Humility (or lack thereof)

Humility
by Annie Wang, SCMP PRD
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/anniewang/ZZZEVI479GD.html

IN TODAY'S CHINA, humility is an obsolete word. People care more about their facade of money, status or anything that makes them feel superior to others. Niuniu has seen people who cannot contain their snootiness as they drop English words into conversations, or date a Westerner.

She understands the mentality behind the superiority complex. In a country made up of 70 per cent peasants, people want to inflate their ego once they think they have reached a certain level of comfort. After all, they have been poor for so long.

Niuniu is low-key. Like most of her yuppie friends, she thinks showing off is for the fake yuppies who lack confidence and security. Her friend Qian Ning, the son of China's former vice-premier Qian Qichen, once said, ''China has only landlords, not real aristocrats.'' Qian Ning has all the buzz ranging from haigui pai (returnee), gaogan zidi (kid of high-ranking officials) and CEO, to business consultant at a Fortune 500 foreign enterprise. Yet he is neither arrogant nor intimidating. Niuniu thinks this is what a real yuppie should be like.

Playing humble may be cool among the yuppies themselves, but bravado often serves its purpose. There is another famous yuppie, named Huahua, in the Beijing cultural circle. She publishes magazines, makes movies and hosts extravagant parties. Swearing, smoking, and wearing ragged clothes, this short-haired woman stands out as China's George Sand.

So far so good.

Huahua recently published her memoirs. The promotion for her biography has turned the maverick into a flamboyant bluffer whose audacity reminds one of the con artists who try to sell fake American diplomas on the streets in the College District.

Unlike previous shoddy biographies by peasant-girl-turned-Cinderella writers who get cheap thrills and quick bucks by selling their bedroom adventures with different races, Huahua's biography highlights her privileged upbringing. She goes into great detail about the rank of her famous grandfather, mother, father and stepfather to demonstrate her elite bloodline. Unlike Qian who doesn't believe in the existence of the aristocrats in a communist state, Huahua tries to paint herself as a ''royal'' of the red noble class, if there is one.

Her distinguished blood makes it more legitimate and less tacky when she talks at length about her marriages with her American, French and Chinese husbands, an interracial theme that has been over-written by previous authors. Huahua keeps saying with pride that her English is better than her Chinese. A red noble is not enough. The combination of an American passport and the communist ranking is considered even more cool.

Finally, the most cliched part of the book is blatantly giving out the figures of the American dollars she was making back in the 1980s when the majority of Chinese were too poor to know the exchange rate between the US dollar and the yuan.

Why does a woman like Huahua need this direct hard-sell style to promote such a small book? And what makes the real yuppies like Huahua become so desperate? Niuniu wonders.

Beibei, who is more savvy, says to Niuniu: ''Since her book is geared towards the masses, her taste has to come down to those of the masses. It's not her fault she needs to show off. It is the fault of the masses. They buy into these things.''

Should Niuniu feel sad for Huahua as an intellectual or for a society filled with shallow materialism? Or simply, is pretension the only way to gain popularity and respect?

The next day, Beibei and Niuniu attend another event promoting a designer's brand, where they meet another 40-something, self-professed avant-garde woman, Lala. She sings blues at the party while making some quasi tai chi movements. Her bland voice is unimpressive, and her awkward body movements make her a clown on the stage.

Unfortunately Lala is unaware of this. She smugly tells the younger girls that she enjoys hanging out with black people. She sounds as if she's the only Chinese woman who dares befriend them. She also makes it known to everybody that her husband doesn't understand Chinese, an overused trick to elevate one's status.

Lala mentions Allen Ginsberg, The Catcher In The Rye and The Beatles, names she thinks can prove she is cool and rebellious.

''I can't believe we're in the 21st century and she's still parading her knowledge of the leftovers from the 1950s,'' Beibei says quietly to Niuniu.

''Does she know even my grandma has an African friend from her tai chi class?'' Niuniu adds.

Beibei says: ''It seems even showing off is a bit of an art. The saddest thing about a braggart is when she doesn't know the stuff she's bragging about is already outdated.''

''I guess compared to Lala, you can say Huahua is cool. At least she can impress some of the proletarians who dream of a first-class life. The proletarians certainly don't need Lala. They already have too much noise in their lives,'' Niuniu says.

Executive Editor of The Times and Top Deputy Step Down

Executive Editor of The Times and Top Deputy Step Down
By JACQUES STEINBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/05/national/05CND-RESI.html

Howell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the two top-ranking editors of The New York Times, resigned this morning, five weeks to the day after the resignation of a wayward reporter set off a rapid chain of events that exposed deep fissures in the management and morale of the newsroom they had led for just under two years.

In a hastily arranged ceremony in the third-floor newsroom, on the same spot where the paper had celebrated winning a record seven Pulitzer prizes just 14 months ago, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., told staff members that he wanted to "applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interest of this newspaper, a newspaper we all love, above their own.`

Mr. Sulzberger said that Mr. Raines, who was the paper's executive editor, would be replaced on an interim basis by Joseph Lelyveld, 66, his immediate predecessor, who retired in 2001. There will be no immediate replacement for Mr. Boyd, 52, who was the paper's managing editor.

Mr. Raines's tenure was the shortest since the paper's longtime Washington columnist James B. Reston served as executive editor of The Times for 13 months during 1968 and 1969 before returning to writing his column.

For a 152-year-old newspaper that has viewed itself as the world's paper of record, the resignations today were a jarring development that created a somber mood in the newsroom. Less than two months ago The Times had further burnished its reputation when it was awarded its 89th Pulitzer, for a front-page series on the neglect of state-monitored adult homes.

It was an extraordinary day at the paper, one on which its reporters and editors found themselves in the unusual position of having their midtown Manhattan headquarters staked out by several dozen reporters and camera crews from competing news organizations.

The announcement came at midmorning in the newsroom. In front of dozens of reporters, editors, photographers and other newsroom staff members, many of whom sobbed audibly, Mr. Raines, 60, told them: "As I'm standing before you for the last time, I want to thank you for the honor and privilege of being a member of the best journalistic community in the world."

"It's been a tumultuous month, 20 months," he added, "but we have produced some memorable newspapers."

He concluded by saying, simply: "Remember, when a great story breaks out, go like hell."

The remark, which could have been spoken by one of the role models Mr. Raines often cited to his staff, the legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, underscored the magnitude of the many news stories that he and Mr. Boyd had led the staff through in just 21 months: the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia; and, ultimately and most recently, the exposition and investigation into how the wayward reporter, Jayson Blair, committed the equivalent of journalistic fraud on at least 36 occasions since October.

