The Quiet American

[finally the movie is released!! they had just finished shooting when i was in HoiAn, Hanoi, and Saigon in the early summer of 2001. and the movie has an 86% score on rotten tomatoes. you can see the trailer here. now playing at Sony Village 7. i can't wait to see it!! -pk]

A Jaded Affair in a Vietnam Already at War
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/movies/22QUIE.html

The mood of wry disillusion that seeps through the screen adaptation of Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American" is sounded in the movie's opening moments by the voice of Michael Caine musing dreamily on the mystique of Saigon in the early 1950's. It is a place, declares his character, Thomas Fowler, where colors and tastes seem sharper than they do elsewhere and where even the rain has a special intensity. People who go to Saigon in search of something, he suggests in a silky murmur, are likely to find it. That something has everything to do with faraway places and a mirage of sex and adventure in an exotic clime.

Fowler is a wistfully cynical British journalist who has fled an arid marriage in England to live in Southeast Asia, where he is reporting on the Vietnamese fight for independence from French colonial rule. His attitude toward the political turmoil swirling around him is one of studied detachment bordering on disinterest. Only when Fowler is in danger of being summoned back to England does he bestir himself to go into the field and pursue a story juicy enough to keep him at his post.

But beneath his worldly facade lurks a streak of romantic fatalism. Fowler is hopelessly besotted with Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), a beautiful former taxi dancer who embodies the Asian feminine stereotype of compliance and impenetrable erotic mystery. Although Phuong lives with Fowler and is financially dependent on him, the relationship can last only as long as he keeps his job. Although he would love nothing more than to take her back to England, his wife adamantly refuses to grant him a divorce.

Fowler may be the richest character of Mr. Caine's screen career. Slipping into his skin with an effortless grace, this great English actor gives a performance of astonishing understatement whose tone wavers delicately between irony and sadness. Fowler is the embodiment of a now-faded British archetype: the suave, impeccably well-mannered man of the world who keeps a stiff upper lip and camouflages any inner torment under a pose of amused knowingness.

Mr. Caine, with his hooded snake eyes and his trace of a Cockney accent, lends Fowler (played by Michael Redgrave in an earlier screen adaptation of the novel) an added frisson of rakish insouciance that makes the character all the more intriguing.

"The Quiet American" is the story of a romantic triangle involving Fowler, Phuong and Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), an American intelligence agent operating under the guise of an economic aid worker. Mr. Fraser, looking puffy and wide-eyed, plays Pyle as an earnest, gawky naïf. It is a brave but uncomfortable performance. Even after his character is revealed to be an American spy who speaks fluent Vietnamese, he makes Pyle's lumbering bluntness appear almost comically oafish.

The story begins with Pyle's murder, then flashes back to fill in the whys and wherefores. As the film digs into the characters' relationships, it re-examines the notion that the personal is political in the context of 1950's cold war mentality and the slow fade of the British Empire. Fowler and Pyle's friendship, which rests on quaint notions of gallantry and honor among gentlemen, is also a metaphor for competing styles of imperialism, one wearily resigned, the other aggressively intrusive.

No sooner has Fowler introduced Pyle to Phuong than Pyle falls madly in love with her. Once smitten, Pyle feels no compunction about blurting his feelings about her to Fowler. Pyle's campaign for Phuong has the support of her avaricious older sister Miss Hei (Pham Thi Mai Hoa), who sees him as a bright marital prospect for Phuong.

After Fowler is caught in a desperate lie and Phuong abandons him to live with Pyle, the two men maintain a civilized friendship. Despite their shared passion for the same woman, the movie implies that both view her as a precious toy who can be bartered in a sporting may-the-best-man-win atmosphere. And in the film's most dramatic scene, Pyle saves his rival's life after the two find themselves stranded on the road between Phat Diem and Saigon and take refuge in a French watchtower that is raided by Communist forces.

It could be said that their feelings for Phuong are meant to reflect their countries' different but equally patronizing attitudes toward Indochina. Where Fowler, ever the detached journalist, affects indifference to the Vietnamese struggle, Pyle is a meddling anti-Communist zealot who has no qualms about helping foment resistance to Communist forces by funneling weapons to a ruthless Vietnamese warlord (Quang Hai).

If "The Quiet American" unequivocally views American intervention in Vietnam as an arrogant blunder, the movie, directed by Phillip Noyce from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan, doesn't convey much strong political passion. Pyle may be buffoonish, but he's not evil. Although a coda to the movie links the events of the story to American prosecution of the Vietnam War a decade later, that afterword seems a convenient formality.

The movie is ultimately more interested in the characters' relationships than in their politics, and it does a superb job of evoking the psychological world of Graham Greene in which the truth of any situation tends to be hidden and riddled with ambiguities. Because "The Quiet American," which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is told through Fowler's eyes, its drama is muted. More than once violence explodes on the screen, but it seems to come out of the blue in random bursts. Even then, the film conveys little of the excitement or the sense of historical imperatives that drive a movie like "The Year of Living Dangerously."

In burrowing deeply into Fowler's consciousness, however, "The Quiet American" beautifully sustains the mood set by Mr. Caine's opening narration. The world as seen through Fowler's eyes may be a shabby paradise on the verge of ruin. But as he ponders his fate under Japanese lanterns at a riverside cafe in Saigon in the heat of the night, its tawdry glamour exerts a sad but irresistible tug.

"The Quiet American" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sexual situations and some violence.

THE QUIET AMERICAN

Directed by Phillip Noyce; written by Robert Schenkkan and Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Graham Greene; director of photography, Christopher Doyle; edited by John Scott; music by Craig Armstrong; production designer, Roger Ford; produced by William Horberg and Staffan Ahrenberg; released by Miramax Films. Running time: 146 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Michael Caine (Thomas Fowler), Brendan Fraser (Alden Pyle), Do Thi Hai Yen (Phuong), Tzi Ma (Hinh), Robert Stanton (Joe Tunney), Pham Thi Mai Hoa (Miss Hei) and Quong Hai (General Thé).

THE DILETTANTE

THE DILETTANTE: A MODERN TYPE.
from Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)
by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

HE scribbles some in prose and verse,
And now and then he prints it;
He paints a little,--gathers some
Of Nature's gold and mints it.

He plays a little, sings a song,
Acts tragic roles, or funny;
He does, because his love is strong,
But not, oh, not for money!

He studies almost everything
From social art to science;
A thirsty mind, a flowing spring,
Demand and swift compliance.

He looms above the sordid crowd--
At least through friendly lenses;
While his mamma looks pleased and proud,
And kindly pays expenses.

Shanghai Biennale – Chinese Lucky Estates

Estate secrets
By Winnie Chung
Monday, November 18, 2002
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/arts/ZZZ5RUTAI8D.html

THE INHERENT cynicism of Hong Kongers caught South Korean artist/photographer Jung Yeon-doo off guard. Jung had been traipsing around one of Hong Kong's crowded housing estates, asking people if they want a free family portrait. To his surprise, there were few takers for the free 20cmx25cm photo offer.

''I never used to encounter this in Korea, but here [in Hong Kong] I have found people are naturally suspicious,'' Jung says. ''We've put out advertisements in newspapers. The housewives have been interested, but their husbands didn't agree.''

The photographs are part of Jung's exhibition, Evergreen Tower - Chinese Lucky Estates, for the Shanghai Biennale 2002 arts festival, which opens at the Shanghai Art Museum on Friday. The theme for the biennale is Urban Creation, and Jung's work depicting lives within the urban jungle will make a worthy contribution to one of China's most high-profile art events. A preview is being hosted in Hong Kong's 1ASpace art organisation in Cattle Depot Artists' Village, where the portraits are projected on to a wall in a continuous loop.

They are an extension of a similar series Jung produced in South Korea earlier, called Evergreen Tower, in which he took portraits of 34 families in the same apartment block in the city of Kwangju. The idea was to try to offer a glimpse of the lives of the different families through their living conditions and demeanour. Jung chooses apartments with the same layout, and his results show a stage setting capturing the drama of everyday life.

''I want to see behind someone's superficial identity,'' he says. ''Someone can be represented as aged 38, or a father of two, but that doesn't really say anything except perhaps his social status. The photographs will show the audiences what these people are really like through bits of evidence in the photographs. For instance, one family had a huge crucifix on the wall, so we know they are Christians. They chose to pose with musical instruments so you can imagine that they might play for the church choir or music group.''

Jung's project in Hong Kong is sponsored by 1ASpace; he is presently their artist-in-residence. His interest in what lies behind the human facade was his starting point for his current work. Born in South Korea in 1969, Jung studied visual art at Seoul National University before attending Goldsmith's College in London. The self-taught photographer started his artistic career by taking pictures of ballroom and tango dancers. ''It wasn't just pictures of people going through the motions of dance,'' Jung says. ''I liked seeing the emotions behind the dancing; the passion that these people have for this hobby.''

To Jung, art is a kind of voyeurism, but he says it is driven more by curiosity. ''I'm not into obscene voyeurism. This is no different to housewives gossiping about what's happening with a neighbour upstairs or in the next block,'' he says.

Natural cynicism notwithstanding, Hong Kong has been an artistic eye-opener for Jung. His initial idea for Evergreen Tower was to focus on one public housing estate, but he found it impractical after the residents' indifference. Instead, he is now taking pictures of families from different social backgrounds, which means travelling to estates from Tai Po to Sheung Wan or Kwun Tong in any one day.

One foresight he had was to invest in a special wide-angle lens usually used for making movies. ''I was lucky I brought that. Some apartments are so small I cannot even get my camera into them,'' he says, producing his first photograph - one of an old couple living in Tsui Ping Estate in Kwun Tong. ''I had to take that standing outside their door.''

Jung says the more homes into which he is invited, the more interesting his work becomes. ''I'm just curious about how people are living,'' he says. ''I don't want to have to fill in the blanks myself.''

Evergreen Tower - Chinese Lucky Estates forms part of the Shanghai Biennale 2002 festival and runs from November 22 until January 12 at Shanghai Art Museum. The Hong Kong preview is at 1ASpace from Tuesday to Thursday (2pm to 8pm) at Cattle Depot Artists' Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan. Tel: 2529 0087

China's Super Kids

China's Super Kids
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/opinion/22KRIS.html

SHANGHAI — Quick, what's 6 + 8 - 7 + 6 + 5?

If you knew instantaneously that the answer is 18, without having to pause even a second, then congratulations! You're as bright as a Shanghai kindergarten student — calculating in his or her third language.

I've met the future, and it is these kids. Americans who come to China tend to be most dazzled by glittering new skyscrapers like the 1,380-foot Jin Mao Tower, but the most awesome aspect of China's modernization is the education that children are getting in the big cities. And the long-run competitive challenge we Americans face from China will have less to do with its skylines, army or industry than with its Super Kids, like Tony Xu.

Tony's real name is Xu Jun, but all the children entering the New Century Kindergarten that he attends get English names as well. Six-year-old Tony's first languages are Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese, but even in English he rattled off answers to equations faster than I could. It was embarrassing when I posed my own question to him, 10 + 5 - 1 - 4 + 5, and he answered 15 before I could tell if he was right. I want a refund on my college tuition.

Parents pay about $2,000, a huge sum here, to send a child to a year of such a private kindergarten. But since urban Chinese families now have only one child each, no expense is too great for one's "little emperor." Throughout China, first-rate private schools are popping up, as the Chinese saying goes, like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.

Of course Chinese education is still hobbled by rural mud-brick schools that are in a shambles, by peasants who pull their daughters out of school, by third-rate universities. But China's great strength is that in the cities, it increasingly is not a Communist country or a socialist country, but simply an education country.

When I lived in China I represented Harvard in interviewing high school students applying for admission, and it was a humbling experience. The SAT isn't offered in China, so instead the kids take the G.R.E. — meant for people applying to graduate school — and still score in the top percentiles. And while many of my Chinese friends worry that the system works children too hard and costs them their childhood, the brightest kids are not automatons; many are serious enthusiasts of art, music, poetry or, these days, the basketball plays of Yao Ming.

The other day I visited one of Shanghai's best high schools, the No. 2 Secondary School Attached to East China Normal University. American students who have earned a perfect score of twin 800's on the SAT should meet the 17-year-old student here who last year got a perfect score of three 800's on the G.R.E.

He Xiaowen, the principal, showed off 14 gold medals that students have earned in the international math and science Olympics. When I asked if she had any problems with students smoking or drinking, she looked so scandalized that I might have been sent to the principal's office, if I hadn't already been there.

One reason for Chinese educational success emerges from cross-cultural surveys. Americans say that good pupils do well because they're smarter. Chinese say that good students do well because they work harder.

A growing body of evidence suggests that Chinese students do well academically partly because their parents set very high benchmarks, which the children then absorb. Chinese parents demand a great deal, American parents somewhat less, and in each case the students meet expectations.

The result is apparent at No. 2 Secondary School. The students live in dormitories, going home only on weekends, and they're mostly studying from 6:30 a.m. until lights-out at 11 p.m. On Saturdays they attend tutoring classes from 9:40 to 5:10, and on Sundays they do what one girl, Gong Lan, described as six hours of "self-assigned homework."

She explained: "This is extra work to improve ourselves. I read outside books to improve my ability in any subject I feel weak in."

Chinese students may not have a lot of fun, and may lag in subjects in which some American students excel, such as sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. But these kids know their calculus and are driven by a work ethic and thirst for education that make them indomitable. With them in the pipeline and little kindergartners like Tony Xu behind them, China may eventually lead the world again.

A new dawn in China for VC?

A new dawn in China?
by Rebecca Fannin Posted 02:40 EST, 21, Nov 2002
http://www.thedeal.com/

Near the bustling city of Shanghai in the high-tech center of Pudong, a semiconductor foundry is churning out silicon wafers for China's fast-growing electronics market. Far from the world's financial capitals, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. represents the dreams of international venture capitalists doing deals in the one of the toughest places to make money — China.

In a conference room in the ultramodern facility, Richard Chang, president and CEO of the plant, says he expects it will be profitable by the end of the year. SMIC's chips are not as advanced as those produced in Taiwan, he explains, but the company is targeting the less technologically sophisticated domestic Chinese market, which is growing by 25% yearly.

SMIC will go public in New York or Hong Kong by the second quarter of 2004, predicts Chang, who was recruited from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. With the IPO, he predicts, the company's venture backers, H&Q Asia Pacific, Walden International and Vertex Management as well as Goldman, Sachs & Co., should make at least two to four times their original investment of $1.1 billion.

Cut to Beijing: A Starbucks near the Forbidden City is selling moon cakes for the annual Harvest Moon Festival and is packed with locals who can afford to pay Rmb9 ($1.09) for a cup of brew. It, too, has venture capitalists salivating over possible returns.

When H&QAP exits its investment in the 30-store, Beijing-based Starbucks franchise it hopes to gain "quite a good return," says Ta-lin Hsu, chairman of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Asian venture capital firm.

In 1998 H&QAP invested $10 million to acquire a controlling stake in Mei Da, the licensee for Starbucks in Beijing and nearby Tianjin. The franchise became profitable this summer and revenues are growing at a double-digit rate, says David Sun, president of the Beijing operation, which is adding 10 stores per year to meet demand and prepare for the 2008 Olympic Games. Sun likens the progress of Starbucks in China to the expansion of McDonald's across Taiwan in the 1980s, which he helped spearhead. H&QAP hopes to exit through a sale, an IPO or by exercising a put option with Starbucks Coffee Co., though it has no target date yet.

Such promising investments symbolize a change in China, where successful venture investing stories have been rare. Many venture capitalists took a bath on their investments from the early 1990s.

Most of the early deals were joint ventures with or investments in government entities, which rarely paid off. Bureaucratic labyrinths, entrepreneur con men and widespread corruption compounded matters. And when an investment did pan out, it was hard to get profits out of the country.

But there are signs that VCs have learned their lessons, and even the hardened veterans sound optimistic that recent investments have avoided the pitfalls of the past.

"China is the one bright spot in the world," says Lip-Bu Tan, chairman of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Asian venture firm Walden International, citing the country's GDP growth rate of 7% to 8% in contrast to the stagnant European and sluggish U.S. economies. "It's not just hype and hope."

Last year, VC investment in China doubled to $1.75 billion, according to the Asian Venture Capital Journal in Hong Kong, while overall investment in Asia declined 3% to $11.9 billion.

Other factors should also give VCs a boost, Tan says. "You have the Olympics coming, [World Trade Organization membership] and you have growth from a very low base." In addition, he adds, there is a "tremendous talent pool of engineers with Ph.D.s" who are keen to start businesses.

Recent changes to rules governing foreign-owned ventures should make it easier to repatriate profits, too.

"What's happening in China now is very much like what happened to Silicon Valley in the 1970s when there was a surge of entrepreneurial activity," says Len Baker, a partner at Palo Alto, Calif. venture capital firm Sutter Hill Ventures. His firm put up an initial $6.5 million to help back the $55 million fund raised by Shanghai-based Chengwei Ventures LLC, which also boasts Yale University as an investor.

The VC community has developed enough now that 38 firms, including Warburg Pincus and Newbridge Capital Inc., recently set up the China Venture Capital Association to lobby for more favorable government regulations and instill ethical and professional industry standards.

Institutional investors have taken note, too. A conference on Chinese venture investments sponsored by Chengwei in Shanghai in September drew Georganne Perkins, director of private equity at the $8 billion endowment run by Stanford Management Co., and Clinton Harris, managing partner of Grove Street Advisors, which manages venture capital investments for the $135 billion California Public Employees' Retirement System.

Still, investing in China isn't easy. To begin with, due diligence is prolonged because of the danger of fraud. Tan, who has completed 23 deals in China since 1994, has been stung by managers who either took bribes or pocketed some earnings. "For them, it might be an accepted way of doing business in China, but for us, it is a no-no and we want out of those deals," says Tan.

Regulations and red tape plague investors in China, but there are a few signs of progress. China now permits foreign-owned VC funds denominated in Chinese renminbi. Foreigners continue to establish offshore holding companies or foreign investment enterprises to invest in China, because those entities can be listed outside China, making it easier for investors or realize profits in hard currencies.

Some sort of offshore structure had been necessary because IPOs within China don't provide a viable exit for foreign investors, explains Chang Sun, managing director at Warburg Pincus Asia LLC in Hong Kong. Domestic IPOs require a long and complicated approval process and don't provide liquidity because founding shareholders are prohibited from selling shares for three years after the listing; only newly issued shares in the IPO can be sold. The same rules apply to H shares, the shares of a Chinese company listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. There are also restrictions on red chips, companies incorporated and listed in Hong Kong with controlling Chinese shareholders.

Despite all the handicaps, funds like Walden are looking for new companies. Tan, a Malaysian-Chinese who grew up in Singapore, shuttles back and forth between California and China about eight times a year looking for new investments and checking on his portfolio. Over the past year, he has added four staffers in China, bringing the team to 12.

Over the next three years, he plans to invest a further $150 million to $200 million of the firm's $750 million fund in China — more than any country in Asia. Most of that will go to startups in software, telecom and semiconductors — areas that are benefiting as China modernizes.

Tan has learned some lessons since his early days, though. This time, he only wants to back firms that are founded by Chinese-born, American-educated entrepreneurs who are returning home to start businesses. This strategy helps solve one of the biggest hurdles in investing in Chinese companies: finding capable managers.

So far, this approach has produced one very profitable investment. In a trade sale in April 2001, Tan made $18 million on a $4 million minority investment in a firm founded by a "returnee," Ying Shum of New Wave Semiconductor. The firm was sold for $80 million to Silicon Valley-based Integrated Device Technology Inc., Walden's most successful deal to date.

"We learned from our mistakes and have decided not to do any more JVs or state enterprises," says Tan. Joint ventures didn't make Walden any money. Deals with state-owned entities produced 1.6 to 1.8 times the initial investment, he says.

"We have not had any write-offs in China yet," he says. But 12 of the 23 companies acquired by the 1994 fund remain there. "We are struggling with a few and are trying to redeem some shares by having them buy us out," he concedes.

Similarly, H&QAP didn't suffer as much as some others, says Hsu, a godfather of Asian venture capital who helped to jumpstart Taiwan's technology industry during the 1970s.

All told, he has invested about $200 million in 15 Chinese deals from its initial China fund and from a regional fund.

"We didn't lose our shirts" says Hsu.

But past deals, which date to 1993, have yielded returns of only about 1.2 to 1.3 times his investments, he says, and there have only been three or four exits — including two real estate projects plus Hainan Airlines Co. Ltd. Those have allowed him to return most of his investors' capital, however.

"We have not written off anything," he says. "We just do not give up."

While Hsu bears the scars from early investments, he has had fortune on his side, too. Last year, he says his firm was able to "get its equity out of" two $10 million to $12 million real estate investments in Dalian and Shenyang as the real estate market recovered from a 1996-2000 slump.

Within the next year, Hsu says he will take Yan Sha, a large and profitable Beijing-based department store franchise, public on a Chinese stock market or sell it to co-investors, the Friendship Store and Hendersen Land.

Hsu says he is in negotiations to sell a portion of Shenzhen-based Sinogen International Ltd., the largest pharmaceutical manufacturer in China, to a U.S. investor "at a pretty good valuation." But he's unlikely to see a big profit on the company, which produces human growth hormone and insulin for the Chinese market. Returns would have been "two to four" times H&QAP's $25 million to $30 million investment seven years ago, he says — if things had gone according to plan and Sinogen had gone public in China two years ago.

He's optimistic, though, about a successful exit from the $12 million investment he made four years ago in Grace THW Group, a producer of fiberglass cloth for printed circuit boards. Grace is run and backed by Winston Wong, the son of Taiwan's top tycoon, Wang Yung-ching, the president of Formosa Plastics Corp., and Jiang Mianheng, son of Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Hsu says Grace will go public toward the end of next year.

So far, the successful exits cited by the VCs have mainly been late-stage technology companies or real estate deals — not early-stage companies. So it remains to be seen how the latest wave of investments in those kinds of companies will turn out.

At Chengwei, most of the nine portfolio companies — mostly early-stage technology companies — are not showing profits yet, partner Bo Feng says, and some don't even yet have revenue.

The danger, he warns, is that with so many venture capitalists scouting for deals, China "is becoming overheated."

Given the checkered record of foreign investors there, he's probably right to be cautious.

Out of work bankers go freelance

Out of work bankers go freelance
by Heidi Moore Posted 02:44 EST, 21, Nov 2002
http://www.thedeal.com

When Robertson Stephens collapsed in July, one head of mergers and acquisitions for a midsize bank looked into hiring a few of the displaced bankers. With a solid name behind them, good contacts and a small pipeline of deals to support them, the Robbie team would be a good investment, he thought.

The only problem: he couldn't afford to pay them. So he devised a plan under which the bankers would work on an "eat what you kill basis." Under this scenario, the bankers get both a finder's fee and a portion of the retainer for any deals they brought in — a cut that could equal up to 20% of the final value of the deal.

You've heard of freelance writers and freelance consultants. Make room for freelance bankers.

As Wall Street continues to lay off employees, freelancing provides a way for displaced bankers to remain in the business without finding a permanent job. And it allows cost-conscious investment banks to acquire talent in a relatively inexpensive way.

"I suspect anyone looking to hire in this market would do it on that basis," said Rohit Manosh, a former Lehman Brothers Inc. banker who helped found merchant bank Tri-Artisan Partners in April. "In the past you haven't gotten good people that way, because they had other options, but for the first time you have very few options out there."

But freelancing is hardly a cure-all for out-of-work bankers or firms that hire them. For one thing, it is difficult for a bank to build a team environment when some of its bankers are really working for themselves, says Jon Melzer, a managing director charged with expanding the M&A practice at boutique Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin.

"If you have that type of model, it becomes a free-agent culture, which is not so bad except that you can't control the quality as much," Manosh adds.

It can also be difficult for banks, especially the largest ones, to trace the fees from a particular deal back to a specific person.

Still, some firms have embraced the freelance banker formula.

"It seems to me to be a convenient thing given the current times, where there are some fellows who have some dealflow they want to keep working on, but the firms are all cutting salaried staff," says Fred Joseph, co-head of investment banking for Morgan Joseph & Co. Joseph says he compares the practice to that of law firms who bring on lawyers as "of counsel."

Joseph says the strategy has had "varied success," but to accommodate its unpredictability, his firm often pays bankers on a sliding scale. Freelancers get a certain percentage of the deal fees if they haul the entire workload; they get 50% of that percentage if the firm has to provide a lot of support staff, 25% if the banker only brings in the client relationship and leaves the nitty-gritty to associates.

Several dealmakers noted that the impetus for freelancing comes most often from bankers looking for work, rather than the firms themselves. The impulse is simple, says Cynthia Remec, president of investment-banking executive-coaching firm Cynthia Remec Associates: "The opportunity cost is infinitesimal," Remec notes. "If they didn't do this, the odds are they wouldn't be working now anyway."

Remec says the trend has not just encompassed senior bankers, like managing directors, but has also trickled down to young bankers, who are even offering to work for free for start-up boutiques to pick up experience. For better established smaller banks, they are offering to work on a week-by-week basis, Remec says.

Either way, it's a tremendous change from the base plus bonus pay packages young and midlevel bankers are used to, but can no longer count on receiving. Some are finding that they can't even give their services away. One head of M&A for a large bank said that, although he has been approached by young bankers looking to work for free, he would never hire them, primarily because of the slave labor aspect.

"It's terrible," he says. "If they do a great job, you can't pay them so you feel bad. If they do a horrible job, they still put in the effort, and you still can't pay them so you feel bad." He adds that at a large bank, it would cause too much resentment to have one young banker do the same work as his or her colleagues, but get paid nothing.

And, Joseph notes, there is one non-negotiable element to picking freelance hires: "The firm takes on real regulatory and supervisory obligations, so you need to know the guys who are taking on your aegis," Joseph says "But if [a hire] really does have dealflow, it can be profitable for both of you."

THE POET AND HIS SONG

THE POET AND HIS SONG
from Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)
by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

A SONG is but a little thing,
And yet what joy it is to sing!
In hours of toil it gives me zest,
And when at eve I long for rest;
When cows come home along the bars,
And in the fold I hear the bell,
As Night, the shepherd, herds his stars,
I sing my song, and all is well.

There are no ears to hear my lays,
No lips to lift a word of praise;
But still, with faith unfaltering,
I live and laugh and love and sing.
What matters yon unheeding throng?
They cannot feel my spirit's spell,
Since life is sweet and love is long,
I sing my song, and all is well.

My days are never days of ease;
I till my ground and prune my trees.
When ripened gold is all the plain,
I put my sickle to the grain.
I labor hard, and toil and sweat,
While others dream within the dell;
But even while my brow is wet,
I sing my song, and all is well.

Sometimes the sun, unkindly hot,
My garden makes a desert spot;
Sometimes a blight upon the tree
Takes all my fruit away from me;
And then with throes of bitter pain
Rebellious passions rise and swell;
But--life is more than fruit or grain,
And so I sing, and all is well.

