entire trip.

Todo con medida? Maybe for the locals, but certainly not for us.

A version of this article appeared April 14, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Blazing Trails in Mexico.

By PAUL J. ZAK

Why are some people trustworthy, while others lie, cheat and steal? Part of the answer may reside in a hormone called oxytocin. Claremont Graduate University’s Paul Zak talks with WSJ’s Gary Rosen about how a “vampire wedding” helped him understand how this chemical works to control trust, empathy and virtue.

Could a single molecule—one chemical substance—lie at the very center of our moral lives?

Research that I have done over the past decade suggests that a chemical messenger called oxytocin accounts for why some people give freely of themselves and others are coldhearted louts, why some people cheat and steal and others you can trust with your life, why some husbands are more faithful than others, and why women tend to be nicer and more generous than men. In our blood and in the brain, oxytocin appears to be the chemical elixir that creates bonds of trust not just in our intimate relationships but also in our business dealings, in politics and in society at large.

Known primarily as a female reproductive hormone, oxytocin controls contractions during labor, which is where many women encounter it as Pitocin, the synthetic version that doctors inject in expectant mothers to induce delivery. Oxytocin is also responsible for the calm, focused attention that mothers lavish on their babies while breast-feeding. And it is abundant, too, on wedding nights (we hope) because it helps to create the warm glow that both women and men feel during sex, a massage or even a hug.

Since 2001, my colleagues and I have conducted a number of experiments showing that when someone’s level of oxytocin goes up, he or she responds more generously and caringly, even with complete strangers. As a benchmark for measuring behavior, we relied on the willingness of our subjects to share real money with others in real time. To measure the increase in oxytocin, we took their blood and analyzed it. Money comes in conveniently measurable units, which meant that we were able to quantify the increase in generosity by the amount someone was willing to share. We were then able to correlate these numbers with the increase in oxytocin found in the blood.

Later, to be certain that what we were seeing was true cause and effect, we sprayed synthetic oxytocin into our subjects’ nasal passages—a way to get it directly into their brains. Our conclusion: We could turn the behavioral response on and off like a garden hose. (Don’t try this at home: Oxytocin inhalers aren’t available to consumers in the U.S.)

More strikingly, we found that you don’t need to shoot a chemical up someone’s nose, or have sex with them, or even give them a hug in order to create the surge in oxytocin that leads to more generous behavior. To trigger this “moral molecule,” all you have to do is give someone a sign of trust. When one person extends himself to another in a trusting way—by, say, giving money—the person being trusted experiences a surge in oxytocin that makes her less likely to hold back and less likely to cheat. Which is another way of saying that the feeling of being trusted makes a person more…trustworthy. Which, over time, makes other people more inclined to trust, which in turn…

If you detect the makings of an endless loop that can feed back onto itself, creating what might be called a virtuous circle—and ultimately a more virtuous society—you are getting the idea.

Obviously, there is more to it, because no one chemical in the body functions in isolation, and other factors from a person’s life experience play a role as well. Things can go awry. In our studies, we found that a small percentage of subjects never shared any money; analysis of their blood indicated that their oxytocin receptors were malfunctioning. But for everyone else, oxytocin orchestrates the kind of generous and caring behavior that every culture endorses as the right way to live—the cooperative, benign, pro-social way of living that every culture on the planet describes as “moral.” The Golden Rule is a lesson that the body already knows, and when we get it right, we feel the rewards immediately.

This isn’t to say that oxytocin always makes us good or generous or trusting. In our rough-and-tumble world, an unwavering response of openness and loving kindness would be like going around with a “kick me” sign on your back. Instead, the moral molecule works like a gyroscope, helping us to maintain our balance between behavior based on trust and behavior based on wariness and distrust. In this way oxytocin helps us to navigate between the social benefits of openness—which are considerable—and the reasonable caution that we need to avoid being taken for a ride.

Consider a real-life experiment that I conducted with a bride named Linda Geddes. A writer for the British magazine New Scientist, Linda had been following my research and thought it would be fun to see if the emotional uplift of her wedding would alter the guests’ levels of oxytocin.

I arrived at the venue, a Victorian manor house in the English countryside, with a 150-pound centrifuge and 70 pounds of dry ice. I unpacked my equipment—syringes, 156 prelabeled test tubes, tourniquets, alcohol preps, Band-Aids—and got to work. The plan that I’d worked out with Linda was to take two samples from a cross section of the friends and family in attendance—one draw of blood immediately before the vows and one immediately after.

