SPAN: July/August 2001

:'"-' "."r;

~

" .f:". -n~~f'7

~~,~:~;t· ~{.}:

'~'-"

.,x~:,;~~~~;-.}..::c

-

.::..

.,

:k";;.1:

~

-.

-

.

- .

,...-

-

. ~~

...,fc'~~.,

. ~:J~"i"'?' ~ •

-

t·-

-";

n

:.

-

,

~

• ':"z.-.... .,;.'

•.~~ -

(!!l:

~.

h

R.I(' Narayan and the

American

Imagination

R

K. Narayan was probably the greatest storyteller in English that India ever produced. During his sixdecade-long career he wrote 15 novels, more than 200 short stories, travelogues, essays and anthologies of Indian epics and folklore. He had an enormous readership spanning three generations of Indians beginning 1935, when his first novel, Swami and Friends, was published. Narayan received several rejection letters from publishers for his first work. Thanks largely due to the persuasion of British novelist Graham Greene, with whom Narayan cultivated friendship for 50 long years, the London publishers Hamish Hamilton brought out Swami and Friends, and Narayan was launched into the literary firmament.

Narayan embarked on his writing career in the early 1930s. He was perhaps the first Indian writer in English who tried to make a living out of writing, a hard decision considering the uncertain writing career and irregular royalty payments from publishers. Critics and readers of Narayan's works compare him with the other prolific writers of the time like Jane Austin, Chekhov and Gogol. He was so lionized in America that when people argued over the composition of a contemporary literary trinity, out of four contenders comprising Faulkner, Hemingway, Greene and Narayan-Narayan was a constant favorite.

The key to Narayan's popularity, according to E.M. Forster, was that he wrote "high-class comedy without any isms." He portrayed ordinary people in ordinary situations and that is what makes his work so extraordinary. His characters are very human, fallible, yet retain the ability to dream. More important to his landmarks are Malgudi's characters-he treats each one of them with sensitivity, sympathy and with a touch of humor.

His portrayal of characters and brand of humor made Malgudi memorable and allowed readers across continents to empathize with its men, women and children.

Narayan's fictional town-a tiny cosmos which "hurled itself into his vision"-is an amusingly quaint place somewhere in South India. He transformed this place into an

imaginary district town Malgudi, just like the American novelist William Faulkner transformed his home Mississippi county into a fictional Yoknapatawpha. Both the novelists employed an element of myth in their works dealing with the universal journey from innocence to experience but they display a complex simplicity. One notices many similarities in the broad canvas that these two eminent writers shared.

The affinity of Narayan's humor with that of Mark Twain has often been mentioned. One of the earliest comments on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer refers to the universality of the novel's theme. "The story is a wonderful study of the boy-mind, which inhabits a world quite distinct from that in which he is bodily present with his elders, and in this lies its great charm and its uhiversality, for boy-nature, however human nature varies, is the same everywhere."

There seem to be many similarities between Twain's work and Narayan's first novel, Swami and Friends. Both the novels portray the adolescent life, experiencing the anguish and protesting the tyranny of the adult world symbolized by school.

Narayan visited the United States for the first time at the age of 50 in 1956. While he was in New York, his favorite haunt was the Chelsea Hotel, which he frequented. Sitting at the Chelsea, Narayan completed The Guide in 1958-a novel which was made into a commercially successful Hindi movie. In 1960 the Sahitya Akedemi honored him with an award for literature for The Guide, the first work of English fiction to win this award. Narayan had received many international honors and awards. He was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1981. Boston University and the University of Texas in Austin house most of Na'rayan's manuscripts and private papers.

N'i!

The master of English fiction left this temporal world at a ripe age of 94 but his imaginary world of Malgudi, its quaint characters will linger forever on the mythic landscape of India.

-Researched

by K. Chellappan

with A. Venkata Narayana

SPAN How It All Starts Inside Your Brain

By Sharon Begley

Publisher James Callahan

Drug Busters

By Hank Schlesinger

Editor-in -Chief John Burgess

The Trade in South Asia

By Lea Terhune

Editor Lea Terhune

An Oasis of Art

By Belmett Schiff

Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana

~ :5 A Different Angle on Representation ~

Gender Equity

Copy Editor Dipesh K. Satapathy

An Interview with Linda Moscarella

~ 1'0

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemant Bhatnagar

g

8'

Life in the Fourth Millennium

z

By Steven Pinker

! l' >-

o Bioneers!

~

1!!

By Karen Olson

(5

~

Destination N.Y.

ill

:;: I

By Kurt Andersen

Ci

th

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research

A Revolutionary'ltinerary

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Services

AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

The Next Economy of Ideas

By John Perry Barlow

Front cover: A U.S. Customs P-3 Orion taxis down the runway at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas. Moments later, the aircraft will lift off to search for drug smugglers over the Gulf of Mexico.

Missions last eight hours or more. See story on page 6. Photograph by Joe Raedle.

Note: SPA does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Govemment. No part of this magazine may be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor.

Price of magazine, one year subscription (6 issues) Rs. ]25; single copy, Rs. 30.

Space Odyssey

By Herbert Keppler

Living on Alpha

By Jim Schefter

We're in a' Jam

By Doug Stewart <D .c 0-

Spotlight-Born

at Home ~ 11

Consular Focus

"-

ยง ~ ill

I (')

~ o m a:

;ii

A LETTER

P

FROM

erhaps no problem affects so many nations as profoundly as drug trafficking. It erodes individual lives, families and ultimately values in communities where drug use is prevalent. The resultant misery recognizes no national boundaries. A sobering survey recently showed that the reason the number of drug addicts appeared to be decreasing in some places was not because they were quitting, but because they were dead. The cover story in this issue is "Drug Busters," by Hank Schlesinger, which chronicles one line of defense against airborne drug smugglers by the U.S. Customs department.

"The Trade in South Asia" briefly examines the local drug trade, and "How It All Starts Inside Your Brain," by Sharon Begley, gives a closer look at how addictive substances work-and the damage that they do.

This issue also offers a bit of Americanathen and now-a nod, in part, to our own Independence Day, July 4. In ''A Revolutionary Itinerary,"

by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an Englishman, tours Revolutionary War battlefields in Massachusetts and New York, and ruminates on the quirks of history that brought the United States into being 225 years ago. "Destination N.Y," by Kurt Andersen, with superb photos by An1it Pasricha, fast forwards to the present multiethnic city, with the focus on essential New York.

Nearby in Long Island City is another landmark of changing eras, the Isamu Noguchi Museum. ''An Oasis of Art," by Bennett Schiff, takes us inside this unique environment created by the innovative American sculptor, whose American mother and Japanese father caused him to become a living cultural bridge. His art, Noguchi wrote, was an "attempt to define my role as a crossing where inward and outward meet, East and West."

If you are touring around the United States, you sooner or later will run into a traffic jam. Sounds familiar? The study of traffic flow is becoming a science, as Doug Stewart tells us in "We're in a Jam." He sat in with the Georgia Department of Transportation traffic division before hitting the road in search of high-tech solutions.

THE

PUBLISHER

Would you like to swing on a star?

Well, a few people have come pretty close to doing that on Alpha, the International Space Station, 32 years after the first moonwalk in 1969. See what it's like to set up house in space in "Living on Alpha," by Jim Schefter. The view, of course, is spectacular, especially if you are hitched to the Hubble telescope. "Space Odyssey," by Herbert Keppler opens the window on some exciting discoveries hundreds of light-years from home photographed by Hubble.

Governance as it applies to women in politics is the subject of an interview with Linda Moscarella, "Gender Equity." And in "The Next Economy of Ideas," John Perry Barlow challenges the old school thinking about copyright and the relationship between creator, audience, patronage and ethics in the brave new world of the Internet.

Legislation must keep pace ,"lith innovation, but just how to do this is being hotly debated. Barlow presents one angle in the controversy.

Leaping over controversy into creativity, some activists are looking to nature to solve environmental woes. "0 Bioneers!" highlights this group of concerned citizens, with members such as mycologist Paul Stamets, who discovered that a mushroom's mycelium can filter and decompose toxic substances.

Jazz musician Louis Banks gives us a few verbal riffs in an interview ,"lith SPAN's Jazz Maven. He talks about some of his favorite things, such as fusion and the prospect of setting up an Indian audition base for Boston's Berklee College of Music.

Consular Focus describes a new courier passback service and drop box visa application that ,,,rill spare people protracted waits in long queues outside the U.S. Embassy. Visas will be returned to recipients by courier. And _the Spotlight is on Janet Chawla, MATRIKA, and village mid"'rives.

We wish you happy reading.

How It All

Starts Inside

Your Brain

ne by one, each crack addict took his turn in the fMRI tube, its magnets pounding away with a throbbing bass. A mirror inside was angled just so, allowing the addict to see a screen just outside the tube. Then the lO-minute video rolled. For two minutes, images of monarch butterflies flitted by; the fMRI, which detects active regions in the brain, saw nothing untoward. Then the scene shifted. Men ritualistically cooked crack. ..an addict handed cash to a pusher ...users smoked. It was as if a neurological switch had been thrown: seeing the drug scenes not only unleashed in the addicts a surge of craving for crack, but also triggered visible changes in their brains as their anterior cingulate and part of the prefrontal cortex~ regions involved in mood and learning~lit up like Times Square. Nonaddicts show no such response. The fMRI had pinpointed physical changes in the brain that apparently underlie cue-induced craving, showing why walking past a bar, passing a corner crack house or even partying with the people you used to shoot up with can send a recovering addict racing for a hit. 'The brain regions that became active are where memories are stored," says Dr. Scott Lukas of McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, who led the 1998 study. "These cues turn on crack-related memories, and addicts respond like Pavlov's dogs."

"This is your brain on drugs": it's not

O

New research on how cocaine, heroin, alcohol and amphetamines target neuronal circuits isrevealing the biological basis of addiction, tolerance, withdrawl and relapse just an advertising line. Through fMRI as well as PET scans, neuroscientists are pinpointing what happens in the brain during highs and lows, why withdrawal can be unbearable and~in one of the most sobering findings~how changes caused by addictive drugs persist long after you stop using. "Imaging and other techniques are driving home what we learned from decades of animal experiments," says Dr. Alan Leshner, director of the U.S National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). "Drugs of abuse change the brain, hijack its motivational systems and even change how its genes function."

