FRONTLINE -- China in the Red

[this is on tonight at 9PM on PBS]

FRONTLINE -- China in the Red
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/red/

Four years in the making, this two-hour FRONTLINE documentary
chronicles three pivotal years in China's historic evolution from a
rigid Communist society to an exploding market economy. For more than
half a century, millions of Chinese workers labored in state-run
factories that provided cradle-to-grave job security. But the economic
reforms that have brought the world's most populous nation economic
prosperity and world-power status now threaten the livelihood of many
Chinese workers. The Chinese Communist Party can no longer afford to
subsidize the factories, and millions of workers are being laid off,
with no social safety net to catch them. "China in the Red" follows
ten Chinese citizens caught up in the social and economic
transformation, and through their stories reveals a nation in flux and
a people struggling to survive in a world they never dreamed would
exist.

Chaos

saw the french film Chaos last night. it was really an empowering feminist anthem -- on the hegemony and recklessness that men bring to society, and how women have to unite and cope. [and the second movie in the last week about coma victims after Talk To Her]

all the men in the movie were such pathetic characters lacking any sense of responsibility or values, other than to themselves -- from the algerian father selling off his daughters and the brothers that abuse their sisters, to the french father and son who are helpless alone and like rabbits, seek to have sex with anything that moves.

as an example of their sense of selfishness, at the start of the film, the french father's first thought after men smash a runaway girl's head against their windshield is not to help the girl dumped in the street, but to get the bloodied windshield washed off!

anyway, an empowering, well shot, and well paced film. go see it!
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/29/movies/29CHAO.html

Round 1 Goes to Mr. Big

Round 1 Goes to Mr. Big
By JOSEF JOFFE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/10/opinion/10JOFF.html

HAMBURG, Germany — Is the latest trans-Atlantic flare-up yet another "Whither NATO?" crisis, like those that have roiled the West for decades with the precision of a German cuckoo clock? No, this time it is war (and not the real war against Iraq, which hasn't even begun). In fact, it is two wars: one that pits Europe against Europe, and another that pits a French-German "axis" against the United States.

It's been a tough stretch for the leaders of the "old" Europe — Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany and President Jacques Chirac of France. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation at the United Nations on Wednesday was found so damning by other leaders around the contintent that 10 Eastern European countries — including five set to join NATO next year — issued a joint statement that they would "stand together to face the threat posed by the nexus of terrorism and dictators with weapons of mass destruction."

This statement came just days after a missive, splattered across the morning papers in Britain and Italy, Portugal and Spain, Denmark and Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, by those countries' leaders that ever so politely told Messrs. Chirac and Schröder to back off. In its diplomatese, that message said of the Iraqi threat: "Our goal is to safeguard world peace and security by ensuring that this regime gives up its weapons of mass destruction. Our governments have a common responsibility to face this threat."

Decoded, however, these two statements read, "We are not amused that Paris and Berlin are trying to gang up on the United States in the name of Europe." No, there was no explicit call to war against Baghdad. Nor did the "Euro 8" or the "Vilnius 10" cheer America's wider goals — regime change or democratization. But the message was clear: Saddam Hussein does have to be disarmed, if need be, by force.

For now, the French-German duo that spent the last few weeks trying to isolate the United States is itself isolated. But this can change tomorrow, as history is accelerating. The real significance of the drama is the collapse of Europe's pretensions to an independent, let alone cohesive, foreign policy.

Essentially, the French and the Germans tried to harness a diplomatic coalition against the so-called hyperpower. They acted as if they viewed the exercise of American might as a greater threat than Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. This is curious, since if Iraq were given time to develop a North Korea-like program, its missiles could reach Berlin and Paris a lot sooner than the urban centers of America. But it makes perfect sense if we recall the great watershed of postwar Europe, Christmas Day 1991, when the Soviet Union committed suicide by self-dissolution.

Suddenly, there was nobody left to contain and constrain Mr. Big. This does not sit well with the Europeans, especially since George W. Bush told them again in his State of the Union address that the "course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others."

Naturally, the Europeans felt more comfortable in the past with Gulliver Bound, although it was nice to be able to untie him just in case the other superpower, the Soviet Union, turned nasty. But that strategic dependence, which used to squelch every "Whither NATO?" crisis in the past, is a decade gone.

No German chancellor would have dared provoke the United States while Soviet shock troops were ensconced 25 miles outside Hamburg. Nor would the French have brazenly threatened a veto in the Security Council while depending on the free security provided by six American divisions in Germany.

Still, as the messages from the rest of the continent indicate, today's Europe as a whole is not ready to balance Mr. Big. It is not yet willing to seek an identity apart from and against the United States. The Europeans know that they can't even clean up their own backyard — in Bosnia, in Kosovo — without help from the U.S. Cavalry. They also know that Saddam Hussein is a real problem, as is North Korea.

And so it is quite useful to have Mr. Big in the game, even though he does throw his weight around a bit too much for comfort. Indeed, the more the Europeans pride themselves in having transcended Hobbesian politics in favor of "civilian power" and "friendly persuasion," the more they need American muscle and will as reinsurance. Europe's goodness depends not on the European Union, but on the Pentagon.

So has President Bush won the game? No, just one round. The Germans, who have defied Washington with the loudest "no" to the war, may lose for now because, as Mr. Schröder has conceded, he does "not know what the French will do." His good friend Mr. Chirac, leaving his options open, has dispatched the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the Middle East. Once the first American cruise missiles hit the bunkers of the Iraqi Republican Guard, France will surely join in.

Further down the road, however, the United States does face a problem: eventually the lesser nations aren't going to take it any more. What the administration fails to appreciate is the Spider-Man principle: "With great power comes great responsibility." The bigger Mr. Big gets, the more trust he must inspire in others. Just one practical point: once American power pushes Saddam Hussein out, who is going to win the peace in Iraq, if not a vast coalition of the willing ready to secure order and reconstruction?

This French-German attempt to gang up on Mr. Big seems to have backfired — undermined by the inconvenient fact that there still are at least 18 other European countries determined to have a voice. Yet the other major players will break ranks again unless the greatest power since Rome learns to respect a simple maxim: To lead is to heed. This is not the counsel of wimpishness, but of wisdom.

Josef Joffe is editor of the German weekly Die Zeit.

Surprising Germany

Surprising Germany
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/10/opinion/10SAFI.html

MUNICH — "Hast Du gehort?" (Have you heard?) Ten days ago, a breathless Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, burst into a dinner party in Berlin's Ludovici restaurant to break the stunning news to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

Leaders of eight European nations — not just Britain, but Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Denmark — had signed an op-ed statement supporting the U.S. stand on Saddam and in effect asserting that Germany and France did not speak for Europe.

Schröder was flabbergasted; he had no idea that this rejection of his anti-U.S. crusade was in the works.

Think about that: a Wall Street Journal request started the round-robin letter; eight nations weighed in on its drafting and redrafting for days; but Germany's chancellor, with his vast intelligence system and diplomatic corps, was totally in the dark.

A few days later, after Colin Powell made his case in the U.N. showing the Iraqi cover-up, 10 more nations of Europe — equally outraged at the Franco-German abandonment of collective security — publicly sided with the U.S. (Watch for a "sense of the Senate" resolution thanking all 18.)

That split confirms a more profound surprise: the notion that Paris and Berlin could take charge of a "common foreign policy" for all of Europe turns out to be pipe-dreaming by presumptuous bureaucrats.

Here at the Munich Security Conference, where strategists of the U.S. and Europe meet each year to smooth out strains, Fischer was surprised again: Germany's new opposition leader, the Thatcheresque Angela Merkel, joined the defining issue as her conservative party's past candidate had failed to do. She said of the anti-Saddam op-ed: "if we had been in government, Germany would have signed that letter."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bested Fischer in their confrontation, making plain that the German-French argument was with the great majority of European nations, not just with the U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman was tough-minded in his gentle way. Senator John McCain gave it to "the new unilateralists" with the bark on, drawing spirited applause by denouncing the German-French opposition to providing NATO chemical and missile defenses to Turkey.

This increasingly shaky German government is due for yet another surprise: a briefing in Brussels Friday of a U.S. Congressional delegation led by McCain and Lieberman by the new NATO supreme commander, U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, revealed a developing U.S. strategy. It holds that the 70,000 U.S. troops garrisoned in Germany, accompanied by their 70,000 dependents, make up too many forces with too outdated a mission stationed too far from potential trouble at too high a cost.

At a time when the U.S. is painfully closing bases at home, many defense strategists conclude that we should reduce and redeploy our troops in Europe. By cutting the number in half; by rotating the troops every six months, thereby obviating the need for dependents' schools and extensive support facilities; and by moving the bases south and east toward low-cost Hungary, southern Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, the Defense Department could spread our military techniques and equipment throughout the alliance and train with fewer environmental constraints at far less cost.

The proposed radical change is not finalized and is not punishment for Chancellor Schröder's antiwar pandering or his subsequent isolationism (although the recent weakening of German resolve, as one diplomat told me, "certainly makes the timing opportune"). German officials are right to worry that U.S. forces now headed from Germany to the Persian Gulf may not, after the war and occupation, return to their old bases.

Quiet planning for this overdue reorganization of our European bases began at the Pentagon as NATO expansion changed the strategic map of Europe. Soviet tanks are no longer the threat; lighter, more mobile forces are called for to project power southward toward the nexus of the terror threat in coming years.

But that's postwar planning. As we prepare to liberate Iraq, Americans must guard against hubris. For example, a U.S. Navy bus picked up the high-profile senators, former national security advisers and military journalists at the Senate steps for transportation to Andrews Air Force Base to board a jet to Munich. On the way to the airport, our bus ran out of gas. There's a lesson in that.

Another Hectic Weekend

another hectic weekend under a new covering of beautiful snow. my sister was in town from paris for pre-fashion week madness. went to Westchester to visit my parents and my grandmother. went to see Thomas Struth's exhibition at the Met. paid a virtual visit to mainland China at a Beijing Daxue new years party. dim sum in chinatown and the end of the week of chinese new years celebrations.

