China Insistent on Protecting Currency

China Insistent on Protecting Currency
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/business/worldbusiness/19zhou.html

HONG KONG, Sept. 18 - The head of China's central bank tonight defended his country's determination to hold its currency at the current level against the dollar and to maintain controls on large flows of money across China's borders.

When the United States Treasury secretary, John W. Snow, visited Beijing two weeks ago, Chinese officials sought to allay American concerns that China's currency might be undervalued - giving its exports a competitive advantage - and promised a series of limited measures. But these officials carefully avoided setting any timetable for fundamental changes to the management of China's currency, known as the yuan or renminbi, or to the system for controlling capital flows.

In his first broad policy address since then, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, spelled out here a series of reasons why Chinese officials do not agree with the criticisms that the Bush administration and Western economists have raised.

Mr. Zhou was very diplomatic in his remarks, never mentioning the United States or American officials at all and volunteering several times that he was simply providing information and not expressing personal opinions. Nonetheless, he made clear his leeriness of any sharp policy shifts.

"There is no strong reason to have any kind of sudden changes," Mr. Zhou said, while quickly adding that in the long term, "we're always going forward, making new changes."

China's central bank has kept the yuan pegged at 8.28 to the dollar by printing hundreds of billions of yuan to buy the tens of billions of dollars a year now flowing into the country each year. The central bank has tried to control the potential inflationary effects of this expansion of the money supply by borrowing back much of the extra yuan, but this policy has become less and less effective.

Chinese banks, awash with funds, lent more in the first seven months of this year than in all of last year, triggering a frenzy of investment and speculation, especially in real estate projects in big eastern Chinese cities like Shanghai.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority was the host of tonight's speech, and the authority's chief executive, Joseph Yam, turned to Mr. Zhou after his speech this evening and, with uncharacteristic bluntness to a top central banker speaking in public, told him, "It looks as if you're running out of options."

Mr. Zhou denied this, saying that the central bank could still stabilize the domestic economy and money supply through administrative methods, like discouraging banks from lending to speculative projects, and by requiring domestic banks to deposit more of their assets with the central bank instead of lending them out. "I am really confident that there is not a serious problem for stabilization," he said.

The International Monetary Fund warned recently that countries holding extremely large reserves of foreign currencies could be forgoing some extra economic growth that the money could promote were it productively invested at home. But Mr. Zhou defended his country's fast-growing reserves, which hit $346.5 billion in June.

Measured in terms of foreign exchange reserves per inhabitant, China, with its enormous population, ranks between Indonesia and Thailand, he pointed out. And if China wants to be cautious and have reserves equal to six months of imports, plus half of its external debt, plus three years of dividends on foreign direct investments then it would need $370 billion in foreign exchange reserves, Mr. Zhou said.

Generally, however, countries set one of these measurements as a goal, rather than add all three together.

Far from favoring any relaxation of capital controls, Mr. Zhou expressed irritation several times at recent signs that speculators, especially Chinese companies and citizens who used to send money secretly out of the country, are now bringing foreign currency back into the country and converting it into yuan in the hope of a quick profit if the central bank allows the currency to appreciate.

"We will be very cautious in the capital account to observe and to check any short-term capital inflow," he said, noting that China encouraged long-term foreign direct investment while liberalizing its rules for certain kinds of capital outflows.

Mr. Zhou also questioned whether China's modest surplus in overall trade would endure.

China's soaring surplus with the United States has produced anger in manufacturing states, where cheap Chinese goods have been blamed for job losses. But China also runs deficits with Persian Gulf countries, from which it buys growing quantities of oil, and with some Asian neighbors, from whom it buys machinery and sophisticated components that Chinese exporters cannot produce for themselves.

Credit rating agencies have somewhat varied views regarding the hazards of currency appreciation and a removal of capital controls. Standard & Poor's essentially agreed on Monday with Beijing's position, saying that a revaluation of the yuan or a partial lifting of capital controls could harm China's credit rating. Moody's and Fitch Ratings are a little less concerned, taking the position that an appreciation of the yuan would not necessarily hurt China's credit rating by itself, and that while a sudden lifting of capital controls might be more risky, China is unlikely to do this.

Appearing on tonight's panel with Mr. Zhou and Mr. Yam was E. Gerald Corrigan, the former president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who is now a managing director at Goldman, Sachs. Mr. Corrigan backed Mr. Zhou's positions on practically every point, saying that China faced such serious problems that it was understandable that Chinese officials would want to control capital flows and retain very large foreign currency reserves.

China's dependence on rapid economic growth to maintain political and social stability, coupled with a fragile banking system laboring under an extremely heavy burden of nonperforming loans, means that any change should be gradual, Mr. Corrigan said. Citing his experience since the 1970's with other countries undergoing significant economic transitions, Mr. Corrigan added that, "A pell-mell rush to open the capital account and float the currency can be a recipe for financial instability on a large scale."

The Gaze Turns Outward

The Gaze Turns Outward and Sees Estrangement
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/arts/design/19KIMM.html

NOT that anyone except the curators felt there was a pressing need for yet another art survey, but the first Triennial of the International Center of Photography is at least that rare case: an instructive, topical show.

It is also timely. The theme, "strangers," is, in the nature of survey themes, nebulous enough to be a catchall for diverse brands of photography and video, which no doubt accommodated the different tastes of the four curators who put this together. But, for once, the title is also specific enough that it actually means something. After 9/11 the subject of strangers has gained traction and psychological resonance, although 9/11 happens not to be what any of the photographs or videos in this show are explicitly about.

Instead, most of these works, in some way or another, express a cautionary view that the world is full of people who are strangers to one another. You might say that after years of navel-gazing, the climate of photo-based art has gradually shifted from me to them.

That is now also the political condition to which everyone is slowly awakening. It is the state of being that David Goldblatt records with his pictures of clashing cultures in South Africa; and what Chien-Chi Chang records with his heroic double portraits of residents at a psychiatric asylum in Taiwan where patients are chained two by two, some of them discreetly holding hands; and what Coco Fusco records with her video of immigrants in Barcelona whom she invites to sing the Catalan national anthem. And it is also what Yto Barrada records with her photograph of Moroccan laborers, silently seated at row after row of tables in a factory, policed by managers, peeling shrimp.

You wouldn't call this concerned photojournalism exactly. The artists don't expect to change the world by making pictures of it. They variously register people and places representative of the gaps and clashes that define us. Much of the work focuses on the Middle East and Africa, but that is not a stated theme. A few photographs stress architecture without any people: buildings as metaphors for estrangement. Efrat Shvily, for example, shoots construction sites in Israel and the West Bank, arid new settlements being built on suburban and contested land, unoccupied and shuttered. There is an inherent element of alienation to many of these triennial pictures and videos, which may leave you, by the end of the show, feeling a little melancholic.

On the other hand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia'sluxurious and weirdly lighted photographs of anonymous passers-by on an arcaded street in Havana have the strange gravity and magical buoyancy of a García Márquez novel. Tim Maul's black-and-white pictures of nooks and crannies around New York record spots that a spiritualist told him had psychic traces of grief. The images are Atgetesque views, secondarily ironic, primarily poetic, the idea of strangers being implied only by their absence.

The works here also meditate inevitably on the intrinsic mysteries of the photographic medium. After all, photography from the start has been about making pictures of strangers. Point and shoot: anyone with a camera can violate someone else's privacy just by pressing a button, which is what caused Cartier-Bresson to remark that there is something appalling about photographing people.

One of the most shocking works in this show is by Harun Farocki, who presents grainy black-and-white surveillance tapes from a California maximum-security prison. We see an inmate shot and killed by guards after a fight with another inmate in the prison yard. Surveillance cameras and also mug shots: photographs monitor strangers. Mug shots were conceived in the 19th century to catalog and distinguish outlaws from the rest of society, to create a visual category of pariahs, who by definition are strangers to civil society.

At the same time, photographs, even videos, can never really say very much about who is in them. Various triennial artists linger over details that supposedly tell us what we should know about a subject; acting like ethnographers, we are meant to decipher these details as signifiers. Zwelethu Mthethwa makes big color photographs of poor black South Africans posing in their houses, presenting themselves to the camera. One picture here shows two young men dressed in suits against a wall made of plain cardboard, shiny pots on a stove beside them — a relaxed image of vaguely mixed gender signals expressing individual humanity. These works are antidotes to the cliché of the black victim in South Africa, composed to make their subjects seem particular and less like social abstractions, which is to say less like strangers.

Except that what can we ever know of somebody just from a picture? The most endearing work in the show is Rineke Dijkstra's excruciatingly funny four-minute video of a shy, cringing young girl with braces lip-synching moronic lyrics by the Backstreet Boys, a perfect expression of adolescent pain and desire, provoking empathy. Ms. Dijkstra also photographs Almerisa, a Bosnian girl whose family settled in Amsterdam, tracking her passage from little waif in her Sunday best — wearing funny blue socks and patent leather shoes, her tiny legs angling from the seat of a red plastic chair at a refugee center — into a teenager, assimilated, hard, trying to look at ease, preening disdainfully for the camera. Photographing the girl, Ms. Dijkstra affects the sympathetic dispassion of a family doctor examining a difficult patient.

But other photographs of Almerisa might chart a different arc, make her seem like another young woman, tell another tale about adolescence and immigration. It is Ms. Dijkstra's privilege as an artist to choose the story she wants. Art only has to have its own integrity and completeness, which shouldn't be mistaken for the truth, even when a photograph looks straightforward.

Several artists tackle this particular truism directly. Susan Meiselas has completed an extraordinary project, a result of which is a book published in conjunction with the triennial. She collected photographs and other materials documenting the encounter of foreigners with the Dani, an indigenous people of the West Papuan highlands, from their "discovery" by an American explorer in the late 1930's through their violent pacification by Indonesians to their present commodification as eco-tourist attractions.

Ms. Meiselas's work expresses the essence of the notion of the stranger in modern culture and also the tricky nature of photographic reality, since photographers have portrayed the Dani differently over the years, as violent savages and noble warriors and happy nudists, depending on who was snapping the pictures and for whom.

Luc Delahaye has taken a different tack toward the same issue. He has shot the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank as a wide panorama in which tiny figures crisscross a wasteland of rubble, beyond which a jumble of low-rise houses spill toward the horizon under puffy clouds. Mr. Delahaye has lately been making these sort of amazing panoramic photographs, not only in the Middle East but also in Afghanistan, at ground zero and other places.

They are responses to standard photojournalism. News photographs focus on incidents. They get close in. They encapsulate a moment, which means they also leave out much of what it is actually like to stand in a place, where your field of vision is wide and all sorts of information compete for your attention. In Mr. Delahaye's panorama of Jenin it isn't immediately clear what you should be looking at or what is going on or even whether this is a coherent image, notwithstanding that it is spectacular. Distance, literal distance, in this case from the people he is shooting, represents a quality of estrangement and conveys the otherworldliness of the camp.

The triennial does not distinguish between figures like Mr. Delahaye and artists like Justine Kurland, who photographs people in communes, or Collier Schorr, who photographs young German soldiers she dresses in Nazi uniforms, or John Schabel, who snaps pictures of people snapping pictures of other people, capturing the flash of their cameras, which look like ghostly orbs.

The line between art and photojournalism, such as it is anymore, is here almost beside the point. Yoshua Okon has produced a hilarious video — I don't know whether you would call it art or low-budget reality television — in which he induces various strangers to improvise soap opera and other scenes in a furniture store in East Los Angeles. Rolling cameras inspire bizarre behavior, which is the basic lesson of all reality television, here played out on a discomfortingly intimate scale. At one point a heavy-set woman wearing a headband and glasses impulsively strangles a plaster bunny while rolling on a bed, cursing her mother-in-law, after which she laughs hysterically. Mr. Okon's camera lingers over her laughing for several minutes. She becomes a stranger whose privacy we feel we have suddenly invaded. The camera makes us into voyeurs.

Then again, she chose to act before the camera. People today go to humiliating lengths to become somebody in the world by having their picture taken, only to make themselves seem more like strangers. Shizuka Yokomizo has produced a series of photographs called "Dear Stranger," for which she wrote anonymously to people with ground-floor apartments in Tokyo, London, New York and Berlin, asking them to stand by their windows at a particular moment on a certain evening to be photographed from the street. She refused to meet them. If they tried to meet her, she would not photograph them. If they declined to be photographed, they could close their curtains or draw the blinds. She and they had to remain strangers.

The pictures show various people posing warily, framed by the panes of their windows, one man shirtless, wearing jeans, all of them stiffly staring into the darkness outside their apartments or half-smiling at the camera, skeptical, apprehensive, curious, compliant, vulnerable — their expressions are hard to fix.

Through Ms. Yokomizo we become strangers looking into the bedrooms of exhibitionists. The portraits are hypnotic and alarming, although they are not really any more invasive than ordinary snapshots of strangers — the reverse, in fact. These people posed for their photographs. They present themselves to us.

The pictures are intimate at the same time they remain mysterious. The bottom line is that every photograph finally makes a stranger of its subject.

Music File Sharers Keep Sharing

Music File Sharers Keep Sharing
By AMY HARMON with JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/technology/19TUNE.html

Despite the lawsuits filed last week against 261 people accused of illicitly distributing music over the Internet, millions of others continue to copy and share songs without paying for them.

Last week, more than four million Americans used KaZaA, the most popular file-sharing software, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, only about 5 percent fewer than the week before the record industry's lawsuits became big news. One smaller service, iMesh, even experienced a slight uptick in users.

The sweeping legal campaign appears to be educating some file swappers who did not think they were breaking the law and scaring some of those who did. But the barrage of lawsuits has also highlighted a stark break between the legal status of file sharing in the United States and the apparent cultural consensus on its morality.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this week, only 36 percent of those responding said file swapping was never acceptable. That helps explain why the pop radio hit "Right Thurr," by Chingy, was available to download free from 3.5 million American personal computers last week, while two million file swappers in the United States shared songs from rock icons like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, according to the tracking company Big Champagne.

The persistent lack of guilt over online copying suggests that the record industry's antipiracy campaign, billed as a last-ditch effort to reverse a protracted sales slump, is only the beginning of the difficult process of persuading large numbers of people to buy music again.

Mitch Bainwol, the new chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, which brought the suits, said in an interview that the group had succeeded in communicating that file sharing is illegal and would have consequences. But he acknowledged that shifting attitudes would be the next battle in what he conceded was more an effort to contain file swapping than to wipe it out.

"It's a two-step process," he said. "I don't think anyone has an expectation that file-sharing becomes extinct. What we're trying to drive for is an environment in which legitimate online music can flourish."

The record industry argues that sharing songs online is just like stealing a CD from a record store. But to many Americans, file sharing seems more like taping a song off a radio. The truth, copyright experts say, may lie somewhere between.

And instead of significantly damping enthusiasm for file sharing, the record industry's lawsuits appear to be spurring increasingly sharp debates about how the balance between the rights of copyright holders and those of copyright users should be redefined for a digital age.

"Law, technology and ethics are not in sync right now," said Senator Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who has called a hearing on the subject for later this month. "I presume these lawsuits are having some impact, but they're not solving the problem."

Soli Shin of Manhattan is not waiting for lawmakers to act. She gave some thought to the ethics of file sharing after hearing of the lawsuits and took her own library of 1,094 songs offline, because she knew they were aimed at people who "share" their music files with others. But she saw no reason to stop getting new music for herself.

"It's really a great convenience," Ms. Shin, 13, said. "If I like what I download maybe I'll buy it."

According to The Times/CBS News poll, adults under 30 are more inclined to consider music sharing over the Internet to be acceptable: 29 percent of them say the practice is acceptable at all times, compared with 9 percent of people older than that.

But the file-sharing trend, which includes many school-age people, has spread across nearly every demographic group, with 27 percent of Internet users between the ages of 30 and 49 involved, according to a survey released in July by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even 12 percent of those over the age of 50 participate in file sharing, the survey found.

Pew also found that among the 35 million adults that its survey indicated download music, 23 million said they did not much care about the copyright on the files they copied onto their computers. Among the 26 million who made files available for others to copy, 17 million did not care much about whether they were copyrighted.

In interviews last week, many file swappers said they were more wary of copying music since the wave of lawsuits was announced. But there was a strong current of defiance, even among those who said they had stopped.