An addicted brain is different~physically different, chemically different~ from a normal brain. A cascade of neurobiological changes accompanies the transition from voluntary to compulsive drug

use, but one of the most important is this: cocaine, heroin, nicotine, amphetamines and other addictive drugs alter the brain's pleasure circuits. Activating this circuit, also called the reward circuit, produces a feel-good sensation. Eating cheesecake or tacos or any other food you love activates it. So does sex, winning a competition, acing a test, receiving praise and other pleasurable experiences. The pleasure circuit communicates in the chemical language of dopamine: this neurotransmitter zips from neuron to neuron in the circuit like a molecular happy face, affecting the firing of other neurons and producing feelings from mild happiness to euphoria.

What happens to the circuit if you inject, inhale or swallow an addictive drug? To find out, Dr. Hans Breiter of Massachusetts General Hospital and colleagues recruited cocaine addicts who had been using for an average of seven to eight years and had used on 16 of the past 30 days. After making sure none had a heart problem or any other condition that would put them at risk, Breiter and colleagues gave each a "party" dose of cocaine, up to about 40 milligrams for a 70-kilogram man. An fMRI took snapshots of their brains every eight seconds for 18 minutes. At first, during the "rush" phase, the addicts described feeling "out of control," as if they were "in a dragster" or "being dangled three meters off the

Turning on

ÂŁ.o

the Pleasure Circuit Addictive drugs as different as cocaine, marijuana and nicotine all seem to affect the pleasure and reward circuit lying deep within the brain.

_~l~' .

COCAINE and ampheta-

OPIATES also target the

mines target the ventral tegmental area, whose neurons connect to the pleasure circuit

structures that cocaine does, as well as regions activated by the brain's natural opiates, like betaendorphin

AlCOHOl

CJ

.

t

hits the ventral tegmentum and pleasure circuit, too, but goes further. It also affects the cortex (thought), cerebellum (movement) and amygdala (emotion)

ground by a giant hand." They also felt a high, a surge of energy and euphoria. The fMRI showed why: cocaine made a beeline for the pleasure circuit, turning on brain areas called the sublenticular extended amygdala and nucleus accumbens and keeping them on.

How? "Drugs of abuse increase the concentration of dopamine in the brain's reward circuits," says Nora Volkow of Brookhaven National Lab. The drugs do that more intensely than any mere behavior, be it eating a four-star meal or winning the lottery. But each drug turns up this feelgood neurochemical in a different way: • Cocaine blocks the molecule that ordinarily mops up dopamine sloshing around neurons. When all the seats on this socalled transporter molecule are occupied by cocaine, there is no room for dopamine, which therefore hangs around and keeps the pleasure circuit firing. The intensity of a cocaine high, Volkow found in 1997, is directly related to how much cocaine ties up the seats on the transpOlier bus.

• Amphetamines block the transporter, too. They also push dopamine out of the little sacs, called vesicles, where neurons store it. More dopamine means more firing of neurons in the pleasure circuit.

• Heroin stimulates dopamine-containing neurons to fire, releasing the neurochemical into the nucleus accumbens, a key region in the pleasure circuit. Nicotine does the same. Heroin also excites the same neurons that our brain's natural opioids do, but much more powerfully.

• Alcohol opens the neurotransmitter floodgates. It releases dopamine, serotonin (which governs our sense of wellbeing) and the brain's own opioids. It also disturbs levels of glutamate, which incites neurons to fire and helps account for the initial alcoholic high, as well as GABA, which dampens neuronal firing and eventually makes (most) drinkers sleepy.

After igniting these acute effects, an addictive drug isn't nearly through with the brain. Chronic use produces enduring changes. The most important: it reduces the number of dopamine receptors. Receptors are simply little molecular baseball gloves that sit on new-ons, grab passing neurotransmitters like fly balls and reel them in.

Animal evidence suggests that the more you take an addictive drug, the more dopamine receptors you wipe out, as the brain attempts to quiet down an overly noisy pleasure circuit. Having fewer dopamine receptors means fewer of those passing dopamines get caught, and the pleasure circuit calms down. But now the law of unintended consequences kicks in. With fewer dopamine receptors, a hit that used to produce pleasure doesn't. This is the molecular basis for tolerance. Drugs don't have the effect they originally did. To get the original high, the addict has to up his dose.

But there's worse. The dearth of dopamine receptors means that experiences that used to bring pleasure become impotent. A good meal, a good chat, a good massage-none ignite thatfrisson of happiness they once did. The only escape from chronic dysphoria, irritability, anxiety and even depression, the user believes, is to take more drugs. Initial use, in other words, may be about feeling good. But addiction is about avoiding abject, unremitting distress and despair. he agony of withdrawal is also a direct result of drugs' resetting the brain's dopamine system.Withdrawal and abstinence deprive the brain of the only source of dopamine that produces any sense of joy. Without it, life seems not worth living. When ajunkie stops supplying his brain with heroin, for instance, he becomes hypersensitive to pain, chronically nauseated and subject to uncontrollable tremors. "This is why addiction is a brain disease," says NIDA's Leshner. "It may start with the voluntary act of taking drugs, but once you've got it, you can't just tell the addict 'Stop,' any more than you can tell the smoker 'Don't have emphysema.' Starting may be volitional.

Stopping isn't."

Although the biological basis of tolerance, addiction and withdrawal is yielding some of its secrets, relapse is harder to explain. Why does an addict who has abstained for weeks, months or longer suddenly reach for the needle or the bottle?

According to lab-animal studies, abstinence allows dopamine receptors to eventually return to normal, so after some period of

T

withdrawal agony the brain should stop craving the drug. Yet addiction is practically the dictionary definition of a relapsing disease. One clue might lie in Scott Lukas' fMRI findings about cue-induced craving.

The memories of drug abuse are so enduring and so powerful that even seeing a bare arm beneath a rolled-up sleeve reawakens them. And just as Pavlov's dog learned to salivate when he heard a bell that meant "chow time," so an addict begins to crave his drug when he sees, hears or smells a reminder of past use. Relapse might also reflect enduring genetic changes. Drugs can act as DNA switches, turning genes on or off. In lab animals, for instance, bingeing on cocaine turns down the activity of a gene that makes a dopamine receptor, finds Dr. Mary Jeanne Kreek of Rockefeller University. If that gene remains chronically inactive, it could lay the basis for relapse as an addict tries to compensate for a crippled pleasure circuit.

Genes may also explain, at least in pmi, why some people are at greater risk of drug addiction than others. It turns out that the same dopamine system that drugs activate can also be turned on by novel experiences, fmds Dr. Michael Bm'do of the University of Kentucky. That suggests that people driven to experience the Next New Thing may be trying to appease the same primal pleasure system as drug abusers-and that if they don't do it by, say, bungee jwnping, they may try to do so with drugs. In fact, people who compulsively seek novelty also tend to abuse drugs more than people who are content with the same-old same-old.

And novelty-seeking seems to have a genetic basis. That suggests that "there is a heritable component to addiction," says Kreek. But genes canalso reduce the risk of addiction. Many Asians carry variants of genes that control the metabolism of alcohol. As a result, they suffer intense reactions-flushing, nausea, palpitationsfrom liquor. That could serve as a built-in defense against alcoholism, since people tend to avoid things that make them throw up. If only avoiding addiction were as easy for everyone else.

D About the Author: Sharon Begley is the science editor a/Newsweek.

Text by HANK SCHLESINGER Photographs by JOE RAEDLE

t's still dark as the aircrew crosses the Naval Air Station's tarmac to the awaiting airplane. The Corpus Christi, Texas, base is quiet at this time of day. Even with an hour or so until dawn, the humidity is, ominously, on the rise.

The base is home to the U.S. Customs Service's Surveillance Support Center. The

flight-suited crewmembers are walking toward an aircraft that's an unlikely looking combatant in America's war against the well-financed drug cartels. It's a P-3 Orion, designed in the 1950s and originally used as the Navy's submarine hunter until it was decommissioned in 1990. These days, thanks to the addition of a radar dome, the

plane's new mission is tracking drugs, not subs.

U.S. Customs officer and pilot Gary "Suds" Sudhoff slips into the pilot's seat of the three-seat cockpit and toggles on a few switches, illuminating the area with an orange glow. The gauges are a mixed bag of original analog equipment and state-of-the-art screens. After running through the final checklist with his copilot and safety officer, Sudhoffbrings the four large turboprops to life and clears takeoff with the tower.

As the plane lumbers down the runway, its four props chop at the humid air. Then, with the aircraft increasing speed, Sudhoff pulls back on the yoke and the plane lifts into the clear night sky. As the lights of Corpus Christi fall away, the plane banks in a wide turn over the Gulf of Mexico and settles into cruising altitude.

This plane is one of 10 P-3 Orions owned by Customs; the agency expects the number to grow to 16 by next year.

Behind the cockpit three detection system specialists take their positions at radar screens. Their job is to monitor air traffic from ground level to about 30 kilometers using pictures painted on screens by the rotating radar dome mounted atop the

plane. Beyond them is the main cabin with situation table, galley, head, and three bunks. While the mission is slated to take a little over eight hours, the bunks may become necessary if the plane detects and pursues a target of interest (TOI). Chases have lasted in excess of20 hours or more.

The plane, as Sudhoffputs it, "flies like a Mack truck." At more than three decades old, the P-3, though graceless in appearance, is in fact an elegantly inspired solution to a serious problem: detecting and tracking airborne drug smugglers. Given a casual look, it might be mistaken for one ofthe military's AWAC (airborne warning and control) surveillance aircraft, a common error because of the rotodome mounted topside.

The P-3 Orion incorporates a beefed up airframe to support the 540-kilogram rotodome, which comes from a Grumman E-2 Hawkeye. In its original use, the system provided the "big picture" around an aircraft carrier battle group. However, whereas the Hawkeye sports a 2,600-kilometer range, the P-3 can fly about 7,400 kilometers. Plus, the P-3 is a cost-effective workhorse, easy to maintain when compared against combat thoroughbreds.

"It's a very affordable AWAC-type plat-

form," explains Sudhoff. "Nothing like it exists in the world outside of the U.S. Customs Service."