NYT articles on Thomas Struth:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/07/arts/design/07KIMM.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/02/arts/design/02WOOD.html

Talk to Her / Nausicaa

this was definitely a week for movies. first, earlier in the week, went to the NY premiere of Gerry hosted by MOMA. by the end and overall there were some pretty landscapes and music of ethereal emptiness (better heard in a dedicated tone-poem), but that was in no way sufficient to redeem the first two thirds of the film which were disgustingly self-indulgent of two idiots (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's brother) getting lost in the desert (a Blair Witch redux). they didn't even start discussing directionals (east-west, highways & sun positions) until the third day of being lost in the dessert. whatever!??!

next was Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. ever since linda got her copy of the Ghibli Archive Set, i've been lusting after them, trying to save money (while i meanwhile spend bucks processing film and buying film supplies!). anyway, was close to chinatown doing errands, and was lured into my favorite HK DVD store to see if they had anything new. seeing the Ghibli set (finally!), i couldn't resist plucking down cash for them and two other anime boxed sets, even though they were priced over similar ebay offerings (figured it was worth it considering shipping costs and waiting time -- that place is dangerous to my wallet!). as expected, the film was beautiful, and so epic in scale and execution compared to so many other anime films and OVAs.

finally, over the weekend, i finally got around to seeing Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her. it was so hypnotic and beautiful, with long languorous shots and a soft sensual and absorbing latin soundtrack. i just didn't want it to end. the characters were odd and deviant when you thought about it abstractly (which of course is usual for Almodovar, or for the real world for that matter), but he portrayed them with such affection and seeming authentic innocence that it was almost impossible not to empathize with them. i'll definitely have to see it again.
http://www.washingtonpost.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/movies/22TALK.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/arts/08REVI.html
http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/talktoher.html

so two excellent movies out of three was not too bad. (oh, actually saw two other films as well that were not bad, both with Maggie Chung -- Moon over New York, and the Soong Sisters -- the former about three overseas chinese young women in New York in the 80s, and the latter, an interesting chronicle of an emerging and war torn China.)

'Matisse Picasso': Artists Dueling, Curators Dealing

'Matisse Picasso': Artists Dueling, Curators Dealing
By SARAH BOXER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/arts/design/09BOXE.html

The card game was played by Matisse and Picasso collectors everywhere. The dealers were a trinational all-star team of curators. The game went like this:

A curator would approach a collector with a deck of cards and lay them out on a table, face-up. The face of each card showed a reproduction of a work by either Matisse or Picasso. The dealers would match one card by Matisse, say, "Blue Nude" (1907), against one by Picasso, say, "Nude With Raised Arms" (1907), as if to mimic the rivalry the artists had in life.

The object of the game? To create sparks for a three-city show in which the two artists would face off on the gallery walls. By playing the card game, the team of curators got a chance to show the richness and range of the show they envisioned. And collectors got to shuffle the deck, juxtaposing the cards in various ways. But the game always ended the same way: the collectors were asked to part with their card, their art, for a year.

It worked.

"Very few people were less than thrilled," said Kirk Varnedoe, a member of the team and, at the time — this was about five years ago — the Modern's chief curator of painting and sculpture. Picasso's grandson, Claude Ruiz-Picasso, played happily with the deck at a cafe table. And Matisse's representative, Claude Duthuit, who had come to the table thinking, "Oh God, not another show!" left excited.

Thus the groundwork was laid for "Matisse Picasso," the blockbuster exhibition that opens on Thursday at the Museum of Modern Art in Queens, after runs in London and Paris.

What could be more appropriate than a jeu de cartes to ignite a Matisse-Picasso show? The 50-year relationship between the two artists was itself a game, a playful, taunting, no-holds-barred duel of loaded brushes between two painters who knew they had no other equals.

The story begins in 1906, when Gertrude Stein introduced them. Picasso, 25, was still an upstart, and Matisse, 37, was riding high. He had just exhibited his masterwork, "Bonheur de Vivre" (1905-06), at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. Picasso took it as a challenge and responded with "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907). Matisse thought the painting was a hoax and came back at Picasso with "Bathers With a Turtle" (1908), a troubling painting of three nude women looking down in terror — or is it curiosity? — toward a small turtle approaching a piece of lettuce.

The two painters respectfully exchanged paintings in 1907, but Picasso reportedly used his Matisse as a dart board. When Matisse saw Picasso's "Harlequin" (1915), which seems to include the image of a white and tan palette, he was sure his own "Goldfish and Palette" (1914) was behind it. In 1926, he declared Picasso "a bandit waiting in ambush." Picasso relished the accusation. When Matisse died in 1954, Picasso, distraught at the loss of his rival, refused to attend the funeral. He said Matisse "left me his odalisques as a legacy."

The other story, the story of the wheeling and dealing behind the exhibition, begins in 1993, when John Elderfield, now the Modern's chief curator at large, was taking down his Henri Matisse retrospective. After the show closed, he said, there were still a few paintings on the walls waiting to be taken away: Matisse's "Blue Nude," "Le Luxe I" (1907), "Bathers With a Turtle," "Bathers by a River" (1909-16). To keep the Matisses company, Mr. Elderfield brought up some of the Modern's Picassos: "Two Nudes" (1906), "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and "Bathers in a Forest" (1908).

For two weeks the Modern had a mini-Matisse and Picasso show. It was the first time since Picasso's death in 1974, in fact the first time in almost 50 years, that their works had been "brought together in confrontation," Mr. Elderfield said.

One of the people who saw the little show was Mr. Elderfield's former Ph.D. adviser, John Golding, a London art historian. He suggested doing a big one, a full-blown historical treatment of the relationship. "We could do this," Mr. Golding said. Mr. Elderfield wasn't so sure: "Did I really want to do more Matisse, to go back to the owners of those paintings and ask for them again?"

Mr. Golding went home to London. A year later, he and Elizabeth Cowling, an art historian at the University of Edinburgh, were taking down a Picasso exhibition at the Tate and wondering what to do next. Ms. Cowling had just read a biography of Picasso and noticed a passage in which he suggested that someone should put together a show of pre-1914 paintings by himself and Matisse. "I thought, `If Picasso thinks so, then that's our subject,' " Ms. Cowling said. "I told John Golding and he said: `You're wrong. The show should be the whole career.' "

But how to organize such a show? "London couldn't do this by itself," Ms. Cowling said. It needed New York. "MOMA has a wonderful collection" of Matisses and Picassos and "the Tate does not," she said bluntly. So in the winter of 1994-95, Mr. Golding and Mr. Elderfield teamed up. "The two Johns got the ball rolling," Ms. Cowling said, but soon it was clear that "we can't do this without Paris, either." The curators contacted the Pompidou, and then the Musée Picasso.

Then they hit a snag. Ms. Cowling said that when she rang up the Musée Picasso to discuss the show, she was told: "I'm talking about it now with Yve-Alain Bois. Is this the same show?" Mr. Bois, a professor of art history at Harvard University, had been organizing a Matisse-Picasso exhibition for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. His plan was to start in the late 1920's, when Picasso was goading Matisse, who had retreated to a conservative style, to come back out and play. (The show was in 1999.)

"We had a different way of doing it," Mr. Elderfield said.

"We had a 50-year narrative," Mr. Varnedoe said.

"There was room for two shows," Ms. Cowling said.

Thus, the three-city curatorial team was formed: in New York, Mr. Elderfield and Mr. Varnedoe; in London, Ms. Cowling and Mr. Golding; in Paris, Anne Baldassari, the curator of the Musée Picasso, and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, the deputy director of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou Center.

The curators decided their show would deal with the artists' long obsession with each other's work. "History and chronology would be respected," Ms. Cowling said. But as there was often a time lag of a decade or more between the call and the response, the flow of the show would be episodic rather than perfectly chronological, focusing on instances in which one artist responded, consciously or not, to the other.

"The objects would be selected so on the wall they speak to each other," Mr. Varnedoe said. It would be "art history without words." There would be 34 different groupings, and the occasion for each could be anything from a striking parallel in color, subject, composition or form to an explicit and documented duel.

On the one hand, Picasso's neo-classical painting "Three Women at the Spring" (1921) would be paired, for purely visual reasons, with two of Matisse's chunky relief sculptures of female backs from 1916 and 1931. On the other hand, a Matisse odalisque titled "Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background" (1925-26), which Picasso found incredibly ugly, would be paired with his cocky response, an anti-odalisque called "Large Nude in a Red Armchair" (1929). With that painting, Mr. Elderfield said, Picasso was clearly taunting Matisse: You want ugly? I'll give you ugly!

But what about loans? "We needed precise loans," Mr. Varnedoe said. Inferior substitutes would not do. The trouble was that many of the desired paintings were the prizes of their home museums. And private collectors, Ms. Cowling said, "don't have any real interest in lending" because their priceless works might get damaged and, in any case, their value would not be enhanced by a show, even one of such magnitude.

How, then, to convince collectors that this exhibition was worth it? The seduction began with the card game. But there was a fair amount of plain old horse-trading.

In order to wrest Matisse's "Blue Nude" and "Pink Nude" (1935) from the Baltimore Museum of Art, Mr. Elderfield said, the Tate agreed to have its Turner watercolor show make the Baltimore museum one of its stops. And the Modern agreed to send Baltimore three Cézanne landscapes to fill the gap on their walls. It was a fair trade, Mr. Elderfield thought. After all, Baltimore had just opened a new rotunda to feature the blue and pink nudes. "We destroyed it," he said.

To make up for the many major paintings to be lent by the State Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Modern agreed to send it several Abstract Expressionist paintings. The Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio owned a small but significant Picasso from 1914-15, "Still Life With Compote," which the curators wanted as a match for Matisse's 1915 "Still Life After Jan Davidsz. de Heem's `La Desserte.' " In return, the Modern agreed to lend Columbus a major Ben Shahn painting and Willem de Kooning's "Woman II."

