http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/22/AR2005102200969.html
washingtonpost.com
Young Democrats Sharpen Tactics Against Old Rivals
New Breed on Hill Works Aggressively To Snap GOP Grip
By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 23, 2005; A04
With the Capitol all but deserted last Monday night, the Democratic "30-Something Working Group" seized the House floor and took aim at their Republican adversaries.
As C-SPAN cameras beamed their performance around the country, Rep. Timothy J. Ryan, 32, of Ohio and Rep. Kendrick Meek, 39, of Florida recited a litany of GOP misdeeds -- mismanaging Hurricane Katrina and neglecting education and health care, for example -- and offered the Democrats' alternatives.
Their conversation even veered to religion, a subject many Democrats are afraid to touch. Ryan described the problems of the poor as a moral obligation and asked of Meek: "Where is the Christian Coalition when you are cutting poverty programs? They are fighting over Supreme Court justices."
The two newcomers -- who have served a combined six years in the House -- are part of a new generation of Democrats who are working to try to topple the GOP. Their fresh ideas, modern media skills and aggressive political tactics have inspired a party that has drifted for much of the past decade -- wedded to old notions and seemingly incapable of capitalizing on White House and congressional Republican miscues.
As part of the new approach, House and Senate Democrats are devising an alternative agenda of key policies. Ryan is pushing proposals aimed at drastically reducing the number of abortions over the coming decade by offering support and services to pregnant women. Others are crafting a plan for reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil by using more domestic agricultural products, an approach that would have significant appeal to Midwestern voters.
"We can't be Dr. No to everything Republicans do," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). "We have to provide our own positive ideas."
The rise of the new breed, including Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Barack Obama (Ill.), the Senate's only African American and the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, marks a generational divide in a party long dominated by Northeastern liberals and Southern conservatives.
Unlike some of their forbears, the newcomers are pragmatists who view the past decade of GOP rule not as an aberration but as a sea change in political campaigning, fundraising and lobbying to which Democrats must adjust. They arrived in Washington as challengers and are comfortable questioning the establishment -- because they have not been part of it.
"Everyone recognizes the bottom line: We've got to win the House," said Van Hollen, who is in his second term. "So people are looking for creative alternatives, and they're much more willing to experiment now."
Many Democrats concede that, as a group, they were bullied into submission by President Bush during his first four years, when his popularity was high. They went along with his tax cuts, backed the war in Iraq and helped adopt a controversial Medicare prescription drug program. This year, however, the Democrats began pushing back more, even before the uproar over the administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina. By standing united, they helped to block Bush's plan to create private accounts in the Social Security system.
But in light of the Democrats' meager political successes in recent years, it is far from certain they can score major gains in next year's elections, even with Bush's popularity falling and widespread displeasure over the war and gasoline prices, according to lawmakers and political experts.
"It's not as easy as it looks," said former representative Robert S. Walker (Pa.). Walker sees plenty of parallels between his crowd of 1994 GOP House revolutionaries and the young Democrats, but he notes that the Republicans started laying the groundwork for their takeover in the early 1980s, at least a decade before their electoral coup. "I can understand why people say an opportunity is presenting itself," Walker said. "But it does take more than a couple of election cycles to change things."
While change within the party has not always gone smoothly, the top leaders recognize the importance of giving newer members running room. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has passed over more senior lawmakers to give newcomers key committee assignments and speaking roles during high-profile floor debates. For instance, she placed Meek on the Homeland Security and Armed Services panels, to enable him to earn national security credentials. And she gave Rep. Stephanie Herseth (S.D.) a prominent role in fighting a GOP plan to reduce Medicaid spending.
She also put junior lawmakers in charge of the 2006 campaign effort. "They are the future," Pelosi said. "And they are starting to set the pace for where things go."
Perhaps no other newcomer has moved up as quickly as Emanuel, an adviser in the Clinton White House who took command of the Democrats' campaign committee after a single House term.
Emanuel has assembled a 2006 candidate slate that includes a former National Football League player, several veterans of the Iraq war, and many senior state officials, the latest being New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid, who signed on last week to challenge Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R). Madrid was recruited by Rep. Hilda L. Solis (D-Calif.), who is in her third term.
Another standout on Emanuel's recruitment team is Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, 39, who arrived in Washington 11 months ago after a dozen years in the rough-and-tumble Florida legislature. She lined up former Florida state senator Ron Klein (D) to run for the seat next door to hers, now occupied by Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R), a veteran legislator.
When Shaw heard the news, he confronted Wasserman Schultz on the floor and told her that the tradition among members of the Florida delegation is to refrain from working against one another. Wasserman Schultz reminded Shaw that several Florida Republicans had worked against Rep. Karen L. Thurman (D-Fla.), who was defeated in 2002.
"I was really polite and said the pact didn't seem to have held very solidly," Wasserman Schultz recalled. "I guess he thought he was speaking to someone who had just begun their political career that day."
Emanuel says of his newcomer colleagues, "They're willing to dust it up, and that's what it's going to take."
They have run into their share of friction. Pelosi has gone back and forth with Ryan over his abortion proposal, worried that certain provisions could dilute the traditional Democratic position backing abortion rights. And Emanuel got into a spat with senior Hispanic House Democrats over the hiring of a campaign committee aide they were pushing.
In the Senate, newer faces must vie with Democratic presidential aspirants for media attention. Two who are breaking through are Obama, 44, and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), 42, one of 22 Senate Democrats who supported John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice of the United States. Yesterday, Pryor gave the Democratic response to Bush's radio address.
"One of the advantages of having a lot of new blood in the Senate is that we don't necessarily come to the chamber with a lot of baggage from past battles," Pryor said. "A lot of my senior colleagues vividly remember the Bork nomination. I don't care about Robert Bork. That's in the past, and I don't think we ought to dwell on that."
Obama, a former Illinois legislator, voted against Roberts but defended Pryor and other Democratic supporters on the Daily Kos blog. Like many new-generation Democrats, he is impatient with the rigidity expressed by some of the party's old-line liberal interest groups, believing the public takes a more nuanced view of issues such as abortion and affirmative action.
"When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive 'checklist,' then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems," Obama wrote.
Pelosi says House and Senate leaders will soon lay out a slate of new ideas, similar to the "Contract With America" that the GOP used to attract voters in 1994, when it took back control of Congress.
One group that Democrats want to tap is veterans and active military members, who have seen their benefits cut or frozen as part of an ongoing budget squeeze. Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), a second-term House member, believes Republicans could pay heavily at the polls throughout the South for overlooking this crucial voting group.
"When I see white male Alabamians shaking their heads, that tells me there are opportunities for Democrats to make major inroads," Davis said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
i hate this fucing man we have to call president, he is a disgrace to all americans, he is no christian, he is not even a man, he is a child, he is not even a child, for he has no heart and he has no brain, he is satan, the devil, he is all that is wrong with humans, his greed, his selfishness, his texan pride, may god help us all from this man, who will for sure, bring destruction to our planet via his atomic bombs, as he tortures all of us , even us, american, can be tortured to his glee, may i say, FUCK YOU G W BUSH, FUCK YOU FOREVER, I SPIT ON YOU
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
usnews.com: Education: E-Learning: Computer-animated courses
Computer-animated courses
By Alex Kingsbury
Rebecca Perez-Dominguez took three weeks to finish her 350-frame computer-animated scene. In it, a blocky little figure deftly tosses pieces of blue luggage into a large open doorway. When one of the suitcases proves too heavy, the frustrated hurler begins shoving it up a steep ramp. The bag finally reaches the top of the ramp only to slide down, flattening the exhausted baggage handler like a steamroller. "I had some trouble in the last few frames because I didn't know how much his head should squish," says Perez-Dominguez. The final product is short, seamless, and entertaining. She was given an A for the assignment.
Though her home in West Hollywood is in the heart of animation country, Perez-Dominguez could just as easily live in upstate New York, London, or Miami. In fact, her classmates at the new Internet school Animation Mentor hail from remote locales including the United Arab Emirates and Iceland. All the courses, taught by some of the most successful people in the animation industry, happen online.
Founded in February by a group of animation veterans from studios including Disney and Pixar, the E-school features some of the world's top cartooning talent teaching to a class of about 300 students. To participate in the program, students need only a Web camera, a sufficiently speedy Internet connection, third-party animation software, and a drawing pad. And with a $13,000 price tag for the entire 18-month certificate program, it's cheaper than a traditional art degree. (One year at the Savannah College of Art and Design, for example, runs $20,000).
The school's mission is simple: train Train the next generation of top-tier animators. Traditional art schools produce jack-of-all-trades graduates, trained well in a variety of skills but masters of none, according to school president Bobby Beck, a former Disney animator. He says many traditional art- school graduates have to take peripheral roles in the film industry because they lack the specialized skills that animation studios are seeking. Chris Ilvento, 26, from East Hartford, Conn., earned a bachelor's degree in graphic design from Eastern Connecticut State University but still yearned to learn the art of cartooning.
"I spent years trying to teach myself how to animate and didn't get very far," he says.
The Animation Mentor program draws students from all walks of life. While some have no artistic training, a background in a visual arts medium certainly helps. Early assignments require animating a bouncing ball. Then students add a jointed leg to the ball, then two, until they have given life to fully articulated human figures. Animation Mentor is a sharp departure from traditional (and more stodgy) E-learning courses, perhaps because it is designed by and for artists. Lectures are slickly edited video productions with short scenes and soundtracks to keep the classes lively. The professors are dynamic and the lessons feature a series of integrated bullet points outlining the topics of each class with motion graphics. The assignments are supposed to be both instructive and humorous. After all, the business is cartoons.
Each stage of an assignment, from pencil sketch to final product, is compiled into a student's online portfolio. Professors and other students view the portfolio and offer comments and critiques. "Live" classes, which students are expected to log into, are held in the evening, Pacific Coast time, and the students revise and edit their assignments during the week.
"I'd been looking to go back to school to get an art degree but I didn't want to disrupt my life," says Irene Chung, 22, a computer programmer in North Carolina, who began her "artistic tangent" on a whim and enjoys her new hobby.
Others see it as a professional steppingstone.
"I always took Looney Tunes and animators like Chuck Jones seriously," says Janessa Portner, 24, who works full time in a bookstore in Vernon, N.J., and spends her nights animating bouncing balls and strolling stick figures. "The most valuable thing is the body of work that we are producing, since that's what the studios are looking for."
Computer-animated courses
By Alex Kingsbury
Rebecca Perez-Dominguez took three weeks to finish her 350-frame computer-animated scene. In it, a blocky little figure deftly tosses pieces of blue luggage into a large open doorway. When one of the suitcases proves too heavy, the frustrated hurler begins shoving it up a steep ramp. The bag finally reaches the top of the ramp only to slide down, flattening the exhausted baggage handler like a steamroller. "I had some trouble in the last few frames because I didn't know how much his head should squish," says Perez-Dominguez. The final product is short, seamless, and entertaining. She was given an A for the assignment.
Though her home in West Hollywood is in the heart of animation country, Perez-Dominguez could just as easily live in upstate New York, London, or Miami. In fact, her classmates at the new Internet school Animation Mentor hail from remote locales including the United Arab Emirates and Iceland. All the courses, taught by some of the most successful people in the animation industry, happen online.
Founded in February by a group of animation veterans from studios including Disney and Pixar, the E-school features some of the world's top cartooning talent teaching to a class of about 300 students. To participate in the program, students need only a Web camera, a sufficiently speedy Internet connection, third-party animation software, and a drawing pad. And with a $13,000 price tag for the entire 18-month certificate program, it's cheaper than a traditional art degree. (One year at the Savannah College of Art and Design, for example, runs $20,000).
The school's mission is simple: train Train the next generation of top-tier animators. Traditional art schools produce jack-of-all-trades graduates, trained well in a variety of skills but masters of none, according to school president Bobby Beck, a former Disney animator. He says many traditional art- school graduates have to take peripheral roles in the film industry because they lack the specialized skills that animation studios are seeking. Chris Ilvento, 26, from East Hartford, Conn., earned a bachelor's degree in graphic design from Eastern Connecticut State University but still yearned to learn the art of cartooning.
"I spent years trying to teach myself how to animate and didn't get very far," he says.
The Animation Mentor program draws students from all walks of life. While some have no artistic training, a background in a visual arts medium certainly helps. Early assignments require animating a bouncing ball. Then students add a jointed leg to the ball, then two, until they have given life to fully articulated human figures. Animation Mentor is a sharp departure from traditional (and more stodgy) E-learning courses, perhaps because it is designed by and for artists. Lectures are slickly edited video productions with short scenes and soundtracks to keep the classes lively. The professors are dynamic and the lessons feature a series of integrated bullet points outlining the topics of each class with motion graphics. The assignments are supposed to be both instructive and humorous. After all, the business is cartoons.
Each stage of an assignment, from pencil sketch to final product, is compiled into a student's online portfolio. Professors and other students view the portfolio and offer comments and critiques. "Live" classes, which students are expected to log into, are held in the evening, Pacific Coast time, and the students revise and edit their assignments during the week.
"I'd been looking to go back to school to get an art degree but I didn't want to disrupt my life," says Irene Chung, 22, a computer programmer in North Carolina, who began her "artistic tangent" on a whim and enjoys her new hobby.
Others see it as a professional steppingstone.
"I always took Looney Tunes and animators like Chuck Jones seriously," says Janessa Portner, 24, who works full time in a bookstore in Vernon, N.J., and spends her nights animating bouncing balls and strolling stick figures. "The most valuable thing is the body of work that we are producing, since that's what the studios are looking for."
Van Gogh: Expressive With a Brush, or a Pen - New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 11, 2005
Van Gogh: Expressive With a Brush, or a Pen
By CAROL VOGEL
Vincent van Gogh considered drawing to be "the root of everything." He once confided to his brother, Theo, that he could not stop drawing because "I really have a draftsman's fist, and I ask you, have I ever doubted or hesitated or wavered since the day I began to draw? I think you know quite well that I pushed on, and of course I gradually grew stronger in the battle."
Although his career lasted only a decade, van Gogh created about 1,100 known drawings, capturing everything around him, from peasants and postmen to landscapes and interiors. Drawing was as important a way to record his thoughts as the letters he wrote to his family and friends.
Yet the public is far more familiar with his 800 paintings. Images like "A Corridor in the Asylum" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Irises" at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles are among the most famous images in the history of art.
That situation may change next week, when the Met unveils "Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings," the first major exhibition of the artist's drawings ever held in the United States. (A version of the show was on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam this summer.) The exhibition, which opens next Tuesday, includes 113 works from public and private collections around the world, 20 of which were not shown in Amsterdam.
