ANTITUSSIVE

http://dir.salon.com/travel/feature/2000/03/18/why/index.html It whirls you around, turns you upside down and stands everything you took for granted on its head. By Pico Iyer - - - - - - - - - - March 18, 2000 | W e travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what." I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that's "moral" since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail," and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship -- both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion -- of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind. Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of "Wild Orchids" (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week's wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis. If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald's would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator -- or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it's fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the "tourist" and the "traveler," perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, "Nothing here is the way it is at home," while a traveler is one who grumbles, "Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo -- or Cuzco or Kathmandu." It's all very much the same. But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you've landed on a different planet -- and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they're being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel). We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow's headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology. And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon -- an anti-Federal Express, if you like -- in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers. But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import -- and export -- dreams with tenderness. By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more -- not least by seeing it through a distant admirer's eyes -- they help you bring newly appreciative -- distant -- eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new "traditional" dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second -- and perhaps more important -- thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe. Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we'd otherwise seldom have cause to visit. On the most basic level, when I'm in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine. We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity -- and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the "gentlemen in the parlour," and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home). Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious -- to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves -- and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, "A man never goes so far as when he doesn't know where he is going." There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year -- or at least 45 hours -- and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I'm not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I'm simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense. So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can "place" me -- no one can fix me in my rsum --I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance. This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families -- to become better Buddhists -- I have to question my own too-ready judgments. "The ideal travel book," Christopher Isherwood once said, "should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you're in search of something." And it's the best kind of something, I would add, if it's one that you can never quite find. I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love. For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning -- from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament -- and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder. And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us. We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I'll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream. That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you've abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity. That whole complex interaction -- not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?) -- is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire. All, in that sense, believed in "being moved" as one of the points of taking trips, and "being transported" by private as well as public means; all saw that "ecstasy" ("ex-stasis") tells us that our highest moments come when we're not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he'd ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. "To write well about a thing," he said, "I've got to like it!" At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O'Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It's not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world. In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald's outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And -- most crucial of all -- the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas -- and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald's outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another. The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents' inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic -- the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million -- it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.) Besides, even those who don't move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you're traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you're often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room -- through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing -- not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing. All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville's colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he'd never visited, it's an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing. In Mary Morris's "House Arrest," a thinly disguised account of Castro's Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, "All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author's imagination." On Page 172, however, we read, "La isla, of course, does exist. Don't let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn't. But it does." No wonder the travel-writer narrator -- a fictional construct (or not)? -- confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. "Erewhon," after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler's great travel novel, is just "nowhere" rearranged. Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is -- and has to be -- an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really there and what's only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin's books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul's recent book, "A Way in the World," was published as a non-fictional "series" in England and a "novel" in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux's half-invented memoir, "My Other Life," were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as "Fact and Fiction." And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that "traveling is a fool's paradise," and the other who "traveled a good deal in Concord"). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us." So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also -- Emerson and Thoreau remind us -- have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center. And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen's great "The Snow Leopard"), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack's "Island of the Color-Blind," which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side. So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, "There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor." Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end. salon.com - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Pico Iyer is a contributing editor of Salon Travel & Food. His new book is "The Global Soul." He is also the author of "Video Night in Kathmandu," "The Lady and the Monk," "Falling off the Map," "Cuba and the Night" and "Tropical Classical."

# posted by Resty Odon @ 11:39 AM 1 comments

By ANTHONY DePALMA NYT January 4, 2005

This may be the age of Internet pop-ups and text-message marketing, but lots of businesses - especially small businesses - still do most of their advertising with old-fashioned low-tech signs. And just as the eyes are said to be windows to the soul, these storefront signs - which often come with fractured grammar and mysterious spelling - can be portals on a great city that is regenerating itself with a flood of new immigrants.

The signs are there to lure customers, of course, but they can do much more. Four out of 10 current New Yorkers were born in a foreign country, more than at any other time since the 1920's, and many have gone immediately into business. Their signs can form a style all their own, and style, as E. B. White, a passionate New Yorker at heart, once observed, is sometimes nothing but "sheer luck, like getting across the street."

With such luck, the errors in usage add unintended meaning, like the East Side pizzeria that for a long time listed "1 litter" bottles of soda on its menu. So many one-liter bottles end up as litter that such a change might be appropriate.

Signs, like the one announcing the imminent closing of a dry-cleaning shop on West 42nd Street, can be read as existential meditations on time. "Last Day of Opening December 23," read the sign in the shop's front window. While the wording did not obscure the sign's message, it did bring to mind Churchill's famous formulation about World War II, and the certain way of placing an event in time to truly understand its significance: "Now this is not the closing," a Churchillian shop owner might well have said. "It is not even the beginning of the closing. But it is, perhaps, the end of the opening." To these Asian shop owners, a decade of taking out spots on 42nd Street was just a prolonged opening, and they will start over again on another city street.

Elyse B. Rudolph, executive director of the Literacy Assistance Center, a group that helps newcomers learn English, says that the immigrants flooding into the city today are "ambitious, smart and wonderful" but that many are not literate in either English or their native language. That means they "do not come with an understanding of the structure of a language," she said.