Private collectors had to be wooed, too. To get Picasso's "Woman in an Armchair" (1927) from the Solinger collection in New York, Mr. Elderfield agreed to give a lecture at Cornell, the alma mater of David Solinger. Mr. Elderfield's odyssey to Ithaca involved piles of snow, a plane that couldn't land and a bus that caught fire.

A curator seeking loans from a collector, Mr. Elderfield lamented, is like the Emperor Henry IV standing barefoot in the snow before Pope Gregory VII at Canossa.

And sometimes even bargaining and groveling didn't work. The Picasso painting to be printed on MOMA's catalog jacket, "The Dream" (1932), promised from the Steve Wynn collection, was "withdrawn at the last moment," Mr. Varnedoe said with more than a hint of annoyance. The cover will have to be changed.

"Sometimes you have what you believe to be an agreement," Ms. Cowling said. "But you don't."

Picasso's "Three Dancers" (1925), belonging to the Tate, was to hang with Matisse's "Nasturtiums With `Dance' II" (1912), belonging to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. "Pushkin had agreed to lend it," Ms. Cowling said, "but in fact they had drawn up agreements to lend it elsewhere." So the painting did not travel to London or Paris and will reach the Modern for only part of its run.

The bitterest disappointment for London and Paris, Ms. Cowling said, was the Modern's refusal to send "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" to them. "It is their Turin shroud," she said, and they didn't want to let it go. But the Modern's refusal, she said, meant that St. Louis would not send "Bathers With a Turtle," Matisse's response to "Les Demoiselles," to Paris or London. "They were inextricably locked together."

Ms. Baldassari had a different take. London, she said, "was obsessed" with pairing the "Bathers With a Turtle" and "Les Demoiselles." She thought it would be just as effective to show the Matisse alongside Picasso's "Three Women" (1908), a Cubist painting that the two Paris curators had obtained from the Hermitage. But St. Louis would not be swayed. The turtles would not travel overseas.

By the time the negotiations were over, the venues themselves had shifted. Mr. Elderfield said that a decade ago he thought the London venue would be the Tate at Millbank, the Paris venue would be the Pompidou and the New York venue would be the Modern at 53rd Street in Manhattan. He was wrong on all three counts.

A few weeks before the exhibition was to open at the temporary Modern in Queens, Mr. Elderfield was still moving walls.

The penultimate room of the exhibition juxtaposed Matisse's late paper cut-outs of acrobats and nudes with Picasso's paintings of acrobats and his cut-and-folded sheet-metal sculpture, "The Chair" (1961). And for the final space, Mr. Elderfield planned to hang two wistful paintings, Matisse's "Violinist at the Window" (1918) and Picasso's "Shadow" (1953). Even though these two paintings were finished 35 years apart, they looked like a mutual goodbye.

But where to put "Women of Algiers, After Delacroix" (1955), Picasso's attempt to absorb Matisse immediately after his death? It didn't fit with the cut-outs, but if it went into the small final room, people might bump into it while looking at the two goodbye paintings. That was a nut Mr. Elderfield still had not cracked.

Maybe the problem of staging the goodbye reflects the trouble in the Matisse-Picasso relationship all along, which Mr. Elderfield described as a continual volley of "jealously, peevishness, envy and fear of envy."

"One surges and the other responds," Mr. Elderfield said. In the end, "no one won." But the game made them both better painters. Picasso had the last word, and it was the kindest: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he."

A Queens Full Circle

Henri Matisse had a lot of trouble finishing "Music": photographs show 18 versions of it between March 17 and April 8, 1939. But it was ready for its debut at the French Pavilion of the 1939 World's Fair in Queens. "Music" was bought by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and has traveled widely, but it has taken 64 years for it to return to Queens.

Where Truth Dares to Meet Your Gaze

Where Truth Dares to Meet Your Gaze
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/07/arts/design/07KIMM.html

THE magisterial midcareer retrospective of the photographer Thomas Struth, now at the Metropolitan Museum, is the right event for right now: serious, tradition-bound, circumspect about the world.

The show can leave you feeling a little the way you may have felt after seeing the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition last year of the painter Gerhard Richter, one of Mr. Struth's mentors. Like Mr. Richter, Mr. Struth operates from a chilly peak, where the air is thin.

But what results are obsessively meticulous photographs, some of them enormous, like mural paintings — hypnotic, silent, slightly claustrophobic, brainy and gorgeous, qualities that can seem in lively tension with one another.

The natural comparison is with Andreas Gursky, Mr. Struth's former classmate and inevitable rival, another German pioneer of the fashionably large-scale color print, whose retrospective also passed through town not long ago. The differences are instructive, apart from the obvious one that Mr. Gursky is a digital wizard while Mr. Struth is basically an old-school, analog photographer. Mr. Gursky's photographs, fetishized marvels of contrivance, exist to be ogled. They are spectacular. Mr. Struth's photographs are strangely the opposite of spectacular. They are too somber and nuanced to be spectacles.

They ask questions. Why do things look the way they do? How did this come about? What can we know about the people in these photographs? What are their relationships to one another? To us? Deep down, Mr. Struth's art is therapeutic, sensitizing viewers, through a kind of tough love, to the peculiar cosmologies of the human condition. Art is a means of "locating yourself in your time," Mr. Struth has said. Exactly.

Born in 1954, he has justly been called a history painter of the present. All his various projects, as this 25-year survey demonstrates, have been directed toward a historical enterprise, whether he has been photographing streets or flowers or families or jungles or people in churches like the Frari in Venice.

In that huge exemplary picture, we see tourists standing before Titian's altarpiece. The photograph is almost as big as the painting. While you look, time seems to stretch out and swallow you up. From halfway down the nave, the camera halts to capture a few blurry white figures bathed in light beyond the shadowy pews and below the painting, which is scarlet and ocher. The movement of the tourists somehow suggests not action but atmosphere. The mood is expectant and flushed.

I assume most tourists who have visited the Frari have passed the spot where Mr. Struth put his camera. But the place looks unfamiliar. Partly it's the geometry: the tip of the vaulted apse meeting the top of the picture, the vault framing a soaring interior anchored (you have to look closely here) by two tiny seated figures on either side, their immobility by contrast subtly stressing the fuzziness of the shifting central figures and locking in the composition at the edges.

The photograph is a meditation on then and now. It's about the dislocation of time and culture by which a sacred old place gains a different but still otherwordly aura as a modern pilgrimage site for people who resemble phantoms. They are less real, more ethereal than the people in the painting.

The blur of these ghostly tourists is one of those photographic serendipities, something only a camera could capture. The total effect is a flood of urgent, conflicting detail. Walter Benjamin once wrote that all the photographs in the world make a kind of labyrinth, and this garrulous picture seems to encapsulate that thought. We look at it, scanning the people scanning the Titian in which people scan the heavens toward which the Virgin ascends.

Looking for what? We look for ourselves in our time, as Mr. Struth has put it. History paintings are morality tales for today. Mr. Struth, it is worth recalling, started his career in the late 1970's by making black-and-white photographs taken from the middle of nondescript city streets in the early morning when no one else was around. The stark frontal format, including the overcast skies and lack of shadow, echoed the strict, abstract, documentarylike inventories of anonymous industrial structures produced by his illustrious teachers in Düsseldorf, Bernd and Hilla Becher.

But Mr. Struth's impulse was somewhat different. As a child of the 50's and 60's, he noticed how his parents and other German adults mostly kept silent about the war, while its physical and psychological effects were everywhere visible anyway. He told me the other day that on his way to school each morning he passed through a bunker to reach the schoolyard. Stones speak, he realized, especially the stones that tend to go unnoticed precisely because they seem typical.

So he began to take pictures of them. The buildings erected on empty lots in postwar Germany were low, plain and cheap. The architecture seemed unspiritual and enervated, implying, to him anyway, a kind of guilt. It coexisted as if shamefully with older buildings.

A photograph he took down Düsselstrasse, in Düsseldorf, sums up the quality of these street scenes. A church steeple fixes the vanishing point, forlornly. Among other things, the image raises the question, "What makes a German city look like a German city as opposed to an American or Italian one?" The deadpan, clinical style (there isn't a hint of nostalgia in any of Mr. Struth's works) meanwhile underscores the psychological intent: this is a surrogate portrait of a whole culture, whose social particulars we dissect building by building. August Sander's portraits seem as germane as the Bechers' photographs.

From buildings to families, the strategy of visual analysis stayed the same: forbidding like his streetscapes, Mr. Struth's family portraits, which he began to take during the 1980's, gradually yielded up their intimacies. We see the people in them stare implacably at the camera, but their body language and the surrounding domestic bric-a-brac reveal what they seem to try not to: the Smith family, for example, dispersed across the living room, each member struggling to look nonchalant, asserts individuality. The Hirose family, representing a very different mindset, cheerfully huddles around a sofa behind a cozy clutter of books.

The family portrait of Mr. Richter with his young wife and two children is the most remarkable. He sits before his painting of a skull, a memento mori. Flowers rest beside his beautiful wife. He holds their son. She holds their daughter. The room, like so much of Mr. Richter's art, has the perfect, sterile feel of an operating theater, but the intensity of the familial gaze is erotic.

"The family is something no one can avoid," Mr. Struth also told me, "in the same way you cannot avoid your own history." History is shepherded and shaped publicly through institutions of moral advancement — museums and churches. The museum and church pictures, Mr. Struth's best-known photographs, are set up basically like the street and family shots, as flat or centrally receding compositions. But many of them are huge.

I return to them appalled and amazed. Mr. Struth makes church facades into billboards of cluttered information, like electronic tickers in Times Square. His pictures borrow the glamour of the art and architecture they regard with agnostic skepticism while making that art and architecture look fresh and weird. He spent five days sweating under the sun on scaffolding erected in the square in front of the Milan Cathedral, taking 100 pictures, until the crowd on the steps dispersed itself just artfully enough to echo the sculptured figures on the facade.

He caught a group of Japanese tourists standing before Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa" in the Louvre so that the long diagonal of figures in the painting happened to coincide with the onlookers, whose respectful distance from the canvas bespoke desire and longing and also an unbridgeable cultural gulf.