Dr. Steve Vaughan, 35, a Manhattan physician who said he had downloaded about 2,000 songs over the Internet in recent years, said he stopped only because of the "fear factor" after hearing about the lawsuits. He said he might try one of the new legal online music services, though he doubted it would enable him to sample as wide a range of jazz, blues and folk to help him decide what to buy on CD.

Those options may be expanding. In addition to Apple Computer's iTunes and a new legal service called BuyMusic that recently began selling songs online for 99 cents, several competing online music stores are set to open this fall.

"If they give me a full selection, and I could sample what I want and it was well organized, I would love that," Dr. Vaughan said. "I'm not doing this to save money. I'm doing this because the music industry doesn't give me what I want."

At the root of the resistance for many — besides a perhaps decisive fondness for getting things free — is a complaint that the record industry is trying to take away the ability to make copies of music to use personally and to share with friends — a practice that Americans have long enjoyed.

Added to that is a deep-seated resentment of the big record labels, which music fans variously accuse of pricing CD's too high and producing too much bad music.

But Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of communications studies at New York University, said he told his students that distaste for record company practices was not a justification for making unauthorized copies of their music.

"If everyone would cool down the rhetoric we might actually have some helpful discussions," Professor Vaidhyanathan said.

"It would be nice to stop demonizing people who think they're doing reasonable legitimate things in their homes and stop demonizing people who are trying to make a living and recoup an investment," he added.

Society, Mr. Vaidhyanathan added, has to reconcile the desire to make personal copies with the new ability to make millions of perfect copies with the click of a mouse. "Suddenly we have this powerful copying technology in our own homes, and we haven't confronted exactly what it means."

The largest number of respondents to The Times/CBS News poll, 44 percent, said sharing music files over the Internet was sometimes acceptable, if a person shared music from a purchased CD with a limited number of friends or acquaintances. Conducted by telephone on Monday and Tuesday this week among 675 adults, the margin of sampling error in the poll was plus or minus four percentage points.

Lorraine Sullivan, a student at Hunter College in New York, paid $2,500 to the record industry association earlier this week to settle the lawsuit it filed against her. But she said she still saw nothing wrong with her use of file-sharing software. She downloaded Madonna songs that she already had on CD, for instance, so that she could have them on her computer and not have to change CD's while she cleaned her apartment.

"I still feel that if you use downloading to sample a CD or a song and you go buy the CD, it's O.K.," said Ms. Sullivan, who has set up her own Web site asking for donations to help pay her fine.

Fear of being sued or fined can help shape a new moral sensibility — as happened with sexual harassment laws, seat belt requirements and no- smoking laws — despite considerable initial public skepticism. Some legal experts and ethicists say the music industry's enforcement of copyright law against Internet file sharers may eventually catalyze a similar change in attitudes.

But many experts argue that legal prohibition alone is rarely effective in getting people to behave differently if it runs counter to strong societal beliefs.

"When efforts to ban behavior fail, like with the Prohibition, they may need to be changed," said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington.

Several legislators, including Senator Coleman, have called for a re-examination of the notion of "personal copying." Some critics have have suggested that Congress could force the record companies to license their material and find a way to tax Internet users to pay them, essentially legalizing file sharing.

The number of Americans using KaZaA, the leading file-sharing software, from home has dropped about 15 percent since late June, when the record industry announced its plans to sue suspected copyright violators, Nielsen/NetRatings said.

"This slide down over a short period of time coincides with the record industry's effort to lower the boom on its users," said Greg Bloom, a senior analyst with Nielsen. "But there are still a lot of people using these services."

Software like KaZaA, Morpheus, Grokster and iMesh lets Internet users find and retrieve files on one another's computers, rather than from a central Web site. To "share" songs on peer-to-peer networks, users put them into a folder on their computer that they open to others. Others searching for those titles can then download copies onto their PC's.

"The record industry needs to win back the hearts and minds of record buyers, because they can't win a technology war," said Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive.

Meanwhile, many recalcitrant file swappers are simply sizing up the odds: "How many people are they suing?" asked Carlo Lutz, 13, a Bronx High School of Science student, who was listening to rap music he had uploaded to his MP3 player on the subway last Thursday.

"There are millions of us," he added. "It's only a drop in the bucket."

Calvin Klein's Successor Loosens the Corset Laces

Calvin Klein's Successor Loosens the Corset Laces
By CATHY HORYN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/18/fashion/shows/18DRES.html

It's pretentious to think that designers can't be replaced once they decide to bow out. After all, Tom Ford would not be the millionaire star that he is if he had stuck to Gucci loafers, and certainly Karl Lagerfeld hasn't spent 20 years pinning camellias on Coco Chanel's portrait. On Tuesday, as Calvin Klein, who this year sold his company to Phillips-Van Heusen, watched from the wings, 32-year-old Francisco Costa took over the designs of the house, and it was definitely a new day.

He accomplished two essential things at Calvin Klein: he gave more credence to the trouser suit in women's lives than to the giddy ruffle — a story of the 2004 spring collections — and he brought forward the notion that freedom in dress begins with female underpinnings, as Chanel knew when she popped women out of their corsets. In fact, Mr. Costa didn't just let flesh and underpants show through his transparent evening dresses, colored in the cool tones of the sea; he treated nudity and lingerie with almost offhand indifference, much as Mr. Ford did last season in his influential Saint Laurent show.

For too long, the element of sex, so liberally dispensed in Mr. Klein's ads, has been so subtle in his clothes as to be invisible. "Calvin clean" has come to mean something almost antiseptic, and, in a way, it was as much of a denial of female sexuality as the Victorian corset. It was minimalism without intrigue and certainly without any dirty thoughts.

What Mr. Costa has done, though, is to use the sexual imagery of the ads as a legitimate well, drawing from their sometimes explicit nature a more layered sensuality. Organza dresses, creased with random pleats or scaled with draped folds like the surface of a lagoon reef, lightly skimmed and whirled around the body. The models wore stretch bras and underpants in foundation tones, a device that came across as less show-off than straightforward. Mr. Costa used a clingy transparent fabric for daytime skirts, mixing them with cashmere tops, but here the look seemed contrived.

This is a season, as Stefano Tonchi, the fashion director of Esquire, noted before the start of the Michael Kors show on Wednesday, when a handful of designers seem concentrated around the same brief period in the late 1970's, when the styles of Mr. Klein and the late Perry Ellis really came alive. You could see it in the nonchalant attitude of Marc Jacobs's baggy linen trousers, worn with girlish tops and high heels. And it was abundantly evident in Mr. Costa's loose cotton shorts, shown with cardigan sweaters layered over rumpled white shirts and men's ribbed undershirts.

You may complain that there's nothing novel about pairing a blousy men's shirt with a sleek gray pantsuit or a polo sweater with a skirt in an etched silk print. But you also can't ignore the carefree attitude that such clothes impart and, above all, the timing of its expression. Mr. Costa, who joined the Klein design staff two years ago from Gucci, is looking at American style through fresh eyes. The new Calvin Klein may just turn out to be the new fashion.

Retailers pouring backstage seemed happy with the clothes. After releasing Mr. Costa from a bearhug, Ron Frasch, president of Bergdorf Goodman, said: "It was a beautiful collection. I think he is one superbly talented young man."

Narciso Rodriguez spent more than a decade working on behalf of other designers, including Mr. Klein, and that gave him experience. But it took him nearly two years, beginning from the time he opened his own business in New York, in 2001, to rid himself of the yoke of being an assistant and finally learn to be a master. Today, Mr. Rodriguez's thinking is so concise he could probably sum up his design principles on the head of a pin. No blather shows.

He continues to cut his clothes close to the body (and if you don't have a body, his dresses will give you one), using seam work as both embellishment and sexual taunt. In his collection on Tuesday, to a soundtrack he commissioned from a group of young fiddle players from Brazil, Mr. Rodriguez showed dresses that combined panels of natural linen with girdle fabrics. There were juicy shades of coral, and some dresses were closed in the back with a ladder of bra hooks.

All this was plenty sexy but the real strength of the collection was in his take on volume, as a cropped jacket in a stiff white cotton with a loose back and as slivers of tops with peplums easing over cigarette pants. Long dresses, taut through the body and exploding in a gauzy cloud at the ankles, pulled off the same mean trick.

Net beach bags, citrus hues, a jangle of gold jewelry — Michael Kors must be in Capri! Good, solid sportswear came down his runway yesterday (remember sportswear?) as models breezed out in striped knits, caftans and miniskirts, including one laced up Jacquetta Wheeler's long legs.

Although Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler were right to present a more relaxed attitude than last season, taking their cues and colors from the 1920's, their show yesterday didn't quite gel. There were some great pieces: gauze skirts worn with bodysuits, cotton velvet shorts (based on boys' bathing trunks) and some witty takes on sailing slickers. But in the main it was separates in search of a collection.

Le Bateau des Reves

JB -- It's a strange house. I can't eat with my hands, I can't lower my head, I can't sit on the floor.

Boatman -- If the birds of the sky eat from the hands of men, they lose their freedom.

JB -- Yes, but the foreigner is so nice. He speaks so nicely. His words are like honey...

"Dream Ship" (Elixo Grenet / Jacques Dallin)
from "Princess Tam Tam" (1935), directed by Edmond Greville (Kino Video)
sung by Josephine Baker

Dreams, the wind rises from afar,
The wave carries us off.
Our eyes lose the beach,
Our heart beats harder.
The sea responds to our efforts
And tomorrow will make us strong.

Dreams, the ocean, what a supreme joy.
The ocean is the surest route of the world,
Leading to adventure. I fling myself.
Your voice sings of hope, and speaks to us of love.

The ocean offers itself to the wave and says,
my beautiful waves that fades and leaps.
The earth tells us that the road of happiness is the ocean.

[the lyrics are so much much more beautiful in the original french. if anyone can help me transcribe and translate better let me know, and i can send you an mp3.]

A Flashy Teenage Trend Capital, and Its Dark Side

A Flashy Teenage Trend Capital, and Its Dark Side
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/international/asia/16TOKY.html

TOKYO, Sept. 15 — Up and down Shibuya's iridescent streets, Japan's teenage girls come and go, on their pilgrimage to their own corner of Tokyo. The heavily made-up Ko-gals, the tanned surfers in their beachwear, the dancers, or those sticking to the now fashionable school uniforms — they represent the panoply of Japan's quickly shifting teenage fashion.

Shibuya, the capital of Japan's teenage girls, is where fashion and consumer trends are born before spreading to the far reaches of the Japanese archipelago and to Taipei, Seoul and Shanghai. In Japan, with the world's second largest economy, the teenage girl is a highly sought-after consumer; the Shibuya girl, who knows each floor of "109," the shopping citadel that dominates a main crossroad here, leads the trend leaders.

So on any given day, marketing agents holding clipboards can be seen interviewing Shibuya girls, hoping to understand their fickle tastes or spot a burgeoning trend. But during what was an unusually cool and rainy summer, more attention was focused on Shibuya's dark side: its hyper-commercialism and the sexualization of teenage girls.

In July, four sixth graders disappeared, apparently kidnapped by a man trying to lure them into prostitution. After one of the girls escaped several days later, the man killed himself before the police arrived. The girls were freed, but the episode led to national hand-wringing.

Indeed, alongside the agents with clipboards, other kinds of agents — known here in Japanized English as "scout" or "catch" — can be seen in broad daylight approaching girls on either side of pubescence.

"Every scout is trying to get a girl into his business," said Kazuhiro Kakuta, a Shibuya regular. "There's the store scout, the restaurant scout, the sex business scout, the entertainment industry scout, the fashion magazine scout."

Mr. Kakuta knows. Better known as "Jimmy," he has stood on Shibuya's main street every day for the last nine years. He shows photos of celebrities from albums tied to his waist with strings. He gives out Band-Aids. He passes out candy.

Though Jimmy, 49, has a paunch and a balding head that he has chosen to shave, and no particular profession, he can usually be seen surrounded by a flock of teenage girls.

On a recent afternoon, the girls gravitated to him, taking candy from the bag he held out.

"I come and see him because he's always here," said Chisato, 16, dressed in her school uniform. She has been coming to see Jimmy since she was 13 and stays in Shibuya every evening until the last train leaves past midnight.

"Her school uniform is rated No. 1 in the country," Jimmy said, correctly, of Chisato's school, in the Shinagawa district.

Sho Kudo, 19, a "catch" who was looking for girls to pose for a new fashion magazine, said with evident admiration: "When I told my father about Jimmy, he was envious. There's no middle-aged man in Tokyo who does what Jimmy does."

Exactly what Jimmy does is not easy to define. He began by picking up garbage around his street corner. Since he became a fixture in Shibuya, he has appeared on television shows and at clubs and has written columns in a sports newspaper, earning enough to support himself. Companies marketing new products have sometimes paid him to pass items to girls: mints, removable tattoos, toys, a can opener for girls with long nails.

Risa Katori and Ayako Katsuki, both 16-year-old students, said they had tested a toothpaste Jimmy had given them.

"Of all age groups, high school students are the most active socially," said Yasuko Nakamura, whose Shibuya-based marketing-consulting firm, Boom Planning, specializes in teenage girls. "Whether at school, home or at their part-time jobs, teenage girls tend to express themselves very forcefully when it comes to products."

Shibuya became known as a mecca for young women in the 1970's, as Japan grew into a rich country and department stores opened up there, said Kazuo Ueyama, a history professor at Kokugakuin University. Back then, the women were college students. As Japan has grown richer, the girls coming to Shibuya have been younger and younger, so that it is now more a place for junior high school girls, or even elementary school girls.

Shibuya has also traditionally been a place where men had liaisons with geisha who worked in expensive restaurants, or with lovers in the area's inns, said Yutaka Sato, a cafe owner whose family has operated businesses here for four generations. That tradition survives in the many so-called love hotels and sex businesses that dot a part of Shibuya, danger zones that the ever younger girls gravitating here must learn to navigate.

"Middle-aged men proposition me every time I come here," said Yuka Himemiya, 19, who had been coming here since her junior high school days. "But that's part of growing up in Shibuya."

"Jimmy? He's the only harmless middle-aged man here."

Shibuya reaches its full power after dark, when the neon lights are turned on to their brightest, and the crowds of men, teenage girls and "catch" intensify their respective endeavors. But Jimmy said he had no interest in Shibuya at night.

"I'm different from other guys who come to Shibuya," Jimmy said. "I don't lay a hand on these girls." He paused, then, smiling enigmatically, said he had waited to approach them until they were older.

"There are plenty of shady characters in Shibuya," he said, "so you have to be careful."

When a Doctor Stumbles on a Family Secret

When a Doctor Stumbles on a Family Secret
By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/health/policy/16CASE.html

A group of health professionals were evaluating potential donors for a kidney transplant recently when they received a surprise. Through routine genetic testing, the group inadvertently learned that one of the adult children was not the child of the man with kidney failure.

The transplant team struggled with the question of what to do with this information. Should the family be told? To whom did the knowledge belong? Was it ethical to use the child's kidney without telling him?

Keeping family secrets used to be a routine part of medicine. But over the past few decades, as patient autonomy and informed consent have come to dominate clinical practice, disclosure has become more commonplace. Every now and then, however, physicians confront complicated family secrets. What they should do about them is far from clear.

Much of the earlier secrecy stemmed from the Hippocratic Oath, the code that stresses doctor-patient confidentiality.

This principle led generations of doctors to keep their mouths shut. For example, psychiatrists preserved the confidences of patients who threatened potentially violent actions against family or friends. Similarly, physicians concealed venereal diseases, even when patients' spouses were at risk of infection.

But in the 1970's and 80's, as American society increasingly questioned the authority of doctors and promoted individual rights, things changed. Thus, in the 1976 Tarasoff case, a court in California ruled that a psychiatrist should have disclosed his patient's homicidal thoughts to the man's girlfriend. The woman, never warned, had been killed by the patient.

And as AIDS spread, states passed laws to require notification of partners, something previously recommended only for venereal diseases. Doctor-patient confidentiality was no longer absolute if others were at risk.

But as the case of the kidney transplant shows, the boundaries of such disclosures are not always clear. Incidental information obtained about false paternity during transplant screening, warns Dr. Francis L. Delmonico, a professor of surgery at the Harvard, can be "a disaster for a family."

If a test is conducted in connection with a possible transplant, Dr. Delmonico says, a good case can be made for concealment. Indeed, that is what occurred in the recent case: the patient did receive a kidney from his non-biological son.