In addition, Ms. Rudolph said, many follow the old immigrant practice of giving their sign business to their own kind. This helps the immigrants get a toehold in New York but the signs suffer, since both the printer and the customer may not know good English from bad.

Such nearsighted oversight was undoubtedly responsible for the sign on the side of a pushcart that was parked for a long time on the corner of 38th Street and Fifth Avenue. The very busy owner ran several grills at once, with a lot of chopping, slapping and swishing. He spoke almost no English beyond the items on the extensive menu printed on the side of his cart. The top section listed Seafood, followed by a category noted as Beef Food and then, logically, another section called Chicken Food.

English words are difficult for foreigners to spell. But part of what seems to be happening in New York City today is an overlapping of ethnic groups that confounds attempts at proper orthography. With Mexicans working in pizzerias and Afghans pushing hot dog carts, even ethnic words get misspelled.

So just about any Italian dish with more than two syllables presents difficulties, and words in which consonants run in pairs, like mozzarella, or run up against unruly vowels, like parmigiana, are never spelled the same way twice. One pizzeria on 41st Street has spaguetti with clam sause, and a lunch cart on Lexington Avenue and 46th Street helps out-of-towners by spelling knish "kanish."

"People tell me it's wrong and I told my brother-in-law, who is the owner, but he doesn't want to change it," said Wael Ahmed, 39, an Egyptian immigrant who works at the stand with kanish and chees steak on the menu. "Sometimes people on the street also tell me it's wrong, but I tell them it doesn't matter because we don't sell knish anymore."

But spelling mistakes are nothing compared to the double-entendres that have found their way onto the streets of the city. And because advanced printing technology makes plastic and canvas printing cheap enough for immigrant shopkeepers to afford, the mysteries endure.

Even when stores change hands, and signs are repainted, some messages live on. So whole generations of New Yorkers will be left to ponder the real meaning of the sign over the entrance to the Park Slope Grocery + Convinient store on Fourth Avenue and 17th Street in Brooklyn. The store's new owners no longer sell beepers (Who does?), but still visible beneath the letters spelling out Smoke Shop is the word Beerpers, an intriguing pentimento that still conjures images of boozy afternoons at the ballpark with the beer man just a beep away.

Technology also makes possible mass-production knockoffs of popular products, like movie DVD's. The Pakistani immigrant hovering over dozens of movies laid out on a Manhattan sidewalk obviously didn't realize that the title of the 1992 Al Pacino film he was selling was "Scent of a Woman," not "Scant of a Woman," though that alternative title might have expressed the loneliness of being thousands of miles from home.

Money, of course, is often the object of obsession, and immigrants recognize the words dollar, dough, buck or moola long before they can string together an English sentence. The dollar becomes their frame of reference in some ways, although at first it may be only in terms of what it means at the foreign exchange booth. How else to explain the sign posted on the front door of a busy Chinese restaurant on 45th Street, just off Avenue of the Americas, that warns coin seekers looking for change without spending a dime: "Sorry! We do not have any quarter for exchange."

The same passion for the dollar may explain why so many bargain stores run by immigrants fix on that magical figure. There are 99-cent stores in every immigrant neighborhood. But each has its own accent. Inspired by its surroundings, one such store near the diamond district in Midtown Manhattan is improbably called 99 cent Dreams. One in a Chinatown basement is called 99 cent or plus. Some critics see the fractured English on these signs as an attack on the very things that hold society together. Others see them as fresh reminders that the city is renewing itself.

But then there are those who see in the signs nothing less than poetry, which itself has had many different meanings, though no one hit closer to the bull's-eye, it could be argued, than the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who believed poetry was simply "the best words in their best order."

And in such order, perhaps, a true reflection of what is important in life. It's hard to come to any other conclusion when looking at the store window on Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street, just a few hundred feet west of the office of one of the city's largest newspapers. There, in bright neon colors, is a stark reminder of priorities, a neon Post-it note to those who work at that newspaper to not take themselves too seriously.

Candy is the first item on the list of four essentials.

Left to right, Soda is next.

Then Beer.

And last, News.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 7:24 AM 0 comments

Updated 09:48am (Mla time) Jan 02, 2005
By Pam Pastor
Inquirer News Service

Editor's Note: Published on page C3 of the January 2, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

PLAZA Miranda was as busy as ever. Vendors were hawking colorful plastic bags and cheap toys and shoppers were rushing to climb into jeepneys, dodging the firecrackers set off by noisy children. Just a few steps away, lining one side of Quiapo church, was a row of fortunetellers. Some were old, some young; some were male, a lot were female, and those who weren't busy reading palms were calling out to passersby, offering a look into their future.

Madam Lita was younger than most of the Quiapo fortunetellers. She smiled as she whipped out her tarot cards.

"It's the Year of the Rooster, we need to work hard and pray because the crisis will continue," she said in the vernacular.

She said prices of commodities would continue to go up.

"There will be a lot of family problems, spouses cheating because of temptations. Judgment day is near, that's why temptations are all around," she added.

Dismal

Madam Lita continued laying down the cards. "There might be a volcanic eruption and an earthquake, but we would recover."

The predictions remained dismal. "There will be chaos. I pity the President, a lot of people will go against her. Members of the NPA will come out, prisoners will also cause trouble."