"Drawings have always been the P.S. part of van Gogh's work," said Colta Ives, a curator of drawings and prints at the Met. "Yet he was a letter writer, a guy with a pen in his hand."
Ms. Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, a curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Met, teamed up with two of their colleagues from the Van Gogh Museum - Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections there, and Marije Vellekoop, curator of drawings - to put the show together. Their mission was to tell the story of van Gogh's work through his drawings and watercolors.
Sitting in the Met's galleries, surrounded by packing crates and work tables, as the exhibition was being installed, Ms. Stein said she had been thinking about a show like this for 20 years. As coordinator first of the Met's blockbuster 1984 show "Van Gogh in Arles" and "Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers" two years later, she was introduced to the artist's drawings. "As exciting as the paintings are," she said, "the drawings were a revelation."
For three years she and Ms. Ives have immersed themselves in van Gogh's world, traveling extensively throughout the United States and Europe. "People opened their collections to us," Ms. Stein said. So did the Van Gogh Museum, which has the largest number of the artist's works on paper in the world.
"We borrowed judiciously," Ms. Stein said. Deciding what not to show was as difficult as what the curators chose. For every drawing on view, at least 20 were reluctantly rejected.
The exhibition also includes eight paintings: three from the Met's own collection, two from the Van Gogh Museum, and three loans, from the Rodin Museum in Paris, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and a private collection. Each was chosen for its relationship to his drawings.
Rather than tackle the subject strictly chronologically, as most curators have done, Ms. Stein and Ms. Ives decided to underscore relationship between drawing and painting in van Gogh's work and how he reinvented certain recurring themes in different ways.
When they began conceiving the show, Ms. Stein said, one of the first things she did was to put together 86 pages of excerpts about drawing from all three volumes of van Gogh's letters. "We wanted to hear his discussion," she said, "to know what mattered to him as an artist."
Throughout his life van Gogh embraced drawing for many different reasons. At first he felt it necessary to master black-and-white before tackling color. Sometimes it was a question of economics: paper and ink was far cheaper than canvas and paint. He also used drawing as a way of working on subjects that interested him, like wintry trees or tree-lined roads or expansive views of wheat fields.
Drawing didn't always come easy. "He struggled with black and white," Ms. Ives said. "But when he got to Arles in 1888, he discovered the reed pen, and it was then he developed a more comfortable relationship with his tool. As reed wears down, it becomes softer, more flexible and responsive to his gestures on paper."
It is generally assumed that most artists make drawings as studies for larger, more complete paintings. But sometimes van Gogh did just the opposite. He would reproduce some of his paintings in pen and ink; he would then send them to his artist friends Émile Bernard and John Russell, and to his brother, Theo, as a way of letting them know what he was up to. None of these drawings were exact copies; each contained spontaneous details.
Often even scholars haven't been sure which came first, a painting or a drawing. Three images of a Zouave solider - a watercolor from the Met's collection, a painting from the Van Gogh Museum and a pen-and-ink drawing that belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - have been the subject of scholarly debate. "It's been long accepted that the watercolor came after the painting," Ms. Stein said. "But when we looked at it, it seemed there were hesitant passages. The background, for example, is unresolved."
First the curators looked at the Met's watercolor next to the Guggenheim's pen-and-ink drawing, which they knew came after the painting.
"It's harvest time; it's raining," Ms. Stein said. "He has a model, he spends five days and writes his brother and his friends that he's finally painting portraits. He doesn't mention the watercolor. Six weeks later he sends the pen-and-ink rendition of the portrait to John Russell. But because the watercolor isn't mentioned in the letters, it's one of the many riddles we addressed."
Marjorie Shelley, a Met paper conservator, subjected the works to technical analysis, including infrared reflectography that revealed the artist's graphite sketch underneath the finished work, showing how he was struggling with his subject, something he did not do with either the painting or the later pen-and-ink drawing.
Ms. Ives was curious about "Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer," an 1888 series of drawings and one painting of a dirt path with a row of thatched cottages on one side and tangled vegetation. From his letters it is known that a pen-and-ink drawing was made before a painting of the same subject. He did the drawing in Saintes-Maries, in the Camargue region of Provence, then returned to nearby Arles and made the painting.
"Noticing the similarity in size between the drawing and the painting, I wondered if there might be a still closer link between them," Ms. Ives said. "Perhaps it wasn't a free-handed interpretation in oil." Or, she said, he may have been so happy with his drawing that he traced it onto the canvas, which is unusual, because he generally painted freehand.
So Ms. Ives made copies of both the painting and the drawing to scale, then superimposed the drawing on the painting. She deduced that van Gogh had indeed traced the drawing's outline onto the canvas as the structure of the composition, then added more sky at the top and more pathway at the bottom to fill the squarer canvas. But drawings and paintings were never exactly the same. In a drawing he made for Bernard, he added a tiny boat in the horizon. "There is no boat in the painting," Ms. Ives said.
The way van Gogh grabbed onto a theme, composed it in his mind and then tried it out in different variations fascinated the curators. "Very few artists do that," Ms. Ives said. "Often we tried to get into van Gogh's shoes and walk with him to see what was catching his eye." A series of watercolors van Gogh created of the plains of La Crau, three miles northwest of Arles, is one example. The curators persuaded the Van Gogh museum to lend them "Harvest in Provence" (1888), a rarely lent painting, because they were able to borrow a watercolor that preceded it and a pen-and-ink drawing from the National Gallery of Art in Washington that the artist did after it.
"Each has a distinctive character," Ms. Ives said. "During the harvest he was out there every day, tromping through the fields, and certain motifs like fences, haystacks, clumps of reeds and rushes he keeps repeating in all different media and scales."
As an art form, however, works on paper are extremely delicate and cannot be subject to light or to changes in temperature. As a result, many of the drawings and watercolors in the show have rarely been exhibited, and it may be some time before the public will see them again.
"The problem with drawings is they have to have a rest," Ms. Ives said. "The next generation won't be able to play in this garden for quite a long while."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 11, 2005
Van Gogh: Expressive With a Brush, or a Pen
By CAROL VOGEL
Vincent van Gogh considered drawing to be "the root of everything." He once confided to his brother, Theo, that he could not stop drawing because "I really have a draftsman's fist, and I ask you, have I ever doubted or hesitated or wavered since the day I began to draw? I think you know quite well that I pushed on, and of course I gradually grew stronger in the battle."
Although his career lasted only a decade, van Gogh created about 1,100 known drawings, capturing everything around him, from peasants and postmen to landscapes and interiors. Drawing was as important a way to record his thoughts as the letters he wrote to his family and friends.
Yet the public is far more familiar with his 800 paintings. Images like "A Corridor in the Asylum" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Irises" at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles are among the most famous images in the history of art.
That situation may change next week, when the Met unveils "Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings," the first major exhibition of the artist's drawings ever held in the United States. (A version of the show was on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam this summer.) The exhibition, which opens next Tuesday, includes 113 works from public and private collections around the world, 20 of which were not shown in Amsterdam.
"Drawings have always been the P.S. part of van Gogh's work," said Colta Ives, a curator of drawings and prints at the Met. "Yet he was a letter writer, a guy with a pen in his hand."
Ms. Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, a curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Met, teamed up with two of their colleagues from the Van Gogh Museum - Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections there, and Marije Vellekoop, curator of drawings - to put the show together. Their mission was to tell the story of van Gogh's work through his drawings and watercolors.
Sitting in the Met's galleries, surrounded by packing crates and work tables, as the exhibition was being installed, Ms. Stein said she had been thinking about a show like this for 20 years. As coordinator first of the Met's blockbuster 1984 show "Van Gogh in Arles" and "Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers" two years later, she was introduced to the artist's drawings. "As exciting as the paintings are," she said, "the drawings were a revelation."
For three years she and Ms. Ives have immersed themselves in van Gogh's world, traveling extensively throughout the United States and Europe. "People opened their collections to us," Ms. Stein said. So did the Van Gogh Museum, which has the largest number of the artist's works on paper in the world.
"We borrowed judiciously," Ms. Stein said. Deciding what not to show was as difficult as what the curators chose. For every drawing on view, at least 20 were reluctantly rejected.
The exhibition also includes eight paintings: three from the Met's own collection, two from the Van Gogh Museum, and three loans, from the Rodin Museum in Paris, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and a private collection. Each was chosen for its relationship to his drawings.
Rather than tackle the subject strictly chronologically, as most curators have done, Ms. Stein and Ms. Ives decided to underscore relationship between drawing and painting in van Gogh's work and how he reinvented certain recurring themes in different ways.
When they began conceiving the show, Ms. Stein said, one of the first things she did was to put together 86 pages of excerpts about drawing from all three volumes of van Gogh's letters. "We wanted to hear his discussion," she said, "to know what mattered to him as an artist."
Throughout his life van Gogh embraced drawing for many different reasons. At first he felt it necessary to master black-and-white before tackling color. Sometimes it was a question of economics: paper and ink was far cheaper than canvas and paint. He also used drawing as a way of working on subjects that interested him, like wintry trees or tree-lined roads or expansive views of wheat fields.
Drawing didn't always come easy. "He struggled with black and white," Ms. Ives said. "But when he got to Arles in 1888, he discovered the reed pen, and it was then he developed a more comfortable relationship with his tool. As reed wears down, it becomes softer, more flexible and responsive to his gestures on paper."
It is generally assumed that most artists make drawings as studies for larger, more complete paintings. But sometimes van Gogh did just the opposite. He would reproduce some of his paintings in pen and ink; he would then send them to his artist friends Émile Bernard and John Russell, and to his brother, Theo, as a way of letting them know what he was up to. None of these drawings were exact copies; each contained spontaneous details.
Often even scholars haven't been sure which came first, a painting or a drawing. Three images of a Zouave solider - a watercolor from the Met's collection, a painting from the Van Gogh Museum and a pen-and-ink drawing that belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - have been the subject of scholarly debate. "It's been long accepted that the watercolor came after the painting," Ms. Stein said. "But when we looked at it, it seemed there were hesitant passages. The background, for example, is unresolved."
First the curators looked at the Met's watercolor next to the Guggenheim's pen-and-ink drawing, which they knew came after the painting.
"It's harvest time; it's raining," Ms. Stein said. "He has a model, he spends five days and writes his brother and his friends that he's finally painting portraits. He doesn't mention the watercolor. Six weeks later he sends the pen-and-ink rendition of the portrait to John Russell. But because the watercolor isn't mentioned in the letters, it's one of the many riddles we addressed."
Marjorie Shelley, a Met paper conservator, subjected the works to technical analysis, including infrared reflectography that revealed the artist's graphite sketch underneath the finished work, showing how he was struggling with his subject, something he did not do with either the painting or the later pen-and-ink drawing.
Ms. Ives was curious about "Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer," an 1888 series of drawings and one painting of a dirt path with a row of thatched cottages on one side and tangled vegetation. From his letters it is known that a pen-and-ink drawing was made before a painting of the same subject. He did the drawing in Saintes-Maries, in the Camargue region of Provence, then returned to nearby Arles and made the painting.
"Noticing the similarity in size between the drawing and the painting, I wondered if there might be a still closer link between them," Ms. Ives said. "Perhaps it wasn't a free-handed interpretation in oil." Or, she said, he may have been so happy with his drawing that he traced it onto the canvas, which is unusual, because he generally painted freehand.
So Ms. Ives made copies of both the painting and the drawing to scale, then superimposed the drawing on the painting. She deduced that van Gogh had indeed traced the drawing's outline onto the canvas as the structure of the composition, then added more sky at the top and more pathway at the bottom to fill the squarer canvas. But drawings and paintings were never exactly the same. In a drawing he made for Bernard, he added a tiny boat in the horizon. "There is no boat in the painting," Ms. Ives said.
The way van Gogh grabbed onto a theme, composed it in his mind and then tried it out in different variations fascinated the curators. "Very few artists do that," Ms. Ives said. "Often we tried to get into van Gogh's shoes and walk with him to see what was catching his eye." A series of watercolors van Gogh created of the plains of La Crau, three miles northwest of Arles, is one example. The curators persuaded the Van Gogh museum to lend them "Harvest in Provence" (1888), a rarely lent painting, because they were able to borrow a watercolor that preceded it and a pen-and-ink drawing from the National Gallery of Art in Washington that the artist did after it.
"Each has a distinctive character," Ms. Ives said. "During the harvest he was out there every day, tromping through the fields, and certain motifs like fences, haystacks, clumps of reeds and rushes he keeps repeating in all different media and scales."
As an art form, however, works on paper are extremely delicate and cannot be subject to light or to changes in temperature. As a result, many of the drawings and watercolors in the show have rarely been exhibited, and it may be some time before the public will see them again.
"The problem with drawings is they have to have a rest," Ms. Ives said. "The next generation won't be able to play in this garden for quite a long while."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Aquarius
Upheavals within a group you're affiliated with, perhaps professionally, might cause you to alter your goals slightly, dear Aquarius. In the long run, this could well prove to be a positive development, though the conditions leading to it could be a bit disconcerting. Think of this as an opportunity to pursue new hopes and dreams that you may not have even considered before. Plan carefully, and then go for the gold.
Upheavals within a group you're affiliated with, perhaps professionally, might cause you to alter your goals slightly, dear Aquarius. In the long run, this could well prove to be a positive development, though the conditions leading to it could be a bit disconcerting. Think of this as an opportunity to pursue new hopes and dreams that you may not have even considered before. Plan carefully, and then go for the gold.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Wired News: Venice Is Deep in Thought
Welcome to Wired News. Skip directly to: Search Box, Section Navigation, Content.
Venice Is Deep in Thought By Momus
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69070,00.html
02:00 AM Oct. 04, 2005 PT
This week's column comes from Venice, Italy. I'm here participating in a festival called Teach Me, organized by the Veneto region, the University of Venice and art school Fabrica. The question I'm asking my students in our sound workshops is, "What are the stories told by the sounds made by objects?" To answer that, we've been carrying small recording devices round the streets of Venice, capturing the sounds of industry, of boats, churches and cafes, footsteps resonating in narrow alleys, fans and generators, human voices. The question I want to ask here, though, is a different one. I want to know whether Venice is a city of the past or the future, whether it's forward- or backward-looking, whether it's sinking ... or thinking?