Linda Wright, an ethicist at the University of Toronto, pointed out the potential advantages of such secrecy in the journal Seminars in Dialysis, noting that disclosure could stigmatize the child, direct anger at the mother or compel the child to withdraw as a kidney donor.

Yet when a transplant team in Toronto recently confronted its own case of false paternity, it chose to disclose the information — gradually and carefully — to the potential donor and her family. Ms. Wright listed several justifications for doing that: the duty to be truthful, respect for autonomy, the medical value of telling children their true genetic heritage and the risk of future disclosure.

In this case, things worked out. Ms. Wright reported that although family members at first responded with "shock and distress," there was resolution. The patient's daughter was especially grateful, announcing that she would have hated the medical personnel had she found out the facts later.

An interesting parallel to that situation occurs with assisted reproduction. Since the first test-tube baby was born, in 1978, physicians have helped produce hundreds of thousands of babies. Among the strategies employed are using surrogates, women who carry and bear the child for the future mother, and surrogate eggs, which are implanted in the mother.

One might expect that children born with the help of such technologies would eventually be told of their parentage. After all, it has become entirely routine for parents of adopted children to divulge similar information. In addition, as Dr. Richard J. Paulson, a fertility specialist at the University of Southern California, says, the increasing ability of people to obtain their genetic information raises the very real possibility of future surprise disclosures.

Yet in the case of surrogacy, Dr. Marcelle I. Cedars, a reproductive endocrinologist at the University of California at San Francisco, notes that children may never be told. Although women requesting egg donations meet with psychologists, they are given options, but not advised to disclose. Thus, when a younger sister donates an egg, her niece may never learn that she carries one-half of her aunt's genetic material.

The situation is different from adoption, in which there is often no biological connection or physical resemblance between parents and child. In egg donations, children may share some genetic material with one or both parents and are therefore less likely to perceive differences. Even if a donor is used, mothers often carry the fetus and deliver the child.

Moreover, there is a long history of anonymous sperm donation. In those cases, some children never learn details about their biological fathers.

How should physicians and other health professionals respond to family secrets?

There are some practical strategies. In kidney transplants, for example, routine testing in the recent case of the father and child for the gene group, called human leukocyte antigen, may not be necessary. Not ordering potentially troublesome tests can therefore help ease some of the problems.

What about the larger questions raised by concealment? Dr. Nancy K. Newman, a family physician at the University of Minnesota, worries about the perpetuation of "toxic secrets" that "involve the erosion of trust in relationships within the family or between family members and others."

Dr. Newman said she did not believe that doctors should disclose all secrets.

"In the case of the kidney transplant," she said, "I'm not sure if the doctors' knowledge of the secret makes it any more toxic."

But she worries about knee-jerk or reflexive decisions to keep quiet. Family secrets, she argues, are an opportunity for physicians to encourage better communication among patients and their relatives.

Republicans for Dean

Republicans for Dean
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/opinion/16BROO.html

The results of the highly prestigious Poll of the Pollsters are in! I called eight of the best G.O.P. pollsters and strategists and asked them, on a not-for-attribution basis, if they thought Howard Dean would be easier to beat than the other major Democratic presidential candidates. Here, and I'm paraphrasing, are the results:

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

You would have thought I had asked them if Danny DeVito would be easier to beat in a one-on-one basketball game than Shaquille O'Neal. They all thought Dean would be easier to beat, notwithstanding his impressive rise. Some feared John Kerry, others John Edwards, because his personality wears well over time, and others even Bob Graham, because he can carry Florida, more than Dean. As their colleague Bill McInturff put it atop a memo on the Dean surge: "Happy Days Are Here Again (for Republicans)."

I think the pollsters are probably right, but I'd feel a lot more confident if I could find somebody who really understood the forces that are reshaping the American electorate.

Over the past few decades, the electorate has become much better educated. In 1960, only 22 percent of voters had been to college; now more than 52 percent have. As voters become more educated, they are more likely to be ideological and support the party that embraces their ideological label. As a result, the parties have polarized. There used to be many conservatives in the Democratic Party and many liberals in the Republican Party, groups that kept their parties from drifting too far off-center.

Now, there is a Democratic liberal mountain and a Republican conservative mountain. Democrats and Republicans don't just disagree on policies — they don't see the same reality, and they rarely cross over and support individual candidates from the other side. As Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has shown, split-ticket voting has declined steadily.

The question is whether this evolution changes the way we should think about elections. The strategists in the Intensity School say yes. They argue that it no longer makes sense to worry overmuch about the swing voters who supposedly exist in the political center because the electorate's polarization has hollowed out the center. The number of actual swing voters — people who actually switch back and forth between parties — is down to about 7 percent of the electorate. Moreover, the people in this 7 percent group have nothing in common with one another. It doesn't make sense to try to win their support because there is no coherent set of messages that will do it.

Instead, it's better to play to the people on your own mountain and get them so excited they show up at the polls. According to this line of reasoning, Dean, Mr. Intensity, is an ideal Democratic candidate.

The members of the Inclusiveness School disagree. They argue that there still are many truly independent voters, with estimates ranging from 10 to 33 percent of the electorate. Moreover, the Inclusiveness folks continue, true independents do have a coherent approach to politics. Anti-ideological, the true independents do not even listen to candidates who are partisan, strident and negative. They are what the pollster David Winston calls "solutionists"; they respond to upbeat candidates who can deliver concrete benefits: the Family and Medical Leave Act, more cops in their neighborhoods, tax rebate checks.

By this line of thinking, Dean is a terrible candidate. His partisan style drives off the persuadable folks who rarely bother to vote in primaries but who do show up once every four years for general elections.

The weight of the data, it seems to me, supports the Inclusiveness side. And the chief result of polarization is that the Democrats have become detached from antipolitical independent voters. George Bush makes many liberal Democrats froth at the mouth, but he does not have this effect on most independents. Democrats are behaving suicidally by not embracing what you might, even after yesterday's court decision, call the Schwarzenegger Option: supporting a candidate so ideologically amorphous that he can appeal to these swingers.

Which is why so many Republicans are quietly gleeful over Dean's continued momentum. It is only the dark cloud of Wesley Clark, looming on the horizon, that keeps their happiness from being complete.

Democrats Go Off the Cliff

Democrats Go Off the Cliff
From the June 30, 2003 issue: Powerlessness corrupts.
by David Brooks
06/30/2003, Volume 008, Issue 41
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

ACROSS THE COUNTRY Republicans and conservatives are asking each other the same basic question: Has the other side gone crazy? Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids? Because every day some Democrat seems to make a manic or totally over-the-top statement about George Bush, the Republican party, and the state of the nation today.

"This republic is at its greatest danger in its history because of this administration," says Democratic senator Robert Byrd.

"I think this is deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America," says liberal commentator Bill Moyers.

George Bush's economic policy is the "most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism," says Senator John Edwards.

"The Most Dangerous President Ever" is the title of an essay in the American Prospect by Harold Meyerson, in which it is argued that the president Bush most closely resembles is Jefferson Davis.

Tom Daschle condemns the "dictatorial approach" of this administration. John Kerry says Bush "deliberately misled" America into the Iraq war. Asked what Democrats can do about the Republicans, Janet Reno recalls her visit to the Dachau concentration camp, and points out that the Holocaust happened because many Germans just stood by. "And don't you just stand by," she exhorts her Democratic audience.

When conservatives look at the newspapers, they see liberal columnists who pick out every tiny piece of evidence or pseudo-evidence of Republican vileness, and then dwell on it and obsess over it until they have lost all perspective and succumbed to fevers of incoherent rage. They see Democratic primary voters who are so filled with hatred at George Bush and John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney that they are pulling their party far from the mainstream of American life. They see candidates who, instead of trying to quell the self-destructive fury, are playing to it. "I am furious at [Bush] and I am furious at the Republicans," says Dick Gephardt, trying to sound like John Kerry who is trying to sound like Howard Dean.

It's mystifying. Fury rarely wins elections. Rage rarely appeals to suburban moderates. And there is a mountain of evidence that the Democrats are now racing away from swing voters, who do not hate George Bush, and who, despite their qualms about the economy and certain policies, do not feel that the republic is being raped by vile and illegitimate marauders. The Democrats, indeed, look like they're turning into a domestic version of the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering.

WHEN YOU TALK to Democratic strategists, you find they do have rationalizations for the current aggressive thrust. In 2003, it's necessary to soften Bush up with harsh attacks, some say. In 2004, we'll put on a happier face. Others argue that Democrats tried to appeal to moderate voters in 2002 and it didn't work. The key to victory in 2004 is riling up the liberal base. Still others say that with all the advantages Bush has--incumbency, victory in Iraq, the huge fundraising lead--Democrats simply have to roll the dice and behave radically.

But all of these explanations have a post-facto ring. Democratic strategists are trying to put a rational gloss on what is a visceral, unplanned, and emotional state of mind. Democrats may or may not be behaving intelligently, but they are behaving sincerely. Their statements are not the product of some Dick Morris-style strategic plan. This stuff wasn't focus-grouped. The Democrats are letting their inner selves out for a romp.

And if you probe into the Democratic mind at the current moment, you sense that the rage, the passion, the fighting spirit are all fueled not only by opposition to Bush policies, but also by powerlessness.

Republicans have controlled the White House before, but up until now Democrats still had some alternative power center. Reagan had the presidency, but Democrats had the House and, part of the time, the Senate. Bush the elder faced a Democratic Congress. But now Democrats have nothing. Even the Supreme Court helped Republicans steal the last election, many Democrats feel. Republicans--to borrow political scientist Samuel Lubell's trope--have become the Sun party and Democrats have been reduced to being the Moon party. Many Democrats feel that George Bush is just running loose, transforming the national landscape and ruining the nation, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.

Wherever Democrats look, they sense their powerlessness. Even when they look to the media, they feel that conservatives have the upper hand. Conservatives think this is ludicrous. We may have Rush and Fox, conservatives say, but you have ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times. But liberals are sincere. They despair that a consortium of conservative think tanks, talk radio hosts, and Fox News--Hillary's vast right-wing conspiracy--has cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out.

When they look to the culture at large, many Democrats feel that the climate is so hostile to them they can't even speak up. During the war in Iraq, liberals claimed that millions of Americans were opposed to war, but were afraid to voice their opinions, lest the Cossacks come charging through their door. The actor Tim Robbins declared, "Every day, the airwaves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And the public, like so many relatives and friends that I saw this weekend, sit in mute opposition and fear." Again, conservatives regard this as ludicrous. Stand up and oppose the war, conservatives observe, and you'll probably win an Oscar, a National Magazine Award, and tenure at four dozen prestigious universities. But the liberals who made these complaints were sincerely expressing the way they perceive the world.

And when they look at Washington, they see a cohesive corporate juggernaut, effortlessly pushing its agenda and rolling over Democratic opposition. Again, this is not how Republicans perceive reality. Republicans admire President Bush a great deal, but most feel that, at least on domestic policy, the conservative agenda has been thwarted as much as it has been advanced. Bush passed two tax cuts, but on education he abandoned school choice and adopted a bill largely written by Ted Kennedy. On Medicare, the administration has abandoned real reform and embraced a bill also endorsed by Kennedy. On campaign finance, the president signed a bill promoted by his opponents. The faith-based initiatives are shrinking to near nothingness. Social Security reform has disappeared from the agenda for the time being. Domestic spending has increased.

Still, Democrats and liberals see the Bush presidency in maximalist terms. "President Bush's signature on his big tax cut bill Wednesday marked a watershed in American politics," wrote E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post. "The rules of policymaking that have applied since the end of World War II are now irrelevant." The headline on a recent Michael Kinsley column was "Capitalism's 'Deal' Falls Apart," arguing that the Bush administration had revoked the social contract that had up to now shaped American politics.

In short, when many liberals look at national affairs, they see a world in which their leaders are nice, pure-souled, but defenseless, and they see Republicans who are organized, devious, and relentless. "It's probably a weakness that we're not real haters. We don't have a sense that it's a holy crusade," Democratic strategist Bob Shrum told Adam Clymer of the New York Times. "They play hardball, we play softball," Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile added. Once again, Republicans think this picture of reality is delusional. The Democrats are the party that for 40 years has labeled its opponents racists, fascists, religious nuts, and monsters who wanted to starve grannies and orphans. Republicans saw what Democrats did to Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and dozens of others. Yet Democrats are utterly sincere. Many on the left think they have been losing because their souls are too elevated.

When they look inward, impotence, weakness, high-mindedness, and geniality are all they see.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Robert Kagan published a book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. Kagan argued that Americans and Europeans no longer share a common view of the world. Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus. The essential reason Americans and Europeans perceive reality differently, he argued, is that there is a power gap. Americans are much more powerful than Europeans, and Europeans are acutely aware of their powerlessness.

Something similar seems to be happening domestically between Republicans and Democrats. It's not just that members of the two parties disagree. It's that the disagreements have recently grown so deep that liberals and conservatives don't seem to perceive the same reality. Whether it is across the ocean or across the aisle, powerlessness corrupts just as certainly as power does. Those on top become overly self-assured, emotionally calloused, dishonest with themselves, and complacent. Those on the bottom become vicious. Sensing that their dignity is perpetually insulted, they begin to see their plight in lurid terms. They exaggerate the power of their foes. They invent malevolent conspiracy theories to explain their unfortunate position. They develop a gloomy and panicked view of the world.

Republicans are suffering from many of the maladies that afflict the powerful, but they have not been driven into their own emotional ghetto because in their hearts Republicans don't feel that powerful. Democrats, on the other hand, do feel powerless. And that is why so many Democratic statements about Republicans resemble European and Middle Eastern statements about America.

First, there is the lurid and emotional tone. You wouldn't know it listening to much liberal conversation, but we are still living in a country that is evenly divided politically; the normal rules still apply; our politics is still a contest between two competing but essentially valid worldviews; power tends to alternate between the two parties, as one or the other screws up or grows stale.

But if you listened to liberal rhetoric, you would think America was convulsed in a Manichean struggle of good against evil. Here, for example, is the liberal playwright Tony Kushner addressing the graduating seniors at Columbia College in Chicago. This passage is not too far off from the rhetoric one can find in liberal circles every day:

And this is what I think you have gotten your education for. You have presumably made a study of how important it is for people--the people and not the oil plutocrats, the people and not the fantasists in right-wing think tanks, the people and not the virulent lockstep gasbags of Sunday morning talk shows and editorial pages and all-Nazi all-the-time radio ranting marathons, the thinking people and not the crazy people, the rich and multivarious multicultural people and not the pale pale grayish-white cranky grim greedy people, the secular pluralist people and not the theocrats, the misogynists, Muslim and Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, the hard-working people and not the people whose only real exertion ever in their whole parasite lives has been the effort it takes to slash a trillion plus dollars in tax revenue and then stuff it in their already overfull pockets.

Second, there is the frequent and relentless resort to conspiracy theories. If you judged by newspapers and magazines this spring, you could conclude that a secret cabal of Straussians, Jews, and neoconservatives (or perhaps just Richard Perle alone) had deviously seized control of the United States and were now planning bloody wars of conquest around the globe.

Third, there is the hypercharged tendency to believe the absolute worst about one's political opponents. In normal political debate, partisans routinely accuse each other of destroying the country through their misguided policies. But in the current liberal rhetoric it has become normal to raise the possibility that Republicans are deliberately destroying the country. "It's tempting to suggest that the Bush administration is failing to provide Iraq with functioning, efficient, reliable public services because it doesn't believe in functioning, reliable public services--doesn't believe they should exist, and doesn't believe that they can exist," writes Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker. "The suspicion will not die that the administration turned to Iraq for relief from a sharp decline in its domestic political prospects," argue the editors of the American Prospect. In Harper's Thomas Frank calls the Bush budget "a blueprint for sabotage." He continues: "It seems equally likely that this budget document, in both its juvenile rhetorical tricks and its idiotic plans for the nation, is merely supposed to teach us a lesson in how badly government can misbehave."

In this version of reality, Republicans are deviously effective. They have careful if evil plans for everything they do. And these sorts of charges have become so common we're inured to their horrendousness--that Bush sent thousands of people to their deaths so he could reap government contracts for Halliburton, that he mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and spent tens of billions of dollars merely to help secure favorable oil deals for Exxon.

Sometimes reading through this literature one gets the impression that while the United States is merely attempting to export Western style democracy to the Middle East, the people in the Middle East have successfully exported Middle Eastern-style conspiracy mongering to the United States.