And So To Bed

And So To Bed
Issue cover-dated November 28, 2002
By Brian Mertens/BANGKOK
http://www.feer.com/articles/2002/0211_28/p064current.html

WITH THE GOVERNMENT cracking down on nightlife excesses, trendy young Thais have decided there's only one thing to do: Take it lying down. And so they're heading straight to the Bed Supperclub, an upmarket bar and restaurant in Bangkok where lounge lizards dine while sprawling on giant divans.

Viewed from the street, the Bed is a huge, elliptical metal tube that seems to have landed like a spaceship amid the noodle carts and massage parlours off Sukhumvit Road. "It's intended to look alien, like a cocoon or a temporary structure, as if you could pick it up and take it somewhere else," says the project's Australian-born designer, Simon Drogemuller, of Bangkok's Orbit Design consultancy.

Inside, things get even more intriguing. The gleaming white interiors are reminiscent of something from Star Trek or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Staff ritually plump the big white pillows and smooth the 15-metre-long sheets that cover the divans lining the walls. The curved walls glow with colours projected by digital light-organs, or dance with images from a video installation commissioned from Thai artist Kamol Phaosavasdi. (The Bed plans more exhibitions and live music gigs.)

It might all sound a bit extreme, but the Bed is actually a pleasant place to visit. The atmosphere is light and bright, and the music is kept low, at least by Bangkok standards. The food's not bad either, and not out of orbit for a high-end Bangkok nightspot--$16 fetches three courses of fusion cuisine. Recent highlights included a black-mushroom consommé with goat-cheese cream and garlic-roast chicken breast on almond-tomato salsa with spicy basil vinaigrette (avoid the fennel and black-olive risotto, though).

Opened in October, the venue is already a hit with Bangkok's design crowd, media people and high society, as well as visitors like Keanu Reeves and Julia Roberts. "It's a fantasy setting, like opening the pages of a good fashion magazine, a dreamland you thought you could never enter," gushes one visitor, fashion writer Watcharin Phongsai. "You can just pop down and feel like you're in an MTV video."

The downside? Well, as diligent loungers might point out, the Bed is not the first venue in the world to let its guests stretch out on divans. Indeed, Drogemuller, readily concedes that Amsterdam's Supperclub got there first. Still, there's nowhere else quite like it in Thailand.

"We thought it would work because it's unique," says Drogemuller. "Dining on beds is closely associated with the middle-to-high-income people who go to these sorts of places. You get the feeling you are being treated like a king."

BED SUPPERCLUB
26 Sukhumvit Soi 11, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok
Tel.: 651 3537

Fashion's High Priestess of Gnosticism

Fashion's High Priestess of Gnosticism
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/fashion/17VIEW.html

Why don't you . . . give all your ideas away to other people, so that you'll fill up again with new ones? Diana Vreeland, the great fashion editor, understood that this is how creative minds work. It's fatal to be a hoarder. When you have an idea, get it out there. Pretend you're Josephine Baker, tossing fruit into the audience. Hit someone on the head with a pineapple. Circulate the energy. Distribute the wealth. Rinse your child's hair with dead Champagne.

This is a gnostic way of thinking. Now relax. It's Sunday. You won't mind a bit of Gnosticism with your Styles. Glamour and knowledge both share the same root in gnosis (secret learning), so why shouldn't Gnosticism be fashion's true faith?

The gnostics were a religious order, circa the year 0, but in modern times it makes better sense to view them as a personality type. Vreeland was one of them.

"If you do not bring bring forth what is within you," the gnostics believed, "what you do not bring forth will destroy you." And I suspect Vreeland truly believed that if she had an idea and didn't get it out there, it would kill her. Killer-diller. If she couldn't come out with observations like "pink is the navy blue of India," she would die.

Thanks in part to those observations, she hasn't. Or, rather, the point of view defined by Vreeland's insights remains indispensable. It is the viewpoint of fearlessness, the stance of "Why not?" And if Vreeland's legend looms larger today than it did during her lifetime, that may be because this particular stance has become harder to sustain.

Vreeland is the subject of a new biography by Eleanor Dwight, and it is the first to explore the personality behind the histrionic public persona. The book rides a wave of printed material by and about Vreeland that did not begin until years after her retirement from Vogue. "Allure," a coffee-table book, written with Christopher Hemphill, of black and white photographs punctuated with Vreeland's taped recollections of them, was published in 1980 and has been reissued this year.

The first book was followed in 1984 by the editor's memoir, "DV." Two additional volumes of Vreeland's musings have appeared in the last year: "Why Don't You?" a collection of her columns for Harper's Bazaar, and "Vreeland Memos," an issue of the fashion periodical Visionaire.

Why don't you . . . buy Dwight's biography and read it, so that I don't have to try your patience with one of those super-compressed summaries that nobody reads anyhow? "Elegance is refusal," Vreeland once pronounced. I don't know whether this is a gnostic idea precisely. But it appears to be an essential antidote to excessive gnostic fecundity. If what you have to bring forth is tedious, just leave it alone.

Vogue in the 1960's was as much the creature of its time as it was the creation of an editor. At the beginning of the decade, fashion magazines reflected a relatively rarefied realm of elegance, style and social poise. Ten years later, they had become a mass medium. Vreeland's Vogue occupied the pivotal place in this transformation. Herself a latter-day Edwardian Woman of Style, she hit her manic professional stride in the postwar years, when people were just beginning to grasp the full extent of changes brought about by mass communications.

These circumstances are unrepeatable. That's why it is pointless to complain that no magazine quite like Vreeland's exists today. No world like hers exists today. When she started out, celebrity was tantamount to notoriety. Now, the news media are glamorous in their own right. Today, everybody knows who Diana Vreeland was. In her own time, she communicated to audiences who never gave much thought to who an editor was.

I know, because I was part of it. When I started reading Vogue in my early teenage years, I had little interest in fashion and knew even less about it. Rather, like The New Yorker, and Ada Louise Huxtable's architecture columns, Vogue represented what I recognized as an urban point of view. I found my suburban life confining. It was a relief to project myself into the escapist fantasies offered by those texts. I wouldn't know of the existence of Diana Vreeland or William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, until many years later. Now the situation has changed. We're all regaled by the antics of editors without magazines.

Vreeland, I later read in a biography of Alexander Lieberman by Calvin Tomkins and Dodie Kazanjian, once described Vogue as "the myth of the next reality." The myth was accurate in my case. The next reality was relatively exempt from the pleasures of cold war normalcy.

People were onto something when they called Vreeland the high priestess of fashion. She was a gnostic priestess. In the gnostic system, there was an outer mystery for the many and an inner mystery for the few. So it was with Vreeland's Vogue. Many readers may have regarded it as the leading fashion magazine. Others, too few to constitute a mass readership, understood that glamour has only incidentally to do with clothes. It has mainly to do with personality structure, with the places we choose to dwell or avoid within the architecture of our subconscious fantasies.

Now, the point of Gnosticism is to be reborn to the divine within oneself. If "the divine" is not acceptable, you can substitute the truth within oneself. Or, as the psychotherapist D. W. Winnicott called it, the authentic self. But Vreeland probably would be comfortable with the divine.

Why don't you bring out that divine thing that is within you? If you don't, that divine thing will slay you.

In any case, you have to kill off the inauthentic, or at least not let it take over the executive committee of the self. Vreeland was vigilant in this regard. Of course, she was also a fabulist. She made up or grossly exaggerated her accounts of her past and the world around her. But if she had stuck to the facts, she would have falsified her self. She had "the wound" of the creative artist: an unshakeable disbelief in her potential to be loved, coupled with an iron determination to conceal this disbelief from herself. From this stemmed her power as an architect of other people's desires.

Ms. Dwight's biography is, among many other marvels, a brilliant study in the relationship between love and work. The book is a treatise of changing mores, too, of course, but at heart it is a report from the front lines in the struggle to craft new identities for men and women in the modern world of work. The evidence suggests that Vreeland was not a feminist. She was, however, a strong woman and a breadwinner who reformed the decorous world of fashion magazines within her muscular grip.

Vreeland's is the flip side of the "Lady in the Dark" story. This extraordinary woman blossomed when circumstances forced her to create a world outside her marriage to a man of limited emotional and financial resources. Reed Vreeland looked the part of leisured money. The leisure part was real. He was a Ralph Lauren ad campaign before a Ralph Lauren was even dreamed of, but evidently possessed neither the earning power nor the work ethic of an average male model. A woman who considered herself unattractive might see him as a catch.

But what a lot of hard work it must have taken for Vreeland to believe that he was worthy of her devotion! The fantasies it must have taken to fill up the vacuum between herself and a human version of the spotted-elk-hide trunks she advised her readers at Harper's Bazaar to strap on the backs of their touring cars! She was herself the driver. And although it is pleasing in life to travel with attractive luggage, greater rewards await those who travel light. A higher quality of attention will be paid to the active partner in the wider world.

"I know what they're going to wear before they wear it, eat before they eat it, say before they say it, think before they think it, and go before they go there!" This astonishing outburst, once overheard by Richard Avedon, could be taken as evidence of a fashion dictator's disrespect for her readers. But perhaps the woman was simply reassuring herself that she could trust her instincts.

What else did she have to go on? It's not as if she was dealing with anything rational. In "DV," Vreeland recounts the possibly apocryphal story of assigning a photographer to shoot a picture against a green background. The photographer strikes out after three attempts. " `I asked for billiard table green!' I am supposed to have said. `But this is a billiard table, Mrs. Vreeland,' the photographer said. `My dear,' I apparently said, `I meant the idea of billiard table green, not a billiard table.' "

In other words it did not pay to follow this dictator literally. Far better to respond with instincts of one's own. This, I think, was the core clause in Vreeland's contract with her readers. We expected her to know where we were going before we went there. We were traveling to places deeper within ourselves.

LBOs: Embracing Barbarians at the Gate

LBOs: Embracing Barbarians at the Gate
Beaten-up companies looking to go private are seeking buyout firms
By Emily Thornton in New York, with Stephanie Anderson Forest in Dallas
http://www.businessweek.com

Henry R. Kravis is like a kid in a candy store. Three years into the worst bear market since 1929, the legendary dealmaker is buying companies left and right. Since June, his firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., has announced plans to acquire businesses worth about $7.5 billion. They include a Canadian phone directory publisher and a French electrical equipment maker. Besides, KKR is eyeing hundreds of American companies. "We're busy again. I love it," Kravis says.

The buyout kings are back. Not since the 1980s have the pickings been so rich for leveraged buyout firms like KKR in the high-profit, high-risk business of buying, fixing, and reselling companies. Sidelined throughout much of the late 1990s, when merger mania pushed asset prices out of sight, they are now picking up businesses at bargain prices as companies shed what they couldn't digest. Flush with more than $100 billion raised from the likes of pension funds, they're emerging as a powerful force in a new wave of restructuring.

This year, LBO deals have soared. Between January and Nov. 6, they were up 50% vs. the same period a year ago to $20 billion--three-fourths of that rise was in the third quarter when they accounted for almost 10% of all mergers and acquisitions announced. That's their largest share since 1989. By contrast, overall M&A activity shrank 57% to $379 billion.

Given their vastly increased financial clout, the LBO firms will be key players in refocusing companies on making better use of their capital instead of chasing growth at all costs. "LBO firms will play a substantially more important role in the current corporate transformation than they did in the 1980s," predicts Alan K. Jones, a managing director and co-head of the group that advises buyout funds at Morgan Stanley. "This is their renaissance."

It's not just low prices that are bringing buyout kings out of the woodwork. It's their conviction that they're in the sweet spot. They believe prices are not going to fall much further. At the same time, there's little risk that chastened companies will bid up prices. "With so many strategic buyers on the sidelines, the environment strongly favors financial buyers," says Sean O. Mahoney, a managing director at Goldman, Sachs & Co. who specializes in LBO financing.

Buyout firms are snapping up hot properties in industries with stable cash flow. Initially, they have focused on yellow-pages publishers, fast-food chains, and book publishers such as Boston's Houghton Mifflin Co. But they're expected to branch out across the economy, as distressed companies like Qwest Communications International (Q ), WorldCom, Vivendi Universal International (V ), and Nortel Networks (NT ) shed more assets.

In many respects what's happening is an about-face from the 1980s, when some buyout funds were the pariahs of the financial world--Barbarians at the Gate, as one book dubbed them. Back then, a handful of firms used mountains of debt to buy public companies in hotly contested deals, took them private, then ruthlessly cut costs to make them profitable.

This time around, LBO shops are invited guests. Sellers are thrilled to do deals with them. Managers consider the stock market more punishing than going private under a new owner. Many also see LBOs as their best chance to motivate managers whose options are under water. Once a company is taken private, buyout firms can shower managers with fresh options at dirt-cheap prices that they can cash in when the company is sold. "Our buyouts are management-led," says William E. Conway Jr., a co-founder of the 15-year-old Carlyle Group. "Hostile takeovers are a thing of the past."

But it's not going to be as easy for LBO firms to extract profits from their prizes. Their slash-and-burn methods are now standard management procedure, so there's less fat to cut. "Our job is a lot harder today because companies are better run," says Perry Golkin, a member of KKR. Adds Harold W. Bogle, a managing director at Credit Suisse First Boston: "You have to look to grow in more strategic ways."

That's why many buyout firms are rolling up their sleeves and getting involved in running the companies they buy. For example, Texas Pacific Group partners made sales calls on the top 15 customers of silicon wafer maker MEMC Electronic Materials Inc. (WFR ) to convince them the company was financially sound. "Firms will be substantially more hands-on than they historically have been," says James G. Coulter, a founding partner at Texas Pacific.

The pressure on firms to deliver returns may even spark another flurry of mergers--this time between the companies in buyout firms' portfolios. "You may see more financial buyers selling to financial buyers," says Carlyle's Conway. They may drive a hard bargain, though. In the mid-1990s, says Mark L. Sirower, head of the M&A practice of The Boston Consulting Group, corporate buyers on average lost 5% of what they paid for businesses, while LBO firms made roughly 25%. The superior returns show how closely major buyout funds scrutinize their deals. On average, they pick only one out of 100 they consider. "The difference is that corporations often acquire to be bigger. LBO firms acquire companies to make money," Sirower says.

Not that the LBO firms always get it right. Many are still nursing their wounds after straying from cheap, understandable businesses at the peak of the market. In 2000, LBO firms did $40 billion of deals after many lost patience waiting for the stock market to decline and took ill-fated gambles. Big firms--including Forstmann Little & Co. and Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst Inc.--together lost billions of dollars on telecom investments made around that time. "I guess we could have all taken a year off and played golf, which would have been a great idea in hindsight," says Thomas O. Hicks, co-founder of Hicks Muse.

This bitter experience is making buyout firms a lot more cautious. Many are forming consortia to share the pain if deals go sour. On Oct. 31, four buyout shops--Thomas H. Lee Partners, the Blackstone Group, Bain Capital, and Apax Partners--said they teamed up to buy Houghton Mifflin from Vivendi.

This newfound caution sits well with today's LBO investors. More public pension funds are backing buyout firms than in the 1980s, and they face heightened scrutiny of their own investments. For example, the University of Texas Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO) recently decided to release its LBO returns on request--breaking a taboo for the secretive firms. "The board felt with the changes that had taken place in the overall environment, we would have to move to a higher level of disclosure," explains Bob Boldt, president of UTIMCO.

The less forgiving business climate presents other obstacles. For starters, bond investors to whom the LBO firms turn for debt financing are getting wary of big deals. And, because many of the companies for sale face shareholder lawsuits and investigations, it's becoming more complicated to close deals on schedule. For instance, the news on Nov. 4 that Vivendi's financial disclosures are under investigation by U.S. and French authorities could thwart the Houghton Mifflin deal. "I'm sure that is complicating the effort to close a sale," says Jonathan Newcomb, former CEO of Simon & Schuster Inc. and now a principal at private-equity firm Leeds Weld & Co.

For now, the buyout kings aren't too worried. They're giddy over the great American fire sale. Plenty more cheap merchandise will hit the racks. "We always thrive when there is turmoil in the markets, and God knows we have turmoil," says Kravis. When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

U.N. Revives Plan for Khmer Rouge Trial

After 9-Month Break, U.N. Revives Plan for Khmer Rouge Trial
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/21/international/asia/21CAMB.html

After nine months, the United Nations revived plans yesterday for an international trial for the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge. They are charged with genocide and gross human rights violations in the deaths of more than one million Cambodians in the 1970's.

But the resolution that ultimately passed in a key committee had been watered down to meet Cambodia's approval.

Although it calls for resuming negotiations on creating a special crimes tribunal, it requires that such a tribunal adhere to 2 of the 53 articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The measure also notes with approval a new Cambodian law that insists that Cambodia's ill-trained and corrupt courts have the final say in the proceedings, rather than the United Nations.

Sponsored by Japan and France, the measure passed the committee unanimously, with more than 100 voting for it 37 abstaining. It still faces a General Assembly vote, but is expected to pass.

It was immediately criticized by several diplomats and rights advocates for failing to ensure that the trial would meet adequate international standards for fairness.

"The resolution fails to include explicit language guaranteeing the tribunal will meet international standards, and it lacks a solid commitment from the Cambodians," said a senior diplomat whose country nevertheless voted for it.

After four years of talks on a tribunal with Prime Minister Hun Sen's government, such complaints have become familiar. In February, deadlocks and disappointments over the tribunal led the United Nations to announce that the talks had stopped.

Nations led by Australia, France, Japan and the United States worked to start another effort. Cambodia is one of relatively few countries to suffer such devastation since World War II without seeing those who carried out the actions brought to trial — despite the 23 years that have elapsed since the Khmer Rouge were overthrown. In that time, there have been trials or truth commissions for Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa and the former Yugoslavia.

Secretary General Kofi Annan reconsidered. In August, he said he would resume talks if given a "clear mandate."

The new resolution was intended to provide that mandate, but even its original sponsors disagreed over whether it was strong enough to ensure fairness.

Australia withdrew its sponsorship at the last minute, when Cambodia called for changes. "We found the changes to weaken the text, but we were not prepared to vote against it," said Ambassador John Dauth of Australia.

Scholars and rights experts said they feared that with so many governments eager to redress an omission, there had been more willingness to water down international law to win Cambodian approval.

"This resolution does not even ask the Cambodian government to live up to the very minimum international standard for a fair trial, much less build in guarantees that those standards will be adhered to," said Stephen R. Heder, a Cambodia scholar at the University of London.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, a minor Khmer Rouge military officer in the first years of the killings, engaged in drawn-out talks with the United Nations. Under his direction, Parliament passed a law to set up a tribunal. The measure had provisions unacceptable to the United Nations.

Michael Kors & Uptown Guys

[old but nice article on Michael Kors...]

Uptown Guys
By Amy Larocca, New York Magazine - August 12, 2002
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/shopping/fashion/6277/index.html

His classic, luxurious aesthetic has made Michael Kors the go-to designer for society girls. Now he's setting his sights on the well-dressed lady's most important accessory: her man.

Michael Kors is not the kind of designer who approves of knee-length tuxedos. Or of tight pants. Or of men who experiment with bright colors. When, in early June, Esquire asked the designer to host a screening of a film -- any film -- that inspired his new line of men's clothing, he chose Downhill Racer, the 1969 classic featuring a lean Robert Redford as a swaggering downhill skier, and co-starring a white turtleneck. "I mean, totally body-conscious, but not vulgar," Kors told the packed theater after the screening. "Après-ski. The American in Europe." He pausedand smiled. "It works." Kors has been dressingthe most polished members of the Park Avenue–Palm Beach–East Hampton set since the early eighties, but his hyperluxurious American classics were geared toward the ladies only. Along the way, the designer was vexed to discover that he couldn't find the two things that he really needed: good black cashmere sweaters (crew and turtleneck, please) and a pair of well-cut gray flannel pants. "Everything was either, like, Fred Tipler hundred-year-old man," he says one steamy afternoon in his pristine offices on Seventh Avenue, "or it was like 'Okay, that's really nice, but it's like supertight and in stretch mesh.' "

Since fall 1998, Kors had been producing a capsule men's collection for his runway shows, mostly because he enjoyed the frisson of sending chiseled boys down the catwalk to flirt with his leggy girls. The men's clothes he made for the runway were reflections and extensions of the women's line: When Kors did his "Palm Bitch" season, with shrunken cable knits and Lilly Pulitzer–style prints, the guys got chintz trunks to match. The results were so egregiously preppy they called to mind Niedermeyer, the evil frat guy from Animal House; needless to say, the clothes weren't for retail. "It tells the story better, having the guys," Kors explains. Desperate to get his hands on the clothes he wanted to wear, he used his women's factories to produce a small range of men's basics to sell on a trial basis at Bergdorf Goodman and at his boutique when it opened in 2000. "It was a little test run," he says. "Market research."

The first few items Kors produced -- which included the black cashmere sweaters and gray flannel pants -- were an instant hit in both locations, even though they were very expensive (a symptom of their limited run). Kors's well-heeled women were thrilled to dress up the men in their lives, and soon the men themselves were begging for more. "They were asking, 'Where's the rest of the enchilada?' " says Kors. Now, after nearly two years spent laboring over fit and production, a full trousseau has arrived in the shape of leather pea coats and ski jackets, chunky cashmere sweaters and soft cotton utility pants, and -- what Kors considers the most important piece -- a down anorak with a lush, fur-trimmed hood. And it's in a full range of stores: his boutique and Bergdorf Goodman once again, but also Saks Fifth Avenue and specialty stores like Camouflage and Scoop.

Naturally, he's still refining the basics that started this whole thing off: those cashmere sweaters, those perfect flannel pants. "I don't know that any woman thinks that everyone can wear the same evening dress," Kors says with a sigh, shaking his head a bit. "But men all assume they can wear the same pants. So I really, really worked on that fit." They're more generously cut than skinny-boy hipsters of recent seasons (Jason Sehorn, for example, was caught complaining to his wife in Paris earlier this year that he couldn't get his Louis Vuitton trousers over his legs). They're higher-waisted because not everyone, after all, wants to be Jim Morrison. And the prices are much more approachable. "Guys don't want to buy clothes and feel like they might have made a foolish mistake," says Robert Burke of Bergdorf Goodman. "They're not going to make mistakes here."

Kors, who strives for Vreeland-like quotability, has a few maxims to share: "Spend your money on coats. It's your ultimate hello," he states, wagging his finger. "Everyone needs to take their suits and take the shirt off and put on a sweater underneath. You're ten years younger! You really have to start looking in a three-way mirror when you're buying trousers. Women are staring at your ass, so maybe you'd better start looking at your own backside."

Which fits in perfectly with the Zeitgeist. Men, after all, are the new women: buffing, nipping, tucking, preening -- and squeezing themselves into new collections by the designers loved by their girlfriends and wives. Nicolas Ghesquière is producing a men's line this season, too, and the term manorexic is fashion-standard for the guys who starve themselves to fit Hedi Slimane's neat, mod suits. "The dieting and taking care of your skin and gym culture -- all of these things are not just part of the gay world anymore," Kors explains.

And, of course, men who want to look good are still struggling with the whole saggy-bottomed, casual-Friday debacle. "Michael's doing sportswear, and doing it perfectly," says Burke. "It's the best parka, the best khakis. They're American classics, only better. It's not really a moment for tricky fashion. People want real clothes."

Above all, Kors believes, men still want to look like men -- men who are thinner, taller, younger, but men all the same. "If you see a man too matched, he looks like he's wearing women's sportswear," Kors says, crinkling up his nose. "I think what I bring to the table is this: You might not be Peter Beard, but, God, wouldn't you want everyone to think that you were?"

He catches his breath and leans back in his chair, grinning like a well-fed cat. He's spent all this time perfecting his ladies, ensuring that they have the best khaki pants, the most beautiful shearling coat, and now, at last, they'll really have the perfect accessory. "It's all about that Madison Avenue stroll," he says, folding his arms. "Finally, Bill Cunningham will be able to shoot them as a couple."

A rare day when things went right

A rare day when things went right
The New York Times
Friday, November 15, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/76992.html

NEW YORK The airport problems, the hidden hotel fees, the endless meetings, the loneliness. Business travel has gotten a bad rap. But now and then, something magical happens. Just when despondency weighs on their hearts, some corporate executives say, somebody comes along to warm it. And those enchanting moments can make the pain of travel suddenly seem worthwhile.

For Glen Bruels, a vice president with the management-consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, who is based in Colorado Springs, the light came on the 20-minute hop back home from Denver a few weeks ago. He wanted to finish some paperwork, and luckily, the seat next to him was empty - until a little girl plopped down on it.
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No problem; he would ignore her. But then she pulled several Barbie dolls from her backpack and started telling him about them. "I kept reading, thinking that she would get the hint," Bruels said. "She didn't." He told her the dolls were nice, thinking his tone would quiet her. It didn't.
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And so, he surrendered to her charm. "We talked about everything under the sun - Barbie fashions, why Barbie and Ken don't always get along, Britney and Justin, how her mother took naps every day and how her sister was always getting in trouble," he said. "She pulled a book out of her pack, 'Amelia Bedelia,' and started to read. I found myself helping her sound out the hard words and listening to her running editorial commentary of what Amelia's life must be like. I told her how I loved reading 'Amelia Bedelia' with my daughter when she was young."
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When they landed, the girl, who was 7, reached into her bag and gave him a lemon flavored hard candy. He told her he would save it for dessert. She nodded and said that was her plan, too. "I think I accomplished more in that 20 minutes than I had the rest of the day," Bruels said.
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For Claudine Enger, an account executive at a public relations firm in Minneapolis,a flight attendant made all the difference. Enger was on a flight with her boyfriend to Denver, and as the plane sat on the steamy runway with the air conditioning off, her heart sank.
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Not for long. "The flight attendant made light of the situation by fanning people with the safety instructions manual," Enger recalled. "She chitchatted with everybody and cracked jokes, and by the time we got off the ground, everybody was laughing." She continued her patter on the flight and then, just before landing, walked down the aisle affixing ladybug stickers to every passenger for good luck. "She strutted by these stuffy businessmen who normally wouldn't talk to anybody on a flight and asked them, 'You'd like one, wouldn't you?'" Enger said. "And every single one of them just smiled and nodded and pressed the stickers on the lapels of their suits."
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In Denver, the couple took some time off for a hike in the mountains. It was there that her boyfriend, Dan Galloway, proposed to her. "When I got the photos back, both of us still had our ladybug stickers on our shirts," she said.
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Rescuing business travelers from the frustrations of their jobs seems to be something of a specialty in the travel industry. When John Faust checked into the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Jefferson City, Missouri, a few months ago, he was in a sour mood. A sales representative for a real-estate company in San Francisco, Faust travels two and a half weeks of every month, far from his Oakland, California, home. In Jefferson City, he usually stays in the Capitol Plaza Hotel, but the legislature was about to begin a new session and the Plaza and most other downtown hotels were full.
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When Faust got to the Holiday Inn, he told the desk clerk about his day, getting up at 5 a.m., putting in several hours at the office, flying to St. Louis and driving two hours to Jefferson City. She listened sympathetically and assigned him a room. It was standard issue - until he opened the door to the bathroom. It was huge, and at its center sat a massive, flaming-red, heart-shaped Jacuzzi bathtub. "I just started laughing," Faust recalled. The clerk told him later she had taken pity on him and sent him to the honeymoon suite.
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The biggest pain for most business travelers is the plane ride, but for those with a fear of flying, it can be a nightmare. Lauri Slavitt, the executive director of Winds of Change, a women's advocacy foundation, is one of them, and her anxiety only increased after Sept. 11. It reached a peak in July on a return flight to Newark from Phoenix. She asked to see the pilot, who assured her of smooth sailing except for "a little turbulence on the approach to Newark," Slavitt recalled. And right on schedule, the plane started bouncing. About the same time, a phone started ringing - somebody's cell phone, she thought - and kept ringing for several minutes until her exasperated seat mate told her to pick up her airphone.
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It was the pilot. "He told me not to worry, he had everything under control and he'd have me down on the ground, safe and sound in 20 minutes," she said. "He succeeded in calming me."
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It wasn't a calm voice that Stacy Graiko needed on a recent flight to Boston from Detroit. Graiko, a vice president of the Mullen advertising agency, craved relief from a throbbing headache. The flight attendant brought her water and five packages of Tylenol tablets and checked on her a couple of times to see how she was feeling. But her solicitousness did not stop there. As Graiko was departing from the plane, the attendant "handed me a bottle of red wine wrapped up in a napkin, and said, 'I hope you can enjoy this when your headache is better.'" The gesture, she said, gave her "a really warm, cozy feeling."
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Warm and cozy was the last thing from the mind of Michael Levin of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, when a bunch of teenagers approached him in a boarding area of Midway Airport in Chicago and asked him if he had found Jesus. Levin, the director of business development with NT Securities in Chicago, had just settled down with a book, and at first he tried to brush the youngsters off.
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But he knew a bit about theology, and finally he put aside his reading. The debate that followed was intense but friendly, and attracted a small crowd. When the teenagers left to board their plane, a man came up and shook his hand. Two other spectators gave him a thumbs-up. "I'm sure the kids felt like I did - that we had experienced something significant," Levin said. "I felt great when I got on the plane."
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This article was based on reporting by Patricia R. Olsen, Melinda Ligos, Stephen Gregory and Jane L. Levere and was compiled by Brent Bowers.