Madam Lita repeatedly talked about a continuing crisis but kept saying that prayers would help us get through it.

She kept stressing that people would rebel against President Arroyo. She also had negative predictions for Filipinos abroad.

"Some people abroad will be imprisoned," she continued, "and there will be Filipinos who will get hurt in disasters in other countries, in bombings and accidents. But people will remain stubborn. A lot of them will still go abroad."

There will be a shift in male-female roles in 2005, she said. "Women will become the breadwinners instead of men."

Celebrity couples will have a tough time next year, according to her. "Many celebrity couples will split up."

She said she also sees a lot of deaths in the coming year. Madam Lita continued stressing the importance of prayer in facing 2005.

She set all the cards down and leaned back, indicating that she was done. It was time to go back to the present, because Madam Lita, the clairvoyant, sure made the present seem so much brighter than tomorrow.

*** E-mail the author at ppastor@inquirer.com.ph

# posted by Resty Odon @ 7:40 AM 0 comments

Man About Town : The forgiveness of kin Updated 08:43pm (Mla time) Dec 24, 2004 By Chuck Dy Inquirer News Service Editor's Note: Published on page E3 of the December 25, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer Dear Man About Town, I have had a crush on my classmate ever since we were in elementary school together. Now that we are in our first year of college together, he has begun to show signs of being romantically interested in me as well. Needless to say, this is something I am really excited about. But my parents warn me about his family, saying that they have a reputation, having been previously linked to certain criminal activities. I've heard this from some friends as well. Now I am confused because I sincerely like this guy, but I am worried that my association with him may not be a good idea because of his family’s lifestyle. MY FATHER, with his inimitable blend of paternal sagacity and personal tribulation, peppered my formative years with adages he felt I would need to later on tackle the inevitable hurdles of growing up. Or perhaps this was less a mentoring strategy than it was a therapeutic exercise, one that allowed him to express his own frustrations at not having been advised in such a manner when he was younger. Whatever the reason, my memories of the first 25 years are punctuated-punchlined, if you will-by the proverbs taken from the Gospel according to Dad. Most were self-evident and obligatory, such as "don't do drugs" and "don't drink and drive." Many were practical, and I have adopted them as my own. Others seemed to stem from a more personal reservoir, cryptic due to a lack of context, like the surreal dictum, "avoid eggplant." But my all-time favorite remains his marital maxim. "Anak," he would whisper conspiratorially, from one man to another, "if you want to know how the girl you are dating is going to turn out 20 years from now, just look at her mother. It's true." This was accompanied by an accusatory glance toward Heaven. A couple of times he even shook his fist at the angels, I swear. There is nothing unnatural about the very human and not-very-humane tendency of judging people by their family names. Even more so in Philippine culture, where the dynastic histories are relatively young and pronounced, where every skeleton is publicly exhumed from private closets, and families are collectively known by their clan names. The repercussion, of course, of such forced intimacy is that we all become guilty by association for the sins of the father. I am uncertain whether Christianity has anything to do with it, but perhaps this whole business of Original Sin lends weight to our society's penchant for condemning whole bloodlines on the account of one or two bad apples. (Speaking of bad fruit, if Adam and Eve had just stuck to meat diets we wouldn't be in this pickle right now). So does the apple never fall far from the tree? The general theory of relatives Let us stray from our gastronomic metaphors (I'm on a literary diet that only allows me limited food references a day) and dwell in the realm of physics. Imagine your family as a galaxy comprised of paternal planets, maternal moons, brothers and as-sister-oids, cousins of gaseous material, aunts and uncles of alien alloy, and that random lunatic grandparent streaking naked through the cosmos of your living room during astral reunions. We all revolve around the Sun of our shared history, held in place by a force beyond our personal reckoning. In turn, we each exert a pull on our other family members, affecting their inertia, simultaneously allowing them to persuade our own activity. We cannot help it. Propinquity demands influence. Thus is our galaxy assessed, on the combined movement and overlapping orbits of all our galactic elements, orchestrated by the adhesive will of our common Sun, and God's sense of humor. And other galaxies cannot help but notice when a comet turns maverick or a moon comes unhinged in our Solar System, and they note with distaste, "They've always had bad gravity; it's the Milky Way." So on one hand, yes, the parent will always influence the child. Consequently, the moral quality of a parent's actions, especially if the child is somewhat aware, will affect their upbringing. But does this necessarily mean that the child will be like the parent, that a son will emulate his daddy's hectoring and philandering ways, or a daughter her mommy's substance abuse and terrible fashion sense? Of course not! I like to note the reverse argument as evidence: If such were the case, then axiomatically, good parents MUST produce good children. And we all know that's not true. We are all progeny of stigma in one way or the other. Whether it is as distant as an ancestor who smuggled firearms for the wrong side during the Spanish-American War, or as proximate as your favorite uncle who just happens to frequent the streets of Manila dressed as your favorite aunt, we all know a family member whom we just don't discuss at Noche Buena. Unfortunately, it appears to be fair dinner conversation for other families who apparently have little qualms about hurling stones through the windows of their glass houses. I emphasize: while family influences, it does not, with any predictable accuracy, determine the eventual character of a family member. Michael Jackson's kids might be normal With that said, I think you should follow your heart on this one. You've liked this guy for a while, which seems to indicate that he has treated you well for a number of years. The duration alone should provide sufficient indication that he has a good heart. Rather than look at what his parents do, you should focus more on what he does, taken apart from the context of his last name. Too often, we tend to fixate on pedigree and we forget that even Blue Ribbon show dogs can turn rabid. Or, inversely, how the pup can turn out loyal and affectionate even if he is the son of a bitch. Should you be wary of him? Just about as wary as anyone getting into any sort of relationship. And with modern romances the way they are, his family affairs should be the least of your worries. Determine the requisite basics first and prioritize your relationship standards. Is he honest? Is he sensitive? Is he hygienic? Do you have interests in common? Does he share your political and social views? Does the phrase "excessive flatulence" make him laugh? It's tough enough nailing those down without having to ponder the lingering effects of his great-great grandmother's reputation as a brothel member. Everyone deserves a chance. I am certain there's a few Germans or Austrians, with the unfortunate last name of Hitler, running around the world today, desperate for unnecessary absolution from an unforgiving world. And they're probably really decent folk without the least inclination for global domination or genocide. Give the guy a break. If people are condemned for the faults of the father, my kid is NEVER going to get a date to the prom. We owe much to our families; for better or for worse, we are the sums of their parts. But the greatest achievement a parent can ever claim is to have their children grow up as individuals, mindful of their heritage, but fully aware of their independence. My folks christened my identity with a little bit of theirs, supporting me in my adventures, sending me cash and cashmere, and texting to let me know that they love me in spite of my refusal to return home for the holidays. But I am indebted to them most of all because they gave me their name, but taught me to make one for myself as well.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 7:37 AM 0 comments