But after the deceptions of Mr. Blair were brought to light, in a four-page article that was published on Mother's Day, it became clear that Mr. Raines's hard-charging leadership style had not only played a role in creating the atmosphere that allowed Mr. Blair to do what he did largely undetected but had also alienated Mr. Raines from much of the staff.

Three days after that article appeared, Mr. Raines appeared before the newsroom staff at a town hall-style meeting to accept ultimate responsibility for what Mr. Blair had done and to pledge to improve his rapport with the people who worked for him.

While Mr. Raines had tried hard in recent days to win over some of his biggest internal critics, at dinners and in private conversation, it was not immediately clear why that effort had come to an abrupt end.

This morning, after embracing many Times employees from the newsroom and throughout the building, including Mr. Sulzberger's father, Arthur Sulzberger Sr., the paper's chairman emeritus and former publisher, Mr. Raines grabbed a straw hat from the office he had just vacated and walked into the drizzle on West 43rd Street with his wife. Mr. Boyd followed a minute or two later.

"There is so much to say," the younger Mr. Sulzberger said, "but it really just boils down to this: This is a day that breaks my heart, and I think it breaks the hearts of a lot of people in this room."

A moment later, he added that the newspaper had "seen good times and bad times" and would continue to do so in the coming decades.

"We will learn from them and we will grow from them," he said. "And we will return to doing journalism at this newspaper because that's what we're here for."

For the outside news media, the day's events represented the culmination of a story line that had played out for weeks, not only in newspaper articles and on the 24-hour news channels but also on Web sites that serve the general public as well as the journalistic world.

On May 28, for example, several reporters on the national staff circulated e-mail messages internally complaining about comments that had been made to The Washington Post by their colleague Rick Bragg, after The Times published an editors' note that said he had relied heavily on the reporting of a freelance journalist for an article about oystermen of the Florida gulf coast.

Mr. Bragg suggested it was common practice for national correspondents to rely on such freelancers for the bulk of their reporting, a characterization that many of the reporters disputed. By early evening, the contents of the messages were being reported on Newsweek's Web site, and Mr. Raines had announced that Mr. Bragg, a reporter to whom he was close, had resigned.

For admirers and supporters of Mr. Boyd, the paper's first black managing editor, today was especially sad. At several critical points, Mr. Boyd had played a role in advancing the career of Mr. Blair, who also was black, and some outsiders had suggested that Mr. Blair, who made rashes of mistakes at times in his four-year career as a reporter, was permitted to advance in part because of affirmative action.

Mr. Boyd acknowledged those concerns, at least indirectly, today, telling the newsroom staff: "I believe in merit, not favoritism, always have and always will. I believe in quality, that is, doing the best job you can each day as much as you can. I believe in inclusion because I think it makes us better. And I believe in diversity."

A committee composed of editors and reporters as well as several outside news media experts has been charged with taking a sweeping look at the paper's newsroom practices, and is expected to report its findings in July.

Anne Akiko Meyers in Recital

went to see Annie Akiko Meyers at a private recital in Paul Hall at Julliard last night. her outstanding performance only confirmed her musical hero status for me. at once technically precise and powerful, while delicate, graceful, and musically sensitive at the same time, there aren't many i count in her league (Maxim Vengerov, Nathan Milstein, maybe Itzhak Perlman?).

in addition, she made the more contemporary parts of the program come alive, which is certainly *not* easy to do. and what very few others (like Leonard Slatkin) can do. i look forward to seeing and hearing more of her! will have to go get some more of her CDs.

New York Philharmonic Agrees to Move to Carnegie Hall

New York Philharmonic Agrees to Move to Carnegie Hall
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL and ROBIN POGREBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/arts/music/02PHIL.html

In a surprising cultural merger, the New York Philharmonic has agreed to move to Carnegie Hall, leaving Lincoln Center, officials of the orchestra and the hall said yesterday. The move back to Carnegie Hall, where the orchestra had historically resided on West 57th Street, could come as soon as 2006, more than 40 years after it left and became an anchor of Lincoln Center.

"There's no reason why it shouldn't be a done deal," said Sanford I. Weill, chairman of Carnegie Hall. "I've worked on a lot of mergers, and I've never seen a fit as perfect as this."

The move would give Carnegie Hall the oldest orchestra in the country and deprive Lincoln Center of the first cultural institution established there. For the Philharmonic, going to Carnegie Hall means it can exchange the flawed acoustics of Avery Fisher Hall for a stage of undisputed sound quality, without having to foot the bill for a costly renovation. It would also turn the orchestra, now led by Lorin Maazel, from a rent-paying tenant into a managing partner.

"We've got two major institutions — one is the greatest hall in the world, the other is the greatest orchestra in the world," said Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic's executive director. "This merger is to strengthen our respective positions."

The plan has jolted Lincoln Center. Its chairman, Bruce Crawford, and its president, Reynold Levy, said they were taken aback when told on Thursday of the planned switch. It leaves them no long-term occupant for Avery Fisher Hall, where the orchestra has been based since 1962. But it also affords them opportunities to reshape the performing arts scene for decades to come.

Martin E. Segal, a chairman emeritus of Lincoln Center, voiced outrage at the prospect that the arts campus would lose its original tenant and called the merger "a form of cultural cannibalism."

Paul B. Guenther, chairman of the Philharmonic, responded that "it was not a question of luring the Philharmonic to Carnegie Hall, but of the Philharmonic doing what is best for its long-term interests."

In light of a nationwide decline in advance ticket sales, the Philharmonic's subscription audience would also give Carnegie Hall a stable revenue stream. At a time when orchestras around the country are succumbing to dire financial pressures, Mr. Weill, chairman of Citigroup and one of the nation's leading philanthropists, and Mr. Guenther, former president of the Paine Webber Group Inc., said the proposed merger would make powerful financial sense, giving the new entity a combined endowment of about $350 million.

Carnegie Hall, owned by the city, has been running in the black, they said, and the Philharmonic this year had a slight deficit, under $1 million, after having operated profitably since the early 1990's. Both Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall have about 2,800 seats.

The two executives confirmed the merger plan in joint telephone interviews yesterday. They said that in the last few days their executive committees had unanimously approved a merger of their boards and organizations and that they had held separate telephone consultations last night to advance the plans.

Before the merger can happen, Mr. Guenther said, the Philharmonic's commitments to Lincoln Center must be fully assessed. Both boards would then need to approve the alliance formally.

Mr. Weill said that he told Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg about the merger on Saturday and that "I think he thinks this is very good."

Mr. Bloomberg could not be reached for comment last night. Kate D. Levin, the city's commissioner of cultural affairs, commended the merger. "There are a lot of opportunities here," she said.