The Concorde: So High, So Fast, So Fashionable

The Concorde: So High, So Fast, So Fashionable
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/travel/concorde.html

IT must be tough to look glamorous at 7:30 in the morning, but some of my fellow Concorde passengers were giving it their best.

In one corner of the British Airways Concorde lounge at Kennedy Airport, there was a very blonde, very pale, all-in-black fashion editor poring through her galley proofs; her unlined forehead and blank expression suggested that the Botox was working its magic.

In another corner, a group of Prada-clad advertising executives carried charts listing the "brand benefits" of a new "low-tar, high-taste" cigarette. At the espresso bar, a mysterious fellow in a well-cut charcoal gray suit conducted several conversations in a row, each in a different foreign language, on his thimble-sized cellphone.

With my Gap shirt and Levi's khakis, I tried not to look too out of place as we awaited the 8:30 a.m. departure of the world's most glamorous airplane.

I didn't need to worry. If anyone else booked on BA Flight 2 to London this late May morning noticed my lack of sartorial chic, they were not letting on. Most were distracted by the morning newspaper or by a final call home. I was the only one who stood at the window to admire the needle-nosed, swan-bodied plane parked only a few feet away.

It appeared that the passenger list that day must have included many veteran Concorde fliers, and their nonchalance about the prospect of crossing the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound must come as a relief to British Airways, which has staked tens of millions of dollars on the relaunch of the plane.

Not so long ago, it seemed that Concorde - aficionados drop the "the" - might never fly again. The plane was grounded for more than a year after the July 2000 crash of an Air France Concorde in Paris, killing all 109 people on board after a tire blowout ruptured the fuel tanks.

The dozen remaining Concordes in the fleets of British Airways and Air France - the only airlines that fly the plane - returned to the skies a year ago this month, after a safety overhaul that involved lining the fuel tanks of the 25-year-old planes with Kevlar, the fabric used in bulletproof vests. The tires have been reinforced with similar material, and there were safety changes to the wiring.

During the shutdown, the airlines were in close touch with their most loyal customers, even offering them inspection tours of the hangars where the planes were refitted. The campaign apparently did some good, since both British Airways and Air France report that most of their regular supersonic passengers - the super-rich and those with expense accounts to travel like them - have returned.

But it has been a struggle to attract new passengers to the Concorde, a task made much harder by the Sept. 11 attacks and the economic downturn in the United States. Neither airline would release recent passenger load figures for Concorde flights, but Christopher Korenke, Air France's vice president and general manager for North America, said:

"We are not completely happy. It's not bad, but it could be better."

He insisted, however, that the Concorde's value could not be measured by passenger figures alone.

"There is a community of individuals working in the financial sector, a community of individuals working in show biz," he said. "This plane gives us the opportunity to serve a very special type of passenger."

I wish I remembered my only other trip aboard the Concorde. It was back in 1990. There had been an earthquake in Iran, and my desperate editor was trying to get reporters there as quickly as possible.

It turned out that the only way to get to Tehran from the United States by the next evening was by Concorde to London, and then on a connecting flight to Iran. There was a gulp at the other end of the phone as I explained this to the editor. "Come back in coach," he pleaded.

And that is about all I remember of the trip. I spent the night before boning up on Iran and making sure my visa was in order, and I was so tired by the time I took my seat on the plane that I quickly dozed off. The excitement of supersonic flight? I slept through it.

A dozen years later, I had the chance to fly on the Concorde again, this time wide awake, although alas, not at my bosses' expense. I made the reservation using 125,000 miles from my British Airways frequent-flier account, enough for a round-trip trans-Atlantic flight on the Concorde and a connecting flight in Europe.

Even if I had the money, I cannot imagine actually spending the $12,652 it takes to buy a round-trip Concorde ticket between New York and London. But I was happy to part with frequent-flier miles for the chance to experience the last great thrill in commercial aviation.

The Concorde check-in desk at Kennedy is an oasis of tranquillity. In a secluded area far from the rest of the British Airways terminal, it has its own uncrowded security-inspection area. Checking in and passing through security took less than five minutes.

A short ramp leads to what is certainly the most luxurious airport lounge I've ever seen. It is set aside for supersonic passengers only - there's none of that riffraff from first class, who have a separate lounge - with its own business center and cafe, set against wall-to-ceiling windows that allow a jaw-dropping view of the plane itself.

I took a window table in the cafe. Even though I would be fed again on the plane, I couldn't resist asking the waiter for an order of the Loch Fyne smoked salmon served on one of the Petrossian croissants that are shipped out to the airport every morning from Manhattan. And a fresh cappuccino.

Some of my fellow passengers preferred an early-morning glass of Champagne from the bottle of Gosset that sat chilling in a bucket of ice. (Even better stuff, Krug, was served on board.) We were invited to the plane 30 minutes before departure, through a Jetway attached to the lounge.

On board, speed requires some sacrifices. The 100-passenger cabin is necessarily cramped, with rows of a pair of seats on either side of the gray pinstriped carpet. The seats are not much larger than those found in a typical economy class, but they are covered in glove-soft Connolly leather and offer a fair amount of leg room. A clever tilting mechanism gives at least the impression of stretching out.

There is no time for a movie, so entertainment comes in the form of five audio channels of music and talk, with advanced, noise-muffling earphones. (You need the muffling; the Concorde, conceived in the early 1960's, when airport noise was not much of an issue, is very loud, inside and out.)

The plane was only about one-third full - the return flight from London is much more popular, since it arrives early in the morning and allows business travelers a full day's work in New York - so most passengers were able to stretch out across two seats. But alas, the plane was celebrity-free on my trip.

"Sorry about that," one of the less discreet flight attendants told me. "We had Elizabeth Hurley a couple of weeks ago; Sting is a regular. Some days, it's like a flying Hello! magazine."

The great adrenaline rush comes at takeoff. The engines are the most powerful jet engines flying commercially, offering more than 38,000 pounds of thrust each. And they are bolstered by afterburners that give the plane a burst of power for takeoff and, later, to reach supersonic speeds.

Because of the noise-abatement requirements around Kennedy, the afterburners must be turned off almost as soon as the plane is in the air, and they remain off until well out over the Atlantic.

The effect is so dramatic - incredible noise and acceleration, followed by relative quiet and a sense that the plane is slowing down -- that pilots make an announcement before every flight to reassure passengers. "It's all completely routine," our pilot explained in his soothing, very British tone.

It was a perfect spring day in New York, and the plane pushed back at exactly 8:30. We found ourselves at the end of the runway 20 minutes later, the plane's needle nose pointed toward the Atlantic.

The engines instantly roared to life, forcing the plane from a dead stop to 225 miles an hour in 30 seconds. As promised, the afterburners shut down a few seconds after takeoff, reviving themselves only when there was water everywhere below us.

The rest of the flight was remarkably, pleasantly routine. There is no physical sensation to crossing the sound barrier. The only way I knew that we were approaching Mach 2 - about 1,350 miles an hour, twice the speed of sound - came when I looked up at the video display panel at the front of the cabin that reports on the plane's speed and height.

I knew that we were approaching our maximum height of 57,000 feet, or more than 10 miles off the ground, when I looked out the window and noticed the slight curvature of the earth. The Concorde is the only commercial airplane to fly so high that the earth's shape is detectable.

The four-course brunch on board was elegantly simple, served on specially made Royal Doulton china on a linen tablecloth. The only déclassé touch was the plastic cutlery that Concorde passengers, like everyone else, must learn to live with as a result of Sept. 11.

After an appetizer of Greek yogurt with fresh berries and bits of honeycomb, I choose an entree of grilled half-lobster with scrambled eggs and truffles. Delicious. The English business executives around me preferred the full English breakfast, including back bacon and fried mushrooms.

I was only a few chapters into a new book when the plane began to slow noticeably. Little more than two and a half hours after takeoff, we were approaching the western shores of Ireland, and the plane needed to return to subsonic speeds to avoid unleashing sonic booms up and down the Irish coast. Twenty minutes later, we were on final approach to London.

The plane landed at 5:15 in bright afternoon sunshine, with a full staff of ground agents ready to escort those of us connecting to other flights to our various terminals at Heathrow.

I felt awake, alert, rested.

For a Wall Street mogul facing negotiations over a billion-dollar contract, for a Hollywood star or network anchor expected on the set the next morning, a $6,000 one-way ticket might seem a bargain if it meant arriving of the other side of the ocean in fighting trim.

Alas, for the rest of us, subsonic exhaustion remains our fate.

Traveler Information

British Airways flies the Concorde once each way daily between New York and London. The round-trip fare is $12,652, plus taxes.

Air France flies the Concorde both ways between New York and Paris every day except Tuesday and Saturday. The round-trip fare is $10,404, plus taxes.

Periodically, both airlines offer promotional fares on the Concorde.

British Airways has three-night London packages that include a round-trip flight on the Concorde, a room in a luxury hotel with full breakfasts, and a chauffeured car between Heathrow airport and the city. Prices begin at $7,429 a person, based on double occupancy, depending on the hotel and season. Single supplements begin at $530.

Among current Air France promotions are a half-price fare for a companion with a full-fare purchase, based on availability, and a one-way fare of $4,254, about 18 percent less than the usual $5,202, available with a purchase at least four days before departure.

Reservations for British Airways can be made at (800) 247-9297 or at www.britishairways.com; Air France reservations can be made at (800) 237-2747 or www.airfrance.com/us.

Astronomers Foresee Enormous Collision of Two Black Holes

Astronomers Foresee Enormous Collision of Two Black Holes
By WARREN E. LEARY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/science/20ASTR.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 — Two giant black holes have been found at the center of a galaxy born from the joining of two smaller galaxies and are drifting toward a cataclysmic collision that will send ripples throughout the universe many millions of years from now, scientists said today.

The detection of the supermassive black holes — collapsing objects so dense that their gravity draws in all material around them, including light — is the first definitive evidence that two of them can exist in the same galaxy.

These particular black holes, found by a team of researchers using the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory, are circling each other in a Mephisto waltz that will lead to their merging in several hundred million years. That joining, astronomers said, will result in a monumental release of radiation and gravitational waves that should stretch across the universe.

"These gravitational waves will spread out to produce ripples in the fabric of space," one member of the research team, Dr. Gunther Hasinger, said at a NASA briefing for reporters today.

Eventually, those ripples will hit Earth's galaxy and cause infinitesimal wobbling in all matter, though it would be far too tiny to be noticed by humans.

Dr. Hasinger, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute of Extraterrestrial Physics, near Munich, said previous observations of NGC 6240, the galaxy with the two black holes, had detected only two bright center regions. But the Chandra observatory's ability to make high-resolution observations of X-ray emissions identified the sources of those radiation bursts as black holes, he said.

Dr. Stefanie Komossa, a Max Planck astronomer who is co-author of a paper on the discovery that is to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, said: "This is the first time we have ever identified a binary black hole. This is the aftermath of two galaxies that collided sometime in the past."

NGC 6240 is 400 million light-years from Earth. Observations of it with the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments had shown two bright knobs of light but no detail at the galaxy's center, Dr. Komossa said. Astronomers hoped to use Chandra, which has revolutionized X-ray astronomy since its launching in 1999, to tell which of the bright spots might be a supermassive black hole.

"Much to our surprise," Dr. Komossa said, "we found that both were active black holes."

The observations showed that the big black holes were each about the size of the inner solar system that includes Earth, a distance stretching from the Sun to Mars, and were circling each other at a distance of 3,000 light-years.

Astronomers said the merging of two similar-size galaxies into NGC 6240 was also a prelude to the future of Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way, composed of hundreds of millions of stars, including the Sun. Many scientists believe that most galaxies, including the Milky Way, have giant black holes with the mass of millions of stars at their centers. In about four billion years, astronomers believe, the Milky Way and the nearby Andromeda galaxy will collide and merge, fusing their black holes into one.

"We're seeing our own future," Dr. Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University, an astronomer who was not a member of the study team, said at the briefing today.

Dr. Hasinger noted that humans on Earth would not have to worry about this galactic collision: they will not be around. The Sun is expected to blow up into a nova in three billion years, and perhaps then collapse to form a small black hole of its own, he said.

Dr. Hasinger said black-hole mergers as seen in NGC 6240 were probably common throughout the universe, with several each year in areas that can be viewed from Earth. Many quasars, distant bright objects that emit huge amounts of X-rays and other radiation, may be examples of black-hole mergings, he said. New space-based detectors, like NASA's planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, should be able to detect gravity waves from these events that could help determine how black holes are formed.

Dr. Komossa said it was possible that more than two massive black holes could merge, creating even larger ones with different characteristics.

Scientists have so far identified two types of black holes: giant ones with the masses of millions of stars that lurk at the core of galaxies, as in NGC 6240 and the Milky Way, and smaller stellar black holes, the collapsed remnants of big stars with masses 3 to 15 times that of the Sun.

In another study, published this week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, French and Argentine astronomers said observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes had detected a stellar black hole streaking across the Milky Way at some 250,000 miles an hour.

The report said a companion star was being dragged along with the black hole and was slowly being consumed by it.

Scientists with the French Atomic Energy Commission and the Institute for Astronomy and Space Physics in Argentina said this black hole, from 6,000 to 9,000 light-years from Earth, might have been created by an exploding star in the inner disk of the Milky Way.

Forget the Sex and Violence; Shame Is the Ratings Leader

Forget the Sex and Violence; Shame Is the Ratings Leader
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/20/arts/television/20BACH.html

The appeal of "The Bachelor" for women is hardly a mystery. This gauzy ABC dating competition is "Jackass" for women: a reality show that revels in emotional risk taking and rejection in the same way that "Jackass," the MTV series, celebrates men's foolhardiness and physical pain.

More than sex, more than violence, humiliation is the unifying principle behind a successful reality show, be it "The Real World," "Survivor," "Fear Factor" or "The Bachelor."

And there is much more ahead, from "The Will," an ABC reality show in which contestants compete for an inheritance, to "Exhausted," a Fox game show based on sleep deprivation. HBO is now hoping to top its rivals with a reality show as only HBO could do it: "Cathouse," which will be shown next month, put hidden cameras in a Nevada brothel. Viewers have shown an insatiable appetite for the queasy thrill that comes from watching an ordinary person suffer searing public embarrassment in exchange for 15 minutes of fame.

"Cathouse" proves, even more than "The Bachelor," that ordinary people want to be on television even if it means 15 minutes of shame.

Tonight, on the finale of "The Bachelor," Aaron chooses between the golden-haired ingénue Brooke and the sophisticated brunette Helene, who was cast as the brainy contestant. (In the land of the blond, the dark-eyed one is queen.) The ratings are expected to be among the highest of the year on any network.

ABC hopes to score again early next year with a distaff version: a Bachelorette will choose among 25 eligible men, but that does not have the same kick to it. Not, as the show's producers fret with ill-concealed glee, because viewers will brand her a slut for canoodling with several suitors, but because the sight of men competing over a woman is more accepted.

In our culture, there is still nothing particularly humiliating about a man pursuing unrequited love, but there is almost always something faintly ridiculous about a woman trying too hard. Cyrano de Bergerac was noble. Christi, the weepy, injured reject on "The Bachelor" (she is known on the show as the "Fatal Attraction" candidate) was closer to Charlotte Haze, the mother in Nabokov's "Lolita."

Which is why the most logical heir to Bachelor II is not "The Bachelorette," but the documentary-style "Cathouse." In matters of sex, there is at least one act that is still considered shameful: paying for it. Yet the very ordinary clients who were secretly videotaped range from a husband and wife who each wanted their own separate session with a hooker to a 22-year-old virgin whose mother sat in on the negotiations. "One thousand dollars?" she exclaimed as if negotiating the price of his first Brooks Brothers suit. "You owe me!"

The hidden cameras show a lot of negotiation, nervous laughter and explicit fondling, but cut away before any X-rated sexual act is performed. (Sometimes the camera pans to the row of egg timers ticking in the madam's office to keep track of each client.) Astonishingly, almost all the clients signed consent forms. (Three of 50 declined.) It turns out that in most people there is quite a lot of Suzanne Stone, the would-be television personality played by Nicole Kidman in the 1995 movie "To Die For," who memorably asked, "What's the point in doing something good if nobody's watching?"

"Cathouse," is scheduled to be shown on Dec. 8, right after the season finale of "The Sopranos" and in time for the holiday season.

Yes, Virginia, there is a "Fear Factor" Christmas. Joe Rogan, the host of NBC's "Fear Factor" reality show, will team up with Brooke Burns, host of "Dog Eat Dog," for "The Blockbuster Hollywood Christmas Spectacular." On Dec. 8 the Blockbuster video chain and NBC are blending traditional coverage of the Hollywood Christmas Parade with scenes of explosions and other noisy special effects from movies.

Like genetically modified foods, reality shows are ingenious and a little scary. You never know what form they will take next. ABC is working on "Are You Hot?" an "American Idol"-like competition that dispenses with a talent requirement and asks viewers to vote who is the sexiest-looking contestant. A cradle-to-grave network, ABC is also working on "The Will," in which family members compete to be named the heir to a relative's estate.

The success of "The Osbournes" on MTV has created a demand for reality comedies. CBS producers are currently searching the hinterlands for the right bumpkin family to cast as "The Real Beverly Hillbillies." Fox is developing a "Green Acres" version, with an affluent family or, better yet, a celebrity, willing to trade the stores for the chores, who is plunked down in a rural wasteland.

Then there is reality tragedy. Fox is also developing, "Exhausted," a game-show version of Depression-era dance marathons, as depicted in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" Contestants will be kept sleepless for 24 hours, then made to compete in a variety of games and contests for another 24. When only two finalists are left standing, they are seated in cozy armchairs. The first to fall asleep loses.

Consensual humiliation is one thing. Unconscious humiliation is a whole other subgenre that has been popular since "Candid Camera" began in 1949. In the summer of 2001 NBC introduced Extreme Candid Camera: "Spy TV," which combined good, clean fun with the cruelty experiments usually associated with Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist whose research on torture at Yale University in the early 60's shed new light on how ordinary people will instinctively obey orders.

In one skit, aspiring fashion models in bikinis were told to pose covered in snakes and holding live roaches in their mouths. In another, an immigrant pizza delivery man, tricked into thinking he was witnessing surgery in a motel room, was so appalled he crashed through a glass window to escape.

Shows that stick to more benign pranks, and that includes a revival of "Candid Camera" (back on the air on the Pax network since 2001, starring Peter Funt, the son of the show's creator, Allen Funt), have dismal ratings, suggesting that viewers prefer their humiliation served raw.

"Oblivious," on TNN, is a kindly hidden-camera game show with cruel ratings. The host, Regan Burns, disguises himself as a waiter, crossing guard or bartender and devises ways to ask five questions of an unsuspecting customer, who wins $20 for each correct answer. The comedy rests less on the ignorance of unwitting contestants than on Mr. Burns's ability to dupe strangers.

"The Jamie Kennedy Experiment" on the WB network takes that duplicity even further. Mr. Kennedy, a comedian who specializes in characters, uses his impersonations to sting people; one of his more amusing personas is that of a white Beverly Hills rapper, an Eminem 90210. There is collusion between the producers and their subjects. A student invites her mother and sister to lunch to meet her new fiancé, and by the time he explains he wants her to drop out of college to support his hip-hop career, the mother storms out.

The inability of those two shows to gain a broad audience doesn't bode well for a charming comedy-reality show, "Who Needs Hollywood?," directed by Shanda Sawyer, that will debut on the Oxygen cable channel on Nov. 27. In it Katie Putrick, the host and a co-producer, travels around the country coaxing ordinary people to put on performances.

In one hourlong episode, she and a flamboyant choreographer, Marvin Thornton, travel to the Raleigh Hotel, one of the last remaining Catskills resorts, to see if they can persuade the aging employees and guests to stage a variety show à la "Dirty Dancing."

The hotel staff and clientele are Borscht Belt old, and Borscht Belt cranky. The show, which reveals the sad, rumpled end of an era, could seem cruel. But some staff members do finally agree to perform, as do some dangerously elderly guests, and the end result is sweet, not humiliating.

The headwaiteris a holdout. "Take those cameras out of my dining room — customers have complained," he instructs Ms. Putrick, who resorts to hiding a minicamera in a skullcap worn by the choreographer. (They call it "the yarmulke cam.")

In the Catskills, at least, there are a few people who will not appear on television at any price, particularly if it interferes with lunch.

Woyzeck at the BAM

went to see Robert Wilson's production of Woyzeck with a friend at the Brooklyn Academy of Music saturday. it was really so refreshing to see Wilson's minimalist, yet aesthetically intriguing, avant garde sets, along with surreal often dirge-ful music by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. In addition, the stage costumes were awesome, and reminded me of the lush retro-sci-fi environment of Dark City.

the significance of the near pleading dialogue ("misery is the river of the world") as well as the quality of the aural delivery was in such contrast to the cloying almost pathetic motivations of the production of "Burn This" (with Edward Norton and Catherine Keener) that i had seen the week before. [although i was genuinely grateful to see that production as well, as it made me more conscious of how overly indulgent we can be with our petty little lives, despite the greater context around us.]

at Woyzeck, i felt like i was at an opera house in europe. and i was, sort of. besides the american director, the cast was Danish, and the production had been first delivered in Copenhagen. such a change from anything we are used to seeing at the Met or the City Opera.

i'll definitely have to come out here to BAM more often.

[as an aside, i also recently saw Edward Norton and Catherine Keener in the dark comedy "Death to Smoochy" (now on DVD), which i actually thought was pretty good (despite the critics), and where Norton and Keener can be seen at their relative best together.]

Joint Ventures in China, a Struggle for Power

In U.S.-China Firm, a Struggle for Power
American Uses Relationships to Save Joint Venture From Executives' Scheme
By John Pomfret, Washington Post Foreign Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3156-2002Nov17.html
Monday, November 18, 2002; Page A01

NANTONG, China -- On a brisk afternoon in January, a Chinese man ran up to a van parked in front of the U.S.-Chinese joint venture where he worked, banged on the window and tossed a pile of documents on the driver's lap. The startled driver called down Alex Smayda, a 33-year-old Californian who was upstairs at a board meeting.

The documents and other subsequent discoveries showed that the company's Chinese executives had secretly established their own companies to compete with the joint venture, the Nantong UniStar Electro-Mechanical Industries Co. And they had deposited $400,000 of its money into a private bank account.

The document drop on that winter's day touched off a struggle at UniStar, which makes automobile parts. It matched Chinese businessmen against their American partners over a $5.3 million investment in one of the fastest-growing automobile markets in the world. Before it ended, UniStar's workers almost rioted in support of the Americans. The Americans quashed plans to send toughs to jump the Chinese general manager. And the general manager came close to gaining control of the investment before the Americans wrestled it back.

The battle for UniStar was a tense exercise in wielding power in one of the most important arenas in China today, the multi- billion-dollar world of joint Chinese-foreign business. Its unfolding was emblematic of the often troubled interactions between Western firms, which seek the Holy Grail of China's 1.3 billion consumers, and Chinese businesses, which seek to maximize profits in a country where regulations and law are not always the last word.

Smayda succeeded in the battle because he knew what Chinese officials cared about -- foreign investment, taxes and social stability -- and which buttons to push. The story of his fight, part of a series of occasional articles about power in the People's Republic of China, focuses on what remains the most powerful tool in China: relationships. But it also shows that contracts, evidence and cash play important roles as well. It is that murky combination -- relationships, law and money -- that determines who wins in China today.

Foreign investment has helped power China's transformation from a rural backwater in the early 1980s to an aspiring world power. By the end of August, according to Chinese statistics, foreign companies had poured $806 billion into 411,495 Chinese enterprises over the last two decades. Since 1993, China has been the favorite destination for foreign capital after the United States.

Nationwide, foreign enterprises contribute 25 percent of China's tax revenue, according to a national tax official. The city of Nantong, on the Yangtze River 60 miles northwest of Shanghai, has {grv}benefited mightily from foreign investment; 1,800 foreign enterprises, including 300 American firms, have invested $5.7 billion in Nantong and generate one-third of its tax revenue.

Foreign investment has allowed China's ruling elite to tap into new sources of power, not from the barrel of a gun, as Mao Zedong saw things, but from the prospectus of an IPO.

While their fathers fought for influence during the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party, which ended Friday, the sons of President Jiang Zemin, Premier Zhu Rongji and legislative chief Li Peng have already voted for the future. Jiang Mianheng is a telecom and real estate mogul in Shanghai. Levin Zhu is an executive at a Western-funded investment bank. Li Xiaopeng is the CEO of Huaneng Power International Inc., listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Attracting foreign investment has also become a way up the Chinese political ladder, and these days the leaders of Chinese cities routinely compete with one another for foreign cash. This has spurred some local governments to become more transparent, simplify their bureaucracies and even experiment with political reform.