The next subject of my utter contempt is the fair-weather friend, or is it fiend, and his victim. If I must make a hate list of criminals officially categorized as "non-heinous", I would confer the top prize to this fiend, and award the second-place trophy to his user-friendly victim.

Yes, there exists a veritable dynamics in this predator-prey relationship. The complexity can get pretty complicated it deserves a separate course in psychology. The symbiotic relationship can occur between and among friends or couples, anything with an opportunistic species of bacteria on one end and a willing fool on the other.

Friendly users and user-friendly folks, how to distinguish them? Let's deal with the users first.

***

A fairly good sign of a potential user is the level of phoniness he or she exhibits in his or her tendency to bootlick.

Of course there’s a thin line between being polite and being phony, but you would know a phony when you see or hear one. All you have to do is observe carefully and trust your instinct. Does his or her mouth spew blatant falsehoods just to make you feel nice? Does the person act like he or she is your number one fan even in cases where you totally suck? Tickled pink by the corniest joke ever delivered on earth, i.e., the one emanating from your mouth? Believe me, chances are he or she is either too naïve or just being plain obsequious.

In short, is he or she a pleaser, more of a yes-man than a genuine rah-rah guy? Is he or she too accommodating for comfort? Trust me, you’re in the same room with a bottom-kisser. No wonder you could hardly breathe: There's a toady blowing a lot of hot air!

Filipinos have a nice term for these creatures: “sipsip” (leech). Now true leeches do suck blood for survival; it’s in the annelid worm's nature. But when human beings do the sucking, they are plain vampires.

By contrast, non-users are true to themselves. They lay their cards on the table at the outset. They are not ruled by the game of putting one's foot forward, always out to impress lest the first impression fails to be everlasting indeed.

If they need to avoid offending anyone, non-users choose kindness as the better part of the truth, but they never overdo it. It's one thing to be diplomatic, tactful, discretionary and restrained, and quite another to be groveling and invariably pathetic. I would like to say that being a user is more of being an animal than being human, but that would be unfair to animals, to steal a quote. It is stooping too low, one wonders why bootlickers don’t get back pains. It is an unimaginative form of lying because it is pretty obvious both to the distant observer and the one being fawned upon.

***

Now the latter - the willing victim - needs a special kind of verbal harassment as well. The problem with this type of person is, he or she knows all along and knows all too well that kowtowing comes with some strings attached. But he or she falls for the trick anyway.

A willing prey is guilty of what shrinks call co-dependency. You can trust him to lend you all his savings. You can treat him like a doormat; you already have his permission even before you ask. This species wants to feel needed, feel martyred, because there's a gaping hole in his psyche that needs to be filled or else he'd collapse like a dead star. But such a foolish type of martyrdom deserves the jail, or to be a cannon fodder, more than it deserves canonization.

As helpless and pitiful as they are at first blush, false martyrs, too, deserve utter contempt for the things they refuse to accept about themselves: That they have the right to be loved and accepted for who they are, and not according to how people around them would like them or need them, or tell them how they are useful. That just for being born human, they automatically have the right to self-worth, and everyone must give them that much.

Unfortunately, these victims of the object-oriented wrongly pin their hopes of happiness, fulfillment and self-worth on someone just as weak, and for the wrong reason. And because their twisted logic happens to be fulfilled by the infectious virus of the opportunistic, they fall ill from the infection of being thusly validated. "I need to be needed," they say, so we can only say in dismay, "Congratulations, dear, you have finally met your match!"