Good photographs capture these crucial instances, symbolic ones, that in real time pass too quickly for the eye to register. Mr. Struth's video portraits of people staring at the camera for long stretches (projected in the Met's Great Hall and periodically on the Panasonic Astrovision screen in Times Square) are fascinating exercises without the same impact as the still pictures for that very reason. Mr. Struth's failures have been contrivances: deploying friends around the Pergamon Museum in Berlin or the Pantheon in Rome, or posing himself beside Dürer's self-portrait.

Compare those stagy photographs to his picture of an old man in front of two Rembrandt portraits at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The exchange of glances is sly magic. You can't simulate such a thing. Photography, a hypersensitive medium, shows when you're faking.

I suspect Mr. Struth had that in mind when photographing Oslo in the gloaming in 2001, the distant city lights illuminating the orange sky, his own shadow cast across a field of snow in the foreground, an unmanipulated panorama whose magnificence seems to say, "Take that, Gursky."

Mr. Struth turns out to be adept at photographing the outdoors on a big scale. Several years ago, a Swiss hospital commissioned from him pictures for convalescent patients' rooms and he produced small close-ups of flowers and large vistas of the landscape nearby.

The vistas, hung on the walls facing the patients, were reminders of home. Above their heads, where visitors could see them, the magnified details of flowers were meant as discreet metaphors for the way that patients concentrated on the particular body part in distress.

But the big landscapes linger in the mind longer. "Garden on the Lindberg, Winterthur," with its dirt road between tall sunflowers, echoes the composition of the street scenes, except that a warm light falls across the road, picking out the flaming orange and black of the sunflowers. It's a path to paradise.

His latest pictures are a series called "Paradise." The maze layout of the Met exhibition reaches a point of repose in a room of these immense photographs of tangled foliage: forests and jungles.

Again superficially akin to the church and city scenes, they exude a new, Zenlike aura. He started them in 1998 when he thought he had run out of ideas. He decided to make images from the disorder of nature, allowing room for what he could not first control when he snapped the picture, because information always goes undetected when you are surrounded by nature. He described this as being "not burdened by the impossible but creating space for the possible."

So in a view of São Francisco de Xavier, in Brazil, a thick, all-over scrim of dappled leaves recalls the busy facade of the Milan Cathedral. It is overwhelming and disorienting, until you give yourself over to its order. Manmade spiritual vistas are replaced by natural ones, wild and ecstatic.

Standing before the photographs of museums and churches and mobs of tourists, we can become absorbed by the chaos of culture, sacred places made profane. In the forest, we acquiesce to the spiritual pleasure of solitude. We turn inward, breathing slowly.

The silence is calming. We may find ourselves in our time.

Search for Miss HK is going to San Francisco

Search for Miss HK is going to San Francisco
Monday, February 10, 2003
by NIKI LAW
http://hongkong.scmp.com/hknews/ZZZ1BKB5XBD.html

Local women will face even tougher competition for the Miss Hong Kong title when the search for contestants is extended to San Francisco this year.
The move comes after six of the past eight titles have gone to overseas contestants.

Interviews for contestants have previously been held only in Hong Kong, Vancouver, Toronto and Los Angeles. But Tsang Sing Ming, assistant controller of the External Affairs Division of Television Broadcasting Limited (TVB), told the South China Morning Post yesterday that interviews would be held in San Francisco for the first time this April.

The decision was reached after San Franciscan Tiffany Lam Man-lee, the reigning Miss Hong Kong, complained that she had to fly to Los Angeles at her own expense in order to enter the contest.

"Eligible contestants who don't live in those areas have to fly themselves to another city or to Hong Kong for interviews. But qualifying contestants at the specified cities are flown to Hong Kong for free by TVB," Mr Tsang explained.

"After talking to Tiffany - who is from San Francisco - we decided to extend the search. We always get at least two finalists who are overseas recruits because they are always of a high-quality and well-educated," he said.

Mr Tsang added that TVB chose cities with a high proportion of immigrants from Hong Kong - like Vancouver and San Francisco - to host its interviews.

Despite the abundance of highly-qualified overseas contestants, Mr Tsang said TVB would not increase the number of spots allocated for overseas recruits. Presently, about 15 to 20 per cent of the 20 finalists in the Hong Kong pageant come from abroad.

"If we recruit so many contestants from abroad, local girls will get angry. It is obvious that candidates from overseas will have a language advantage over University of Hong Kong and Chinese University students," he said.

"We must be fair or they may boycott the contest all together and might accuse us of not representing Hong Kong accurately."

The overseas recruits who have taken the Miss Hong Kong title in the past eight years include Ms Lam; Vivian Lau Wai-wan (2000), Sonija Kwok (1999), Anne Heung Hoi-lan (1998), Virginia Yung from Vancouver (1997); and Winnie Young Yuen Yee from Los Angeles (1995).

Under current rules, women aged between 17 and 28 with a minimum education of Form 5 or the equivalent can qualify to enter the pageant, provided they were either born in Hong Kong or have lived in the city for a total of two years or more.

niki.law@scmp.com

For Yao, Lights, Cameras and an All-Star Frenzy

For Yao, Lights, Cameras and an All-Star Frenzy
By LIZ ROBBINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/sports/basketball/08STAR.html

ATLANTA, Feb. 7 — The boom mikes bounced just above his head, and the white-hot camera lights blinded his eyes as television crews and photographers rushed backward in a cavalcade to capture his entrance.

Journalists crowding his circular table, three deep, were told to stand back to make a path for the big man's every elongated step.

From 7 feet 6 inches above the fray, Yao Ming surveyed the scene today at his first All-Star Game news conference, and in an instant that needed no translation, he exhaled a quick, overwhelmed sigh before diving into his fishbowl.

Minutes later, Shaquille O'Neal walked into the ballroom unadorned by the same high-pitched fanfare. By then Yao, the Houston Rockets' center from Shanghai, had already begun talking about being named an All-Star Game starter as a rookie, voted by the fans, who sent O'Neal, the three-time most valuable player of the N.B.A. finals, to the bench.

Yao, at age 22 the game's youngest All-Star, acknowledged his stardom but tried to duck the attention and accept his honor with humility. "I still believe that I am a blue-collar, a blue-collar amongst the All-Stars," Yao said through a translator.

Michael Jordan, making his last All-Star appearance, skipped the news media session. Kobe Byrant and Jason Kidd were snowbound in the New York area and Allen Iverson told the league he was sick.

Yao was unquestionably the phenomenon that 21 journalists and 4 television crews from Asia, along with more than 100 reporters from around the world, came to witness. "This is one element of the pressure I am in," Yao said of the news media. "This is really something special. I think that the greatest excitement is to be selected to the All-Star Game. Nothing can be more exciting than that."

At times, it was clear that Yao would have sooner preferred playing a video game. Watching from the table 30 feet away, his teammate Steve Francis shook his head under his mirrored shades when asked about the scene. "See it every day," said Francis, who will start at guard Sunday. "As much as he doesn't really want all the attention, all the time, he's used to it.

"I couldn't begin to imagine what it's like. I think he really, really does appreciate it. But there's so many eyes on him day and night. Outside of the locker room, it's hard to be Yao Ming." With his teammates, Yao indulges in three very American staples off court: "PlayStation, pizza and French fries," Francis said.

And yet, Yao has a sharpness that seeps through his translations, a keen wit and sensitivity to the people and unfamiliar culture around him.

"A lot of the things he does, like off the court, and how aware he is about situations, as far as people's feelings, I didn't expect it at first," Francis said. "He'll know when guys are upset, and he asks if they're O.K. He speaks another language to you guys, but he doesn't speak another language in the locker room."

Today, Yao politely answered but didn't really answer questions with circular aphorisms, dispensing thoughts on Jordan, Mini-Me, Shaq and Francis. Yao let his wit slip only at certain times. When Francis said today he was going to get Yao the M.V.P. award, Yao responded, "I'm so touched I feel like crying."

Francis and Yao have given the Rockets a 26-22 record at the break in what has been an exciting but inconsistent season for Houston.

Opponents say he has mobility and graceful skills rare for someone his size. But Yao's impact goes beyond his 13 points and 8.1 rebounds a game. A matchup against O'Neal on Jan. 17 drew the second-largest viewership on cable television. Yao and the Rockets won in overtime, and when asked whether he deserved to start the All-Star Game over O'Neal, Yao said through his translator: "I don't think that is enough. I think that with my performance, people can see the difference between me and Shaq."

The week before the two played, O'Neal had made a comment he later said was "stupid," mimicking Chinese words in a sing-song voice. Today, O'Neal was complimentary toward Yao, but he did not elaborate. "He's very good for the league," O'Neal said. "And I'm a connoisseur of what's good for the league."

Yao, the Rockets' No. 1 pick, understands that he supports the hopes of both his country and a league searching for new stars in the imminent post-Jordan era.

"Either burden is too heavy for me to stand it," he said. "So it doesn't matter which one is heavier. I will try my best to make myself a student of basketball."

He did not consider his impact comparable to Tiger Woods's. "Basketball is larger than a golf ball," he said. "I am very honored, but I cannot achieve that."

Cleveland center Zydrunas Ilgauskas, the first-time All-Star who played against Yao last week, had just two reporters near the end of the session around him. "So many questions about Yao," Ilgauskas said. "I feel like I know him."

Yao was quick to point out that he was not the only foreign player starring on the court.

"It's amazing how he gets in his first year and is able to adjust to everything and already has an impact on his team," said Dirk Nowitzki of Germany, who has led the Dallas Mavericks to the league's best record (38-10).

Yao said his most difficult challenge had been the pressure to perform combined with the physical stress of back-to-back games. "Everything is happening too rapidly, too fast," he said.

It has only been a half-season, but someone asked him what his plans were when he retired. "After I retire from the N.B.A., I will probably join the mass media, because I have always been bothered by the mass media," he said. "And if I cannot beat them, I will join them."

Suddenly Onscreen, It's All About Wonder

Suddenly Onscreen, It's All About Wonder
By MARGO JEFFERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/arts/08REVI.html

A female nude stands in the middle of a 1929 collage by Magritte. She is framed, literally, by the faces of 16 men, each with his eyes closed. Written above and beneath her shapely body are the words: "I do not see the woman hidden in the forest."