Take Shunde, a city in Guangdong province. It has undertaken one of China's most significant government reform programs as a way to attract and keep foreign investors. The local government has laid down guidelines for all to see on how decisions should be made, a transparency unheard of in the rest of China. The city's budget, the salaries of officials, and state contracts and other government business are published in a newspaper, Shunde Political and Administrative Matters. Investment has poured in. Per capita income hovers around $1,000 a month, well over 10 times the national average.

"If a city wants to attract foreign investment," said Chen Yongzhi, Shunde's former Communist Party secretary and one of the masterminds of the local reform movement, government services "have to be better and better. Only places with a sustainable economy have a sustainable government."

Chen has benefited as well. He was recently given a major promotion and was a delegate to the 16th party congress.

First Sign of Trouble

Cutler & Co., an asset management firm from Medford, Ore., bought 60 percent of the UniStar plant in 1998. UniStar had lost money since it was formed in 1993, but Cutler officials thought they could turn things around. Smayda was given the task.

A lanky American with a mischievous smile, Smayda got his first job working for a defense contractor in Taiwan about 10 years ago. He began to study Chinese and worked on the skill of relationship-building by socializing with Taiwanese government leaders and teaching English to their wives. Smayda came to China five years ago, bringing good Mandarin and, more important, the ability to navigate in Chinese society.

At that board meeting last January, things were looking good for UniStar. The firm, which manufactures wire harnesses for passenger cars, was predicting its first profits. But the documents dropped into the van told a strange story. UniStar was selling 250-pound coils of copper to a company called Asian Star at one-tenth the market price. And UniStar was not paying taxes on the sales.

At Nantong's municipal business registry, aides sent by Smayda found that two women identified as Asian Star's chiefs were the wives of Uni- Star executives. In addition, Asian Star had set up machinery inside UniStar's factory.

At the next board meeting on Feb. 8, Smayda confronted his Chinese partners with his findings. They denied knowledge of the firm. But Smayda blamed one of them, general manager Jiang Minquan, in spite of the denials.

A product of China's state-owned enterprise system, Jiang had a reputation as a smart manager. But like most gifted Chinese businessmen, he was also adept at cutting corners. Later on, Jiang justified his actions this way:

"We didn't want to lose a precious business opportunity to grow our business and occupy the market," he said. "But I knew clearly that our foreign partner wouldn't agree with us. So we set up the business in the name of our Chinese side."

Nevertheless, Smayda had a problem. His general manager was establishing companies that were competing with UniStar and then denying knowledge of those firms. Smayda needed the government's help to force Jiang to stop. But as a foreigner, he felt powerless, especially in a relatively small place like Nantong, where local officials tend to protect their own.

At one point, Smayda showed up at Nantong's tax bureau to report that Jiang was violating Chinese regulations by selling goods and not paying taxes. He found the door locked and UniStar's accountant -- a man who helped cook the books -- huddling with tax inspectors inside.

Smayda pounded on the door and barged in. "I said, 'Get this guy out of this place,' " he said. " 'I'm here to report that this guy is breaking the law, defrauding the government and our company.' "

Spies at the Factory

Smayda had some allies. Workers at the factory were feeding Smayda and his team documents. One document indicated that Jiang was negotiating to open a wire harness factory in Anhui province, several hundred miles away.

Led by a 50-year-old laborer named Zhang Ruimin, workers at the factory had decided to throw in their lot with the Americans. The key issue, Zhang said, was that the Chinese side of the joint venture, which previously was held by a public company, had recently been privatized; Jiang had taken 25 percent of the shares.

The workers were worried that Jiang was moving capital from the joint venture to the Chinese side of the company, opening competing businesses that would end up destroying the joint venture and with it their jobs.

"We had spies everywhere," Zhang said. "Guys at the guardhouse were watching stuff leave the factory and writing it down. We had people watching the movements of the general manager. We had people in all of their offices -- from accounting to shipping -- copying files."

Smayda dubbed Zhang "the man who knew too much."

"I would walk outside and someone in the bushes would say, 'Psst, over here,' and hand me something. I would get in the elevator and the elevator man would stop between floors and tell me what he'd seen," Smayda said.

When tensions were at their highest, workers told Smayda they were preparing to pay a motorcycle gang $100 to teach Jiang a lesson. Smayda nixed that plan.

On Feb. 26, Smayda called the mayor's office to complain and was invited over by one of his aides. "I said our Chinese partner is breaking the law," Smayda said. "I told him I was returning to the factory to solve it with or without government help."

Smayda returned to the factory gates to find a truck heading out of the factory with some of the Chinese executives inside. Smayda swung his van around and blocked its path.

"By this time, workers are looking out the windows, streaming out into the courtyard," Smayda said. "Some of them start cheering. Some of them start making a handcuffs sign with their hands and pointing at the general manager's office. Then some of them start chanting 'Arrest him! Arrest him.' "

Smayda mounted the border of a small fountain and addressed the crowd.

"I told them we were there to protect the factory, protect the workers," Smayda said. "I said I would personally stay until the problems were resolved. It was critical to get the support of the masses, just like in 'Gladiator.' "

Smayda's point was not lost on Nantong officials, who, informed of the brewing unrest, had just arrived at the factory. Local government officials can lose their jobs if workers protest. The head of the foreign investment bureau waded into the crowd and pulled Smayda upstairs to a meeting with Jiang.

Jiang agreed to an audit and to joint custody of the company seals, meaning that no transactions could take place without the approval of both sides. The audit yielded results: hundreds of thousands of dollars in false receipts and the discovery of new factories owned secretly by the Chinese side.

"We needed to be very, very careful," Smayda said, "because if the audit went too far and discovered real problems with the privatization, linked to government officials, then it could end up destroying the whole company even if we won."

At 3:05 p.m. on March 5, Xia Jun, the accountant, burst into the shipping office, told the shipping supervisor to get out of the way and began erasing files at her computer. Word went out on the grapevine and Smayda rushed to the police.

"I said, 'You have to do something,' " Smayda said. "The police said they'd be over in the morning. I went to the mayor's secretary again. He said it's a communication problem. The head of the foreign investment bureau actually told me to come back in a month. We were watching the factory disappear before our eyes."

Influence in High Places

Smayda decided to appeal to officials in Nanjing, the provincial capital. On March 19, he found himself in a private club owned by a friend in Nanjing, drinking with government officials. The friend had arranged meetings with aides of several department chiefs in the province, including the prosecutor's office and the vice governor in charge of foreign investment.

The aides asked Smayda to get a letter from the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai detailing the charges. Officials in the provincial capital then called Nantong.

When Smayda returned to Nantong, the atmosphere had changed. Qian Zhongyi, a secretary general in the Nantong government, had been placed in charge of the issue and, despite a bad cold, held a meeting with Smayda at city hall.

"Alex said if you don't solve this problem I will go back to the province and use all the methods at my disposal," Qian said. "He's been in China a long time. He does have good relations. We didn't want to test him."

As Qian and others eventually saw it, Jiang broke the law by trying to establish firms to compete with UniStar, basically trying to steal the company's business. But he was pushed to do this because Cutler & Co. had rejected a series of proposals to expand investment in the plant.

"Jiang is not a crook," Qian said. "He was trying to grow the business. The key issue was that he needed to obey the law. We realized he had to go."

In an interview, Jiang denied breaking the law and attributed the problems at UniStar to bad communication between Cutler and its Chinese partners. He accused "people or workers with backward thoughts and beliefs" of "trying to overthrow me" by "aggravating disputes."

A deal was cut. Cutler & Co. agreed not to push for Jiang's prosecution and the Nantong authorities agreed to bend the law, force him to sell his shares and remove him from the factory. Several others, including accountant Xia Jun, left with him. The decision was announced on March 29 in a meeting at city hall.

Smayda returned to the factory afterward.

"Light was fading. All the workers, about 700 of them, were gathered in the courtyard. They shot off fireworks. We came back to their cheers," Smayda said. "It was like 100 years ago in the United States. Some union guy saying, 'Rise up! Solidarity!' It was a huge day."

These days business is booming. UniStar is growing at 15 percent a month and is planning to expand -- into the Anhui firm that Jiang had wanted to keep as his own.

Smayda was recently in Beijing, trying to fix another joint venture that a Chinese partner was angling to steal.

"It never ends," he said.

Lilly Heir Makes $100 Million Bequest
to Poetry Magazine

Lilly Heir Makes $100 Million Bequest to Poetry Magazine
By STEPHEN KINZER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/books/19GIFT.html

CHICAGO, Nov. 18 — An ailing heir who tried but failed to have her poems published in a small literary journal has given that journal an astonishing bequest that is likely to be worth more than $100 million.

Ruth Lilly, 87, an heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, submitted several poems to Poetry magazine in the 1970's and was rewarded only with handwritten rejection notes from the editor, Joseph Parisi. Evidently she did not take the rejections to heart. Mr. Parisi announced her gift at the magazine's 90th-anniversary dinner on Friday.

"Its a real mind-blower," said the United States' poet laureate, Billy Collins, who was at the dinner. "Poetry has always had the reputation as being the poor little match girl of the arts. Well, the poor little match girl just hit the lottery."

This gift has suddenly turned Poetry from a struggling journal little known outside literary circles to one of the world's richest publications. Mr. Parisi said it was by far the largest single donation ever made to an institution devoted to poetry.

"There just isn't anything to compare it to," Mr. Parisi said. "We will be the largest foundation in the world devoted to poetry. It's a huge responsibility, as I'm realizing every day more and more."

Poetry magazine was founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, who had worked as an art critic for The Chicago Tribune. Like many journals dedicated to fine literature, it has been poor for most of its life. At times its assets have been less than $100. It has never missed an issue, however, and is one of the oldest continuously published literary journals in the United States.

The magazine has published works by some of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century, including T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery and Wallace Stevens. It pays a flat rate of $2 a line and has a monthly circulation of 12,000.

Mr. Parisi said he had not met Ms. Lilly but understood that she was pleased with the way his magazine handled her previous donations. During the 1980's she endowed two fellowships for young poets and a poetry prize that is now worth $100,000.

"Last month I got a call from a lawyer who said he was preparing a new estate plan for Mrs. Lilly and that we were to be one of the beneficiaries," Mr. Parisi said. "He told me I better sit down because it was going to be quite a large amount of money. When we got over there, we found this estate document that was literally eight inches thick. It's a very complicated structure, with money coming in over 15 or 20 years or more. Part of it is based on stock prices. I don't understand it all myself yet. Nobody knows exactly how much it will ultimately be, but let's say were comfortably into the nine figures."

Mr. Parisi said he was hiring money managers and investment advisers. He said part of the gift would be used to expand the magazine's four-member staff, which handles everything from editing to typesetting, and move it out of its cramped quarters on the second floor of a private library in Chicago.

Beyond that, Mr. Parisi said, he hopes to start programs to draw more people to poetry, including one to train middle school and high school teachers how to introduce their students to contemporary poetry.

"This is something that will ultimately be nationwide, and I hope it will grow like Topsy," he said. "Our overall mission will remain the same, which is to encourage poets every which way we can and to increase the audience for poetry."

News of the donation stunned the poetry world.

"It's really wonderful that poetry can get this kind of attention and affection," said Aime Beal, managing editor of Alice James Books, a small publisher in Maine that specializes in poetry. "I can't imagine having a budget like that. You could do anything."

The Michigan poet Richard Tillinghast said the donation "seems to come right out of the blue, but on the other hand it is harmonious with the greater visibility of poetry over the last 10 years."

"I've got a very high opinion of Poetry magazine," Mr. Tillinghast said. "You can pick up an issue and see a very representative selection of what's going on in poetry. So this is great news from every point of view."

Ms. Lilly has made many donations to charitable institutions, concentrating them in her native Indiana.

Money from her fortune has gone to help build parks, libraries and hospitals, as well as for more unusual purposes like supporting members of the clergy who want to take time off from their routines to reflect on their calling.

Unlike many philanthropists, Ms. Lilly does not seek publicity. Many recipients of her largess are not even aware of her involvement.

"She doesn't want her name on anything, and I doubt she's ever cut a ribbon," Mr. Parisi said. "That's good for us, because you don't get a plaque for supporting poetry. You better get a reward in heaven, because you sure won't get one on earth."

Deal to Sell Burger King Collapses

Deal to Sell Burger King Collapses
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/business/19BURG.html

The home of the Whopper appears to be headed for the discount menu, where it could become a popular item, perhaps even for Warren E. Buffett.

The planned $2.26 billion sale of Burger King was scuttled yesterday after its parent, Diageo P.L.C., acknowledged that the group of financiers that had agreed to acquire it had backed out of the deal.

While the group — the Texas Pacific Group, Goldman Sachs & Company and Bain Capital — is still talking with Diageo about a deal at a much lower price, about half a dozen suitors that were rejected when Burger King was first put up for sale are considering new offers.

The most intriguing potential new suitor, Mr. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, was not part of the early bidding. But executives close to the sale process said yesterday that Mr. Buffett was taking a serious look at a possible offer for Burger King. Berkshire already owns Dairy Queen.

Among the list of other bargain hunters evaluating a possible new bid are the Triarc Companies, the owner of Arby's; the Blackstone Group; Madison Dearborn Partners; and Thomas H. Lee Partners, according to executives close to the sale process. Several of the potential suitors have already scheduled meetings with Diageo and its advisers to examine Burger King's finances.

Diageo, which owns brands that include Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff and Captain Morgan, is now expected to receive nothing close to the $2.26 billion that it expected when it announced the deal in July. Burger King has had soft sales this fall as it engages in a fierce price war with McDonald's and Wendy's. Under the sale agreement to the investor group, Burger King had to satisfy "certain performance targets" for the deal to be completed. Earlier this month, Diageo warned that the deal could unravel.

The investor group led by Texas Pacific now wants to pay only about $1.5 billion for Burger King, the executives said. Diageo's own broker, the Cazenove Group, expects the sale price to be $1.5 billion.

Shares of Diageo plunged 4.1 percent yesterday after it announced that the deal was in jeopardy, falling 29.5 pence, to 681 pence.

Analysts are worried that a deal will come at a significant discount to the price first envisioned and will probably not be completed by the end of the year.

"There is little visibility on the timing or the likely changes to the terms and price, but clearly the change could be more than the $200 million change that we originally thought," Mark Puleikis, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, which is acting as an adviser to Diageo, wrote in a note to his clients. "While we remain a fundamental bull on the stock and feel that the current valuation is undemanding, we find it difficult to see the shares performing until the market gets clarification on both the B.K. issue and current trading conditions."

Diageo has struggled for more than two years to shed Burger King. In June 2000, Diageo announced its intention to sell 20 percent of Burger King, setting off speculation that a spinoff was likely. The public offering was later canceled after the company sold its Pillsbury division, home to brands like Green Giant vegetables and Betty Crocker, to General Mills.

It is unclear whether the delay of the sale will affect the day-to-day operations of Burger King, which has 11,000 outlets worldwide. Burger King's franchisees, which own 92 percent of the company's restaurants, have said that the sale process has been unsettling because management, which has had nine chief executives in 12 years, has had to focus on the negotiations and not on running the business.

Still, the franchisees have pressed for the sale and have long backed Texas Pacific as the preferred buyer. Burger King's chief executive, John H. Dasburg, has a longstanding connection with Texas Pacific: he ran Northwest Airlines when Texas Pacific sold the carrier a stake in Continental Airlines. Texas Pacific is credited with turning around several businesses, including Continental Airlines and Ducati motorcycles.

China Leaps Into Internet Era

China Leaps Into Internet Era
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-A-New-Age.html
Filed at 1:46 a.m. ET

BEIJING (AP) -- They wear snazzy suits and welcome rich capitalists, but they still call each other ``comrade.'' At their every gathering, the mantra is the same: Only the Communist Party can keep the peace while guiding China through the era of the Internet and the Starbucks frappucino.

In 1997, the last time the party gathered to decide the policies and personalities to guide 1.3 billion people, China's leaders were paying homage to Deng Xiaoping, the recently dead revolutionary hero who ended decades of political and economic turmoil by decreeing class struggle out and prosperity in.

They still are. Five years on, they stood last week beneath a golden hammer and sickle at the Communist Party Congress, bowed their heads in silent ritual for the martyrs of revolution and endured speeches peppered with the names of Deng and Mao Zedong.

Only the faces changed.

Vice President Hu Jintao, 59, replaced President Jiang Zemin, 76, as party general secretary, and a raft of other younger politicians moved up at a congress whose other major act was to proclaim it would ``keep pace with the times'' by allowing the ``advanced forces of production'' -- capitalist moneymakers -- to join up.

China is zooming into the 21st century, its skylines shooting heavenward like some souped-up computer-design program gone haywire. Internet use is soaring and Starbucks has invaded Beijing's imperial fortress, the Forbidden City. But China's Leninist politics remain frozen in time.

In 1997, dissidents emboldened by the leadership's laissez-faire treatment of the economy and its abandonment of any pretense of reining in convulsive social changes tested the waters by forming the China Democracy Party. Trying to follow the law, organizers attempted to register the group. It was banned, and some two dozen organizers were convicted of subversion and sent to prison.

The few dissidents raising their voices during this year's party congress did so from overseas, where most lucky enough to regain their freedom now live.

In five years, Beijing's streets have changed beyond recognition: Low-slung dumpling and noodle shops along the Avenue of Eternal Peace have vanished, replaced by block-long malls and ``six-star'' hotels. Dusty northern suburbs have been paved over by industrial parks.

The Asian financial crisis decimated regional economies in 1997 but left China unscathed, apart from a short-lived decline in foreign investment. China's economy is growing by more than 7 percent a year, and showcase cities like Beijing and Shanghai feature better food, better dress and better public transport.

In the walled compounds of defunct factories, high-rise apartment buildings have sprouted -- unaffordable for workers who once toiled there. They now scrape by peddling socks, shoe insoles and flowers on city sidewalks. Laughing groups of boys hauling barrels of restaurant slop in the wee hours zip back to their farms on newly motorized bicycle carts.

In an age of terrorism, layoffs and anger over abuse of power, evidence of the leadership's obsession with security is more intense than in 1997. Video cameras watch pedestrian tunnels and street corners where armed police stood guard as delegates' motorcades blew past.

Plastic ID cards embedded with computer chips were required to enter the Great Hall of the People during the congress. The Internet age may allow Chinese unprecedented access to the outside world, but it also gives the authorities new tools to keep tabs on a public excluded from all but the most ceremonial aspects of political life.

The finale to Jiang's 13 years in power completed a process begun in 1997, when an earlier group of elder revolutionaries retired, clearing party opposition to capitalistic policies like mergers, layoffs, bankruptcies and restructuring.

China has since gained membership in the World Trade Organization with promises to open its markets; dramatically raised home ownership by selling off state-owned housing; won the 2008 Olympics and muzzled international criticism of its authoritarianism through canny diplomacy.

Five years ago, the party paid some lip service to ``enhancing democracy.'' This time, Jiang made no offer to let ``100 flowers blossom'' with a diversity of opinions; instead, he spoke of ``improving public morality.'' A fan of the Confucian order of knowing one's place, he declared government and party in charge of ``the exercise of political and labor rights.''

Today, Chinese grumble at widespread corruption but avoid politics. Having a greater say in choosing their leaders remains a distant dream.

And the leaders? Just like 1997, only more so, they're focused on keeping their promise to the masses -- building the ``well-off'' lifestyle that will make more Chinese richer, and keep the Communist Party safely in power for the next five years and, they hope, for many more beyond.

------

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Elaine Kurtenbach, Beijing bureau chief for The Associated Press from 1994 to 2000, now covers China business from Hong Kong.

Fuel in NYC Buildings Raises Concern

Fuel in Buildings Raises Concern
By CHARLES V. BAGLI
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/nyregion/19FUEL.html

Tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel are stored in a half-dozen big buildings in Manhattan, posing a potentially lethal hazard in the event of an accident or a terrorist attack.

The city's Buildings and Fire Departments are investigating the fuel tanks at the buildings because of the similarities to the situation at 7 World Trade Center, where thousands of gallons of burning fuel may have contributed to the collapse of that skyscraper after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. One building in particular is believed to have twice as much fuel as 7 World Trade Center, in a building half the size.

As the investigation proceeds, city officials are trying to determine whether owners and tenants of the buildings violated the city's fire and building codes when they installed dozens of diesel fuel tanks in the buildings in the 1990's for huge backup generators and air-conditioners.

Last week, building inspectors found at least eight tanks on the upper floors of one tower in TriBeCa — containing a total of 2,200 gallons of diesel fuel — that may be illegal, officials said. But before they issue any citations for violations, the Buildings Department officials are poring over confusing and often conflicting records to determine whether the department had issued a waiver of the building code, as well as exactly how much fuel is stored in the TriBeCa building and where.

The buildings, known as telecom hotels, house telecommunications and Internet tenants that require backup generators and diesel fuel to keep their computers running and cool in a blackout. The buildings serve, as a tenant in the TriBeCa tower once put it, as a "nerve center" for international telecommunications.

But since the attack on the World Trade Center, city officials have been examining whether the current fire and building codes governing construction standards, as well as fuel storage in urban areas, are adequate in light of new realities.

With the spread of telecom hotels in many cities, the National Conference of States on Building Codes and Standards is closely watching what happens in New York, said Mike Unthank, the organization's president and the top state building official in New Mexico. The group is considering adopting a model building code clause for fuel tanks that could be adopted at state and local levels.

The New York Times is withholding the addresses of the buildings at the request of city officials, who cited their importance to international telecommunications and their potential as terrorist targets.

"The building code task force is looking at fuel tank storage issues, including the size and location of tanks and the transfer piping, in all buildings, not just telco buildings," said Patricia J. Lancaster, the buildings commissioner. "We're examining the code for tall buildings with regard to all sorts of threats, including biohazards, chemical and nuclear hazards, and bombs."

The TriBeCa tower where the Buildings and Fire Departments completed their inspection last week has long been the subject of complaints from surrounding residents. Bruce L. Ehrmann, co-founder of Neighbors Against Noise — noxious odors, incessant sounds and emissions — said that the numerous generators and air-conditioners that sprang up on every ledge of the tower sound like a thundering locomotive and spew pollution over the surrounding residential buildings.

But no one gave the tanks that supplied fuel for the generators much thought until the attack on the World Trade Center.

Unlike the twin towers, 7 World Trade Center was not hit by a jet, but investigators did determine that a catastrophic blaze fed by diesel fuel in the 47-story tower may have caused its collapse. It also appears that diesel fuel continued to be pumped from the tanks into the blaze after the building began to burn.

A report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency concluded that more analysis was needed to determine the full role of the burning diesel fuel in the collapse. Shyam Sunder, chief investigator for the review of the World Trade Center by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said that the agency was looking at the sources of fuel in the building, where there were seven tanks with a combined capacity of 42,000 gallons, and what led to its ignition. "We know for sure that the collapse of 7 was significantly due to the fires in the building," Mr. Sunder said. "The FEMA report suggests that the fires persisted for a long time."

Consolidated Edison, which had an electrical substation underneath 7 World Trade Center, and its insurance companies have filed a $314 million lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land, charging it with improper use and maintenance of the diesel fuel tanks and citing their role in the fire.

With new diesel generators and fuel tanks being installed periodically at the tower in TriBeCa, Neighbors Against Noise also began to raise questions about all that fuel sloshing around in one building. Councilman Alan J. Gerson, who has worked with the group, then asked the Buildings Department to look into the matter.

"This is a potential tinderbox," Mr. Gerson said. "It's unacceptable to have any significant quantity of fuel stored above ground, literally across the street from where people live. We need to have stepped-up enforcement and new building code regulations. We should also encourage the conversion of diesel engines to fuel cell technology."

John F. Hennessy III, chairman of Syska Hennessy Group, a consulting, engineering and construction firm involved in the construction of 7 World Trade Center, played down the potential hazard of the fuel tanks in a dense urban environment.

"Is it something that should be looked at?" Mr. Hennessy said. "Certainly. But at the same time, I don't think we have a ticking time bomb in these buildings."

"You're not looking at an overly dangerous situation," if fuel tanks are installed properly and according to building and fire codes, he said. "Fuel oil is not like gasoline; it burns slower. It kept burning in 7 because there was nothing to extinguish the fire."

But the volume of fuel and its location concern some experts.

According to a review of Fire Department permits, there are tanks with a capacity of 45,425 gallons in the basement and on the upper floors of the TriBeCa tower. But records at the State Department of Environmental Conservation indicate the number is far higher: 80,560 gallons, about twice the amount at 7 World Trade Center, in a building half the size. The records, which are no longer available on the Internet because of security concerns, did not include two generators and fuel tanks installed in September.

Battalion Chief Bill Van Wart, a spokesman for the Fire Department, would not explain the discrepancy.

Last week, the Buildings Department completed an inspection of the TriBeCa tower that found tanks with a capacity of "upwards of 80,000 gallons," including eight 275-gallon tanks on the upper floors that may have been in violation of the city fire and building codes. Fire Department records indicate that another building housing telecommunications equipment has eight fuel tanks with a total capacity of 156,500 gallons.

The codes do not limit the amount of fuel stored in the basement of a building, as long as the steel tanks have a specific fire rating and are surrounded by a catch basin and a concrete wall. But under the city code, only one 275-gallon tank per floor is permitted on above-ground floors.

Ms. Lancaster said her department was trying to determine whether a waiver was granted to the tenants or landlord who installed the equipment, in which case the multiple tanks would be legal. Otherwise, the owners, who face possible fines and criminal charges, will be required to bring the tanks into compliance with the building code, Ms. Lancaster said.

A spokesman for the landlord of the TriBeCa tower declined to comment.

Many hospitals and educational institutions have backup power stations. But telecommunications centers, known in the trade as telecom hotels, are a more recent phenomenon that grew very rapidly in many major cities, beginning in the mid-1990's with the rapid growth of telecommunications and Internet companies.

Landlords in many cities began converting some older buildings with thick floors capable of supporting heavy equipment, computers and generators. In New York, the companies gobbled up 4.9 million square feet in less than three years.

One of the first buildings to become a telecom hotel was the tower in TriBeCa, where the landlord initially installed generators and air-conditioners on the ground floor, creating a street-level din for the surrounding neighbors. But as the telecommunications companies in the building multiplied, the generators started showing up on ledges on higher floors. The 275-gallon tanks on the upper floors feed the generators and are in turn fed by larger underground tanks. Portable generators are also set up on the streets outside the brick tower.

Local residents complained that noise continued to increase at the tower. One man said he could not hear the television in his living room, while other people had not opened their double-pane windows in five years.

Now there are the fuel tanks. According to the Buildings Department, there are about 60 tanks in the building, including 39 on above-ground floors and outside the structure.

"If this is potentially another 7 World Trade," said Tim Lannan, a co-founder of Neighbors Against Noise, "it's a huge concern."

