June 30, 1996

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN artist and muse is intuitive, private, visceral, complex. It is most notable in the visual arts, of course: an artist like Picasso might spend decades painting the same model, often a wife or lover, obsessively exploring her many facets. But muses inhabit the performing arts just as potently, and their impact is no less crucial or revealing. Choreographers speak of choreographing their work "off" an individual dancer, and the expression is apt. George Balanchine invented some of his greatest ballets for Suzanne Farrell, the dancer he called "my alabaster princess." For her he created "Mozartiana" and "Don Quixote," with Ms. Farrell representing Balanchine's own unrecoverable youth and beauty.

WHEN Ki-Jana Carter of the Cincinnati Bengals suffered a season-ending knee injury in his first preseason game last year, he learned a lesson that many professional football players don't learn until too late: a career in the National Football League, and the pay that comes with it, can be short-lived. Mr. Carter, 22, the top draft pick in the N.F.L. in 1995, has a $19.2 million, seven-year deal that included a $7.125 million signing bonus, the richest to date for a rookie. The contract is lined with incentives -- an extra $100,000 for scoring 12 or more touchdowns in a season, for instance, and a clause that could make Mr. Carter, a running back, a free agent after four years.

WHEN the union of two pivotal engineering achievements, the elevator and the steel frame, spawned the skyscraper at the close of the 19th century, the new form flourished in lower Manhattan. In 1911, intrigued by the potential to accommodate multiple uses in a single framework, Theodore Starrett of the Starrett real estate family proposed a 100-story tower to house industry, business, residences and a hotel in a self-contained vertical city. But the idea of living as well as working in lower Manhattan became the exception rather than the rule; the skyscrapers that were built downtown were monolithic "cathedrals of commerce." Now Starrett's vision may be coming to pass. Less than a year after an incentive plan for residential conversions in lower Manhattan was approved by the State Legislature, at least 20 buildings are slated for alteration, and developers are mining the canyons of Wall Street for more.

THEY are called "oil burners," and you can hear them coming before they arrive. The frugal diesel engine, an 1892 invention of the German engineer Rudolf Diesel, has been embraced by thrifty Europeans since the first diesel passenger car, the Mercedes-Benz 260D, was introduced in 1936. But the efficient, cacophonous, long-running diesel engine never really caught on in the United States, where gasoline has been cheap and plentiful. Now, after nearly disappearing from American roads, the engine is making another run at this country under the hood of the Volkswagen Passat TDI, which stands for "turbocharged direct injection." Available in Passat sedans and wagons, the 1.9-liter four-cylinder TDI engine differs in many respects from conventional diesels.

JUST when Americans might have thought the Middle East was safe -- at least for oil and Israel, the usual concerns -- there was a sharp, ugly reminder last week of just how unstable the region really is: a huge truck bomb that took 19 American lives. Ironically enough, the explosion was in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which six years ago was the main base for the American-led gulf war that undid Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.