NOW IT IS TRUE that you can find conservatives and Republicans who went berserk during the Clinton years, accusing the Clintons of multiple murders and obsessing over how Vince Foster's body may or may not have been moved. And it is true that Michael Savage and Ann Coulter are still out there accusing the liberals of treason. The Republicans had their own little bout of self-destructive, self-pitying powerlessness in the late 1990s, and were only rescued from it when George W. Bush emerged from Texas radiating equanimity.

But the Democratic mood is more pervasive, and potentially more self-destructive. Because in the post-9/11 era, moderate and independent voters do not see reality the way the Democrats do. Bush's approval ratings are at about 65 percent, and they have been far higher; most people do not see him as a malevolent force, or the figurehead atop a conspiracy of corporate moguls. Up to 80 percent of Americans supported the war in Iraq, and large majorities still approve of the effort, notwithstanding the absence so far of WMD stockpiles. They do not see that war as a secret neoconservative effort to expand American empire, or as a devious attempt to garner oil contracts.

Democrats can continue to circulate real or artificial tales of Republican outrages, they can continue to dwell on their sour prognostications of doom, but there is little evidence that anxious voters are in the mood to hate, or that they are in the mood for a political civil war, or that they will respond favorably to whatever party spits the most venom. There is little evidence that moderate voters share the sense of powerlessness many Democrats feel, or that they buy the narrative of the past two and a half years that many Democrats take as the landscape of reality.

And the problem for Democrats, more than for Republicans, is that they come from insular parts of the country. In university towns, in New York, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and even in some Democratic precincts in Washington, D.C., there is little daily contact with conservatives or even with detached moderates. (In the Republican suburban strongholds, by contrast, there is daily contact with moderate voters, who almost never think about politics except just before Election Day.) So the liberal tales of Republican malevolence circulate and grow, are seized upon and believed. Contrary evidence is ignored. And the tone grows more and more fevered.

Perhaps the Democrats will regain their equanimity. Perhaps some eventual nominee will restore a temperate tone. The likeliest candidates--Kerry, Gephardt, Edwards, and Lieberman--are, after all, sensible men and professionally competent. But if the current Democratic tone remains unchanged, we could be on the verge of another sharp political shift toward the Republicans.

In 1976, 40 percent of Americans were registered Democrats and fewer than 20 percent were registered Republicans. During the Reagan era, those numbers moved, so that by 1989, 35 percent of Americans were registered Democrats and 30 percent were registered Republicans. During the Bush and Clinton years Democratic registration was basically flat and Republican registration dipped slightly to about 27 percent.

But over the past two years, Democratic registration has dropped to about 32 percent and Republican registration has risen back up to about 30 percent. These could be temporary gyrations. But it's also possible that we're on the verge of a historic moment, when Republican registration surpasses Democratic registration for the first time in the modern era.

For that to happen, the economy would probably have to rebound, the war on terror would have to continue without any major disasters, and the Republicans would have to have some further domestic legislative success, such as prescription drug benefits, to bring to the American voters. And most important, Democrats would have to remain as they are--unhappy, tone deaf, and over the top.

David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

A Kinder Gentler Overclass

A Kinder Gentler Overclass
A conversation with David Brooks, the author of Bobos in Paradise
June 15, 2000
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-06-15.htm

With Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks has introduced a new word -- "Bobo" -- into the lexicon, where it seems destined to take its place alongside such classic monikers as "yuppie," "hippie," and "WASP." The book argues that the bohemian spirit of the sixties has merged with the acquisitive impulses of the eighties to yield, in the nineties, a hybrid bourgeois-bohemian (or "Bobo") spirit of the age.

In the fifties and sixties, Brooks explains, the Protestant establishment fell victim to a new meritocratic ethos which, thanks to the educational-testing movement, began conferring status according to educational achievement rather than inherited wealth and breeding. Although many of the bright Baby Boomers who gained access to top schools initially scorned wealth, these well-educated idealists often became rich in spite of themselves, as the information economy began lavishly rewarding their knowledge and education. In the nineties, these newly well-off antimaterialists found ways to reconcile their unexpected wealth with their high-minded ideals. The result, Brooks writes, is a new upper class whose "grand achievement" has been the creation of "a way of living that lets you be an affluent success and at the same time a free-spirit rebel."

Bobos lavish their money not on luxuries, but on necessities like kitchens and bathrooms, splurging on Corian countertops, slate shower stalls, and stainless steel refrigerators. The most popular Bobo leisure-time pursuits are strenuous or edifying (like hiking or ecotourism) rather than hedonistic. And Bobo job offers (even in the business world) claim to hold out potential for personal growth and self-discovery. Brooks dissects this new Bobo lifestyle with perceptive humor:

"To calculate a person's status, you take his net worth and multiply it by his antimaterialistic attitudes. A zero in either column means no prestige, but high numbers in both rocket you to the top of the heap. Thus, to be treated well in this world, not only do you have to show some income results; you have to perform a series of feints to show how little your worldly success means to you.... You will devote your conversational time to mocking your own success in a manner that simultaneously displays your accomplishments and your ironic distance from them. You will ceaselessly bash yuppies in order to show that you yourself have not become one. You will talk about your nanny as if she were your close personal friend, as if it were just a weird triviality that you happen to live in a $900,000 Santa Monica house and she takes the bus two hours each day to the barrio."

While it is doubtful that many readers will see themselves in every aspect of Boboism as described by Brooks, few will make their way through the book without numerous flashes of self-recognition.

Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and a commentator on NPR and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He recently spoke with Atlantic Unbound's Sage Stossel.

David Brooks

Bobos in Paradise shrewdly describes the peculiarities of American elites of the 1990s, just as Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class addressed the elites of the 1890s. And your playfully descriptive approach to your subject (which you call "comic sociology") is reminiscent of Paul Fussell's insightful and humorous depiction of American class distinctions in his book Class (1983). Did these, or any other works, inform choices you made in writing Bobos in Paradise?

I read both books, and I actually mentioned both of them in my proposal. But neither of them were quite like my book. Fussell's is too nasty for my taste. He's sort of acerbic about every class except for his own -- the university class -- which he called the "X Class."

As for Veblen's book, critics have taken it as satirical, but he said he meant it as a serious work of sociology. I think it's a great book and something I learned a lot from. But I didn't aspire to go quite as deep as he did.

No books are exactly like mine -- most sociologists don't try to tell jokes, and most comedy writers don't have pretensions the way I do. But there are a bunch of books from the late fifties and early sixties, like The Establishment, by Digby Baltzell, and The Status Seekers, by Vance Packard, that are more in the vein of what I was trying.

What I admire about writers from that time is that they weren't overly specialized: you felt free to theorize and put out your ideas about everything. Now the careerism of academia has taken over, and the etiquette is that one has to stick to one's own little furrow.

If you had to pick a male and a female Bobo posterchild for 2000, who would they be?

On the male side, I think you'd have to choose Bill Gates, who dresses like a grad student but turns out to be this ruthless businessman.

And for a woman, I think you can't do better than Hillary Clinton, because she marched in the sixties and traded currencies in the eighties, and she has a full stock of countercultural, progressive attitudes mixed with down-home ambition.

You mention that you first took notice of Bobo ascendance upon returning from a four-year stint in Europe. Is there something distinctly American about Boboism, or are European elites showing signs of Boboism as well?

I thought it was American when I wrote the book, but since then I've had calls and seen newspaper stories from all around the world saying, "It's just the same way here!" I've heard that from Japan and Sweden, and there have been about ten stories in the British press, and big stories in Brazil and Argentina. In the Parisian context they say there's a merging of the Left Bank and the Right Bank.

I always thought our business class was much more anti-intellectual than the others, so I thought the merger of commerce and art would be more striking here. But people abroad tell me they see the same sorts of patterns everywhere.

You point out that "Norman Podhoretz was practically burned alive for admitting in his 1967 memoir, Making It, that he, like other writers, was driven by ambition." Have you been criticized for writing so frankly about the jockeying for status that goes on in Bobo culture?

It's funny. I haven't received too many bitter attacks from anybody. Maybe from a few people who hate the Bobos and think I'm not tough enough, but from the Bobos themselves I've received two basic responses. One was typified by a woman who's got one of these massive kitchens and a beautiful McMansion. She called me and said, "This is so great that you're writing about these people. It's too bad we can't live that way!" And I felt like saying, "You are! You are, like, the epitome!" So there's the self-denial. But the more prevalent response is people who say they read it with some measure of pained embarrassment.

So do people invite you over and then not know whether to give you fava beans or Kool-Aid?

I get a lot people saying "My house is off the record" when I go over there. But my own house is so pathetic that I have no grounds on which to judge others.

Nicholas Lemann has written (in a 1996 Atlantic article), "Clearly a group of Americans exists that is affluent, highly educated, professional, and liberal. But the extent to which this group and 'the elite,' defined economically, are the same has been wildly exaggerated by people who have spent their lives in the liberal-professional subgroup. Most books about the elite make it sound like a clonally enlarged version of the population of the rarefied enclaves where the authors live: Manhattan, Cambridge, Palo Alto, and Washington, D.C., west of Rock Creek Park." Do you think that your perception of the educated elites has been magnified by living in Washington? How evenly is Bobo culture distributed?

Saying that it only prevails in places like Cambridge, Palo Alto, New York, and Washington strikes me as like saying, "You know, the Roman Empire wasn't powerful -- it only prevailed in Europe and the Middle East." I mean, Cambridge, Washington, Palo Alto, and New York are pretty important parts of the country -- the trend-setting parts of the country. So, no, it's not everywhere, but it's certainly prevalent.

And the other thing is that it's very hard to point to places that are Bobo-free. If you want to get away from it, maybe you could go to a stock-car race. But even there they probably serve wine or something. The cultural influence is so strong that it trickles down. In discount malls they now have chi-chi nature stores at cut-rate prices, and K-Mart and Target are now turning themselves into boutique-type places with knock-off Crate & Barrel stuff. So really, you have to go to the South Pole if you want to escape it.

You commend the intellectual culture of today for engaging with the mainstream rather than renouncing it in favor of lofty abstractions, as intellectuals did in the 1950s. What do you make of the contention (by such authors as Michael Janeway, in Republic of Denial, or James Fallows in Breaking the News) that, in this age of celebrity punditry, journalism is straying from serious consideration of the issues into mere grasping after money and celebrity?

Well there are some idiots who know nothing who go on MSNBC or Fox or CNN and mouth off. We all know who they are. And they tend not to write books. Or at least not books that anybody pays attention to.

But there are others who are more substantive. Jim Fallows worked in the White House, edited U.S. News -- a mass magazine -- and works for more highbrow magazines as well like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Somebody like him (or Nick Lemann or Henry Louis Gates Jr. or Doris Kearns Goodwin) is much more engaged in the marketplace and in political life than, say, Edmund Wilson was. Maybe those figures don't have the literary-critical monumentality of Edmund Wilson, but it seems to me that the life they're leading is exactly the sort of life that public intellectuals should lead.

You write that one of the defining aspects of Boboism is a noncommital attitude toward religion. If, as you say, Boboism holds a hegemonic position in American culture, does this mean that the Christian Right is less culturally and politically influential than is often imagined?

I think that was demonstrably true this year in the presidential primary campaign. Evangelical Christians have become more affluent and better-educated. Affluence has worked its magic on them; they've become softer and more forgiving. There's just less of a mood of anger and a feeling that all of society is going to hell. So the style of religious politics they go in for is not the angry Jerry Fallwell style, but the soft, lovey-dovey George W. Bush style.

You talk a lot about how the many different forms of bohemianism were essentially revolts against the bourgeois status quo. Do you think there is likely to be a revolt against Boboism? If so, what might it look like?

When I wrote the book proposal and sent it around to publishers, my last chapter was about the coming backlash. It made sense to me, because there's talk of widening income gaps, and there are certainly widening social gaps -- between the people who shop at a Restoration Hardware, for example, and the people who wouldn't get all the verbal references at a store like that, all those sly references to F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and such. But as I went around the country, I didn't find much social resentment.

Actually, I saw a woman get arrested at a Restoration Hardware in Palo Alto for yelling at some of the rich customers. She was yelling "You rich bitch!" and things like that. I thought, Here's real social resentment -- here comes the revolution! But other than that incident I really didn't find much. What I did find was a society that doesn't resent the elites -- that doesn't have a clear sense that some people are better than others. Everybody seems to belong to their own little clique. There's no sense of inferiority. And therefore no sense of resentment.

So does that mean that Boboism is here to stay?

I don't see anything toppling it. I don't see any mass populist revolt against it. What I do see is an elite that's very good at co-opting things. Marx said the most dangerous elites were the ones who could absorb the talented members of the oppressed classes. And thanks to admissions committees and outreach programs and things like that, Bobos are very good at absorbing talented people into their ranks. So I really see this group lasting and lasting and lasting.

So it's kind of like "The End of History" (as Francis Fukuyama would have it) for our culture?

Yes, this is the subtext of my whole book -- the question of whether or not we've reached the end of history and it's all going to end in this tepid, boring, big kitchen. This is something I've been debating with friends -- whether Bobos can ever rouse themselves to do something heroic and lead more inspiring lives. Without much evidence, I hold the hope that they can.

Are you hoping for some kind of mass activism?

Well, in my fantasy world they'd get re-energized by patriotic national service of some sort or another. But having said that, I don't have any specific idea about what they should do with all this great fervor. There was a pioneer ideal for a long time in American history, a sense that America had a unique mission in the world, and that people made tremendous sacrifices for it. Now that sort of spiritedness has faded away.

Joel Rogers and Ruy Teixeira argue in America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters that politicians could profit from courting the 55 percent of the American electorate who "bear little resemblance to ... the suburban college-educated professionals we hear so much about." A recent New York Times article pointed out that labor has been regaining political power recently. Do you think that the working class is starting to have a resurgent influence?

Not a rising one. One reason is that despite the emergence of a more energetic union leadership, it still is true that union membership is going down and down and down. What's left is mainly government workers. And they don't have the same fervor or working-class roots as people who work in manufacturing. Also, the sociologist Alan Wolfe tells me there's not a whole hell of a lot of difference between the lower-middle class and the Bobos on the matter of politics. They're both basically centrist. And even though the Bobos may impose certain values that they hold dear -- for example, that smoking is worse than five of the Ten Commandments -- the lower middle classes, who actually smoke more, don't seem to work up arguments to defend themselves. They just sort of accept the judgment of polite society that smoking is evil. It's the same thing with the issue of guns. So I don't see any rise of the proletariat.

You write that the old order, in which only hereditary aristocrats could attain positions of great power, "drove ambitious climbers -- like LBJ and Richard Nixon -- nearly crazy with resentment." Now that we're living in the Bobo era of meritocracy, will we see the same kind of frustrated, warped political scheming on the part of well-bred WASPs with low SAT scores?

I wish. I went around looking for well-bred WASPs who would defend WASPdom, but they've internalized their own oppression and they don't. I mean, you could make a case that the world of John McCloy and Dean Acheson was a better world than we have now. I half considered making the case. But as a Jewish kid from New York it's not really my place to defend the people who would keep people like me out.

I noticed that the old WASP club chairs -- the big leather chairs -- are now sold by Restoration Hardware and Crate & Barrel as just another archaic remnant of a charming dead culture.

What role do you think the ubiquity of chain stores like Pottery Barn, The Gap, and Restoration Hardware, to the exclusion of most others, plays in creating the semblance of uniform tastes? Are the buyers Bobo or are they merely victims of Bobo designers?

One thing we're not hurting for is options. I think it's stronger to make the other charge, that we have too many options -- especially with the Internet making it much easier to sample retailers and other things throughout the world.

Families used to have one toothpaste and now they have five because each member of the family likes a different brand. And big companies have found ingenious ways of segmenting themselves to meet diverse tastes. So I don't see us all marching in lockstep to get our identical dishware from Crate & Barrel.

You close the book by saying that if Bobos "raise their sights and ask the biggest questions, they have the ability to go down in history as the class that led America to another golden age." What do you think could coax Bobos' attention away from their slate shower stalls and their twenty-grain bread and into an examination of the "big questions"? Is there a politician who you think could unleash the Bobo potential to make significant contributions to the civic good?

I thought John McCain could. That was explicitly his appeal -- that we have to think of something larger than our self-interest. He's not a Bobo, actually. He has some Bobo traits, but the best parts of him are representative of an old warrior ethic -- an aristocratic ethic believing in sacrifice and honor and glory and all sorts of old-fashioned ideas like that. The fact that people responded to him as much as they did makes me think that it's a time of hunger for something more.