Carter Brey, the Philharmonic's principal cellist, called the move "the best news in the world."

"I don't think there is a musician in the New York Philharmonic who would not love to be affiliated with Carnegie," he said.

Mr. Weill and Mr. Guenther said that talks would continue this week to plan an expansion of Carnegie Hall's backstage space at an estimated cost of $10 million to $20 million — far less than the $100 million a consultant had projected — but that otherwise the hall, celebrated for its fine acoustics, would remain untouched. They said that the switch could probably not come before the 2006-7 season because of longstanding bookings by Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, but that the Philharmonic would step up its appearances at Carnegie in the meantime.

Reinstalling the 161-year-old orchestra in the hall where it presided from 1891 to 1962 would sharply curtail the availability of the famed stage to the world's leading ensembles, sending them in search of other sites, undoubtedly including Avery Fisher Hall, where the Philharmonic is now the lone regular tenant. Lincoln Center uses the theater for other programming when it is available.

The relocation would also come as another prime tenant at Lincoln Center, the New York City Opera, is pursuing a move downtown. It has long been unhappy with the acoustics in the New York State Theater, which it shares with the New York City Ballet. Irwin Schneiderman, the chairman of City Opera, said the company would not be interested in moving into Avery Fisher. "It doesn't have the stage or the fly space that an opera house needs," he said.

The orchestra's decision to pull out of discussions about reconstructing Avery Fisher Hall, at a cost of as much as $260 million, underlines the problems Lincoln Center faces as it grapples with even a scaled-down renovation project. The renovation was once put at $1.5 billion over a decade, and now has been reduced to $350 million over 12 years, not counting work on Avery Fisher.

Mr. Crawford said the plan took him by surprise. "We knew what they described as low-level discussions had gone on a few months ago," he said. "I had been assured by the Philharmonic this was not a real option. I would have preferred a more collegial approach."

Mr. Crawford said he was not aware that the Philharmonic had hired the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to study the cost and feasibility of a move to Carnegie Hall. The firm had been one of seven rejected for a redesign of Avery Fisher Hall last year.

Mr. Levy, Lincoln Center's president, said: "Lincoln Center has been a great home to the New York Philharmonic. Avery Fisher Hall was built for the Philharmonic."

But they and Beverly Sills, the center's previous chairwoman, said the orchestra's departure created opportunities for extended residencies by other orchestras and educational collaborations with the Juilliard School. "Close the door, open a window," Ms. Sills said.

Mr. Crawford said the Metropolitan Opera's orchestra, which typically plays several engagements at Carnegie Hall, might like to establish a more substantial season at Avery Fisher. He said Lincoln Center's Great Performers series and its summer festival might also use Avery Fisher more.

"We have this fabulous facility," Mr. Levy said. "We need to fix it up and aesthetically and acoustically improve it, but I have no doubt we can discharge our responsibility to the city and to the public."

Many issues remain to be resolved. But Mr. Weill and Mr. Guenther dismissed the impediments as largely minor. "Leases never stopped anything good from happening," Mr. Weill said. Mr. Guenther said that a merger had attracted such powerful support, "I'd bet on it."

They said that the planned administrative sharing, while unusual, would pose no problems. Mr. Mehta of the Philharmonic is to stay on to run the orchestral aspects, alongside Robert J. Harth, Carnegie Hall's executive and artistic director, who will run the house.

Mr. Mehta said the Philharmonic, which pays its musicians 52 weeks a year, might take advantage of Carnegie Hall's two other stages, perhaps moving its chamber music from the 92nd Street Y. "The possibilities are endless," he said.

Petitioners Urge China to Enforce Legal Rights

Petitioners Urge China to Enforce Legal Rights
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/international/asia/02CHIN.html

BEIJING, June 1 — Three young legal scholars have created a sensation in Chinese intellectual circles with a modest proposal: to enforce personal rights that are guaranteed in the Constitution, starting with the protection of downtrodden migrant workers in the cities.

In a petition to the national legislature that has drawn unusual attention and praise in the news media, the scholars challenge the system by which big-city police officers detain, fine and expel rural migrants at will, with no judicial oversight.

The petition, which was submitted last month, followed a national outcry over the unexplained beating death of a man detained in the southern city of Guangzhou. But the drafters had larger goals in mind when they described the system as "inconsistent with our country's Constitution and laws," and they argued that as citizens they could ask the legislature to revoke it.

"We hope that by taking up this smaller, concrete issue, we can advance the cause of constitutional rights in general," said Xu Zhiyong, 30, a law professor at Telecommunications University in Beijing and an author of the petition.

Their argument has struck a deep chord at a time when China is becoming more enmeshed with the global community, national leaders pay homage to the "rule of law" and the public is increasingly fed up with arbitrary police powers.

By pushing for incremental progress, the petitioners exemplify the "change from within" approach that many young intellectuals see as China's most promising, and perhaps only, path to political change.

Some call their appeal naïve in a country where the Constitution has been, as one law professor put it, "a collection of slogans," purportedly offering freedoms of speech, the press and association along with Mao Zedong Thought. Only last week, four intellectuals who tried to organize discussions of democracy were handed long prison terms.

Yet in the often paradoxical legal environment of China today, proposals that are tied to widely acknowledged social problems, that do not challenge one-party rule and that are couched in narrow terms of legal reform can be debated more openly than ever before.

Scholars like Mr. Xu do not deride an earlier generation whose grander yearnings brought euphoria and then disaster in 1989, as the army crushed mass pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

"I have respect for those who raised human rights issues in the past," he said. "But now we hope to work in a constructive way within the space afforded by the legal system. Concrete but gradual change — I think that's what most Chinese people want."

Mr. Xu is spokesman for the three petitioners; his colleagues are Teng Biao and Yu Jiang. All are 30, hold doctorates from Beijing University Law School and now teach.

More prominent legal scholars have lent their support, with five of them sending a similar petition to the legislature challenging the legal basis of migrant detentions.

That second statement, whose drafters include He Weifang, the editor of the Beijing University Law Journal, said the detention system had brought repeated cases of "gross abuse of power and violation of human rights." Its abolition as unconstitutional, they said, "would be a significant step forward in building a legal system."

No one is more aware of the capriciousness of the detention system than a man named Wu who moved to Beijing from Henan Province three years ago and makes less than $100 a month as a distributor of scrap wood.

"I don't know what the Constitution says, but we all know that this system just isn't right," said Mr. Wu, 30, who shares a shack on the edge of the city with two fellow workers and was afraid to give his full name.

