Archaeology Magazine - Slideshow - The Islamic Stepwells of Gujarat, India

Archaeology Magazine - Slideshow - The Islamic Stepwells of Gujarat, India

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She credited Cave with giving her the confidence to express herself artistically, saying: "He taught me to never veer too far from who I am, but to go further, try different things, and never lose sight of myself at the core. For me, the hard part was unleashing the core of myself and being totally truthful in my music."

"Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free." -Rumi

Cayetano - Fairy Tales

weaving into the fabric of my self-evolution...

Madonna, my partner in aging

When I was a stripper, I danced to her songs. Now, in my 40s, she's leading me into a new adventure: Middle age

By Christine Macdonald

Saved by Pop Culture is a new series about the redemptive power of art. This piece originally appeared on Christine Macdonald's Open Salon blog.

The first time I heard Madonna sing she was telling me to get up and do my thing. I was 14 and dancing with Mitch Ruben, one of my many high school crushes. We were barefoot, dancing on the grass in the backyard of Lori Morgan's house. I couldn't make eye contact so I just swayed to Madonna's "Everybody," looking at the clouds, the grass, the sky, my feet. My mouth closed, I traced my braces with the tip of my tongue underneath my upper lip, snapping my fingers and feeling alive. High on hormones and Fresca, I lost myself in the lyrics: Let the music take control / Find a groove and let yourself go / When the room begins to sway / You know what I'm trying to say.

By the time high school graduation rolled around, I was one of a slew of 17-year-old Madonna wannabes donning a forearm full of black rubber bracelets, fake rosary beads and lace headbands. The song "Holiday" became my personal anthem, my break from the anguish of everyday teenage life.



In my 20s, working as a stripper, I danced to "Like a Prayer" without once thinking of the irony; if Madonna could burn crosses in her video, surely a naked dancer could give the pole a spin. "Vogue" was another stripping favorite of mine. I posed onstage like I was in one of her videos, letting my body groooove to the music.

After seeing the documentary "Truth or Dare," my Madonna obsession escalated. When rubbing elbows with the other club-hoppers in Waikiki, I wore fishnet tights complete with hot pants and a black, mesh body suit with a black bra underneath.

A couple of years later I met one of Madge's backup dancers at a club. I took it as a personal message that he was coming on to me and slept with him almost immediately. After the walk of shame in his hotel (a scene completely reminiscent of "Justify My Love"), I phoned my best friend (a gay dude, naturally) and we giggled for hours.

After an earth-shaking heartbreak in 1998, I shed countless tears to "Power of Goodbye" -- only to feel cleansed and stronger after repeating her lyrics: Freedom comes when you learn to let go / Creation comes when you learn to say no / There's no greater power than the power of good-bye. She just got me.

I'm now in my early 40s and, although my wild days are behind me, I am still influenced by Madonna. On the treadmill I think of her toned body as I try to visualize my old stripper self underneath the coat of cellulite and body fat. "Jump" reminds me to focus: I haven't got much time to waste, it's time to make my way. And I push myself just a little bit harder.

To some, she's too radical. Others may say she's tired. But for me, she'll always be part of my pop culture DNA, an artist who weaved her way through the fabric of my self-evolution timeline without ever missing a beat.

Lovely Lynn

Just a Maid in Movies, but Not Forgotten
By MANOHLA DARGIS
FOR Lynn Nottage, the aha moment that led to “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” her new play about race, sex, fame and the dream — and crushing reality — of Hollywood, was unexpected. She was watching “Baby Face,” a delectably sordid 1933 studio film about an Übermensch in silk stockings played by Barbara Stanwyck, who climbs to the top one bed at a time.

But it wasn’t the star who caught Ms. Nottage by surprise, it was the woman next to her: Theresa Harris, the African-American beauty with the honey voice and sly look who was holding her own against Stanwyck and taking up precious screen space.

This wasn’t one of those nearly invisible black actresses who filled Hollywood movies in the years before the civil rights era, the woman at the edge of the screen announcing visitors and taking hats. Harris’s character is a maid, but she’s also Stanwyck’s companion, and something of a friend. Entranced by both the character and actress, Ms. Nottage started wondering about Harris — who she was and how she got to Hollywood and the types of films she had been able to make in that notoriously inhospitable town. “I was struck,” she said of the performance, “by how different it was from so many of the other representations of African-American women that I had seen from that period.”

Curious to know more, she set off on an intellectual investigation that became an aesthetic revelation, as she searched for Harris’s traces in the Hollywood histories of African-Americans, in biographies, online, on YouTube and DVD. She didn’t find much, save for movies like “The Flame of New Orleans,” a period confection directed by René Clair in which Harris somewhat reprises her role in “Baby Face,” but with more lines and real glamour shots. With little to go on but the movies, Ms. Nottage began filling in the blanks with her imagination. The result is “By the Way,

Meet Vera Stark,” an imaginary history that, like other of Ms. Nottage’s plays, weaves the personal with the political. Now in previews at the Second Stage Theater, it opens May 9.

Ms. Nottage, 46, has a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Pulitzer for her play “Ruined,” about women in war-ravaged Congo. These bona fides suggest a level of intimidating gravitas, but this is also a woman who, I discovered when we met one afternoon in March in a Midtown apartment, greatly enjoys gabbing about old movies. She had just come from rehearsals for “Vera Stark,” which stars Sanaa Lathan, best known for movies like “Love and Basketball,” as Vera; Jo Bonney is the director. Ms. Nottage arrived with a small wheeled suitcase that she uses to haul around her scripts and a handful of DVDs for us to sample. As I fumbled with the player she talked about “Vera Stark” and how it had been inspired by watching Stanwyck and Harris.

Tellingly, Ms. Nottage couldn’t remember the name of Stanwyck’s character (Lily Powers), but she did remember Harris’s: Chico. It’s no wonder. From the moment Harris, whose character works in a speakeasy alongside Stanwyck’s, appears on-screen, leaning over a pile of dishes and singing “St. Louis Blues,” she draws your eyes to her. Your interest deepens soon after, when Lily’s abusive father fires Chico for breaking some dishes. “If Chico goes, I go,” Stanwyck snarls.

“I love that moment,” Ms. Nottage said, with a small laugh. “This is what first gave me pause, seeing that moment — wow, this is going to be a different experience.”

For a while it is. Because while Stanwyck is unquestionably the star, Harris has real screen time: she’s attractively lighted, and stands and sits side by side with Stanwyck like the intimates they convincingly play. The relationship shifts after Lily sleeps to the top and Chico starts wearing a maid’s uniform (if sometimes a white fur muff and stole). They can’t “occupy the same universe once Lily moves into society,” Ms. Nottage said.

Directed by Alfred E. Green in 1933, a year before the production code was strictly imposed, “Baby Face,” with its brazenly sexual lead, was too racy to make it into theaters uncensored. Its offending sections were excised and remained unseen by general audiences until 2004 when a curator at the Library of Congress found an uncensored copy, adding another gem to the “precode” DVD catalog.

The film’s frank, even brutal portrayal of sex is what knocked me out the first time I saw it. Here, after all, is a studio film about a sexually abused young working-class woman (Lily) who, inspired by a lecture from a Nietzsche-reading cobbler, takes her revenge on men. What I didn’t see, however, and what Ms. Nottage showed me as we watched the film, was something nearly as startling: Theresa Harris.

Harris’s character isn’t merely an embellishment in “Baby Face”: she has important lines, a strong presence and — this is crucial given how black women could be made into grotesques and comically desexualized — lovely, at times glamorous. The director wants us to see her as the beautiful woman she was, and I was taken aback that I hadn’t really noticed her before. Watching Harris, I realized that when I had looked at women’s pictures, those five-hankie weepies, the only women I had seen before were white. I’m not alone. Most academic books about women in film are really about white women in film.

These were the other women in women’s pictures: the black cooks, nurses and maids, maids, maids who, breaking out of the margins if only a little, joked with Mae West, fretted about Claudette Colbert and stood by white woman after white woman, scolding them and appealing to their better selves if every so often, like Chico, also playing their laughing co-conspirator. Sometimes they didn’t have names, and they didn’t necessarily make it into the credits. Still, they were there. And they did what they could with what they were given, a strategy that Ms. Nottage illustrates when Vera tells a friend that the Southern epic she has her eye on doesn’t just have slaves — it has “slaves, with lines.”

“Vera Stark” opens in 1933 with its title character helping rehearse her employer, a white actress, Gloria Mitchell, who’s up for the role of “the beautiful octoroon prostitute” in the fictional “Belle of New Orleans.” Vera, an actress who works as a domestic, lands her first important role as the prostitute’s sister and “devoted servant and companion” and over time achieves such a level of success that later observers (seen intermittently) debate her legacy. “She was shackled to the stage and paraded like chattel,” one character says of Vera’s time at the Folies Bergère. “She was doing what she loved,” another shouts. The play suggests that both are right.