The most important thing happening in the world today is genetic engineering, which is about to take off. I think that will force us to confront some fundamental subjects. It could be that we'll just decide that whatever's going to avert disease is worth it. Or maybe we'll decide that there's something wrong with engineering human beings. Those are the fundamental sorts of questions that science, if it keeps moving, will force us to confront. We'll have to think about eternal things -- whether God made us and whether we can play God.

You are a politically conservative writer and a senior editor at a conservative publication, yet Bobos in Paradise is not an overtly conservative book. In what ways (if at all) do your political views manifest themselves in the book?

The only way I think my political views may have influenced the book is that, being conservative, I accept that all societies are unequal. Seeing inequality -- seeing an elite -- doesn't drive me crazy. Being a conservative makes me a little more dispassionate in contemplating the upper classes. I'm not hotheaded, and I'm not resentful about the fact that some people have more money or more education than others.

Tom Wolfe, another trenchant observer of the American scene, eventually turned to writing novels. Have you considered someday turning to fiction?

Well, I've thought about it, and I hope to do it someday when I'm old. But basically, what I decided at a reasonably early age is that fifty years ago novels may have set off big debates about what we're like and how we live, but today novels don't do that. Novel-writing has become a little sect of people who go to creative-writing seminars and Iowa workshops, and somehow it doesn't seem to have as big or as furious an interaction with the rest of the world. What I'm trying to do in the book is exactly what novelists used to do, which is describe how we live now.

European Holiday

European Holiday
Europeans wonder why Americans have it so good. The answer: We work hard for it while they take vacations.
by Irwin M. Stelzer
09/16/2003 12:00:00 AM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

ENVY IS A TERRIBLE THING. Not so much because it makes those whom it afflicts unhappy, or as myth has it, turn green, but because it dulls their analytical skills. At meeting after meeting, in university seminars and in think tanks around the world, envy of America distorts discussions of what accounts for the wealth of nations.

Europeans know that America's standard of living exceeds their own by a very substantial margin. They know this not because they have pored over arcane statistics about output-per-man-hour, or investment in research and development, or other indicia on which economists rely. They know it because they have seen with their own eyes what a modest Holiday Inn at DisneyWorld offers by way of accommodation, service, and food; they know it because they see on television how Americans live, or hear it from relatives living in Florida--or even Detroit; they know it because their policymakers, many of them viscerally and violently anti-American, are always trying to devise programs that will enable their economies to match the performance of America's. When E.U. policymakers are shielded from public view in the safety of a seminar room, they concede that the American economy is the gold standard when it comes to producing the material good things of life.

This knowledge is pervasive. Young Italian men are too poor to set up their own living quarters long after American men have graduated from their starter accommodations. Germans are more frequently out of work, and for longer periods, than even the least lucky Americans. Brits snack on tiny sandwiches taken out of refrigerators that barely house a small bottle of milk and a few daily necessities, while America's housewives shop less frequently because their refrigerators are close to walk-in size. All because American working folks produce more of just about everything in any year than their European counterparts.

Ah, say Europeans, but the availability of material goods is one thing, "happiness" and "the quality of life" are something else, and very different. Start with vacations. Italians get 42 days of paid vacation every year, the French 37, the Germans 35, and the British 28. We Americans, meanwhile, take off only 14 of the 16 days to which we are entitled. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Americans also work a 49-hour-week, which adds up to 350 more hours of labor a year than the typical European worker. Woe unto the frazzled Americans.

IF ANYTHING, these figures understate the difference between Americans and Europeans. Take the British. Anyone who has ever tried to do business in Britain in August knows that the month should be counted as vacation time. Even those trying to work find so many of their colleagues on holiday that they might as well stay home or leave town themselves. Add to that the period between, say, December 15 and January 10, when many Brits down tools, pens, and copious quantities of beer and champagne, and several bank holidays. Throw in the time off now cascading on the work force from the fevered brains of New Labour policy wonks--maternity and paternity leave, sick days, and, soon Europe Day (May 9, as mandated in Part IV, Article IV-1 of the new constitution), and the official figure of 28 days becomes, at best, a lower limit.

THE 14-DAY "vacation" estimate for Americans, on the other hand, is an overstatement. The ubiquitous Blackberry enables us to read and send emails from the seas and oceans, from beaches, fields, hills, and rooftops; call forwarding routes those who dial an office directly to the cell phone of the lawyer, consultant or engineer who is technically on vacation; and vacation days at posh spas are often scheduled around a company or industry conference.

A good way to sum up Americans' views of vacations is to study the habits of George W. Bush. He retreated to his ranch, where the temperature regularly exceeds 100 degrees, to clear brush. For relief from that vacation activity, he met with his foreign policy team, then with his economic advisers, then traveled to national parks to push his plan to reduce the incidence of forest fires, then on to California for a fund-raising tour. By contrast, Europe's leaders disappeared from view, some to the Caribbean, others to Tuscany, still others to California and Montana. No vacatio interruptus for them.

SO EUROPEANS INSIST that Americans may be more "productive," as economists measure productivity, but only because they work longer hours. In any given hour, they contend, European workers can produce as much or more. The fact that Europe's economies typically produce fewer goods and services for the delectation of their citizens then becomes a matter of choice--the voluntary selection of leisure over work.

Not a bad argument, if correct. After all, perhaps the one thing the French have got right is their famous chacun à son gout. The problem is that although an American worker can often trade off higher income for more leisure time, it is not so easy for Europeans to do the opposite. An Italian worker who would like more income and less vacation time can show up for work in August, but his factory or office will be closed. A British worker who would like to make a few extra pounds by working in the week after Christmas will have a hard time being productive in an empty office or plant. About the only thing a European worker can do to improve the ratio of income-to-leisure is emigrate to America. Which is why millions of Italians, Irish, Germans, and other Europeans have voted with their feet in favor of America's balance between work and leisure, with no discernible flow in the opposite direction.

All of this, of course, makes one wonder just how Europe's policymakers know, as they claim they do, that the less productive lifestyle of their citizens is, indeed, a matter of choice? The answer is simple: they know that Europeans are "happier," in good part because incomes, although lower than in America, are more equally distributed. So the Economist cites a study of Harvard students in which those polled say they would prefer to earn $50,000 a year while others earned half that, than to earn $100,000 annually while others earned twice as much.

Europeans who cite this study in an effort to bring Americans down a peg or two provide a perfect example of the addled thinking resulting from envy. Harvard students are not famously stretched to pay the rent (parents foot dorm bills) or meet family obligations or medical bills; even the neediest receive subsidies from the richest and most generous university in the world. So, to resort to the vernacular, their talk is cheap: until they earn their livings by the sweat of their own brows, they would do well not to tell pollsters that they prefer earning half as much so long as others earn less.

When Europe's policymakers rise above envy and politically correct talk of "happiness," "equality," and "leisure-trumps-income," they express real worry. Not only is the American economy more productive than Europe's, the gap is widening--output per man-hour in the United States continues to rise, as the infrastructure left behind by busted dot.coms becomes more and more efficiently deployed. Worse still for those who want to play catch-up, America's outlays on research and development, a harbinger of future improvements in productivity, continue to outstrip those in the European Union.

The good news for the European Union is that serious European policymakers understand the problem. The bad news for Europe is that they prefer to hide behind talk of the advantages of not working, rather than to implement policies that make work more attractive. Meanwhile, they might give a thought to the Chinese, who seem to view leisure with even greater suspicion than we Americans do.

Irwin M. Stelzer is director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, a columnist for the Sunday Times (London), a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.

Arbus Reconsidered

[retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opening Oct 25th.]

Arbus Reconsidered
By ARTHUR LUBOW
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/magazine/14ARBUS.html

Living a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,'' Norman Mailer said after seeing how she had captured him, leaning back in a velvet armchair with his legs splayed cockily. The quip was funny, but a little off base. A camera for Arbus was like a latchkey. With one around her neck, she could open almost any door. Fearless, tenacious, vulnerable -- the combination conquered resistance.

Soon after Arbus's death, the art director Marvin Israel -- who was her lover, colleague, critic and goad -- told a television journalist: ''It could be argued that for Diane the most valuable thing wasn't the photograph itself, the art object; it was the event, the experience. . . . The photograph is like her trophy -- it's what she received as the reward for this adventure.''

In an eye-opening sequence in ''Revelations,'' the compendious new book that is being published in tandem with a full-scale retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you discover with a start the behind-the-scenes drama that produced her famous photograph of ''A Naked Man Being a Woman.'' As her title indicates, it is a portrait of a young man standing naked in his apartment, genitals tucked out of sight, in a Venus-on-the-half-shell pose. First she photographed him as a bouffant-haired young matron on a park bench; then at home in a bra and half slip; unwigged and unclothed a few moments later, with legs demurely crossed; up posing for the prized shot; and finally, as a seemingly ordinary fellow back on a park bench. Somehow, she had persuaded him to take her home and expose a secret life. It's what she did again and again. ''She got herself to go up to people on the street and ask if she could photograph them,'' recalls her former husband, Allan Arbus. ''One thing she often said was, 'I'm just practicing.''' He chuckles. ''And indeed, I guess she was.''

During her lifetime, Arbus was lionized, but she was also lambasted for being exploitative. Her suicide in 1971 seemed to corroborate the caricature of her as a freaky ghoul. The critic Susan Sontag divined that Arbus photographed ''people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive,'' from a vantage point ''based on distance, on privilege, on a feeling that what the viewer is asked to look at is really other.'' Patricia Bosworth's biography in 1984 took the suicide as an emblem of the life and told a lurid tale that is neatly summarized by the tag line on the paperback edition: ''HER CAMERA WAS THE WINDOW TO A TORTURED SOUL.'' In The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Lieberson eviscerated Bosworth's book but also deprecated Arbus's pictures as ''mannered, static snapshots'' that were ''chaste, icy, stylized.'' Chaste, icy, stylized? Arbus's friend Richard Avedon, maybe. Not Diane Arbus.

Doon Arbus was 26 when Diane died. As the older daughter of a divorced mother, she took on the responsibility of managing the estate. Her response to the critics was to clamp the spigot shut. Arbus's letters, journals and diaries could not be examined. Anyone wishing to reproduce Arbus photographs would have to submit the book or article for Doon's vetting; any museum contemplating a retrospective had to enlist her active collaboration. In almost all cases, permission was denied. Unsurprisingly, critics and scholars fumed. As Anthony W. Lee, the co-author of a new academic treatise, ''Diane Arbus: Family Albums,'' puts it in an acid footnote, ''Those familiar with the writings on Arbus's photographs will recognize a common thread that joins them all, which this essay also shares: nearly all are published without the benefit of reproductions of some of her most famous work.'' That work now appeared in three handsome, meticulous monographs, which over the last three decades Doon has compiled and released.

So it comes as a shock to see -- in the first full-scale museum retrospective since 1972 and in the book -- that Diane Arbus at long last is presented whole. Together with the pictures that have become icons (the Jewish giant and his bewildered parents, the disturbingly different identical twins, the in-process transvestite in hair curlers, etc.), there are many of her photographs that have never been seen (or even, in some cases, printed). Better still, there is a rich assortment of extracts from her letters and journals that reveal her to be a quirky, funny, first-rate writer, an extraordinarily loving mother and an empathetic observer of her photographic subjects. More than 30 years after her death, a new portrait is emerging of one of the most powerful American artists of the 20th century, in the style that she favored. Uncropped.

Allan, who is now a trim and graceful white-haired man of 85, gave Diane her first camera soon after they married in 1941. She was 18, and they had met five years earlier, when he started working at Russek's department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the fur and clothing emporium founded by her grandfather and run by her father, David Nemerov. Diane was the second of three children (her older brother, Howard, became a prize-winning poet). She was named for a character in a play her mother enjoyed; as with her fictional namesake, it was pronounced ''Dee-ann.'' During Diane's childhood, the Nemerovs lived in large apartments on Central Park West and on Park Avenue. ''The family fortune always seemed to me humiliating,'' she told the journalist Studs Terkel. ''It was like being a princess in some loathsome movie'' set in ''some kind of Transylvanian obscure Middle European country.'' The public rooms were filled with reproduction French furniture in slipcovers. In the Nemerovs' home life, as in their ritzy clothing store, everything was for show.

Diane attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the leafy Riverdale section of the Bronx, where the student body was composed largely of the children of affluent, liberal Jews. In art class, her renderings stood apart. ''She would look at a model and draw what none of us saw,'' recalls her classmate, the screenwriter Stewart Stern. Yet she mistrusted her facility with a paintbrush. ''As soon as she finished something, she'd show it and they'd say, 'Oh, Diane, it's marvelous, it's marvelous,''' Allan recounts. Diane told Terkel that praise of that sort ''made me feel shaky.'' Her father enlisted the Russek's fashion illustrator to give her lessons, but Diane lost interest in painting, perhaps because it was easy for her. ''I had a sense that if I were terrific at it, it wasn't worth doing, and I had no real sense of wanting to do it,'' she said.

She felt otherwise about the Graflex, a smaller version of the classic newsman's camera, that she received from Allan. Photography suited her. She had a sharp eye. ''We once visited a cousin of mine,'' Allan recalls. ''He had a large bookcase, which extended -- '' He indicates a span of 8 or 10 feet. ''We sat on a couch opposite the bookcase. Some weeks later, we visited him again, and Diane said, 'Oh, you have a new book.''' The newlyweds would study photographs in galleries, especially Alfred Stieglitz's American Place, and in the Museum of Modern Art. The Park Avenue apartment building in which Diane's parents lived had a darkroom for the use of tenants. The young Arbuses appropriated it.

David Nemerov, who was wondering how his son-in-law intended to earn a living, happily hired the couple to do advertising shoots for Russek's. ''We were living, breathing photography at every moment,'' Allan says. ''This was a way to get paid for it.'' Although he and Diane admired the photojournalism of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the heyday of the pictorial newsmagazine was about to fade before the allure of television, and the excitement -- along with the opportunity -- was in fashion magazines. The Second World War delayed until 1946 the debut of their fashion photography studio, which operated under the joint credit ''Diane & Allan Arbus.'' Diane came up with the ideas; Allan set up the lights and camera, clicked the shutter, developed the film and printed the proofs. The business was a success but unremittingly stressful. ''We never felt satisfied,'' Allan explains. ''There was that awful seesaw. When Diane felt O.K., I would be in the dumps, and when I would be exhilarated, she would be depressed.'' In retrospect, he says he thinks it was a mistake to demand a concept for each shoot rather than simply photograph models in front of white no-seam paper, as Avedon did in Harper's Bazaar to great acclaim. ''I guess we figured if we photographed the way Dick did, it wouldn't come out,'' he says. ''We were afraid to try it. I remember one day Dick just popped into the studio. We were talking back and forth. I said, 'When we started in this, I thought it would be so easy.' He said, 'Isn't it?'''

In 1951, they closed down the studio and escaped to Europe with their 6-year-old daughter, Doon. (Their second child, Amy, would be born three years later.) But the respite lasted only a year. Once back, it was the same grind for four more years until, one night in 1956, Diane quit. ''I can't do it anymore,'' she told Allan unexpectedly one evening. Her voice rose an octave. ''I'm not going to do it anymore.'' Although unprepared, Allan understood. ''At a fashion sitting, I was the one operating the camera,'' he says. ''I was directing the models on what to do. And Diane would have to go in and pin the dress if it wasn't hanging right. It was demeaning to her. It was a repulsive role.'' At first he was terrified of operating without her. ''But it came out all right,'' he says. ''In some ways, it was easier to work, because I didn't have that load of Diane's dissatisfaction to deal with.''

Soon after Arbus's death, the art director Marvin Israel -- who was her lover, colleague, critic and goad -- told a television journalist: ''It could be argued that for Diane the most valuable thing wasn't the photograph itself, the art object; it was the event, the experience. . . . The photograph is like her trophy -- it's what she received as the reward for this adventure.'' Today, when you shuffle through the lifeless photos by imitators in the Arbus idiom, you are reminded of how much time Arbus spent with so many of her subjects and of how fascinated she was by their lives. She invested the energy in them that a painter like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon would devote to repeated portrait sittings; but unlike Freud or Bacon, who chose their intimates as their subjects, Arbus picked strangers and, through her infectious empathy, was able to transform these subjects into intimates. ''She was an emissary from the world of feeling,'' says the photographer Joel Meyerowitz. ''People opened up to her in an emotional way, and they yielded their mystery.'' Without sentimentalizing them or ignoring their failings, she liked and admired her freaks. She first met Eddie Carmel, the Jewish giant, almost a decade before she took her extraordinary photograph of him with his parents. You feel that had she never gotten the picture, Arbus still would have considered the time with Carmel well spent.