Venice is undoubtedly a museum city, a city whose center -- sharply defined by canals, islands and the melancholy lagoon in which it sits -- stopped expanding and changing centuries ago. Not only is the physical infrastructure of Venice literally sinking into the sea, but climate change is likely to bring water levels up in the near future, threatening the city's very existence. Meanwhile, industry is declining, and manufacturing jobs are being outsourced to China. These threats add to the peculiarly sinister literary and cinematic ghosts that haunt the city: the killer dwarf of Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, the decadent pedophile in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice who succumbs to lust and cholera as (in Visconti's film version of the story) heavy Mahler music plays.
iMomusOn the other hand, Venice is very much a city of the present and the future. The absence of cars could, in itself, be seen as somewhat futuristic; I'm sure many cities will ban cars from their central areas within the next hundred years, and, like Venice, become places where the loudest sound you hear is the sound of happy human voices. Venice lives by charisma, communication and creativity. Tourists from all over the world arrive at Marco Polo airport, making Venice's economy a global one. Its industries have transitioned successfully to services and spectacle; even the glass blowers on the island of Murano are now performer-artisans who call their wares art. Art has also become an economic motor in the form of the Biennale, an impressive array of cutting-edge curation held in the former weapons magazine, the Arsenale.
If an almost total lack of Wi-Fi signal in Venice indicates that the city isn't quite as futuristic or as communication-oriented as it might be, the seemingly endless succession of conferences dedicated to creativity suggest that it's a city that's thinking faster than it's sinking, a city rich in what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital," and which welcomes what Richard Florida calls "the creative class."
On the evening of my second day in Venice, I was ferried out to the small island of San Servolo, which houses Venice International University. A party was celebrating the end of a conference co-hosted by the Biennale and an organization called Cittadellarte, whose mission is "to inspire responsible change in society through creative ideas and projects." This seemed like the ideal opportunity to ask a question that was forming in my mind, related to Florida's ideas about how creativity can transform economies. Florida has estimated that up to 30 percent of the American work force is currently involved in activities he classifies as creative. So what happens when that figure creeps up to 50 percent and higher? What happens when all manual and industrial jobs are outsourced to places like China, and the citizens of post-industrial cities all become, in some sense, artists? How can this separation of creativity and production be a good thing?
The first person I asked was Michelangelo Pistoletto, artist, artistic director of Cittadellarte and head of the Pistoletto Foundation. Would he consider it a disaster for Venice, or Italy, to become all creativity and no productivity?
"Creativity for its own sake is something that ends up in a museum," Pistoletto told me. "But creativity can outline the parameters, the ways in which we can think about the relationship between people and the planet. We need responsible transformation which really changes the system of competition. Products are the bearers of messages. So I want to see these messages which art can convey in the form of products, messages about responsible social transformation."
"Each product is a vehicle of a certain message," said Paolo Naldini, Cittadellarte's administrator, expanding on the theme. "Therefore each product, even if it doesn't want to, has a social responsibility. Maybe it's completely socially irresponsible, or maybe not. Creativity is the force, the energy to transform everything, starting from your own life, your own personality, to the whole society. The creative mind is the mind that wants to take responsibility for what's happening. When it comes to products, it's there to make the product a responsible one."
As an example, Naldini told me how the illy coffee company had commissioned artists to make a cup. The winning design had featured a saucer with the words "No water, no coffee" written on it. "So illy itself became a producer that, instead of being interested only in the quality of coffee, came to understand that they need to pay attention to the quality of water, or to the very existence of water, which is a common good."
But isn't creativity just being used as an added value here, while production is outsourced to China?
"That's one way things can go. But let's look at it also this way. What's happening in China is the same thing that happened here, an industrial revolution. If we realized in the '60s and the '70s that we were about to crash into a wall, that our progress was ending in the devastation of the planet, now they're doing the same thing, but 10 times faster and 10 times bigger. So what do we need in order to compete? Definitely not to go on this same old way -- to reduce cost and implement productivity by introducing machines, automation and stuff like that -- but to identify which are the issues that we will need. So if we manage to identify sustainability, for example, as business, and ecology as the economy, then we will be able to compete within the whole planet. Creativity is a tool to identify the issues that we need to be competent."
And what if everyone becomes a member of "the creative class," but nobody is making anything?
"It's a very good point. What Italy represents is precisely the coexistence of creativity (culture) and material production (goods). And, in all this, difference is a value rather than a problem. Diversity. You see this in the Italian Renaissance cities, monuments, domes, churches, dialects, food, cuisine. But you see that in products too. Fifty kilometers east of here, there's an incredible culture of the production of knives, cutlery, things like that. So there's an overlapping of the creative need, the creative tension, and the producing one."
But production is in decline!
"Yes. But we don't need to ask if something's made in Italy, but made how? It won't matter, at the end of this very long utopian path we're talking about, if it's made in Romania, or made in Vietnam or in China, but it will matter how it's made. For example, there is another Italian company, Xenia; they make very high-quality men's clothes. They are trying to promote the idea of 'made in Xenia.' They are producing in China, or wherever, but it's a state of mind, which is like a state."
On the vaporetto, heading back toward Venice's main island, I spoke to Francesco Bernabei, economic dean of the Cittadellarte. Bernabei, who has a background in ethical banking, spoke about an "ethics of production." "Finally, though, the problem is not production," he told me. "The problem is money. The way money is distributed, and the way people accept that distribution."
Dusk was falling, and around us on the quay the life of Venice was going on, ordinary and extraordinary. African street vendors were selling cute mechanical kittens and knockoff Louis Vuitton bags designed by Takashi Murakami, while Chinese tour groups settled into gondolas manned by straw-hatted gondoliers, elegantly macho as they punted off down the canals, talking casually into cell phones.
Welcome to Wired News. Skip directly to: Search Box, Section Navigation, Content.
Venice Is Deep in Thought By Momus
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69070,00.html
02:00 AM Oct. 04, 2005 PT
This week's column comes from Venice, Italy. I'm here participating in a festival called Teach Me, organized by the Veneto region, the University of Venice and art school Fabrica. The question I'm asking my students in our sound workshops is, "What are the stories told by the sounds made by objects?" To answer that, we've been carrying small recording devices round the streets of Venice, capturing the sounds of industry, of boats, churches and cafes, footsteps resonating in narrow alleys, fans and generators, human voices. The question I want to ask here, though, is a different one. I want to know whether Venice is a city of the past or the future, whether it's forward- or backward-looking, whether it's sinking ... or thinking?
Venice is undoubtedly a museum city, a city whose center -- sharply defined by canals, islands and the melancholy lagoon in which it sits -- stopped expanding and changing centuries ago. Not only is the physical infrastructure of Venice literally sinking into the sea, but climate change is likely to bring water levels up in the near future, threatening the city's very existence. Meanwhile, industry is declining, and manufacturing jobs are being outsourced to China. These threats add to the peculiarly sinister literary and cinematic ghosts that haunt the city: the killer dwarf of Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, the decadent pedophile in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice who succumbs to lust and cholera as (in Visconti's film version of the story) heavy Mahler music plays.
iMomusOn the other hand, Venice is very much a city of the present and the future. The absence of cars could, in itself, be seen as somewhat futuristic; I'm sure many cities will ban cars from their central areas within the next hundred years, and, like Venice, become places where the loudest sound you hear is the sound of happy human voices. Venice lives by charisma, communication and creativity. Tourists from all over the world arrive at Marco Polo airport, making Venice's economy a global one. Its industries have transitioned successfully to services and spectacle; even the glass blowers on the island of Murano are now performer-artisans who call their wares art. Art has also become an economic motor in the form of the Biennale, an impressive array of cutting-edge curation held in the former weapons magazine, the Arsenale.
If an almost total lack of Wi-Fi signal in Venice indicates that the city isn't quite as futuristic or as communication-oriented as it might be, the seemingly endless succession of conferences dedicated to creativity suggest that it's a city that's thinking faster than it's sinking, a city rich in what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital," and which welcomes what Richard Florida calls "the creative class."
On the evening of my second day in Venice, I was ferried out to the small island of San Servolo, which houses Venice International University. A party was celebrating the end of a conference co-hosted by the Biennale and an organization called Cittadellarte, whose mission is "to inspire responsible change in society through creative ideas and projects." This seemed like the ideal opportunity to ask a question that was forming in my mind, related to Florida's ideas about how creativity can transform economies. Florida has estimated that up to 30 percent of the American work force is currently involved in activities he classifies as creative. So what happens when that figure creeps up to 50 percent and higher? What happens when all manual and industrial jobs are outsourced to places like China, and the citizens of post-industrial cities all become, in some sense, artists? How can this separation of creativity and production be a good thing?
The first person I asked was Michelangelo Pistoletto, artist, artistic director of Cittadellarte and head of the Pistoletto Foundation. Would he consider it a disaster for Venice, or Italy, to become all creativity and no productivity?
"Creativity for its own sake is something that ends up in a museum," Pistoletto told me. "But creativity can outline the parameters, the ways in which we can think about the relationship between people and the planet. We need responsible transformation which really changes the system of competition. Products are the bearers of messages. So I want to see these messages which art can convey in the form of products, messages about responsible social transformation."
"Each product is a vehicle of a certain message," said Paolo Naldini, Cittadellarte's administrator, expanding on the theme. "Therefore each product, even if it doesn't want to, has a social responsibility. Maybe it's completely socially irresponsible, or maybe not. Creativity is the force, the energy to transform everything, starting from your own life, your own personality, to the whole society. The creative mind is the mind that wants to take responsibility for what's happening. When it comes to products, it's there to make the product a responsible one."
As an example, Naldini told me how the illy coffee company had commissioned artists to make a cup. The winning design had featured a saucer with the words "No water, no coffee" written on it. "So illy itself became a producer that, instead of being interested only in the quality of coffee, came to understand that they need to pay attention to the quality of water, or to the very existence of water, which is a common good."
But isn't creativity just being used as an added value here, while production is outsourced to China?
"That's one way things can go. But let's look at it also this way. What's happening in China is the same thing that happened here, an industrial revolution. If we realized in the '60s and the '70s that we were about to crash into a wall, that our progress was ending in the devastation of the planet, now they're doing the same thing, but 10 times faster and 10 times bigger. So what do we need in order to compete? Definitely not to go on this same old way -- to reduce cost and implement productivity by introducing machines, automation and stuff like that -- but to identify which are the issues that we will need. So if we manage to identify sustainability, for example, as business, and ecology as the economy, then we will be able to compete within the whole planet. Creativity is a tool to identify the issues that we need to be competent."
And what if everyone becomes a member of "the creative class," but nobody is making anything?
"It's a very good point. What Italy represents is precisely the coexistence of creativity (culture) and material production (goods). And, in all this, difference is a value rather than a problem. Diversity. You see this in the Italian Renaissance cities, monuments, domes, churches, dialects, food, cuisine. But you see that in products too. Fifty kilometers east of here, there's an incredible culture of the production of knives, cutlery, things like that. So there's an overlapping of the creative need, the creative tension, and the producing one."
But production is in decline!
"Yes. But we don't need to ask if something's made in Italy, but made how? It won't matter, at the end of this very long utopian path we're talking about, if it's made in Romania, or made in Vietnam or in China, but it will matter how it's made. For example, there is another Italian company, Xenia; they make very high-quality men's clothes. They are trying to promote the idea of 'made in Xenia.' They are producing in China, or wherever, but it's a state of mind, which is like a state."
On the vaporetto, heading back toward Venice's main island, I spoke to Francesco Bernabei, economic dean of the Cittadellarte. Bernabei, who has a background in ethical banking, spoke about an "ethics of production." "Finally, though, the problem is not production," he told me. "The problem is money. The way money is distributed, and the way people accept that distribution."
Dusk was falling, and around us on the quay the life of Venice was going on, ordinary and extraordinary. African street vendors were selling cute mechanical kittens and knockoff Louis Vuitton bags designed by Takashi Murakami, while Chinese tour groups settled into gondolas manned by straw-hatted gondoliers, elegantly macho as they punted off down the canals, talking casually into cell phones.
The card represents the critical factor for the issue at hand. Six of Coins (Success): A time of prosperity and profit. Success and generosity in material things. Power and influence turned to noble pursuits. Philanthropy, and the balancing of physical and spiritual life. May suggest gifts or aid to one in need.
Monday, October 03, 2005
So what do you have to do to find happiness? - Sunday Times - Times Online
The Sunday Times October 02, 2005
So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Are we wired up to be cheerful, or are some of us destined to languish in abject misery? Dorothy Wade reports on the new science of feeling good
Behind the neoclassical facade of the Royal Institution, in London's Mayfair, the latest in a 200-year series of lectures was taking place in a hushed amphitheatre this summer. Standing on the shoulders of scientific giants such as Faraday and Dewar were three academics debating "Happiness, the science behind your smile".
Purists might imagine the founding geniuses of the Royal Institution turning in their graves. What does science have to tell us about such a frivolous subject? And how do you define happiness, let alone study it? But happiness has finally burst out of the academic closet. Several weighty volumes on the subject have been published this year. And on the same night as the RI event, the economist Lord Layard and the psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud were debating the Politics of Happiness at the London School of Economics just a mile away.
Perversely, happiness has a negative image in our culture. Influenced by a sceptical European philosophical outlook, we think of happiness as a trivial pursuit for the Oprah generation, a Shangri-La perpetuated by self-help gurus. Isn't it selfish to try to increase our happiness, while much of the world faces suffering and premature death?
Great writers from Freud — "the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation" — to Philip Larkin — "man hands on misery to man" — have painted happiness as an elusive butterfly. But ordinary people believe they are happier than average (an obvious impossibility) and that they'll be even happier in 10 years' time. If true, it would be good news because research shows that happier people are healthier, more successful, harder-working, caring and more socially engaged. Misery makes people self-obsessed and inactive.
These are the conclusions of a burgeoning happiness industry that has published 3,000 papers, set up a Journal of Happiness Studies and created a World Database of Happiness in the last few years.
Can scientists tell us what happiness is?
Economists accept that if people describe themselves as happy, then they are happy. However, psychologists differentiate between levels of happiness. The most immediate type involves a feeling; pleasure or joy. But sometimes happiness is a judgment that life is satisfying, and does not imply an emotional state.
Public surveys measure what makes us happy. Marriage does, pets do, but children don't seem to (despite what we think). Youth and old age are the happiest times. Money does not add much to happiness; in Britain, incomes have trebled since 1950, but happiness has not increased at all. The happiness of lottery winners returns to former levels within a year. People disabled in an accident are likely to become almost as happy again. For happiness levels are probably genetic: identical twins are usually equally bubbly or grumpy.