This way, user-magnets are also guilty of addiction, their drug being self-delusion, plus the lies being peddled by the person to whom they've become attached, the significant other fulfilling that void. As in all addictions, people revolving within this self-centered pair's orbit get adversely affected, even get used, in the process. In literary circles, this laughable pairing may also qualify as some sort of poetic justice for the rest of us. Indeed, there is something Shakespearean about the rest of us being able to exclaim, "Truly they deserve each other!"

***

There’s probably a Doc Martens-kisser in all of us, so conventional wisdom, I imagine, would let this crime get off the hook so easily. Between the accused and the co-accused, it's the same law of the jungle operating here: Be nice to people if they are nice to you; who knows, they might be of some use to you at some future date?

That's precisely what's so infuriating about users and the used: They reduce people into useful objects. They make a travesty of loving relationships, turning these into a pathetic state of "transaction," as another writer beautifully said.

***

It's a sad, sad world when it is a world populated by the user and the used. People befriend people because of selfish agenda. There is a kind of "selfish selflessness" in it, as an American poet-laureate sagely puts it. Relationships, even entire organizations, can be infected by this particularly appalling dynamic. A seemingly balanced state of affairs, however, suddenly tips after a friendship turns sour, after somebody wakes up and realizes that, hey, it's all about a "transactionalized" thing, nothing more.

It never occurs to a lot of people that human instinct may be predatory some of the time, but being decent, at least to oneself, is the better part of being human.

Someone said "Never lend a friend money, books, or CDs if you don't want a friendship to end." Whoever said that, he is surely as selfish as he is sagacious. What's a friend for, anyway, if he's not someone you can lean on in time of need? On the other hand, what's a friend for if all he sees in you is an ever-ready cash without the need for a PIN number, a sounding board that echoes only the things you want to hear, and a cheering squad of one nincompoop - all rolled into one?

Look around you and, with a little dose of sensitivity, it wouldn't take an animatronics expert to see the people guilty of such an illicit affair. I Need You, You Need Me is their national anthem, How Am I Supposed to Live Without You? their favorite theme song. For indeed, if one of the two dies out on the other, it would mean instant death. Goodbye, co-dependency. Hello, black hole!

***

How then do we deal with the user and the used more properly? Well, I guess, the best thing we can do is leave them at their game. The last time I checked, the world's constitutions have yet to legislate true friendship, true love, and devotion. Besides, like they always say, it's impossible to make the blind see or wake up someone who's awake, unless you're some kind of messiah.

All kinds of phonies thrive in dishonesty and lies; therefore, only their exposure to the truth would kill them. Thank goodness fawning people and their willing victims have a way of outing themselves without us lifting a finger. They have a certain capacity to self-destruct in due time. We are preternaturally pissed off for the longest time, but we are saved from the messy job of convicting them in a fair trial.

7.5.2004

# posted by Resty Odon @ 11:09 AM 0 comments

A new study will change how you generate ideas and decide who's really creative in your company.

These days, there's hardly a mission statement that doesn't herald it, or a CEO who doesn't laud it. And yet despite all of the attention that business creativity has won over the past few years, maddeningly little is known about day-to-day innovation in the workplace. Where do breakthrough ideas come from? What kind of work environment allows them to flourish? What can leaders do to sustain the stimulants to creativity -- and break through the barriers?

Teresa Amabile has been grappling with those questions for nearly 30 years. Amabile, who heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and is the only tenured professor at a top B-school to devote her entire research program to the study of creativity, is one of the country's foremost explorers of business innovation.

Eight years ago, Amabile took her research to a daring new level. Working with a team of PhDs, graduate students, and managers from various companies, she collected nearly 12,000 daily journal entries from 238 people working on creative projects in seven companies in the consumer products, high-tech, and chemical industries. She didn't tell the study participants that she was focusing on creativity. She simply asked them, in a daily email, about their work and their work environment as they experienced it that day. She then coded the emails for creativity by looking for moments when people struggled with a problem or came up with a new idea.

"The diary study was designed to look at creativity in the wild," she says. "We wanted to crawl inside people's heads and understand the features of their work environment as well as the experiences and thought processes that lead to creative breakthroughs."

Amabile and her team are still combing through the results. But this groundbreaking study is already overturning some long-held beliefs about innovation in the workplace. In an interview with Fast Company , she busted six cherished myths about creativity. (If you want to quash creativity in your organization, just continue to embrace them.) Here they are, in her own words.

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types

When I give talks to managers, I often start by asking, Where in your organization do you most want creativity? Typically, they'll say R&D, marketing, and advertising. When I ask, Where do you not want creativity? someone will inevitably answer, "accounting." That always gets a laugh because of the negative connotations of creative accounting. But there's this common perception among managers that some people are creative, and most aren't. That's just not true. As a leader, you don't want to ghettoize creativity; you want everyone in your organization producing novel and useful ideas, including your financial people. Over the past couple of decades, there have been innovations in financial accounting that are extremely profound and entirely ethical, such as activity-based costing.