Ms. Nottage seems less interested in rescuing the African-American actresses who were her inspirations than in arguing for the complexity of their images. She sees films like “Baby Face” and movies made before the code was enforced as presenting a more realistic vision of race in America than many later films simply because they show blacks and whites existing alongside one another. “If that code hadn’t set in,” Ms. Nottage speculates, “the whole trajectory of Hollywood would have been different, and some would argue that race in America would be different because the representations of people of color and particularly of women would have been much more expansive.”

It didn’t happen that way, of course, and there was nothing that Harris — who died in 1985 but about whom little else has been written — and actresses like Fredi Washington and Nina Mae McKinney could do to stop history’s tide. Yet, like the quietly biting title of “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” — with its suggestion of a life that’s seen as an afterthought — meaning can run deeper than its surfaces initially suggest. Look at an old Hollywood movie and you may see a woman playing a maid. Ms. Nottage wants us to look harder.

“As an actress, she was progressive,” she said of Harris. “She was asserting her presence in the films. I wouldn’t argue that it’s entirely directors. I would argue that there’s something this woman did that was unique — that demanded directors pay attention.”

thanks Sarai :)

The Laughter Cure
Laugh more and you'll be healthier and happier.

By Rachele Kanigel

As I lie on a wooden floor stretched out in Savasana, my mind is calm after an hour of vigorous exercise and deep breathing. The people around me are still and the room is quiet, save for the sounds of slow, gentle inhalation and exhalation. It could be the final moments of any yoga class. But then the man next to me suddenly lets out a thunderous guffaw. Across the room, a woman giggles in response. Soon the entire room is alive with sound—chortles and chuckles, hearty laughs and howling hoots.

The whole evening has been filled with such eruptions of laughter, some spontaneous, some scripted. In fact, Madan Kataria, the leader of this class, has promised to make us all laugh harder, more deeply, and more fully than we’ve ever laughed before.

Kataria, a physician from Mumbai, India, is the founder of and chief proselytizer for Laughter Yoga, a movement that since 1995 has spawned 5,000 laughter clubs—in which people meet regularly just to laugh—worldwide. To date there are just 200 or so clubs in the United States, including ones in Atlanta; New York; Orlando, Florida; St. Louis; and Tucson, Arizona. But Kataria hopes to change that over the next few years, by training more teachers. “Our objective is to build an international community of people who believe in love and laughter,” Kataria says. About 20 people—yoga instructors and health care providers, retirees and middle-aged people looking for a new life path—have gathered in a spacious 1910 Craftsman bungalow near Pasadena, California, for this workshop. The five-day training includes sessions on the health benefits of laughter, starting and running a laughter club, and working with particular populations, such as children and the elderly. But most of the time is spent on what Kataria calls his “breakthrough technology”: exercises designed to get people to laugh for no reason. These, combined with simple yoga breathing techniques and “laughter meditation,” are the heart of Laughter Yoga. Though little clinical research has been done to date, Kataria promises that Laughter Yoga relieves stress, boosts immunity, fights depression, and eventually makes people into more positive thinkers. On the opening day of the training, Kataria, 50, greets his disciples dressed in kurta pyjamas, the traditional Indian tunic and pants. His elegant silk ensemble, combined with his erect posture, gives him the look of an Indian prince. That, or a priest, because when he walks into the room, many look to him with almost religious devotion.

How Laughter Heals
In his introductory remarks, Kataria explains why laughter is good for the body. “When you start laughing, your chemistry changes, your physiology changes, your chances to experience happiness are much greater,” he says. “Laughter Yoga is nothing more than prepping the body and mind for happiness.”

Kataria goes on to explain that laughter has two sources, one from the body, one from the mind. Adults tend to laugh from the mind. “We use judgments and evaluations about what’s funny and what isn’t,” he says. Children, who laugh much more frequently than adults, laugh from the body. “They laugh all the time they’re playing. Laughter Yoga is based on cultivating your childlike playfulness. We all have a child inside us wanting to laugh, wanting to play.”

The idea that laughter has beneficial effects is not new. Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review, documented his own laughter cure in the 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient. Cousins had been diagnosed in the mid-1960s with ankylosing spondylitis, a painful degenerative disease of the connective tissue that left him weak and barely able to move. Doctors gave him a 500-to-1 chance of recovery. But instead of undergoing conventional treatments, Cousins checked out of the hospital and into a hotel, where he set up a film projector and played funny movies. He took massive doses of vitamin C and submitted himself to hours of the Marx Brothers. “I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect,” he wrote, “and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep.”

Cousins recovered and lived for another 26 years. And, in part inspired by his experience, a handful of scientists began researching the healing power of laughter.

One of them was William Fry, then a psychiatrist at Stanford University. In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Fry documented some of the health benefits of what he calls “mirthful laughter.” In a series of studies, Fry and his colleagues found that laughter increases circulation, stimulates the immune system, exercises the muscles, and even invigorates the brain. Other researchers have found that laughter reduces stress hormones and may even help prevent heart disease.

But can fake laughter—laughter devoid of humor, laughter that’s forced rather than spontaneous—have the same beneficial effects? Fry believes that aside from the mental stimulation that comes in the moment of discovery when you hear a good joke or appreciate a pun, the effects should be largely the same. “I think it’s definitely beneficial,” says Fry, who has heard about but hasn’t experienced Laughter Yoga. “I’m very much in favor of this program.”

Everyday laughter
Kataria himself was not always so jovial. As a young man, he admits, “I wanted to be rich and famous.” But later he hungered for something more. In 1995, Kataria was researching an article on the health benefits of laughter for a medical magazine he edited. In the middle of the night it struck him: If laughter is so good, why not make it part of people’s daily routine? The next morning he went to a public park near his home and began talking to people who were out for their morning walk. “I want to start a laughter club. Will you join me?” Most people brushed him off—“I’m too busy,” “That’s silly.” But his wife and three others agreed to try it. They took turns standing in the center of the group and telling jokes to make the others laugh.

Kataria kept going back to the park for these “laughter club” meetings. Members told silly jokes, sexy jokes, vulgar jokes. And the club grew. Passersby would see the group of laughing people in the park and join in. But after a few weeks, people got tired of hearing the same jokes. So Kataria decided to try something new: laughter without humor. “We’re looking for the purest form of laughter,” he says.

Over time, Kataria developed a series of laughter exercises, most involving interactions with other people. Since he had practiced yoga for many years and his wife, Madhuri, was a yoga teacher, Kataria integrated stretching and yoga breathing techniques—particularly deep diaphragmatic breathing and prolonged exhalation—into the laughter sessions. He coined the term “Hasya Yoga.” (Hasya is the Sanskrit word for laughter.)

Kataria has since taken Laughter Yoga to schools and orphanages, prisons, senior homes, institutions for people with disabilities, and corporations. Though he charges for teacher training sessions, he decided not to license the Laughter Yoga brand, and most certified teachers offer sessions for free or a nominal fee.

Banishing Stress
Back at the training, Kataria begins the Laughter Yoga session with his standard warm-ups. He starts by having people clap rhythmically and chant, “Ho, ho, ha, ha, ha” several times. Then he tells us to take a series of deep breaths, filling our lungs with air and releasing with a big laugh. Next come the laughter exercises. We are to go around the room and greet each person with a laugh. He encourages us to look into other people’s eyes and says not to worry if the laughter feels forced. “If you can’t laugh, fake it,” he says. “The body doesn’t know the difference between real laughter and fake laughter.”

I can’t help but feel a little ridiculous, laughing my way around a room full of strangers. As I gaze into each person’s eyes, I try to figure out if they are really laughing or, like me, just faking it. I think I catch a knowing, are-we-really-doing-this? glance from one woman. But after a few minutes, many of my classmates seem to be genuinely laughing. One woman, Lucia Mejia, is practically rolling on the floor during some of the exercises, her body convulsed with laughter.

“I’ve never laughed like that,” Mejia says later. A nurse from Southern California, she had impulsively signed up for the workshop after attending a lecture by Kataria the previous evening. “That night was a breakthrough, a life-transforming experience for me,” she says. Mejia, who was traumatized as a child, says she had developed a defensive approach to the world. “People would ask me, ‘Why are you so angry?’ It was like I had a mask on. Laughter Yoga broke through my body’s memories, to the point where my facial expressions changed.”