This could be the visual epigraph for "Talk to Her," Pedro Almodóvar's latest movie. Mr. Almodóvar won an Oscar in 2000 for "All About My Mother." For "Talk," he has already received the best director citation from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, a Golden Globe for best foreign-language film and three European Film Awards.

Mr. Almodóvar takes us back to the time when image, gesture, speech and music were one cinematic language.

Like the Surrealists, Mr. Almodóvar is obsessed with desire in all its forms — desire as lust, as rebellion, as visionary ecstasy. In films like "Law of Desire" or "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," he made social and sexual outrage his content and visual extravagance his form. Now, with "All About My Mother" and "Talk to Her," he has traveled beyond outrage and extravagance to wonder.

Wonder is a word we do not use much anymore. When we say something is wonderful we usually mean that it gives us great pleasure. But to feel wonder is to be overwhelmed by things beyond our experience and almost beyond our understanding.

It was a book about the Middle Ages that got me thinking about how rarely we experience this in art today. In "Metamorphosis and Identity" the historian Caroline Walker Bynum points out that wonder mattered as much to medieval artists and thinkers as irony and skepticism matter to us. During a time of great change and anxiety (like ours today), wonder encompassed fear, dread and ecstasy.

In Ms. Bynum's words, it ranged "from terror and disgust to solemn astonishment and playful delight." This makes wonder as complex as any postmodernist could desire. Our sense of what defines us, from the moral to the biological, is changed. The boundaries we observe are "crossed, confused or erased," Ms. Bynum writes. There is no better description of what takes place in "Talk to Her." Mr. Almodóvar's genius — and I believe he is a genius — lies in finding so many ways of expressing and arousing wonder.

What are we to make of the two women in "Talk to Her" as they lie ravishingly comatose in hospital beds? They do not look dead or dying. Alicia, a young dancer hit by a car, is radiant and beautifully dressed, while Lydia, the fierce matador gored by a bull, lies with her long dark hair flowing down white sheets like a warrior-saint. Medically, it would be miraculous for either to awaken.

And what of the two men always beside them, Benigno cheerfully preparing for the miracle, Marco stricken with grief and guilt? Benigno is not merely Alicia's nurse; he has chosen to live for and through her. Marco, a journalist, had begun an intense but self-absorbed affair with Lydia just before her accident. Neither man really knows the object of his desire. And neither has found a way of communicating with the women he meets each day.

For Mr. Almodóvar, turning a human into an object of desire is as risky — and irresistible — as turning life into art. When Benigno cares for Alicia, toning and oiling her body, dressing her, arranging her limbs for visitors and for sleeping, he acts as the worshipful and perverse artist. This is the flesh tone I want, he is almost saying, and this is how her room will be decorated for my vision of her. Thanks to his care, Alicia has the pampered, luxurious flesh of an Ingres odalisque. And when she and Lydia, looking quite soignée with their sunglasses and coifed hair, sit facing one another in deck chairs on the hospital balcony they are like mannequins ready for display in shop windows or Surrealist studios.

By these standards, glum silent Marco is a kind of failed artist. Talk to Lydia, Benigno urges him; women take in so much more than we think. Believe she is alive, he means. Let her live in your imagination, give her life there, and you can invent a life to share with her.

One of the men commits a desperate act during the film. It confounds us because it arouses so many feelings. We are appalled by the facts, touched by the need, astonished by the outcome. Is the man punished? Yes. Do not be fooled by Almodóvar's emotional and sexual extravagance. Everything is allowed in his world because he knows that humans try, or at least dream of, everything. But no one is exempt from the consequences of loving in a way that confines or appropriates another person.

Alicia's teacher declares: "I'm a ballet mistress. Nothing is simple." She is talking as much about the soul as about the body. Nothing about love or sex is simple, nothing about good and evil is simple. Transformation is always possible in an Almodóvar film.

Metamorphosis is the lingua franca, the only constant, of his filmmaking. We are used to watching the other arts imitate film; Mr. Almodóvar reverses the process. His films move among theater, dance and painting. "Talk to Her" begins as a trompe l'oeil theater piece. A salmon-and-gold tasseled curtain rises and we find ourselves at a modern-dance performance, watching the stage (and the men who watch the stage) where two women in white move between somnambulism and spasm. Ballet is here too. Alicia is Sleeping Beauty, while Lydia, with her thwarted passion, could be Myrta, that otherworldly queen from "Giselle" who rules the ghosts of maidens spurned by faithless lovers.

Mr. Almodóvar takes us back to the time when image, gesture, speech and music were one cinematic language. When the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso sings, he is filmed with such languor and intimacy that we feel we've left the movie to join him in the café. When Benigno describes a silent movie he has seen to Alicia, Mr. Almodóvar creates one. And his love of color and texture along with his use of the stillness found in landscapes and portraits make him as much painter as director.

Julie Taymor is after this kind of cinematic fusion too. Painting is the heart of her film biography of Frida Kahlo, and when we witness that act we feel wonder. "Frida" is only Ms. Taymor's second full-length movie, but her glorious visual imagination is rooted in nonnaturalistic, largely non-Western theater traditions. People levitate, disappear and turn into puppets onscreen. Objects, colors and music interrupt or become forms of dialogue.

Kahlo's work was much admired by the Surrealists. "The promises of fantasy are filled with greater splendor by reality itself," exclaimed André Breton. More simply put, Kahlo's life — her physical sufferings, radical politics, passionate affairs and love of Mexican culture — became her art. She painted herself in jewelry, shawls and long skirts framed by monkeys and fierce vegetation; with her head bound in a ropelike black mantilla or imprisoned in a stiff white Spanish ruff; naked and bleeding on a hospital or a lover's bed; standing in a dry land like an antique statue, her spine a broken Greek column held together by a brace.

In one of her most famous works, the 1940 "Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair," painted not long after her divorce from Diego Rivera, Kahlo is wearing a man's suit, with her legs apart. Her long, wavy hair covers the floor like fallen branches. Music notes run across the top of the canvas. The notes are from a popular song, and the words above the notation read, in translation: "Look, if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are shorn, I don't love you anymore."

For we mortals, metamorphosis comes after suffering and struggle. Ms. Taymor puts Kahlo in front of a mirror. She drinks, weeps, chops at her hair. She goes on painting. I wish the film's script had been more inventive and less linear because at moments like this it is magical with feeling. It shows us something we see and imagine all too rarely: a woman who has learned how to gaze at her own image in solitude, then turn it into art.

'Inventing Japan': The Emperor's New Clothes

'Inventing Japan': The Emperor's New Clothes
By CHRISTOPHER BENFEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/books/review/09BENFYT.html

INVENTING JAPAN
1853-1964.
By Ian Buruma.
194 pp. New York: A Modern Library Chronicles Book/ The Modern Library. $19.95.

After Pearl Harbor, the Emperor Hirohito, according to Ian Buruma in this masterly short history of modern Japan, was in a ''splendid mood.'' The well-traveled poet-sculptor Kotaro Takamura, who had visited New York and London, and lived for a time in Paris, the city of his idols Baudelaire and Rodin, wept with joy. The distinguished literary critic Takao Okuna, a witness to the devastating dive bombers and torpedoes in Hawaii, described the ''sense of euphoria that we'd done it at last. . . . All the feelings of inferiority of a colored people from a backward country toward white people from the developed world disappeared in that one blow.'' A hundred years of fitful Westernizing, following Commodore Matthew Perry's famous ''opening'' of Japan to the West in 1853, had come to this, a suicidal attack in more ways than one.

But even as its military propaganda trumpeted themes of Asian greatness and a rejection of Western values, Japan, as Buruma slyly notes, was still cribbing from the West -- though not from the liberal political traditions of England or the United States.

Much of the ''new Japanese order,'' he writes in ''Inventing Japan,'' ''was borrowed from European fascism and grafted onto more East Asian habits of thought.'' Such analysis is in keeping with the title and overarching argument of Buruma's concise and penetrating book: namely, that nations like Japan are made -- they are the result of certain political choices at certain times -- rather than born.

Buruma, the versatile author of earlier books on Asia like ''Behind the Mask,'' ''The Missionary and the Libertine'' and a recent and well-received study of Chinese dissidents, ''Bad Elements,'' is deeply suspicious of any appeal to ancient traditions or ancestral practices, dismissing the code of the samurai as a ''sign of idleness'' in the inert feudal society that Perry helped bring down, and pointing out that emperor worship is a late ''invention.'' He notes repeatedly how such claims, in a proud and nationalistic country like Japan, have been used to justify authoritarian clampdowns on human rights and political freedom.

Modern Japan, like modern Germany (to which Buruma often compares it), has shown a depressing affinity for authoritarian politics. The story Buruma tells is largely one of missed opportunities for the ''sickly child'' of Japanese democracy. His heroes, hardly household names in the West, are liberal-minded figures like Ryoma Sakamoto and Yukichi Fukuzawa. The low-ranking samurai Sakamoto, depicted in Japanese films as ''a wild-haired protohippie with a sword,'' decided, faced with the gunboat diplomacy of Perry's black ships, that ''the best way to fight the barbarians . . . was to learn all their tricks first.'' This became the official strategy of the Meiji period (1868-1912) and its ''astonishing race for modernity.'' Sakamoto studied European constitutions and drafted a blueprint for a parliamentary democracy in 1867. Fukuzawa, another adherent of ''learning their tricks first,'' founded a school, a magazine and a debating society in Tokyo to introduce Western learning and encourage bold and speculative thought. According to Buruma, Fukuzawa ''was one of the first -- and still uncommon -- examples of an independent Japanese intellectual.'' But when the government sought to restrict freedoms of speech and the press during the 1870's, Fukuzawa relented. ''Something died in the 1870's,'' Buruma concludes, ''and with some notable exceptions, it never fully revived until 1945.''