One thing makes a striking difference. When two American psychologists studied hundreds of students and focused on the top 10% "very happy" people, they found they spent the least time alone and the most time socialising. Psychologists know that increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering them up. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote "hell is other people", the arch-pessimist of existentialist angst was wrong.
America has pursued the chimera of happiness vigorously, not least through the insatiable consumption of self-help literature such as Climb Your Stairway to Heaven: 9 Tips for Daily Happiness! So it is no surprise that it's an American who is making happiness a subject of scientific study. At first glance, Martin Seligman's bestselling book Authentic Happiness, with its sunshine-yellow title on a sky-blue cover, blends with other manuals on the pop-psychology shelves. But America's latest guru of feeling good is not a stage hypnotist, an evangelical preacher or even a business visionary. Seligman is an eminent professor of psychology with a string of degrees. One of the chief architects of the prevailing model of depression, his work has helped to found modern "cognitive" therapies.
The man who's trying to do for happiness what Newton did for gravity has found it a scarce commodity in life. Seligman describes himself as a "walking nimbus cloud" who spent 50 years "enduring mostly wet weather in my soul". Feeling out of place as a chubby 13-year-old Jewish kid at a wealthy college, he hit on the role of therapist as a route to the hearts of unattainable girls. "What a brilliant stroke! I'll bet no other guy ever listened to them ruminate about their insecurities, nightmares and bleakest fantasies."
As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered "learned helplessness" and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with "learned helplessness" as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour.
Now Seligman is famous again, this time for creating the field of positive psychology. In 1997 the professor was seeking a theme for his presidency of the American Psychological Association. The idea came while gardening with his daughter Nikki. She was throwing weeds around and he was shouting. She reminded him that she used to be a whiner but had stopped on her fifth birthday. "And if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch."
Seligman describes this as an "epiphany". He vowed to change his own outlook, but more importantly recognised a strength — social intelligence — in his daughter that could be nurtured to help her withstand the vicissitudes of life. Looking back on "learned helplessness", he reflected that one in three subjects — rats, dogs or people — never became "helpless", no matter how many shocks or problems beset them.
"What is it about some people that imparts buffering strength, making them invulnerable to helplessness?" Seligman asked himself — and now he's made it his mission to find out.
Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.
A few pioneers in experimental psychology bucked the trend. Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively. Showing how easy it is to give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently.
Inspired by Isen and others, Seligman got stuck in. He wanted to revolutionise psychology, but his weapon would be tough science. Clinical psychology was the science of how to get from minus five to zero. This would be the science of getting from zero to plus five. Seligman wanted experiments, he wanted statistics, he wanted proof.
He raised millions of dollars of research money and funded 50 research groups involving 150 scientists across the world. Four positive psychology centres opened, decorated in cheerful colours and furnished with sofas and baby-sitters. There were get-togethers on Mexican beaches where psychologists would snorkel and eat fajitas, then form "pods" to discuss subjects such as wonder and awe. A thousand therapists were coached in the new science.
Their holy grail is the classification of strengths and virtues. After a solemn consultation of great works such as the samurai code, the Bhagavad-Gita and the writings of Confucius, Aristotle and Aquinas, Seligman's happiness scouts discovered six core virtues recognised in all cultures: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. They have subdivided these into 24 strengths, including humour and honesty.
But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of defining levels of happiness and classifying the virtues? Aren't these concepts vague and impossible to pin down? Can you justify spending funds to research positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic depression to be solved?
Seligman knows his work can be belittled alongside trite notions such as "the power of positive thinking". His plan to stop the new science floating "on the waves of self- improvement fashions" is to make sure it is anchored to positive philosophy above, and to positive biology below. And this takes us back to our evolutionary past.
Homo sapiens evolved during the Pleistocene era (1.8 m to 10,000 years ago), a time of hardship and turmoil. It was the Ice Age, and our ancestors endured long freezes as glaciers formed, then ferocious floods as the ice masses melted. We shared the planet with terrifying creatures such as mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats.
But by the end of the Pleistocene, all these animals were extinct. Humans, on the other hand, had evolved large brains and used their intelligence to make fire and sophisticated tools, to develop talk and social rituals.
Survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into a persistent mould. Professor Seligman says: "Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what's wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn't work in the modern world."
Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. When life runs smoothly, we're on autopilot — we're only in a state of true consciousness when we notice the stone in our shoe.
Of the six universal emotions, four — anger, fear, disgust and sadness — are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral.) According to the psychologist Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness, and one of the Royal Institution lecturers, the negative emotions each tell us "something bad has happened" and suggest a different course of action. Fear tells us danger is near, so run away. Anger prompts us to deter aggressors. Sadness warns us to be cautious and save energy, while disgust urges us to avoid contamination.
Joy, according to Nettle, simply tells us, "something good has happened, don't change anything". The evolutionary role of pleasure was to encourage activity that was good for survival, such as eating and having sex. But unlike negative emotions, which are often persistent, joy tends to be short-lived. We soon get sick of cream cakes or blasé about our pay rise.
What is it about the structure of the brain that underlies our bias towards negative thinking? And is there a biology of joy? At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images — a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing — the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain.
The ability to feel negative emotions derives from an ancient danger-recognition system formed early in the brain's evolution. The pre-frontal cortex, which registers happiness, is the part used for higher thinking, an area that evolved later in human history.
Professor Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has scanned brains in different emotional states. When he wired up a Buddhist monk entering a state of bliss through meditation, he found electrical activity shooting up the frontal lobe of the monk's brain on the left side. Observing toddlers at play, he picked some who were exuberant and uninhibited, behaviour linked to higher levels of positive emotion, and others who were quiet and shy. Tested later, the inhibited toddlers showed greater activity on the brain's right side; activation of the lively toddlers' brains was on the left. Happiness and sadness are lopsided.
Modern humans, stuck with an ancient brain, are like rats on a wheel. We can't stop running, because we're always looking over our shoulders and comparing our achievements with our neighbours'. At 20, we think we'd be happy with a house and a car. But if we get them, we start dreaming of a second home in Italy and a turbo-charged four-wheel-drive.
This is called the "hedonic treadmill" by happiness scholars. It causes us to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. The more possessions and accomplishments we have, the more we need to boost our level of happiness. It makes sense that the brain of a species that has dominated others would evolve to strive to be best.
Our difficulty, according to Daniel Nettle, is that the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. Wanting involves two ancient regions — the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens — that communicate using the chemical dopamine to form the brain's reward system. They are involved in anticipating the pleasure of eating and in addiction to drugs. A rat will press a bar repeatedly, ignoring sexually available partners, to receive electrical stimulation of the "wanting" parts of the brain. But having received brain stimulation, the rat eats more but shows no sign of enjoying the food it craved. In humans, a drug like nicotine produces much craving but little pleasure.
At the Royal Institution, Nettle explained how brain chemistry foils our pursuit of happiness in the modern world: "The things that you desire are not the things that you end up liking. The mechanisms of desire are insatiable. There are things that we really like and tire of less quickly — having good friends, the beauty of the natural world, spirituality. But our economic system plays into the psychology of wanting, and the psychology of liking gets drowned out."
Liking involves different brain chemicals from wanting. Real pleasure is associated with opioids. They are released in the rat brain by sweet tastes. When they are blocked in humans, food tastes less delicious. They also dampen down pain so that pleasure is unadulterated.
Happiness is neither desire nor pleasure alone. It involves a third chemical pathway. Serotonin constantly shifts the balance between negative and positive emotions. It can reduce worry, fear, panic and sleeplessness and increase sociability, co-operation, and happy feelings. Drugs based
on serotonin, such as ecstasy, produce a relaxed sense of wellbeing rather than the dopamine pattern of euphoria and craving.
In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and it's no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.
Psychologists such as Seligman are convinced you can train yourself to be happier. His teams are developing new positive interventions (treatments) to counteract the brain's nagging insistence on seeking out bad news. The treatments work by boosting positive emotion about the past, by teaching people to savour the present, and by increasing the amount of engagement and meaning in their lives.
Since the days of Freud, the emphasis in consulting rooms has been on talk about negative effects of the past and how they damage people in the present. Seligman names this approach "victimology" and says research shows it to be worthless: "It is difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large effects."
The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are "unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future", says Seligman. His colleague Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy after becoming disillusioned with his Freudian training in the 1950s. Beck found that as depressed patients talked "cathartically" about past wounds and losses, some people began to unravel. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some of which were fatal. There was very little evidence that psychoanalysis worked.
Cognitive therapy places less emphasis on the past. It works by challenging a person's thinking about the present and setting goals for the future. Another newcomer, brief solution-focused therapy, discourages talk about "problems" and helps clients identify strengths and resources to make positive changes in their lives.
The focus of most psychotherapy is on decreasing negative emotion. The aim of Seligman's therapy is to increase positive emotion (positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites and can co-exist: women have more of both than men). From the time of Buddha to the self-improvement industry of today, more than 100 "interventions" have been tried in the attempt to build happiness. Forty of these are being tested in randomised placebo-controlled trials by Seligman and his colleagues.
In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week. The other is about identifying your signature strengths and using one of them in a new and different way every day for a week. A third technique involves writing a long letter to someone you're grateful to but have never properly thanked, and visiting them to read it out in person.
Seligman and his graduate students weep tears of joy when they do this exercise, but most Brits would probably rather be miserable than do it. So it's a relief to hear that it doesn't work particularly well. It has strong, but only brief, effects.
Seligman speculates that doing more exercises for longer would bring greater benefits. Hundreds of thousands of people have registered with his website www.reflectivehappiness.com — where, for $10 a month, they are given a happiness programme including instruction in a package of positive exercises.
Sylvia Perkins, a 73-year-old retired librarian from south Michigan tried the "Savour a Beautiful Day" task. Her husband died of lung cancer four years ago, and after a recent mild stroke she moved into an assisted living community. "The move has been very difficult for me and I've been trying to fight off the feeling that I've just come here to die. When I heard about this exercise, I decided to give it a try, because it seemed like a hopeful thing to do."
She spent her "beautiful" day going through photos and mementoes and making scrapbooks for each of her children. She also wrote them letters about her most precious memories of them and stuck them in the albums. "This exercise helped me feel reconnected to my children. I have felt more hopeful about my situation. I realise that my health prognosis is really quite good and I am confident that I will have many more years to share with my family."
Positive psychology has a schmaltzy American feel that might not translate well into a British setting. Dr Nick Baylis of Cambridge University is working with colleagues to "tweak" positive psychology for "British ears". He calls his research the "study of wellbeing" rather than the science of happiness. As a forensic psychologist, he worked with young offenders at Feltham and decided that studying what went wrong in damaged lives was not productive. "I had looked at broken lives. Now I wanted to look at lives that go well."
He founded the charity Trailblazers to give young offenders positive role models. In his Young Lives research project, he interviewed hundreds of accomplished people from Kate Adie to Jamie Oliver about their strategies for making the most of life. Their advice and ideas can be found in www.YoungLivesUK.com and in the book Wonderful Lives.
When Baylis went to Cambridge as Britain's first lecturer in positive psychology, he was treated as a "neo-Nazi", he says. The study of happiness was a "taboo subject". He sent an e-mail to colleagues who might have an interest in wellbeing, and received a reply from only one, Professor Felicia Huppert. She studies the secrets of a happy, productive old age, and theirs is now a fruitful collaboration. The British approach to wellbeing also emphasises good physical health and diet, proper sleep, relaxation and exercise, and spending time in the natural environment.
Given its famously bad health and diet, Glasgow is a city in need of positive medicine. It's become a live laboratory for the new science. Last month, Professor Seligman paid his second visit to Glasgow's Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing, to spread the happiness gospel to Scottish teachers, coaches and businessmen as part of the Vanguard programme, backed by the Scottish Executive. The sceptical Scots seem to welcome Seligman's empirical approach.
Dr Carol Craig, who runs the centre, is passionate about curing Scotland's epidemic of pessimism and low self-esteem. She points to many indicators of malaise: the Scottish suicide rate is double the English one, and antidepressant prescribing is 40% higher. A new UN report says that Scotland is the most violent country in the developed world. Scottish children are among the least confident anywhere, according to the World Health Organization.
Craig believes that the dark, forbidding nature of Calvinist religion is responsible for the dour Scottish psyche. "We're a culture that encourages feelings of lack of self-worth. We're a culture that goes out of its way to make sure people don't feel good about themselves," says Craig.
From a young age, Scots are taught humility, modesty and conformity. Scottish humour often pokes fun at those who "get above their station". Craig speculates that the high rate of emigration from Scotland has denuded the country of optimists and left too many pessimists behind. Could any of this be linked to the fact that men in one part of Glasgow, Shettleston, have a life expectancy of 64? (Scottish men, on average, live to 73.) And that west Scotland is the unhealthiest region in Europe, with high rates of heart disease, cancer and strokes? Has anyone found a causal link between happiness and health?
Nuns may hold the answer. Nuns make a great natural experiment, because they lead the same routine lives with similar diets and activities. None have married or had children. Yet there is huge variation in their health and longevity. In 1932, 180 novices in Milwaukee wrote short sketches of their lives. One wrote: "God started my life off well by bestowing upon me grace of inestimable value. The past year has been a very happy one." She lived to 98 in wonderful health.
Another wrote a joyless and neutral sketch, ending: "With God's grace, I intend to do my best for our Order." She died after a stroke at the age of 59. Researchers who quantified positive feeling in all 180 sketches discovered that nearly all (90%) of the happiest quarter were still alive at 85. But of the least cheerful quarter, only a third survived to that age.
Another piece of the jigsaw fitted this year when a team from University College London tested the happiness levels of 216 middle-aged civil servants in a study of risk factors for coronary heart disease. People who had the most happy moments per day had the lowest rates of cortisol, a hormone that can be harmful if produced excessively, and of the chemical plasma fibrinogen, a predictor of heart disease. The happiest men (but not women) also had the lowest heart rates.
Angela Clow, professor of psychophysiology at Westminster University, is a world authority on the biochemistry of stress. "There is clear evidence that stress makes you susceptible to illness, but I wanted to turn this around and discover how happiness makes you healthier. There's not a lot of happiness research in the UK, because if you do it, people think you're trivial," says Clow.
In one experiment, she and colleagues blindfolded participants and wafted smells of chocolate, water and rotten meat under their noses. Then they measured levels of secretory IgA, an antibody that protects the body against invading cells, in their saliva. Chocolate sent the antibody levels soaring up; rotten meat brought them down. Clow found that pleasant music also boosted the immune system, as did stimulating the left side of the brain with magnetism.