Robert Brown, a neighbor and friend who often breakfasted with the Arbuses when they lived on East 72nd, recalls a Sunday morning, probably in 1957, when Allan showed Diane a newspaper item that he knew would interest her: the circus was coming to town. The troupe would be debarking from a train early the next morning and parading to Madison Square Garden. ''Let's go!'' Diane said. Allan was too busy, but Brown, who is an actor, accompanied her to the parade and then drove her to Madison Square Garden. Coming to pick her up three hours later, Brown asked the backstage doorman where she was. ''Oh, the photographer?'' the man answered. ''She never got very far.'' He pointed. She was sitting on the floor with the midgets. ''I don't think she was snapping,'' Brown says. ''She was getting involved.''

Arbus trawled the city, getting deeply involved with the people who caught her eye: the sideshow performers at Hubert's Dime Museum and Flea Circus, the cross-dressers at Club 82, the moonstruck visionaries with handmade helmets and crackpot theories, the magicians and fortunetellers and self-proclaimed prophets. But she also pursued more ''ordinary'' types -- the swimmers at Coney Island, the strollers down Fifth Avenue, the people on benches in Central Park. At first, she was shy about getting too close. Sometimes she would catch her quarry unawares, from a distance, and then crop the image to give a close-up effect. But she wasn't happy doing that. ''We were very against cropping,'' Allan says. She wanted to capture her subjects whole and unaltered, before adding them to her ''butterfly collection.''

Many of her pictures from the 50's are grainy, in the style of Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and other documentary photographers of the time. ''The reduced tonal scale makes it seem like a copy of a copy, like an old record that's faded and a lot of the information is gone,'' says John Szarkowski, curator emeritus of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. ''Which is fine for a certain kind of description, where you know you're not getting everything.'' In the late 50's, however, something mysterious transformed Arbus's work. ''I don't think there is any development,'' Szarkowski says. ''It happened all at once. Basically, it was like St. Paul on the road to Damascus.'' Allan is more specific: ''That was Lisette. Three sessions and Diane was a photographer.''

Diane took her first course with Lisette Model in 1956. Earlier she had studied briefly with Berenice Abbott and Alexey Brodovitch, but Model had a far greater impact on her artistically and personally. ''Model was able to instill in Arbus a self-confidence of approach and engagement that really released her,'' says Peter C. Bunnell, curator emeritus of photography at Princeton University. ''Arbus in her own personality was rather shy. Not what Lisette was, in a European tradition, an independent, aggressive woman.'' Model's great influence on Arbus came through their conversations about the art of photography. ''After three months, her style was there,'' Model told the writer Phillip Lopate. ''First only grainy and two-tone. Then perfection.'' Arbus, shortly before her death, told her own class of students, ''It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it'll be.''

The Arbuses' professional split was followed in 1959 by a personal one. Diane and the girls moved to a converted stable in the West Village. It was a subtle separation. Allan maintained the fashion photography business under the joint credit. He continued to test Diane's new cameras and to have his assistants develop her film. She printed her photos in his darkroom. He managed their joint finances, and he often came for Sunday breakfast. However, despite the persistence of their bond, the separation and eventual divorce forced -- and liberated -- Diane to step out on her own. ''I always felt that it was our separation that made her a photographer,'' Allan says. ''I couldn't have stood for her going to the places she did. She'd go to bars on the Bowery and to people's houses. I would have been horrified.''

Certainly, Diane was traveling far from the white seamless world of fashion photography. Because so many of her subjects lived on the fringes of polite society, her pictures provoked a controversy that has yet to die down. Most people today who are familiar with the name ''Diane Arbus'' would probably identify her as ''the photographer of freaks.'' This stereotype insulates them from the power of the photographs. Portraits of sideshow freaks constitute a small portion of Arbus's output. On the other hand, it is true that she adored them. ''There's a quality of legend about freaks,'' she told a Newsweek reporter. ''Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.'' She said that she would ''much rather be a fan of freaks than of movie stars, because movie stars get bored with their fans, and freaks really love for someone to pay them honest attention.'' But the word ''freak'' is so vague and charged that it can be misleading. Arbus did not photograph people who were disfigured by calamity -- fire, toxic poisoning, war. She was not a photojournalist like W. Eugene Smith. She did not chase after victims. The pacifist Paul Salstrom once traveled with her to a motel that his aunt managed near Los Angeles. After the aunt agreed to be photographed, Salstrom inquired if Arbus would also like to photograph his uncle, but she declined. ''My uncle had a large growth on the back of his neck,'' Salstrom explains. ''She said, 'I'm not going to ask him, because I feel sorry for him.'''

Arbus regarded circus freaks as ''aristocrats'' and female impersonators as gender-barrier pioneers. To her, there was nothing pathetic or repulsive about them. One of her most famous pictures is ''A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C., 1966.'' With teased black hair and heavily outlined eyebrows, the woman is made up to look like Elizabeth Taylor, an aspiration that, inevitably, she has not quite achieved. Her arms are overburdened with a large pocketbook, a camera in its case, a leopard-patterned coat and a big baby girl, and although she is looking straight ahead, she seems preoccupied. Her baby's arms and face are extended forward, as is the honest, open gaze of her husband. The only off-kilter figure in this upstanding group is their son, a mentally retarded boy, his eyes, head and body all askew, his small hand held by his father. Unlike the mother, the father is grasping onto nothing else but his son, whose crooked body fills the gap between the parents. As another photo in ''Revelations'' establishes, Arbus spent some time in this family's home. She later wrote, ''They were undeniably close in a painful sort of way.''

Arbus's choice of subject matter was not especially novel. From the transvestites of Brassai to the circus dwarf of Bruce Davidson, odd-looking and socially transgressive people have always attracted the attention of photographers. But even when those photographers took you backstage, you still felt that you were at a performance. Arbus went home with her subjects, literally and emotionally. That's why her portraits of a young man in hair curlers or a half-dressed dwarf in bed retain the power to shock. It's not the subjects that unnerve us: her photographs of a middle-class woman in pearls or a pair of twins with headbands can be just as startling. What shocks is the intimacy. ''I don't like to arrange things,'' she said. ''If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.'' When she took a picture, she instinctively found the right place to stand. Her vantage point denied the viewer any protective distance.

Once she parachuted out of fashion photography, Arbus relied on magazine editors for assignments. Her empathetic curiosity and undivided focus -- ''whatever the moment presented, she was in it,'' says her friend Mary Sellers -- made her a remarkable reporter. On a trip Arbus took to Los Angeles in 1964, Robert Brown, who by then was living there, chauffeured her to Mae West's house on two successive days. When he picked her up the first night, she was bubbling with excitement. ''You know what we did most of the time?'' she told him. ''She's got a locked room with models in plaster of all the men she's had sex with -- of their erections.'' Reminiscing about her former lovers, West had waxed rhapsodic: ''Each one is different: the way they sigh, the way they moan, the way they move; even the feel of them, their flesh is just a little different. . . . There's a man for every mood.'' Arbus took it all down for the article she would write. She probably waited until the next day, by which point West would have been completely charmed and relaxed, to take the visual record of the septuagenarian sexpot -- in negligee, backlighted by the merciless Southern California sun. ''Mae West hated the pictures,'' Allan Arbus recalls. ''Because they were truthful.''

A waiflike figure with huge green eyes, a goofy grin and a girlish giggle, Arbus would roam the city, laden down with camera equipment. Her blend of whispery fragility and unstoppable tenacity was very seductive. ''She had this little squeaky voice, completely unarming because she was so childlike and her interest so genuine,'' says the photographer Larry Fink, who observed her working in New York parks. ''So she would hover there and smile and be a little embarrassed, with her Mamiyaflex going. She would wait for people to relax, or to get so tense that they would be the opposite of relaxed, with much the same effect.'' Sandra Reed, the albino sword swallower who is the subject of one of Arbus's most arresting late photographs, recalls Arbus, clad in denim, coming up to her before the circus opened. ''I thought it was someone wanting an autograph,'' Reed says. ''She would get a rapport going between you and her. She asked me how it was to travel around, places I'd seen, things I'd done. She was very relaxed, a very ordinary person. She talked to me about the sword-swallowing, how I did it. We talked for quite some time, an hour, maybe two. She asked me if I would mind to be in full costume, and I said, 'No problem.''' Reed performed her act, and Arbus photographed her. The shoot, Reed thinks, took about 45 minutes.

''People were interested in Diane, just as interested in her as she was in them,'' Szarkowski says. He first met Arbus late in 1962. He had recently succeeded Edward Steichen as director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and Arbus was picking up a portfolio of her work that she had dropped off for review. ''It was an accident,'' he says. ''I came out of my office, so my assistant introduced us somewhat embarrassedly. I liked her immediately. She was a person with a very lively intelligence. So the conversation went on, and it got to the point where she asked what I thought of the work.'' Arbus's portfolio consisted mostly of portraits of eccentric New Yorkers that she had done for Harper's Bazaar. Szarkowski remembers telling her: '''I don't find it quite right. It seems to me the photographs don't fit what your intention is.'''

They were grainy 35-millimeter pictures, the sort that photojournalists snapped on the fly. ''Technically, they looked a little bit like Robert Frank, not quite like Bill Klein,'' Szarkowski says. ''I said to her, 'It seems to me what you're interested in is much more permanent, ceremonial, eidetic.''' He then pointed to an anomalous photograph she had taken with a large Rolleiflex camera that produces a more finely detailed, square negative. '''That's what you're looking for; it's like Sander,''' Szarkowski recalls saying to her. ''Maybe it was my North Wisconsin accent. She said, 'Who's Sander?'''

Perhaps it was his twang, or maybe Arbus was momentarily distracted, because she certainly was familiar by then with the work of the great German photographer August Sander. Shrewd as Szarkowski was to recognize the affinity, Sander had been brought to her attention two years earlier by Marvin Israel, who would prove to be the most astute and important champion of Arbus's work. Israel, like Arbus, was a person who thrived on contradictions. He was raised in a well-off New York Jewish family (the money came from a women's-clothing business) but affected a down-at-the-heels bohemian style. A protege of Alexey Brodovitch, who galvanized American magazine design with the electric energy of the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism, Israel was art director of Seventeen in the late 50's and then himself became the art director of Brodovitch's baby, Harper's Bazaar. He worked in a dusty, cluttered three-floor studio in the cupola of a building on lower Fifth Avenue, amid the cacophony of birdcalls (a parrot and a caged crow being the loudest) and the barking of a vicious adopted stray mongrel, named Marvin. ''Shut up, Marvin,'' he would bark back.

In late November 1959, a few months after moving into the West Village carriage house, Arbus met Israel, and they became lovers. Their intense friendship and professional collaboration would continue until the end of her life.

Israel gave Arbus a portfolio of Sander photographs from a 1959 issue of the Swiss magazine Du, seeing immediately that Sander was the photographer whose ambition and perspicacity most resembled her own. Sander set himself a monumental task -- ''to see things as they are and not as they should or might be''; by so doing, he thought he could provide a ''physiognomic image of an age.'' In his Teutonic thoroughness and anthropological zeal, Sander was a creature of his place and time; as an artist, however, he transcends those categories. Sander was after clarity. He printed on the shiny smooth paper normally used for technical illustrations, and he ignored the introduction of panchromatic glass plates that would obscure blemishes. He typically spent an hour or more talking with his subject before taking the photograph, and whenever possible, he scheduled the sitting in the subject's home, not in a studio, to capture more of the truth.

In the next generation, Bernd and Hilla Becher took up Sander's typological mania and ran with it. What fascinated Arbus about Sander was the psychological inquiry, which she adopted and pushed as far as she could. Arbus photographed many of the same subjects as Sander (carnival performers, midgets, women in slinky dresses, blind people, twins). Comparing their work is instructive. For example, Sander's portrait of fraternal twins, from 1925, shows a timid, eager-to-please girl and a dour, conventional little boy; you can see, as in embryo, the roles in society that they are preparing to play. In contrast, there is nothing sociological about Arbus's 1967 portrait of identical twin girls in Roselle, N.J. Instead, she has taken a kind of psychological X-ray. The girl on the right smiles angelically and trustingly. The one on the left is slightly off: her eyes are misaligned, her mouth is suspiciously pursed, her stockings are bunched at the knees, even the bobby pins on her white headband have slipped below her eyes. Wearing identical frocks, the girls are standing so close that they seem to be joined in one body, two aspects of the same soul. ''What's left after what one isn't is taken away is what one is,'' Arbus wrote in a notebook in 1959. That aphorism could be the caption to this picture.

Marvin Israel said that when he was at Bazaar, he wanted to assign Arbus to photograph every person in the world. In the early heady days of their affair, when she was peppering Israel with almost daily postcards, Arbus once wrote him that ''everyone today looked remarkable just like out of August Sander pictures, so absolute and immutable down to the last button, feather, tassel or stripe. All odd and splendid as freaks and nobody able to see himself, all of us victims of the especial shape we come in.'' By the time Arbus picked up a camera, the termite-riddled social order of Sander's day had crumbled. She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities -- cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveau riche, the movie-star fans -- and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort. Arbus's friend Adrian Allen, who began her career as an assistant to the legendary Brodovitch, recalls going through the layout of the posthumous monograph that Doon and Israel put together and seeing with shock the image of a woman she had known, seated on a park bench. In her three-strand necklace and helmetlike bouffant hairdo, Arbus's subject seems riven by secret hopelessness. ''I had never seen this woman look like that before,'' Allen says. ''She was always laughing, smiling, covering up what was underneath.'' Somehow, like a dowser of despair, Arbus had picked up the signal of misery. Not long after the picture was taken, the woman in the bouffant hairdo committed suicide.

Because Arbus took her own life, many people assume that she was constantly grim. Actually, she was an enthusiastic woman with a highly honed sense of the absurd, who was afflicted by blasts of bleakness. ''She was a very lively person,'' Szarkowski says. ''She had a very vivacious mind. She was never a depressed person in my presence.'' Allan Arbus, who knew her as well as anyone did, saw a fuller picture. ''I was intensely aware of these violent changes of mood,'' he says. ''There were times when it was just awful, and there were times. . . . '' His expression mimics fizzy exhilaration. Diane preferred receiving confidences to giving them, one reason photography was her natural medium. ''She wanted to contend with something else, not express herself,'' Doon says.

The relationship with Israel was painful for Arbus. Married to Margie Ponce Israel, a brilliant but emotionally troubled artist, he was not as reliably available or emotionally supportive as Arbus wished. ''Diane made no secret of the fact that she was waiting and waiting for Marvin's attention,'' says Elisabeth Sussman, co-curator of the show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who has gone through Arbus's journals, letters and date books. Arbus did not talk to most of her friends about Israel. Unusually, the artist Mary Frank knew them both independently. ''A desire to be cared for is a very human instinct,'' Frank says. ''Marvin could not have given Diane that feeling. He was a very complicated person, and interested in his own powers. He was capable of kindness, but then there was this explosive aspect.'' Frank says that she saw Arbus despondent a couple of times, and ''it definitely had to do with Marvin.'' Where Allan gave Diane technical advice and emotional bolstering, Israel excited her to take on new projects and challenges. ''He was always interested in artists pushing as hard as they could toward their own obsessions or perversities,'' says the writer Lawrence Shainberg, who was a close friend.

Like Arbus, Israel loved to explore the seamier precincts of New York. They didn't have to go far. Forty-Second Street was very different then: ''everyone winking and nudging and raising their eyebrows and running their hands through their marcelled hair and I saw one of your seeing blind men and a man like you have told me about with the pale ruined face-that-isn't-there and a thousand lone conspirators,'' Arbus wrote Israel. Some of those trophies appeared publicly when she agreed with much trepidation to be included, along with Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, in an exhibition, ''New Documents,'' that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in February 1967. Like the contemporaneous ''New Journalists'' in Esquire and New York (Arbus worked for both magazines), the newfangled documentary photographers in this show made the seeing eye a part of the picture. To her relief, Arbus adored the way her work looked hanging in the museum galleries. ''I've been here as many times as I can get here -- I love it,'' she told a reporter. However, her ambivalence about presenting her photographs as art objects remained. In March 1969, in Midtown New York, Lee Witkin opened the first commercially viable gallery devoted to photography. Arbus agreed to let him display some of her pictures, but she declined his offer of a large exhibition. Although she accepted offers to lecture and sold prints to museums, she always voiced her doubts about whether she was ready for this attention.