New Book Details Bush Advisers' Doubts and Rivalries

New Book Details Bush Advisers' Doubts and Rivalries
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 16, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61461-2002Nov15.html

[full Woodward article that this article is also based on is here:]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64603-2002Nov16.html

A new book says President Bush's advisers had grave doubts about the early course of the war in Afghanistan and suggests that the ultimate defeat of the Taliban was due largely to millions of dollars in hundred-dollar bills the CIA handed out to Afghan warlords to win their support.

"Bush at War," by Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, draws on four hours of interviews with Bush and quotes 15,000 words from National Security Council and other White House meetings in reconstructing the internal debate that led to U.S. military action in Afghanistan and the decision to aggressively confront Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In detailing tensions within Bush's war cabinet, the book describes Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as frequently at odds with Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and struggling to establish a relationship with Bush. But it depicts Powell as determined to make his case that military action against Iraq without the help of allies could have disastrous consequences, a chance he finally got at a dinner with Bush last Aug. 5.

While the dinner has been previously reported, the book describes in detail the case Powell made -- reading from an outline on loose-leaf paper -- that the United States has to have international support against Iraq. "It's nice to say we can do it unilaterally," Powell told the president bluntly, "except you can't."

The dinner persuaded Bush to seek a resolution from the United Nations over the objections of Cheney and Rumsfeld.

The book reports that despite their outward optimism, Bush's advisers had deep doubts about their strategy of bombing the Taliban while relying on ground forces from the Northern Alliance, the ragtag, factionalized opposition. At one point, the Pentagon developed plans to send in 50,000 U.S. troops. Bush, according to the book, hated what he saw as "hand-wringing" by his aides, but even he expressed doubts about the strategy, roaring at one point that he was "concerned about the fact that things aren't moving."

At a climactic meeting in the Situation Room two weeks into the campaign, Bush went around the table, demanding that his aides affirm their support for the strategy. They pledged allegiance to his plan, and his call for alternatives was met with unanimous "no's."

"Don't let the press panic us," Bush said.

According to "Bush at War," the CIA spent $70 million in direct cash outlays on the ground in Afghanistan, a figure that also included money for setting up field hospitals. "That's one bargain," the president said in an interview with Woodward last August. The money was handed out by about a half-dozen CIA teams spread through the country, starting with a 10-man paramilitary team code-named "Jawbreaker" that landed in Afghanistan on Sept. 27, 2001. The team leader carried $3 million in a single attache case.

In the interview, conducted at the president's ranch in Crawford, Tex., Bush was unusually reflective about his personal style and his ambitions as president. "Sometimes that's the way I am -- fiery," he said, describing his relationship with his aides, and added: "I can be an impatient person." He spoke about his "instincts" or his "instinctive" reactions a dozen times during the ranch interview. "I'm not a textbook player; I'm a gut player," he said.

Bush outlined a far-reaching moral mission for his presidency in the aftermath of the attacks.

"I will seize the opportunity to achieve big goals," Bush said. "There is nothing bigger than to achieve world peace." Bush, discussing his experiences as a troubleshooter during his father's presidency and campaigns, said, "The vision thing matters. That's another lesson I learned."

Describing his aspirations for an ambitious reordering of the world through preemptive and perhaps unilateral action, Bush turned first to Iraq but then to North Korea and its dictator Kim Jong Il. With the administration contemplating a response to North Korea's nuclear weapons program, Woodward reports that Bush shouted and waved his finger in the air as he vented about Kim.

"I loathe Kim Jong Il," Bush said. "I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people. And I have seen intelligence of these prison camps -- they're huge -- that he uses to break up families, and to torture people."

During the interview Bush was joined by first lady Laura Bush, who said she had been nervous and anxious after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. "I woke up in the middle of the night," the first lady said, gesturing toward her husband. "I know you did. I mean, I'd wake up in the middle of the night and know he was awake."

"I don't remember that. Was I some?" Bush asked, looking at her.

Woodward recounts that she nodded a strong affirmative.

"Yes," the president conceded. "Yes. Right after the attacks, I mean, I was emotional."

Bush said security fears forced him to cancel two White House poker games with friends from East Texas. Bush also said he was "floored" to learn that 11 days after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the FBI had interviewed 417 people as part of its terrorist sweep and that agents had put 331 people on their watch list, which consists of potential terrorists who might be in the United States or traveling to the country. Bush said he decided to keep the number secret because of the trauma that remained from the attacks.

In Bush's fractious war cabinet, previously unreported personal differences appear to be at least as pronounced as the widely known policy disputes: Cheney takes a swipe at Powell, Powell perhaps unintentionally denigrates the military, and Powell and Rumsfeld "had at times been almost glaring at each other across the table" over Afghanistan operations. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bypasses Rumsfeld to give to Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, the military information they need and the gossip they crave.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, whose role has been something of a mystery to those outside the inner circle of the administration, emerges as a backstage broker among members of Bush's war council who absorbs Bush's frustration when deliberations or events peeve him. Bush described her as "a very thorough person, constantly mother-henning me."

Rumsfeld is portrayed as irascible and visibly unhappy that, during the early days of war planning, the dominant figure was CIA Director George J. Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration. "This is the CIA's strategy," Rumsfeld railed at an NSC meeting nine days after the invasion of Afghanistan. "They developed the strategy. We're just executing the strategy."

The book's extensive portrait of Powell conveys his frustration with having to pretend that there was a policy consensus within the war cabinet on Iraq and the Middle East. He called it being "in the icebox" during periods when the White House banned him from television.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, according to the book, Karl Rove, Bush's chief political aide, "detected a subtle, subversive tendency, as if Powell were protecting his centrist credentials and his own political future at Bush's expense."

The ill will continued into the administration, when Rove "felt Powell was beyond political control and operating out of a sense of entitlement."

Powell's sense of isolation was so great that last March he began requesting private time with Bush in an effort to bond. Rice sat in on the meetings, held once a week for 20 or 30 minutes. "I think we're really making some headway in the relationship," Powell is quoted as telling Armitage, his best friend, after a summer conversation in the Oval Office.

Bush decided to take his case against Hussein to the United Nations in response to Powell and over the initial opposition of Cheney, who is described as "beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam." Cheney continued to argue against new resolutions giving Iraq one last chance, but Bush yielded to Powell's case for such an offer.

When Bush spoke to the U.N. General Assembly, however, the president realized that the addition to his speech had been left off the TelePrompTer. "With only mild awkwardness, he ad-libbed it," according to the book.

Bush said during a February visit to the North Korean border that he had no intention of invading North Korea, but made it clear in the interview with Woodward he is not content with the status quo. "They tell me, we don't need to move too fast, because the financial burdens on people will be so immense if we try to -- if this guy were to topple," Bush said. But, he went on, "Either you believe in freedom and want to -- and worry about the human condition, or you don't."

In another sign of how deeply the president personalizes international relations, the book describes how Bush's relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin flowered after the president heard that Putin had been given a cross by his mother. In his interview, Bush recalled saying to Putin: "That speaks volumes to me, Mr. President. May I call you Vladimir?"

During a meeting in New York with Pakistan's leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Bush bluntly denounced an article by investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh in the New Yorker magazine. The article, published in December, reported that the Pentagon had contingency plans to work with an Israeli special operations unit to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons if the country became unstable. "Seymour Hersh is a liar," Bush is quoted as telling Musharraf.

The president is shown to be preoccupied by public perceptions of the war, looking at polling data from Rove, now his senior adviser, even after pretending to have no interest.

Roger E. Ailes, a media coach for Bush's father and now chairman of the Fox News Channel, sent a confidential communication to the White House in the weeks after the terrorist attacks. Rove took the Ailes communication to the president. "His back-channel message: The American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible," Woodward wrote. He added that Ailes, who has angrily challenged reports that his news channel has a conservative bias, added a warning: "Support would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly."

The book is based on interviews with more than 100 people involved in planning and executing the war. Woodward would not describe the records of NSC meetings he reviewed beyond saying that they were official and verbatim, and that in many cases he was able to check the accounts with multiple sources.

In a note to readers, Woodward said that most of the interviews were conducted on background, meaning that he could use the information but the sources would not be identified by name. The 378-page book includes copious instances of Woodward's hallmark of revealing the interior monologues of key newsmakers, including a description of Rice's thoughts as she watched television alone.

Since his Watergate collaboration with Carl Bernstein, Woodward has written a parade of bestsellers on subjects that include intrigue at the Pentagon, the Federal Reserve Board and the Supreme Court. Woodward, 59, shared in his second Pulitzer Prize this year as part of a team of reporters from The Post's national staff recognized for covering the war on terrorism.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

China's new elite seeks a direction

China's new elite seeks a direction
By John Pomfret The Washington Post
http://www.iht.com/articles/77127.html

BEIJING The Communist Party leadership in Beijing has sent a mixed message with its choices for the Politburo's new Standing Committee, the select group of party mandarins who run the world's most populous country.

There is China the emerging economic power. There is China the responsible international player. Then there is China the den of thieves. There is the Communist Party, firmly united, remaking itself into a party of technocrats, experts and businessmen. Then there is the party of strongmen and executioners facing the danger of factional rivalries.

Parsing China is never easy. The place is enormous. Anything can be said about this vast country of 1.3 billion souls at any given time and, at least someplace, it is probably true. But a close look at the new nine-member Standing Committee, the most powerful body in the country, gives a sense that China's leaders themselves have not really fixed the direction they want their country to go.
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"There is a schizophrenia at the top," said Wu Guoguang, a political scientist and former Chinese government official. "On one hand it's a Mafia, on the other it's a modern country."
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"I am confused by this message," said a senior Western banker who has dealt with China's senior leadership for years. "They have given us two very competent people, but then the rest are either unknown or so mediocre I don't know what they are trying to do."
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Tops among the men who have respect among people like the banker are Wen Jiabao, No. 3 in the party hierarchy and the presumptive prime minister, and Zeng Qinghong, 63, No. 5 in the hierarchy and expected to be named vice president. Wen is set to manage China's increasingly complex economy, its widespread trade relations and the billions of dollars in foreign investment. Zeng will probably run China's foreign affairs and seek to bolster its growing role in the world.
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But there's a question mark at the top. Hu Jintao, 59, a hydrologist who Friday became the party's general secretary, is a cipher. Colorless but smart, Hu is a Rorschach test for China watchers. Optimists about China cite him as a reformer, ready to experiment with political loosening and farther-reaching economic reforms. Pessimists cite him as another strongman, recalling that he was party secretary in Tibet in 1989 when martial law was declared and that, after the crackdown on student-led demonstrations around Tiananmen Square, he was the first regional party secretary around China to send a congratulatory telegram to the central government.
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Surrounding Hu, in positions No. 2 and Nos. 4-8 on the Standing Committee, are men loyal not to him but to his predecessor as general secretary, President Jiang Zemin, who ruled China for 13 years following the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
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That is the strange thing with China's political transitions, said David Zweig, an expert at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology: "In the United States, a new president gets to pick the people he's working with. In China, the guy going out the door picks them."
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The imbalance in Jiang's favor was felt throughout the 16th Congress of the Communist Party, which ended Thursday and came to its public climax with Friday morning's rollout of the new leadership. In theory, the congress was supposed to be the time and place to introduce Hu to China. But the weeklong gathering turned out to be Jiang's show. Hu did not give one major speech. When Hu did speak at last Friday, he quoted almost whole passages from Jiang's political report.
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Hu called the congress one of "unity." But an expansion of the Standing Committee to nine members from seven underscored an explosion of regional and economic division in China and also the unwillingness to keep any senior leader out of the tent. Within the 24-member Politburo, areas of China that had not been represented for years - such as Xinjiang and Sichuan - saw their party secretaries get a seat.
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Jiang also got himself re-elected to the Central Military Commission, guaranteeing him a major say in all party decisions for the foreseeable future. Jiang even dominated biographical materials handed out by the Communist Party to introduce Hu's new Standing Committee. In theory, Hu's should have been first. But there on page 1 was Jiang Zemin.
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Chinese officials made much of the democracy granted to the 2,114 delegates to the 16th Congress. They were allowed to vote for the 356 voting and alternate members of the Central Committee. Two of Jiang's top allies, Jia Qinglin and Zeng, received the biggest number of no votes, 65 for Jia and 85 for Zeng, delegates said. But both men acceded to the Standing Committee anyway - taking the fourth and fifth spots respectively. Chinese analysts believe that Zeng got negative votes because he is feared. The 63-year-old former rocket scientist has been hailed as the best political infighter in China today. Zeng has done away with Jiang's enemies over the years and ensured that his patron became China's undisputed leader.
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Jia, on the other hand, garnered negative votes because he is associated with the largest smuggling scandal in China's history, Chinese delegates said. Jia, the top candidate to lead the Chinese People's Consultative Conference, a powerless advisory body, was one of the most important officials in Fujian Province from 1986-95, while Lai Changxin was smuggling billions of dollars of oil into Fujian's biggest port and Jia's wife, Lin Youfang, was head of Fujian's state-owned import-export company.
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Chinese sources predicted his presence on the Standing Committee of the Politburo will significantly complicate Hu's job, which is to present an image of a party that is concerned with corruption.
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"Like all new leaders, Hu will need to make a statement at the beginning of his rule with some kind of 'Strike Hard' campaign," predicted a senior Western diplomat. "But with Jia up there, it's kind of hard to get anyone serious about it."
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Also representing the party's darker side is Wu Guanzheng, the Shandong party secretary who rose to prominence because he smashed the Falun Gong spiritual sect in Shandong Province, resulting in scores of deaths. Wu is eighth in the party hierarchy and will lead the Central Disciplinary Inspection Committee, which deals with corruption. Another placed in this category by analysts is Luo Gan, ninth in the hierarchy and the party's security man. A new book, "China's New Rulers: The Secret Files," which purports to be based on internal party documents, says Luo oversaw the execution of 60,000 people for various crimes over the course of four years, far higher than even the highest previous Western estimates.
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Huang Ju and Wu Bangguo, two of Jiang's associates from Shanghai, seemed to have made it onto the Standing Committee mainly because of their association with Jiang.
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"The party likes to say that it has institutionalized a political transition," Wu Guoguang said in a telephone interview from Hong Kong. "But a big portion of these appointments were made as favors by Jiang to people who had been with him for many years. It was like, 'If I can't help you now, I will never be able to help you.' That's more like a secret society than the government of a big country."

Who Needs the U.N. Security Council?

Who Needs the U.N. Security Council?
By JAMES TRAUB
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/magazine/17UNITED.html

Who Needs the U.N. Security Council?
1) The Bush administration, seeking international cover to do what it wants, and 2) everybody else, seeking to rein in the United States. Welcome to the New World Order.

''Diplomacy is about an illusion,'' [Gelson] Fonseca [the Brazilian ambassador] told me recently, ''the illusion that I am equal to you. When I sit across the table from America, I have the illusion that I can convert you by the force of my argument, and you, in order to sit across the table from me, must share that illusion.'' And yet because it is an illusion, Fonseca accepts the fact that the United States cannot be successfully confronted; it must rather, he says, be ''seduced'' -- a very Brazilian approach to diplomacy. What Fonseca means is that diplomacy in the unipolar world must be devoted to coaxing the United States inside the system of rules and institutions. Like many of his colleagues, he has a tremendous fear of a United States freed from those constraints; he would almost rather surrender to American wishes than see the U.S. dismiss the Security Council. ''Order,'' Fonseca says, ''is better than justice.''

[Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the UN] insisted that the French position had much less to do with a sense of national prerogative than with the need for a united front. ''In France, we have five to six million Muslims,'' he said, ''between 8 and 10 percent of the population.'' In case of war, he went on, ''we have to do whatever is possible to limit the bitterness. It is in our common interest to move step by step. If Saddam Hussein violates the rules set by the international community, then it is not a unilateral act of aggression against Saddam Hussein. It is Saddam Hussein who is creating an attack against the international community. ''

The Mission of France to the United Nations is located on the 44th floor of a high-rise building on East 47th Street, just a few blocks from the U.N. itself. When I went to visit Jean-David Levitte, France's ambassador to the U.N., in the midst of the tortured and enormously protracted negotiations over a resolution requiring Iraq to accept a team of U.N. weapons inspectors and disarm, Levitte drew me to the south-facing plate-glass window of his office and delivered an ever-so-slightly defensive speech on Franco-American amity. ''I watched the World Trade Center buildings come down from here,'' he said. ''At that time, France was president of the Security Council, and the very next day, Sept. 12, we introduced Resolution 1368, which, for the first time in U.N. history, described a terrorist attack as a threat to international peace and security'' -- and thus gave the United States an unequivocal right to retaliate against Al Qaeda and against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

The campaign against Al Qaeda represented one of those rare moments when the Security Council swings quickly behind American aims. The U.N. itself felt implicated in the terrorist attack: its headquarters was evacuated both that day and the next, and there was brief talk of holding a Security Council meeting in a local coffee shop. But the moment of solidarity couldn't last. For the Security Council, Afghanistan was a momentary departure from a tradition of conflict resolution; for the Bush Administration, it was the first battle in a global war.

It is not only the United States but also the United Nations that has become a different place after 9/11. Only yesterday, it seems, the great issue was getting an increasingly disengaged United States to pay its back dues and pay attention; now the problem is keeping an aroused America from sallying off on what virtually every other member of the Security Council considers a reckless crusade. The Security Council needs the United States in order for it to play a meaningful role in world affairs, but it appears as though the United States doesn't need the Security Council -- or at least that many of the leading members of the Bush administration think that it doesn't. Secretary of State George Marshall had predicted in 1948 that should there be ''a complete lack of power equilibrium in the world, the United Nations cannot function successfully.'' And now, for the first time since the U.N.'s establishment, that state of affairs has come to pass.

And so the resolution on Iraq has been the first test case of the new world of American supersupremacy. As Gelson Fonseca, the Brazilian ambassador to the U.N., put it archly, ''You have a situation of dual containment: you have to contain the United States; you have to contain Iraq.'' Containing the Bush administration has meant finding a middle ground between rubber-stamping American policy -- and thus making the council superfluous -- and blocking American policy, and thus provoking America to unilateral action, which of course would make the council irrelevant. Fonseca seemed to feel that containing the U.S. is a harder job than containing Iraq, and possibly a more important one.

As I prepared to leave after talking to Levitte, he said, ''You know, I told you this story about Resolution 1368 because I want you to understand something: we want the United States in.'' Of course they do. But what neither Levitte nor his colleagues know for sure is what it will take to keep the Bush administration in. Last week, the Security Council unanimously passed a resolution demanding that Iraq allow the weapons inspectors who left four years ago not only to return but also to conduct more rigorous inspections for signs of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons production. If Saddam rebuffs the inspectors, there will almost surely be war. If he meekly complies, there probably won't. But Saddam may decide to test the fragile entente now reigning in the council by complying well enough for the French and the Russians but not well enough for the Americans. And then . . . who knows?

The central question posed by the debate over Iraq remains: Is the blessing of the international community so valuable a good that even this administration, at this moment of American power, is prepared to sacrifice something of its freedom of action in order to secure it? And if it is not, what, exactly, is the Security Council for?

he Security Council has for many years been a dim shadow of what it was intended to be by the architects of the U.N. system. In ''F.D.R. and the Creation of the U.N.,'' Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley argue that from the earliest days of World War II, President Roosevelt foresaw a new world order governed by what he called ''the Four Policemen'' -- the United States, Great Britain, Russia and China. The failure of the post-World War I League of Nations had made Roosevelt skeptical of the merits of a world body, but by 1942, Sumner Welles, his under secretary of state, had drawn up a proposal for a ''United Nations Authority'' with a ''security commission'' of the four policemen, who would provide the forces needed to quash threats to world peace. At Teheran in November 1943, Roosevelt persuaded Stalin to accept a single, centralized body consisting of all the world's nations and governed by a council dominated by the big four. (France was added later.) Secretary of State Cordell Hull addressed a joint session of Congress and magnificently asserted, ''There will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balances of power.''

The Security Council, then, was a new system, designed to prevent another 1914 or 1939, in which the most powerful nations would exercise an effective monopoly on force. Sir Brian Urquhart, one of the first employees of the United Nations and later one of its most important chroniclers, says: ''We got into World War I owing to a kind of ludicrous diplomatic folk dance that didn't pan out, and there was no international delay mechanism, no breakwater to stop this rush to war; and that's what they set up the League of Nations to prevent. Then in 1939, you had a war caused by unchecked aggression. And so the new side of the U.N. as opposed to the league is that it provides a mechanism for taking action.'' The Security Council, which would consist of the five ''permanent members'' as well as 10 other members who would rotate on and off, was intended to serve both as a ''delay mechanism'' and, should deliberations fail, as an enforcement body.

The United Nations Charter, drawn up in San Francisco in the summer of 1945, makes amazing reading today, when American conservatives talk about signing on to U.N. treaties as a surrender of national sovereignty. Chapter VII deals with ''Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression.'' Article 42 of Chapter VII empowers the Security Council to ''take such action by air, sea or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security.'' Article 43 requires U.N. members to make armed forces and ''facilities'' available to the body ''on its call.'' And Article 47 establishes a ''Military Staff Committee,'' consisting of the five permanent members' chiefs of staff, which would be responsible for the ''strategic direction of any armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council.'' What is perhaps even more amazing, from our own perspective, is that Congress passed the U.N. Charter almost without debate.

Nevertheless, it was clear even at the time that the five permanent nations, soon to be abbreviated as the P5, might not permit their foreign policies to be directed by the Security Council. Stalin insisted on veto power for each of the P5 members, as did, if less vehemently, the United States. And then the cold war settled in, and each side used its veto, or the threat of one, to check initiatives dear to the other. Urquhart recalls that the U.S. had agreed to make a ''very substantial force'' available for Chapter VII enforcement actions, but that the entire arrangement was scuttled in the late 40's when Stalin balked at the idea. Roosevelt's dream of a global police force led by the great powers died before it could even be tested.

But something else was happening at the same time. The process of ''decolonization'' was unfolding much faster than anyone had expected, and new nations were pouring into the United Nations. Chapter VII was already a memory by the time most of these third-world nations joined, and in any case, the new members were more concerned with economic development than with peacekeeping. Starting in the 1950's, the U.N. began to spawn a whole range of agencies largely directed at the needs of the new members -- bodies dealing with health, food, education, relief, refugees and so on. And the culture of the institution drifted further and further from the muscular principles of Chapter VII. This is the domain most of us associate with the U.N. -- high-minded confabulations on intractable global problems, solar-powered cookers, declarations on the rights of historically oppressed communities, etc. This sense of an organization preoccupied with terribly important things it can't actually do very much about has not done much for the U.N.'s reputation, at least in the United States.

But the U.N. does not, of course, belong to the United States. David Malone, a former Canadian diplomat who runs the International Peace Academy, a research group far more hardheaded than its fuzzy-sounding name implies, notes: ''The U.N. in its own mind is largely about a positive agenda that the agencies deliver. Many members aren't comfortable with anything beyond the positive agenda. They view the fight against bad guys and evil as incompatible with the ethos of the organization and being conducted at the behest of a few big powers they don't trust.'' By the end of the cold war, 90 percent of the U.N.'s resources were being devoted to the agencies; peacekeeping had become a vestigial activity, carried out largely in quiet places like Cyprus.

And then came the U.N.'s very own Prague Spring. The ideological deadlock of the cold war was melting away, and with it the constraints on the Security Council. Saddam Hussein came along just when the Security Council was ready to deal with him. When Iraq overran Kuwait in 1990, the council passed a resolution of condemnation. Once the first President Bush decided on a war, he sought a Security Council resolution before he went to Congress, calculating, correctly, that the authority of the council would pressure the Congress into approval -- the exact opposite of the thinking that has governed the current Bush administration. And the council, after a very brief debate, invoked Chapter VII to authorize a coalition force to dislodge the Iraqi forces.

The war was, of course, a great success, and an excited President Bush became the tribune of a new U.N. Veterans of the organization still recall with wonder the speech in which Bush offered to turn over Fort Dix for the training of U.N. peacekeepers. In June 1992, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, acting at the behest of the permanent five, submitted ''An Agenda for Peace,'' which argued that the time had come to rejuvenate U.N. enforcement and to make the Security Council the genuine global peacekeeper envisioned by Chapter VII. It was a moment of euphoria throughout the U.N. community. There was a feeling, as Shashi Tharoor, the U.N.'s head of public information and one of its chief institutional voices, recalls, that ''every problem can come to us, and we can prescribe a solution.'' Boutros-Ghali, Tharoor told me, ''even spoke rashly of 'a problem of too much credibility.' Within two and a half years he was eating those words, because we had a crisis of too little credibility.''

What happened, of course, was Srebenica -- a byword for moral failure. This fiasco virtually discredited U.N. peacekeeping. Perhaps the fault lay less with the U.N. than with the nations of the Security Council, which were unwilling to send the kind of troops needed to counter the savagery of the Bosnian conflict. Perhaps the fault lay with the expectations themselves. William Shawcross wrote an account of peacekeeping efforts titled ''Deliver Us From Evil.'' That was the job description; but peacekeeping could not deliver the world from evil.

No one knows the answer to the peacekeeping problem. If you ask people around the U.N. what will happen the next time genocide threatens -- say, in Burundi -- the answer will be, ''We'll authorize a regional organization to go in.'' Few people expect a U.N. force of ''blue helmets'' to venture into mayhem. And if you point out that no ''regional organizations'' happen to exist in the neighborhood of Burundi -- well, that's true.

Throughout the late 90's, conservatives like John Ashcroft accused the Clinton administration of seeking to ''subcontract'' American foreign policy to the U.N. The Bush administration took office vowing never to fall into that trap. While still an adviser to the campaign, Condoleezza Rice, later Bush's national security adviser, criticized the belief that ''the support of many states -- or even better, of institutions like the United Nations -- is essential to the legitimate exercise of power.'' Legitimacy, for at least most members of the Bush foreign-policy team, arose from a clearheaded assessment of national interest; little could be expected from the U.N., a moralistic body squeamish about the exercise of power and largely hostile to American interests. Only a few in the administration, most notably Secretary of State Colin Powell, believed that acting in concert with others was such a good in itself that the U.S. should seek to do so whenever possible.

Exhibit A in the indictment of U.N. pusillanimity handed up by the hawkish wing of the Bush team was policy toward Iraq. In the aftermath of the gulf war, the Security Council established the combination of harsh economic sanctions, ''no fly'' zones and weapons inspections that more or less kept Saddam Hussein in his cage. But by 1998, inspectors were complaining of constant interference, and in December of that year, the United States and the British insisted -- over the objections of the French and the Russians -- that the inspectors be withdrawn, and then mounted a bombing campaign directed at Iraqi weapons sites. Since that time, the Security Council had seemed to be much more disturbed by the consequences of confronting Iraq than by the consequences of failing to do so. The big issue in the Security Council last year was not Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction but the harm done by the sanctions. Russia, Iraq's chief ally among the P5, argued that Iraq had fully disarmed itself of nuclear weapons and began agitating to have the ''nuclear file'' closed and Iraq be given some benefit for its compliance.