The aircraft's features also make it ideal for interdiction work. With its long-range capabilities and a cruising speed of nearly 650 kilometers per hour, the P-3 Orion is an ideal tracking and communications platform utilizing a slew of sophisticated computers and communications against smuggling operations.

"It's very forgiving: You can do a lot to it and it keeps flying," says Sudhoff. "The airframe itself can operate in a slow, low, dirty environment-down in the dirt and weeds-or it can go up high and act like an AWAC." If you measure success by deterrence, the P-3 program qualifies. Allied with other radar detection measures, it has forced a major and costly restructuring of the drug smugglers' operations. Today, Customs officials point out that the standard operating procedure for smugglers is to land short of the border and break up the loads for transport by human carriers or ship, or to drop sealed cargo at sea to be picked up by "go fast" boats.

"In the old days, the skies were wide open until we started showing up," says

The Trade in South Asia rafficking. The term applies to a number of illicit rackets, but worldwide the image it conjures is the illegal drug trade. Criminal drug traffic-of heroin, opium, cocaine, and more recently methamphetamines and "designer drugs"-pervades the globe. India, unfortunately, is smack on the contraband highway, situated as it is between Asia's largest producer of heroin and synthetic drugs, Burma, and poppy-rich Afghanistan. Though India and Afghanistan do not share a border, they are nevertheless near neighbors, separated only by about 300 kilometers through a northerly neck of Pakistan adjacent to the Hindu Kush.

India, too, grows the opium poppy. Opium is essential in the manufacture of the powerful pain-killing drugs legally prescribed to alleviate severe pain from injuries and illness.

India is a major supplier to pharmaceutical companies abroad.

Legal cultivation of opium is limited to the three states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, and it is above

board: growers are licensed and strictly monitored. Ramesh Bhattachatji is narcotics commissioner for the Gwalior-based Central Bureau of Narcotics, which is responsible for licensing and regulating poppy growers. It also supervises import and export of narcotics and other drug-related substances, and makes significant contributions to curtailing trafficking. He says that a big worry today is diversion of precursor chemicals.

These substances are also legally produced in India for export to pharmaceutical companies, but some of it gets handed out the backdoor, diverted to the illicit market. "We have very strict controls within India, but diversion occurs when countries outside India import the goods," Bhattacharji says.

Shipments of acetic anhydride, necessary in heroin processing, and ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, used to make amphetamines and methamphetamines, are closely watched. Potassium permanganate, familiar to many as the pink in "pinkie pani" used to clean fruits and vegetables, is in demand in South

lItiiiU •• A

~

=

CiIlm·BIU·ifmiiDl

America for cocaine production. India has, in recent years, strengthened controls over such exports likely to be misused.

The results are good, even with the comparatively small force policing exports. S.c. Chakrabarty, of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), explains: "All manufacturers have to keep accounts of shipments. Orders are placed from outside and part of it is diverted." Indian authorities have successfully identified points of diversion for some of the chemicals seized abroad that originated in India, thereby blocking their future use. Yet with all the good work, the enforcement prospects are daunting.

The most recent INCB report grimly forecasts that "the flow of ephedrine into Myanmar from India, one of the biggest maufacturers and exporters of ephedrine in the world, and the flow of methamphetamine through the traditional heroin routes from Myanmar into India are indications that amphetamine-type stimulants may become a problem in Papaver somniferurn, the opium poppy, is the main source of non-synthetic narcotics such as morphine and codeine.

Incisions made on the unripe seed pods release a milky fluid which is scraped by hand and air-dried to produce opium.

Heroin is a semi-synthetic derivative of opium.

India." The total amount seized in the region increased from less than 1,000 kilograms in 1998 to 7,000 kilograms in 1999.

Sources are diversions and jilicit laboratories.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) works closely with Indian authorities on certifYing drug and chemical consignments to the United States. The United States is India's biggest opium buyer and large quantities of precursor chemicals are shipped to U.S. pharmaceutical companies.

There is also strong cooperation between DEA and the Indian Government on intelligence sharing and training. The DEA helps fund programs and brings in teams when possible, in addition to DEA investigators posted here. The U.S. increasingly sees the importance of stemming the illicit drug trade in South Asia. Afghan opium and heroin sent over the Balkan Route via Central Asia significantly fuels the world heroin market. Bhattacharji says that according to seizure evidence, most of the opium circulating in India is from Afghanistan, despite last year's decree by the Taliban leadership forbidding

Sudhoff. "We'd get airplanes galore flying here in twos and threes. They were flying convoys. We'd fly out of here anci detect one. Just as we're setting up, we'd detect a second and a third and sometimes a fourth. Then we started nabbing these guys and taking them down. We've gotten so good it's no longer profitable. It's too dangerous for them to do that anymore."

After a few hours in the air, Sudhoff reaches his destination, a section of air space on the American-Mexican border.

He sets in at a cruising altitude of 4,850 meters and begins his first "orbit" of the patrol area. The brown sloping hills of the Southwest border glide under the plane.

For the next several hours, the P-3 Orion is the neighborhood cop on the beat.

The radar operators are in position, headphones securely mounted and their eyes fastened on their screens. Two operators are watching for smugglers; the third tracks the course of the plane and surrounding airspace. Above them, the 7.3meter diameter dome rotates, refreshing the screens six times a minute and scanning nearly 5.2 million hectares with each revolution. The plane's computer system takes the information provided by the

opium poppy cultivation. "The reality on the ground doesn't match Taliban claims," Bhattacharji says, adding that given the drought in Afghanistan, "they are making a virtue out of necessity. Opium poppies are a high water crop." High quality heroin also seeps through the lndo-Bunnese border, where it is relatively cheaper, though the price goes up when it hits the streets in India.

At the other end ofthis continuum is the target consumer, the casual user or addict. And if the price of a line of coke seems high, the price of the transnational illicit drug trade is far higher. In the U.S., according to DEA estimates, "one-third of all violent acts and almost one-half of all homicides are drugrelated-many big city mayors say reality is closer to 80 or 90 percent." Drug usage in India has shot up in recent years, and so has the crime rate. Dr. Rajat Ray, of the De-Addiction Centre of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AJIMS) in New Delhi, says that about 5,000 new addicts come to the center each year, adding to a base of about 30,000 in Delhi alone. In Delhi, Ray says, heroin is the drug of choice for most of those who are treated at the centers, though alcohol and

radar and brings it up on the screen as colored icons. Surface targets are circles, squares are airborne, and an upside down V is hostile. Information on speed, direction, and altitude of targeted planes is just a click away. Using keyboard and trackball controls, the pilots can focus in on any suspicious aircraft.

Planes appear onscreen, giving off their "squawk," the four-digit transponder code.

Literally hundreds of planes are in the air at anyone time. Aircraft without transponder signals flying either low and slow or low and fast trying to evade radar merit further inquiry. The operators can have aircraft profiles checked out almost instantly by Customs' Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center at March Air Force Base located in Riverside, California.

Typically, the "Dome" works in tandem as a "Double Eagle" team with another P-3 called a Slick. If the Dome spots a suspicious aircraft, Customs will launch a Slick. While the Slick lacks a dome, it is nonetheless outfitted with a high-tech arsenal of surveillance equipment.

The Slick's key capability is its Forward Looking Infrared system. Mounted in a bay at the nose of the aircraft, the system lowers itself into operation to record TOIs,

in Customs' shorthand. Operational both day and night, the system delivers stunningly detailed black and white images of the target.

Typically, the Dome will use rough coordinates from its radar to vector in the Slick to the target aircraft. When the Slick is within range, it activates its own radar, an APG-63 system also used by F-15 fighters.

The APG-63 's relatively narrow beam gives the Slick the target aircraft's altitude, ground speed, heading, and closure rate. In addition, the Slick's radar links to the infrared system to provide images of a target plane nearly 15 kilometers off.

The second piece of Slick gadgetry is a gyro-stabilized optical telescope.

Called Customs Airborne Stabilized Optics Systems, the device is a digitally enhanced camera with an impressive focal length. "It allows us to zoom in from quite a distance-we can identify objects 15 or 20 miles away," says Sudhoff, who also flies the Slicks. "We can zoom in and still maintain a standoff. In the old days, we'd have to get within 500 yards with binoculars. Now we can stand 5 miles off and get I-foot-high tail numbers."

Mounted inside the Slick, the boxshaped telescope peers through a concave

practice of injecting heroin." Similar trends are observed in India's Northeastern states and in Pakistan, where rates of opiate addiction are among the highest in the world and likely to climb, according to the INCB report.

But if that is not enough, some heroin seizures in the recent past have terrorist earmarks. Using drugs to finance insurgencies is nothing new, Latin American guerilla outfits having set the Crude "laboratories" set up in prototype. Consignments of heroin intercepted remote places process opium to by Indian police have included the explosive make heroin. Increas- ingly, RDX, a strong indication that militants based in clandestine factories use smug- the region may rely on drug trafficking to run . .... gled precursor cheJ1llcals their show. As S.c. Chakrabarty pointed out DIsease transmISSIOn IS a pnmary concern. to make synthetic stimulants wryly, "The global underground organizations HIV /AIDS and lethal strains of hepatitis are such as methamphetamine. are as efficient as overground multinational corspread through intravenous drug use. The porations." The consequences of drug trafficking are far-reachINCB research findings show "virtually all cases of HIV infection along a particular heroin trafficking route in ing. Governments prioritizing anti-trafficking measures and Southeast Asia involved the same subtype of the virus HIV-l, expanding international cooperation on enforcement seem to be suggesting that mv infection was spreading together with the the keys to closing the door on this Pandora's box.

-L.T.

cannabis are more commonly abused elsewhere. "Some bit of local, indigenous manufacture of heroin has started taking place. Over earlier years we used to blame only our neighboring countries." He adds, there are also reports of illicit poppy cultivation. Affordability and access leads to increased usage. "There was a shift from injection to smoking heroin, and for this they can use indigenous products, which are impure and cheaper," Ray says.

India-wide, in 1988 there were a handful of NGOs working on drug detoxification. Now there are 400.

side window. Operated via two monitors, the optics system provides both a long view as well as a digitally enhanced closeup. Operation is something like a video game. The operator acquires the target long-range on the screen, maneuvers a cursor into position, and clicks for the system to zoom in for a better look.