Few Chinese would dispute that the system controlling rural migrants is rife with abuse. Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are picked up, fined, sent home or forced to work under a special set of rules that are outside normal criminal procedures. The system even has its own detention centers, which partly rely on fines and forced labor.

The system was established by administrative fiat in 1982 and has never been enshrined in law. As practiced, it violates several constitutional guarantees, including one requiring adherence to judicial procedures when people are detained.

"Sometimes it doesn't even matter whether you have the right permits to be here or not," Mr. Wu said. "They'll take away your cart, they'll take away the tools you need to make a living."

He said he was detained last year after he was stopped and did not have a temporary resident's permit. He said he had left his at home.

In truth, many of the three million migrants who live and work in the Beijing area do not have the required residency, employment and home-town permits. Everyone, including the police, knows this.

Mr. Wu said he was taken to a center north of Beijing, where he was not allowed to make a phone call and fed only steamed bread twice a day. Within a few days, he was taken by train to his home province, where relatives secured his release for $24. Detainees who could not muster the fine, he said, had to spend a week in custody doing farm work.

As soon as he scraped together the train fare, Mr. Wu returned to Beijing, resuming the same work.

Mr. Wu's experience was a common result of a system that, in its patent unfairness, reflects the contradictory attitudes cities hold toward rural migrants.

The menial work the migrants do, from construction to garbage recycling, water delivery to vegetable sales, is vital to city life and the economy. Yet city officials say the residence restrictions are necessary to prevent the growth of slums, and residents like to blame migrants for crime and filth.

"They need us, but they're afraid of us," Mr. Wu said of the Beijing authorities.

Mr. Xu, the petition writer, said: "The Constitution says that all people are equal before the law. But because of the disparities in our society, rural people are heavily discriminated against and their freedoms are restricted."

The focus on China's Constitution, and how to give it practical force, is one of the new frontiers of legal probing and no one is sure how far it can be pushed.

"In the past, the Constitution was little more than a banner with no legal effect," said Mr. He, the law review editor. "Increasingly now it is drawing the eye of legal scholars and the public at large."

"Many laws and regulations are brazenly at odds with provisions of the Constitution," Mr. He added. "But we have another problem: who has the right to interpret the Constitution?"

China has no firm procedure for deciding whether government rules or actions are constitutional. This potentially crucial task is not lodged in an independent Supreme Court, as in the United States, but relies on political decisions as formally expressed through the legislature, the National People's Congress, which is dominated by the Communist Party.

Through efforts like the campaign against migrant detentions, Mr. He said, many legal experts hope to make the People's Congress and its elite standing committee more active and effective.

"We hope that by enhancing the role of the People's Congress in interpreting the Constitution, we can steadily advance the rule of law," he said. "An even more idealistic hope is the establishment of a constitutional court that would be totally neutral and separate from the Congress."

All efforts to promote rule of law in China will eventually press against a sensitive political question: is the Communist Party a servant of the law or above it? But that final reckoning lies in the future, and in the meantime, scholars see large opportunities for progress.

"In the 1980's, people thought you could rely on passion to change things," Mr. He said.

"Intellectuals today are more realistic and realize that lasting, real changes depend on the slow, steady transformation of the culture and institutions," he said. "For this moment and this era, this is the most effective approach."

Monsanto Struggles Even as It Dominates

Monsanto Struggles Even as It Dominates
By DAVID BARBOZA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/31/business/31SEED.html

Monsanto should be thriving.

The company has helped develop most of the world's biotech crops; it produces the best-selling agricultural chemical of all time; and after a series of huge acquisitions, it can now call itself the world's No. 2 agricultural seed company, behind the Pioneer Hi-Bred unit of DuPont.

Yet profits are in a slump, its shares have tumbled nearly 50 percent in two years, and the company continues to take a beating over the introduction of genetically altered crops.

In all the turmoil, the Monsanto Company even lost its second chief executive in three years, Hendrik A. Verfaillie, who stepped down in December. Only this week did it name a successor — Hugh Grant, a longtime company executive who most recently has been chief operating officer.

Despite all the company's advantages, analysts say, its progress has been impeded by heavy spending, management shake-ups and the unexpected costs of trying to win the world over to those altered crops.

"Europe is really the stumbling block for global acceptance, and that's a problem," said Leslie Ravitz, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.

And Andrew Cash, an analyst at UBS Warburg, noted that "part of the problem was their infrastructure is for a global market." He added, "If the world market had accepted biotech two years ago, or even now, they'd be much more profitable."

Monsanto executives, for their part, say they are right on course. While Mr. Grant, on his promotion, acknowledged that "we're at an important crossroads," he stressed his longstanding belief that altered crops "have great potential."

The company has successfully moved away from a dependence on chemicals, and biotech profits are growing, top executives say. Indeed, this year, for the first time, Monsanto predicts that over half of its agricultural profits will come from something other than chemicals.

Biotech genes, one of Monsanto's newest businesses, are expected to produce about $600 million in gross profits this year, analysts say.

Chemicals — a mainstay since the company's founding in 1901 — are in sharp decline.

"Fifteen years ago, we were digging holes in the ground, extracting oil," Mr. Grant said in a recent interview at company headquarters in St. Louis, before his elevation to chief executive. "We were making nylon. We were a fibers company. Then we were a fine-chemicals company. Now we're a seeds and biotechnology company."

This is what Monsanto wanted to become, not an aging chemical concern but a new-age biotech company that would use the tools of genetic engineering to help transform the world of food and agriculture.

But Monsanto spent dearly to get here, investing billions in the last decade to acquire huge seed companies and to develop genetically altered crops.

The new Monsanto essentially has two main products: genetically altered seeds and Roundup, the herbicide that works in tandem with some of the company's most popular biotech crops. Roundup now commands a remarkable 90 percent of the world's herbicide market. And because Monsanto was a pioneer in genetically manipulating plants, it controls over 90 percent of the market for biotech "traits," the genes that transform ordinary seeds into new types of crops.

Still, profits have been lackluster for two years, analysts say, partly because of weakness in Latin America, where inventory and management problems have taken a toll.

Investors say Monsanto has also been weighed down by its heavy cost structure. Return on equity is weak, analysts say, because of the roughly $10 billion the company spent in the last decade to acquire seed companies and market about a dozen varieties of genetically altered crops.

"They don't even make their cost of capital, so that means every quarter they're actually destroying value," Mr. Cash, the analyst, said. "They introduced biotech traits in '95, and now there are 140 million acres. That's astounding. So it must be costs; it can't be sales."

Weak profits have sent Monsanto shares down, to $20.05 at the close of business yesterday from a peak of $38 in June 2001.