Jeffrey Briar, a boyish-looking man with an infectious giggle, says Laughter Yoga changed his life, too. He became certified to teach it in 2005 and founded a club that now meets daily in Laguna Beach, California. Though he has taught yoga for 33 years and has been trained in Ashtanga, Kundalini, Iyengar, Sivananda, and Integral Yoga, he says, “I’ve never been this enthusiastic about any technique.”

In addition to leading and attending daily Laughter Yoga sessions, Briar says he uses the techniques throughout the day to relieve tension. If he’s sitting in traffic or feeling upset, he’ll laugh. “I can laugh myself out of stress in as little as 20 seconds,” he says, and then demonstrates with an uproarious cackle.

In my two days of Laughter Yoga sessions, I never quite reach the point where my laughter “flows like a fountain from deep within,” as Kataria promised the first day. But I do get quite a workout. By the end of the second day, my belly aches from my exertions.

A few weeks after the training I’m in my car, driving my 12-year-old son, Dashiell, home from fencing class. It’s been a stressful day of deadlines, traffic jams, and nearly missed appointments, and when he says something annoying I’m tempted to snap at him. Instead, I throw my head back and let out a big laugh that reverberates deep in my belly.

“Laughter Yoga?” he asks with a smile. I nod my head and shoot him a big grin.

How do you laugh when nothing’s funny? Just open your mouth into a wide smile and force the breath out. You may feel silly at first, but when you’re in a group of people committed to laughing, the make-believe version often transforms into the real thing. A typical Laughter Yoga session involves some warm-up clapping and chanting (“Ho, ho, ha, ha, ha”), a few deep breaths with prolonged exhalation, 15 to 20 minutes of laughter exercises interspersed with deep breathing, and then 15 to 20 minutes of laughter meditation. Here’s a primer to help you get started:

Greeting Laughter Walk around to different people with palms pressed together at the upper chest in the Namaste greeting or shake hands and laugh, making sure to look into other people’s eyes.

Lion laughter Thrust out the tongue, widen the eyes, and stretch the hands out like claws while laughing.

Humming laughter Laugh with the mouth closed and hum.

Silent laughter Open your mouth wide and laugh without making a sound. Look into other people’s eyes and make funny gestures.

Gradient laughter Start by smiling and then slowly begin to laugh with a gentle chuckle. Increase the intensity of the laugh until you’ve achieved a hearty laugh. Then gradually bring the laugh down to a smile again.

Heart-to-heart laughter Move close to a person and hold each other’s hands and laugh. If people feel comfortable, they can stroke or hug each other.

To learn more about Laughter Yoga or to find a club near you, go to www.laughteryoga.org.

Rachele Kanigel is a writer in Oakland, California.

Art in the Time of War

Art in the Time of War
From the May-June 2011 issue | More Richard J. Evans | April 19, 2011

THE LOOTING of artifacts and cultural objects in times of war and violent political upheaval continues to arouse international concern in the twenty-first century just as it did in the twentieth. The plunder of archaeological sites in Egypt during the recent revolution (after they were abruptly abandoned by teams of archaeologists who were understandably concerned about their personal safety) is only the latest example. In Afghanistan and Iraq too, war was followed by the wholesale looting of museums and other sites, and it was not long before plundered objects began to find their way into collections in the West.

What can be done about the trade in looted art? How has society dealt with it in the past and how should it deal with it now? The history of this practice goes back far indeed, beginning perhaps with Jason and the Argonauts looting the Golden Fleece; and it continued with the Romans’ habit of looting art from conquered cities in order to parade it through the streets of Rome in the ceremonial procession of the Roman triumph before putting it on display in the Forum.

Cultural looting on a grand scale, with the stolen objects appropriated for public display in the conqueror’s capital, was in the ancient world an act of state designed to advertise the supremacy of the victor and underline the humiliation of the defeated. Here, these displays said, was a great power whose generals could best rich and well-resourced rival powers; they advertised both to the victorious state’s own citizens the rewards that could be gained from military conquest and to the rest of the world the inadvisability of coming into conflict with a state of such power and magnificence.

In Byzantium, the Hippodrome was adorned with looted art, and during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 the city itself was in turn looted by the crusaders, with large amounts of cultural booty taken back to Venice to adorn the Basilica of St. Mark—most notably, of course, the four gilded horses of the Apocalypse which can be seen in the city today. During the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish troops looted book collections across Europe to stock the university library at Uppsala. In other examples, such as the sack of Magdeburg in 1631, when the army of the Catholic Holy Roman emperor massacred the inhabitants of the rebellious Protestant town, wanton destruction as well as the theft of riches was carried out by individual soldiers for their own personal enrichment. Magdeburg, in fact, caused widespread shock and dismay across Europe; while early modern lawyers such as Grotius conceded that, provided a war was being fought for a just cause, any property seized from the enemy became the property of the individual or state that took it, they also urged moderation and insisted that soldiers needed the express permission of their commanding officer before engaging in looting of any kind.

Private looting indeed has always gone on side by side with state-sponsored spoliation, but it has also aroused more disapproval. Most notorious of all was Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman court. He obtained permission from the sultan to take away old pieces of stone from the Parthenon in Athens, then under Turkish rule, which he and his team did with such enthusiasm—and carelessness, breaking a number of the sculptures in the process—that several shiploads returned with them to Britain, where he intended to use them to decorate his home.

These are only the best known of a vast series of acquisitions of ancient archaeological remains in the nineteenth century, many of which were taken from territory occupied by the Ottoman Empire by purchase or agreement with the Ottoman authorities, often achieved through the use of bribery. Even at the time, Elgin’s action ran into widespread criticism, in England as well as from the nascent Greek independence movement—supported by Lord Byron with some of his most biting satirical verses. Defenders of such acquisitions argued above all that they would not be safe if they remained in situ, since local people were already quarrying many of these sites for building materials; critics argued that the remains were far more seriously damaged by those who took them to pieces in order to carry off the most valuable parts.

ELGIN’S ACTIONS reflected his belief that educated Englishmen were the true heirs of classical civilization, whose legacy permeated the minds of educated elites across Europe. This influence was nowhere greater than in revolutionary France, where Napoleon’s victorious armies began concluding a series of treaties with conquered states across Europe, notably the Treaty of Tolentino, signed by the pope in 1797, that allowed them to appropriate artworks to stock the Louvre Museum, founded in 1793. The loot carried off to Paris from all over Italy included the four horses of the Apocalypse from St. Mark’s in Venice and scores of ancient Greek statues, which entered the city in a Roman-style triumphal procession, accompanied by banners that read: “Greece relinquished them, Rome lost them, their fate has changed twice, it will never change again.” They were joined by Renaissance paintings, live camels and lions, and the entire papal archive. All this underlined the claim of Paris to be the new Rome. Only the French, so the proclamation went, were civilized enough to appreciate such treasures.

During the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, large quantities of antiquities were collected by a team of 167 scientists, scholars and artists shipped over to Africa by Napoleon. When he was defeated, the British claimed the collection—including the famous Rosetta stone—as booty, validated by the Treaty of Alexandria, and put it in the British Museum, where it remains. No one seems to have objected.

Spoils (or the decision as to what to do with them) still went to the winner, and after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the Prussians took back the artworks and cultural objects stolen from them by force. However, at this point, attitudes were already beginning to change. The Duke of Wellington, commander of the allied armies, resisting pleas from Britain’s prince regent to purchase some of the finer pieces for the royal collection, decided to arrange for the rest to be returned to the “countries from which,” he wrote, “contrary to the practice of civilised warfare, they had been torn during the disastrous period of the French Revolution and the tyranny of Buonaparte.” “The same feelings which induce the people of France to wish to retain the pictures and statues of other nations,” he added, “would naturally induce other nations to wish, now that success is on their side, that the property should be returned to their rightful owners.” In addition, he noted, returning it would underline to the French the scale and finality of their defeat, while keeping it in Paris might encourage them to believe that they were still the rightful masters of Europe.

In the event, only just over half of the looted objects were returned; the rest had been sent out to provincial museums in France, beyond the knowledge of the occupying allied armies. These events sparked widespread debate across Europe. Paradoxically, they led to a new determination by European states to found or expand museums and to send out expeditions to acquire ancient cultural artifacts, following the lead of Napoleon rather than that of Wellington. This new development, among others, led, for example, to the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum in 1816.

Nevertheless, Wellington’s disapproval of military plunder did find an increasing number of supporters as the nineteenth century progressed. The duke himself thought that plunder distracted the troops from the military operations at hand and alienated the local population, which, as his experience in expelling Napoleon’s forces from Spain had shown, it was very important to keep on one’s side (at the time, Wellington had won over the locals by keeping his soldiers well disciplined, and in return, guerrilleros had fought alongside the British and the Portuguese).