"We can slave both the telescope and the infrared to the radar. The radar is pointing in a certain direction; the computer knows where it is pointing and where the target is," explains Sudhoff.

"The computer takes the information the radar is generating on its own and feeds those signals into either the telescope or the infrared system." There is also a manual targeting site mounted in the cockpit, allowing the pilot to focus the optical system in on a target by eye.

A typical operation will begin with the dome-equipped P-3 Orion making the initial identification of a suspect aircraft.

"We're looking for a target in the suspect area, a known drug area or corridor," says Sudhoff. "Is it squawking-that is, is there a transponder signal? If the answer is no, then that's a red flag.

Where is it coming from and where is it headed? Is it coming from a known drug

source area and heading to a known drug drop-off area? Now, is it day or night?

Let's say it's nighttime, he's flying with no lights on, and he's a hundred feet off the water, a million miles from nowhere.

OK, he's got our interest. Then we send in the Slick, the interceptor."

What happens next depends on the smuggler's tactic. With the Dome acting as a command and control center, the target aircraft is followed to its drop-off point. If the shipment of drugs is dropped at sea to waiting "go fast" boats, a common practice today, Customs can launch its own bust team in a boat. However, if the plane lands, a squad-sized bust team can be dispatched in one of the agency's Sikorsky Black Hawk copters equipped with the infrared and "Night Sun," a spotlight that generates two million candle power to light up the scene. The Black Hawk helicopters are also equipped with long-range fuel tanks, giving them a flight time of almost six hours, and boast a speed of about 240 kilometers per hour.

Coordinating interdiction operations is the job of the Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center. The Riverside, California, facility is one of four such centers, though the only one dedicated to domestic

interdiction in the United States.

The facility provides what Customs calls "seamless radar surveillance" of the entire southern tier of the United States and the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico.

It does this by piping in data from a host of civilian, military, and Customs radar facilities. In theory, operators at Riverside can look at any point in the sky over the continental United States as well as several areas outside U.S. borders.

Today's mission is over, and Sudhoff turns the large plane around, pointing it back toward Corpus Christi. The mission was, after all, routine. But maybe that's the good news in the fight against drugs.

"The P-3 program is effective in stopping smugglers, and it's cost effective," says Raymond Kelly, U.S. Customs commissioner under the Clinton administration. "In my view, they have been a cost-effective way of deterring and virtually preventing cross-border flights carrying drugs. In essence, it's the only government shield offered against smuggling by air and it's only going to get better as the number of planes increases." 0 About the Author: Hank Schlesinger quently contributes to Popular Science.

fre-

e are lost in Long Island City, which is not even a city but part of the borough of Queens in New York, a blank sort of place-an industrial zone of bare lots, factories, warehouses, truck depots, parking lots, garages and, here and there, a scattering of houses and even a small 1920s apartment building. It hasn't changed much, in fact, since the protean sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi came to it in 1960 and set up a studio in a former factory building.

We are trying to find what is now the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, which is something of a challenge, it being beyond the compass of a puzzled and irritated taxi driver and hardly conspicuous on the outside, although unforgettably beautiful within. Long Island City is not quite the place where one would expect to find such a museum, and therefore it is not nearly as well known as it should be. lt is in itself, however, a work of art, in its planning and design, and in its display of more than 250 of the sculptor's works. Some of the pieces are arrayed in a

W

Long Island City s best-kept secret, the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum offers a rare insight into the sculptor S work

Designed by Noguchi himself, the museum :sgarden combines American and Japanese plantings as a symbol of his dual heritage and provides an artful setting for his lyrical stone sculptures. The museum reveals the immense variety of Noguchi:S work.

Above: MAGIC RiNG, wrought of red Persian travertine in 1970.

Right: An array of whimsical, yet utilitarian, Akari light sculptures. Left: A cast-iron portrait head, made in 1929, of American artist Marion Greenwood.

Above: Area 9, Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum . . Left: Area I, Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum.

garden of 800 square meters among white birch, weeping che1Ty, katsura, magnolia, ailanthus, golden bamboo, Korean boxwood, Japanese black pine, glossy abelia, juniper, and Boston and English ivy. Others are on view in the museum's 1,000 square meters of indoor gallery space, which, along with the garden, comprises something altogether extraordinary. The complex, which is open April through October, was a bequest from Noguchi, who died in 1988 at 84, and is governed today by a foundation.

Because of its somewhat remote location, the museum operates a shuttle bus on weekends from midtown Manhattan. Traffic permitting, it is only a short trip across the 59th Street Bridge-a transit from the overwhelming clangor and sheer bulk ofthe city center-to this remarkable oasis and back again. Chances are you will have been changed somewhat by where you have been.

The museum, which opened in 1985, is an integrated expression of one of the 20th century's most elegant and creative spirits.

It is here that you can see, in examples that Noguchi himself selected, the embracing universality, range and richness of a lifetime's work in stone, clay, wood and metal. Here, too, you can see evidence of his explorations in shaping earth, water, sound, space and light itself. There are, for instance, his parks, plazas and playgrounds, his furniture designs, fountains and lamps, his dance and theater sets, and, of course, his gardens. You could say that of the major sculptors of the 20th century only Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti were his peers.

There is something else about this remarkable place-its superb catalog, written entirely by Noguchi. In it are photographs of some 200 of the works on view, with revealing comments by the artist. There is no better way of comprehending what he had in mind.

In his statement on the engaging 1.7-meter-tall basalt work Woman, from 1983-85, one of his last achievements, Noguchi says: "An abandoned sculpture of 1983 suddenly came to life. Its true nature revealed, it now left no doubt as to what it must be.

My every decision came with an inevitability. An overcoming of hesitations."

And, of Core (Cored Sculpture), from 1978, he writes: "Sometimes, out of despair when we have given up, the stone itself sends a message-should one say, bit by bit-so that we may receive it. Finally everything falls into place and emerges with a precision so remarkable it cannot be chance."

For insight into an artist's consciousness, there is little so intimately revealing, other than the letters of Vincent van Gogh, though the two artists were vastly different in temperament, background and ideation.

Noguchi first came to Long Island City in 1960 to be closer to the cluster of stone suppliers in the neighborhood and also to set up a spacious studio, living quarters and, ultimately, an architectural planning office, which he shared with the architect Shoji Sadao.

Noguchi worked with Sadao on many landscape, garden and public a1t projects, and they became close friends. Today Sadao is the executive director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation.

The sculptor had long had his eye on a two-story redbrick

fsamu Noguchi with STRANGE BIRD, taken at the artist MacDougal Alley, New York City. c. 1945

s studio

at

photoengraving plant just across the street from his studio, and when it became vacant in 1974 he quickly acquired it and began extensive renovations, jointly planned with Sadao. Seven years later a cinder-block wing was built on the adjacent site of a former gas station. This addition became the tip of the triangular block that is now the Isamu 10guchi Garden Museum. The entrance, through an inconspicuous door, leads into a tiny foyer as nondescript as the exterior of the compound. A small doorway gives way to a spacious, angled, one-sided area in which is displayed a selection of the sculptor's large pieces in granite and basalt, the major work of his last years. It is one of 14 geometric, light-filled areas of the museum, each of which showcases a different period of the artist's prolific, 64-year career.

"Through gardens I came to a deeper awareness of nature and of stone," Noguchi wrote in the preface to the catalog. "The natural boulders of hard stone-basalt, granite, and the like-which I now use are a congealment of time. They are old. But are they old as sculpture? One day about 30 years ago I split one. Eventually I was able to make it mine, a 'sculpture' of my time and forever. I called it Myo. These are private sculptures, a dialogue between myself and the primary matter of the universe. A mediation, if you will, that carries me on and on one step after another." The museum and catalog, he goes on to say, "attempt to define my role as a crossing where inward and outward meet, East and West."

In many ways, Noguchi's life was as dramatic as his work.

There was a fissure running down it as deep and enduring as the ones he would crack and cut into the most obdurate of stone. This dichotomy may say something about his attraction to the opposites of rough and smooth and how they relate to each other in sculpture. In his personal life it represented the duality of East

and West, a division that, if he never resolved it in his life, he which had been established in an abandoned church on Tompkins Square in New York City. My first show, ofterra-cottas, was held managed to in his art.

"I work all over the place," he said in a film documentary. "I feel there three months later."

Noguchi had signed up for classes at the school at the sugequally at home wherever I am. People seem to welcome me ...and that's my pleasure, but that's my sadness-that I really haven't got gestion of his mother, who had returned to the United States in 1923 after 17 years in Japan. But by this time, according to the a home." Beginning in the late 1960s oguchi would spend half of each year in ew York and the other half on the Japanese island of artist's autobiography, he had lost forever his "extreme attachment" to her.

Shikoku, where he rebuilt a traditional samurai house and studio, oguchi proved to be a brilliant and facile student under and created his last monolithic masterpieces.

Noguchi's mother, Leonie Gilmour, an American writer and Ruotolo's guidance. In an astonishingly short time he became a independent spirit, gave birth to Noguchi in Los Angeles on successful academic sculptor, creating life-size traditional figures and exhibiting regularly. But Noguchi lost interest in academic November 17, 1904. His father, the poet Yonejiro (Yone) sculpture as quickly as he had mastered it. He had seen an exhibiNoguchi, was not there to welcome his son. He had already tion of Brancusi's sculpture in late 1926-powerfully simple, abreturned to Japan, where he soon married a Japanese woman.

Nevertheless, when Noguchi was 2, Yone persuaded Leonie to stract, and completely different from what Noguchi himself had come to Japan with baby Isamu. There he established them in a been doing, In the spring of 1927, having been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the young artist found himself in Paris separate house. But the relationship soon broke down, and Leonie began a new life in Japan as a translator, writer and actually working as an assistant to Brancusi.

"I was initiated in stone by Constantin Brancusi ...," Noguchi teacher of English, not an easy task even for this indefatigable woman. But the situation was even more difficult for a little boy would write. "He showed me how to square a block out of limestone, This is how I learned of the honesty of sculpture as a prewho didn't quite look like the other children in his classroom.

When Isamu was 13, Leonie, who had already informally ap- requisite for overcoming the easy attractions of clay modeling."