Still, most analysts agree that Monsanto has no real peer in biotech crops. "There's nobody else in the input traits that's competitive," Mr. Ravitz of Morgan Stanley said. "They are way ahead there."

Monsanto's biggest rivals — DuPont, Syngenta and Bayer — are working to develop their own biotech crops, but only a handful of products have reached the market. Some of the best prospects are two to seven years away, the companies say.

"Part of it was our late entry into the biotech arena," said Richard L. McConnell, the president of Pioneer Hi-Bred, DuPont's seed unit.

DuPont and Syngenta, however, are about to release products that go head-to-head with some of Monsanto's best-selling biotech traits. And some analysts predict that those two companies will capture a significant share of the market — and perhaps pressure Monsanto to lower its prices.

In the meantime, the competitors are content to profit from Monsanto's biotech traits, which are licensed to most of the world's major seed companies.

Sales of soybeans are growing because of Monsanto's biotech traits, said John Sorenson, the president of Syngenta Seeds North America, referring to the growth of Monsanto's popular Roundup Ready soybeans, which are genetically altered to withstand being sprayed by Roundup. "It's been a very profitable segment for us."

When biotech crops were first planted commercially in the United States, in 1996, Monsanto was not the first to market them, but it was the most aggressive.

That year, about 2 million acres of biotech crops were planted nationwide; today over 100 million acres are.

Roundup has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of this boom. Although it was already a blockbuster product, sales soared to over $2.4 billion in 2001, making it the best-selling agricultural chemical ever.

More than 80 percent of the soybeans in the United States and Argentina, the world's biggest exporters, are now genetically altered. And much of the land they are grown on is sprayed with Roundup.

To compete, other seed companies plan to introduce a series of "output" traits, or genes that could improve the quality or taste of crops like corn, soybeans, canola and tomatoes.

Competitors say output traits will be even more profitable, and experts say that contest will inaugurate the real biotech race.

"It's like a game of Monopoly," said Tray Thomas, the president of the Context Network, an agribusiness consulting group in West Des Moines, Iowa. "Monsanto has hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. But a lot of the game is yet to be played."

Monsanto says it plans to maintain its lead by devoting nearly 80 percent of its more than $500 million in annual research and development spending to biotech traits. Its rivals, by their own estimates, devote closer to 20 percent.

But therein lies a problem, analysts say: Monsanto's research spending has held down profitability. "They're generating gross profits, but they invest it back into the business," Mr. Ravitz said.

Monsanto also faces problems abroad, where genetically altered crops are sometimes scorned. Europe is showing no signs of easing its restrictions, and is in fact considering tightening some of them, which would make it more difficult to export biotech crops there. "Europe has been a major problem," Mr. Thomas said. "A lot of farmers are worried that they'll plant things they won't be able to sell in Europe."

Problems like that have inflated the cost of commercializing biotech crops, not just in Europe, but in other nations that follow Europe's lead.

In the United States, the biotech industry abandoned altered potatoes and delayed the marketing of altered wheat because of consumer health concerns. Monsanto says the crops have been properly tested and pose no threat to humans or the environment.

Monsanto has also drawn government scrutiny. According to a regulatory filing in March, the Justice Department was investigating whether the company engaged in anticompetitive conduct in the herbicide market. And lawyers are pressing forward with a class-action lawsuit that accuses Monsanto of conspiring with competitors to control the world's biotech seed market.

Monsanto said yesterday that it was cooperating with the Justice Department investigation. The company said it acted properly and denied that it engaged in any conspiracy to control the seed market.

Monsanto executives say they gained dominance with pioneering research and by getting some of the first products to market. "The bets we made really started in the 1980's," said Mr. Grant, the chief executive. "We really stopped on chemical R&D, and we focused on biotechnology."

Having proved that biotech traits can be profitable, Monsanto said it was moving into another phase: stacking genetically altered traits in seeds, one on top of another.

The company is also preparing to introduce consumer traits, like a biotech seed that will be fortified with omega-3, a fatty acid considered beneficial to human health.

"We're starting to populate our pipeline with consumer traits," said Robert T. Fraley, Monsanto's chief technology officer. "Now, we'll have oil, corn and canola with omega-3."

The problem is that competitors are coming out with new products that will challenge Monsanto's dominance of biotech corn and cotton. And Monsanto also faces declining profits from Roundup; its patent expired in 2000, and its price continues to drop.

"There are a lot of risks," Mr. Cash, at UBS, said. "The market is worried about competition. The market is worried about costs. The market is worried about them getting paid for their traits. They've got a big hill to climb."

Cruel and Tender: The Real at the Tate

Tuesday May 27, 2003
'I can't face it. I'm not going'
by Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,963891,00.html

We tried to get Jonathan Jones to go to an exhibition of the world's most wonderful photographs. Here he explains why it is his idea of a nightmare

Duty is never a good reason for doing anything. It is certainly not a good reason to look at art. Looking at the list of the photographers in Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph, about to open at Tate Modern, the burden of duty, in the end, is all I felt. So many, I would have to look at so many.

Even reading to the end of the exhibition's title feels like a chore. I would have to be troubled by Diane Arbus, moved by Walker Evans, aware of the immense contemporary influence of Stephen Shore, shocked and embarrassed by Boris Mikhailov. I can't face it; I'm not going.

To be bored in advance seems rude. But recently I've had to admit something to myself. I find photography in art galleries, framed and hung on the wall, almost entirely unrewarding. It was never my favourite, but I always thought it was, you know, modern and progressive, something to be taken seriously. The rot set in while looking at an exhibition of classic photographs of New York at the city's Jewish Museum. Here was a great Weegee image of people at the beach at Coney Island in the 1940s. A wonderful picture that I first saw in a magazine or somewhere years ago, and always loved. Here it was, a silvery print, on the wall. It was disappointing.

In frames on the wall is the opposite of the way we experience photographs in real life. In real life, there are photos everywhere. Their significance is unflagged. You read the paper, a picture on page eight catches your eye. You look at someone's holiday photos, one seems touching. Perhaps none of the many photos you see each day means anything to you at all: nobody is saying they have to.

Many would agree that photography is wonderful precisely in its ordinariness, its availability, its functional honesty, and that those who want to set it up as art are the snobs, the enemies of photography. But photography's "democracy" is an illusion. Photography lends itself to pretension of all kinds. Ever since it was invented, photography, the child of science, has been experiencing an "artistic" adolescence.