The Americans, to be sure, did little to nourish that ''something.'' Convinced that the Japanese were a ''childlike people who would run amok without imperial guidance,'' first Commodore Perry and then Gen. Douglas MacArthur, during the American occupation following World War II, adopted highhanded ways more appropriate to an emperor than a representative of democracy. MacArthur's decision to exonerate Hirohito of war crimes -- consistent with the view that the Japanese required a patriarch at the helm of the state -- muddied responsibility for the ruthless war waged by the Japanese in the Pacific and in Asia. ''If the man who had been formally responsible for everything was innocent,'' Buruma writes, ''it was hard to see how those who thought they were following his sacred orders could be found guilty.''

Buruma's primary focus is on political history, and the chances and mischances of Japanese democracy. His treatment of Japanese cultural achievement, so fascinating to Westerners since the great world's fairs of the turn of the century, is surprisingly cursory. He may feel that the Meiji-era revivals of haiku, the tea ceremony and the martial arts are sufficiently known in the West, and besides, they hark back to an ''aristocratic'' Japan he dislikes. He mentions in passing that the early 1950's were ''a golden age for Japanese cinema'' while devoting a full paragraph to the ways in which film ''was also a perfect vehicle for right- and left-wing anti-Americanism.'' Here again he may feel that Kurosawa and Ozu, who surely deserve as much credit for ''inventing Japan'' as the propaganda operatives of the 1950's, are familiar enough. The relatively obscure Taisho period of the 1920's, by contrast, is accorded a full and fascinating chapter; Buruma persuasively compares this brief flowering of cosmopolitan hybridity and democratic politics to Weimar Germany -- a moment of ''hope for those who promoted freedom.''

Ian Buruma belongs to a generation of cultural critics -- including Michael Ignatieff, Tony Judt, Paul Berman and the French thinker Alain Finkielkraut -- who have come to prominence during the past decade or so. Inspired by cleareyed defenders of human freedom like Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron, they are as distrustful of enemies of democracy on the left as on the right. Buruma twice mentions that there was a Soviet judge, ''one of Stalin's henchmen,'' on the international military tribunal that tried Japanese war criminals -- a warning against complacent distinctions between good guys and bad. In an epilogue, he holds out hope for a democratic Japan, a nation sufficiently mature neither to demonize nor to worship the great powers. His eloquent closing wish is that the Japanese, in their present economic crisis, might outgrow their ''infantile dependency on the United States'' and ''finally bid the black ships farewell, because they no longer need them.''

Christopher Benfey, a co-director of the Weissman Center at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of the forthcoming book ''The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan.''

Give me that architect look

Let Me Guess, You Must Be an Architect
By RUTH LA FERLA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/fashion/09NOTI.html

HE has not had a run on them yet, but Robert Marc, a New York eyewear designer and retailer, would not be surprised to hear customers pleading, "Make me a pair of glasses just like Daniel Libeskind wears."

Mr. Libeskind, the Berlin architect, became the focus of attention last week when it was announced that his firm, Studio Daniel Libeskind, was one of two design teams with a project under consideration for the World Trade Center site. The other was the Think team, headed by the architects Frederic Schwartz, Rafael Viñoly and Ken Smith of New York and Shigeru Ban of Tokyo.

"You never hear customers saying, `Make me look like a lawyer,' " Mr. Marc observed. "It's always, `Give me that architect type of look.' "

With their soaring towers and memorials, both concepts were the talk of the town. A few New Yorkers, however, seemed almost as impressed by the architects' eyewear. Mr. Viñoly appeared in photographs wearing two pairs of spectacles on his head — something of a fashion signature. Mr. Smith wore his trademark dark spherical frames, and Mr. Libeskind had on a pair of heavy rectangular spectacles that highlighted his stern expression.

"Libeskind's glasses are out of control," said Brian Sawyer, a New York architect, his amusement mixed with admiration. He knows that for architects, signature glasses are a conscious attempt to trademark their faces, much as they trademark a building. Mr. Libeskind's frames are a particularly severe example of so-called statement glasses, meant to confer a degree of gravitas, but hinting all the while that he (or she) has raffishly artistic leanings.

Spectacles with a pronounced geometric shape are a natural style choice in a profession focused on structure and form, Mr. Sawyer pointed out. "For me they are just like a watch," he said. "I revel in all the miniature aspects of their mechanics, but they are also a beautiful thing."

So prevalent are they as an insignia of the architect's profession that ordinary people often try to copy them.

"You never hear customers saying, `Make me look like a lawyer,' " Mr. Marc observed. "It's always, `Give me that architect type of look.' "

At Alain Mikli or Selima Optique, among the brands professionals prefer, shoppers go in for eccentrically spherical or rhomboid shapes, some owlishly endearing, some as forbidding as Dr. Frankenstein, depending on one's point of view.

Joseph Lee, an architect with G Tects, a New York firm, favors Dolce & Gabbana glasses with a clear acrylic rim. Mr. Lee is perfectly aware that his glasses give him the aspect of a mad scientist. But their look is only fitting, he maintained. "We think of ourselves as working in a research lab, where we like to explore different aspects of theory," Mr. Lee said.

It was Le Corbusier who first made owlish black spectacles a signature, thereby giving generations of followers permission to adopt a similarly geeky look. "He made it safe to make a statement through eyewear," said Mayer Rus, the design editor of House & Garden magazine.

Indeed, Le Corbusier inspired Philip Johnson to design a similarly rounded pair of glasses for himself in 1934, which he had manufactured by Cartier. Ken Smith, the landscape architect, has adopted a contemporary version of Mr. Johnson's black-rimmed orbs — the perfectly rigorous complement to his black-on-black attire.

Like Le Corbusier, architects today are often remarkably loyal to their chosen eyewear style.

"Just as you want to be identified with a particular design approach, you want to be known for your glasses," Mr. Sawyer said. "Sometimes they are the only things that basically don't change about you."

Often those glasses suggest a balance of weirdness and starchy conservatism. "Of all the applied artists, the architect most often resembles a Wall Street banker," Mr. Rus said. "They don't want clients to feel they are some sort of kook who is going to make them a crazy blob of a building."

Determined to strike a sober note, a few fall back on glasses with a look that, sadly, verges on cliché. "They rationalize their glasses as being some sort of minimalist style statement," Mr. Rus said, "but they end up looking like something from an avant-garde German performance troupe."

That kind of assessment does not faze eyewear obsessives, for whom glasses are often their only concession to style — the ostentatiously understated equivalent of a nylon Prada coat.

Some also see them as marvels of invention. Gordon Kipping, who heads G Tects, is immoderately attached to his IC! Berlin stainless-steel sunglasses, stamped out of five sheets of metal, making their hingeless design as flexible as a hairpin.

"I just like the fact that they're an innovative technology," Mr. Kipping said. The architect, who spends between $250 and $350 on each pair of glasses he owns, is no less fixated on his Sandy Grendel glasses, Swiss made and designed especially for dentists.

"I like the all-titanium armature across the top, and that it comes with a visor and fiber optic light fixtures that snap on," he said.

Strangers quickly peg him as an architect, but that's all right, Mr. Kipping said. "I just tell them, it's the glasses, right?"

Poets Pit Pens Against Swords

Poets Pit Pens Against Swords
By MARTIN ARNOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/books/06BOOK.html

Does poetry matter? Few but other poets may read it. Auden wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen." Except perhaps when violent events are upon us. Then it can cut through the darkness, console, summon. War and poetry, for instance, have always been connected, and now, at what seems the moment before war, America's poets are suddenly again playing a traditional, if at times quixotic role of poets as spokesmen for dissent.

Paradoxically, war and poetry were conjoined again last month, and the slumbering legions of American poets were set marching when Laura Bush postponed a Feb. 12 White House symposium on the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman.

Some of the poets invited to the event said they would use it to protest war against Iraq. Of course, poetry has not always been used for protest in war. Poignant patriotic verse, written from war zones, often made war's violence seem less meaningless.

Perhaps the ultimate role of poets is to be hidden but ready like firefighters to come forth in emergency. If so, Auden was wrong. Poetry concentrates thought and emotion, and it emerged to console after Sept. 11. Now Mrs. Bush has summoned it, accidentally, once again, this time to its traditional duty of protest and dissent. Sam Hamill, a poet and founder of the Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Wash., has organized a poetic protest in which he has urged poets to deluge the White House with anti-war poems. He said that as of Tuesday about 3,500 poems had been collected.

On Feb. 16 nine poets — including Ruth Stone, the 1992 National Book Award winner — will conduct a reading at the First Congregational Church in Manchester, Vt., sponsored by the local Northshire Bookstore. It is being called "A Poetry Reading in Honor of the Right to Protest as a Patriotic and Historical Tradition." They will read the work of the poets picked by Mrs. Bush for her symposium: the two revolutionaries Hughes and Whitman, and Dickinson. And their own poems. (There will be a similar reading at New York University on Wednesday at 1 p.m. at the Bobst Library.)

Poets may rightly grumble that they aren't read or paid enough, but in times of crisis it's the poets, of all the artists in all countries, who suddenly seem the most important. Robert Lowell was a face of protest during the Vietnam war. Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves were among those who, writing from the trenches in World War I, best conveyed the anguish of war in what was not protest but patriotic poetry.

So now, hardly surprisingly, we have our poets stepping forward to protest war, at what appears a fairly late moment. Why are poets the leading dissenters? Galway Kinnell, who declined his invitation to the White House symposium but will be reading in Vermont, said simply: "It's poetry's duty and part of its role to speak out. This ferment by poets had its beginnings with poetry readings against the war in Vietnam."

Mr. Hamill said, "I think poets have become the conscience of our culture." He added: "I was inspired by the antiwar rallies of the 60's. But protest has always been the role of the poets. Read Whitman's editorials on slavery. He was out there long before anyone else." (Well, yes, Whitman was a newspaperman, too.)

Jay Parini, who will also be reading in Vermont, said he accepted the White House invitation happily "because I thought I could have said something about the war directly to Mrs. Bush." He said he believed poets become important in crisis time "because our language is pure, and politicians abuse language." He added: "It might take time, but the language of poetry seeps through. Poets like Robert Lowell made a difference during Vietnam."