Before long he would begin to produce his first stone and wood prenticed the child to a Japanese carpenter, sent the slight, appresculptures in a studio in Montparnasse. hensive boy to the experimental Interlaken School in Rolling Later in life, oguchi would comment, "Any person [ have Prairie, Indiana. Think of him there, thrust into an entirely new world, coming from an old one of which he was never really a been influenced by, I've been obliged to betray in a sense. It's only through freeing ourselves from the obligation of being bepart, a child of a father who deserted him and of a mother who holden to others that we are really free ...You have to deny yoursent him away.

It was 1918. America had entered the war, and Interlaken was self too, your own past, because it's your own past that's going to then constrain you." turned into an Army training camp. The school's founder, When he returned to New York in 1929, Noguchi supported Edward Rumely, took a fatherly interest in the boy and found a home for him with Samuel Mack, a Swedenborgian minister in himself by sculpting portrait heads of prominent figures, including the architect/engineer R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the La Porte, Indiana, while Noguchi attended the local high school, graduating in 1922. geodesic dome. Fuller became a lifelong friend, and his visionRumely then arranged for Noguchi to spend the summer in ary, utopian theories later influenced Noguchi's large-scale urban Connecticut tutoring the son of the sculptor Gutzon BOl'glum, projects. By 1930, the artist had earned enough from these porlater to become renowned for the monumental heads of traits to enable him to return to Paris. Two months later he was on Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt he his way via Moscow to Peking, where he remained for eight months studying ink-brush painting. carved into the rock face of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

Noguchi had intended to go to Japan for some sort ofreconcilThe artist had agreed to give Noguchi some training in sculpture iation with his father, whom he hardly knew. He had written to in exchange for the tutoring. But before the summer was over, his father to let him know he was coming and had received a Borglum, in one of art history's more stunning assessments, told crushing reply saying that he oguchi he would never be a Martha Graham "wears" Noguchi:S wire sculpture sculptor. should not come to Japan using for her role as Medea. ~ his father's name. oguchi had Meanwhile, Rumely, ever on the lookout for the boy's future, .~then gone to China instead, but he had raised funds to send him to persisted, and in 1931 he arrived ~ in Tokyo to a cool welcome and a Columbia University. Noguchi _ __ ~ "trying meeting" with his father. enrolled in 1922 to study medi/---~~z cine. But, as he described it, "I _ ... -::-.-::=- ~~~ -. g Accor d'mg to Dore As hton ' s fime biography Noguchi: East and was rescued from a premedical --. ~ I ~~ /1'ru v N h' b h course at Columbia University by 'I / jJ /:'''''.?r~''':.:..-'i rrest, lone oguc I, y now t e Onorio Ruotolo, director of the father of a large family and an ar.. U dent nationalist, did not want to Leonardo da Vinci Art School,

f

_A~

/0'

"-""

/~

.

__

---

~

--~ ---- ~~ ~

(Continued on page 58)

GenderEquity A

Different Angle on Representation

Linda Moscarella is a grassroots activist of 25 years standing whose sights are trained on democracy and governance, particularly where women's rights are concerned. She has worked for changes in civil society at local, state, national and international levels, and she

i:l

recently visited India as part of a tour

~

arranged by the Public Affairs section

~ '" ~

i!'

of the U.S. Embassy. Moscarella's visit

f

was short, but long enough for her to

0

o

fan the flames at a program organized by the Delhi Commission of Women and the American Embassy. Some participants disputed Moscarella's views when she spoke about women's reservation and some of its drawbacks. As she told SPAN Editor Lea Terhune during a breakfast conversation earlier, though her exposure to India is limited, she is impressed with the political work Indian women are doing. Her knowledge of democratic process is considerable, and she offers a thought-provoking take on the future of representation, at least in the United States.

SPAN: The issue of women's reservation in India is so highly charged it has closed down sessions of Parliament, under sllccessive governments.

Why do you think women's reservation has not been an issue in the U.S.? It is not an idea that comes up in connection with women in government, even though women are very poorly represented in the United States compared to, say, Scandinavian countries.

LINDA MOSCARELLA: It's interesting, because it's true that it doesn't come up in the United States, even though we have done certain kinds of reservation systems in universities for minorities, so that it's not completely foreign to the United States. However that is on its way out in the United States.

I think we never had the kind of system that invited reservation. As a woman it never crossed

my mind, personally. I'd never thought about it at all.

I always thought it was a good thing that blacks had some extra help in getting representation at good universities and I still think it got them somewhere they would not have gotten otherwise, but I do think that this probable going away from it is also a good thing at this point. So that makes me feel that it is not necessarily a solution for Indian women to get reservation, which I know, they think is their solution.

Why do you think that? Many of the men here are not in favor of it, and some do everything they can to subvert it.

Well, yes. This kind of reservation system works best in conjunction with proportional representation, and they don't have proportional representation here.

So it's almost like trying to mix apples and oranges to get the effect that they want with this kind of "firstpast-the-post" election system. It might be a better first step to try to introduce a mixed system-partially proportional representation and partially onedistrict-one-elected-person system. They can get a piece of the action this way without completely changing their system, without doing what the men are obviously so worried about, that they are going to lose their own seats. This is what makes them not like this idea-it pushes them out.

Trying to do it with the system they have now will involve what they are doing at the local level, in which they somehow rotate which seats are supposed to be women's seats. It might be a good idea to shake things up once or twice that way, but I don't think it will work as a long-term approach. So I think it's a mixed bag. It's not something that I would say yes, this is a wonderful idea and try to do this. I think they've got to think it through a little more.

Could you explain proportional representation?

We don't have proportional representation in the United States, but many countries do have proportional representation, which is a system that you can use if you have the kind of district or city where you have multiple seats, as for a city council. Supposing you have a 10-seat city council, you can have a system of voting that allows proportional representation. This is also a multi-party approach. It works better with that.

If you have, say, five parties, and each party puts up a slate. The most simplified system is a closed system in which you vote for the party and the party decides who the representatives will be. The number of seats on the city council will be proportional to the percentage of votes that each party has. If one party gets 40 percent of the votes, they get four seats on the city council. If the other one gets 10 percent of the votes he

gets one seat. And in this case there would be a threshold of 10 percent. That means if you get under 10 percent you are not going to get represented. The advantage of this kind of system is that it more accurately represents the constituency at large. You have a city council that more closely resembles the actual population that you have.

What we have in the United States and what they have here in India is one district, one representative, so that, for instance, in the U.S. Congress, you have two people vying for a seat. If you have three people, the person who gets the most votes wins. No matter what party that person represents, no matter what proportion of support is in the population, that's the person who is going to be your representative. In the situation of women-because women are 50 percent of the population or a little more-if you have this kind of winnertake-all situation you are always going to have women underrepresented. It is almost inevitable. It might at some point swing the other way, so that there are more women. It's not conducive to trying to represent populations within a population.

So that's a problem for women in the U.S. Are there people who promote proportional representation in the U.S.?

Yes, there are some, but it is considered at the moment a pretty esoteric idea. But there is an approach that can be used with the kind of single representative districts that we have now that I think would work. It's not exactly proportional representation, but it's close. The idea would be that if you have more than two people running, the voter would be able to rank his choice: my first choice is this, my second choice is that and my third choice is that. Then you can safely vote for a person who probably isn't going to win, without giving the election to the person whom you would least like to have win, which is what usually happens. Two people who are similar will split a vote. How it would have worked in this last election, if you wanted to vote for Ralph Nader, you put him at number one. You would pick Gore for two, most likely. One person has to get 50 percent of the vote in this system for it to work. So if you count the votes and nobody has 50 percent on the first round, the second choice votes of the person with the least amount of votes go to the second choice person. They switch over. With that system, Gore would have been president of the United States. That's another way the voter is given a better choice.

There a few cities in the United States where they have proportional representation in the city council.

That's an area where it works very, very well, and you do have more women on those city councils, because

you are not pushing a man out of a seat. In such a city you would not have districts represented by one person. The whole of city council essentially represents everybody in the city.

If more women get involved in politics, will politics be cleaner?

To some extent. There are several parts to that. Any time someone who really is an outsider gets into some kind of system like this, the tendency is for that person to bring a different point of view. And this person hasn't, obviously, been chosen by the local power, so she isn't going to play ball with the local power. So I think there is that piece of it-which is negated if the women who are in power are the family members or from close clan groups to those men who are already in power.

I do think that women could make a difference. In general women favor social programs. They want to see health care systems, they want to see better education, they want to see things that are going to promote that part of the system where they live. They usually want to see guns at least regulated in some way. They are much less likely be enthusiastic about new weapons systems than men. They just don't get excited about spending another two trillion dollars on some new gadget. But on the other hand, once they get into a position of power, they of course see what it is they are protecting or representing and this sometimes changes how they feel about it.

I have always felt that if there were a sufficient number of women in power-a critical mass-that you would in fact have a reasonably good chance of standing up and saying, "We won't be safer if we develop this missile shield. It will not make us safer, it'll just make us poorer." If a lone woman does that, she is just considered one of those who is trying to destroy the most powerful country on earth. If a significant number of women say this over and over again, I think they might get somewhere. But the question is, can it ever happen in any country that isn't already over the top?

The Scandinavian countries have got the best representation of women, and they do a very good job. The Scandinavian countries are very well run. They work extremely well. But they are not really players in this global game. So I don't know. It's a question.

Why are women candidates so routinely beaten down in the United States? Geraldine Ferraro comes to mind. As the jirst woman vice-presidential candidate in U.S. history, on the ticket with Walter Mondale in 1984, she was subjected to intense scrutiny and her husband'sjinancial dealings were made into an issue.

She certainly got it. I think men are really scared of the kind of woman who might actually challenge the

system, and I think Geraldine Ferraro was one of those women, who were very smart and very capable and who didn't really own a big piece of the system. It wasn't her system. I think she scared people to death.

Well, Hillary Clinton scares them to death. They are just berserk over Hillary Clinton. I think it's fascinating. To me it really represents men fighting for their lives, when you see that kind of reaction you see how badly they are threatened, how they feel the hot breath on their necks. They really don't Iike it. And I think to a certain extent they have imagined this. I am not sure the whole contest exists in the sense that men have depicted it. Who knows what would happen if women really had 50 percent of the power? It hasn't been done at any time within written history. It might have happened in some prehistorical time, but we have no written evidence of such a thing.

Ideally it would be like a good marriage, I suppose, where the male and female elements balance each other.