The fact is, almost all of the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work. Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells. Intrinsic motivation -- people who are turned on by their work often work creatively -- is especially critical. Over the past five years, organizations have paid more attention to creativity and innovation than at any other time in my career. But I believe most people aren't anywhere near to realizing their creative potential, in part because they're laboring in environments that impede intrinsic motivation. The anecdotal evidence suggests many companies still have a long way to go to remove the barriers to creativity.

2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator

The experimental research that has been done on creativity suggests that money isn't everything. In the diary study, we asked people, "To what extent were you motivated by rewards today?" Quite often they'd say that the question isn't relevant -- that they don't think about pay on a day-to-day basis. And the handful of people who were spending a lot of time wondering about their bonuses were doing very little creative thinking.

Bonuses and pay-for-performance plans can even be problematic when people believe that every move they make is going to affect their compensation. In those situations, people tend to get risk averse. Of course, people need to feel that they're being compensated fairly. But our research shows that people put far more value on a work environment where creativity is supported, valued, and recognized. People want the opportunity to deeply engage in their work and make real progress. So it's critical for leaders to match people to projects not only on the basis of their experience but also in terms of where their interests lie. People are most creative when they care about their work and they're stretching their skills. If the challenge is far beyond their skill level, they tend to get frustrated; if it's far below their skill level, they tend to get bored. Leaders need to strike the right balance.

3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity

In our diary study, people often thought they were most creative when they were working under severe deadline pressure. But the 12,000 aggregate days that we studied showed just the opposite: People were the least creative when they were fighting the clock. In fact, we found a kind of time-pressure hangover -- when people were working under great pressure, their creativity went down not only on that day but the next two days as well. Time pressure stifles creativity because people can't deeply engage with the problem. Creativity requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up. In fact, it's not so much the deadline that's the problem; it's the distractions that rob people of the time to make that creative breakthrough. People can certainly be creative when they're under the gun, but only when they're able to focus on the work. They must be protected from distractions, and they must know that the work is important and that everyone is committed to it. In too many organizations, people don't understand the reason for the urgency, other than the fact that somebody somewhere needs it done today.

4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs

There's this widespread notion that fear and sadness somehow spur creativity. There's even some psychological literature suggesting that the incidence of depression is higher in creative writers and artists -- the de-pressed geniuses who are incredibly original in their thinking. But we don't see it in the population that we studied.

We coded all 12,000 journal entries for the degree of fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, joy, and love that people were experiencing on a given day. And we found that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. The entries show that people are happiest when they come up with a creative idea, but they're more likely to have a breakthrough if they were happy the day before. There's a kind of virtuous cycle. When people are excited about their work, there's a better chance that they'll make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day's happiness often predicts the next day's creativity.

5. Competition Beats Collaboration

There's a widespread belief, particularly in the finance and high-tech industries, that internal competition fosters innovation. In our surveys, we found that creativity takes a hit when people in a work group compete instead of collaborate. The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that's destructive because nobody in an organization has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization

Maybe it's only the public-relations departments that believe downsizing and restructuring actually foster creativity. Unfortunately, I've seen too many examples of this kind of spin. One of my favorites is a 1994 letter to shareholders from a major U.S. software company: "A downsizing such as this one is always difficult for employees, but out of tough times can come strength, creativity, and teamwork." Of course, the opposite is true: Creativity suffers greatly during a downsizing. But it's even worse than many of us realized. We studied a 6,000-person division in a global electronics company during the entire course of a 25% downsizing, which took an incredibly agonizing 18 months. Every single one of the stimulants to creativity in the work environment went down significantly. Anticipation of the downsizing was even worse than the downsizing itself -- people's fear of the unknown led them to basically disengage from the work. More troubling was the fact that even five months after the downsizing, creativity was still down significantly.

Unfortunately, downsizing will remain a fact of life, which means that leaders need to focus on the things that get hit. Communication and collaboration decline significantly. So too does people's sense of freedom and autonomy. Leaders will have to work hard and fast to stabilize the work environment so ideas can flourish. Taken together, these operating principles for fostering creativity in the workplace might lead you to think that I'm advocating a soft management style. Not true. I'm pushing for a smart management style. My 30 years of research and these 12,000 journal entries suggest that when people are doing work that they love and they're allowed to deeply engage in it -- and when the work itself is valued and recognized -- then creativity will flourish. Even in tough times.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/creativity.html

# posted by Resty Odon @ 9:31 AM 0 comments

Thu Dec 9, 4:57 PM ET U.S. National - AP

By RICHARD N. OSTLING, AP Religion Writer

NEW YORK - A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God — more or less — based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.

Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.

Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"

The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.

The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.

The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.

This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Books.

Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."

Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife.

Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew's reversal, "apart from curiosity, I don't think it's like a big deal."

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.

Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.

Another landmark was his 1984 "The Presumption of Atheism," playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 10:51 AM 0 comments

(Filed: 19/07/2003) Tel.uk

As the Heritage Lottery Fund decides whether to pay £20 million to save Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks for the nation, Peter Mandler and Lottery Fund chairman Liz Forgan explain what can be done about the new 'art drain'

Any day now the Heritage Lottery Fund will announce its decision on a grant to the National Gallery in the region of £20 million in order to buy Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks. The choices are stark.