Even William Henry Fox Talbot couldn't resist giving his account of his discoveries the sub-poetic title The Pencil of Nature. Before you could finish holding the pose for a Victorian photograph, middle-class dilettantes were making sickly sweet religious art and taking pictures of children in the nude. Then came Alfred Stieglitz, the father of American modern art and photography's most pompous prophet: for Stieglitz, there was a fixed gulf between the banality of everyday photography and the preoccupation with light shadow and form of the photographer-artist.

Today, that modernist idea of high art made with the camera has vanished, and the old forms of lens-snobbery along with it. Photography is praised precisely for its lack of distinction, its ease of access, its universality. And yet the pretensions are grander than ever. There is a widespread belief that photography has an apocalyptic destiny in the history of art.

When the camera was invented, the old forms of art - those hallowed hand-made arts of painting and sculpture - were exposed as relics of privilege and stale tradition, dead, ritualised, essentially class- and faith-bound practices, doomed to be displaced by the mass medium of photography. The German Marxist Walter Benjamin argued something like this in the early 20th century.

Today it has become the small change of conversation, an idée reçue, a truth universally acknowledged. We now accept that photography "ended" the cults of painting and sculpture and, I suppose, medals and engraving, and brought about a new, more democratic, more truthful art, one that is appropriate to our culture, that speaks to us. Routinely, people will say that paintings of modern warfare by Dix, Beckmann or Picasso are feeble and deceitful compared to the immediacy of a photograph - even though we have copious evidence going back to the American civil war that war photographs are not unmediated truths but manipulated visual statements.

It bothers me that even after photography has marginalised every other kind of image, even when our culture is saturated by unquantifiable varieties of photographic information, we feel we ought to be speaking up for the photograph, for its invincible superiority to other media. There is a bullying, unquestioning crassness to today's hegemony of the photograph, expressed in a constant need to declare the camera's unique art-historical mission to eradicate all previous art forms. Even when it comes to the great modern exponents of high art, we want to reduce them to photographers. Thus exhibitions have been dedicated to the photography of Degas and Picasso. Neither Degas nor Picasso believed that their photography was high art. Not even Warhol believed his photos were his real art - when he talked about "my art", including giving it up, he meant his paintings. Warhol was the last modernist. That is, he was the last great exponent of a type of 20th-century art profoundly hostile to the photograph. Modernism hated photography. It wanted to be the opposite of photography. The cult of photography today may even be the reason it is currently impossible to make modern art.

Today we can scarcely even grasp what modernism was in visual art- how ambitious, revolutionary, high, how beyond old and new. We want to make modernism more like us, and we do this by reinventing it as photography. Jackson Pollock allowed his neighbour Hans Namuth to photograph him at work in 1950. Namuth's photos have become 20th-century classics, an interpretation, an iconic remaking, of Pollock as artist. In a disturbing way, these photographs have displaced Pollock's paintings: we can't think about Pollock without thinking about the photographs. And yet, they were never more than a record at best, a footnote, with very slight explanatory power. They tell us almost nothing about Pollock the painter. Looking at One or Autumn Rhythm is not made any easier by the existence of these photographs; nor would anyone at the time have expected it to be.

Modernist artists were good at posing for the camera. There are wonderful pictures of Picasso in his old age, like the funny one by Robert Doisneau where he poses at lunch with bread rolls arranged to look like giant hands. This is a nice sub-cubist joke - but you cannot replicate the complexity and richness of a Picasso in a photo. No photograph has ever been made that is as modern, as revolutionary, as the cubist paintings Picasso made almost 100 years ago. Nor will there ever be such a photograph.

Those stumbling attempts at abstract photography, the Rayograms, the photomontages, look so strained. Our art history, corrupted by the lens, gives far too much credence to the flimsy and naive attempts by 20th-century photographers to reproduce the innovations of 20th-century painting. That woman with a cat's face, that other woman who looks like a violin - would anyone really trade any avant-garde snapshot for the least work of Matisse, the most tentative Pollock?

Modern art was not, as we kid ourselves, empathetic with photography. On the contrary, the artists who assimilated and imitated photography were 19th-century academics; Gérôme's paintings of ancient Rome with their chilly verisimilitude are flatly photographic; Bouguereau's titillating nudes have the pallor of the photographer's studio. Banally reproducing appearances while indulging lazy fantasies, "contemporary" in its tackiness while deeply conservative in its emulation of what it thought was Renaissance pictorialism, this is the art that modernism set out to destroy.

Modernism - Seurat's perforated classicism, Cézanne's broken essays - began in the 19th century as an attack on appearances, the received, the apparent. On the photographic.

Photography cannot rival the visual and intellectual fullness of high modernist painting and sculpture. It ends up looking silly. Modernist photography is a curio at best. In truth, photography's great seduction is its verisimilitude, its power of imitation - that is, it does, better than painting, the most conservative thing that painting can do. It is this aspect of photography, I suppose, that Tate Modern means by "the real in the 20th-century photograph". The instant sublimity of Andreas Gursky, the frank exploitation of Boris Mikhailov. What we want from a photograph is what we used to get from painting: a plausible picture of the world. This is great, but modernism denied that it was the function of high art. The dominance of camera-based art today is a confession of our inability to continue, or to face, the revolutionary art of modernism.

It is photography that has reduced our expectations of art to a few stock, one-dimensional reactions: shock and horror, or pity, or lust. In the end, photographs don't deliver more than information - here's something grotesque, here's something funny, here's something austerely impressive. The mysterious and utopian possibilities of Picasso or Pollock are nowhere to be found as you walk through a photography exhibition.

· Cruel and Tender is at Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 from June 5. Details: 020-7887 8000.

Farnsworth House for sale

Sex and Real Estate
By WILLIAM NORWICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/01/magazine/01DESIGN.html

Is less more?

As far as Mies van der Rohe and the state of Illinois are concerned, it will have to be, if only for budgetary reasons.

For sale by its current owner, Lord Palumbo, the glass-and-steel aerie completed by Mies in 1951 and known as Farnsworth House is one in a trinity of landmark 20th-century houses that also includes Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer's Gropius House. Farnsworth House is also the setting for one of the juiciest tales in real estate, a story of how great architecture and perfectionism can be hijacked by love -- and by the need (banality of banalities!) for closet space.

Enshrined on 58 acres of prairie on the banks of the Fox River, it was built as a weekend retreat for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in Plano, Ill., about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. And it became the glass house that begat all glass houses. When Philip Johnson saw Mies's plans, it inspired him to build his Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., in 1949. Because of the house's inestimable value as a cultural destination, George Ryan, Illinois's former Republican governor, planned for the state to buy it for $7 million and run it as a museum. But the deal fell apart. The current Democratic leadership cites the purchase as being imprudent in light of the state's $5 billion budget deficit.