Comparing patients in a day-surgery waiting room with music and art on the walls against one with no music and plain white walls, Clow found that the art and music patients had lower heart-rates, blood pressure and cortisol, and needed less sedation before their surgery.
"But why should happiness have such an effect on the immune system?" asks Clow. She speculates that there is an evolutionary mechanism. Our happiest ancestors were bold creatures who socialised and ventured out to explore. This brought them into contact with infection, so they needed higher levels of antibodies in a stronger immune system.
But repeated stress weakens us. The stress response temporarily increases the level of cortisol, a vital hormone that regulates the whole immune system. This is a healthy response, designed to produce fight or flight only in cases of real danger. Unfortunately, the daily hassles of modern life induce repeated stress in some of us, subjecting our bodies to frequent pulses of cortisol. This unbalances the immune system and makes us ill.
Laughter and humour are also being studied for their effects on health. Research methods include using a tickle machine, and probing with electrodes to find the funny parts of the brain. Laughter, like stress, increases blood pressure and heart rate and changes breathing. But unlike stress, it reduces levels of chemicals circulating in the body. In one study, people's cortisol and adrenaline were reduced after watching a favourite comedy video for 60 minutes.
It's difficult to resist the logic of the happiness doctors. Stay in your Eeyore-ish bubble of existentialist angst and have a life that's short, sickly, friendless and self-obsessed. Or find a way to get happy, and long life, good health, job satisfaction and social success will be yours. You'd better start writing that gratitude letter now.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
Men often complain about their wives' volatility. Now research confirms that women really are both happier and sadder. Positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites — you can have both in your life. Women experience more of all emotions except anger. First it was found that women experience twice as much depression as men. Next, researchers found that women report more positive emotion than men, more frequently and more intensely. It all points to men and women having a different emotional make-up. Cognitive psychologists say that men and women have different skills related to sending and receiving emotion. Women are expressive; men conceal or control their emotions. Women convey emotion through facial expression and communication; men express emotion through aggressive or distracting behaviour. Does the difference lie in biology, social roles or just women's willingness to report emotion? That's up for debate.
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions . Please read our Privacy Policy . To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website .
The Sunday Times October 02, 2005
So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Are we wired up to be cheerful, or are some of us destined to languish in abject misery? Dorothy Wade reports on the new science of feeling good
Behind the neoclassical facade of the Royal Institution, in London's Mayfair, the latest in a 200-year series of lectures was taking place in a hushed amphitheatre this summer. Standing on the shoulders of scientific giants such as Faraday and Dewar were three academics debating "Happiness, the science behind your smile".
Purists might imagine the founding geniuses of the Royal Institution turning in their graves. What does science have to tell us about such a frivolous subject? And how do you define happiness, let alone study it? But happiness has finally burst out of the academic closet. Several weighty volumes on the subject have been published this year. And on the same night as the RI event, the economist Lord Layard and the psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud were debating the Politics of Happiness at the London School of Economics just a mile away.
Perversely, happiness has a negative image in our culture. Influenced by a sceptical European philosophical outlook, we think of happiness as a trivial pursuit for the Oprah generation, a Shangri-La perpetuated by self-help gurus. Isn't it selfish to try to increase our happiness, while much of the world faces suffering and premature death?
Great writers from Freud — "the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation" — to Philip Larkin — "man hands on misery to man" — have painted happiness as an elusive butterfly. But ordinary people believe they are happier than average (an obvious impossibility) and that they'll be even happier in 10 years' time. If true, it would be good news because research shows that happier people are healthier, more successful, harder-working, caring and more socially engaged. Misery makes people self-obsessed and inactive.
These are the conclusions of a burgeoning happiness industry that has published 3,000 papers, set up a Journal of Happiness Studies and created a World Database of Happiness in the last few years.
Can scientists tell us what happiness is?
Economists accept that if people describe themselves as happy, then they are happy. However, psychologists differentiate between levels of happiness. The most immediate type involves a feeling; pleasure or joy. But sometimes happiness is a judgment that life is satisfying, and does not imply an emotional state.
Public surveys measure what makes us happy. Marriage does, pets do, but children don't seem to (despite what we think). Youth and old age are the happiest times. Money does not add much to happiness; in Britain, incomes have trebled since 1950, but happiness has not increased at all. The happiness of lottery winners returns to former levels within a year. People disabled in an accident are likely to become almost as happy again. For happiness levels are probably genetic: identical twins are usually equally bubbly or grumpy.
One thing makes a striking difference. When two American psychologists studied hundreds of students and focused on the top 10% "very happy" people, they found they spent the least time alone and the most time socialising. Psychologists know that increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering them up. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote "hell is other people", the arch-pessimist of existentialist angst was wrong.
America has pursued the chimera of happiness vigorously, not least through the insatiable consumption of self-help literature such as Climb Your Stairway to Heaven: 9 Tips for Daily Happiness! So it is no surprise that it's an American who is making happiness a subject of scientific study. At first glance, Martin Seligman's bestselling book Authentic Happiness, with its sunshine-yellow title on a sky-blue cover, blends with other manuals on the pop-psychology shelves. But America's latest guru of feeling good is not a stage hypnotist, an evangelical preacher or even a business visionary. Seligman is an eminent professor of psychology with a string of degrees. One of the chief architects of the prevailing model of depression, his work has helped to found modern "cognitive" therapies.
The man who's trying to do for happiness what Newton did for gravity has found it a scarce commodity in life. Seligman describes himself as a "walking nimbus cloud" who spent 50 years "enduring mostly wet weather in my soul". Feeling out of place as a chubby 13-year-old Jewish kid at a wealthy college, he hit on the role of therapist as a route to the hearts of unattainable girls. "What a brilliant stroke! I'll bet no other guy ever listened to them ruminate about their insecurities, nightmares and bleakest fantasies."
As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered "learned helplessness" and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with "learned helplessness" as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour.
Now Seligman is famous again, this time for creating the field of positive psychology. In 1997 the professor was seeking a theme for his presidency of the American Psychological Association. The idea came while gardening with his daughter Nikki. She was throwing weeds around and he was shouting. She reminded him that she used to be a whiner but had stopped on her fifth birthday. "And if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch."
Seligman describes this as an "epiphany". He vowed to change his own outlook, but more importantly recognised a strength — social intelligence — in his daughter that could be nurtured to help her withstand the vicissitudes of life. Looking back on "learned helplessness", he reflected that one in three subjects — rats, dogs or people — never became "helpless", no matter how many shocks or problems beset them.
"What is it about some people that imparts buffering strength, making them invulnerable to helplessness?" Seligman asked himself — and now he's made it his mission to find out.
Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.
A few pioneers in experimental psychology bucked the trend. Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively. Showing how easy it is to give people an intellectual boost, Isen divided doctors making a tricky diagnosis into three groups: one received candy, one read humanistic statements about medicine, one was a control group. The doctors who had candy displayed the most creative thinking and worked more efficiently.
Inspired by Isen and others, Seligman got stuck in. He wanted to revolutionise psychology, but his weapon would be tough science. Clinical psychology was the science of how to get from minus five to zero. This would be the science of getting from zero to plus five. Seligman wanted experiments, he wanted statistics, he wanted proof.
He raised millions of dollars of research money and funded 50 research groups involving 150 scientists across the world. Four positive psychology centres opened, decorated in cheerful colours and furnished with sofas and baby-sitters. There were get-togethers on Mexican beaches where psychologists would snorkel and eat fajitas, then form "pods" to discuss subjects such as wonder and awe. A thousand therapists were coached in the new science.
Their holy grail is the classification of strengths and virtues. After a solemn consultation of great works such as the samurai code, the Bhagavad-Gita and the writings of Confucius, Aristotle and Aquinas, Seligman's happiness scouts discovered six core virtues recognised in all cultures: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. They have subdivided these into 24 strengths, including humour and honesty.
But critics are demanding answers to big questions. What is the point of defining levels of happiness and classifying the virtues? Aren't these concepts vague and impossible to pin down? Can you justify spending funds to research positive states when there are problems such as famine, flood and epidemic depression to be solved?
Seligman knows his work can be belittled alongside trite notions such as "the power of positive thinking". His plan to stop the new science floating "on the waves of self- improvement fashions" is to make sure it is anchored to positive philosophy above, and to positive biology below. And this takes us back to our evolutionary past.
Homo sapiens evolved during the Pleistocene era (1.8 m to 10,000 years ago), a time of hardship and turmoil. It was the Ice Age, and our ancestors endured long freezes as glaciers formed, then ferocious floods as the ice masses melted. We shared the planet with terrifying creatures such as mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats.
But by the end of the Pleistocene, all these animals were extinct. Humans, on the other hand, had evolved large brains and used their intelligence to make fire and sophisticated tools, to develop talk and social rituals.
Survival in a time of adversity forged our brains into a persistent mould. Professor Seligman says: "Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what's wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favoured you, but it doesn't work in the modern world."
Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. When life runs smoothly, we're on autopilot — we're only in a state of true consciousness when we notice the stone in our shoe.
Of the six universal emotions, four — anger, fear, disgust and sadness — are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral.) According to the psychologist Daniel Nettle, author of Happiness, and one of the Royal Institution lecturers, the negative emotions each tell us "something bad has happened" and suggest a different course of action. Fear tells us danger is near, so run away. Anger prompts us to deter aggressors. Sadness warns us to be cautious and save energy, while disgust urges us to avoid contamination.
Joy, according to Nettle, simply tells us, "something good has happened, don't change anything". The evolutionary role of pleasure was to encourage activity that was good for survival, such as eating and having sex. But unlike negative emotions, which are often persistent, joy tends to be short-lived. We soon get sick of cream cakes or blasé about our pay rise.
What is it about the structure of the brain that underlies our bias towards negative thinking? And is there a biology of joy? At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images — a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing — the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain.
The ability to feel negative emotions derives from an ancient danger-recognition system formed early in the brain's evolution. The pre-frontal cortex, which registers happiness, is the part used for higher thinking, an area that evolved later in human history.
Professor Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has scanned brains in different emotional states. When he wired up a Buddhist monk entering a state of bliss through meditation, he found electrical activity shooting up the frontal lobe of the monk's brain on the left side. Observing toddlers at play, he picked some who were exuberant and uninhibited, behaviour linked to higher levels of positive emotion, and others who were quiet and shy. Tested later, the inhibited toddlers showed greater activity on the brain's right side; activation of the lively toddlers' brains was on the left. Happiness and sadness are lopsided.
Modern humans, stuck with an ancient brain, are like rats on a wheel. We can't stop running, because we're always looking over our shoulders and comparing our achievements with our neighbours'. At 20, we think we'd be happy with a house and a car. But if we get them, we start dreaming of a second home in Italy and a turbo-charged four-wheel-drive.
This is called the "hedonic treadmill" by happiness scholars. It causes us to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. The more possessions and accomplishments we have, the more we need to boost our level of happiness. It makes sense that the brain of a species that has dominated others would evolve to strive to be best.
Our difficulty, according to Daniel Nettle, is that the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. Wanting involves two ancient regions — the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens — that communicate using the chemical dopamine to form the brain's reward system. They are involved in anticipating the pleasure of eating and in addiction to drugs. A rat will press a bar repeatedly, ignoring sexually available partners, to receive electrical stimulation of the "wanting" parts of the brain. But having received brain stimulation, the rat eats more but shows no sign of enjoying the food it craved. In humans, a drug like nicotine produces much craving but little pleasure.
At the Royal Institution, Nettle explained how brain chemistry foils our pursuit of happiness in the modern world: "The things that you desire are not the things that you end up liking. The mechanisms of desire are insatiable. There are things that we really like and tire of less quickly — having good friends, the beauty of the natural world, spirituality. But our economic system plays into the psychology of wanting, and the psychology of liking gets drowned out."
Liking involves different brain chemicals from wanting. Real pleasure is associated with opioids. They are released in the rat brain by sweet tastes. When they are blocked in humans, food tastes less delicious. They also dampen down pain so that pleasure is unadulterated.
Happiness is neither desire nor pleasure alone. It involves a third chemical pathway. Serotonin constantly shifts the balance between negative and positive emotions. It can reduce worry, fear, panic and sleeplessness and increase sociability, co-operation, and happy feelings. Drugs based
on serotonin, such as ecstasy, produce a relaxed sense of wellbeing rather than the dopamine pattern of euphoria and craving.
In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and it's no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.
Psychologists such as Seligman are convinced you can train yourself to be happier. His teams are developing new positive interventions (treatments) to counteract the brain's nagging insistence on seeking out bad news. The treatments work by boosting positive emotion about the past, by teaching people to savour the present, and by increasing the amount of engagement and meaning in their lives.
Since the days of Freud, the emphasis in consulting rooms has been on talk about negative effects of the past and how they damage people in the present. Seligman names this approach "victimology" and says research shows it to be worthless: "It is difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large effects."
The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are "unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future", says Seligman. His colleague Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy after becoming disillusioned with his Freudian training in the 1950s. Beck found that as depressed patients talked "cathartically" about past wounds and losses, some people began to unravel. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some of which were fatal. There was very little evidence that psychoanalysis worked.
Cognitive therapy places less emphasis on the past. It works by challenging a person's thinking about the present and setting goals for the future. Another newcomer, brief solution-focused therapy, discourages talk about "problems" and helps clients identify strengths and resources to make positive changes in their lives.
The focus of most psychotherapy is on decreasing negative emotion. The aim of Seligman's therapy is to increase positive emotion (positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites and can co-exist: women have more of both than men). From the time of Buddha to the self-improvement industry of today, more than 100 "interventions" have been tried in the attempt to build happiness. Forty of these are being tested in randomised placebo-controlled trials by Seligman and his colleagues.
In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week. The other is about identifying your signature strengths and using one of them in a new and different way every day for a week. A third technique involves writing a long letter to someone you're grateful to but have never properly thanked, and visiting them to read it out in person.
Seligman and his graduate students weep tears of joy when they do this exercise, but most Brits would probably rather be miserable than do it. So it's a relief to hear that it doesn't work particularly well. It has strong, but only brief, effects.
Seligman speculates that doing more exercises for longer would bring greater benefits. Hundreds of thousands of people have registered with his website www.reflectivehappiness.com — where, for $10 a month, they are given a happiness programme including instruction in a package of positive exercises.