This latter consideration played a significant role in the American Civil War, in which the Union wanted to avoid lasting damage to universities, museums and their collections in the South and so ordered that:

Classical works of art, libraries, scientific collections, or precious instruments, such as astronomical telescopes, as well as hospitals, must be secured against all avoidable injury, even when they are contained in fortified places whilst besieged or bombarded.

This was the first formal recognition that cultural property was different from other kinds of property and formed the basis for subsequent international declarations on the issue.

THE RISE of the nation-state brought with it a growing consciousness of the need to preserve the national heritage. The idea that the looting of cultural objects in wartime should be outlawed thus gained strength. European nations began to catalog and protect their own artifacts and valuables, and to take steps to preserve what was increasingly regarded as the common European cultural heritage, above all in Greece and Italy. Even the destruction and looting of the Chinese emperor’s Summer Palace in the Second Opium War in 1860 aroused widespread criticism in Europe. In 1874, the Brussels Declaration on the laws and customs of war outlawed the destruction of enemy property unless it was militarily required. These principles were elaborated at the first Hague Conference in 1899 and enshrined in the Hague Convention of 1907, to which Germany was a signatory (a significant point in view of events later in the century).

The Hague Convention explicitly banned what it called “pillage” and declared that an occupying country must act as the trustee of the property and possessions of the defeated state and its citizens. The problem was, however, that modern artillery warfare, high-explosive shells, and the sheer mass and weight of the military hardware then available made indiscriminate bombardment of towns and cities far easier than ever before. Meanwhile, the advent of democracy and mass nationalism had begun to transform the nature of warfare into a conflict not between professional armies but between whole nations and peoples, in which attacking the civilian population by means of economic blockade or, indeed, bombardment from the ground or air was becoming tacitly accepted, even though with the state of military technology at the time, accurate pinpointing of targets to avoid cultural monuments was more or less impossible.

In the First World War, zeppelins bombed London, and German and Austro-Hungarian shelling destroyed the Serbian National Museum in Belgrade. It proved impossible to stop actions such as the destruction of the Catholic University of Leuven’s library by the German army in 1914 along with sundry other, less famous monuments. On the other hand, actual looting, and in particular the theft or removal of works of art, was carried out on a fairly limited scale during the First World War, at least in comparison to what came after. The stalemate on the western front ensured that there was little opportunity for the occupying Germans to acquire works of art illicitly—Paris was well beyond the German zone, for instance—and few examples seem to be known of theft on the more mobile eastern front. The Hague Convention, signed so recently, still commanded some respect.

NOT FOR long. The Second World War saw the plunder, looting and spoliation of cultural objects in Europe to a degree that dwarfed anything seen even in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. World War I may not have witnessed much state-sponsored theft, but the upheaval of the conflict opened up a new world of expropriation on a general scale. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was followed by the wholesale confiscation of private property. And in Germany, the Nazis believed they had a right to take what their enemies—notably the trade unions and the socialists—owned, without compensation, which they did as soon as they came to power, following this with the stage-by-stage expropriation of the property of Germany’s Jews. In the struggle of all against all that social Darwinism (at least in the version the Nazis believed in) preached, might was right, and the defeated had no rights either to property or even ultimately to life.

In practice, of course, such beliefs legitimized not only formal practices of looting and expropriation by the Nazi Party and the German state but also random yet very widespread acts of individual theft, blackmail and extortion by ordinary party members, lower state officials, low-ranking storm troopers and, during the war, members of the armed forces. Not surprisingly, the Third Reich soon became a byword for corruption.

A few leading Nazis used their newly acquired fortunes to start building up large collections of art, both personal and institutional. Hermann Göring for instance owned ten houses, castles and hunting lodges, all provided and maintained at the taxpayers’ expense. In all these locations, and particularly in his vast and ever-expanding principal hunting lodge at Carinhall, named after his first wife, Göring wanted to display artworks, tapestries, paintings, sculptures and much else besides to emphasize his status as the Reich’s second man.

By contrast, the Reich’s first man, Adolf Hitler, made a point of avoiding ostentatious displays of personal wealth, preferring instead to accumulate an art collection for public use. Hitler had long planned to turn his hometown of Linz, in Austria, into the cultural capital of the new Reich, even drawing sketches for the new public buildings and museums he hoped to construct there. Berlin, too, had to have art museums suitable for its new status as “Germania,” the coming capital of the world. In 1939, Hitler engaged the services of an art historian, Hans Posse, a museum director in Dresden, to build the collection he needed for this purpose. Posse was provided with almost limitless funds, and by the middle of the war he was acquiring art objects (at manipulated prices and in defiance of individual countries’ laws) from all over German-occupied Europe, amassing an almost incredible total of more than eight thousand by the time of his death.

In March 1938, the Nazis invaded Austria. While German soldiers and Austrian Nazis broke into the homes of Jews, stealing whatever they wanted, or stopped Jewish women on the streets and divested them on the spot of their fur coats and jewelry, the SS and Gestapo made straight for the homes of Vienna’s most prominent Jewish families with orders to confiscate the contents.

Top of the list were the Rothschilds, whose collections were confiscated and then put up for auction to meet alleged tax liabilities—a common practice in the 1930s, made easier by 1939 through the imposition of special taxes and levies on German and Austrian Jews. Further regulations required Jewish emigrants to leave their assets behind if they emigrated, for appropriation by the Reich. After the conquest of France in 1940, too, the property of citizens who had fled the country also fell to the German Reich; the same applied eventually to all Jews deported from every occupied country in Europe to Auschwitz and other extermination camps in the east.

Looting was also widespread in countries inhabited by people the Nazis regarded as “subhuman.” German culture to the Nazi mind was intrinsically superior to that of others, and inferior races were capable neither of sustaining their own heritage nor of properly safeguarding the products of other cultures. Thus, German cultural artifacts had to be repatriated. Such beliefs were reminiscent of the French view, under Napoleon, that only France had the right to safeguard European culture, but of course the Nazis took this credo much further, gave it a racial twist and applied it in an extreme version of the nationalist ideology of the nineteenth century to their own alleged heritage rather than that of the classical world.

Following the German takeover in March 1939 of what remained of the Czech state after the Munich Agreement of the previous September, the invaders began confiscating objects without compensation from both public and private collections, including not only allegedly German items from the Czech National Museum and the library of Charles University in Prague but also from the palaces of the Hapsburg, Schwarzenberg and Lobkowitz families.

However, Hitler’s treatment of Czechoslovakia was relatively mild compared to that meted out to the Poles, whose country he invaded in September 1939. Hitler vowed to wipe Polish culture and identity off the face of the earth. The German invaders carried off large quantities of cultural booty. Country houses along the invasion route were ransacked, and pressure was applied to their aristocratic owners to reveal the whereabouts of hidden treasures. On December 16, 1939, the German authorities ordered the compulsory registration of all artworks and cultural objects dating from before 1850, together with jewelry, musical instruments, coins, books, furniture and more from the same period, in the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich. These were duly confiscated, along with the vast majority of Polish property in these areas. The orders in effect constituted a license to Germans to loot what they wanted.

Nazi legal expert Hans Frank ruled the remainder of Poland, decorating his headquarters with stolen artworks and shipping trophies back to his home in Bavaria (when American troops arrived there in 1945, they found a Rembrandt, a Da Vinci, a fourteenth-century Madonna from Kraków, and looted vestments and chalices from Polish churches). Quarrels broke out as Hermann Göring tried to obtain pictures for himself, with Hans Frank objecting to the removal of prize finds from his headquarters. Perhaps this was not such a bad idea, however, since Frank had no idea how to display or preserve Old Masters, and was once reprimanded by Nazi art historian Kajetan Mühlmann for hanging a painting by Leonardo da Vinci above a radiator.

This process of looting and expropriation was repeated on an even-larger scale when Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Among the most famous of these items was the celebrated Amber Room given to Peter the Great by King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia and subsequently augmented by further gifts from his successor. The Soviets had taken away all the furniture and movable items but left the amber paneling in place, and the room, installed in the Catherine Palace in the town of Pushkin, was dismantled and returned to Königsberg in East Prussia where it was put on display; most of it was in all likelihood destroyed in the battle for Königsberg at the end of the war, and any items remaining in storage will by now have crumbled into dust. The Soviets of course had removed many cultural treasures out of reach of the invading armies. There were no great private collections left in the Soviet Union, since all had been confiscated by the Communist state, and the Germans never managed to conquer Moscow or St. Petersburg; but much still remained to be looted. Two hundred seventy-nine paintings were carried off from Kharkhov, then the third-largest city in the Soviet Union and the most populous the Nazis captured. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler requisitioned considerable quantities to decorate and furnish the planned SS headquarters at Wewelsburg.