Until Sept. 11 of last year, the Bush administration officially viewed Iraq less as a threat to world peace than as a hopeless mess; Secretary of State Colin Powell had even taken up the call for less burdensome ''smart sanctions.'' After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration, worried about Saddam making chemical and biological and nuclear weapons and perhaps allowing them to slip into the hands of terrorists, was prepared to disarm him by any means. When Bush addressed the General Assembly two months ago, he asserted provocatively that the U.N. would turn into a League of Nations if it continued to permit Saddam Hussein to keep inspectors out in defiance of U.N. resolutions.

When I suggested to Levitte, the French ambassador, that the Security Council would never have acted to restore inspectors to Iraq without the American threat of war, he said: ''This is absolutely true. But let's be fair. What is the Security Council? The Americans tend to consider that there is somewhere a supreme power imposing its will on America. It is 15 members; it is not a kind of supreme power. And the United States is first among equals.''

And that is why the president's bristling speech provoked nervous applause, a few snide jokes and, as David Malone of the International Peace Academy says, ''an instant refocusing on Iraqi noncompliance.'' The threat of war, of course, concentrated many minds, but it is also true that the United States can determine the agenda of the Security Council if it wants to, even if it cannot quite dictate outcomes. That has not always been true, but the era of ideological opposition to the United States, whether from the Soviet bloc or the third world, has largely come to an end; it has been a long time since anyone called for a ''new world economic order'' to redistribute wealth to poor nations. There is a widespread acceptance in the U.N. of the fact of American supremacy, even if high-handed American behavior has left a deep residue of resentment.

It is, in fact, precisely because the U.N. system cares so much about preserving its own relevance that the members have generally resigned themselves to the new American hegemony. Even the Security Council's most zealous defenders recognize that it must be a ''mirror'' of world power in order to remain effective. And so council members have tended to swallow their anger over American arrogance. ''With the amount of hair we tear out of our heads over the United States, we should all be bald,'' a representative of one of America's allies put it. You often hear expressions of gratitude over even minimal American gestures of respect for the U.N., like Shashi Tharoor's comment that ''in a case where the United States is acting in the name of the international community, the fact that it has come to seek the blessings of the international community is welcome.''

Diplomats are trained to accept reality and work with it -- to play a weak hand as strongly as they can. Whenever I think of the U.N., I picture Gelson Fonseca, the Brazilian ambassador, a charming, bushy-browed, multilingual gentleman possessed of a strikingly sinuous mind. ''Diplomacy is about an illusion,'' Fonseca told me recently, ''the illusion that I am equal to you. When I sit across the table from America, I have the illusion that I can convert you by the force of my argument, and you, in order to sit across the table from me, must share that illusion.'' And yet because it is an illusion, Fonseca accepts the fact that the United States cannot be successfully confronted; it must rather, he says, be ''seduced'' -- a very Brazilian approach to diplomacy. What Fonseca means is that diplomacy in the unipolar world must be devoted to coaxing the United States inside the system of rules and institutions. Like many of his colleagues, he has a tremendous fear of a United States freed from those constraints; he would almost rather surrender to American wishes than see the U.S. dismiss the Security Council. ''Order,'' Fonseca says, ''is better than justice.''

And so, as the first debate in this new era of American dominance got under way in September, the Security Council was prepared to play a weak hand strongly; but no one could say for sure whether the Bush administration was willing to play at all. The administration had come grudgingly to the negotiating table, and the initial draft resolution circulated by the Americans included elements so manifestly intolerable to the Iraqis -- like the idea of a military force supporting U.N. inspectors -- that it appeared to be designed to be repudiated, and thus to bring about the war that Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other leading figures in the administration were strongly suggesting was the only alternative. This was too great a price for the U.N. to pay. At a gathering in mid-September, a group of diplomats and top U.N. officials asked themselves whether they should simply accept the invitation to rubber-stamp American policy. ''The preponderant view was that this was not better,'' says Paul Heinbecker, the U.N. ambassador from Canada, which is not currently a Security Council member. ''The U.N. has to stand for something; it has to have some principles.''

It was left to the French to state those principles. No major nation cherishes the illusory equality of the U.N. more than the French, whose sense of great-power standing depends almost entirely on their membership in the P5. The French were infuriated in 1998 when the British and the Americans bombed Iraq without seeking council authorization. The French would not permit the council to be sidelined once again. In late September, the French proposed that in the event of Iraqi noncompliance with the inspections regime, the United States be compelled to seek a second Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force. The Russians publicly, and other members of the council privately, backed the French position. After several weeks of deadlocked talks, the Americans, working with the British, proposed compromise language in which the Security Council would ''convene immediately'' for deliberations in the case of Iraqi noncompliance, though the administration would not have to seek further authority from the council to begin a military assault. This was a two-step process, not the two-resolution process the French wanted, but it took only a small sophistry to blur the distinction. The French accepted.

I happened to visit Levitte two days after the new American language arrived. Levitte is a rising star in French diplomacy, the former foreign-policy advisor to President Jacques Chirac and a new kind of French diplomat, informal and affable. He insisted that the French position had much less to do with a sense of national prerogative than with the need for a united front. ''In France, we have five to six million Muslims,'' he said, ''between 8 and 10 percent of the population.'' In case of war, he went on, ''we have to do whatever is possible to limit the bitterness. It is in our common interest to move step by step. If Saddam Hussein violates the rules set by the international community, then it is not a unilateral act of aggression against Saddam Hussein. It is Saddam Hussein who is creating an attack against the international community. ''

This was not only a French position; I heard some variant of it from other members of the council and even more from U.N. professionals who feared they would have to live with a Middle Eastern world aflame with anger. For them, ''international legitimacy'' was not a diplomatic nicety or an abstraction; it was the means by which war became a collective good rather than an exercise in American self-interest. Beyond Iraq, there was anxiety that American action could loose the dogs of unilateralism; Russia could well cite the Iraqi precedent to take its own war on Chechen terrorism into neighboring Georgia. And so the other council members were imploring the United States to stay inside the international system as the price for their acquiescence to a process that might well lead to war -- a war that virtually none of them believed in.

But the French also understood that simply by agreeing to engage in diplomacy, the Bush administration had already accepted some limits on its freedom of action in order to gain the imprimatur of a Security Council resolution. At this critical moment, according to administration sources, Bush had come down on the side of Powell and the multilateralists. What happened? First of all, polls showed that a clear majority of Americans preferred the inspections-first route and would be much more comfortable with a war conducted with United Nations support -- a source of tremendous comfort within the United Nations itself. Moreover, the U.N. had hardly been unresponsive as regards the war on terrorism. As Richard Haass, a senior State Department official (and a strong advocate of the multilateralist view), puts it, ''This is the second major issue we have brought to the U.N., the first being Afghanistan, and there we did just fine.'' Haass adds, ''You've got to ask yourself what's the price in terms of delay and constraint, and what the benefits are.''

Those benefits were overwhelming: a military threat backed by a united Security Council would be far likelier to persuade Saddam Hussein to disarm, and in the event of war, the United States would be much likelier to obtain overflight rights and access to Middle East bases. (There would also, in all likelihood, be financial support and international help in administering postwar Iraq.)

And so with Secretary Powell conducting the negotiations (the American ambassador to the U. N., John Negroponte, served largely as a message carrier), the Bush administration ultimately came a long way toward the French position, leaving more latitude to the inspectors and modifying language that appeared to provide a pretext for war no matter what the Iraqis did -- what the French called ''automaticity.''At the dramatic Security Council meeting at which all 15 nations endorsed the resolution, Negroponte explicitly confirmed that the language permitted no automaticity.

But the session also exposed the continuing deep fears among council members of the administration's unilateralist impulses. When Ireland's ambassador to the United Nations said at the meeting, ''It is for the council to decide on any ensuing action,'' no one could mistake his meaning. Bush administration officials, on the other hand, fear that council members will try to block a military response. The era of good feelings could dissipate fast.

every other friday, the military attaches of the five permanent members of the Security Council meet in a conference room at the U.N., read the minutes of their last meeting -- which consist only of the reading of the minutes of their previous meeting -- and then adjourn. This is all that remains of the Military Staff Committee established by Article 47 of the U.N. Charter. And it is virtually all that remains of the founding vision of the Security Council as an institutionalized version of the World War II alliance. And yet as the debate over the Iraq resolution demonstrates, the Security Council has not been consigned to irrelevance. As Edward Luck, the author of ''Mixed Messages,'' a history of America's turbulent relationship with the U.N., observes, ''While the Security Council may have failed as a military tool, as a political tool it's more important than ever.'' Luck predicts that ''the demand of the American public for international authorization is going to become greater and greater.''

The Security Council need not be wholly reduced to its legitimacy-granting function. The U.N. and its various agencies have built up enormous expertise in the thankless task of nation building; one U.N. official says that the Bush administration even approached the organization to take over the civil administration of Afghanistan after the Taliban had been dislodged, a role that it has played in East Timor and elsewhere. (The U.N. had the good sense to decline.) The American resolve to engage in strategic nation wrecking may increasingly force the Security Council, which will be asked to authorize these missions, into the role of picking up the pieces.

But in a world defined by the fight against terrorism, which is to say a world shaped by a single power overwhelmingly preoccupied with the fight against terrorism, the Security Council's central role will be to shape the terms and establish the conditions under which that fight becomes broadly acceptable. Its job is both to restrain and to license the superpower.

Conservative critics of the U.N., some of whom now occupy important posts in the Bush administration, have long argued that the Security Council is useful only when it accepts American leadership and embraces American interests -- which, they would add, is virtually never. And yet what has become obvious in recent weeks is that with only the most modest gestures toward multilateralism on the part of the U.S., the Security Council is prepared to offer that embrace. And the Bush administration is likely to hug back when it suits its needs. It's a relationship of convenience. But it's a relationship.

One Security Council diplomat who finds this prospect both professionally pleasing and deeply gratifying to his sense of irony points out that the final draft of the Iraq resolution essentially gives Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. inspection team, the power to decide whether or not the Iraqis are in compliance (though Blix has told the Council he doesn't want to bear that burden). Blix, he points out, ''is a nice, soft-spoken, grandfatherly Swede, not an American, not a warmonger'' -- the perfect legitimator of the American war effort. ''If the war comes,'' he adds, ''I see Bush making an 8 o'clock speech to the nation, with Hans Blix mentioned at least 10 times.''

James Traub is a contributing writer for the Times magazine.

Fierce Entanglements

Fierce Entanglements
By DEBORAH SONTAG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/magazine/17VIOLENCE.html

For years, prompted by feminists, the strategy for dealing with domestic violence has been to get the men out of the women's lives. But that's not what all women want. How is anyone to understand the toughest love?

"But Sylvia did not see Michael as a monster. She saw him as the product of a lousy childhood. She also saw him as a good provider and, in time, as the father of their two daughters. Nor did she see herself as defenseless but rather as the beneficiary of a good upbringing, as a self-reliant working woman and as someone who stood her ground. She never wanted Michael locked up; she wanted him to change. She wanted to rehabilitate her family, not to break it up. And in that way, Sylvia -- like so many other women who refuse to call themselves victims -- is a formidable challenge to doctrinaire thinking about the nature of domestic violence and how to combat it."

When Michael Wilkes left Sumter, S.C., two decades ago, he was trying to escape what he perceived to be his bloodstained fate. He was only 21, but he was already in trouble -- in petty trouble with the law, in big trouble at home. He didn't want to end up like his father: a career criminal, a wife beater and dead by his wife's hand. So, baby-faced and jittery, Michael boarded a Greyhound for New York, fleeing an urge to exact vengeance on the stepmother who killed his father. He was running, too, from a failed, violence-ridden marriage of his own.

At first, things went well. Michael quickly found a job as a gofer for an art studio in Manhattan. He worked hard, the owner took him under his wing and within two years he had settled into a cozy basement apartment in Queens. That's where he met Sylvia.

Sylvia, the landlady's daughter, was voluptuous and dark-skinned, with fine features and twinkly eyes. She thought that Michael was ''adorable and nice,'' and she was impressed by his cooking, especially his barbecue sauce. It was only a matter of time before they got involved. Michael's plans to recreate himself suddenly became more complicated.

Michael had succeeded in starting over as an industrious working man. But he thought that his hostility toward women was something he could not choose simply to rise above. He just felt it in him; if he got passionate about a woman, he was prepared to be betrayed, and his guard went up. And with Sylvia, the passion was intense. ''I loved her to death,'' Michael says. It's a phrase that a man given to battering women probably shouldn't use.

Right from the start, Michael found himself falling into familiar patterns with Sylvia. ''The distrust of a woman -- I had it deep,'' he says. ''I physically abused my first wife -- smacks, punches, kicks. And then I turned around and did it again with Sylvia. The least little thing, I would fight her. I would hurt her. And she didn't deserve none of it.'' Speaking now as a sober-minded 41-year-old, after all he has been through and more precisely all he has put others through, Michael is trying hard to shoulder full responsibility for his actions.

Sylvia, however, argues that the dynamic was mutual all along. Michael wasn't the only one who had issues, she says. When they met, she had just escaped from a violent relationship that deteriorated to the point where the man was stalking her, armed with a knife. She was defensive and her fuse was short. ''It's inaccurate to say only that Michael would beat me,'' Sylvia says, more forgiving of Michael than he is of himself. ''He did. But we would beat each other. We would destroy the house. It became kind of dangerous for both of us. I didn't know who was going to kill who.''

It was a complex situation, murkier than the black-and-white portrayal of domestic violence that currently guides public policy. In that view, there's a batterer and a victim; the batterer is an ogre molded -- misshapen -- by patriarchal society; the victim, a mouse made helpless by it. There is only one happy ending: the batterer is punished, the victim liberated.

But Sylvia did not see Michael as a monster. She saw him as the product of a lousy childhood. She also saw him as a good provider and, in time, as the father of their two daughters. Nor did she see herself as defenseless but rather as the beneficiary of a good upbringing, as a self-reliant working woman and as someone who stood her ground. She never wanted Michael locked up; she wanted him to change. She wanted to rehabilitate her family, not to break it up. And in that way, Sylvia -- like so many other women who refuse to call themselves victims -- is a formidable challenge to doctrinaire thinking about the nature of domestic violence and how to combat it.

Since the end of the 19th century, American courts have been denying husbands the right to ''chastise'' their wives, but abusive men were rarely arrested, much less prosecuted. The police didn't want to get involved in what was going on behind closed doors or usurp a man's authority in his home. In most cases, they didn't even have the legal authority to make domestic violence arrests unless they had personally witnessed an assault. When they were called into a domestic situation, officers would extricate the man for a walk around the block and then return to the job of fighting what they perceived as ''real crime.''

As the feminist movement grew in the 1970's, advocates for women began to decry what they described as the government's collusion with batterers. They struggled to build a network of shelters for battered women and to get domestic violence redefined as a serious crime. They lobbied for new state laws that would remove the police's discretion and mandate arrests for domestic violence. And they succeeded. Over the last two decades, and especially in the last 10 years, mandatory arrests have become a linchpin of the government's effort to address the issue; they are seen as a way to protect women, punish offenders, deter future violence and send a message that spousal abuse won't be tolerated.

ow, though, a growing number of professionals are questioning the effectiveness of the mandatory arrest policies that advocates fought so long and hard for. Making more arrests and ensnaring more couples in the criminal justice system has not yet proved itself as a policy of deterrence, they say. And arrests sometimes backfire, especially in inner-city neighborhoods, causing unintended problems for some of the women that society is trying to protect. It would seem, they argue, that we are ignoring human nature, putting principle above the lives involved and creating an unproductive antagonism between the system and some victims. Many battered women, for instance, don't want their men arrested or put away. The questioners, who include academics, crime experts, black feminists and social workers, are wondering aloud if we have come to rely too much on the law to solve a problem that defies easy solutions.

After all, the criminal justice system is a blunt club for a problem as psychologically dark, emotionally tangled and intimate as domestic violence. At the very least, it cannot address the abuse that is not criminal. Serious violence, physical and sexual, is only part of the problem, and many experts are equally concerned about the psychological and emotional abuse that warps so many lives.

Then, too, there is the vastness of the phenomenon. In New York, the police field at least 200,000 complaints of domestic abuse a year. Even under the new laws, only tens of thousands result in arrests, the vast majority for misdemeanor-level abuse. But that is still a significant number of offenders for the system to process, and in the end only a fraction of offenders get prison time. Thus, many men are cycled through the system to little avail, sometimes ending up angrier and back with their partners.

It is indisputable that many women are protected, educated and freed from misery by the courts and the counselors. But many others resist or resent the intrusion of the government into their intimate lives. Often, they are still deeply involved with their abusers and feel belittled by professionals who presume to know what's in their best interest. They don't want to be humiliated for choosing their partners, pressured into leaving them or blamed. They don't want to be ''battered by the system,'' as a recent workshop given by survivors of domestic violence in New York was called.

''Crimes of an intimate nature make it much more difficult for people to come forward, and the volume of cases dictates that it can be an impersonal and horrific experience,'' says Abena Darkeh, domestic violence coordinator for New York City's criminal courts. ''I suspect that the majority of people working in the system would not choose to go through it'' if they experienced domestic violence themselves.

Well-meaning professionals often find themselves in an uncomfortable and sometimes adversarial relationship with victims. Prosecutors, especially, become frustrated by the many women who balk at testifying against their husbands. Increasingly, social workers are pushing for an approach that is more clear-eyed and less judgmental.

As Ruth Schulder, a social worker in the Bronx, says: ''Nobody has the right to say to a woman, 'You can't be with this guy.' So we have had to deal with the reality.'' And the reality is that abused women often make calculated decisions to stay with their partners. Sometimes a woman really has no choice; she's scared that leaving would make him more dangerous, or she doesn't think she can survive financially on her own. But other times she stays for the same reasons that people in other kinds of imperfect relationships do: because of the kids, because of her religion, because she doesn't want to be alone or simply because she loves him.

As they weigh the successes and inadequacies of the criminal-justice-dominated approach to domestic violence, a handful of experts are calling for a repeal of mandatory arrest laws altogether. Others, in larger numbers, are suggesting fine-tuning the criminal justice approach, making it both more humane and less central. They want more prevention and intervention on the community level. Still others, the therapeutically minded, are so bold as to suggest not only working more collaboratively with families but also doing so in a way that includes the men.

''If we don't work with the men, we can't change the world,'' Geraldine Abelson, a social worker, said at a recent conference in New York. Her comment underscores the idealism of many in the field. They don't just want to make women safer. They want to break the cycle of violence. They want to change the world. And that may well be too utopian a basis for any public policy.

Linda Mills took the podium at a New York City-sponsored domestic violence conference this fall to give a keynote speech that she knew would rankle many. Her voice rang out with an accusation and a dare: ''Mainstream feminism has maintained a stranglehold on our explanations of, and responses to, domestic violence, and it is time to take our voices back.'' Then Mills offered her credentials for making such a charge. Publicly, she is a legal scholar and social worker who is a vice provost at New York University. But, she told the crowd, she, too, is a feminist, and she, too, is a onetime victim of domestic violence -- at the hands of a man she described as a violence-prevention expert.

''He was passionate about his work, passionate about me,'' Mills said. ''I loved the attention he gave me; I started to love him. When he socked me in the arm the first time, I was surprised. I was hurt and I was angry. He shared with me his history: an abusive mother, an absent father. He was sure that's where his anger, his aggression, came from. I listened; I felt sad for him. I told him that if he ever hit me again, I would leave him. When he pushed me and later spat at me, I made the same threats.''

Still, Mills said, her gaze defiant, even though the violence later escalated to include rape, she wouldn't have wanted the police to know. She would never have testified against him. ''Doing so would have robbed me of the little dignity I had left.'' And, she said, the ''system'' needs to respect women who feel that way. The system, she said, patronizes victims by failing to listen to them, usurping their decision-making power and underestimating them -- underestimating their ability to negotiate their own safety and underestimating their role in the abusive relationship. Domestic violence is construed as one-sided aggression, when often there is a warped dynamic of intimacy in which both the men and the women are players. It is dishonest, she went on, to stifle conversation about the ways in which women, too, are aggressive and violent.

Many in the audience shuddered. But Mills, who first created a stir when she published a 1999 Harvard Law Review article called ''Killing Her Softly: Intimate Abuse and the Violence of State Intervention,'' was asking publicly questions that some in the field have been asking privately.

Some veteran advocates see Mills as an ivory-tower pontificator whose views are dangerous, capable of inspiring a backlash. They don't want to waste their energy engaging in an internal debate, not at a time when some government officials are asking them to justify the devotion of scarce resources to domestic violence. ''Where's the bang for the buck in terms of public safety?'' a senior New York police official asked advocates earlier this year.

These advocates find themselves in an uneasy position: first, relying on a male-dominated institution -- the criminal justice system -- then, defending it despite their own ambivalence about the arrest policies they encouraged.

Sylvia never thought the police belonged in her home. She didn't call them when Michael gave her black eyes. She didn't call them when he broke her nose in a fit of delusional jealousy, although she sat him down and pointed to her bloody, disfigured face and said, ''What if someone did this to your daughter?'' But she did call 911 one time and one time alone -- about a decade ago, before New York passed its mandatory arrest law -- when Michael threatened to leave and take their daughters. Two female officers showed up. Sylvia taunted him in front of them, playing on his chronic fear that she was cheating on him, a holdover from his bad first marriage. She told the officers that Michael couldn't take the children because the girls weren't his (a bald lie).

The officers then tried to rile him. ''I wish a man would hurt me,'' one said, hand on the butt of her gun. ''I would blow his brains out.'' But in the end, all they did was tell him to get lost. Michael camped out in his mother-in-law's basement, scared that this time Sylvia wouldn't take him back. After a few days, he returned with trepidation and apologies to the scene of the crime, his home. ''After a man abuses a woman,'' he says, ''his famous thing is, 'I'm sorry.'''

Sylvia stood firm. She said: ''I'm goddamn sick of your sorries. You're just one sorry [expletive].'' She shut him up and talked at him about his suspiciousness, his possessiveness, his temper and his violence. And a light went on for him, Michael says. A light went on, and it stayed on, because, he says, ''she spoke the truth. For the first time, I was listening to a woman, and she made much more sense than I did.''

As she was talking, though, Sylvia was questioning herself. ''Lord, history is repeating itself,'' she was thinking. ''I'm going back down this way with another guy.'' But she believed that Michael was different, that he had a good heart. ''Being that he went through so much, he had a real problem,'' she said. ''But we were determined to be with each other.''

Sylvia undertook to counsel Michael herself. ''Sylvia's tongue-lashings,'' as Michael calls them, went on for years, always with the same bottom line. His actions had consequences. If he hit her again, she would leave. End of story. Unfortunately, though, it wasn't the end of the story.

The case of Tracey Thurman in Torrington, Conn., called national attention to just how dangerous -- and costly to government -- the old approach could be. In 1982, Thurman repeatedly and to no avail called the police to report brutal threats by her estranged husband. Then, in 1983, Thurman's husband, a short-order cook at a restaurant frequented by police officers, stabbed her repeatedly. When the police arrived, they didn't arrest him immediately; they stood by as he kicked his bleeding wife in the head twice. Thurman survived and won an approximately $2 million jury award against the local police department. Her story became a classic cautionary tale about police inaction in domestic violence cases.

An experiment in 1984 in Minneapolis played a defining role in reshaping the police approach. On the basis of 314 domestic violence cases, a study conducted by the criminologists Lawrence W. Sherman and Richard A. Berk concluded that arrests discouraged batterers from committing future acts of battery. The authors cautioned that the sample size was small and the findings preliminary, but their caution was not heeded. Citing their work, a federal task force recommended that arrest become the standard response to misdemeanor domestic violence cases. It did; most states now have mandatory arrest laws.

After his Minneapolis study, however, Sherman refined his thinking on the basis of further studies that revealed a far more complicated picture. He oversaw one such study in Milwaukee, which showed that arrest makes low-income men more violent than does a simple warning by the police. The low-income men in Milwaukee, most of whom happened to be black, were three times as likely to be arrested than employed white men were. Therefore, by his study's oddly precise calculations, mandatory arrest in Milwaukee prevented 2,504 acts of violence against primarily white women at the price of 5,409 additional acts of violence against primarily black women.

Although the results were expressed in racial terms, Sherman said the men's status in society was the determining factor. Arrests generally deterred employed offenders, the studies showed, but provoked unemployed offenders to commit up to twice as many more assaults. That is, if a goal of the arrest policy is to protect women, the policy seems to backfire when applied to the low-income population that is most likely to be arrested for domestic violence.

Sherman, now a University of Pennsylvania professor, began to argue that laws mandating arrests for misdemeanor domestic violence offenses should be repealed. ''Until you admit that mandatory arrest is a failure in our inner cities, you won't get anybody to spend a penny on looking for other alternatives,'' he told me. Defenders of pro-arrest tactics say that mandatory arrest laws work much better when they lead to prosecution and treatment. But Sherman and others counter that prosecution and treatment are problematic, too.

t's because of O.J. that a lot of men are now catching the blunt end of it,'' Michael says. Indeed, some defenders of current policies like to cite the Simpson case to explain why mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution policies are important, no matter what the studies show. During Simpson's trial, prosecutors played a 911 tape of a frightened Nicole Brown Simpson pleading with the police to rescue her from her husband. O.J. was never arrested because Nicole didn't want to press charges. If Los Angeles had had a mandatory intervention policy, Nicole Simpson's wishes wouldn't have mattered. The police could have built a case despite her. If prosecutors needed her testimony, they could have subpoenaed her, and if she refused to comply, a judge could have held her in contempt.

Cheryl Hanna, a Vermont Law School professor and former prosecutor, wrote in a 1996 Harvard Law Review article that it used to make her squeamish to use the state's powers to coerce a reluctant victim like Nicole Brown Simpson to cooperate. She preferred to dismiss or indefinitely postpone such cases rather than subject the women to revictimization by the state. She now says that she was wrong. She should have served the greater good by reaffirming the government's hard line against domestic violence.

Some cases are so unambiguous and gruesome that the government's instincts to override a victim's wishes seem entirely justified. In 1994 in New York City, Mario Russo stabbed his wife four times in the chest, missing her heart by just an inch. She was seriously injured, and Mario, then a new immigrant from Italy, told the police to arrest him. In the station house, he confessed to the stabbing in a torrent of broken English, saying his wife was mentally ill, that she ''got out of line'' and that he ''went crazy.'' Yet, stunning prosecutors, Rosa Russo insisted on testifying in her husband's defense. She said she had been cooking, they got into an argument and she fell on her knife. On Valentine's Day in 1995, her husband was convicted of attempted murder and sent to prison. Nonetheless, at least for a while, the Russos kept up their relationship. He wrote to her, and she visited him. She even requested a conjugal visit, prosecutors said.

But then there are the cases in which the government seems overeager to take an unequivocal stance against spousal abuse. The case against Joseph P. Kirkner IV, in Chester County, Pa., for instance, was a simple assault case. Kellie Kirkner called 911 on July 4, 1999, to report that her husband had choked and shoved her. Kellie, however, decided that she didn't want to testify against her husband because she wanted to preserve her marriage. Prosecutors subpoenaed her; a judge quashed the subpoena. The prosecutors did not relent, appealing to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and keeping the case open even as the Kirkners split up. In the end, the Supreme Court ruled that the judge's decision was inappropriate, and in October, three years after the incident, the case went to trial.