Sylvia Perkins, a 73-year-old retired librarian from south Michigan tried the "Savour a Beautiful Day" task. Her husband died of lung cancer four years ago, and after a recent mild stroke she moved into an assisted living community. "The move has been very difficult for me and I've been trying to fight off the feeling that I've just come here to die. When I heard about this exercise, I decided to give it a try, because it seemed like a hopeful thing to do."
She spent her "beautiful" day going through photos and mementoes and making scrapbooks for each of her children. She also wrote them letters about her most precious memories of them and stuck them in the albums. "This exercise helped me feel reconnected to my children. I have felt more hopeful about my situation. I realise that my health prognosis is really quite good and I am confident that I will have many more years to share with my family."
Positive psychology has a schmaltzy American feel that might not translate well into a British setting. Dr Nick Baylis of Cambridge University is working with colleagues to "tweak" positive psychology for "British ears". He calls his research the "study of wellbeing" rather than the science of happiness. As a forensic psychologist, he worked with young offenders at Feltham and decided that studying what went wrong in damaged lives was not productive. "I had looked at broken lives. Now I wanted to look at lives that go well."
He founded the charity Trailblazers to give young offenders positive role models. In his Young Lives research project, he interviewed hundreds of accomplished people from Kate Adie to Jamie Oliver about their strategies for making the most of life. Their advice and ideas can be found in www.YoungLivesUK.com and in the book Wonderful Lives.
When Baylis went to Cambridge as Britain's first lecturer in positive psychology, he was treated as a "neo-Nazi", he says. The study of happiness was a "taboo subject". He sent an e-mail to colleagues who might have an interest in wellbeing, and received a reply from only one, Professor Felicia Huppert. She studies the secrets of a happy, productive old age, and theirs is now a fruitful collaboration. The British approach to wellbeing also emphasises good physical health and diet, proper sleep, relaxation and exercise, and spending time in the natural environment.
Given its famously bad health and diet, Glasgow is a city in need of positive medicine. It's become a live laboratory for the new science. Last month, Professor Seligman paid his second visit to Glasgow's Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing, to spread the happiness gospel to Scottish teachers, coaches and businessmen as part of the Vanguard programme, backed by the Scottish Executive. The sceptical Scots seem to welcome Seligman's empirical approach.
Dr Carol Craig, who runs the centre, is passionate about curing Scotland's epidemic of pessimism and low self-esteem. She points to many indicators of malaise: the Scottish suicide rate is double the English one, and antidepressant prescribing is 40% higher. A new UN report says that Scotland is the most violent country in the developed world. Scottish children are among the least confident anywhere, according to the World Health Organization.
Craig believes that the dark, forbidding nature of Calvinist religion is responsible for the dour Scottish psyche. "We're a culture that encourages feelings of lack of self-worth. We're a culture that goes out of its way to make sure people don't feel good about themselves," says Craig.
From a young age, Scots are taught humility, modesty and conformity. Scottish humour often pokes fun at those who "get above their station". Craig speculates that the high rate of emigration from Scotland has denuded the country of optimists and left too many pessimists behind. Could any of this be linked to the fact that men in one part of Glasgow, Shettleston, have a life expectancy of 64? (Scottish men, on average, live to 73.) And that west Scotland is the unhealthiest region in Europe, with high rates of heart disease, cancer and strokes? Has anyone found a causal link between happiness and health?
Nuns may hold the answer. Nuns make a great natural experiment, because they lead the same routine lives with similar diets and activities. None have married or had children. Yet there is huge variation in their health and longevity. In 1932, 180 novices in Milwaukee wrote short sketches of their lives. One wrote: "God started my life off well by bestowing upon me grace of inestimable value. The past year has been a very happy one." She lived to 98 in wonderful health.
Another wrote a joyless and neutral sketch, ending: "With God's grace, I intend to do my best for our Order." She died after a stroke at the age of 59. Researchers who quantified positive feeling in all 180 sketches discovered that nearly all (90%) of the happiest quarter were still alive at 85. But of the least cheerful quarter, only a third survived to that age.
Another piece of the jigsaw fitted this year when a team from University College London tested the happiness levels of 216 middle-aged civil servants in a study of risk factors for coronary heart disease. People who had the most happy moments per day had the lowest rates of cortisol, a hormone that can be harmful if produced excessively, and of the chemical plasma fibrinogen, a predictor of heart disease. The happiest men (but not women) also had the lowest heart rates.
Angela Clow, professor of psychophysiology at Westminster University, is a world authority on the biochemistry of stress. "There is clear evidence that stress makes you susceptible to illness, but I wanted to turn this around and discover how happiness makes you healthier. There's not a lot of happiness research in the UK, because if you do it, people think you're trivial," says Clow.
In one experiment, she and colleagues blindfolded participants and wafted smells of chocolate, water and rotten meat under their noses. Then they measured levels of secretory IgA, an antibody that protects the body against invading cells, in their saliva. Chocolate sent the antibody levels soaring up; rotten meat brought them down. Clow found that pleasant music also boosted the immune system, as did stimulating the left side of the brain with magnetism.
Comparing patients in a day-surgery waiting room with music and art on the walls against one with no music and plain white walls, Clow found that the art and music patients had lower heart-rates, blood pressure and cortisol, and needed less sedation before their surgery.
"But why should happiness have such an effect on the immune system?" asks Clow. She speculates that there is an evolutionary mechanism. Our happiest ancestors were bold creatures who socialised and ventured out to explore. This brought them into contact with infection, so they needed higher levels of antibodies in a stronger immune system.
But repeated stress weakens us. The stress response temporarily increases the level of cortisol, a vital hormone that regulates the whole immune system. This is a healthy response, designed to produce fight or flight only in cases of real danger. Unfortunately, the daily hassles of modern life induce repeated stress in some of us, subjecting our bodies to frequent pulses of cortisol. This unbalances the immune system and makes us ill.
Laughter and humour are also being studied for their effects on health. Research methods include using a tickle machine, and probing with electrodes to find the funny parts of the brain. Laughter, like stress, increases blood pressure and heart rate and changes breathing. But unlike stress, it reduces levels of chemicals circulating in the body. In one study, people's cortisol and adrenaline were reduced after watching a favourite comedy video for 60 minutes.
It's difficult to resist the logic of the happiness doctors. Stay in your Eeyore-ish bubble of existentialist angst and have a life that's short, sickly, friendless and self-obsessed. Or find a way to get happy, and long life, good health, job satisfaction and social success will be yours. You'd better start writing that gratitude letter now.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
Men often complain about their wives' volatility. Now research confirms that women really are both happier and sadder. Positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites — you can have both in your life. Women experience more of all emotions except anger. First it was found that women experience twice as much depression as men. Next, researchers found that women report more positive emotion than men, more frequently and more intensely. It all points to men and women having a different emotional make-up. Cognitive psychologists say that men and women have different skills related to sending and receiving emotion. Women are expressive; men conceal or control their emotions. Women convey emotion through facial expression and communication; men express emotion through aggressive or distracting behaviour. Does the difference lie in biology, social roles or just women's willingness to report emotion? That's up for debate.
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions . Please read our Privacy Policy . To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website .
Countdown to the Eve of Destruction - New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 3, 2005
Countdown to the Eve of Destruction
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 2 - The last person to take a bow when John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" had its momentous premiere on Saturday night at the San Francisco Opera was not the composer but Pamela Rosenberg, the outgoing general director of the company. Though it is unorthodox for an opera house administrator to appear onstage for curtain calls, here it was warranted.
As part of her initiative called "The Faust Project," Ms. Rosenberg had approached Mr. Adams with the idea of writing an opera on a 20th-century American Faust: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who presided over the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bombs. Though initially hesitant, Mr. Adams, who thinks big, could not resist. Nor could his longtime collaborator, the director Peter Sellars.
In a risky stroke Mr. Sellars assembled a libretto from interviews with the project participants, history books, conversation transcripts, declassified documents and poetry. His cut-and-paste job has produced a libretto of heightened emotional resonance and surprising dramatic continuity. With Mr. Adams's haunting score, what results is a complex, searching and painfully honest if somewhat problematic opera.
"Doctor Atomic" is the ultimate waiting game. It begins in June 1945 as the physicists, scientists and military personnel who are working at Los Alamos, N.M., are poised to test the first atomic bomb. The rest of the two-and-a-half-hour opera takes place on the night before and the morning of July 16, the day the first bomb was tested at the site that Oppenheimer, inspired by a John Donne poem, called Trinity. In a sense, not much happens: only that Oppenheimer and the other participants grapple with their consciences as the countdown to detonation, quite literally, commences.
The Oppenheimer of "Doctor Atomic" is a true Faustian figure, a questing, cultured, brilliant and arrogant man, vividly portrayed by the charismatic Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who sings with burnished tone and makes every word count. As Mr. Sellars explained in a preperformance talk, Oppenheimer understood that by pushing science to new limits he would unleash barely imaginable forces in the world and even more fearsome forces within mankind. But he willed himself to turn off the part of his brain that processes ethical qualms about his work. The "best people" in Washington will make these decisions for us scientists, he argues.
In his talk, Mr. Sellars bemoaned today's culture, in which the government and the news media simplify everything with "ridiculous crudeness." Welcome to opera, he said, where we do not shy from ambiguity and complexity.
Still, it takes great music to achieve this. "Doctor Atomic," Mr. Adams's third full-fledged opera, may be his most inventive and emotional score to date, and the conductor Donald Runnicles drew a keen, compelling and assured performance from the orchestra.
In his days as a fledgling composer, Mr. Adams rejected the academic atonality he was steeped in as a student and embraced Minimalism, jazz, electronics and experimental styles. But once over his rebellion, he increasingly allowed himself to incorporate elements of the more complex techniques he had been exposed to. In "Doctor Atomic," Mr. Adams, 58, breaks new ground in that sphere.
Whole spans of the orchestral and choral music tremble with textural density. Stacked-up clusters and polytonal harmonies have stunning bite and pungency. Skittish instrumental lines come close to sounding like riffs from a serialist score. The vocal writing is wondrously varied, sometimes jittery and naturalistic, sometimes melismatic and elegiac. You hear evocations of sci-fi film scores and bursts of Varèsian frenzy.
When he needs to propel the music forward, Mr. Adams, true to form, creates a din of pummeling rhythms, fractured meters and jolting repeated figures: call it atomic Minimalism. Yet tension runs even through the long, ruminative, wistful episodes, like the poignant bedtime scene between Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty.
A sensitive and long-suffering alcoholic, Kitty was portrayed with touching vulnerability by the mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson, though her diction was frustratingly mushy. Like Wagner's Erda, Kitty sees all too well the implications of the work that consumes her dazzling but remote husband. It seems right that the couple sometimes converse in a private language of quotations from sensual Baudelaire poems, for they cannot face each other with unblinking honesty.
There are Wagnerian touches to the music beyond its orchestral lushness and bigness, in, for example, Mr. Adams's way of using the orchestra to comment on the story and the characters.
One telling instance comes in a short scene with Gen. Leslie Groves, the blustery Army commander on the project. For a moment Groves forgets the mission and is drawn by Oppenheimer into a conversation about his weight problem. Dynamically portrayed by the husky bass Eric Owens, Groves shows Oppenheimer his calorie counter and talks about his diet regimen, which is not going well. Groves's chatter is enshrouded in luminous harmonies and pleading melodic lines, as if the orchestra sees the one person with the power to postpone the test in a fleeting moment of human frailty and tries to talk sense to him.
Act I closes with a transfixing scene for Oppenheimer, when he recites that Donne sonnet, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," an abject surrender to God. Mr. Adams's setting is like some contemporary evocation of an intricately contrapuntal Renaissance song with a tortured melodic line and unstable modal harmonies.
Other standouts in the cast include the baritone Richard Paul Fink, who uses his stentorian singing to mask the manipulative ways of the physicist Edward Teller, who would become Oppenheimer's nemesis during the McCarthy years. The elegant baritone James Maddalena (who created the title role in Mr. Adams's "Nixon in China") portrays the meteorologist Jack Hubbard, who must suffer the tirades of General Groves.
The mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton made an impact in two mysterious scenes as the Oppenheimers' maid, who sings totemic songs to the couple's children. The tenor Thomas Glenn brought his sweet voice and boyish innocence to the role of Robert Wilson, a young idealistic physicist plagued with guilt about the test.
Alas, the musical performance was troubled by balance problems, which were not helped by the use of amplification. Electronic elements have long been part of the Adams style. Since the large orchestra was electronically enhanced, the solo singers had to wear wireless microphones. Introducing amplification into opera is Mr. Adams's prerogative. But if you are going to abandon 400 years of tradition and amplify singers to get the balances right, then get the balances right.
All other aspects of Mr. Sellars's production are remarkable. Adrianne Lobel's striking sets use movable columns and sliding lab tables filled with plutonium cores and other gadgets, set against a silhouette of New Mexico mountains. The costume designer Dunya Ramicova dresses the chorus as 1940's scientists, technicians and workers, who remind us that the Manhattan Project employed thousands of workers. The choreographer Lucinda Childs uses dancers to "physicalize the anxiety of waiting," in Mr. Sellars's words, and lend a quality of abstraction to the affecting and graceful staging.
The waiting, of course, culminates in the detonation. Before he composed a note Mr. Adams knew that any attempt to depict an atomic explosion in music would be clichéd on arrival. His solution is ingenious. As the moment approaches and the battering-ram orchestra seems to be sounding inside your head, suddenly all goes quiet and we experience the detonation as if we were 200 miles away in Los Alamos. The music is delicate, strange, melodically dispersed, harmonically tentative. You sense the atmosphere crackling, the world changing. The calm voice of a Japanese woman is heard. We know what comes next.
But that is for a sequel. Maybe Ms. Rosenberg is already on the case.
"Doctor Atomic" repeats on Wednesday at the War Memorial Opera Houseand continues through Oct. 22.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 3, 2005
Countdown to the Eve of Destruction
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 2 - The last person to take a bow when John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" had its momentous premiere on Saturday night at the San Francisco Opera was not the composer but Pamela Rosenberg, the outgoing general director of the company. Though it is unorthodox for an opera house administrator to appear onstage for curtain calls, here it was warranted.
As part of her initiative called "The Faust Project," Ms. Rosenberg had approached Mr. Adams with the idea of writing an opera on a 20th-century American Faust: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who presided over the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bombs. Though initially hesitant, Mr. Adams, who thinks big, could not resist. Nor could his longtime collaborator, the director Peter Sellars.
In a risky stroke Mr. Sellars assembled a libretto from interviews with the project participants, history books, conversation transcripts, declassified documents and poetry. His cut-and-paste job has produced a libretto of heightened emotional resonance and surprising dramatic continuity. With Mr. Adams's haunting score, what results is a complex, searching and painfully honest if somewhat problematic opera.