After all the blood had been drawn, I slipped out with my test tubes nestled in their cushion of dry ice. It took two weeks for the samples to arrive at my California lab via FedEx, but the results showed just what we were hoping for: a simple snapshot of oxytocin’s ability to read and reflect the nuances of a social situation.

The changes in individual oxytocin levels at Linda’s ceremony could be mapped out like the solar system, with the bride as the sun. Between the first and second draws of blood, which were only an hour apart, Linda’s own level shot up by 28%. For the other people tested, the increase in oxytocin was in direct proportion to the likely intensity of their emotional engagement in the event. The mother of the bride? Up 24%. The father of the groom? Up 19%. The groom himself? Up 13%…and on down the line.

But why, you may ask, would the groom’s increase be less than his father’s? Testosterone is one of several other hormones that can interfere with the release of oxytocin, and the groom’s testosterone level, according to our blood test, had surged 100%! As the guests admired Linda in her strapless bridal gown, he was the alpha male.

Our study at the wedding had demonstrated just the kind of graded and contingent sensitivity that allows oxytocin to guide us between trust and wariness, generosity and self-protection. Should I feel safe and warm and cuddly in this crowd, or do I have to be on guard? Or maybe it is a situation in which the best outcome results from oxytocin dominating in one person and testosterone driving the other.

It is the sensitivity of oxytocin in its interaction with a range of other chemical messengers that helps to account for why human behavior is so infinitely complex—and why the bliss of the wedding day (and night) is often hard to maintain. (Consider the old joke about the guy who couldn’t understand why his wife was unhappy. “I told you that I loved you when I asked you to marry me,” he said. “I don’t see why I need to tell you again.”)

But there is a larger payoff from this research: After centuries of speculation about human nature and how we decide what is the right thing to do, we at last have some news we can use—empirical evidence that illuminates the mechanism at the heart of our moral guidance system. So what can we do to shift behavior a bit more toward the expression of oxytocin and thus improve the workings of our entire society?

The experiments I have conducted show that many group activities—singing, dancing, praying—cause the release of oxytocin and promote connection and caring. As social creatures, we have created activities that prompt the expression of oxytocin in order to foster connection to others. In fact, those who release the most oxytocin when they are trusted are happier and healthier because they have richer social lives.

Even the sort of “social snacking” that happens through Twitter or checking out a friend’s Facebook page can prompt an oxytocin surge. But the real criterion for success is whether these online activities complement more substantial personal connections. Does this form of communication foster human bonds or does it foster anonymity and abstraction to the point of cutting off empathy?

Another approach to tune oxytocin release is to seek exposure to people outside our own families or cultural and geographic “tribes.” There are solid evolutionary reasons why our species developed the tendency to be wary of those whose physical appearances or behavioral patterns are different from our own. For millions of years an individual’s social world was limited almost entirely to her village and tribe, and outsiders were, for good reason, considered a threat until proven otherwise. Yet research has shown that this suspicion is malleable, and it fades with exposure.

With worries on the rise about the country’s cultural and political divisions, some bottom-up boosts of oxytocin, based on face-to-face interaction, could help. It might take the form of a domestic student-exchange program, allowing kids from the big cities and small-town, rural kids to get to know one another. The revitalization of urban life, with its varied and crosscutting relationships, is a step in the right direction, too. One city going in the opposite direction is Washington, D.C., where fraternizing across party lines—once the norm—is nearly unheard of these days. Acrimony on Capitol Hill reflects, in part, these oxytocin-starved relationships.

A few years ago, I began warning visitors to my lab that before they left, I was going to give them a hug. This scares some people, but I’ve found that my slightly eccentric announcement changes the depth of the conversation, making it more intimate, more engaging and more valuable to us both. I suspect that by forecasting a hug, I’m also signaling how much I trust the person, so I’m inducing a release of oxytocin in their brains. Those people, in turn, will connect better to others and treat them more generously. Nothing grander is required for a virtuous circle to begin.

—From “The Moral Molecule” by Paul J. Zak, to be published May 10 by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA). Copyright © 2012 by Paul J. Zak.

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page C1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Trust Molecule.