Yes, yes. I think it should and it could. But both people have to be grown-ups. Do all adults have the potential to grow up and live up to their human potential?

Nobody knows. It hasn't been done. So it's interesting, but it's a challenge and it's very scary to people. They know that we've got a system here and it's working, and it may have problems but we are all still alive.

People tend to divide gender issues into black and white, patriarchy or matriarchy, don't they?

If what I am interested in comes about, it won't be a patriarchy or a matriarchy. I think that we should be beyond that at this point, and if we are not we may as well stay as we are. I think it is a very hard thing for men to deal with. A negative message to me is that my son hasn't gotten the message. He's quite smart and he's quite political, but he has bought into the system that got him power and feels that it is the right way, and there's nothing I can say. That's where he is right now. So I see that even in a younger generation, with well-educated, intelligent men. They are still frightened. It always is scary to break out of conditioning.

But I see it as an evolving process. I can see that there is improvement, and we are getting closer. I think that until women everywhere have a reasonably good chance of living without being protected by the patriarchy that this can't change. And it has changed in the United States as women have become much more independent. Certainly my daughter and her friends are much more independent than 1. They may not think it's a great deal, because they all have to work, but they do know that they can take care of themselves.

D

Life in the

Fourth Millennium Will human nature triumph over scary futurist projections? eople living at the start ofthe third millennium enjoy a world that would have been inconceivable to our ancestors living in the 100 millennia that our species has existed. Ignorance and myth have given way to an extraordinarily detailed understanding of life, matter and the universe. Slavery, despotism, blood feuds and patriarchy have vanished from vast expanses of the planet, driven out by unprecedented concepts of universal human rights and the rule of law.

Technology has. shrunk the globe and stretched our lives and our minds.

How far can this revolution in the human condition go? Will the world of 3000 be as unthinkable to us today as the world of 2000 would have been to our forebears a millennium ago? Will our descendants live in a wired Age of Aquarius? Will science explain the universe down to the last quark, extinguishing mystery and wonder? Will the Internet turn us into isolates who interact only in virtual reality, doing away with couples, families, communities, cities? Will electronic media transform the arts beyond recognition?

Will they transform our minds?

Obviously it would be foolish to predict what life will be like in a thousand years.

We laugh at the Victorian experts who predicted that radio and flying machines were impossible. But it is just as foolish to predict that the future will be utterly

foreign~we also laugh at the postwar experts who foresaw domed cities, jetpack commuters and nuclear vacuum cleaners. The future, I suggest, will not be unrecognizably exotic because across all the dizzying changes that shaped the present and will shape the future one element remains constant: human nature.

After decades of viewing the mind as a blank slate upon which the environment writes, cognitive neuroscientists, behavioral geneticists and evolutionary psychologists are discovering instead a richly structured human psyche. Of course, humans are ravenous learners, but learning is possible only in a brain equipped with circuits that learn in intelligent ways and with emotions that motivate it to learn in useful ways. The mind has a toolbox of concepts for space (millimeters to kilometers), time (tenths of seconds to years), small numbers, billiard-ball causation, living things and other minds. It is powered by emotions about things~curiosity, fear, disgust, beauty~and about people~ love, guilt, anger, sympathy, pride, lust. It has instincts to communicate by language, gesture and facial expressions.

We inherited this standard equipment from our evolutionary ancestors, and, I suspect, we will bequeath it to our descendants in the millennia to come. We won't evolve into bulbous-brained, spindly-bodied homunculi because biological evolution is not a force that pushes us to greater intelligence and wisdom;

it simply favors variants that out-reproduce their rivals in some environments.

Unless people with a particular trait have more babies worldwide for thousands of generations, our biological constitution will not radically change.

It is also far from certain that we will redesign human nature through genetic engineering.

People are repulsed by genetically modified soybeans, let alone babies, and the risks and reservations surrounding germ-line engineering of the human brain may consign it to the fate of the nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner.

If human nature does not change, our lives in the new millennium may be more familiar than the futurologists predict.

Take education, where many seers predict a revolution that will make the schoolroom obsolete. Some envision Summerhillesque free schools, where children interact in a technology-enriched environment and literacy and knowledge will just blossom, free from the drudgery of drill and practice. Others hope that early stimulation, such as playing Mozart piano concertos to the bellies of pregnant women, will transform a plastic brain into a superlearner.

But an alternative view is that education is the attempt to get minds to do things they are badly designed for.

Though children instinctively speak, see, move and use common sense, their minds may be constitutionally ill at ease with many of the fruits of modern civilization:

written language, mathematical calculation, the very large and very small spans of time and space that are the subject of history and science. If so, education will always be a tough slog, depending on disciplined work on the part of students and on the insight of a skilled teacher who can stretch stone-age minds to meet the demands of alien subject matter.

Our mental apparatus may also constrain how much we adults ever grasp the truths of science. The Big Bang, curved 4-D space-time and particles that act like waves-all are required by our best theories of physics but are incompatible with common sense. Similarly, consciousness and decision-making arise from the electrochemical activity of neural networks in the brain. But how moving molecules should throw off subjective feelings (as opposed to mere intelligent computations) and choices for which we can be held responsible (as opposed to behavior that is caused) remain deep mysteries to our Pleistocene psyches.

That suggests that our descendants will endlessly ponder the age-old topics of religion and philosophy, which ultimately hinge on concepts of matter and mind.

Why does the universe exist, and what brought it into being? What are the rights and responsibilities of living things with different brains, hence different minds, from ours-fetuses, animals, neurologically impaired people, the dying? Abortion, animal rights, the insanity defense and euthanasia will continue to agonize the thoughtful (or be settled by dogma among the unthoughtful) for as long as the human mind confronts them.

One can also predict that the mind will shape, rather than be reshaped by, the information technology of the future.

Why have computers recently infiltrated our lives? Because they have been painstakingly crafted to mesh better with the primitive workings of our minds. The graphical user interface (windows, icons, buttons, sliders, mice) and the World Wide Web represent the coercion of machines, not people.

We have jiggered our computers to simulate a world of phantom objects that are alien to the computer's own internal

workings (ones, zeroes and logic) but are comfortable for us tool-using, visiondependent primates. Many other dramatic technological changes will come from getting our machines to adapt to our quirks-understanding our speech, recognizing our faces, carrying out our desires in accord with our common sense-rather than from getting humans to adapt to the ways of machines.

Our emotional repertoire, too, ensures that the world of tomorrow will be a familiar place. Humans are a social species, with intense longings for friends, communities, family and spouses, consummated by face-to-face contact.

E-mail and e-commerce will continue their inroads, of course, but not to the point of making us permanent antisocial shut-ins; only to the point where the increase in convenience is outweighed by a decrease in the pleasure of being with friends, relations and interesting strangers. If our descendants have spaceports and transporter rooms, they will be crammed at Thanksgiving and Christmas. ut human relationships also embrace conflicts of biological interests, which surface in jealousy, sibling rivalry, status-seeking, infidelity and mistrust. The social world is a chess game in which our minds evolved as strategists.

If so, the mental Jives of our descendants are not hard to predict. Conflicts with other people, including th.ose they care the most about, will crowd their waking thoughts, keep them up at night, animate their conversation and supply the plots of their fiction, whatever the medium in which they enjoy it.

If constraints on human nature make the future more like the present and past than futurologists predict, should we sink into despair? Many people, seeing the tragedies and frustrations of the world today, dream of a future without limits, in which our descendants are infinitely good, wise, powerful and omniscient. The suggestion that om future might be constrained by DNA shaped in the savanna and ice ages seems depressing---even dangerous.

Admittedly, many declarations of

ineluctable human nature turned out to be wrong and even harmful-for example, the "inevitability" of war, racial segregation and the political inequality of women.

But the opposite view, of an infinitely plastic and perfectible mind, has led to horrors of its own: the Soviet "new man," re-education camps and the unjust blaming of mothers for the disabilities and neuroses of their children.

Many leaps in our quality of life came from the recognition of universal human needs, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and of universal limitations on human wisdom and beneficence, which led to our government of laws and not men.

Universal obsessions are also the reason that we enjoy the art and stories of peoples who lived in centuries and millennia past: Shakespeare, the Bible, the love stories and hero myths of countless cultures superficially unlike our own. And the mind's foibles ensure that science will be a perennial source of enchantment even as it dispels one mystery after another. The delights of science-of the Big Bang, the theory of evolution, the unraveling of the genes and the brain-come from the surprise triggered by a conclusion that is indubitably confirmed by experiment and theory but that contradicts standard human intuitions.

Third-millennium futurologists should realize that their fantasies are scaring people to death. The preposterous world in which we interact only in cyberspace, choose the endings of our novels, merge with our computers and design our children from a catalogue gives people the creeps and turns them off to the genuine promise of technological progress. The constancy of human nature is our reassurance that the world we leave to our descendants will be one in which scientific progress leads to delight rather than boredom, in which our best art and literature continues to be appreciated, and in which technology will enrich rather than dominate human lives.

D About the Author: Steven Pinker is a professor of cognitive science at the department of brain and cognitive sciences in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MlT).

No longer just raging against the machine, these activists look to nature as the guide for solving environmental woes

L

ast fall I found myself in the most unlikely of circumstances-standing in the midst of a crowd that was wildly cheering slime mold and fungi research. They weren't academics; very few of them, in fact, were scientists. These were bioneers, or biological pioneers, who come together annually in San Rafael, California, to share ideas about restorative solutions to environmental problems.

The picture painted by the bioneers is not pretty.

Our life systems are in peril: Biodiversity is in a free fall; topsoil is poisoned and disappearing; few children breathe truly clean air; cancer is epidemic. But these visionary pragmatists-farmers, students, priests, lawyers, teachers, radio show hosts, ecologists, designers, writers, artists, political activists-are hopeful about the future. They believe that as the industrial age ends, we are about to enter an age of biology. "This isn't airy-fairy New Age nonsense. This is grounded reality," said Kenny Ausubel, who founded the Bioneers Conference in 1990 and now produces it with his wife, Nina Simons.

Take the work of mycologist Paul Stamets, who runs Fungi Perfecti, a Washington-based company that cultivates medicinal mushrooms.