Kellie Kirkner requested immunity from prosecution -- she, too, had hit and struck her spouse, she eventually testified. As the jury understood it, what transpired was more of a battle royal over credit-card spending than spousal abuse. Joseph Kirkner was acquitted.

One unforeseen consequence of the mandatory arrest laws has been that many women are getting arrested along with their boyfriends or husbands. Police arrive at a home, face accusations and counteraccusations and arrest both parties. Advocates for women see this as an unfortunate way in which the new laws, as interpreted by poorly trained police officers, have hurt women. In New York, legislators were persuaded to amend the law, requiring police officers to determine the ''primary physical aggressor'' and arrest only that person. Mills argues, however, that the proliferation of dual arrests might signal that there is more reciprocal abuse than people want to acknowledge.

Defenders of pro-arrest policies say that the legal system can and should learn to handle domestic violence cases both aggressively and with sensitivity. They often point to the way that domestic violence is addressed in a place like Brooklyn, which has a felony court dedicated to the issue. The court has an unusually low rate for dismissing cases while also assigning every victim an advocate who directs her to services. In preparing its cases, the D.A.'s office does far more social work than is traditionally done by prosecutors, says Wanda Lucibello, chief of the special victims division there.

''There's so much gray area in these cases,'' Lucibello says, with ''land mines in every direction. It's a philosophical discussion, day in and day out.''

As a result of some of those philosophical discussions, Galla Hendy, 33, is one former victim who says that the system was responsive enough to allow her to liberate herself from a dangerous relationship -- eventually.

When I met Galla last summer, her ambivalence was right out there, practically sitting on the red plastic table of a Popeyes in Far Rockaway. Fingering a gold hoop in her right ear, she talked wistfully about her ex-batterer and, as of six months earlier, her ex-boyfriend, too. ''I miss him,'' she said. ''Yeah, I do. I ain't going to lie. He's not so much of a bad person except for the violence.''

When Galla first met him in 1996, she was working two jobs to support her three children. She was a home health aide by day, a stripper by night. One evening, he came into the strip club, and she asked him if he wanted ''a wall dance or a lap dance.'' They ended up talking. She let him know she was dating someone, and he said: ''Forget about Mr. Wrong. Here is Mr. Right.'' And for quite some time Galla agreed with him. They seemed to have so much in common -- both health care workers, both immigrants (she from Guyana, he from Jamaica), both parents.

They fell in love; four years ago they had a daughter. By Galla's account -- all of this is by her account; her ex-boyfriend could not be reached -- he was frustrated because he wasn't working. He has sickle cell anemia, and he had gone on disability after hip surgery. Galla tried to reassure him, to keep him from beating up on himself. She didn't mean for him to start beating up on her. It began on their daughter's first birthday. Galla's boyfriend was out of the apartment, and she left the baby in the care of her 11-year-old son to shop for a party. When she bustled in with her packages, he was back, and she could see the fire in his eyes. He was outraged by what he saw as her negligence; he struck her with his cane. She calmed him down ''by making myself available to him,'' but things were never completely calm again.

After many unsettled months and one spectacular argument, she took their daughter and went to stay with a friend. When she returned home, he was angry, certain that she had been cheating on him. He hit her. She begged him to stop. He even put on a pair of boxing gloves and started using her as a punching bag. She felt as if she had nothing left in her to fight back with -- until he took out the rope. He encircled her neck, crazed to know if she was somebody else's woman. The more she denied it, the more he tightened the rope. ''I actually thought I was a goner,'' she said. She lied, saying that she had been cheating on him. He let her go, and he left the room. But he returned with a gun, placing it under a pillow in front of her face. Eventually, the fight drained out of him. ''You see what you made me do?'' he said.

At dawn, she said, he brought out a bottle of champagne, then forced her to have anal sex. The kids woke up and absorbed the tension in the apartment. Her son, then 12, got into an argument with her boyfriend, who ended up throwing his gun at the boy and daring him to shoot. Galla sent her son outside and told him to call the police. They came quickly and just as quickly had him on the ground in handcuffs as they searched for the weapon. Galla felt a twinge of betrayal.

He was taken to jail. Galla went to the district attorney's office. She was unsure if she should help prosecutors make a case against the father of her daughter. But counselors there advised her to think about the possibility that the violence could escalate and about the safety of her children. She listened.

When she went before the grand jury, though, she found it excruciating to recount her story of physical and sexual abuse to a roomful of strangers, mostly men. She saw horror in some eyes, boredom in others. She felt as if she were the one being judged.

He was indicted for assault, sodomy and child endangerment. Galla went to visit him in jail. She was hurt and confused to see the man she loved behind bars. ''Why would I do this to him?'' she asked herself. ''Then again, why would he do this to me?'' He still didn't think he had done anything wrong, but Galla began feeling sorry for him. It wasn't good for his health to be locked up. She herself didn't want to go through a trial. Enough was enough. She wanted him freed and she wanted him home.

So Galla went to the D.A.'s office and asked if some kind of deal could be worked out. Her boyfriend needed help, she told them; he didn't need to be locked up.

Lucibello's staff members arranged a plea deal; they eventually counted his six months in jail as time served, and he accepted five years of intensive probation and assignment to a batterers' intervention group. And when he was released from jail, the couple reunited.

But he came out of jail with a lot of animosity in him. He wanted to engage Galla in relentless conversations about the incidents that led to his arrest. He wanted her to agree that it was all her fault. He was angry about having to attend a program. He kept his fists to himself, but he did grab her hard by the shoulders a few times. Their little daughter would hide the phone. ''Don't call the police on Daddy,'' she'd beg her mother. Earlier this year, after Galla refused to let him use her new pearl white car for his newspaper delivery job, he moved out.

Still, a month later, Galla found herself calling him when she was lonely. When she started dating someone else, he threatened to shoot the man, telling Galla she would see her name in the papers. She called 911. There is now a full order of protection that prohibits him from making any contact with her. Galla doesn't miss him anymore, she told me in late October.

On a typical lackluster fall day, a parade of sad and angry men and women filed before Judge John M. Leventhal in New York Supreme Court facing felony charges of assaulting, kidnapping or murdering their wives, husbands and same-sex partners. It was hard not to be struck by just how many of them there were, dealing in such a public way with intimate lives gone awry, and to multiply it out across the country and queasily feel the vastness of the phenomenon.

It was also hard not to notice that while the judge and almost all the lawyers were white, almost every defendant was black or Latino, either unemployed or taking time off from jobs cleaning houses or stocking grocery shelves for their court appearances. Lisa C. Smith, a Brooklyn Law School professor and former prosecutor, told me that she doesn't think domestic violence really is a crime that cuts equally across all social classes. ''In order to get people to care about the concept, it was painted that way, but it's not true,'' she said. ''It's far more prevalent in the lower socioeconomic level.''

Indeed, federal statistics show that low-income women are far more likely to be victims of domestic violence. But Judge Leventhal said he thought that the class composition of his courtroom reflected instead an under-reporting of domestic violence by more affluent people. Other experts echo this; the more affluent have the means to handle their domestic violence problems privately -- using private physicians, therapists, hotels, divorce lawyers.

I asked the judge if it bothered him that the government was arresting more poor people for crimes that he believed to be committed by all classes. ''Sure it bothers me,'' he said, looking discomforted. A week later, he called me back to say he really didn't look at it that way: ''Don't lower-income people deserve protection, too?''

Dr. John Aponte, a former police psychologist who counsels batterers, says that he hates that the vast number of men referred to him by the courts are on welfare, unemployed or have prior criminal records. ''That says to me that the system is rounding up the usual suspects. The system is only getting those available for capture. And let me tell you, the men know it. When the men in my groups see only other poor people in the program, it makes them think, I'm just here because I got caught, so I have to learn how to not get caught.''

The issue of race sometimes seems inescapable. One Tuesday this fall, I sat in on a batterers intervention group, a room full of black and Latino men mandated into a 26-week program. After one man denied that he had ever hit his wife, a man named James, playing the self-appointed role of lie-detector, burst out with: ''Well, that's not what the white man say! Why do you think you're here, bro?''

Melinda Hunter, 30, a teacher in the Bronx, told me that her partner used to ''play the race card'' to stop her from calling the police and that it worked. She was a college-educated woman from Ohio who met her boyfriend when she arrived in New York in 1995. She was a tour guide at Radio City Music Hall, and he was building sets. Unaware of her own attractiveness, she was so flattered by his attention that she overlooked her qualms when she learned that he was in a work-release program. Having just finished ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X,'' she told herself that most black men were going to pass through prison at some point.

Later, when her partner had grown abusive, he, by then the father of her children, restrained her from reporting him by saying: ''They'll send me back to prison. Don't let the white man take me and break up another black family.'' Even when they finally did land in court, she covered up for him (encouraged by a police officer, she said, who told them, ''These things happen''). The charges were dismissed, but her partner's probation officer made him move out. Hunter got herself into a support group, and when I met her last summer, she was adamantly liberated. Little by little, however, because he was familiar, because she is sentimental, because of the kids, she let her partner back into her life. She was embarrassed to tell me this, but, she said, they are going to church together, he is ''reborn,'' and she is trying to have faith in the possible.

In the 1980's, Aponte moved from the police department to New York City's victim services agency to help domestic violence advocates figure out how to deal with the men. At the time, he said, the thinking was (and remains): punishment. ''There was a lot of anger in the feminist community. It was: 'They're lost. They're no good. They're beyond redeeming. To deal with the men is to consort with the enemy.'''

Aponte felt differently. Many men were first offenders, and he thought they were capable of learning and changing. Beyond that, it was undeniable that a majority of women returned to relationships involving abuse -- ''so it seemed kind of imperative to get the men into some kind of rehab.''

Eventually, the system came to need comprehensive programs for men. Since only a small percentage of men arrested for domestic abuse get prison time, judges had to do something with the rest. Batterers intervention programs became a way of disposing of many cases, and they proliferated. Still, many judges view these programs skeptically, as do advocates for women, and New York State does not regulate them, so as to avoid giving them any stamp of approval.

''The jury is still out on whether they do any good,'' Judge Leventhal said, although he orders many into the programs as a condition of bail. ''And there's a fear that they do some harm, that they give victims false hope that these men have been treated, so they welcome them back.''

The very existence of the programs brings up the question of whether and how a batterer can be rehabilitated. Samuel Aymer, a psychotherapist in New York, says the belief that abusers can change is the guiding principle of his work. But he says that many of those running programs have doubts that limit or even poison the process. Indeed, many programs don't even try to be rehabilitative; they consist of didactic lectures based on feminist theory: domestic violence results not from individual personal or moral deficits but from an abuser's belief that he has the right to inflict his will on his partner. In these programs, needless to say, there is little sharing of personal histories; the circumstances and concerns of the men are not discussed.

''These men are not simply puppets of the patriarchal system who must unlearn their pigheaded thinking,'' Aymer said. ''The patriarchal system doesn't make all men abusers. So what is it about these guys? Let's help them develop insights into their behavior. That does not mean excuse the abuse. Reject it. But don't reject him.''

Aymer, who used to counsel battered women, was recruited into working with men by Aponte, who trains social workers to combine education and group treatment in 26-week programs that use a lot of role playing. One such program is run on Tuesday nights by Ruth Schulder and Carlos Scott at a Salvation Army office under an elevated subway line in the Bronx.

I attended the eighth and ninth weeks of the program this fall, before the men's resistance to being there had completely broken down. They sat in metal chairs in a semicircle, arms folded across their chests protectively, defiantly. Wearing hooded sweatshirts or jean jackets, they rocked backward on the institutional blue carpet, jiggling their legs. Many of the men asserted not only that they had never hit their wives but also that it was a matter of principle for them not to do so. I asked Schulder if I had come to the wrong class. ''No,'' she said. ''They're lying.''

One, a chubby, talkative man said that everything was fine in his home except that his Maria was in a depression. Schulder, who has flaming red hair and a tough, jokey, compassionate manner, snorted and said out of the side of her mouth, ''Oh, you can tell the new people.''

Then she addressed the man, Alex, directly: ''What was your act to get here?'' He began, ''Well, she--.'' Schulder cut him off. ''Not she -- you. You -- what was the word you used? You shmushed her face, right?'' Well, Alex said, after 12 years in a relationship, nobody's perfect. Twelve years and one thing, and suddenly you have the police at your door. That's when James, the self-appointed lie-detector, told him to get real.

Schulder played a horrific tape recording of a 6-year-old girl who calls 911 to report that her mommy and daddy are having a fight. The girl is crying so hard that she is choking. Against the audible commotion in her home, she is screaming ''Stop it!'' and ''Mommy!'' and ''No, don't take the baby!'' The situation and her agitation escalate as her father apparently strikes her sister and tries to choke her mother. The call abruptly ends when, it seems, her mother discovers her on the phone and hangs it up.

''How does that make you feel?'' Schulder asked the group. James jumped in first. ''Like I want to kick somebody's butt.'' Several men said that they would never fight with their wives in front of their children, and Schulder pointed out that the parents of the girl on the tape didn't realize that she was there or on the phone. ''Kids always see; kids always hear,'' she said. Schulder told the men that when she played the tape for women in her parenting classes, they all cried. ''I was crying inside,'' one man said. Schulder asked why he held it in. ''I am among men,'' he said.

At another point, Schulder asked the men if their partners respected them. ''Every day I'm closer to asking my wife, ''Do you fear me?'' James said. A bulky man who wears a purple scarf over his plaited hair, James said that he doesn't think he has given her any reason to, but Schulder, letting that pass, asked if his present wife knows he was violent toward his ex. James explained how he dealt with his first wife: ''To me it was like, you don't beat her, you can't get nothing from her. All her other babies' fathers, they punch her in the face and she act better. She did what she was supposed to do.'' Schulder asked what she was supposed to do, what was in her ''contract.'' James said that she was supposed to look after the kids while he went to work. But when he came home from work, he used to find the kids alone in the apartment. So he would ''smack her face.'' Schulder said that she fully understood why it upset him to find his children unattended. ''But you don't have the right to hit her,'' she said. ''What happens when you don't do your job at work, do you get smacked?''

At the end of one 26-week class, one of Aponte's men asked if he could hug him. Aponte was taken aback. He doesn't really do hugging. He asked the man why. The man told him that he had never before met a powerful man who wasn't abusive. Aponte hugged him.

After Sylvia laid down the law, Michael was intensely motivated to change. ''I never really laid a hand on her again,'' he said. ''I would want to, but I knew if I would do it, I'd lose this woman I really loved.'' But while he forced himself to stop hitting Sylvia, he couldn't rise up out of himself entirely. He didn't like any inkling that he was being disrespected in his home. He would feel overwhelmed by the need to assert his control. He would lose his temper and his palms would start sweating, and if not Sylvia then someone else was going to bear the brunt of it.

''I guess I kind of switched my pattern toward the kids,'' Michael mumbled, fingering his wisp of a mustache. He was embarrassed. He glanced over at Sylvia, who was asleep in the brass bed in the adjacent bedroom. Fully dressed, she was underneath a fluffy quilt blocking out all conversation, since she had just come home from work at a group home for disabled adults and was due to head out to a second shift, an all-nighter. Their daughters, 15 and 11, were in their rooms, giggling with friends.

''I would spank them,'' Michael said. ''It started as spanking. But I overdid it.''

One night a couple of years ago, his older daughter, then 12, crossed some kind of a line and angered him; Michael doesn't remember the precipitating incident. Her daughter really angered Michael, Sylvia told me later. ''She was a big girl, too old to be spanked. But he spanked her anyway, and worse.'' Michael beat his daughter with a stick.

The girl, who is overweight and very sensitive, was hurt physically and devastated emotionally. When she went to school the next day, she showed her bruises to a teacher. The school called the child-welfare authorities. They took away the girls and put them in a foster home. Sylvia was furious and sad. Michael said he was disgusted with himself, the old familiar remorse that would sweep over him like a wave of nausea after he struck Sylvia.

Looking back, Sylvia draws from her bottomless supply of compassion for Michael, but it is hard-edged. ''I don't think Michael intended to hurt the child,'' she said. ''He never intended to hurt me either. But in the eyes of society today, abuse is abuse, and if you don't fix things in your own home, the system's going to fix it for you.''

After a few weeks the girls returned home, and Michael left for several weeks on the court's order. He and Sylvia were made to take a parenting class. During the intake process, Michael acknowledged his history of domestic abuse. It was the first time Michael had ever identified himself to the authorities as a batterer. He was put on a waiting list for a batterers group.

Then, in the spring of 2001, while he was still waiting for a group to open up, Michael got into an argument with one of the housekeepers he supervised at a Manhattan hotel where he is facility manager. She wanted the weekend off, and he turned her down. He claims that she began swinging at him, he grabbed her hands and she kneed him. He then punched her ''out of reflex,'' he said, breaking her eye socket. ''When I saw the damage I inflicted on her. . . . She was a beautiful young lady, and after I struck her, it was like the beauty and the beast,'' Michael said. The police came. Michael was handcuffed, jailed for a night, charged and released. Despite his disgust with himself, it angered him that the police didn't arrest the housekeeper, too, because, he said, she had started it.

The system treated the case as a domestic assault, assuming that Michael and his subordinate were boyfriend and girlfriend and that Michael was the ''primary physical aggressor.'' He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. His bosses at the hotel, where he has worked for 18 years, suspended him for two months and ordered him to go for counseling. Since the hotel was willing to pay for counseling, Michael was able to forget about the waiting list for a free class and enroll in a private program in Brooklyn.

Although Michael resisted at first, he came to see the group as his salvation. Schulder -- ''Miss Ruth'' to Michael -- led it along with ''Mr. Q,'' Quentin Walcott. ''I don't know what it was about Michael, but he was driven to be honest,'' Walcott says. ''That really helped the group dynamic.'' Michael found it an exhilarating revelation to consider that his behavior was learned and could be unlearned. He was not crazy and he was not doomed. Battering was a choice.

Sylvia says the program started Michael soul-searching, which was alien to him. ''They put everything in perspective for him, and he was amazed. He would talk to me about his past and how much it damaged him and how he could finally put it behind him.'' Still, Sylvia said, Michael did not undergo a miracle transformation. He continues to say things he shouldn't say and think in ways that undermine him. ''When his job stresses him out, I tell him, ''Honey, your title means a lot,'' Sylvia says. ''You are a professional. Act like a professional.''' Michael cools down by taking walks around the block. He takes a lot of walks around the block.

When I first met Michael, he struck me as a man who was tormented by the consequences of his abusive behavior. He didn't like it that his daughter kept reminding him that she had a lawyer's number in her pocket, that she had rights, that he couldn't touch her. He didn't like it when his subordinates at work teased him if he tried to discipline them. ''Don't be thinking you can do us like you did'' that housekeeper, they'd say. Yet he was driven to be confessional, to hold himself accountable for his behavior.

He talks to himself every morning when he brushes his teeth, he told me, trying to focus his energy on how it's in his best interest to keep his cool, to be ''a man in the new way I understand that word.'' It seems to me that a combination of forces over many years -- Sylvia laying down the law, the city's taking away his kids, his arrest at work and the subsequent treatment program -- has finally convinced him how much is at stake. ''I don't want to lose my wife, I don't want to lose my girls and I don't want to lose my job,'' he says. ''I don't want to hurt no one no more no way.''

Whether his motivation will be sufficiently powerful to overcome a lifelong pattern remains to be seen. For the moment, Michael and Sylvia are setting their sights on a more concrete goal: a vacation in the Poconos.

Deborah Sontag is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.

A Wizard of Oz in Fashionland?

There Once Was a Wizard in the Wonderful Land of Calvin
By CATHY HORYN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/12/fashion/12DRES.html

No better parable exists to describe the enchanted phoniness of the fashion world than L. Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz." Skipping down glamour's yellow brick road are straw editors and tin men, believing what they believe, while lurking behind the big curtains of Paris and Seventh Avenue, surrounded by vigilant monkey publicists, are gods waiting to be condemned as mere mortals.

The recent publication of a book about Zack Carr, the late creative director of Calvin Klein, reminds me again that the fashion world is not all it appears, at least (or least of all?) to outsiders.

Mr. Carr, who died two years ago at age 55 of a rare form of cancer that slowly crippled him, was much admired within the industry for his talent and his Southern charms. He was a product of Kerrville, Tex., in the Hill Country, where he was known as Chuckie or as just one of the Carr boys. There were two other brothers, and one of them, George, put together the coffee-table homage, "Zack Carr," with Sam Shahid, an art director in the fashion business, and PowerHouse Books.

What makes this $75 book noteworthy among the pre-Christmas editions is that by limelighting the talent of a behind-the-scenes player, which Mr. Carr was for the 25 years he spent at Calvin Klein, it raises some Oz-like questions. Who actually was the designer at Calvin Klein all those years, Mr. Klein or his acolyte? And does it matter in the new gilded age of brands, when many designer collections are not designed by the designer at all, whether the public knows?

George Carr and Mr. Shahid said they wanted to do a book that dwelt only on the acolyte, not the star. To that end, they included original sketches, photos of Mr. Carr with friends and examples from the collections he designed briefly in the 1980's under his own label. But there are few images of clothes he designed for Calvin Klein. "It was a decision that I personally made," said Mr. Shahid, who has worked on many of Mr. Klein's advertising campaigns. "Let's do a book on Zack." Mr. Carr agreed. "It's all Zack for Zack." He added: "Nobody has to put Calvin Klein down to get Zack's story out. The proof is in his sketches."

Mr. Klein, who was not among the 600 people who attended the book party on Thursday at the Parsons School of Design (he was feeling under the weather), praised Mr. Shahid's "fantastic art direction" but said he didn't think the book was about Mr. Carr or him.

"I think the book is about George Carr," Mr. Klein said. "This is about a brother and his feelings for Zack. To me, that's what the book is about — this love and admiration."

It may be, as the photographer Bruce Weber suggested, that the only purpose of this elegant book is to keep alive the memory of an unsung design hero, a phrase used by Patrick McCarthy, the editorial director of Fairchild Publications, in the book's wistful series of remembrances.

But what a pity. By wanting to be noble and to give credit where it was due, the collaborators missed — or perhaps tiptoed around — the most compelling drama of all: the complex relationship between Mr. Klein and Mr. Carr.

Of the two men, it was Mr. Carr who possessed the artistic temperament, or rather displayed it freely in moody silences that often ended with a spree of treats from the Comme des Garçons shop for his adoring assistants. As Grace Coddington, a friend and the creative director of Vogue, said, "He could be up or down, over the moon or insecure."

Narciso Rodriguez recalled that when he was at Calvin Klein, he showed Mr. Carr some sketches he and another assistant had made, but Mr. Carr turned away coldly and wouldn't speak to them for days. "Then one morning he came in and said: `Y'all' — he still spoke in a Texas accent — `Y'all, I just want to say, I hate you. I'm so jealous. I cannot believe the power I see in your sketches. I hate you both.' " Mr. Rodriguez laughed. "Then he'd drag us off to Raoul's for dinner. There was no one like Zack. Creative, generous, vulnerable. He knew everything that was fashion history, and everything that would be fashion history."

Mr. Weber, who first met Mr. Carr in the late 1970's, remembered a car trip back from Long Island when Mr. Carr brought up Elizabeth Taylor. "He could name every movie she had been in — who had done the hair, makeup, clothes," Mr. Weber said. "We had a great talk of fantasy about her." Later, after meeting the actress, he started sending her gifts. "I don't think she ever realized who sent them," Mr. Weber said. "A cashmere stole. Ten silk scarves from Calvin Klein."

He added: "Zack was a mentor to a lot of us. He was aware of Georgia O'Keeffe long before anyone else in this small group. He was like the crazy professor, and Calvin was part of the class."

But to anyone connected with that group, the relationship between Mr. Carr and Mr. Klein was a marriage. "Zack loved Calvin, and he hated him," said a former design assistant, speaking, as others did, on condition of anonymity. "He could talk about Calvin for hours. Zack was a master at that relationship."

Mr. Weber recalled going on a trip to Greece with them when they broke into a huge fight. As marriages go, he said, "it wasn't so different from Liz's and Richard Burton's," a parallel that others drew as well.

To say where the creative lines were drawn between them is much harder, however, because it raises touchy questions of loyalty and betrayal in a business where there is little candor. "It's difficult," Ms. Coddington said, "because I love Calvin." She thought for a moment and said, "Zack was always in the shadows, but, really, he was Calvin Klein." Others made similar comments, saying in one instance that Mr. Carr's designs were "more Calvin than Calvin."

Yet Mr. Carr did not have what it takes to be the frontman in the business, and when his own company closed at the end of the 80's, he returned to Calvin Klein, where he remained until he became ill — looked after by family, friends like Ms. Coddington, and Mr. Klein.

So perhaps the key word is "difficult." It is difficult to know what makes a marriage. And as Ms. Coddington said, with some wisdom, "There's so much more to being a designer than designing clothes."

No one knows that better than Mr. Klein. He does not know what strain in Mr. Carr's big personality allowed him to occupy the shadows of another's fame. "I can't explain it," he said yesterday. "I think Zack had a great time when he worked here." But neither, Mr. Klein said, does he resent anyone else for trying to explain it, or saying that Mr. Carr was Calvin Klein.

"I take it as a great compliment," he said. "I've been able to set up a company where many people think that way." He added: "You can't do this job alone. It's a collaborative effort by many people. And you have to be around a long time to have that kind of thing."

The Track of a Teardrop, a Filmmaker's Path

The Track of a Teardrop, a Filmmaker's Path
By A. O. SCOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/movies/17SCOT.html

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR'S new movie, "Talk to Her," which is likely to cement his somewhat unlikely reputation as one of the leading filmmakers of our time, begins wordlessly, with a performance of "Café Müller," a dance piece by the German choreographer Pina Bausch.

Two women, apparently blind, stumble across the stage as their male companions scramble to clear tables and chairs from their paths and to prevent them from slamming into the walls. In the audience, two men, strangers to each other, sit side by side, one of them watching, with evident curiosity, the progress of a tear down the other's cheek.

The story that follows reunites the two men — a male nurse named Benigno and a journalist named Marco — in a private clinic outside Madrid, and traces the progress of their serendipitously entwined destinies. Benigno, who spent most of his life caring for his invalid mother, now devotes himself to the care of Alicia, a young ballerina left comatose by a car accident. Down the hall, Marco sits at the bedside of his lover, Lydia, a bullfighter who lies in a vegetative state after being gored in the ring. The film's title comes from a bit of advice that Benigno, who regales the silent Alicia with amusing anecdotes, beauty tips and movie plot summaries, gives to the disconsolate Marco.

"Benigno is not only talkative," Mr. Almodóvar said during an interview in a midtown hotel on a rainy afternoon last month, a few days before "Talk to Her" brought the 40th New York Film Festival to a rapturous close. "He tells a lot of stories — related to ballets, to movies. The movie is a kind of glorification of storytelling."