Poetry has a grand history as an avenging sword in Latin America. William O'Daly, who will read in Vermont, said: "In Latin America historically people often looked to their poets for guidance. In Chile it was Pablo Neruda. In China it's always been a tradition. We haven't reached that in this country yet, but we will get to embrace the role of poets in the political world, if we are willing to invite those of opposing ideas."

The United States poet laureate, Billy Collins, said, "A lot of the poetry of protest will have a short shelf life unless the poems transcend the events." He said the poems written "from the trenches by British poets in World War I are still being read today, are very relevant." Mr. Collins is not among the Vermont readers.

Jody Gladding, who will be at Vermont, said: "I think poets may hopefully be able to articulate what everybody is thinking. In other cultures, like Latin America, that's traditional."

The common theme among poets seems to be their belief that the beauty and precision of their use of language can make a difference. David Budbill said, "Telling the truth in vivid language committed to humanity is important for people to hear, because politicians don't." And Greg Delanty said, "One advantage poets have is that we are not encumbered like politicians worrying about how our words affect our careers."

Edward Morrow, a co-owner of the Northshire Bookstore with his wife, Barbara, said they were sponsoring the reading event because they had become incensed when they read letters in newspapers calling war dissenters unpatriotic. "Who better than poets to refute that?"' he asked. "They reflect society and see its underlying truths."

Poets have been clearing away sloppy thoughts since the beginning of literature, unfortunately not always with the grand witty imagination of the Greek playwright and comic poet Aristophanes. Like most poets, he was against war. Unlike most, he had a great idea to prevent it. He came up with the preposterous thought that women should withhold sex until their men gave up their warring ways. Women are so wonderful: they did it. And it worked. Read all about it in "Lysistrata."

When Hubert, 85, Met Mildred, 73

When Hubert, 85, Met Mildred, 73
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/nyregion/09MARR.html

Love stories — they're a dime a dozen. The soaps are full of them, and they overwhelm the pages of novels and the movies. The plots are built of the same basic ingredients. Who needs another love story?

But it's constantly young love, occasionally middle-aged love. Who will sing of nursing home love, wheelchair love, love on the borders of life's end?

So, if you will, one more love story, in time for Valentine's Day.

The Sarah Neuman Center is a nursing home in Mamaroneck, N.Y., part of the Jewish Home and Hospital network. Its 300 beds are occupied by the old and the frail, people mostly winding down their lives, thinking more about yesterday than tomorrow. One of them is Hubert Spurr, 85. It could rightly be said that love brought Mr. Spurr into the nursing home and then abandoned him there.

His wife arrived first. Her name was Lucy, but everyone called her by her childhood nickname, Bubbles. She was his second wife, and they had been married for more than 20 years. Their love was an enviable love, an incandescent love. And then Alzheimer's chose her.

For years, Mr. Spurr cared for her at their Westchester home, until it was no longer possible, and in May 2001 she moved into the nursing home.

Most of his life, Mr. Spurr worked as a telegrapher, retiring at 64 from United Press International. Then he fished and he traveled a lot with his wife. He was not robust — he had injured himself during a bad fall on the street and was wobbly — but was able to continue to live in his own home with some help. Yet he couldn't bear the thought of separation. Soon after his wife's arrival, he moved into her room, and continued to care for her with unstoppable devotion. It was who he was.

This was their life, until Sept. 10 of last year, when Mrs. Spurr, at 92, died in Mr. Spurr's arms. His own will died with her. There was nothing more he wanted out of life, not a thing. He missed her so much that he cried every day.

"I want to die," he would say to others in the home. "I have no interest in living."

Sorrow proliferates in a nursing home, amid the surge and ebb of enervating lives, but the rhythms of the home continue. Meals, medications, physical therapy, movies, bingo.

Five times a week, a sullen Mr. Spurr reported to physical therapy. Sometimes, the patients are taken down early, creating a traffic jam of wheelchairs waiting their turns. One morning at the beginning of October, he was early. He found himself positioned beside a woman named Mildred Bobe. She was 73, a youngster in a home where the average age is 88.

When he gazed at her, he could see she was as consumed with grief as he was. And he could see something else: black eyes that hypnotized him. Oh did he adore those eyes.

Until her health betrayed her, she had enjoyed a contented life. She worked as a supervisor in the data entry department at Salomon Brothers and lived with her three cats — Ivory, Ebony and Max — in Flushing, Queens.

She had known love, but never marriage. Life unfolds that way for some people, and she was untroubled about the outcome. She had had a couple of proposals from men who were appealing in many ways. But what stopped her was her sense that they had wayward eyes that would never remain fastened on her. "Nice fellows," she would say. "But I always saw the flaws."

She continued to date often enough, for she loved to dance, but she was satisfied with the single life. Her relatives knew her as Spinster Millie.

Then her health deteriorated — she had several heart attacks — and she left her job in 1986, and slowed down. She joined the local Kiwanis Club and became its president. She fraternized with neighbors. It kept her busy and happy.

Her health worsened. She had a weak heart, diabetes, high blood pressure, a malfunctioning kidney. She had help come in. One day, she found herself on the floor and unable to get up. Her older sister in White Plains tried to care for her, but it was too much. At the end of May of last year, Ms. Bobe reluctantly entered Sarah Neuman.

She hated being away from her home. Here she was confronted with all the dreaded afflictions of old age: disability, dependency, loneliness. Her days seemed to be more about dying than living.

When she went to occupational therapy, she would have a hood or towel draped over her head and she often fell asleep. She couldn't muster the strength to brush her teeth.

As they waited their turns at that first encounter, Mr. Spurr began talking to her. He encouraged her to really work on her rehabilitation; it would make a difference in her life. He used to hunt and fish, and he regaled her with stories on those subjects. Ms. Bobe found his descriptions engrossing. She liked this man. "And he's a handsome-looking man," she said.

She perked up. "He told me I have beautiful eyes," she said. "I fell for that. Even after all these years, I fell for that."

They began spending time together, talking during their therapy sessions, doing activities together. They both like history. One day, they had a good discussion about Rasputin.

He found himself renewed. "I wanted to live again," he said. He began to understand that old age was still about hope.

But a change of plans was afoot. Her sister, Rochelle Rospigliosi, was moving to Seattle with her husband and wanted to take Ms. Bobe along to live with them in their new home. Toward the end of October, Ms. Bobe shared this news with Mr. Spurr.

Distraught, he tried to talk her out of it. It wouldn't work; how could she be sure she would get the right medications, have her meals made just the way they had to be made? It seemed all too risky. She couldn't go.

And of course there was another factor: what would he do without her? Something was going on inside him. He would never have thought it possible. His 85-year-old heart was in love again.

Feelings were stirring in her as well, yet the prospect of being back in a community was a potent lure. She planned to go to Seattle.

One day at the end of October, Mr. Spurr suggested they visit the nursing home's gift shop. By now, he had bought her various gifts there — a necklace, a watch, a bracelet. While she browsed, he whispered to the proprietor, "Give me the most expensive ring you've got."

The woman pulled it out. He liked its look, the best in the shop, $18. He slipped it on Ms. Bobe's finger.

"I don't want you to go to Seattle," he told her. "Stay here and marry me."

At once, she said, "Yes."

Marry after knowing each other a few weeks? Wasn't that sudden?

She: "Not at 73. The future is now."

He: "I figured at 85 I better take whatever opportunities presented themselves."

Both of them came to the nursing home expecting to wait out the end of their lives. Neither suspected they would discover a new beginning.

When she heard the surprise development, Ms. Rospigliosi had an are-you-kidding reaction. "I prayed a lot," she said. She went to the nursing home to meet Mr. Spurr, and then she eased up on the prayers: "We all just fell in love with Hubie."

To improve on the $18 ring, Mr. Spurr had his daughter get a nicer engagement ring for Ms. Bobe.

The nursing home has been abuzz with the news. The engagement has lit up the entire place. The porters call Mr. Spurr Loverboy or The Man. Not surprisingly, there is some jealousy. One woman who has been cordial with Mr. Spurr huffed to others, "I saw him first." She's 92.

Feb. 13 was chosen as the wedding date, the day before Valentine's Day. The home's rabbi will preside over a civil ceremony in the winter garden, followed by a reception that the home will cater. All the residents are invited. The couple could have registered at the nursing home's gift shop, but has decided against gifts. "Where would we put them?" Mr. Spurr said. "We don't have the room."

Ms. Bobe's niece, Barbara Pomer, will be the maid of honor, but most of the rest of the wedding cast is being assembled from the staff of the nursing home. One of the therapeutic recreation leaders will be best man. The ring bearer will be the son of a worker in the finance department. The piano player will be a woman from the therapy department. Another therapeutic recreation leader is doing the floral arrangements (he was once in the flower business). A maintenance man will sing "Spanish Eyes."

One thing is particularly important to Ms. Bobe. This is her first wedding, and she certainly intends it to be her last, and she wants to walk down the aisle. So does Mr. Spurr. Both use wheelchairs, and for a while, they considered doing it without walkers, but they realized they don't want to risk falling and spoiling the mood. So they plan to use walkers, but not wheelchairs. It has to look good.

Mr. Spurr had been living with a roommate in Room 310 and Ms. Bobe and her roommate are in Room 202. Once they are married, they naturally want their own room. Right now there is no vacancy, and the home can't predict when they can be accommodated. Only death opens up rooms. A couple of weeks ago, though, when there was a death on the second floor, the home moved Mr. Spurr into the space. Now, at least, he is only a few doors away from his heartthrob.

Through the halls of the nursing home, they wheel, their faces alive with joy. They are rarely apart. He gets behind her in his wheelchair and pushes hers.

They go to bingo together, where the prize is a 25-cent voucher. He refuses to go on Saturdays, because the prize is merely candy, and so she skips those games too. They attend a cooking class. They watch TV in his room, though she leaves at 8:30, because her roommate goes to bed early and she doesn't want to disturb her. They like to go to the communal TV room for the 4:30 "Sherry Hour."