THE SCALE of looting and expropriation practiced by the Germans between 1938 and 1945 was thus unprecedented—and its legacy carried on far beyond the Nazi defeat. The Bolsheviks, who had used Communist ideology to justify the mass confiscation of private property after 1917, were not unfamiliar with the practice, and the Nazis’ atrocities gave the opportunity, or excuse, for similar acts of plunder (both official and individual) by the incoming Red Army in the later stages of the war. In their hasty retreat, the Germans were forced to leave behind numerous collections, like others across Europe by this time placed for safekeeping in cellars, mines and other hiding places away from the heat of battle and the destructiveness of bombing raids. Special Soviet art-recovery units roamed the countryside searching for these hoards, and those they succeeded in finding were carried off to a special repository in Moscow. One and a half million cultural objects were eventually returned to East Germany with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic as an ally, or client state, of the Soviet Union after 1949.

But a good deal went astray. The mayor of the northwest German town of Bremen for example had sent the city’s art collection for safekeeping to a castle not far from Berlin, where Red Army troops found it. Arriving to inspect the collection, Viktor Baldin, a Russian architect enlisted in the Red Army, found the valuable works scattered around the countryside and did his best to recover them, in one case trading a Russian soldier a pair of boots for an etching by Albrecht Dürer. While Baldin kept the hundreds of drawings he had found, waiting for an opportunity to return his hoard to Bremen, other items from the same collection began to turn up on the art market at intervals; one dealer gave a Berlin woman 150 marks and a pound of coffee in return for a Cranach in 1956.

Eventually, when Mikhail Gorbachev inaugurated a more liberal regime in Russia, Baldin was able to petition the government to start negotiations for the collection’s return. The Bremen City Council offered a panel from the Amber Room taken by a German soldier who had been employed in packing it away, and a small number of other items were handed over, but this was not enough, and the Russians asked why they should give back looted art to Germany when so many of their own cultural treasures had disappeared or been destroyed as a result of the actions of the invading Nazi armies. Indeed, in 1998 the Russian Duma declared all the looted art state property, requiring an act of parliament to return it to the Germans. Controversy continues to rage in Russian political circles, and in the meantime, the bulk of the collection remains in the Hermitage; one thousand five hundred items from the Bremen state museum are still reckoned to be missing.

In the chaos and destruction of the last months of the war, many valuable cultural objects of all kinds were lost or destroyed. The Western Allies, not least as the result of pressure on the military authorities by concerned art experts in Britain and the United States, were acutely aware of the need to preserve the cultural heritage of Europe in the final phase of fighting—even before the D-day landings in 1944. Eisenhower’s supreme headquarters established a Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section, or MFAA, charged with locating and safeguarding cultural objects and preventing looting by Allied troops. U.S. officials everywhere began compiling lists of stolen art to prevent Nazis from keeping the works hidden and profiting on the art market once the memory of the war had faded. MFAA units followed the army into liberated towns, scoured castles and mines, and began storing artworks preparatory to returning them to their original owners.

Looted art found in Germany was stored at the Munich Central Collecting Point. A major operation soon began to return the works, and lorries and trains carried many thousands of paintings, drawings, sculptures, altarpieces and other objects across Europe back to their places of origin. The collecting points were finally closed down in 1951, when the remaining objects were handed over to a West German agency, which returned another million finds to their owners, three-quarters of them outside Germany, over the next ten years. The rest, some three thousand five hundred lots, were then distributed to German museums and other institutions from which they could, and can still, be claimed on presentation of the proper documentation.

Inevitably, a large number of pieces remained unaccounted for—at least twenty thousand of them according to one estimate. Most of these are small items—silver, jewelry, crockery and the like—or paintings and drawings by minor artists that are obscure enough to have escaped the attention of art experts. It may not have been simple to conceal well-known paintings by celebrated artists, but such items as these were far easier to hide away until the opportunity presented itself to bring them to sale. During the 1950s, art dealers were not particularly concerned about the provenance of the items they were asked to put up for auction: most of their effort went into establishing their authenticity. Large numbers of artworks were brought onto the market by people who had acquired them in a variety of dubious ways during the war, and then sold them on to institutions that in many cases bought them without knowing where they had come from.

Following the return of so much looted art to its owners in the aftermath of the war, the number of restitution actions and claims fell sharply during the 1950s. Furthermore, time limits on legal claims to the return of stolen goods existed, and still exist, in almost all European countries (Germany, thirty years; England, six years). Only two countries in Europe do not have such legislation: Poland, because of the sheer scale of the spoliation to which Polish collections were subjected during the war, and Greece, because of the Elgin Marbles. In essence, it became very difficult for former owners to obtain legal redress against the misappropriation of their possessions during a war that ended as long ago as 1945. The interest in restitution more or less died in the face of all these obstacles.

THEN, IN 1989–90, came the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. As court cases for the restitution of houses and businesses seized by the Communists from 1949 onward grew in number, compensation actions for loss and damage caused by the Nazi regime were launched, especially by former slave laborers. In the United States, and to some extent elsewhere as well, historical memory of the Holocaust moved to the mainstream of national culture, with memorial museums being founded in many cities, and increased attention in the mass media, reaching perhaps a high point with Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. The 1990s saw the renewal of war-crimes trials in some countries (although few in number and not uniformly successful). And Eastern European archives were opened for investigation, allowing many missing works to be traced.

Thus the art world reawakened to the problem of looted art after decades of treating it as a low priority. In December 1998, the new tone was set by the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, hosted by the U.S. Department of State with over forty national governments and numerous NGOs invited. The meeting built on the experience of the previous year’s international conference set up to deal with the question of Nazi gold, including that taken from the dental fillings of extermination-camp victims, much of which had found its way into the vaults of Swiss banks by the end of the war. The 1998 conference demanded the identification of all art confiscated by the Nazis, with a view to restoring it to its former owners on moral grounds even if they were not entitled to it legally. The commitments forged at the Washington Conference were followed up by similar agreements made by art-gallery and museum directors. There have been resolutions by international bodies such as the Council of Europe to similar effect. In this climate, the chances of claimants successfully securing the return of looted art were dramatically increased.

Considering the favorable environment for looted art’s return, many expected museums and galleries in the UK and elsewhere to be inundated with claims. But this has not happened. In many cases, the trail has gone cold, and evidence is almost by definition hard to obtain, since the cases in which claims were clear were often settled in the immediate aftermath of the war. Often the original owners are dead, and sometimes their heirs had been killed by the Nazis as well. Entire families perished in very large numbers in Auschwitz and the other death camps, and while institutions, museums and galleries possessed the knowledge, the resources and the evidence to mount actions to try and regain what they had lost, the same was seldom true of individuals. So only a small fraction of the artworks identified by museums and other bodies as of uncertain provenance during the years 1933 to 1945 have actually attracted claims. The UK Spoliation Advisory Panel set up in 2000 by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has dealt with little more than one case a year since then, though the steady trickle of claims shows no sign of drying up. In view of this trend, other countries such as the United States have been reluctant to follow suit and set up similar public bodies.

WHAT IS the future of preservation and restitution, then? As far as art taken from one country by another is concerned, as a general principle there is clearly a clash between any nation’s need to preserve and display its own cultural heritage and the global community’s need to learn about other cultures through universal museums like the Metropolitan or the British Museum. The way forward is surely to accept the validity of the universal museum, but to make exceptions where an object has been stolen relatively recently, or where it is of overwhelming cultural and historical importance to the nation or region from which it has been, whether legally or illicitly, removed.

In the process of righting the wrongs of the past, it is clearly not possible to achieve anything like adequate restitution on a global scale. The major thrust of the restitution effort has been directed toward reparation for the crimes committed by the Nazis, not least because the survivors and their immediate heirs are still among us. As professor Michael Marrus remarked in his recent study of the subject, “the Holocaust restitution campaign arose in highly unusual circumstances, unlikely to be replicated and unlikely therefore to affect other campaigns for justice for historic wrongs.” In the end, as he says:

Restitution is more about the present than about the past: it speaks to the survivors who are still among us . . . to the society at large for which such issues may be said to matter . . . and to a world in which injustice and wrongdoing are still too common—but for which, at the very least, we should have mechanisms available, when the carnage ends, to seek some measure of justice.