''Nothing really protects the house now from uncertainty -- it could even be taken down and moved,'' said Palumbo, a British patron of the arts, who bought the house from Farnsworth in 1968. A man who collected modern architecture the way others might collect Rembrandts, Palumbo also owns Kentuck Knob, a 1956 Frank Lloyd Wright house in Chalk Hill, Pa., and last year sold the Maisons Jaoul, two Le Corbusier buildings outside Paris.

After Palumbo learned of the state's decision to abandon Farnsworth House, which he considers ''a timeless work of art . . . the 20th-century equivalent of a Greek temple sitting in a meadow,'' he retained the art advisers Nancy McClelland and Lars Rachen to help him sell it either privately or by auction. ''Three years ago I was quite ill,'' Palumbo said by way of explaining. ''I felt I had to make a choice between here and Kentuck Knob. Pennsylvania has one overriding advantage. It is in striking distance of Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, which has looked after me fantastically.''

Spring came late to Plano this year. When I visited, buds were still negotiating their holdings on trees, but despite cold rain and river winds there was absolute quiet. With views that would send a feng shui expert to nirvana, the house hovers about five feet above the ground. Inside, looking out, nature becomes everything, from pageant to decoration. It is the house's religion.

Farnsworth House is sparsely furnished, of course. At its center is a core faced in exquisite primavera wood that contains the kitchen and bathrooms. The space surrounding the core is encircled by glass. A Barcelona bed near a fireplace makes one area the living room; a table with chairs is the dining room; a bed and storage closet make the sleeping area.

''The house is like a lotus flower,'' Palumbo said. ''It floats on the water and never seems to get wet. A month in this house,'' the minimum amount of time his wife, Hayat, and he have tried to spend there each year, ''is incredibly therapeutic. You can sit in a thunderstorm here, with lightning crackling all around you, and you are sort of part of the storm and yet not.''

Lord Palumbo's father, Rudolph, having left school at age 12, eventually made his fortune in real-estate development. He collected 18th-century things, porcelains and furniture. His mother, Elsie, however, was a musician with a penchant for modern music. ''As a result,'' Palumbo recalled, ''the shock of the new never bothered me.''

He was first acquainted with the work of Mies, and his philosophy of less-is-more, while a student at Eton, and it was like a thunderclap. (Mies's oft-quoted expression, according to the architectural historian Franz Schulze's guide to Farnsworth House, was actually ''bienahe nichts,'' or ''almost nothing'' -- as in the best is almost nothing.)

After graduating from Oxford, and working for a time in the mid-60's in the drawings department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- ''a fabulous time,'' he recalled -- Palumbo returned to London and joined his father's business. One of his first efforts was to try to persuade Mies to design a building for the Palumbos to develop in London. Mies accepted, but after years of debate, plans to build a 290-foot office tower next to Mansion House, the official residence of London's lord mayor, were rejected. ''Another giant glass stump better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London,'' Prince Charles famously opined of the building.

In the intervening years, Palumbo visited Mies in Chicago, where the architect moved from Berlin in 1938. Checking into the Drake Hotel a few hours before they were meant to have lunch, he opened a copy of the day's Chicago Tribune, and there, to his amazement, in the real-estate section, was an advertisement placed by Edith Farnsworth: house for sale.

It is understood that Mies and Farnsworth first met at a dinner party in the winter of 1945. Sparks sparked, as they say. He was 59 and in all his architect-as-emperor glory. She was 42, an intellectual and independent woman, who, as a nephrologist at Passavant Memorial Hospital in Chicago, was attaining national renown for her research work. She said she had a stretch of land about 60 miles outside Chicago where she wanted to build a weekend house, but not just any house. Might Mies recommend an architect?

Indeed, he might.

Palumbo excitedly dialed the number in Plano; the lady of the house answered. As she was leaving soon for Italy, Farnsworth invited him to lunch that day. Palumbo next rang Mies and explained the circumstances, asking to reschedule their meeting for later that day when he returned from Plano.

''Will she be there?'' Mies asked.

Palumbo answered yes.

''Well, good luck,'' the grand man said.

As the philosopher Groucho Marx duly noted, love flies out the door when money comes innuendo. The glass house in Plano meant one thing to Farnsworth and obviously another to Mies, who saw it as his intellectual property. When in love, you believe that the house will ''give a purpose to our plans and days,'' Marjorie Garber writes in ''Sex and Real Estate.'' ''The house as beloved.''

By the time construction was nearly completed, the architect and the doctor were suing each other. Mies claimed that he was owed $75,000 for the house; she said $65,000. Farnsworth eloquently defended herself in court, but lost: Palumbo says he heard that Mies had recorded their conversations.

''My Mies-conception,'' Farnsworth wrote in her unpublished memoirs.

ut this battle was not simply about money -- sex never is. Always a purist, the architect had designed the house without screens; Farnsworth was devoured by mosquitoes. Eventually, she screened in the upper deck -- a screened-in porch! -- which to this day brings a shudder to Mies devotees. To protect herself from curiosity seekers who turned up regularly on her lawn -- ''I would prefer to move as the women do in the Old Quarter of Tripoli,'' she wrote, ''muffled in unbleached homespun so that only a hole is left for them to look out of'' -- Farnsworth installed unbecoming blinds and planted mumsy rosebushes. Then there was the all-important fashion issue.

''Edith had asked for a closet for her dresses,'' Palumbo said, ''and Mies told her: 'It's a weekend house. You only need one dress. Hang it on the hook on the back of the bathroom door.'''

Either Mies was ''simply colder and more cruel than anybody I have ever known,'' Farnsworth observed, or ''perhaps it was never a friend and a collaborator, so to speak, that he wanted but a dupe and a victim?''

Finally, the architect gave in and provided a closet, but to make his point, he did it in teak rather than the more rarefied primavera used everywhere else.

Their animosity begat plenty of publicity. In April 1953, House Beautiful ran an article about the ''Less Is More'' movement in architecture. Written by Elizabeth Gordon, with the unnamed help of Farnsworth, ''The Threat to the Next America'' was, in its flag-waving homage to domesticity, a nod to the McCarthy era. More recently, the stormy relationship of Mies and Farnsworth has inspired two plays written by Chicago-area playwrights, ''The Glass House,'' by June Finfer, and ''Jessie and the Fat Man,'' by Alanah Fitch.

Farnsworth went out of her way to mask any Miesian touches. When Palumbo took occupancy of the house, he did everything he could to restore the house to the architect's vision, including removing the porch and installing furniture almost exclusively of Mies design.

''I asked Mies how to decorate the house,'' Palumbo recalled, ''and he responded, 'Do whatever you like.' A typical Mies answer, but of course it was not that simple.''