Under threat: Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks

Either this ransom is paid from public funds to the trustees of the Duke of Northumberland, or it gets on a jet plane to reside for ever at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Either way, the Duke wins what he considers to be his just deserts: the full market value for the painting. And why shouldn't he?

In a robust self-defence in The Daily Telegraph in January, the Duke listed his many voluntary contributions to the public weal, but insisted that in the end he had a right - and his trustees a legal duty - to dispose of his private property on the open market just as he wished.

We seem in these matters to have reverted to "Victorian values" - it's my property and I'll do what I like with it. In this case, the Duke argues that he will use the money earned to protect other parts of the "national heritage" (his houses and estates at Syon and Alnwick), but it's his decision whether and how to do so.

The idea of "national heritage" as something in which the public has a real stake, and not just a peek loaned to it by noblesse oblige, has gone by the board. Yet not that long ago the dukes were on the other side, begging the nation to embrace their houses and pictures as "national heritage". A little history is in order to remind us why they thought that then, why they've changed their minds since, and what we ought to do about it now.

Until the end of the 19th century, only a few radicals dared to suggest that the aristocracy's possessions were anything but their private property. When Americans began to buy up the choicest works of art around 1900, and some little protests were kicked up in aesthetic circles about the "art drain", the dukes were outraged that anyone would dare even to discuss their personal transactions.

"Mind your own business," they said, and the public more or less accepted this state of affairs. The only "control" on export was the willingness of the public to stump up the full market price, and charitable bodies such as the National Art Collections Fund and the National Trust tried - often unsuccessfully - to raise funds for the purpose.

All changed over the course of the 20th century, for one main reason: tax. To pay for the world wars and the welfare state, governments jacked up the rate of inheritance tax. Among those hardest hit were aristocrats with a lot of capital (mostly in the form of land and art) and little income. Art lovers saw their chance.

Shouldn't the most mobile forms of capital - pictures especially - be regarded as "national heritage" and therefore exempted from inheritance tax if unsold, to keep them in the country? Aristocrats were slow to respond to this argument. The tax exemption would have to be paid back when the asset was sold, so what was the point of having it?

Gradually, as the rates for inheritance tax (then known as estate duty) crept up and up, to a top rate of 75 per cent by 1946, the aristocrats came to embrace the idea, at least as a survival strategy. They stopped saying "mind your own business" and learned to speak the new language of "national heritage".

"When a man's house is scheduled as a national monument, he ceases to be a householder in the ordinary sense of the word," argued the Marquess of Salisbury in 1953, seeking more tax exemptions.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, a formidable body of such exemptions was built up for property defined as national heritage. These exemptions pleased the owners, who got relief from very high tax rates, and they pleased the public, who got a stake in the "national heritage" and secured it against export.

Since the 1980s, of course, all tax rates have come down, and the dukes have changed their tune. It is once again worth their while to sell, so they want to sell. The Duke of Northumberland wants to go back to being "an ordinary householder", who can do what he likes with his private property.

That is fair enough. It is dukes doing what they do best - protecting the long-term interest of their estates - just as it was in their interest to play the "national heritage" card when taxes were high. But in the meantime, the rest of us - the nation whose heritage it is - have taken our eyes off the ball.

When in the 1950s government briefly considered placing controls on the export of works of art, it was thought that the tax system was doing the job and no further controls were needed. The "export licence" scheme only set up an early warning system, giving the government notice when owners proposed to sell for export their important works of art.

But sales of this kind were less likely to arise so long as high taxes meant that owners kept very little of the proceeds. When owners did sell, they often sold to the national collections, thanks to a largely informal system whereby owners were let off some of the tax if they sold to national collections instead of to foreigners. This bribe, sweetly dubbed the "douceur", meant that selling to national collections at a discount was the best way to realise capital.

With tax rates lowered, the system no longer works. Owners can pay all the inheritance and capital gains tax owing and still reap a substantial sum from a foreign buyer; in the case of the Raphael, the Duke of Northumberland may get £27 million after tax. National collections can't compete at that level, and at lower rates of tax the "douceur" is too low to give them much leverage.

That is why we are seeing today a seemingly uncontrollable rash of alarms over the export of works of art, the most recent being Joseph Wright's portrait of Richard Arkwright junior and Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Omai. The owners have noticed that the rules of the game have changed, but the public hasn't.

What might be done? If we want to keep the free market, then the Lottery Fund has to pick up the slack and give the national collections the resources to compete. Otherwise there may never be any substantial additions to the national collections ever again.

Alternatively, or additionally, government needs to give the "national heritage" more attention. In the current climate, it's unlikely that tax rates will rise to act as a deterrent to export, although more could be done to make the "douceur" effective even at lower tax rates. So government ought to revisit the whole question of defining and preserving the "national heritage".

What is it? What are the public's rights and responsibilities in relation to it? Are private owners of the heritage just "ordinary" property owners, or do they have responsibilities too? What do other countries do?

If we don't now consider all of these questions, which the high tax regime allowed us to ignore for most of the last century, then we must gird ourselves for another, final "art drain".

*** Peter Mandler is university lecturer and fellow in history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is the author of 'The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home'

# posted by Resty Odon @ 9:34 AM 0 comments

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

If walking upright first set early human ancestors apart from their ape cousins, it may have been their eventual ability to run long distances with a springing step over the African savanna that influenced the transition to today's human body form, two researchers are reporting today.