While there is a sincere and to some degree effective worldwide effort to restore art looted in the Nazi period, however, the international community has been signally unsuccessful in preventing looting and destruction from occurring during and immediately after new military conflicts. While there is now a mass of international legislation in place to preserve cultural artifacts in times of war, it is still very difficult to enforce it effectively. International intervention in conflicts like the Balkan wars of the 1990s is obviously difficult to organize and slow to implement. By the time it takes place, it may be too late. In the wake of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Serbian forces deliberately shelled the public library in Sarajevo in an attempt to obliterate the cultural and historical memory of Bosnia, while Croatian gunners knocked down the historic and symbolic bridge at Mostar and vandalized Serbian Orthodox churches in the places they conquered.

In the chaos following the invasion of Iraq by U.S. and allied troops in the early twenty-first century, the motivation for looting and destruction was not cultural genocide but private gain, coupled with military indifference. As the reporter Robert Fisk noted:

I was among the first to enter the looted Baghdad archaeological museum, crunching my way through piles of smashed Babylonian pots and broken Greek statues. I watched the Islamic library of Baghdad consumed by fire—14th and 15th century Korans embraced by flames so bright that it hurt my eyes to look into the inferno. And I have spent days trudging through the looters’ pits and tunnels of Samaria, vast cities dug up, their precious remains smashed open—thousands upon thousands of magnificent clay jars, their necks as graceful as a heron’s, all broken open for gold or hurled to one side as the hunters burrowed ever deeper for ever older treasures.

As Fisk explains: “Of 4,000 artefacts discovered by 2005 from the 15,000 objects looted from the Baghdad Museum two years earlier, a thousand were found in the United States . . . 600 in Italy,” many of them pillaged by order from private collectors and their agents. Greed, he noted, had been globalized. It is hard to resist the comparison with 1945, when the careful preparations made by the MFAA ensured that European cultural heritage was largely preserved and its looted assets returned to their rightful owners.

It is vital to learn the lessons of the Second World War and put effective arrangements in place in advance of future fighting to rescue and restore cultural objects and prevent looting. Such arrangements were not made in Iraq in 2003, and the devastation was vast. The international community cannot prevent looting and destruction in the course of civil unrest, but it can take steps to minimize it in cases of interstate conflicts. Above all, the art and museum world needs to be more vigilant in monitoring the trade in looted goods in the wake of conflicts such as those in Iraq or Afghanistan, and law-enforcement agencies need to step in with sanctions against those who encourage—or benefit—from it. In a globalized world, every state has, as the Hague Convention urged more than a century ago, a duty to act as the trustee of the culture of all nations, not just its own.

Lady Gaga Born This Way vs. Express Yourself (by @DollAndTheKicks) cover

NO QUESTION.

SMFH.

What an amateur...

SMH.


The biggest pop star in the world has had a mini-meltdown. Lady GaGa broke down in tears (as usual) during her recent interview with NME magazine after being questioned over the similarities between her hit “Born this Way” and Madonna’s classic “Express Yourself”.

A bit of it does sound quite a lot like ‘Express Yourself’, though, doesn’t it?

“I don’t think… I swear to you. I am not stupid enough to put out a record and be that moronic.”

The reference seemed so obvious that it had to be intentional because, as you say, you’re not stupid…

“No. Listen to me. Why the fuck…? I’m a songwriter. I’ve written loads of music. Why would I try to put out a song and think I’m getting one over on everybody? That’s retarded. What a completely ridiculous thing to even question me about. I will look you in your eyes and tell you that I am not dumb enough or moronic enough to think that you are dumb enough or moronic enough not to see that I would have stolen a melody. If you put the songs next to each other, side by side, the only similarities are the chord progression. It’s the same one that’s been in disco music for the last 50 years. Just because I’m the first fucking artist in 25 years to think of putting it on Top 40 radio, it doesn’t mean I’m a plagiarist, it means that I’m fucking smart. Sorry.”

The criticism did seem to take the wind out of the song’s sails.

“There’s a lot of people who want to see me fail. The minute they see something to shoot at, they shoot, and the bigger I become the bigger target I am. Nobody in this room at any point looked around and said ‘Oh my God, it’s ‘Express Yourself’. ‘ Not once. Listen. I swear to you. I can only be honest with you about it.”

What will people say about ‘Judas’?

“I dunno… I think they will really love it. (Starting to well up) I just don’t want my fans… I don’t know. This is exhausting. I just don’t wanna perpetuate that shit. I’m sure you want to address it but it’s just so ridiculous. I was just fucking shellshocked by it. It’s so funny to hear you say, ‘It must have been a homage’, I’m like, NO. When I homage, I fucking homage with a big sign saying I’ve done it. Why would I not do that now? (Sighs) I just like… I just have to say… (Starts crying) I feel like honestly that God sent me those lyrics and that melody. When you feel a message to give to the world and people are shooting arrows at it… there’s no way for something that pure to be wrong. (Reaches for Marilyn Monroe lighter) I need a cigarette.”

Who knew that it was so easy to send GaGa into meltdown mode?

It’s all very interesting to hear her swearing black and blue that the similarities were unintentional. Especially after the back ‘n’ forth that went on between GaGa and Madge after “Born this Way” premiered.

The drama started when Madonna randomly uploaded the 1989 VMAs performance of “Express Yourself” onto her official Youtube. GaGa subtly retaliated the next day by performing “Born this Way” at the Grammy awards rocking a similar version of Madonna’s iconic platinum ponytail from the Blonde Ambition tour, followed by an odd acceptance speech in which she thanked Whitney Houston for giving her the strength to write “Born this Way” — if you know your diva history, then you’d know that Whitney and Madonna were notorious enemies throughout the 1990s. Shade to the highest power.

GaGa followed up her Grammy performance by announcing on Jay Leno that Madonna and her team e-mailed her their blessings over “Born this Way”. Madonna’s rep then hilariously told CNN that they were “unaware” of any such e-mail having been sent.

Somethin’ in the milk ain’t clean!

Imagine if the Tea Party was Black

Tim Wise: Imagine if the Tea Party was Black
By Jamie Triplin-Hines, DC Civil Rights Examiner
April 25th, 2010 9:07 am ET
Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S. Wise has spoken in 48 states, on over 400 college campuses, and to community groups around the nation. Wise has provided anti-racism training to teachers nationwide, and has trained physicians and medical industry professionals on how to combat racial inequities in health care. His latest book is called Between Barack and a Hard Place.

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin.

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Imagine that a rap artist were to say, in reference to a white president: “He’s a piece of $hit and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Because that’s what rocker Ted Nugent said recently about President Obama.

Imagine that a prominent mainstream black political commentator had long employed an overt bigot as Executive Director of his organization, and that this bigot regularly participated in black separatist conferences, and once assaulted a white person while calling them by a racial slur. When that prominent black commentator and his sister — who also works for the organization — defended the bigot as a good guy who was misunderstood and “going through a tough time in his life” would anyone accept their excuse-making? Would that commentator still have a place on a mainstream network? Because that’s what happened in the real world, when Pat Buchanan employed as Executive Director of his group, America’s Cause, a blatant racist who did all these things, or at least their white equivalents: attending white separatist conferences and attacking a black woman while calling her the n-word.

Imagine that a black radio host were to suggest that the only way to get promoted in the administration of a white president is by “hating black people,” or that a prominent white person had only endorsed a white presidential candidate as an act of racial bonding, or blamed a white president for a fight on a school bus in which a black kid was jumped by two white kids, or said that he wouldn’t want to kill all conservatives, but rather, would like to leave just enough—“living fossils” as he called them—“so we will never forget what these people stood for.” After all, these are things that Rush Limbaugh has said, about Barack Obama’s administration, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama, a fight on a school bus in Belleville, Illinois in which two black kids beat up a white kid, and about liberals, generally.

Imagine that a black pastor, formerly a member of the U.S. military, were to declare, as part of his opposition to a white president’s policies, that he was ready to “suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.” This is, after all, what Pastor Stan Craig said recently at a Tea Party rally in Greenville, South Carolina.

Imagine a black radio talk show host gleefully predicting a revolution by people of color if the government continues to be dominated by the rich white men who have been “destroying” the country, or if said radio personality were to call Christians or Jews non-humans, or say that when it came to conservatives, the best solution would be to “hang ‘em high.” And what would happen to any congressional representative who praised that commentator for “speaking common sense” and likened his hate talk to “American values?” After all, those are among the things said by radio host and best-selling author Michael Savage, predicting white revolution in the face of multiculturalism, or said by Savage about Muslims and liberals, respectively. And it was Congressman Culbertson, from Texas, who praised Savage in that way, despite his hateful rhetoric.

Imagine a black political commentator suggesting that the only thing the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS building did wrong was not blowing up Fox News instead. This is, after all, what Anne Coulter said about Tim McVeigh, when she noted that his only mistake was not blowing up the New York Times.