By MARY M. LANE

Berlin

Associated Press

James Taylor

In November, Taylor Swift closed her “Speak Now” tour at Madison Square Garden with a surprise guest: James Taylor. The duo’s tranquil acoustic performance on a sofa had the vague air of an elderly father strumming guitar with his progeny, as Ms. Swift, 22, in a voluminous ball gown, and Mr. Taylor, 64, languidly crooned “Fire and Rain.” But teenagers in New York sang along as fervently as kids in Atlanta and Los Angeles had done when Ms. Swift bounced around stage in a minidress rapping with Nicki Minaj.

Even if Mr. Taylor’s core audience is more AARP than rap, this air of generational timelessness has long been an element of Mr. Taylor’s career. Currently performing in Europe, Mr. Taylor introduced “Something in the Way She Moves” in Berlin last week as the song that sealed his first record deal, singing it with a voice as soothing and expressive as it was 44 years ago.

Fans hoping for a new album soon will be disappointed. The reason for not going into the studio: “No time,” said Mr. Taylor backstage. But he did discuss songwriting, addiction and his new friend Ms. Swift.

Jackson Browne sings in “The Load-Out” that all the cities he tours tend to run together. Do different cities or audiences resonate differently for you?

Ireland, Italy and Brazil are the most musical places for me. They’re extremely musical cultures and anything you pitch they basically catch. I have a great following in Italy and I don’t know why. I speak French, but outside of Paris I don’t play in France, but somehow I’ve always been able to put a tour together in Europe based on England, Ireland, Scotland and Italy.

What brings you to Europe? You don’t have an album coming out.

I wasn’t in any shape to tour extensively in Europe before. I was addicted and tired and it was really as much as I could do to earn a living for a while there. It was in 1983 that I got clean and sober; I didn’t push for it for many years, and it wasn’t until 1996-97 that I got serious about trying to do so. I’m glad that I still have the ability to tour in Europe. I do love it.

How then is the creative process different since you’ve been clean?

I was a self-medicator. I was never looking to get destroyed or blasted or wasted. I was trying to “normalize.” I don’t know if I was born with a deficit—because there is certainly a long history in my father’s family of addiction. The early songs were also pushed out. There was this urgency to express.

And then there’s this period of time where you think of yourself as a songwriter: It’s expected, it’s anticipated and you’re actually contracted to do it. You develop a feel for it, a method for it, and you lose a bit of that urgency—the passionate need to write songs. But what takes its place is a longer-term kind of energy. You have a method and know how to do it.

I think of my first three or four records—everything through “One Man Dog” [1972]—as being my “first stuff” that really came out when I arrived and was an event of early success. Then there followed albums that plateaued and, in many ways, those albums like “Gorilla” [1975] and “In the Pocket” [1976] are my favorites. There wasn’t so much pressure on. We were in cruise.

Then there were records associated with my bottoming out, getting sober and going through early recovery: “Dad Loves His Work” and “That’s Why I’m Here.” Those were harrowing times.

In “Hey Mister, It’s Me Up on the Jukebox,” you talk about coping with fame.

It’s a real wrenching thing to go from being a private person to being a public person, especially when you’re being autobiographical. But it’s what everyone wants—to get everyone’s attention, to have your music make a living for you, to be validated in that way. So I’m a little embarrassed that I complained about getting what I wanted so badly. I know there are people who don’t like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated, but my audience has been very good—they don’t bother me and when they do contact me it’s usually on the nicest possible terms.

You’ve performed with Taylor Swift.

She and I did a benefit together before she took off. We met then, her parents had played her a lot of my music when she was growing up and her mother told Taylor she named her after me. It was lovely to meet her and she seemed like a nice, young, earnest person trying to find her way in the music business. The next time I met her she was doing a company picnic. We hung out in the dressing room and she said, “I’m finishing my tour in a couple of weeks, will you come out on stage at Madison Square Garden and sing with me?” and I said, “Sure.” She hasn’t changed much—her circumstances have changed and she’s handling it quite well, but she’s outgrowing the phase she was first in.

You get a feeling with her latest album that she’s becoming less country.

Yeah, I think so, too. The first stuff she did was in Nashville in a country context and she’s becoming herself more. She’s 22 now, she was 18 or 19 when we met. I think she’s finding her own voice more and she sounds more like what she wants to sound like than when she was first being interpreted by people who produced her.