Stamets and others discovered that a mushroom's mycelium-the mat of threadlike filaments spreading in the soil beneath the visible cap and stem-can filter and decompose toxic substances. When Washington's Department of Transportation invited 20 groups to participate in a trial of various biological cleanup approaches,

Stamets put his "mycoremediation" process to the test. He placed fungal spores on a pile of dirt soaked in diesel oil, covered it with a tarp, and returned a month later to find the mushrooms thriving. The fungi had done a remarkable job breaking down the contamination in the dirt while remaining free of petroleum products themselves.

Stamets has found that mycelial mats can also clean up potentially harmful E. coli bacteria, among other substances. But Stamets, a quiet man who prefers the forest to the spotlight, doesn't take credit for any new discoveries. "Mycelium is leading the way," he said. "I'm just following."

Or visit with Janine Benyus, who lives in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana.

Trained as a forester, she works with biomimicry, what she calls "the conscious emulation of life's genius." Benyus suggests that when we are trying to solve a problem, we ask ourselves, "What would nature do here?" To improve the health of our society, for instance, we might study plant societies. Benyus says we are currently living like weedy annuals that invade disturbed soil and don't intend to stay. Ifwe want a healthy society, we ought to emulate the cooperative model of the mature forest.

William McDonough, an internationally renowned architect and designer, is one of the few

â&#x20AC;˘

~ f!k :;s:

â&#x20AC;˘

bioneers-along with writer Alice Walker and Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop-noted by the mainstream media. Time magazine named McDonough a "Hero for the Planet" in 1999 for his radical approach to design. Imagine how different our world might be if everyone asked the design questions he considers essential: "How do we love all of the children of all species for all time?" and "When do we become native to this place?" McDonough, whose headqualiers for the Gap Corporation in San Bruno, California, is a manual of energy conservation, is currently redesigning Ford's famous Rouge River auto plant in Dearborn, Michigan, as an ecological industrial facility.

Everywhere I looked I discovered bioneers doing incredible work: Environmental anist Jo Hanson created an artists-in-residence program at San Francisco's waste disposal company. Rebecca Adamson, president of the First Nations Development Fund, advocates economic development strategies that suppOli indigenous rights and culture. Joel Salatin, a biodynamic farmer, developed a system of rotational grazing that builds as much as an inch of topsoil a year on his farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

While many of these people work in relative isolation, the Bioneers network is turning into an intricately connected and growing web of visionaries who use nature as their model. They're not just activists and scientists. They're spiritual and community leaders, alternative health care professionals, herb growers, database designers, and young people who want a better world. They recognize that by working together, they have the ability to restore the eanh and improve society.

The scant media attention focused on this collection of ecological innovators depicts the Bioneers organization as the first tendrils of an emerging movement. And in its forward-thinking orientation toward solutions, Bioneers might indeed appear to be something brand new. But, in fact, the organization might better be described as the coming of age of the environmental movement that began in the 1960s.

As the network gains momentum, Ausubel and Simons are more anxious than ever to spread bioneering ideas. They've created Bioneers: Revolutionji-om the Heart of Nature, a radio series that now_airs on 120 stations in the United States

and 390 in Australia. They're looking into torming a speakers' bureau. And they're using the Internet.

The organization has a "solutions strategies database" (www.bioneers.org) so the curious can participate in an "orgy oflinking." The main speakers at the October 2000 gathering were broadcast live on the Web. It's a natural medium for the Bioneers, said Paula Gunn Allen, a ative American educator and writer from the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico: "The Internet is the first bare hint in modern societies of a model of how the universe functions."

With all this connectedness and integration, is there room in Bioneers for the voices of outrage and the politics of protest? Judging by the thunderous reception that greeted celebrity tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill, there's still plenty of appreciation for principled dissent. "It is not only our right to be angry," Hill told her fans, "it is our responsibility."

Indeed, the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle were a pivotal event for most of the people here. Environmental activist, writer, and teacher Starhawk, who was arrested in Seattle and spent five days in jail, said the event marked a wider social change as well. "The world itself was cracking open," she said, "and something else was being born."

That something appears to be collective action.

Author David Korten said that the protests sparked the beginning of a "global movement for a living democracy" based on natural systems.

Stony, a 16-year-old from Sonoma, California, told me he was unable to get to Seattle for the protests, so he and friends-a group called Planting Earth Activation-planted organic gardens in their community.

"We are shifting from a culture that values things to one that values relationships, " said Bioneers co-producer Nina Simons. If the Bioneers have one message, it's that restorative solutions are grounded in connections: among people but also between humans, animals, plants, and the earth. Some strategies are complex, based on innovative technology and design, but others are simple. As Hunter Lovins, co-director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, said, "We need to learn the skills of community if we are going to avoid being squashed by huge forces of globalization." She sent the bioneers off with an assignment: "Go next door, introduce yourself, and say howdy."

0 About the Author: Karen Olson is an assistant editor o/Utne Reader.

Destination

"How the lunatics flung up their caps and roared in sympathy with the headlong engine and the driving tide!"

-Charles Dickens, on arrival in New York, passing the insane asylum on Blackwell s Island aboard the steamboat New York

ure, there are people who simply wind up in New York, find themselves living here the way people wind up in Des Moines or Fullelton or Fort WOIth, by accident or default. She is raised at 74th and Amsterdam, rents her own first apmtment up West End Avenue at 103rd, then settles in a brownstone duplex in Park Slope; he grows up in Bayside and after dental schoQI decamps a few miles west, to a junior two-bedroom at 67th and York with a view (of Queens). Or they arrive for college and never leave; or they're transfelTed in for a headquarters tour of duty; or they tag along with a wife or boyfriend.

But surely, for more people here than anywhere else, moving to New York was an urban choice, particular and self-conscious, bedazzling and scary. Moving to New York requires a yearning-to live by one's wits or test one's mettle; to make art

S

or a pile of cash (or, during the 1980s, both at once); to live nakedly or anonymously or simply to get as far as possible from Des Moines or Fullerton or Fort Worth; or even, still, to breathe fi路ee. Fifty-one years ago, E.B. White wrote that those who were "born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something" make up "the greatest" New York. Each of them "embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love" and must come here "willing to be lucky."

Given the cost of living, the ambient hypettension and the clattering grind, the decision to move to New York remains at least somewhat irrational, requiring a kind of quasi-religious commitment. And yet in this ostensibly hyper-rational age, people from all over still make that decision in staggering numbers. It's corny but true: arriving in New York, from the provinces or overseas, remains a central episode in the American narrative, a kind of living iconic rite. The mythic pull of the city has been gathering force for a long time, encoded in a body of literature so extensive and so familiar as to constitute its own genre. Walt Whitman invented (and embodied) the modern ode-to-New York

mode, embracing the coarse and unlovable aspects of the place together with the plainly grand ones. His poems have colored coming-to-New York stories ever since, seeping into American Bildungsromane that celebrate the grunge and stink and bloody-minded rattle of the city along with the mattinis and art and sleek talk. In this romantic urban landscape, game tyros dare the tough big city to defeat or disillusion them-David Copperfields without all that David Copperfield stuff that Holden Caulfield was too cool to indulge explicitly. Stories as various as "Catcher in the Rye," "The Godfather," "A Chorus Line,"" ew York, ew York," "Working Girl," "Bright Lights, Big City," "Wall Street," "Slaves of New York," "Angela's Ashes" and "Felicity" are all New York newcomer stories, each somewhere on the spectrum between the perpetually wowed ("Breakfast at Tiffany's") and the relentlessly dark ("Midnight Cowboy").

Each generation and each caste has had its fresh iteration of the New York myth.

(Jackson Pollock and the Beats replace John Reed and the Communists, Don DeLillo replaces John O'Hara, "Seinfeld"

View of Manhattan Fom across the Hudson Rivel:

New York is historically an ethnic melting pot. People go there hoping to transform their lives.

Glamour in shop windows along Fifth Av.enue.

replaces "Annie Hall," Tito Puente replaces Duke Ellington, Fran Lebowitz replaces Dorothy Parker, Wendy Wasserstein and Paul Rudnick replace Kaufman and Hart, Melissa Bank replaces Dawn Powell, Jeff Koons replaces Andy Warhol, Biggie Smalls replaces Charlie Parker.)

But the city's staITing role in that mythand its resulting position in the popular imagination of America and the worldremains the same. Even the New York that Dickens depicted in 1842 is uncannily familiar: the city, he wrote, was manic (people and vehicles "all travelling to and fro: and never idle ... These restless Insects"), physically delirious ("confused heaps of buildings"), fashion-forward ("Heaven save the ladies, how they dress!

What pinking of thin stockings, and pinching of thin shoes, and fluttering of ribbons and silk tassels") and media-mad ("fifty newspapers ...pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and ... imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and vilest motives").

The real-life city of New York, of course, has recently undergone a radical transformation. Twenty-five years ago, the city was in bankruptcy, the sidewalks teemed with crazy people, commercial sex was in its golden age and swaths of West 42nd Street and the Bowery were druggy dead zones. (All of which young knee-jerk nihilists, nurtured by a century of Whitmans and Allen Ginsbergs and Lou Reeds, regarded as attractive antiamenities.) Today there are brand-new chunks of New York that could pass for Toronto or San Diego; Times Square is spectacularly family-friendly (again); Central Park and Bryant Park have been redeemed to an extent not possible to imagine in the '70s. There are a third as many murders, thousands of new information-age jobs, a shocking sense of civic life more or less in control. But while stat1ing salaries have doubled, some rents have quintupled. For people without an MBA or a law degree, entry-level pay no longer covers a decent one-bedroom in a pleasant Manhattan neighborhood. The supply of cheap garrets have been outsourced to Brooklyn.

For most people who come here from

Sri Lanka, or Nigeria, or Ecuador, of course, there is nothing bittersweet about the new, improved New York of 2000.

They do not come here because they loved "Bright Lights, Big City" in high school or heard about the Cedar Tavern on the National Public Radio. They come for the same reason immigrants have always come: the chance to make more money

than they could in Bangladesh or Ukraine or Ireland. And while today they don't believe (if they ever did) that the streets are paved with gold, they do know, or sense, that nowhere in America is there more opportunity for sheer stamina to be rewarded. A taxi can be driven 18 hours a day. Drywall can be taped 70 hours a week. Wallets and umbrellas and falafels

Block parties bring city neighborhoods together:

can be peddled on the sidewalks pretty much all the time. In other words, the workaholic money madness of New York is part of the attraction for new arrivals at the bottom of the ladder as well as at the top. The couple from St. Kitts working five jobs between them surely belies the newest New York myth-that there is no more middle or working class, only the

rich and the permanently poor.