In the months after the New Documents show, she bristled with new ideas. ''She would have 30 projects at once,'' Allan says. But then she would fall into funks that were harder and harder for her to pull out of. ''She was in so much pain, and really struggling with what the meaning of her life was,'' Mary Sellers says. ''I had never felt her to be as fragile and unsure.''

When the lease came up on the carriage house, Arbus was forced to move, in January 1968, to a less attractive apartment in the East Village. She had had a serious bout of hepatitis two years earlier; in 1968, she suffered a relapse. Maybe most unsettling to her was Allan's decision to move to Los Angeles in June 1969 to pursue an acting career. ''I guess it was oddly enough the finality of Allan leaving (for Calif.) that so shook me,'' she wrote to her friend Carlotta Marshall. ''He had been gone somewhat for a hundred years but suddenly it was no more pretending. This was it. . . . I am learning all over again it seems how to live, how to make a living, how to do what I want and what I don't, all sorts of commonsensical things I have tended to make a big deal about.'' One of the things that she had to learn was how to develop film, because Allan was closing his darkroom. Although she had always made her own prints, she relied on his assistants for processing film. ''It was hard for her to take over this part of photography,'' he says. The technical aspects never appealed to her. ''She was very funny about her cameras,'' he continues. ''If one didn't work, she would put it aside and then pick it up the next day to see if it had gotten better.'' Yet she knew precisely what look she was after, and she would improvise technically to achieve it. In 1965, she began printing her negatives with the black border exposed -- as if to emphasize both that this image was uncropped and thus unaltered, and also (sabotaging its pretensions to truth) that in the end it was only a photograph. ''For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture,'' she once said. ''And more complicated.''

In the last two years of her life, she was working on a project that delighted her deeply. Through a relative of Adrian Allen, she obtained permission to photograph at institutions for the severely retarded in New Jersey. These pictures, which Doon posthumously labeled the ''Untitled'' series, represent a sharp departure from Arbus's previous work. Combining flash unpredictably with daylight and catching her subjects on the move, she was relinquishing control and embracing the accidental. She wrote Allan that the photographs ''are very blurred and variable, but some are gorgeous. FINALLY what I've been searching for, and I seem to have discovered sunlight, late afternoon early winter sunlight. It's just marvelous. In general I seem to have perverted your brilliant technique all the way round, bending it over backward you might say till it's JUST like snapshots but better.'' In her notebook, she devoted five pages to individual descriptions of her retarded subjects. Writing to Amy, she explained: ''Some of them are so small that their shoulder would fit right under my arm and I would pat them and their head would fall on my chest. They are the strangest combination of grown-up and child I have ever seen. One lady kept saying over and over: 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' After a while one of the staff said, 'That's all right but don't do it again' and she quieted down. . . . I think you'd like them.''

Adrian Allen went to see the photographs in the Westbeth artist-housing complex in the West Village, which is where Arbus moved from East 10th Street in January 1970. ''The whole floor was filled with that project,'' Allen recalls. ''At first I found it kind of awful to look at these people. Then, as I started to look at the larger prints and found how the people connected with her -- they were the sort of people who couldn't connect with anybody, but that quality she had of getting people to let her in, even if they were mad or retarded -- in those pictures, I sensed her presence.'' Allen understood that Arbus's excitement arose from her attachment to her retarded subjects. ''She loved the photographs because they illustrated the connection.'' She had devoted so much energy to getting people to doff their masks. Now, with these mentally impaired people, she found a transparency of expression. Oddly, in many of her most famous photographs of them, they are wearing masks for Halloween.

Sometimes the work would buoy her spirits, but not for long. ''She was always, always both devoted to and loathing of photography,'' Mary Sellers says. ''She was always wondering not was it good enough, but was it true enough.''

In many of her late photographs, she returned to her early practice of capturing people who were unaware of her camera. But the effect was different now. She was a mature artist, and she could find the intimacy she wanted in unexpected ways. So that in ''A Woman Passing, N.Y.C., 1971,'' the determined hunch of the walk, the proudly chic uplift of the hat and the liver-spotted hand gripping the pocketbook make us feel we know this woman as well as if we had read a novel about her. As early as 1967, Diane wrote to Amy: ''I suddenly realized that when I photograph people I don't anymore want them to look at me. (I used nearly always to wait for them to look me in the eye but now it's as if I think I will see them more clearly if they are not watching me watching them.)''

One of the many misperceptions about Arbus is that her work, in its emotional toll and immersion in the ''dark side,'' contributed to a fatal despair. In fact, her work elated her. ''She made it seem like a lark,'' says Michael Flanagan, a friend of hers and Israel's, who worked for a time as Allan's assistant and developed her negatives. ''The pictures were sometimes dark and scary, but she was lighthearted, like it was an adventure for her.'' The doubts and depressions were triggered by other causes, sometimes by a sense of abandonment, at times by an internal biological flux she could neither understand nor control. ''I go up and down a lot,'' she wrote Carlotta Marshall in late 1968. ''Maybe I've always been like that. Partly what happens though is I get filled with energy and joy and I begin lots of things or think about what I want to do and get all breathless with excitement and then quite suddenly either through tiredness or a disappointment or something more mysterious the energy vanishes, leaving me harassed, swamped, distraught, frightened by the very things I thought I was so eager for! I'm sure this is quite classic.'' She went to visit Allan and his new wife, Mariclare Costello, in Los Angeles in the fall of 1970. He remembers that once, while driving in the car, she told him: ''I took a pill before we left and I feel much better. It's all chemical.''

Marshall saw her several times in mid-July 1971, on a visit to New York from Holland, where she now lived. At their last get-together, they stayed up late, talking. ''We talked about suicide and death, but we talked about everything,'' Marshall says. ''I just didn't pay special attention to the fact that she brought it up. It wasn't a morbid discussion.'' On July 26, when Marshall was on a ship heading back to Europe, Allan was acting in a movie in Santa Fe, Doon was working on a book in Paris, Amy was attending summer school in Massachusetts and Israel was weekending with his wife at Avedon's house on Fire Island, Arbus swallowed a number of barbiturates, climbed fully dressed into her bathtub and cut her wrists with a razor blade. Two days later, Israel went to her apartment and found the body.

Arbus was 48 when she died. In the autopsy report, the Medical Examiner's Office left this tantalizing observation: ''Diary suggestive of suicidal intent, taken on July 26th, noted.'' The on-the-scene medical investigator's report refers to a '''Last Supper' note,'' and Lawrence Shainberg, one of three friends whom Israel called to wait with him for the police to arrive, recalls seeing the words ''Last Supper'' written on a page of her open diary. What could she have meant? At the Last Supper, Jesus said that the wine and unleavened bread were his blood and body, containing eternal life -- a black-humor analogy for someone slashing her wrists and gulping fatal tablets. He also said that he would be betrayed by someone very close to him.

Did Arbus leave other clues in her date book? We don't know. The diary page for the 26th, and for the two pages following, have been neatly excised. ''I've stared at that book for I can't say how long,'' says Sussman, the co-curator. That Arbus took secrets with her to the grave is completely in character. She collected other people's mysteries and divulged few of her own. ''I never thought that I knew all her secrets,'' Allan says. (Asked if she knew all of his, he says, ''Probably.'') The diaries, notebooks and letters that are included in the museum retrospective and in ''Revelations'' enable us to come closer to seeing Arbus in the way that she saw her subjects -- with an unexpected, even unsettling, intimacy. Never for a second, however, do we feel that we have exhausted the mystery.

Arthur Lubow is a contributing writer for the magazine and last wrote about the Spanish chef Ferran Adria.

Is Buddhism Good for Your Health?

Is Buddhism Good for Your Health?
By STEPHEN S. HALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/magazine/14BUDDHISM.html

In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson's office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion, and word of his accomplishments had made it to northern India. The exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists was writing to offer the minds of his monks -- in particular, their meditative prowess -- for scientific research.

Most self-respecting American neuroscientists would shrink from, if not flee, an invitation to study Buddhist meditation, viewing the topic as impossibly fuzzy and, as Davidson recently conceded, ''very flaky.'' But the Wisconsin professor, a longtime meditator himself -- he took leave from graduate school to travel through India and Sri Lanka to learn Eastern meditation practices -- leapt at the opportunity. In September 1992, he organized and embarked on an ambitious data-gathering expedition to northern India, lugging portable electrical generators, laptop computers and electroencephalographic (EEG) recording equipment into the foothills of the Himalayas. His goal was to measure a remarkable, if seemingly evanescent, entity: the neural characteristics of the Buddhist mind at work. ''These are the Olympic athletes, the gold medalists, of meditation,'' Davidson says.

The work began fitfully -- the monks initially balked at being wired -- but research into meditation has now attained a credibility unimaginable a decade ago. Over the past 10 years, a number of Buddhist monks, led by Matthieu Ricard, a French-born monk with a Ph.D. in molecular biology, have made a series of visits from northern India and other South Asian countries to Davidson's lab in Madison. Ricard and his peers have worn a Medusa-like tangle of 256-electrode EEG nets while sitting on the floor of a little booth and responding to visual stimuli. They have spent two to three hours at a time in a magnetic resonance imaging machine, trying to meditate amid the clatter and thrum of the brain-imaging machinery.

No data from these experiments have been published formally yet, but in ''Visions of Compassion,'' a compilation of papers that came out last year, Davidson noted in passing that in one visiting monk, activation in several regions of his left prefrontal cortex -- an area of the brain just behind the forehead that recent research has associated with positive emotion -- was the most intense seen in about 175 experimental subjects.

In the years since Davidson's fax from the Dalai Lama, the neuroscientific study of Buddhist practices has crossed a threshold of acceptability as a topic worthy of scientific attention. Part of the reason for this lies in new, more powerful brain-scanning technologies that not only can reveal a mind in the midst of meditation but also can detect enduring changes in brain activity months after a prolonged course of meditation. And it hasn't hurt that some well-known mainstream neuroscientists are now intrigued by preliminary reports of exceptional Buddhist mental skills. Paul Ekman of the University of California at San Francisco and Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard have begun their own studies of the mental capabilities of monks. In addition, a few rigorous, controlled studies have suggested that Buddhist-style meditation in Western patients may cause physiological changes in the brain and the immune system.

This growing, if sometimes grudging, respect for the biology of meditation is achieving a milestone of sorts this weekend, when some of the country's leading neuroscientists and behavioral scientists are meeting with Tibetan Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama himself, at a symposium held at M.I.T. ''You can think of the monks as cases that show what the potential is here,'' Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who has pioneered work in the health benefits of meditation, says. ''But you don't have to be weird or a Buddhist or sitting on top of a mountain in India to derive benefits from this. This kind of study is in its infancy, but we're on the verge of discovering hugely fascinating things.''

In the 2,500-year history of Buddhism, the religion has directed its energy inward in an attempt to train the mind to understand the mental state of happiness, to identify and defuse sources of negative emotion and to cultivate emotional states like compassion to improve personal and societal well-being. For decades, scientific research in this country has focused on the short-term effects of meditation on the nervous system, finding that meditation reduces markers of stress like heart rate and perspiration. This research became the basis for the ''relaxation response'' popularized by Prof. Herbert Benson of Harvard in the 1970's. Buddhist practice, however, emphasizes enduring changes in mental activity, not just short-term results. And it is the neural and physical impact of the long-term changes, achieved after years of intense practice, that is increasingly intriguing to scientists.

''In Buddhist tradition,'' Davidson explains, '''meditation' is a word that is equivalent to a word like 'sports' in the U.S. It's a family of activity, not a single thing.'' Each of these meditative practices calls on different mental skills, according to Buddhist practitioners. The Wisconsin researchers, for example, are focusing on three common forms of Buddhist meditation. ''One is focused attention, where they specifically train themselves to focus on a single object for long periods of time,'' Davidson says. ''The second area is where they voluntarily cultivate compassion. It's something they do every day, and they have special exercises where they envision negative events, something that causes anger or irritability, and then transform it and infuse it with an antidote, which is compassion. They say they are able to do it just like that,'' he says, snapping his fingers. ''The third is called 'open presence.' It is a state of being acutely aware of whatever thought, emotion or sensation is present, without reacting to it. They describe it as pure awareness.''

The fact that the brain can learn, adapt and molecularly resculpture itself on the basis of experience and training suggests that meditation may leave a biological residue in the brain -- a residue that, with the increasing sophistication of new technology, might be captured and measured. ''This fits into the whole neuroscience literature of expertise,'' says Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard neuroscientist, ''where taxi drivers are studied for their spatial memory and concert musicians are studied for their sense of pitch. If you do something, anything, even play Ping-Pong, for 20 years, eight hours a day, there's going to be something in your brain that's different from someone who didn't do that. It's just got to be.''

Jonathan D. Cohen, an expert on attention and cognitive control at Princeton, has been intrigued by reports that certain Buddhist adepts can maintain focus for extended periods. ''Our experience -- and the laboratory evidence is abundant -- is that humans have a limited capacity for attention,'' he says. ''When we try to sustain attention for longer periods of time, like air-traffic controllers have to do, we consider it incredibly effortful and stressful. Buddhism is all about the ability to direct attention flexibly, and they talk about this state of sustained and focused attention that is pleasant, no longer stressful.''

If nothing else, the meeting at M.I.T. this weekend shows that Davidson, one of its principal organizers, has managed to persuade a lot of marquee names to join him in making the case that it has become scientifically respectable to investigate these practices. Participants include mainstream scientists like Eric Lander, a leader of the human genome project; Cohen, a prominent researcher into the neural mechanisms of moral and economic decision-making; and Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-Prize-winning Princeton economist who has pioneered research into the psychology of financial decision-making.

''Neuroscientists want to preserve both the substance and the image of rigor in their approach, so one doesn't want to be seen as whisking out into the la-la land of studying consciousness,'' concedes Cohen, who is chairman of a session at the M.I.T. meeting. ''On the other hand, my personal belief is that the history of science has humbled us about the hubris of thinking we know everything.''

The ''Monk experiments'' at Madison are beginning to intersect with a handful of small but suggestive studies showing that Buddhist-style meditation may have not only emotional effects but also distinct physiological effects. That is, the power of meditation might be harnessed by non-Buddhists in a way that along with reducing stress and defusing negative emotion, improves things like immune function as well.

The power of the mind to influence bodily function has long been of interest to scientists, especially connections between the nervous, immune and endocrine systems. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and Ronald Glaser, researchers at Ohio State University, for example, have done a series of studies showing that stress typically impairs immune function, though the exact woof and weave of these connections remains unclear.

Interestingly enough, the Buddhist subjects themselves are largely open to scientific explanation of their practices. ''Buddhism is, like science, based on experience and investigation, not on dogma,'' Matthieu Ricard explained in an e-mail message to me last month. The religion can be thought of as ''a contemplative science,'' he wrote, adding, ''the Buddha always said that one should not accept his teachings simply out of respect for him, but rediscover their truth through our own experience, as when checking the quality of a piece of gold by rubbing it on a piece on stone, melting it and so on.''

In July, I joined Davidson and several colleagues as they stood in a control room and watched an experiment in progress. On a television monitor in the control room, a young woman sat in a chair in a nearby room, alone with her thoughts. Those thoughts -- and, more specifically, the way she tried to control them when provoked -- were the point of the experiment.

Davidson hypothesizes that a component of a person's emotional makeup reflects the relative strength, or asymmetry, of activity between two sides of the prefrontal cortex -- the left side, which Davidson's work argues is associated with positive emotion, and the right side, where heightened activity has been associated with anxiety, depression and other mood disorders.

His research group has conducted experiments on infants and the elderly, amateur meditators and Eastern adepts, in an attempt to define a complex neural circuit that connects the prefrontal cortex to other brain structures like the amygdala, which is the seat of fear, and the anterior cingulate, which is associated with ''conflict-monitoring.'' Some experiments have also shown that greater left-sided prefrontal activation is associated with enhanced immunological activity by natural killer cells and other immune markers.