Imagine that a popular black liberal website posted comments about the daughter of a white president, calling her “typical redneck trash,” or a “whore” whose mother entertains her by “making monkey sounds.” After all that’s comparable to what conservatives posted about Malia Obama on freerepublic.com last year, when they referred to her as “ghetto trash.”

Imagine that black protesters at a large political rally were walking around with signs calling for the lynching of their congressional enemies. Because that’s what white conservatives did last year, in reference to Democratic party leaders in Congress.

In other words, imagine that even one-third of the anger and vitriol currently being hurled at President Obama, by folks who are almost exclusively white, were being aimed, instead, at a white president, by people of color. How many whites viewing the anger, the hatred, the contempt for that white president would then wax eloquent about free speech, and the glories of democracy? And how many would be calling for further crackdowns on thuggish behavior, and investigations into the radical agendas of those same people of color?

To ask any of these questions is to answer them. Protest is only seen as fundamentally American when those who have long had the luxury of seeing themselves as prototypically American engage in it. When the dangerous and dark “other” does so, however, it isn’t viewed as normal or natural, let alone patriotic. Which is why Rush Limbaugh could say, this past week, that the Tea Parties are the first time since the Civil War that ordinary, common Americans stood up for their rights: a statement that erases the normalcy and “American-ness” of blacks in the civil rights struggle, not to mention women in the fight for suffrage and equality, working people in the fight for better working conditions, and LGBT folks as they struggle to be treated as full and equal human beings.

And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the mess we do, on a daily basis.

Game Over.

Thank you for this piece, Tim. Wish more prejudiced people in general would take the time to step outside themselves and imagine what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot. But, unfortunately, people tend to see how if the perceived "minority" were to be treated if they replicated some of the same prejudiced actions; and they use that to fuel their own power. Simply put, they know that they will and can get away with it.



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Persistance, Prudence.

Eighty Years Along, a Longevity Study Still Has Ground to Cover
By KATHERINE BOUTON
After reading “The Longevity Project,” I took an unscientific survey of friends and relatives asking them what personality characteristic they thought was most associated with long life. Several said “optimism,” followed by “equanimity,” “happiness,” “a good marriage,” “the ability to handle stress.” One offered, jokingly, “good table manners.”

In fact, “good table manners” is closest to the correct answer. Cheerfulness, optimism, extroversion and sociability may make life more enjoyable, but they won’t necessarily extend it, Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin found in a study that covered eight decades. The key traits are prudence and persistence. “The findings clearly revealed that the best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness,” they write, “the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person, like a scientist-professor — somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree.”

“Howard, that sounds like you!” Dr. Friedman’s graduate students joked when they saw the statistical findings. On a recent visit to New York, Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin did both seem statistically inclined to longevity. Conscientiousness abounded. They had persisted in a 20-year study — following up on documentation that had been collected over the previous 60 years by Lewis Terman and his successors — despite scoffing from students: Get a life!

The hotel room (Dr. Martin’s) was meticulously neat, and they had prudently ordered tea and fruit from room service. Both were trim and tanned, measured in their answers, trading off responses like the longtime collaborators they are. Despite a busy schedule they were organized enough for a relaxed talk.

In 1990, Dr. Friedman and Leslie Martin, his graduate student at the time, realized that an invaluable resource for studying well-being and longevity existed right in their own state of California. In 1921, Dr. Terman had chosen 1,528 bright San Francisco 11-year-olds for a long-term study of the social predictors of intellectual leadership. Dr. Terman interviewed the children, their families, their teachers. He studied their play habits, their parents’ marriages and their personalities: were they diligent, extroverted, cheerful? He and his team followed up with the participants every five or 10 years. Dr. Terman died in 1956, but colleagues continued the regular interviews with the original subjects, asking the same questions Dr. Terman had asked.

Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin pored through Dr. Terman’s records, dredged up death certificates and asked Dr. Terman’s questions of study participants’ survivors. They also conducted a group analysis of other similar studies, and collaborated with experts in many fields.

The secret to a long life has been much studied. The health economist James Smith, at the RAND Corporation, found that the answer was education. Stay in school. This is no doubt true. But his findings don’t necessarily conflict with Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin’s: what keeps people in school is often conscientiousness.

The New England Centenarian Study, on the other hand, found that the children of centenarians scored in the low range for neuroticism and the high range for extroversion. (For women it also helped to be agreeable.) Both men and women were about average in conscientiousness. Dr. Friedman pointed out that this was a selected group — the researchers could not study the centenarians themselves, except by self-reporting, so they turned to their children. There was also no control group. The Friedman/Martin/Terman study is unique in that it followed a single set of participants from childhood to death.

How do you pose the same questions to participants over an 80-year period? Dr. Friedman deferred to Dr. Martin. One of Dr. Terman’s original questions to parents was “How likely are you to upbraid a workman?” Not very relevant in contemporary life. Employing a complicated linguistic measurement called factor analysis, Dr. Martin said, the researchers were able to come up with the 21st-century equivalent: “How do you deal with co-workers?”

Many assume biology is the critical factor in longevity. If your parents lived to be 85, you probably will, too. Not so, Dr. Friedman said. “Genes constitute about one-third of the factors leading to long life,” he said. “The other two-thirds have to do with lifestyles and chance.” As an example of chance, he cited veterans of World War II. “A disproportionate number of those sent overseas, especially to the Pacific, died at a greater rate after the war than the men who had been deployed at home,” he said. In any given year, men sent overseas were more than one and a half times as likely to die, compared with their peers who had stayed home.

There are three explanations for the dominant role of conscientiousness. The first and most obvious is that conscientious people are more likely to live healthy lifestyles, to not smoke or drink to excess, wear seat belts, follow doctors’ orders and take medication as prescribed. Second, conscientious people tend to find themselves not only in healthier situations but also in healthier relationships: happier marriages, better friendships, healthier work situations.

The third explanation for the link between conscientiousness and longevity is the most intriguing. “We thought it must be something biological,” Dr. Friedman said. “We ruled out every other factor.” He and other researchers found that some people are biologically predisposed to be not only more conscientiousness but also healthier. “Not only do they tend to avoid violent deaths and illnesses linked to smoking and drinking,” they write, “but conscientious individuals are less prone to a whole host of diseases, not just those caused by dangerous habits.” The precise physiological explanation is unknown but seems to have to do with levels of chemicals like serotonin in the brain.

As for optimism, it has its downside. “If you’re cheerful, very optimistic, especially in the face of illness and recovery, if you don’t consider the possibility that you might have setbacks, then those setbacks are harder to deal with,” Dr. Martin said. “If you’re one of those people who think everything’s fine — ‘no need to back up those computer files’ — the stress of failure, because you haven’t been more careful, is harmful. You almost set yourself up for more problems.”

How about exercise? Dr. Martin once ran the Marathon des Sables, a six-day race across the Moroccan desert, carrying her own food, bedding and clothing over 150 miles. But extreme exercise is not a predictable indicator of longevity (though the organization and persistence required to get there probably are). As important as exercise and lifestyle are to health, and thus to longevity, pushing yourself to extremes is not necessarily going to lengthen your life span, particularly if you don’t enjoy it.

Spend your time working at a job you like instead. “There’s a misconception about stress,” Dr. Friedman said. “People think everyone should take it easy.” Rather, he said, “a hard job that is also stressful can be associated with longevity. Challenges, even if stressful, are also a link.” In the end, he said, “if people were involved, working hard, succeeded, were responsible —no matter what field they were in — they were more likely to live longer.” Many people, of course, have to stay in a job they don’t like or don’t do well in. That’s bad stress, and they found those people were more likely to die young.

When it comes to marriage, there are many caveats. Marriage itself, adding together the husband’s and the wife’s happiness, was a good predictor of future health and longevity. But more interestingly, it was the man’s happiness that was the better predictor of health and well-being — for both the husband and the wife. Her own happiness mattered much less to her future well-being. Their mutual compatibility was also a strong factor in predicting their children’s longevity: the single strongest social predictor (as opposed to personality predictor) of early death was parental divorce during childhood.

I asked Dr. Friedman and Dr. Martin what the single strongest social predictor of long life was. Their unhesitating answer: a strong social network. Widows outlive widowers. (Widows also tended to outlive still-married women.) Women tend to have stronger social networks. Interestingly, neurotic widowers tended to outlive their less neurotic peers — they were more likely to take care of their health after their wives were gone.

One of my friends commented after hearing about the importance of conscientiousness, “No wonder women live longer than men.” That’s partly true, Dr. Friedman said, but a great deal of it also has to do with social networks, a social support system, which women are often more likely to have. “Among male/female differences, that’s a big piece,” he said.