The evolution of physiques for distance running made humans look the way we do now, whether winning a marathon, nursing a strained Achilles tendon or sitting on an ample gluteus maximus in front of the TV.

Endurance running, unique to humans among primates and uncommon in all mammals other than dogs, horses and hyenas, apparently evolved at least two million years ago and probably let human ancestors hunt and scavenge over great distances. That was probably decisive in the pursuit of high-protein food for development of large brains.

The apparently crucial role of running in human evolution has been largely overlooked in previous research. But today, the two scientists, Dr. Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah and Dr. Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard, report in the journal Nature that their analysis of the fossil record found striking anatomical evidence for the capability of prolonged running in the Homo genus, beginning about two million years ago.

"Today, endurance running is primarily a form of exercise and recreation, but its roots may be as ancient as the origin of the human genus," the scientists conclude in the article.

Dr. Bramble, a professor of biology and a specialist in the biomechanics of animal locomotion, said, "Running made us human, at least in an anatomical sense," adding that he and Dr. Lieberman were "very confident that strong selection for running was instrumental in the origin of the modern human body form."

Paleontologists not involved in the research praised the hypothesis as an important insight into the apparent significance of long-distance running in human survival and evolution. But they raised questions about what stimulated the physical transition that led to this human capability.

By two million years ago, Dr. Bramble and Dr. Lieberman noted, early species of the Homo family, notably Homo erectus, had long, slender legs for greater strides. They had shorter arms and a narrower rib cage and pelvis. Their skulls included features to help prevent overheating. A ligament attached to the base of the skull kept their heads steady as they ran.

Although tissues do not fossilize, traces of muscle and tendon attachment points on bones of early species revealed an extensive network of springy tendons along the back of the legs and feet, including a well-developed Achilles tendon that anchored calf muscles to the heel bone. Tendons served to store and release elastic energy during running but were not needed for ordinary walking.

And there was the gluteus maximus, the muscle of the buttocks. Earlier human ancestors, like chimpanzees today, had pelvises that could support only a modest gluteus maximus, nothing like the strong buttocks of Homo.

"Have you ever looked at an ape?" Dr. Bramble said. "They have no buns."

Dr. Lieberman, a paleontologist, explained: "Your gluteus maximus stabilizes your trunk as you lean forward in a run. A run is like a controlled fall, and the buttocks help to control it."

The scientists compiled a list of 26 traits connected with running that early Homo specimens exhibited. It was a result of 13 years of research that started with watching pigs running on a treadmill.

"Dennis and I noticed how the pigs can't hold their heads still while running," Dr. Lieberman recalled. "Any good human runner keeps his head still because of the nuchal ligament, a tendon in the back of the neck."

The scientists learned that all accomplished running animals, modern or fossil, had a mark in the skull where the nuchal ligament had been. They found it in early Homo specimens, but not in Australopithecus, the genus that lived more than three million years ago and included the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy skeleton.

"That was an epiphany for us," Dr. Lieberman said.

Dr. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said the Bramble-Lieberman hypothesis was "a pretty compelling picture of the importance of running in human evolution, and overall, I'm very impressed."

Dr. Rightmire, who did not participate in the research, said the hypothesis made sense if the evolutionary focus was limited to Africa, particularly the increasingly open grasslands, where ancestral Homo specimens were more likely to have tall, lithe bodies. But "the picture is less clear," he said, among the early Homo erectus migrants out of Africa, many of whom appear to have been small and stocky.

The two scientists speculated in the article and in interviews that running by early human ancestors was more than simply a natural step, so to speak, beyond upright walking. These apelike ancestors, the scientists noted, were walking almost three million years before they became runners and began to assume more modern physiques.

In such ancestors as Australopithecus, the physical characteristics favoring running were either absent or underdeveloped. They had short legs, long forearms and high, permanently shrugged shoulders. The fossil record is scant in the million-year transitional period between most australopithecines and the emergence of Homo erectus.

Somehow, the scientists continued, those early ancestors who developed primitive running attributes must have improved their chances of survival and reproduction. They were not as swift in a sprint for prey as their contemporary four-legged competitors. But their ability to run greater distances than other predators must have been an advantage in making a kill or at least scavenging the kills of their swifter rivals.

In the journal article, the scientists suggested that endurance running "may have made possible a diet rich in fats and proteins thought to account for the unique human combination of large bodies, small guts, big brains and small teeth."

But the scientists conceded that it might be difficult to establish to what extent the running capability proved useful in hunting and scavenging.

Dr. Alan Walker, a paleoanthropologist at Penn State University who has excavated Homo erectus specimens in Africa, said the new research on long-distance running had yet to explain the stimulus for the transition in anatomy and the specific importance of the change to early human survival - whether it might have been for hunting, scavenging or escaping predators.

About one consequence of the evolved running physique there is little doubt. Running came to early Homo at a cost: the loss of physical traits useful for climbing trees for refuge and food. By this time, however, the climate and the landscape were changing, scientists have learned, and the woodlands of East Africa were giving way to arid grasslands and miles of running room.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 8:30 AM 0 comments