Palumbo asked the landscape designer Lanning Roper to reimagine the grounds, to give them a more poetic, countryside feeling.

''It is really a perfect house for two,'' Palumbo said. ''Very intimate, yet very private. As for decorating, very few things work. You want nothing to compete with the views. 'What about pictures?' I asked Mies.''

The minimalist master answered slowly, ''There's always an easel, I suppose.''

LES Surface Hotel

[more news on the recent arrival to the LES neighborhood... more news here]

May 26, 2003
$250 a night at the corner of posh and gritty
by Geraldine Baum
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-baum26may26.story

The word shmatta does not comfortably roll off Paul Stallings' tongue. A tall WASP from the Midwest, Stallings grew up in a tony Chicago suburb before making his way to New York. In the late 1970s he traded in a job at a law firm to renovate falling-down buildings on the Lower East Side when this historic neighborhood was at a low point.

Stallings has since fixed up many buildings and learned the ways of the locals, including how to differentiate between a shmatta — typically a $12 cotton dress — and a retro designer frock now sold in hip shops along Orchard Street. The 52-year-old Stallings has become as important a figure around here as Herman Spitzer, the Orthodox Jew who has been selling shmattas for 40 years on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow streets.

And now Stallings is going to do something unimaginable: He is going to plop a 20-story designer hotel on a site that was once Schmulka Bernstein's sau-

sage-making plant — and in the middle of a neighborhood that has seen pushcarts, pickle stores, salsa record shops, tenements and drug dealers but never an invasion of conspicuous consumers who will want to observe from a distance the immigrant struggle like some fascinating floor show. The Surface Hotel, set to open in September, will have most of the standard hip accouterments, including flat-screen TVs in every room. For those of us who once had a grandmother named Sadie in this neighborhood, this is shocking news. New York swallows its history, but the thought of my tiny Sadie's ghost, in her support hose, sipping a pink Cosmopolitan in hotel named for a fashion and design magazine, is too much to take.

For the first time in its storied history, this neighborhood is being remade not only by the new poor but also by the new rich. For generations, waves of immigrants escaping pogroms and poverty made their way from Ireland, Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe to the tenements and sweatshops of the Lower East Side. Immigrants are still coming, still fleeing poverty and oppression. Now they come from outlying provinces in China and Latin America to work (still) in sweatshops and live (still) in cheap tenement apartments.

But instead of competing with immigrants from other countries for space and briny pickles and good cheese, they are up against young hipsters escaping high rents and Starbucks, seeking a new territory for their art galleries, sex toy shops, edgy bars and eclectic boutiques. This is their unspoiled frontier east of a Soho that was once bohemian but now looks a lot like a New Jersey mall. (Even Bloomingdale's is opening a branch there!)

Stallings, who has devoted 25 years to renovating the Lower East Side, does not want to spoil its character. He knows that the attraction of the Surface will be the "authentic" experience of staying in a gritty neighborhood with a good night life and then retreating to a comfortable hotel with big rooms and floor-to-ceiling windows which look out onto tenements.

Much the way my Sadie probably dreamed of owning her own house with a lace-covered table for Sabbath suppers, Stallings has his Lower East Side dreams too. His involve a young creative person, say, a musician, who dared to rent one of his renovated apartments 20 years ago when the area was overrun by junkies and squatters. Now that musician is in his 40s and is perhaps an industry big shot on a business trip from L.A. looking to have a drink in a hotel lounge where half the people have paint on their jeans.

"I wanted to create a hotel that wasn't in a bubble existing separate from the community," Stallings said, noting that area residents will get priority reservations at a yet-to-be-named but sure-to-be-cool hotel restaurant.

During a tour of the $250-a-night rooms at the Surface, a woman in a housedress emerged from her apartment in an adjacent tenement and began hanging her laundry on the fire escape. "That's what we want people to experience," said Amador Pons, the 28-year-old hotel architect, first pointing to the woman sunning her laundry and then sweeping his hand across a cityscape of tenement rooftops and East River bridges.

Stallings has gone to great lengths to protect that experience, buying the air rights around the hotel and declining to take over the lease of a grungy hardware store next door. Thrusting his hands into his jeans, he insists he wants Spitzer's son Ziggy to keep the corner dress shop open for a long time.

The neighborhood is full of odd juxtapositions and ironies. At a coffeehouse on Hester Street, a young man wearing a nose ring also wears a button that says "Free Palestine." In Sadie's day that would have meant free Palestine for the Jews. Now it means free Palestine from the Jews. Nearby, the proprietor of a just-opened restaurant named Tenement boasts a menu of "comfort food" like they used to eat in the old days. Sadie might have gone for the potato pancakes but it's a sure bet she would have passed on the pasta with smoked bacon in cream sauce.

But there is yet much for her in the old neighborhood. Sadie didn't go in for fancy, and there are still great bargains on Orchard Street. (And she would have been delighted that one of her granddaughters, a flutist, pays almost nothing to rent studio space in a tenement basement.) After a performance at a Yiddish theater, Sadie surely would have headed for the last candy store on the Lower East Side for a bag of sugar-free suckers and some jelly slices.

Stallings says he would like to preserve the neighborhood as a place that Sadie's ghost would be comfortable revisiting. But a chic hotel here could unleash a wave of gentrification that leaves the neighborhood beyond recognition — another Soho-cum-Short Hills Mall.

Now the area stands on the brink of reinvention. There is a lot of plywood covering construction in storefronts. Soon, famed restaurateur Brian McNally will open a new place down the block from the Surface. And the Vanity Fair crowd is already gaga over a new art theater and celebrity chef Wylie Dufresne's new restaurant on what was once one of the worse drug-dealing blocks in the city.

It would be easy to conclude that some of these interlopers are commodifying poverty and making a spectacle of immigrant culture. If so, it will be a bittersweet moment for generations who were once new Americans on the Lower East Side when all that plywood comes down. But Stallings and others like him are giving this area a future. It will be different from the past, but a future no less.

Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend

[another adoringly beautiful narrative and profound statement of love, devotion, and familial feminine spirit by linda.]

My mom is turning 60 next week. For a woman who's almost 60, she still looks really young, and she's one of the girliest girls I know. For example, she'll NEVER leave the house without make-up on, and there's always a little make-up pouch in her purse filled with cosmetics with the color palette of the current season. Whenever we go out to eat, she'd always take out her lipstick case and mirror and freshen up her lipstick after every meal. As a little girl, I remember watching my mom put make-up on every morning and wishing I could grow up soon so that I too can wear make-up and be beautiful and glamorous like her.

[continued here...]