The project is far from finished. Dr. Martin also wants to look into other variables affecting health, like sleep patterns. And she is interested in how their findings can begin to have an effect on public policy. Dr. Friedman said he thought the most important as-yet-unanswered question was about work — “retirement kinds of issues,” he said. “We know it’s not good to retire and go to the beach.” But it’s also not good to stay in a stressful boring job. “We need to think about negotiating these transitions in a healthy way,” he added.

“The Longevity Project” is written for the general reader, and it is full of self-assessment questionnaires, structured cleverly so the correct answers are not obvious. The subject matter of the questionnaires is illustrative of some of the other factors that are associated either positively or less positively with longevity: They include sociability (are you the life of the party?), emotional sociability, neuroticism, catastrophic thinking, life satisfaction, marital happiness, job passion and accomplishment, religiosity and social support network.

But the book is also amply footnoted with scholarly citations that others may want to follow up. It’s far more nuanced in its discussion than any short summary could be. When I asked Dr. Friedman how he could prevent people from oversimplifying his findings, he sighed. He said he tells them they have to read the book. I have oversimplified, of course, and I, too, would recommend you read the book. It’s a lot more complex than it sounds.

“Love, in itself, doesn’t trouble me at all. It gives you courage, security, helps you to ignore other trifling things. It’s in great passion that I have never believed.



Give me one example of a great passion, a true one, one with Christian names, surnames, and addresses, not some legendary one, and I’ll believe it. You see? You’re silent.



Great passions, my dear, don’t exist, they’re liars’ fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while. That’s why, every time I’ve loved a man, I’ve never let it overwhelm me. I have loved him, I’ve even been jealous of the flies touching him, but I have known all along that it had to end. And when it ends…you cry a bit, but then you get over it. Two, three months later, you meet him in the street and it seems impossible you could ever have lost any sleep or shed any tears over him. Pouf!”



-Anna Magnani, quoted in 1963 interview (reprinted in Oriana Fallaci’s Gli antipatici)

City's last Geisha

At 84, a City’s Last Geisha Defies Time
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
KAMAISHI, Japan — The requests to see her perform had dwindled over the years. But when the earthquake struck at 2:46 p.m. on March 11, this city’s last geisha was, fittingly, at home getting ready to sing that night at Kamaishi’s 117-year-old ryotei, an exclusive restaurant featuring fine food and entertainment where she began working as a 14-year-old seven decades ago.

She had already put on the white split-toe socks she would wear with her kimono and was preparing to put her hair up. Hired to entertain a party of four in honor of a colleague’s transfer from Kamaishi, she had picked just the right song, one meant to steel young samurai going to their first battle.

But a tsunami would engulf this city within 35 minutes and, as Kamaishi trembled from at least 15 big aftershocks during that short time, the geisha, Tsuyako Ito, 84, fought to survive. She had lived through three tsunamis before in Kamaishi, a place that the waves have destroyed with regularity over the centuries, and as a girl she had listened to her grandmother’s tales of the great 1896 tsunami.

“My grandmother said that a tsunami is like a wide-open mouth that swallows everything in its path,” Ms. Ito said from a local hospital where she was being treated for asthma, “so that victory comes to those who run away as fast as possible.”

Her mother carried her on her back to safety at the time of Ms. Ito’s first tsunami in 1933. This time, after her legs gave out, an admirer carried Ms. Ito on his back to higher ground. Ms. Ito, who had planned to retire on her 88th birthday, a milestone in Japan, survived her fourth — and “most frightening” — tsunami.

The waves, however, swept away her shamisen, a three-stringed instrument, and kimono, the two tools essential to a geisha’s art.

The recent tsunami is believed to have killed about 1,300 people in Kamaishi, whose low-lying areas have been transformed into a dusty ghost town where the smell of ruined buildings now mingles with that of the sea.

The birthplace of Japan’s steel industry, Kamaishi played a key role in the country’s modernization and militarization, so that it became the first target on mainland Japan of American warships during World War II. During Japan’s postwar boom, the city’s population swelled as it easily overcame the ravages of two tsunamis.

Kamaishi became famous for its delicious seafood, the winning ways of its main employer’s rugby team, Nippon Steel, and its diversions.

As Japan’s fortunes have declined in the past two decades, Kamaishi’s fall has been faster and steeper.

Its population, nearly 100,000 two generations ago, has now fallen below 40,000 and is aging. Many who have lost homes and businesses here are not expected to remain.

But Ms. Ito vowed to sing and dance again in Kamaishi. A famous beauty, she both danced and played the shamisen, while most geishas were skilled only at playing the shamisen, said Setsuko Kanazawa, whose family owns Saiwairo, the ryotei where she performs.

To cultural preservationists here, she is the guardian of a local culture that was fast disappearing.

The last ryotei in Kamaishi, Saiwairo was also its most exclusive. It was built in 1894 on the most elevated point of an area that would be dotted with bars, brothels and other ryoteis. While tsunamis washed away Saiwairo’s neighbors, they never reached its first floor.

It was at Saiwairo that Ms. Ito began an apprenticeship at the age of 14.

“I loved to dance,” she said. “And I simply wanted to become a leading geisha in Kamaishi.”

The truth, whispered for decades inside the family home, was darker, said Satoshi Ito, Ms. Ito’s nephew. Ms. Ito’s father ran a small-time construction business and, her nephew said, had ties with Japan’s gangsters, the yakuza.

“He would repair roads here and there, using yakuza to control certain areas,” said Mr. Ito, 63, who lived with his aunt here but is now staying at an evacuation shelter.

“Her father is supposed to have told her she was suited for that life,” he added. “But to put it harshly, I think that he did it to guarantee some debts.”

After a marriage to a sushi restaurant owner, the birth of a daughter and a divorce, Ms. Ito went to Tokyo to study dance under a famous instructor. Back in Kamaishi, Ms. Ito and a dozen other geishas were constantly on call at this city’s ryoteis, as Kamaishi’s economy began booming in the 1950s. At Saiwairo, steel industry executives occupied some rooms as owners of fishing vessels held parties in others, Ms. Kanazawa said.

But Kamaishi’s economy peaked a decade before Japan’s did, as the city’s two main industries began declining in the 1970s.

Nippon Steel began moving its operations out of Kamaishi, eventually closing down its blast furnaces in 1989; fishing shrank as new rules on exclusive economic zones kept Kamaishi’s fishing vessels closer to Japan.

In 1978, the central government began building the world’s deepest and most expensive breakwater in Kamaishi’s harbor, a plan intended to protect the city against tsunamis as well as to create jobs.

But the breakwater, which took 30 years to complete, did little to stop Kamaishi’s economic slide. What’s more, after Japan’s economic bubble burst two decades ago, company executives could no longer hire geishas on their expense accounts, said Ms. Kanazawa of Saiwairo.

Saiwairo opened its doors to a larger public, first as a new site for weddings; in recent years, in a reflection of this city’s aging population, it has become a popular setting for memorial services.

“We couldn’t survive on pride alone,” Ms. Kanazawa said.

Still, sometimes the calls came for Ms. Ito, some from old customers, others from new customers reflecting the world’s new economic order.

“About once a month,” Mr. Ito said of the frequency of his aunt’s performances. “Chinese industrialists, among others, now come here.”

And so on March 11, as Ms. Ito was getting ready to perform, the biggest tsunami of her life assailed Kamaishi, tearing apart the breakwater and eventually reaching inland all the way to the house where she and her nephew lived.

As it turned out, after a wall in her house collapsed and she slowly moved to flee, Hiroyuki Maruki, 59, a sake store owner and the president of a group dedicated to preserving an old melody called “Kamaishi Seashore Song,” came by looking for her. “She is the only one who knows how to sing that song,” Mr. Maruki said.

As Mr. Maruki carried Ms. Ito up a hill, she recalled “feeling the soft warmth of his back.”

Mr. Maruki said: “I thought she’d be light, but she was surprisingly heavy. I wondered at one point what was I going to do.”

Having survived yet another tsunami, Ms. Ito said that her regret was that she had been unable to sing that night.

“I’d practiced the night before, and after putting my thoughts together, I thought this song would be all right,” she said, explaining that the song told the story of a young samurai on horseback going to his first, long-awaited battle.

“It ended without my singing,” she said. “It’s such a nice song, too.”


Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

you know trees

You've come a long way, Andrew, from the timid, shy soul you once were. Hiding out on distant planets, befriending alien tree forms, splashing in snow fed streams, and secretly planning your time on earth with a pair of sexy, euro-style pants. and all.

So what do you say we drop all the practical logic, rational reasonableness, and cautious optimism, and give those tree forms something to talk about - before they start making stuff up.

You know trees.

I'm totally with you on this -
The Universe

lightening the load