When one scientist in the control room said, ''All right, here comes the first picture,'' the young woman visibly tensed, gripping her elbows. Electrodes snaked out of her scalp and from two spots just below her right eye. And then, staring into a monitor, the young woman watched as a succession of mostly disturbing images flashed on a screen in front of her -- a horribly mutilated body, a severed hand, a venomous snake poised to strike. Through earphones, the woman was prompted to modulate her emotional response as each image appeared, either to enhance it or suppress it, while the electrodes below her eye surreptitiously tapped into a neural circuit that would indicate if she had successfully modified either a positive or negative emotional response to the images.

''What's being measured,'' Davidson explained, ''is a person's capacity to voluntarily regulate their emotional reactions.''

Daren Jackson, the lead researcher on the study, added, ''Meditation may facilitate more rapid, spontaneous recovery from negative reactions.''

The visiting monks, as well as a group of meditating office workers at a nearby biotech company, have viewed these same gruesome images for the same purpose: to determine what Davidson calls each individual's ''affective style'' (if they are prone, for example, to hang onto negative emotional reactions) and if that style can be modulated by mental effort, of the sort that meditation seeks to cultivate. It is the hope of Davidson and his sometime collaborator Jon Kabat-Zinn that the power of meditation can be harnessed to promote not only emotional well-being but also physical health.

Since founding the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979, Kabat-Zinn and colleagues have treated 16,000 patients and taught more than 2,000 health professionals the techniques of ''mindfulness meditation,'' which instructs a Buddhist-inspired ''nonjudgmental,'' total awareness of the present moment as a way of reducing stress. Along the way, Kabat-Zinn has published small but intriguing studies showing that people undergoing treatment for psoriasis heal four times as fast if they meditate; that cancer patients practicing meditation had significantly better emotional outlooks than a control group; and not only that meditation relieved symptoms in patients with anxiety and chronic pain but also that the benefits persisted up to four years after training. Kabat-Zinn is conducting a study for Cigna HealthCare to see if meditation reduces the costs of treating patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome.

For the time being, meditation science is still stuck in a cultural no-man's land between being an oxymoron and something more substantive. ''We're very early in the research,'' said Davidson, who admitted that ''the vast majority of meditation research is schlock.'' But a well-designed study published in July by Davidson, Kabat-Zinn and their colleagues provides further evidence that the topic is legitimate.

In July 1997, Davidson recruited human subjects at a small biotech company outside Madison called Promega to study the effects of Buddhist-style meditation on the neural and immunological activity of ordinary American office workers. The employees' brains were wired and measured before they began a course in meditation training taught by Kabat-Zinn. It was a controlled, randomized study, and after eight weeks, the researchers would test brain and immune markers to assess the effects of meditation.

There was reluctance among some employees to volunteer, but eventually, about four dozen employees participated in the study. Once a week for eight weeks, Kabat-Zinn would show up at Promega with his boom box, his red and purple meditation tape cassettes and his Tibetan chimes, and the assembled Promega employees -- scientists, marketing people, lab techs and even some managers -- would sit on the floor of a conference room and practice mindfulness for three hours.

In July, the results of the experiment at Promega were published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, and they suggest that meditation may indeed leave a discernible and lasting imprint on the minds and bodies of its practitioners. Among the Promega employees who practiced meditation for two months, the Wisconsin researchers detected significant increases in activity in several areas of the left prefrontal cortex -- heightened activity that persisted for at least four months after the experiment, when the subjects were tested again. Moreover, the meditators who showed the greatest increase in prefrontal activity after training showed a correspondingly more robust ability to churn out antibodies in response to receiving a flu vaccine. The findings, Kabat-Zinn suggested, demonstrated qualitative shifts in brain activity after only two months of meditation that mirror preliminary results seen in expert meditators like monks.

These results are still embraced cautiously, at best. Indeed, the Wisconsin study took five years to publish in part because several higher-profile journals to which it was submitted refused even to send it out for peer review, according to Davidson. And yet, by the time the study was over, the subjective experience of participants complemented the objective data: meditation ultimately left people feeling healthier, more positive and less stressed. ''I really am an empiricist in every aspect of my life,'' said Michael Slater, a molecular biologist at Promega. ''I doubt dogma, and I test it. I do it at the laboratory bench, but also in my personal life. So this appealed to me, because I could feel the reduction in stress. I could tell I was less irritable. I had more capacity to take on more stressors. My wife felt I was easier to be around. So there were tangible impacts. For an empiricist, that was enough.''

Granted, that's not enough for many other people, especially the scientific skeptics. But Slater made an offhand comment that struck me as a highly convincing, though thoroughly unofficial, form of peer review. ''My wife,'' Slater said quietly, ''is dying for me to start meditating again.''

Stephen S. Hall is the author, most recently, of ''Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension.''

Court Delays Recall Vote in California; Faulty Ballots Cited

Court Delays Recall Vote in California; Faulty Ballots Cited
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/national/15CND-CALI.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — A federal appeals court ordered a delay today in California's gubernatorial-recall election, adding new drama and uncertainty to an extraordinary chapter in American politics.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs that holding the election on Oct. 7, as scheduled, would be wrong because some votes would be cast on outdated punch-card machines, making those votes less likely to be counted.

But the court stayed its ruling for a week to allow proponents of the recall time to appeal to the full court — or higher — "if they so desire."

And an appeal to highest court appeared to be a certainty. "Give us 24 hours," Ted Costa, head of the Sacramento-based Peoples' Advocate, one of the groups behind the recall, told The Associated Press. "We'll get something off to the Supreme Court."

But for the moment, at least, the Ninth Circuit decision was heartening to Democrats and Gov. Gray Davis, who has been fiercely battling the drive to recall him and has argued that the election timetable is too short.

A Davis spokesman, Peter Ragone, said his camp received the news "with some measure of caution" tempering the elation, and that Governor Davis would follow through with his scheduled appearances, including two today in Compton with former President Bill Clinton and a fund-raiser later in Beverly Hills.

"Obviously, we believe if the election were held in March, more people could vote, and that would be good for the state," Mr. Ragone said, describing the recall campaign as "the world's most amazing political roller-coaster."

The Supreme Court is in summer recess and is not due to return until next month, so if the forces behind the recall do indeed try to get a Supreme Court hearing, their next step may be to apply to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who initially reviews matters from the Ninth Circuit, which covers a wide swath of the Western United States.

And it is by no means clear whether the recall may yet be held on Oct. 7, despite the Ninth Circuit ruling, or whether Mr. Davis and his allies will prevail, in which case the election may be moved to March 2, the next regularly scheduled primary election day.

For a while, though, the momentum was with the American Civil Liberties Union and the other parties arguing that the recall campaign was a hasty, ill-advised way to decide Governor Davis's political fate.

"This is a classic voting rights equal-protection claim," the Ninth Circuit declared, holding that the voters using punch-card machines would be denied their equal rights.

The court referred repeatedly to "hanging chads" and "dimpled chads" and other previously arcane terms that became household words in the legal battle over Florida ballots in 2000 that vaulted Gov. George Bush of texas into the White House by a tiny margin over Vice President Al Gore.

The three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit that ruled today, overturning a Federal District Court ruling of a few weeks ago, said it recognized the seriousness of delaying an election, and did not do so lightly.

But the impact of having millions of Californians vote with outmoded technology, and thus being less likely to have their voices heard, was just too serious, the circuit court held.

The counties involved include the state's most populous region, Los Angeles, in addition to Mendocino, Sacramento, San Diego, Santa Clara and Solano. They represented 44 percent of the state's registered voters during the 2000 election.

"Just as the black-and-white fava bean system of revolutionary times was replaced by paper balloting, and the paper ballot replaced by mechanical lever machine, newer technologies have emerged to replace the punch card, including optical scanning and touch-screen voting," the judges wrote.

Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground

Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground
By SAUL HANSELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/technology/15DARK.html

Some people may well be intimidated by the 261 lawsuits that the music industry has filed against Internet users it says are illegally sharing songs.

But hundreds of software developers are racing to create new systems, or modify existing ones, to let people continue to swap music — hidden from the prying eyes of the Recording Industry Association of America, or from any other investigators.

"With the R.I.A.A. trying to scare users around the world, the developer community is pumping up to create networks which are safer and more anonymous," said Pablo Soto, a developer in Madrid who designed the software for two file-sharing systems, Blubster and Piolet.

Some experts wonder if the industry's efforts will create more trouble for it than ever. "The R.I.A.A. is breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria," said Clay Shirky, a software developer who teaches new media at New York University.

Blubster, which has an estimated quarter-million users, already uses technology to make eavesdropping more difficult, Mr. Soto said. Its next version will encrypt files so they can be decoded only by their intended user.

Other systems are sending files on more circuitous Internet routes instead of, or in addition to, using encryption. And some developers hope to replace the current systems, which connect millions of users, with private file-sharing networks — speakeasies that may be too small for the industry to find.

The developers of the new systems say there is nothing illegal about writing software that helps people keep secrets. United States courts have held that file-sharing software may not be banned if it has both legitimate and illegal uses.

The Recording Industry Association of America has said that it is unconcerned about the increasing anonymity of file sharing. The stated purpose of its lawsuits is not to catch every hard core music pirate, but to show millions of casual file sharers that what they are doing is illegal.

In addition, none of the new methods offer perfect anonymity, experts say. Yet many of the new systems are likely to make the recording industry work harder to find file traders.

Private file sharing stems from academic work on encryption and data security over the last decade. One system is Freenet, introduced in 1999 by Ian Clarke. It allows people to publish files to be used by others, with technology meant to keep the source anonymous.

"Everyone said the Internet was an anarchistic thing through which anyone could say anything," Mr. Clarke said. "But in reality it is incredibly easy to monitor what is going on on the Internet. I was interested in creating a system that would preserve anonymity."

Freenet is similar to other file-sharing services in that users make part of their hard drives available to hold content to be downloaded by other users. But all the files are encrypted so no one knows what files are on a given machine. Requests to download a file are also encrypted.

Freenet has been a way to disseminate banned political tracts and has been used by people who want to share illegal content like child pornography. Mr. Clarke says he is willing to help people send files illegally if he can also prevent political censorship. "I am an absolutist on free speech," he said.

Freenet, however, is slow and hard to use, and it requires knowing a specific file name. As a result, it has not been a viable alternative to music-sharing services like KaZaA. Developers in Germany are creating a program called Frost meant to make Freenet easier to use.

Another file-sharing model is for business users who want to collaborate while protecting secrets from competitors. "The needs of businesses and the needs of file traders are the same," Mr. Shirky said. "I want a secure way to send you a three megabyte PowerPoint file with no way for anyone else to see it. That is not different from an MP3 file."

Software by companies like Groove Networks creates private file networks for specified users. Groove, which can cost $69 or more per user, is not widely employed by music sharers. But a program called Waste is attracting the interest of music traders who want to create "darknets," as private file-sharing communities are known.

Waste was written by Justin Frankel, who works for the Nullsoft unit of America Online. It was posted on Nullsoft's site one day last May and removed the next , although not fast enough to keep copies from circulating on the Web. (AOL's corporate cousin, Warner Music, is a backer of the R.I.A.A.'s campaign against file sharing.) Frankel and AOL did not return calls seeking comment.

Investigators for the music industry acknowledge that some of these technologies may make their jobs more difficult, but they suggest that users may not want to take advantage of them.

"The thing about darknets is that the users show more culpability than people who simply use peer-to-peer," said Randy Saaf, referring to peer-to-peer sharing systems like KaZaA. Mr. Saaf is chief executive of MediaDefender Inc., a music technology company that does work for the record industry. "When people are found to be using them, they will face stiffer penalties."

Meanwhile, older file-sharing services do not want to lose users to darknets or other newcomers. Many of them are trying to add features they say will protect privacy. Streamcast networks, the creator of Morpheus, introduced a feature this summer that lets users relay files by way of intermediary computers known as proxy servers — a technique that can help obscure the path between the source of the file and the person who downloads it.

Proxy servers and similar methods can be an effective way to hide, said Stuart Schechter, a Harvard security researcher. But, he said, there is nothing to stop the recording industry from creating proxy servers as so-called honey pots to serve as decoys and gather information on users. "The problem with any of these systems is how do you decide who to trust," he said.

Tell Us, Doctor, What Is It About Models?

Tell Us, Doctor, What Is It About Models?
By GUY TREBAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/fashion/15DIAR.html

In 1953, Dr. Edmund Bergler, a New York psychoanalyst trained at the Freud Clinic in Vienna, focused his analytic intelligence on understanding that most sadly neglected field of human pursuits: fashion. The result was a book, "Fashion and the Unconscious," a matchless addition to the literature both of homophobia and of claptrap.

Dr. Bergler was not the first to suggest that the will to hoax womankind with fashion originates in the unconscious minds of maternally fixated, orally regressed homosexuals. He wasn't even the first to see a link between "unconscious repetition compulsion" and a tendency to writer's cramp. (Freud got there first.) But Dr. Bergler did manage to commit to the page analytic canards whose qualities of unbridled gaga can be appreciated for their humorous qualities even a half-century on.

Man, wrote Dr. Bergler, meaning heterosexual man, "for whom the neckline plunges, for whom the skirts are shortened and swirled, who whistles (sometimes in thought) after every good-looking girl is not, as he believes, looking after Lady Godiva." What said man is frantically seeking, Dr. Bergler asserted, "is inner reassurance that he is the he-man."

If there is one time of the year when a reporter's inner he-man is put to the test it is Fashion Week. Hiking from showroom to backstage areas to the front row, one dutifully notes the latest trend for dye-treated burlap, Liza Minelli eyelashes and ultrasuede pleats, while secretly indulging that most helplessly he-man of inner vices, the obsession with models. "It's a real disease," said Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barney's, on Saturday morning, as he awaited the start of the As Four show at the Josephine tent in Bryant Park.

"Johnny and I were just discussing it," said Mr. Doonan, referring to his partner, the designer Jonathan Adler. Specifically they were discoursing on Karolina Kurkova's exceptional proportion of leg to torso; about Linda Evangelista's ability to draw a crowd, even in retirement and when wearing a do-rag and jeans; about how the wide-set eyes and yearling dimensions of the Italian model Maria Carla Boscone are so unearthly compelling and strange that Mr. Doonan has been unable to resist casting her for successive Barney's campaigns.

"It's about beauty, I guess," Mr. Doonan noted mildly, hesitant to lay claim to his inner he-man. "I also like to look at the birds in the trees," he said, and the tacit comparison between birders and model obsessives is apt. The feeling a birder gets from glimpsing a yellow-bellied sapsucker is probably no different from the thrill a model obsessive gets glimpsing Elise Crombez, the Belgian catwalk star du jour.

Models, said Pat McGrath, the influential makeup artist, as she applied gold sequins to the feline Ethiopian beauty Liya Kebede at the Baby Phat show last evening, "are a strange species of their own." They compel our eye with their giraffe-like limbs, their miniature heads, their fragile ankles and the facial features that, however apparently varied, still conform to ideals of beauty that scholars say have not changed much at all through history. Is it the marketplace or something immutable in human nature that makes the snarling butch loveliness of the Dominican model Omahyra Mota more like the beauty of Mey Bun, the shaven-headed 20-year-old Cambodian model from Brooklyn, than not?

"They're best when they're silent," said Mr. Doonan, and it is true that as naturally as model beauty attracts attention, it is their blankness and silence that seduce the mind. "Kate Moss kept her trap shut and it really helped her career," Mr. Doonan continued. Smart models always do.

"People are addicted to models because they are addicted to fantasy," said Ms. McGrath, whose own addiction began when she was a girl in Northampton, England. "Looking at these women in magazines, you were drawn into another world of women you would never meet, whose apartments you would never enter. Their beauty hijacked you into their world." It is a world populated by beings whose image is so sublimely inscrutable that, as the 62-year-old Henrik Ibsen once wrote about his 18-year-old crush, Emilie Bardach, one is free to "adorn it poetically."

Backstage at the Baby Phat show yesterday, the scene was typically chaotic, noisy, fogged with hair spray and cigarette smoke. The small work areas were jammed tight with television camera crews, dressers, hairdressers, makeup artists, manicurists, personal assistants, publicists, friends, caterers, children, dogs and fantastically beautiful women wearing nothing but underpants. Who knows what Dr. Bergler might have made of this post-Freudian scene from he-man heaven? And, honestly, who cares?