Mr. Almodóvar, in both Spanish and English, is an eager, serious talker, even though his new movie presents decided conversational challenges. "It's a bit of a contradiction that a movie that talks about words, communication, human voices is a movie that's difficult to talk about without betraying it," he warned at the beginning of the interview. In at least one very concrete sense, he's right. To attempt even a bald, literally accurate plot summary is to risk not only spoiling some keen surprises but, much worse, falsifying the film's delicate tone and heartfelt mood. Events that might sound outlandish, even grotesque if I tried to tell you about them here are presented with warmth, humor and sympathy. The film's passionate, brightly colored humanity would inevitably be lost in translation.

"Talk to Her," which opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles, is by far the most complex, layered narrative Mr. Almodóvar has attempted — gliding backward and forward in time, examining the knots and permutations of at least a half dozen thorny, passionate relationships. But somehow, for all the swerves and surprises that follow, that initial sequence of nonverbal, inadvertent communication contains the film's emotional core; it functions as a cinematic overture, gesturing toward themes and states of feeling that will be elaborated, embroidered and brought together in a work of daunting dramatic scope and breathtaking coherence. Most obviously, Ms. Bausch's blind women prefigure Alicia (played by Leonor Watling) and Lydia (Rosario Flores), shut off from sensory contact with the world. But the emotion that filters from the stage to Marco (Darío Grandinetti), and then to Benigno (Javier Cámara), is also an allegory of both Mr. Almodóvar's message and his method. A work of art speaks to us, and invites us to speak to each other.

"I would have liked to call it 'The Man Who Cried,' " Mr. Almodóvar remarked at his Film Festival news conference. That title, had it not already been taken by Sally Potter for her 2000 film starring John Turturro and Christina Ricci, would certainly have been apt. Marco's tears, which so fascinate Benigno, will also resonate with moviegoers who find themselves caught up in the film's swirl of unrestrained, beautifully modulated sentiment. "One of the ideas that I wanted to convey was a man who cried for emotional reasons linked to a work of art — from seeing a work of enormous beauty," Mr. Almodóvar said, and it is an idea carried forward by the film's tone as much as by its content. His previous movie, "All About My Mother" (1999), which won the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Oscar for best foreign film, was a powerful and unironic tribute to the great Hollywood "women's pictures" of the 1940's and 50's, and to the actresses who brought them to life. "Talk to Her," which shares its predecessor's interests in grief and in loyalty, is a melodrama in a decidedly masculine key.

Both movies offer audiences something they might not have anticipated from this director: a good, honest cry. In the 1980's, Mr. Almodóvar, who was born in 1951 in the provincial Spanish town of Calzada de Calatrava, seemed to embody the transgressive exuberance of his country's cultural awakening after decades of political repression. Spain's recent history had been lachrymose enough, and there was little time for tears or sighs in the baroque, frenetic world of his films. Of course, there was plenty of sensation — gasps of shock, convulsions of laughter, spasms of liberated desire.

In Mr. Almodóvar's early features, which quickly won him heroic status in Spain and a cult following outside it, the thwarted energies of the Franco era burst out in a riot of color, sex, music, drugs and decadence. To see "Labyrinth of Passion," "Dark Habits" and "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" was to see the anarchic, libertarian strain in Spanish cinema — long represented by the peripatetic surrealist government-in-exile of Luis Buñuel — restored to its native soil, and to witness both the joys and the dangers of sudden freedom. Those movies were riotous to the point of chaos — pulpy, campy and gleefully overwrought.

At lunch after the news conference, Mr. Almodóvar happily recalled an early assessment from the American press: "sometimes in bad taste, but never boring." Which was precisely the point: in post-Franco Spain, offending sexual propriety, religious authority and Fascist family values in the name of pleasure was a therapeutic and a political necessity.

But Mr. Almodóvar has always understood that the pursuit of pleasure is not all about fun. In the early films there were always undercurrents of risk, cruelty and pain, and an implicit recognition that bodies and feelings, in addition to outmoded social norms, might be damaged by unchained eros. And as the ghost of Franco receded — and the specter of AIDS haunted Europe — he began to explore the darker implications of desire. (In addition to being a central theme in his work, desire is also the name of the production company Mr. Almodóvar founded with his brother and longtime producer Agustín in 1987). "Matador" (1986) and "Law of Desire" (1987) are still headlong, passionate and funny, but they are also disturbing, even a little frightening, in the way they follow the logic of sensual need — the craving for intensity, for novelty, for physical connection — to the edge of the grave.

THOSE two films, followed by the smashing international success of "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," his great screwball melodrama of 1988, established Mr. Almodóvar as much more than just a naughty provocateur. The habit of provocation for its own sake, however, may have proved hard to break. In the early 90's, it seemed that Mr. Almodóvar risked slipping into mannerism. The sexual insouciance that was so fresh in, for instance, "Labyrinth of Passion" feels forced in "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down" (1990) and "Kika" (1994); their light-hearted treatments of stalking, rape and sadomasochism are less bracing than abrasive.

There is a sense of incipient fatigue in these two films — the bad taste was threatening to become boring after all — which nonetheless have their moments of vibrancy, humor and insight. They look now like the last bubblings of the post-Fascist cultural ferment — the cinematic equivalent of Chevy Chase's old "Saturday Night Live" news flash: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

By the 90's, however, Almodóvarismo, in Spain and beyond, was very much alive. Traces of his influence began to show up everywhere, a notion that elicited a good-natured wince from Mr. Almodóvar. "I do see my influence in some Spanish films," he said, "and even some American films, but I say that with some embarrassment. I truly would not counsel anyone to imitate me, not because I'm so unique, but because I think the way I work is very personal, and also because the kind of material I work with is often on the verge of being ridiculous, even grotesque. Some of my movies became plays, in Spain and in Italy, and they were very successful, but I didn't like them at all. They were very broad and exaggerated. The mistake is that people will think I'll be very happy to go to a play with a lot of drag queens, and I can't tell them that I'm fed up with drag queens, because it might be offensive or it might not be politically correct."

His would-be followers are not the only ones to miss the nuance and sophistication of his work. Like his characters, who keep copies of Djuna Barnes, Tennessee Williams or Davis Grubb's "Night of the Hunter" on their bedside tables, Mr. Almodóvar is a passionate reader, and from very early in his career he dreamed of adapting novels as various as "The Accidental Tourist," "The Silence of the Lambs" and, more recently, "The Human Stain." The options on those properties, of course, were taken — just think of what the recent history of American cinema would look like if they had not been — though an adaptation of "The Paperboy," Pete Dexter's melancholy Southern novel, did reach the early stages of production. When Hollywood studios came calling, it was usually with projects like "Sister Act 2" and "To Wong Foo With Love Julie Newmar," as if cuddly, commercialized camp, with men in dresses and women in habits, would have represented the logical next step in Mr. Almodóvar's career, instead of a giant step backward.

"Flower of My Secret," released in 1995, marked not only a return to form, but a new direction, as if Mr. Almodóvar, starting from a parodic, camp sensibility, had found his way back to the full, theatrical emotionalism that camp feeds upon and travesties. "I think that emotions have always been present in my films," he says now, "but I'm conscious of a change, of almost deciding that I will concentrate solely on emotions and take away as much of anything extraneous to them as I can, and that takes place as of `The Flower of My Secret.' I now deal with a completely open heart."

"It's not something I had decided," he continued. "It seems imposed on me by my own life and my own experience. I suppose it comes with age; it doesn't really have to do with an intellectual position. I prefer to be unconscious about the reasons. I think it may have to do with a change of a vision, a vision I wouldn't like to say is pessimistic, but which is sad, mournful about life. When I think about my life, I think more about suffering than about joy."

In his last four films — "Flower of My Secret," "Live Flesh," "All About My Mother" and now "Talk to Her" — this sorrow is transformed into tenderness and beauty. There is something deeply consoling in Mr. Almodóvar's mature vision, and the consolation comes from a deep faith in the power of art. To an extent more unusual in the movies than in life, perhaps, his characters define themselves, and reach each other, through their experience of books, movies, theater and music. In "High Heels," Victoria Abril's character expresses her rage toward her mother by citing a scene from Bergman's "Autumn Sonata." The lovelorn romance novelist in "Flower of My Secret" dissects her romantic predicament with reference to "The Apartment." The desperate lovers in "Matador" find their violent passions mirrored and inspired by Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in "Duel in the Sun."

The examples proliferate, and they are not confined to movies, or to actually existing works. (At the center of "Talk to Her" are excerpts from "The Shrinking Lover," a wonderfully bizarre black and white silent film directed by Mr. Almodóvar himself.) Nor are they displays of erudition for its own sake, or attempts to cannibalize cultural prestige.

Sometimes they operate at an almost subliminal level. At one dramatically crucial point in the new film, Mr. Almodóvar noted, the camera glances at a copy of "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham underneath a telephone. "On the cover," he said, "you see a detail of a painting of a body under water, with her hand resting on the water." This apparently casual image has a deep and complex resonance. "On one hand, this is a confession that I love `The Hours,' and that I would have liked to have made the movie, but they already did it. But it is also about the theme of death and water. Rain becomes for Benigno a point of entry into the world of Alicia's coma. Obviously I don't talk about all these meanings because it's not necessary to understand them, but when I'm making a movie it's necessary to surround myself with a lot of images that have a lot of meaning for me, and to the story."

And the story, as a result, is saturated with meaning and thick with feeling beyond what the viewer is able to analyze or the filmmaker to explain. "Talk to Her," like the Pina Bausch pieces that serve as its bookends, and the gorgeous Caetano Veloso song that is its centerpiece, seems to possess a soul of its own, compounded of gravity and elegance, not explicable or reducible to anything else. "This movie represents something very intimate of myself," Mr. Almodóvar said at the end of our interview, "something that even I feel embarrassed to talk about, some part of myself that I don't even know how to verbalize."

Yet it communicates perfectly. As I stood up to leave, Mr. Almodóvar offered to autograph my copy of the soundtrack CD, which includes Mr. Veloso's song, as well as Alberto Iglesias's lush, melancholy orchestral score. As the elevator doors closed, I glanced down at the cover, and noticed the message Mr. Almodóvar had written above his signature, a private communication I am happy to pass along. "Cry," it said.

An Architect Finds Her Buzz

An Architect Finds Her Buzz
By JULIE V. IOVINE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/garden/14LIND.html

THE Vanity Fair group portrait is today's equivalent of Parnassus, where glorified talents come to pose. Last week, an elite fraternity of architects participating in a high-end housing project in Long Island gathered for the magazine's group photograph of 40 top architects. Richard Meier, the mastermind of the all-star development, anchored the foreground. Michael Graves settled in the second tier. Just in time to say, "Cheese!" the mighty Zaha Hadid, wielding an oversize gold purse, maneuvered insistently from far right to dead center, while some of the younger set carped about being relegated to the fifth row.

Lindy Roy, 39, in a Comme des Garçons frock coat slashed with panels of pinstripe and camouflage fabric, stood out on the far right. Six feet tall, Ms. Roy holds her own with ease. Professionally, she is teetering between start-up jitters and white-hot ascendancy.

Today, in a newly fashionable stretch of the meat-market district, Ms. Roy will have a debut at an invitation-only opening of a gallery and showroom for the Swiss furniture maker Vitra. The store is designed with a flavorful hint of automat; through a two-story window, passers-by will glimpse a stack of rubber-matted platforms, like a vertical conveyor belt, each holding a tasty-looking chair. It is Ms. Roy's first significant job to be completed, and it's for a company known for catching talent on the way up.

"Don't ask me to say what specifically attracted me to her," said Rolf Fehlbaum, the chairman of Vitra, who in 1987 gave Frank Gehry his first European commission, the Vitra Museum, and then crowned Ms. Hadid, the London-based architect, with a career-making firehouse. "With Lindy, I felt a sense of promise and the presence of a fast mind with a keen understanding of architecture."

Less than a decade out of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Ms. Roy, born in South Africa, has been hyped as one of design's bright young things in glossies like Interview. In April, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will begin a series of exhibitions of innovative new designers with a show of Ms. Roy's work.

She is an architect on the verge, even without much built work. Three of her projects, including a heli-ski resort in Alaska, where visitors will arrive on mountaintops in helicopters, and a spa in Botswana where guests can bathe among crocodiles, appear in the "New Hotels for Global Nomads" exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Works closer to home include an apartment for a Vitra executive in a condo on Perry Street designed by Mr. Meier and a $1.5-million house, with a swimming pool in the living room, to be built next spring in the development that was the occasion for the Vanity Fair photo session.

"Lindy's name always comes up in conversations about who's doing something that's going to make a difference," said Joseph Rosa, the curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco museum. "She comes from a different cultural background, and her outsider mentality, her drive and excitement are all reminiscent of the just-do-it optimism of the European Modernists who went to California and were so influential to postwar architecture."

Last week, Ms. Roy strode with confidence through the chaos of the Vitra showroom's final preparations. Dressed in jeans and a form-follows-form leather jacket, she negotiated adroitly between railless staircases and workers trailing behind with punch lists. With an easy comaraderie and breezy flirtatiousness, she calmed a construction worker made apoplectic by an high ledge on a stair. She peeled back the wrapper to inspect the sheen on stainless-steel treads slipping like a Slinky down a molded-walnut staircase. "It really looks good," she said with the infectious cheer that friends and competitors say lends her an aura of invincible success.

Over an omelet at Pastis, Ms. Roy reviewed the highlights of her brief but gathering career. The first break was the Botswana spa, designed when she was fresh out of school for a friend who owns a safari company. Ms. Roy's zoomy computer renderings of an archipelago of floating spas inspired by termite lodgings were an easy sell to magazines on the lookout for wacky futuristic designs. Then in 2001 she won a competition to design a summer installation in the courtyard of P.S. 1 in Queens. With 12 hammocks, 42 fans and mobile stretchers slung with plastic bladders, she conceived her island as a kind of "Swept Away" for hip young anesthesiologists. Next came the Vitra commission, which she is completing with Peter Himmelstein Design.

"Watching the space emerge is incredibly intense," Ms Roy said, "It's such a long way from designing on computer, where you can hit the delete button if you don't like a beam. In reality, there are a lot of hits and misses."

Ms. Roy's work takes the sanitized aesthetic of the medical lab and fleshes it out with sensual materials, a dash of humor and a whiff of risk. The Vitra showroom abounds in double takes, including an acrylic-impregnated wood floor in a tiger-stripe pattern and display platforms that turn into staircases. A bar she is designing for the meat-market district will have cast-resin tabletops suspended from overhead tracks once used for meat hooks, as if to say, "Let the furniture do the mingling."

"I know a lot of architects, and they are all portentous," said one client. "Lindy is fun without being a wiseacre."

"I go with what works," Ms. Roy said.

Like many young architects in a post-Rem Koolhaas world, she bolsters every design with heavy research. No napkin sketches for this generation. After graduating from Columbia architecture school, Ms. Roy studied deconstruction, semiotics, swarm theory and brain waves. Then she spent two years working for Peter Eisenman, the profession's heavyweight thinker, before heading off to teach design and design theory at Rice. Two years ago, she opened her own firm, Roy.

In addition to finding inspiration in swarming termites, she admires the work of nondogmatic Modernists like Oscar Neimeyer, Jean Prouvé and Buckminster Fuller. "And, of course, I follow all the fashion designers, especially Rei Kawakubo and Issey Miyake," she said.

But it's the intrigue with danger that Roy-watchers say sets her work apart. "In her hotel projects, she really understands the sublime, as in the 19th-century fascination with seeking the exotic, the remote and the overpowering," said Donald Albrecht, the curator of "Global Nomads." In one project, she envisioned barge motels floating down a Louisiana river poisoned by the petrochemical industry. Ms. Roy attributes her skill at designing for risky situations — a mountain ski drop or toxic dump — to the instability of a childhood spent in South Africa. (Her own home, however, is in a placid Greenwich Village town house.)

Last summer, Ms. Roy jumped at the chance to design in just 10 days a museum show to mark the 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. A close-up portrait of Presley's face covers the side of a 50-foot trailer truck. Inside, she arranged a federal badge presented by Richard M. Nixon, a Colt .45 and the gold coveralls from Presley's later years in backlighted alcoves and lined the rest with black rubber shag carpeting.

Ms. Roy belongs to a generation of architects accustomed to working the levers of the news media and publicity machinery. She didn't flinch when Vogue came calling to feature her and, Winka Dubbeldam another tall, attractive woman architect, in an article that could have been headlined "Babes in Designland." Hers is the first generation of women architects comfortable about being womanly and authoritative on the job.

"When I was starting out," said Deborah Berke, a Manhattan architect, "I was really careful about being taken seriously as a woman and not appearing frivolous — I simply wouldn't do certain things. Now I see younger women architects posing in fashion magazines and appearing in advertisements, and I think, `Boy, was I an idiot!' "

Not that it all has come effortlessly for Ms. Roy. "I remember one summer," she said, "just sitting and staring at the phone thinking: `Who can I call? How can I make things happen?" To complete the research for the Louisiana barge project — it has been called, much to Ms. Roy's chagrin, toxic tourism — she ran up all her expenses on credit cards when she could not get a grant. For the moment, there is no client for the meat-market bar. No problem: she may finance it herself if the right partners materialize. "It's only a matter of time before all the paraphernalia of the meat market become valuable artifacts from another era," she said.

At the Vitra construction site, it's business as usual, with about 30 construction workers stomping around, and Ms. Roy commanding their full attention. "She helps get the job done," said Rupert Heron, the superintendent for the Vanguard Construction Company. "And she's hands-on. A lot of architects aren't. Not only is she a lady. She's a gentleman."

Shanghai Polishes Up Its Rough Edges

Shanghai Polishes Up Its Rough Edges
By ELAINE LOUIE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/garden/14SHAN.html

SHANGHAI — IF there are two square blocks that signify the exuberant, modern future of this city, they are the Xintiandi district, where new white-walled boutiques and dark, romantically lighted bars are housed in 1920's brick buildings. When Benjamin Wood and Carlos Zapata of the Boston design firm Wood & Zapata won the commission four years ago to turn Xintiandi into something unreservedly commercial, they decided to add a bar of their own. Their DR bar, which has a serpentine wall of curvy roof tiles sliced one inch thick, was once a dilapidated 700-square-foot space that was the headquarters of the local Communist Party.

"It was very dark and unheated and had no plumbing," Mr. Wood said. The floor was mud. People went there to register to vote, report on their communities and read the newspapers, displayed in a plexiglass case outdoors.

Now the same men gather outside DR, eager for a glimpse of the new China. "They're fascinated that some Westerner who built this froufrou martini bar has sawed up their roof tiles to make a wall," Mr. Wood said. What the former residents see is architects and designers — both local and foreign — having cocktails at DR by candlelight and discussing Shanghai's transformation, almost overnight, from a rundown city to one teeming, once again, with new ideas.

Next week, the 2002 Shanghai Biennale opens here with a forum on "The Present and Future of Chinese Urban Architecture," including lectures by Arata Isozaki and Michael Graves. Shanghai is "glimmery and shining and full of life," said Alanna Heiss, director of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, and chief curator of a portion of the biennale.

Xintiandi (pronounced shin-tea-en-dee) signifies the future of this city, and is the first neighborhood to be completed in a 128-acre (27 square blocks) master rehabilitation plan. The plan was the work of the Shui On Group, a developer in Hong Kong, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco. "Xintiandi has successfully given Shanghai not just a nice development and nice buildings," said Albert Chan, general manager of Shui On Group. "It has somehow given Shanghai a new lifestyle, a way of life not possible before it was born." He said that more than 15 other Chinese cities have approached Shui On to develop their own versions of Xintiandi.

In some parts of the city, there are dazzling white apartment houses that look like they came from Richard Meier, loftlike spaces with exposed beams that could be found in Montmartre and interiors painted nontraditional colors like purple and taxicab yellow.

"Shanghai has always had a modern sensibility, of thinking without constraints," said Calvin Tsao, a partner at Tsao McKown, a Manhattan architectural firm, and a visiting critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is working on a hotel here. "In the 20's and 30's, Shanghai embraced Art Deco design — Western design," he said.

The time seems ripe for a new embrace. "It's not that Shanghai is beautiful like Paris or sexy like Rome," Mr. Tsao said. "Now Shanghai is sort of like Berlin, after they tore down the wall." Berlin, it should be said, before Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster and Renzo Piano designed major buildings there.

"It's not often that a Western architect like myself gets to come to a place like China," Mr. Wood said. "It's like a gold mine." After the Communists took over in 1949, nothing happened for 50 years. "Now, it's a rampant outbreak of total energy," he added. "It's because people have gone out into the world and come back to China. It's an insertion of Western modernism into China."

Shanghai, a bustling port city of 13 million people, is speaking the international language of design, but in mixed tongues. Futuristic skyscrapers like the Orient Pearl Tower and the Jin Mao Tower abound in the Pudong financial district. "Everyone is trying to create their own unique, special piece, and at the end of the day, Will it hold together?" asked Adrian Smith, the architect of Jin Mao and a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago. Most of the new skyscrapers, he said, ignore Chinese culture and design. Instead, he said, they are "derivative of Western architecture, which is then placed on amphetamines."

The last little boutiques of Xintiandi were finished last month, and the area now has the spirit of SoHo when Banana Republic first arrived. TMSK, another high-design night spot, has an eye-popping art-glass bar. Shops sell celadon bowls alongside clothing from Comme des Garçons, and visitors can find an ice cream parlor, a McDonald's, a Starbucks, a Vidal Sassoon salon.

At the DR bar in Xintiandi, designers, artists and architects meet to exchange information on resources and admire new materials. The base of the bar is made of indigenous materials like black inkstone. The bar top has silver threads woven so tight by two women in Canton that spilled liquids cannot penetrate, said Delphine Yip, a 29-year-old architect born in Hong Kong, who went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and now directs Wood & Zapata's Shanghai office. They needed $65,000 to turn the party headquarters into the DR bar.

Because so many resources here are hard to find, Wood & Zapata named their bar DR, short for design resources. "If you want to know where to get the inkstone, we will tell you," Ms. Yip said, adding that there is now so much work in Shanghai that architects don't have to compete with one another.

Architects look to the same schools — Tongji University in Shanghai and Chinghua in Beijing — for help, Mr. Wood said. "But in architectural offices, or at a dinner party, you'll get two Shanghainese, two from Hong Kong and an Australian," he said. Students are influenced by Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, Rem Koolhaas, Rafael Moneo and Steven Holl, Ms. Yip said. Foreign-born or foreign-trained architects are paid American or Hong Kong rates, but those Chinese-born and trained make 20 to 80 percent of that.

Both Mr. Wood and Ms. Yip have extended their minimalist aesthetic to their homes. Mr. Wood has created a minimalist home out of the villa he has rented in Shanghai. "Minimalism is in short supply," he said, "but I'm doing my best to try to promote it."

Ms. Yip rents a 1927 wood farmhouse in an alley off a commercial street called Huaihai Road, where she lives, with some misgiving, among her landlord's ornate teak furniture. In a minimalist gesture she has draped black cloth over the most elaborate pieces and painted the walls white.

If Mr. Wood and Ms. Yip are minimalists, the glass artists Chang Yi and his wife, Loretta Yang, are not. They own and designed the TMSK bar. Their bar is made of blue and green glass tiles, their bar stools are enclosed in egg-shaped red silk lanterns.

Mr. Chang, 50, and Ms. Yang, 52, are China's answer to Harvey Littleton, who is considered the father of the studio glass movement in the United States. Thirty years ago, Mr. Chang was a film director in Taiwan, and Ms. Yang a movie star. In 1986, Ms. Yang started making glass the way the Chinese made it in the Shang dynasty nearly 4,000 years ago. "I saw Lalique and Daum," Ms. Yang said, "but no Chinese pieces."

Mr. Chang and Ms. Yang organized the Contemporary Glass Exhibition in Taipei in 1995, and showed 54 artists, including Dale Chihuly. The couple have their own brand name, Liuligongfang, a rarity in China, and 44 boutiques selling their glass jewelry, statues and vessels throughout Asia.

Robert Chan, 27, a partner in Nube (pronounced new-bay, Spanish for cloud) Design, is a minimalist designer of products and interiors and a follower of Philippe Starck, Claudio Silvestri and Richard Meier. Mr. Chan grew up in London, studied industrial design at the Royal College of Art, and moved to Shanghai five years ago.

Last year, he began to focus on interior design. Most of his clients are local Chinese in their 30's to 50's who want the cachet of hiring a foreign designer. But he also works for people like Alex Abplanalp, 39, managing director of Zenith Media. Mr. Abplanalp, an Englishman, had seen Mr. Chan's work in magazines and hired him to gut and renovate his rented house here for $140,000. A maximalist, Mr. Abplanalp wanted Mr. Chan to advise him on colors, and where to put his Indian chairs inset with mother-of-pearl and ebony, his Chinese daybeds and his huge gilt mirrors.

So Mr. Chan abandoned his beloved white walls for ones painted deep yellow, purple and turquoise. He had teak floors installed and organized Mr. Abplanalp's flamboyant furniture into eclectic groupings.

The spirit of such interiors, after so many years of dutiful party loyalty and regulated lives, is one of joy, the same spirit inhabiting Xintiandi. Ms. Yip said, "Old people come here and feel nostalgic, and young people think it's so modern and trendy, and Western people think it's so Chinese."

Navy to Limit Sonar Testing Thought
to Hurt Sea Mammals

Navy to Limit Sonar Testing Thought to Hurt Sea Mammals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/science/17WHAL.html

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 16 — The Navy has agreed to scale back temporarily the testing of a new sonar system designed to detect enemy submarines.

The agreement was reached on Friday after months of protests by environmentalists and two weeks after a federal magistrate judge blocked the testing, citing concerns about marine life.

The accord is a compromise between the government and the ecologists who filed a lawsuit over the testing. It will last seven months while the Navy's operating permit is challenged in federal court.

Magistrate Judge Elizabeth LaPorte had already blocked the Navy from experimenting with the system, which was to be routinely tested throughout the world's oceans.

The Navy had planned to test the system in about 14 million square miles of ocean. Under the agreement, the Navy will limit its tests to about a million square miles of remote ocean around the Mariana Islands.

"It's the least sensitive area of ocean we could get," said Andrew Wetzler, an lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which says the Navy system can harass or kill marine mammals.

The sonar system can send signals hundreds of miles. It can be as loud as 215 decibels, as much noise as a twin-engine F-15 fighter jet makes when it takes off.

The agreement does not prevent the Navy from using the system to detect modern, quiet submarines in wartime, and it acknowledges that the Navy must be allowed to train with it.

Neither the Navy nor the Justice Department returned calls seeking comment. The judge ordered all discussions between the environmental group and the Navy to remain confidential.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said Navy sonar used in March 2000 may have caused at least 16 whales and 2 dolphins to beach themselves on islands in the Bahamas. Eight whales died, and scientists found bleeding around their brains and ear bones, injuries consistent with exposure to loud noise.