"Doctor Atomic" is the ultimate waiting game. It begins in June 1945 as the physicists, scientists and military personnel who are working at Los Alamos, N.M., are poised to test the first atomic bomb. The rest of the two-and-a-half-hour opera takes place on the night before and the morning of July 16, the day the first bomb was tested at the site that Oppenheimer, inspired by a John Donne poem, called Trinity. In a sense, not much happens: only that Oppenheimer and the other participants grapple with their consciences as the countdown to detonation, quite literally, commences.
The Oppenheimer of "Doctor Atomic" is a true Faustian figure, a questing, cultured, brilliant and arrogant man, vividly portrayed by the charismatic Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, who sings with burnished tone and makes every word count. As Mr. Sellars explained in a preperformance talk, Oppenheimer understood that by pushing science to new limits he would unleash barely imaginable forces in the world and even more fearsome forces within mankind. But he willed himself to turn off the part of his brain that processes ethical qualms about his work. The "best people" in Washington will make these decisions for us scientists, he argues.
In his talk, Mr. Sellars bemoaned today's culture, in which the government and the news media simplify everything with "ridiculous crudeness." Welcome to opera, he said, where we do not shy from ambiguity and complexity.
Still, it takes great music to achieve this. "Doctor Atomic," Mr. Adams's third full-fledged opera, may be his most inventive and emotional score to date, and the conductor Donald Runnicles drew a keen, compelling and assured performance from the orchestra.
In his days as a fledgling composer, Mr. Adams rejected the academic atonality he was steeped in as a student and embraced Minimalism, jazz, electronics and experimental styles. But once over his rebellion, he increasingly allowed himself to incorporate elements of the more complex techniques he had been exposed to. In "Doctor Atomic," Mr. Adams, 58, breaks new ground in that sphere.
Whole spans of the orchestral and choral music tremble with textural density. Stacked-up clusters and polytonal harmonies have stunning bite and pungency. Skittish instrumental lines come close to sounding like riffs from a serialist score. The vocal writing is wondrously varied, sometimes jittery and naturalistic, sometimes melismatic and elegiac. You hear evocations of sci-fi film scores and bursts of Varèsian frenzy.
When he needs to propel the music forward, Mr. Adams, true to form, creates a din of pummeling rhythms, fractured meters and jolting repeated figures: call it atomic Minimalism. Yet tension runs even through the long, ruminative, wistful episodes, like the poignant bedtime scene between Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty.
A sensitive and long-suffering alcoholic, Kitty was portrayed with touching vulnerability by the mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson, though her diction was frustratingly mushy. Like Wagner's Erda, Kitty sees all too well the implications of the work that consumes her dazzling but remote husband. It seems right that the couple sometimes converse in a private language of quotations from sensual Baudelaire poems, for they cannot face each other with unblinking honesty.
There are Wagnerian touches to the music beyond its orchestral lushness and bigness, in, for example, Mr. Adams's way of using the orchestra to comment on the story and the characters.
One telling instance comes in a short scene with Gen. Leslie Groves, the blustery Army commander on the project. For a moment Groves forgets the mission and is drawn by Oppenheimer into a conversation about his weight problem. Dynamically portrayed by the husky bass Eric Owens, Groves shows Oppenheimer his calorie counter and talks about his diet regimen, which is not going well. Groves's chatter is enshrouded in luminous harmonies and pleading melodic lines, as if the orchestra sees the one person with the power to postpone the test in a fleeting moment of human frailty and tries to talk sense to him.
Act I closes with a transfixing scene for Oppenheimer, when he recites that Donne sonnet, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God," an abject surrender to God. Mr. Adams's setting is like some contemporary evocation of an intricately contrapuntal Renaissance song with a tortured melodic line and unstable modal harmonies.
Other standouts in the cast include the baritone Richard Paul Fink, who uses his stentorian singing to mask the manipulative ways of the physicist Edward Teller, who would become Oppenheimer's nemesis during the McCarthy years. The elegant baritone James Maddalena (who created the title role in Mr. Adams's "Nixon in China") portrays the meteorologist Jack Hubbard, who must suffer the tirades of General Groves.
The mezzo-soprano Beth Clayton made an impact in two mysterious scenes as the Oppenheimers' maid, who sings totemic songs to the couple's children. The tenor Thomas Glenn brought his sweet voice and boyish innocence to the role of Robert Wilson, a young idealistic physicist plagued with guilt about the test.
Alas, the musical performance was troubled by balance problems, which were not helped by the use of amplification. Electronic elements have long been part of the Adams style. Since the large orchestra was electronically enhanced, the solo singers had to wear wireless microphones. Introducing amplification into opera is Mr. Adams's prerogative. But if you are going to abandon 400 years of tradition and amplify singers to get the balances right, then get the balances right.
All other aspects of Mr. Sellars's production are remarkable. Adrianne Lobel's striking sets use movable columns and sliding lab tables filled with plutonium cores and other gadgets, set against a silhouette of New Mexico mountains. The costume designer Dunya Ramicova dresses the chorus as 1940's scientists, technicians and workers, who remind us that the Manhattan Project employed thousands of workers. The choreographer Lucinda Childs uses dancers to "physicalize the anxiety of waiting," in Mr. Sellars's words, and lend a quality of abstraction to the affecting and graceful staging.
The waiting, of course, culminates in the detonation. Before he composed a note Mr. Adams knew that any attempt to depict an atomic explosion in music would be clichéd on arrival. His solution is ingenious. As the moment approaches and the battering-ram orchestra seems to be sounding inside your head, suddenly all goes quiet and we experience the detonation as if we were 200 miles away in Los Alamos. The music is delicate, strange, melodically dispersed, harmonically tentative. You sense the atmosphere crackling, the world changing. The calm voice of a Japanese woman is heard. We know what comes next.
But that is for a sequel. Maybe Ms. Rosenberg is already on the case.
"Doctor Atomic" repeats on Wednesday at the War Memorial Opera Houseand continues through Oct. 22.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946, the third of six children. He remembered a very secure childhood on Long Island, which he summed up by saying, “I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment, and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.” He received a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a variety of media. He had not taken any of his own photographs yet, but he was making art that incorporated many photographic images appropriated from other sources, including pages torn from magazines and books. This early interest reflected the importance of the photographic image in the culture and art of our time, including the work of such notable artists as Andy Warhol, whom Mapplethorpe greatly admired.Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter, using a Polaroid camera. He did not consider himself a photographer, but wished to use his own photographic images in his paintings, rather than pictures from magazines. “I never liked photography,” he is quoted as saying, “Not for the sake of photography. I like the object. I like the photographs when you hold them in your hand.”His first Polaroids were self-portraits and the first of a series of portraits of his close friend, the singer-artist-poet Patti Smith. These early photographic works were generally shown in groups or elaborately presented in shaped and painted frames that were as significant to the finished piece as the photograph itself. The shift to photography as Mapplethorpe’s sole means of expression happened gradually during the mid-seventies. He acquired a large format press camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. These included artists, composers, socialites, pornographic film stars and members of the S & M underground. Some of these photographs were shocking for their content but exquisite in their technical mastery. Mapplethorpe told ARTnews in late 1988, “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking.’ I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before…I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.”During the early 1980s, Mapplethorpe’s photographs began a shift toward a phase of refinement of subject and an emphasis on classical formal beauty. During this period he concentrated on statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and formal portraits of artists and celebrities. He continued to challenge the definition of photography by introducing new techniques and formats to his oeuvre: color Polaroids, photogravure, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachomes and dye transfer color prints, as well as his earlier black-and-white gelatin silver prints.Mapplethorpe produced a consistent body of work that strove for balance and perfection and established him in the top rank of twentieth-century artists. In 1987 he established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research and finance projects in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.
Company Linked To Schwarzenegger Calling Shots In Mass. Anti-Gay Amendment Drive
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
(Boston, Massachusetts) A California consulting company used by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been hired to help organize the drive in Massachusetts to ban same-sex marriage.
Arno Political Consultants, of Sacramento, will provide advice and help Vote On Marriage - a coalition of conservative groups that includes the Massachusetts Bishops Conference and the Massachusetts Family Institute - collect the 65,825 signatures required to put a proposed amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions on the ballot in 2008.
The names must be turned in to the Secretary of State by Thanksgiving.
Arno was used by Schwarzenegger most recently to help sell his legislative reform package which goes to voters in a special election this November. The company has been involved in a number of conservative ballot measures nationwide including the anti-gay marriage amendment in Ohio. That measure passed by a wide margin last year. It has also worked for the Republican National Committee to register GOP voters in Florida.
On Thursday Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill passed by the state legislature that would legalize same-sex marriage in California. (story )
In Massachusetts, where gay marriage is already legal Vote On Marriage wants to nullify the 6,500 same-sex marriages already performed, prevent gay and lesbian couples from obtaining marriage licenses, and block the state from allowing civil unions or allowing partner benefits.
Already the drive for signatures is drawing charges of fraud. The Boston Globe reports that some Massachusetts residents are reporting what they're calling deceptive practices by signature-gatherers.
Lara Szent-Gyorgyi told the Globe that she was returning items at a Wal-Mart store when she noticed someone outside gathering names for a separate ballot initiative, one that would allow the sale of wine in supermarkets. Szent-Gyorgyi said she had signed, and had then been asked to sign a few other petitions, but she said she had not been told what they were for. One was the gay-marriage petition.
''It was very misleading," Szent-Gyorgyi told the Globe.
On Sunday, with Arno's help, supporters of the amendment will launch a massive blitz in churches across the state. (story ) "Protect Marriage Sunday," will be held at all Roman Catholic and a large number of Protestant churches. Organizers will encourage parishioners to sign the petition.
If Vote On Marriage is successful in getting the required number of signatures the issue must then go to the legislature. In a joint session all that is needed is 50 votes to ensure the ballot question goes to voters in 2008.
Earlier this month the legislature turned down its own proposed amendment that would have banned bay marriage but allowed civil unions. ( story) Many of those voting against the measure opposed the civil unions provision and said they would support the Vote On Marriage version.
Even if the measure gets on the ballot in 2008 there are growing indications it would be rejected by voters.
A new University of Massachusetts-Lowell poll suggests that 56 percent of registered voters oppose the initiative and that 40 percent support it. Among Catholics who have been flooded with church material supporting the amendment the poll shows they are almost equally divided on gay marriage.
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a poem by dave zeus:
Dear family and friends, and those that still care to listen to me:
I dont know about you my friends and family, but I continue to feel like my "kind", my lesbian sisters and gay brothers, are targets these days for more and more persons of "that" religious persuasion we continue to call themselves: "christian", I for one, no longer refer to my love for Christ in that term, I am no longer a "christian".
I am reminded of a school that will not let their students perform a play where a gay man was killed because he was gay....i am reminded i live in a country that has gone backwards a hundred years in regards to civil rights for gays, blacks, muslims, and any one who looks different from the pope's and george w bushe;s white jesus.....
At this point I have no idea what term would apply for those of us who are genuine in our faith, a term that would seperate us from the likes of george w bush, the governor of california, mister bobby welch, billy graham, and the 3.5 million christians who voted for this madman of a president, I do not feel I have a crisis of faith per se, but I have no interest in sharing heaven with those 3.5 million lost souls.
i refuse to let myself be called a "christian", in this society, that term belongs to those 3.5 million americans no matter how genuine one or two or even three real christians might be, in the face of that flood of hatred that has taken this country by storm, that has taken the white house, the senate, the house of representative, the supreme court, the schools, and the churches, that hatred for homosexuals that has these christians blaming gays for 9/11 and the very hurricanes, these christians say its because of us homosexual sinners, that such horrors have befallen this great united of states.
hatred is now a christian virtue and a christian value, one that is written in books, spoken aloud by a president, spoken aloud by a pope, by christian leaders on tv and in churches,, hatred of homosexuals is accepted, homosexuals are the new "nigger", and its okay what we ride in the back of the buses, its okay that individual states elect prejudice into their state constitution, hatred for homosexuals is how karl rove won the white house
but then, family and friends, arent you so sick and tired of this gay mess, gay this and that, why cant we be left alone, have our own families, adopt and have our own children, why cant these persons of faith leave us the "F" alone.
arent you all tired of all this homo this and homo that, arent you all tired of the fight we homosexuals have had forced upon us, that i can be fired for being gay, i have no civil rights what so ever because i happen to have been born gay,
i have been fighting this stupid fight since 1973.....and what i first dealt with before many many others did, now millions of gays now have to deal with the hatred and predjudice i got to know so well from the likes of bobby welch, and persons i loved as my best friends at that very first baptist church of daytona beach...turned their christian backs on me, and ruined a very important part of my life.......but wasnt it i who ruined it, wasnt it i who was in control in how my family and friend reacted to this first of the gays being "outed" at that first of first baptist churches, dont you continue to feel it was my fault i took a road that lead to drugs and sadness and suffering, wasntn it my fault i reacted like a normal human being, that i was turned out and away from a chruch i had dedicated all my life too, and a church i had planned on serving for my entire life as a social minister, is there any one better then me who can understand what my broken heart did to me and to my loved ones?
but there are still old friends who miss "the old david", who still to this day do not understand what happens to an individual when an entire community, an entire church and support group, and entire university, turns on this one person, because he loves another man
but of course it was my fault for making all the wrong choices, it was my fault by taking a job that got me hurt, it was my fault that 20 years later i look another job that got me hurt, of course its my fault for not seeing, for not having the clarity of thought, that my love for children, might
cause my body harm, of course i did it all on purpose, of course i planned on getting hurt when i held down kwame clea for months on end, till my knees turned brittle, and i could no longer walk, of course it was my fault again and again, that i never lived up to my true potential....
i have been told to forget all those years, to forget the time i had someone spit on me because i was with a black gay friend.....that somehow all of this is my fault, but what i know now, is that that was just the beginning of a fight that would come of age in the 21st century.....where a president and a man called karl rove would use the christian fear and yes, hatered, real hatred, of homosexuality and homosexuals, to get a certain christian president re-elected,
as chruches grow larger and become so large they remind me of the romans and their colisium, I am so reminded how the likes of bobby welch, (and the hundreds of ministers who churches are larger then football stadiums), would play in perfect in the seat as caesr and rather then watching lions eat christians, he continues, from his pulpit and his web site, would have christians feed us homosexuals to the lions, for we are the ultimate sinners.
why are christians so obsessed with homosexuals, why is this america so obsessed, why are american christians behind a president who continues to let our boys die in an illegal and immoral war, american has lost its heart, and the majority of christians have lost their way.
and why have democratic senators voted for mister roberts to run the supreme court, I for one have lost all my faith in the democratic party, I doubt I will ever vote again, I do not trust a single soul in any church or in any house of congress or senate
the message of Jesus was simple, love, and there is none of that anywhere, I dont feel it from anyone anymore. The vatican is out to ban gays, american is determined to make marriage only between a man and a women, ...
what is important to you and me now? is it important to continue to hold old hurts and memories close to our hearts and minds that we continue to not forgive each other?
what is important to you and me now? is it important to not forgive a father who is mentally ill, is it important to not forgive children who were brought up in what seemed to be a world full of love only to find it a world full of betrayl
what is important to you and me now? is it important to continue to not communicate, is it essential to stay stuck in our world views? is it so important that we refuse to reach out to family and friends, that we refuse to understand that a life time of pain can destroy all relationships?
what is important, is that each new day should be exactly that, a new day, where the hurts and sorrows, the misunderstandings, the failures we see in the lifes of our kin, are forgotten, are forgiven, and that each new day we forget what hurt us so much so long ago, that in this new day we real christians start listening.
many years ago i hurt a number of people close to me, and many of those persons, friends I had in church and close friends I held dear to my heart, let that hurt grow into a wound that to this day has yet to be healed.