Your recent tour with Carole King had no modern pyrotechnics. Do you think they take away from the music?

No, I think they’re good. It’s just a matter of what kind of show it is. Lady Gaga, Madonna…Taylor Swift definitely has a high-production value show with sponsors’ messages, lots of merchandising. It’s definitely a high-gear, firing-on-all cylinders global tour. I think for people who can do that it’s wonderful, and I see a lot of her own personality and creativity in that process, but it’s simply not the thing I do. Carole and I are the types of musicians where it’s about the music, we don’t have video, pyrotechnics, snow, elephants, tigers leaping through burning hoops and an army of dancing robots. It’s a much simpler event, with the possibility of being an intimate, actual conversation with the people who are there.

By JIM FUSILLI

‘Sweet Heart Sweet Light” (Fat Possum), the new disc by Spiritualized, didn’t quite turn out the way leader Jason Pierce intended.

“It was a hard record to make,” he said, calling from London. “I wanted to make something that was easier to do, but it turned out to be the hardest.”

He said his goal for the album, Spiritualized’s 11th (including live discs and compilations), was to keep the music lean—”simple and exposed,” as he put it—and let the songs deliver the impact. “Sometimes, when you know how to do it, you have to unlearn it to make it more interesting,” he said.

Press Here Productions

The band takes a step back to basics with its new album, ‘Sweet Heart Sweet Light.’

Spiritualized backed off a bit on “Sweet Heart Sweet Light” but, as it was with the group’s other discs, the new album still features the kind of arrangements that take special care: thick, droning, not-so-simple waves of swooping, swirling guitars and synths under Mr. Pierce’s laid-back vocals. The core four-piece unit is built to play big, with Tony “Doggen” Foster on guitars and bass, Kevin Bales on drums, Tom Edwards on keyboards, and Mr. Pierce on guitars and keys. Here it’s augmented by a string quartet, a horn section featuring free-jazz players, and a choir. Several tracks written as simple rock ballads build in intensity to extended codas. “So Long You Pretty Thing,” the track that closes off the album, starts off as a sing-along between Mr. Pierce and his young daughter, Poppy; almost eight minutes later, his voice rides atop billowy brass and strings. Another track, “Life Is a Problem,” was once a fairly straightforward tune but soon incorporated an orchestra. “We played it like a Mississippi blues, but it works better with an orchestra,” Mr. Pierce said.

Mr. Pierce is a student of rock’s past masters and is intrigued by other musical forms. He’s made free jazz and experimental electronic albums under the name J. Spaceman.

“When you start studying music, something that you previously loved, you find yourself wanting to know how did they synch the vocals or how did they achieve that sound,” he said. His many tastes emerge on Spiritualized’s discs, as the band shifts its emphasis by adding and subtracting vintage R&B, booming 1960s rock, punk, Delta blues, choral music, blaring horns and elements of gospel to its mix. “Sweet Heart Sweet Light” is less complex than the group’s previous efforts, but not by much.

Following its highly regarded and—thus far—career-defining 1997 album, “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space,” with which his band stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Oasis and Radiohead as the U.K.’s best band, Mr. Pierce worked for four years on its follow-up, “Let It Come Down,” employing more than 100 musicians to achieve the recording’s Phil Spector-like wall of sound. The gospel-influenced “Amazing Grace” came out two years later.

In 2005, Mr. Pierce suffered a near-fatal bout of pneumonia and respiratory failure. He rallied to release “Songs in A&E”—as in the Accident and Emergency Ward at Royal London Hospital—by 2008. That same year, the band performed “Ladies and Gentlemen. . .” in its entirety at the Sydney Opera House and New York’s Radio City Music Hall with an orchestra and choir, allowing the band and its guests to approach the grandeur the recording had achieved in the studio. “They were amazing experiences,” he said. But for a forward-looking artist, there is a contradiction to playing old material: “I suppose it will be history one day. But there’s no need to hurry it along.”

Now 46 years old, Mr. Pierce is still plagued by health problems that made “Sweet Heart Sweet Light” a challenge to complete. “I was undergoing treatment for a liver disease, which is pretty gruesome. I could work one hour a day, or one hour a week.” Though it was recorded in London, Los Angeles, Reykjavik and Rockfield, Wales, Mr. Pierce said he had to mix the album on his laptop rather than in a studio when the budget ran dry.