"You get like an eyedropper full," he said.

"It's better than nothing," she said.

They await the big day. Soon it will happen. Then they will be what they most want to be, husband and wife, now and forever.

Vote France Off the Island

Vote France Off the Island
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/opinion/09FRIE.html

Sometimes I wish that the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council could be chosen like the starting five for the N.B.A. All-Star team — with a vote by the fans. If so, I would certainly vote France off the Council and replace it with India. Then the perm-five would be Russia, China, India, Britain and the United States. That's more like it.

Why replace France with India? Because India is the world's biggest democracy, the world's largest Hindu nation and the world's second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it's become silly. India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France can't see how the world has changed since the end of the cold war. India can.

Throughout the cold war, France sought to differentiate itself by playing between the Soviet and American blocs. France could get away with this entertaining little game for two reasons: first, it knew that Uncle Sam, in the end, would always protect it from the Soviet bear. So France could tweak America's beak, do business with Iraq and enjoy America's military protection. And second, the cold war world was, we now realize, a much more stable place. Although it was divided between two nuclear superpowers, both were status quo powers in their own way. They represented different orders, but they both represented order.

That is now gone. Today's world is also divided, but it is increasingly divided between the "World of Order" — anchored by America, the E.U., Russia, India, China and Japan, and joined by scores of smaller nations — and the "World of Disorder." The World of Disorder is dominated by rogue regimes like Iraq's and North Korea's and the various global terrorist networks that feed off the troubled string of states stretching from the Middle East to Indonesia.

How the World of Order deals with the World of Disorder is the key question of the day. There is room for disagreement. There is no room for a lack of seriousness. And the whole French game on Iraq, spearheaded by its diplomacy-lite foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, lacks seriousness. Most of France's energy is devoted to holding America back from acting alone, not holding Saddam Hussein's feet to the fire to comply with the U.N.

The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam's part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war.

Mr. de Villepin also suggested that Saddam's government pass "legislation to prohibit the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction." (I am not making this up.) That proposal alone is a reminder of why, if America didn't exist and Europe had to rely on France, most Europeans today would be speaking either German or Russian.

I also want to avoid a war — but not by letting Saddam off the hook, which would undermine the U.N., set back the winds of change in the Arab world and strengthen the World of Disorder. The only possible way to coerce Saddam into compliance — without a war — is for the whole world to line up shoulder-to-shoulder against his misbehavior, without any gaps. But France, as they say in kindergarten, does not play well with others. If you line up against Saddam you're just one of the gang. If you hold out against America, you're unique. "France, it seems, would rather be more important in a world of chaos than less important in a world of order," says the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World."

If France were serious about its own position, it would join the U.S. in setting a deadline for Iraq to comply, and backing it up with a second U.N. resolution authorizing force if Iraq does not. And France would send its prime minister to Iraq to tell that directly to Saddam. Oh, France's prime minister was on the road last week. He was out drumming up business for French companies in the world's biggest emerging computer society. He was in India.

The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club

The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club
By BILL KELLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/opinion/08KELL.html

If the United States storms into Iraq, as now seems almost inevitable, it will have been airlifted to war with a tailwind from some unlikely sources.

For starters, three men who have little in common with President Bush have articulated the case for war better than the administration itself — at least up until its recent crescendo of case-making. Tony Blair, who so resembles the American predecessor Mr. Bush despises, has been an eloquent and indispensable ally in the face of grave political risk. Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who embodies the patient, lawyerly internationalism some Bush partisans cannot abide, has managed without endorsing war to demonstrate Iraq's refusal to be contained. Kenneth Pollack, the Clinton National Security Council expert whose argument for invading Iraq is surely the most influential book of this season, has provided intellectual cover for every liberal who finds himself inclining toward war but uneasy about Mr. Bush.

The president will take us to war with support — often, I admit, equivocal and patronizing in tone — from quite a few members of the East Coast liberal media cabal. The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club includes op-ed regulars at this newspaper and The Washington Post, the editors of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek. Many of these wary warmongers are baby-boom liberals whose aversion to the deployment of American power was formed by Vietnam but who had a kind of epiphany along the way — for most of us, in the vicinity of Bosnia.

The president also has enough prominent Democrats with him — some from conviction, some from the opposite — to make this endeavor credibly bipartisan. Four of the six declared Democratic presidential hopefuls support war, with reservations. (Senator John Kerry seemed to come down from the fence last week after Colin Powell's skillful parsing of the evidence.)

We reluctant hawks may disagree among ourselves about the most compelling logic for war — protecting America, relieving oppressed Iraqis or reforming the Middle East — but we generally agree that the logic for standing pat does not hold. Much as we might wish the administration had orchestrated events so the inspectors had a year instead of three months, much as we deplore the arrogance and binary moralism, much as we worry about all the things that could go wrong, we are hard pressed to see an alternative that is not built on wishful thinking.

Thanks to all these grudging allies, Mr. Bush will be able to claim, with justification, that the coming war is a far cry from the rash, unilateral adventure some of his advisers would have settled for.

Does this mean, then, that Mr. Bush is pulling together a new American consensus about how to deal with the dangerous world he inherited?

I don't pretend to speak for the aviary, but almost all of the hesitant hawks go out of their way to disavow Mr. Bush's larger agenda for American power even as they salute his plan to use it in Iraq. This is worth dwelling on a little, because with this war the administration is not just taking on a dictator, it is beginning to define in blood the new American imperium.

What his admirers call the Bush Doctrine is so far a crude edifice built of phrases from speeches and strategy documents, reinforced by a pattern of discarded treaties and military deployment. It consists of a determination to keep America an unchallenged superpower, a willingness to forcibly disarm any country that poses a gathering threat and an unwillingness to be constrained by treaties or international institutions that don't suit us perfectly.

Let's imagine that the regime of Saddam Hussein begins to crumble under the first torrent of cruise missiles. The tank columns rumbling in from Kuwait are not beset by chemical warheads. There is no civilian carnage to rouse the Arab world against us. In fact, Al Jazeera shows American soldiers being welcomed by Iraqis as liberators. The illicit toxins are unearthed and destroyed. Persecuted Kurds and Shiites suppress the urge for clan vengeance.

If all this goes smoothly — and even if it goes a little less smoothly — Mr. Bush will hear a chorus of supporters claiming vindication. I imagine a triumphalist editorial or two in the neoconservative press. Pundits who earlier urged Mr. Bush to ignore Congress and the U.N. will assure him that he can now safely disregard everyone who caviled at the threshold of war, and urge him to get on with the next liberation in the series.

But in fact a victory in Iraq will not resolve the great questions of what we intend to be in the world. It will lay them wide open, and with them deep divisions within both of our political parties.

The first test we will face upon the conquest of Iraq is whether our aim is mainly to promote democracy, or mainly to promote stability. Some, probably including some in Mr. Bush's cabinet, will argue that it was all about disarmament. Once that is done, they will say, once Saddam's Republican Guard is purged, we can turn the country over to a contingent of Sunni generals and bring our troops home in 18 months.

"Some of these guys don't go for nation-building," says Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Foreign Relations Committee Democrat who has ended up supporting war as the least bad option. "They think it's cheaper to just go back and empty the swamp again if you have to."

Iraq would not become a great regional role model, though it would live better than it did under Saddam. The Saudis and probably the Israelis would prefer this to a rickety democracy governed by an unpredictable Shiite majority.

Others, in both parties, see Iraq as the beginning of the next colossal democracy project after the reformation of Eastern Europe. Fouad Ajami, a scholar with no illusions about the Middle East's capacity for heartbreak, has written that a MacArthur-style occupation of Iraq offers us the prospect of an Arab country "free of the poison of anti-Americanism" and offers the region "a break with the false gods of despotism." Nation-building may be vastly more expensive and difficult than swamp-clearing, but Mr. Ajami dares us to try. Mr. Bush has yet to take up that dare.

A second question will be whether, having used force, we continue to rely on force or lean more heavily on diplomacy. The most ardent think-tank interventionists have already mapped out a string of preventive conquests — Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan if its friendly president is ousted by Islamic militants, perhaps eventually China. They argue for more immense Pentagon budgets to build forces configured for pre-emptive strikes. The reluctant hawks will reply that, having demonstrated our might, we need not be so quick to exercise it again, particularly since (as we seem to have learned in North Korea) not all problems lend themselves to the remedy of airstrikes.

Iraq will also leave us arguing over how fully to enlist international organizations as partners in whatever global renovation we undertake, in Iraq and beyond. Being sole occupiers of an Arab land, as the Israelis have learned to their distress, is not a recipe for good will. Nor is it cheap.

"The more powerful we are, the more we need the United Nations," says Senator Biden — to amortize the dangers and costs of stewardship. Mr. Bush has kicked some new life into the U.N., and been well repaid; I'd place a small bet that he will even get a second resolution on Iraq. Now we should stop treating it with such petulance and embrace it as a source of support and legitimacy.

So the war in Iraq does not settle the question of American power, but raises it to a new urgency. I think there is a consensus to be built. It is not the ultrahawk view of an America radiating indifference to everyone who gets in its way, keeping aspiring powers in their place, shunning the clumsy implements of international law and leading with its air force. Nor is it the Vietnam-syndrome reticence about American power that still holds portions of both parties in sway.

Ronald Asmus, a Clinton Europe hand who came to the idea of regime change by way of Slobodan Milosevic, imagines a consensus somewhat like the honorable coalition that grew up during Bosnia and Kosovo. The desire to save the Balkans united humanitarian Democrats who are not squeamish about force with idealistic Republicans who define American interest more broadly than self-defense. For a time, Paul Wolfowitz and Joseph Biden sang from the same hymnal. (The French foreign minister hummed along!)

"The question is, is this about American power, or is it about democracy?" Mr. Asmus asks. "If it's about democracy, we'll have a broader base of support at home and more friends abroad. The great presidents of the last century — F.D.R., Wilson, Truman — all tried to articulate America's purpose in a way that other parts of the world could buy into. Bush hasn't done that yet." Before long, we'll find out if he cares to.