I can no longer heal any of those wounds, and I prefer to communicate via e mail and not in person, not by phones, and not by letters, because there is always prejudice when I attempt to speak
This life is really short, I know you have had friends and loved ones die, as have I. Life is too short to hold grudges, life is too short to continue thinking, "oh this or that person could have done so much more with their life, they had so many talents, they had so much to offer, but they messed it up somehow.....they did this or that, they failed at this or that, they hurt us by doing this or that.....its time we all stop judging, for we are each new persons each new day,
I am not the same person I was yesterday. I am not the same person I was 30 years ago. But I have learned many many things, and one of the most important things I have learned, is to forgive and forget, I have learned to keep on fighting when everything is against me, and I have learned that we are only better persons when we keep our minds open to the impossible.
like my dear friend teri in chicago, I continue to live with daily pain, 24 hour chronic pain, and I learn to deal with it, to fight it, and like my dear friend james johnson, who has overcome prostate cancer and lost his prostate, has hiv but has not developed aids, who has lost his father, like all others, there is always another human who suffers more then I do, there is always another human who
has been dealt more blows then myself......
so we humans that have to come to some kind of understanding as to what the meaning of suffering is....we have to just fight, we have to just keep getting up every morning and keep on fighting, even though this suffering, in my current perspective, is meaningless, suffering has no wisdom to teach me,
teri in chicago gets up every morning and keeps on working and working and fighting, james gets up every morning and rides a bike to work, but he manages to call me every night to laugh about his day, to talk about the art work he does, to talk about the millionares he serves food to every night and what fools they are....., and to me he turns suffering and pain into "making something", "doing something", he speaks to me in words and in thoughts, that some of us humans can still make something of our lives.
for most of us, our daily lives are out of our control, there are bills to be paid, there are physical limitations and conditions we have no control over, some of us are in nice loveing relationships, but many of us are old and wise and appreciate living alone...
we are each of us the combinaton of the years and the experiences we have had on this little blue planet, and to each new day we must bring and develop a new way at looking at our present day and our present circumstances, we must each learn how to ignore the masses of humans that have lost their lives and their minds,
and for the few of us who, either through a failure of planning, or of being dealt blows beyound our control, shall take advantage of this time we have left to learn that old virtue called wisdom, and with that wisdom endure suffering, endure pain, endure stupidity, endure the society we live in, and for those of us whom are artists of any sort, we find that from our hands and from our minds and hearts, we create creativity.....
and it is in those moments where we can lose time, pain, and suffering, where we can lose moments and hours and sometimes even days, it is in those acts of creating, that we give
our singular lives true meaning.
--
dave hughes
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff
(Boston, Massachusetts) A California consulting company used by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been hired to help organize the drive in Massachusetts to ban same-sex marriage.
Arno Political Consultants, of Sacramento, will provide advice and help Vote On Marriage - a coalition of conservative groups that includes the Massachusetts Bishops Conference and the Massachusetts Family Institute - collect the 65,825 signatures required to put a proposed amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions on the ballot in 2008.
The names must be turned in to the Secretary of State by Thanksgiving.
Arno was used by Schwarzenegger most recently to help sell his legislative reform package which goes to voters in a special election this November. The company has been involved in a number of conservative ballot measures nationwide including the anti-gay marriage amendment in Ohio. That measure passed by a wide margin last year. It has also worked for the Republican National Committee to register GOP voters in Florida.
On Thursday Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill passed by the state legislature that would legalize same-sex marriage in California. (story )
In Massachusetts, where gay marriage is already legal Vote On Marriage wants to nullify the 6,500 same-sex marriages already performed, prevent gay and lesbian couples from obtaining marriage licenses, and block the state from allowing civil unions or allowing partner benefits.
Already the drive for signatures is drawing charges of fraud. The Boston Globe reports that some Massachusetts residents are reporting what they're calling deceptive practices by signature-gatherers.
Lara Szent-Gyorgyi told the Globe that she was returning items at a Wal-Mart store when she noticed someone outside gathering names for a separate ballot initiative, one that would allow the sale of wine in supermarkets. Szent-Gyorgyi said she had signed, and had then been asked to sign a few other petitions, but she said she had not been told what they were for. One was the gay-marriage petition.
''It was very misleading," Szent-Gyorgyi told the Globe.
On Sunday, with Arno's help, supporters of the amendment will launch a massive blitz in churches across the state. (story ) "Protect Marriage Sunday," will be held at all Roman Catholic and a large number of Protestant churches. Organizers will encourage parishioners to sign the petition.
If Vote On Marriage is successful in getting the required number of signatures the issue must then go to the legislature. In a joint session all that is needed is 50 votes to ensure the ballot question goes to voters in 2008.
Earlier this month the legislature turned down its own proposed amendment that would have banned bay marriage but allowed civil unions. ( story) Many of those voting against the measure opposed the civil unions provision and said they would support the Vote On Marriage version.
Even if the measure gets on the ballot in 2008 there are growing indications it would be rejected by voters.
A new University of Massachusetts-Lowell poll suggests that 56 percent of registered voters oppose the initiative and that 40 percent support it. Among Catholics who have been flooded with church material supporting the amendment the poll shows they are almost equally divided on gay marriage.
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a poem by dave zeus:
Dear family and friends, and those that still care to listen to me:
I dont know about you my friends and family, but I continue to feel like my "kind", my lesbian sisters and gay brothers, are targets these days for more and more persons of "that" religious persuasion we continue to call themselves: "christian", I for one, no longer refer to my love for Christ in that term, I am no longer a "christian".
I am reminded of a school that will not let their students perform a play where a gay man was killed because he was gay....i am reminded i live in a country that has gone backwards a hundred years in regards to civil rights for gays, blacks, muslims, and any one who looks different from the pope's and george w bushe;s white jesus.....
At this point I have no idea what term would apply for those of us who are genuine in our faith, a term that would seperate us from the likes of george w bush, the governor of california, mister bobby welch, billy graham, and the 3.5 million christians who voted for this madman of a president, I do not feel I have a crisis of faith per se, but I have no interest in sharing heaven with those 3.5 million lost souls.
i refuse to let myself be called a "christian", in this society, that term belongs to those 3.5 million americans no matter how genuine one or two or even three real christians might be, in the face of that flood of hatred that has taken this country by storm, that has taken the white house, the senate, the house of representative, the supreme court, the schools, and the churches, that hatred for homosexuals that has these christians blaming gays for 9/11 and the very hurricanes, these christians say its because of us homosexual sinners, that such horrors have befallen this great united of states.
hatred is now a christian virtue and a christian value, one that is written in books, spoken aloud by a president, spoken aloud by a pope, by christian leaders on tv and in churches,, hatred of homosexuals is accepted, homosexuals are the new "nigger", and its okay what we ride in the back of the buses, its okay that individual states elect prejudice into their state constitution, hatred for homosexuals is how karl rove won the white house
but then, family and friends, arent you so sick and tired of this gay mess, gay this and that, why cant we be left alone, have our own families, adopt and have our own children, why cant these persons of faith leave us the "F" alone.
arent you all tired of all this homo this and homo that, arent you all tired of the fight we homosexuals have had forced upon us, that i can be fired for being gay, i have no civil rights what so ever because i happen to have been born gay,
i have been fighting this stupid fight since 1973.....and what i first dealt with before many many others did, now millions of gays now have to deal with the hatred and predjudice i got to know so well from the likes of bobby welch, and persons i loved as my best friends at that very first baptist church of daytona beach...turned their christian backs on me, and ruined a very important part of my life.......but wasnt it i who ruined it, wasnt it i who was in control in how my family and friend reacted to this first of the gays being "outed" at that first of first baptist churches, dont you continue to feel it was my fault i took a road that lead to drugs and sadness and suffering, wasntn it my fault i reacted like a normal human being, that i was turned out and away from a chruch i had dedicated all my life too, and a church i had planned on serving for my entire life as a social minister, is there any one better then me who can understand what my broken heart did to me and to my loved ones?
but there are still old friends who miss "the old david", who still to this day do not understand what happens to an individual when an entire community, an entire church and support group, and entire university, turns on this one person, because he loves another man
but of course it was my fault for making all the wrong choices, it was my fault by taking a job that got me hurt, it was my fault that 20 years later i look another job that got me hurt, of course its my fault for not seeing, for not having the clarity of thought, that my love for children, might
cause my body harm, of course i did it all on purpose, of course i planned on getting hurt when i held down kwame clea for months on end, till my knees turned brittle, and i could no longer walk, of course it was my fault again and again, that i never lived up to my true potential....
i have been told to forget all those years, to forget the time i had someone spit on me because i was with a black gay friend.....that somehow all of this is my fault, but what i know now, is that that was just the beginning of a fight that would come of age in the 21st century.....where a president and a man called karl rove would use the christian fear and yes, hatered, real hatred, of homosexuality and homosexuals, to get a certain christian president re-elected,
as chruches grow larger and become so large they remind me of the romans and their colisium, I am so reminded how the likes of bobby welch, (and the hundreds of ministers who churches are larger then football stadiums), would play in perfect in the seat as caesr and rather then watching lions eat christians, he continues, from his pulpit and his web site, would have christians feed us homosexuals to the lions, for we are the ultimate sinners.
why are christians so obsessed with homosexuals, why is this america so obsessed, why are american christians behind a president who continues to let our boys die in an illegal and immoral war, american has lost its heart, and the majority of christians have lost their way.
and why have democratic senators voted for mister roberts to run the supreme court, I for one have lost all my faith in the democratic party, I doubt I will ever vote again, I do not trust a single soul in any church or in any house of congress or senate
the message of Jesus was simple, love, and there is none of that anywhere, I dont feel it from anyone anymore. The vatican is out to ban gays, american is determined to make marriage only between a man and a women, ...
what is important to you and me now? is it important to continue to hold old hurts and memories close to our hearts and minds that we continue to not forgive each other?
what is important to you and me now? is it important to not forgive a father who is mentally ill, is it important to not forgive children who were brought up in what seemed to be a world full of love only to find it a world full of betrayl
what is important to you and me now? is it important to continue to not communicate, is it essential to stay stuck in our world views? is it so important that we refuse to reach out to family and friends, that we refuse to understand that a life time of pain can destroy all relationships?
what is important, is that each new day should be exactly that, a new day, where the hurts and sorrows, the misunderstandings, the failures we see in the lifes of our kin, are forgotten, are forgiven, and that each new day we forget what hurt us so much so long ago, that in this new day we real christians start listening.
many years ago i hurt a number of people close to me, and many of those persons, friends I had in church and close friends I held dear to my heart, let that hurt grow into a wound that to this day has yet to be healed.
I can no longer heal any of those wounds, and I prefer to communicate via e mail and not in person, not by phones, and not by letters, because there is always prejudice when I attempt to speak
This life is really short, I know you have had friends and loved ones die, as have I. Life is too short to hold grudges, life is too short to continue thinking, "oh this or that person could have done so much more with their life, they had so many talents, they had so much to offer, but they messed it up somehow.....they did this or that, they failed at this or that, they hurt us by doing this or that.....its time we all stop judging, for we are each new persons each new day,
I am not the same person I was yesterday. I am not the same person I was 30 years ago. But I have learned many many things, and one of the most important things I have learned, is to forgive and forget, I have learned to keep on fighting when everything is against me, and I have learned that we are only better persons when we keep our minds open to the impossible.
like my dear friend teri in chicago, I continue to live with daily pain, 24 hour chronic pain, and I learn to deal with it, to fight it, and like my dear friend james johnson, who has overcome prostate cancer and lost his prostate, has hiv but has not developed aids, who has lost his father, like all others, there is always another human who suffers more then I do, there is always another human who
has been dealt more blows then myself......
so we humans that have to come to some kind of understanding as to what the meaning of suffering is....we have to just fight, we have to just keep getting up every morning and keep on fighting, even though this suffering, in my current perspective, is meaningless, suffering has no wisdom to teach me,
teri in chicago gets up every morning and keeps on working and working and fighting, james gets up every morning and rides a bike to work, but he manages to call me every night to laugh about his day, to talk about the art work he does, to talk about the millionares he serves food to every night and what fools they are....., and to me he turns suffering and pain into "making something", "doing something", he speaks to me in words and in thoughts, that some of us humans can still make something of our lives.
for most of us, our daily lives are out of our control, there are bills to be paid, there are physical limitations and conditions we have no control over, some of us are in nice loveing relationships, but many of us are old and wise and appreciate living alone...
we are each of us the combinaton of the years and the experiences we have had on this little blue planet, and to each new day we must bring and develop a new way at looking at our present day and our present circumstances, we must each learn how to ignore the masses of humans that have lost their lives and their minds,
and for the few of us who, either through a failure of planning, or of being dealt blows beyound our control, shall take advantage of this time we have left to learn that old virtue called wisdom, and with that wisdom endure suffering, endure pain, endure stupidity, endure the society we live in, and for those of us whom are artists of any sort, we find that from our hands and from our minds and hearts, we create creativity.....
and it is in those moments where we can lose time, pain, and suffering, where we can lose moments and hours and sometimes even days, it is in those acts of creating, that we give
our singular lives true meaning.
--
dave hughes