Despite his ailments, Mr. Pierce said he still aims to create grand works. To his mind, dedicated effort is the only way to do it. “So much of music today is [about] looking back at great moments like they could drift away. The only way to slow that down is by making great records now. I refuse to believe the rock ‘n’ roll doctrine that you just throw it down and it happens.” If that were the case, he added, “We’d all be sitting around waiting for magic.”

Spiritualized will tour the U.S. and Canada throughout May. The new songs, as well as his back catalog, will be performed in the “simple and exposed” form Mr. Pierce envisioned when he wrote “Sweet Heart Sweet Light.” “We’re back to [being] like a little punk band: five pieces, two guitars.”

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com or follow him on Twitter: @wsjrock.

A version of this article appeared April 12, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Spiritualized Revival.

A few eyebrows were raised last month when disgruntled Liverpool cinemagoers to the Oscar-nominated “The Artist” demanded their money back, saying they weren’t told it was a silent film. While their actions are a little strong, as a wine writer, I can empathize. When was the last time you bought a bottle of wine only for it to taste nothing like you thought it was going to? Only the other day, a collector of Burgundy’s wine was lamenting to me how he can spend as much as €20 on a bottle and still get it “very wrong.”

Wine labels are often extremely confusing. Yes, they can be graceful, charming and, in some cases, works of art, but when compared to the labeling of other foodstuffs, they are rarely credited as informative. Of course, there are exceptions. The widespread practice in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Chile, New Zealand and the U.S. of placing the name of the grape variety and tasting notes on the back label has helped the consumer enormously. But sometimes, I wonder whether anybody outside of the rarefied circles of the wine world really understands what the descriptors on the back label actually mean.

Drinking Now

From everyday drinking to a treat from the cellar, three wines ripe for
tasting today
.

It is a question wine professional Robert Joseph, of U.K. wine-research company DoILikeIt?, has been investigating. In surveys he has conducted, consumers rarely come up with fruit descriptors to describe wine, he says. This is revealing, as that is the common language used by wine professionals (myself included). So where a wine critic might describe a white wine as possessing notes of apple, lemon or orange peel, according to Mr. Joseph’s research, consumers prefer words like dry, smooth, fruity, mellow, rich, crisp, fresh, full-bodied and zesty. Similarly with red wine: spicy, intense, smooth and oaky are preferred to red cherry, balsamic, cedar and black currant.

In a separate survey conducted by DoILikeIt?, around 3,000 British supermarket consumers were given a set of descriptors and asked: “Which words do you associate with wine you like?” The results show that 20% to 25% liked oaky white wine, while 40% didn’t. Again, these are revealing, as in European wine circles, the overuse of ageing wine in new oak barrels is often derided by critics. Admittedly, 40% is a large number, but it is not by any stretch a majority.

Which brings us to Australian Chardonnay. In the mid 1980s, Australia took the export markets by storm when they produced easy-to-drink, fruit-driven Chardonnay, with a distinctive, creamy oakiness. “Sunshine in a bottle,” was what some critics called it, and it worked. It was a huge success and, in many ways, Australian Chardonnay became a brand within its own right.

Back then, Australian wine producers told us that the concepts of terroir and different regional styles didn’t matter, as it was the grape variety that was the main driver of flavor. But in recent years, there has been a revolution in Australian winemaking that has seen a change in the style of Chardonnay produced. It is, says Adam Eggins, chief winemaker at Clare Valley wine producer Wakefield, a style that is heading toward less wood.

Wine producers in Australia have started to produce Chardonnays that have a crisp, lean style—in some cases with no oak at all. Moreover, when you talk to Australian wine producers, you now regularly hear words such as regionality and cool climate.

But, as Mr. Joseph asks, who is dictating the style change? He questions whether the new Australian Chardonnays have a sufficient point of difference to make him want to buy them over, say, a Macon-Villages. Moreover, if he were offered an unoaked Australian Chardonnay in a restaurant, why would he choose that against a similar style of wine from a European region such as an Albariño from Spain or a Grüner Veltliner from Austria. Are there any conclusions we can draw from these findings?

Of course, any survey is just a snapshot. But it is interesting to note that when I asked Mr. Eggins which of his Chardonnays sold best, he immediately pointed to the oily rich Chardonnay, which, you’ve guessed it, was aged in oak.

Write to Will Lyons at william.lyons@wsj.com