But for the immigrants who were drawn here from the American sticks (like me), the appeal is less obvious.

Manhattanism has spread deep into the provinces. Epicurean grocery stores and Miramax films and alternative weeklies and imitation SoHo's are now a part of even small cities and leafy suburbs. So

how has New York itself sustained its spell? Why do people still come here in such numbers, from so many other American places? For approximately the same reason, [ think, that the new nationwide ubiquity of casino gambling and strip clubs improbably fed the explosive growth of Las Vegas during the last 20 years-as more and more Americans

acquire a taste in their hometowns for sin or old-fashioned urban civilization, more and more of them yearn for the wellspring, the big show, the real thing.

Tnretrospect, my childhood in Omaha, a kilometer from a cornfield, looks like a New York 101 distance-learning experiment. Every week on TV during the 1960s, I watched a couple of movies from the 1930s or '40s, almost all of them glo-

rifications of this city-"My Man Godfrey," "His Girl Friday," "On the Town." On TV, half my pleasure in programs like Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts," "The Dick Cavett Show" and Johnny Carson's "Tonight" (before the move to California) derived from their unmistakable Manhattan tangthe occasional evening clothes, the jokes about Central Park, the unapologetic cos-

mopolitanism. I played the cast album of "West Side Story" over and over and spent years studying Mad magazine, by far the New Yorkiest artifact generally available to children in Nebraska. Venturing regularly by bus into downtown Omahaalone, almost sneakily-I managed to' see the big old stone buildings, the used-book shops, the single adult theater, the liquory breezes from pitch-black bars, the people

of color, the policemen on foot, the kooks, the bums, the suspicious characters and all the rest as a thrilling miniature glimpse of what New York might be like.

So, just after college, I turned down a good job in Alexandria, Virginia, and moved, unemployed, directly to New York. Like all newcomers, I felt my outsiderdom acutely. I've found that this is a feeling that attenuates but never entirely goes away-living here is always part "Blade Runner," part Edith Wharton. And some of the pleasure of the place derives from those regular frissons of alienation.

Unlike San Francisco's or Seattle's, New York's scale makes overfamiliarity impossible. That rule extends to professional subcultures as well as to geography.

Unlike Washington or Los Angeles, ew York has no single, oppressively dominant professional realm, but a half-dozen different major leagues, countless selfobsessed pecking orders you've never even heard of. Whereas in more anodyne, more normal American cities, the treacly breeze from the Cinnabon shop at the mall is the single-most intense public aroma, New York assaults pedestrians with intense odors-South Street's dead fish, the meat district's day-old beef, horse manure on Central Park South, peppers and hot fat in Chinatown. And whereas those cities are optimized to anticipate every consumer desire, New York, with its tiny markets and tinier kitchens, demands a constant rhythm of commercial interactions-newspaper here, bread here, vegetables here, wine there-that can be exhausting once the novelty wears off.

It is not a Welcome Wagon kind of place. Yet it can be more comfortable for newcomers than ovel11y "friendly" cities. ew York's waves of immigration and emigration become a self-perpetuating spiral: newcomers as a class feel less like oddballs here, and so new newcomers keep pouring in, attracting more newcomers still. They ride that great assimilation machine, the subway, an egalitarian marvel that permits (O.K., forces) a real and immediate engagement with the urban tide unavailable in cities where everyone drives cars. ewcomers here wander on streets crowded with people and shops,

getting a de facto crash course in urbanism. They eat among crowds of interesting strangers (during my first year here, I probably ate more restaurant meals than my relatively cosmopolitan parents ate in their whole lives), and every meal out is another chance to eavesdrop and stare at people you don't know-a pleasure that in other cities can result in the police being summoned. So the newcomers don't stay newcomers for very long.

I envy new New Yorkers. Not the rents they have to pay, or the loneliness that goes without saying. Assuming they arrive equipped with some basic New York catechism, I envy them that first year's plunge into the city of their imaginations.

Am I sentimentalizing? Should I be embarrassed by the civic-booster goosebumps I still get when I hear the first bars of "Rhapsody in Blue" and read the 30-year-old Dickens' first glimpses of the city? Is it undue pleasure I take in my 24-year-old niece's giddy an'ival in the city this summer? She could have stayed in Minneapolis-where she had an excellent job, free housing, plenty of friends, a progressive civic ambience and hot and cold running espresso-rather than pay her share of $3,000 for a small three-bedroom walk-up on the unfashionable edge of Williamsburg. But instead she has moved to ew York, simply because it's New York: New York for New York's sake.

The other night, she told me, she discovered a charming dive just down the block from her apartment where Latin Americans drink sweet cocktails and dance to merengue on the jukebox. "I thought there was just 'merengue music,''' she said, sounding like a postmodem That Girl, both amused by her own newcomer's excitement and also genuinely excited. "It turns out there are like a hundred different kinds of merengue!" A 43-year-old Peruvian she met at the bar, a man named Pepe, wants to take her out dancing in Manhattan. r doubt she'll go, but she couldn't be more pleased to have been asked, and to be here.

0 About the Author: Kurt Andersen is a columnist for The ew Yorker. He was co-founder and editor of Spy magazine, and editor-in-chief of ew York Magazine.

M

ost of the numerous war memorials in Concord, Massachusetts, are to the young men of the town who died while winning America's wars over the centuries, but one is to the losers. Standing at the olih Bridge and dated April 19, 1775, it reads, They came three thousand miles and died To keep the past upon its throne; Unheard, beyond the ocean tide Their English mother made her moan.

Like those English soldiers, my countrymen, I had to come 5,000 kilometers-but on a peaceful mission, to look around battle sites of the War of Independence. Some of these are found in particularly attractive corners of America, and they provide a nice connecting theme for a family holiday. But my visit also gave me an opportunity to ponder the complexities and ironies of history.

My journey began at Lexington and Concord, once a day's march from Boston, now half an hour's drive away. Around there an English tourist always has a home-away-from-home feeling.

Despite the differences of topography, flora, and fauna, most vividly amid the garish russets and ochers of the famed New England fall (the time of my visit, last year), in Massachusetts I cannot quite feel I'm in a foreign country. Gloucester and Worcester, Plymouth and Weymouth, Leominster and Sunderland, Oxford and Cambridge: it isn't called New England for nothing. Lexington and Concord both have the recognizable tang of English villages, each with its village green, the Battle Green at Lexington dominated by its Minuteman statue, the smaller Concord green framed by those memorials.

My purpose in making this visit was not to concoct a revisionist interpretation ofthe War ofIndependence, although the conflict was politically and morally confused, with right and wrong anything but clear-cut. Not least, there were plenty of Englishmen who warmly sympathized with the Colonial rebels, and plenty of American loyalists, or Tories, who wanted to remain true to their monarch in London-and who would have tried to, if he and his ministers hadn't pigheadedly made their position impossible.

The King of Great Britain, denounced in the Declaration of Independence for his "injuries and usurpations," was kindly in person (the affectionate portrait in Alan Bennett's The Madness of King George isn't a fantasy), and Lord North, his Prime Minister, was "an easy-going, obstinate man, with a quick wit."

But they blew it, lacking what might nowadays be called strategic humility. The Coercive Acts were passed, to suppress incipient rebellion, and troops were sent across the Atlantic. Lord Chatham, of all people (Pitt the Elder, who had been his country's victorious war leader in the previous decade), demanded the repeal of the acts: "There is no time to be lost; every moment is big with dangers. ay, while I am now speaking, the decisive blow may be struck."

So it was, not many weeks after he spoke. By April of 1775 Massachusetts was coming to the boil, with a popularly elected Congress, and a Committee of Safety preparing armed resistance. General Thomas Gage was governor and the commander Left, above: Munroe Tavern, Lexington, Massachusetts, was built in 1695, and served as British headquarters and hospital on April 19, 1775, during the first clash of arms in the American Revolutionary Wm: The hostelry was operated by Sgt. William Munroe, a member of the Minuteman Company, that first opposed the Redcoats.

Far left: North Bridge, in Concord, Massachusetts. It was here that the British, banking on their superior equipment, marched blithely into disaster. The underdog colonial militia cut them down in a hail of bullets, killing or wounding 274 men. The War of Independence had begun.

of the British army in North America, a likable man, married to an American woman, and with no hatred of the colonists. But when he learned that the committee was stockpiling munitions and food at Concord, he sent a detail there to seize the supplies.

The story never palls in the telling: warning lights in the Old North Church of Boston, the rides of William Dawes and Paul Revere to rouse the people of Lexington and Concord, and then "the shot heard round the world."

First blood was shed at Lexington. When the Redcoats, under Major John Pitcairn, arrived in the morning, they found a band of Minutemen on the common. After some delay firing began, and soon eight colonists lay dead, as the British marched on to Concord. Today both places are sleepy and postcard-pretty, though full of alarmingly luxurious boutiques, antiques stores, and restaurants. The good people of Concord can dine on crab cakes with balsamic-vinegar sauce and other dishes unknown to the Pilgrim fathers, who got by also without Lexington's Whole Health Farmacy and the Center for Acupuncture.

Each town is admirably maintained. Apat1 from its visitors' center, the Lexington Historical Society keeps several Colonial-era houses impeccably tidy, though be wamed if you have a problem with fancy dress: there's a lot of it about in these parts-tour guides dressed in periwigs and breeches, or long skirts. At moments during my tour I felt like the Hollywood producer who said he didn't want to see any more movies where they wrote with feathers. It was in Lexington that Revere stopped with his waming, before riding on toward Concord. One-and-a-half kilometers to the east of the green stands the Munroe Tavem, commandeered that April day by the British as headquarters and field hospital, while the barkeep himself, William Munroe, was down the road serving in Captain John Pat'ker's company. Those Minutemen had their own headquat1ers at the Buckman Tavern, where Parker's company met at dawn to await the British. The tavern was restored in the I920s, but it preserves a door with a hole from a British musket round. rom Lexington to Concord is the nine kilometers of the Battle Road Trail. You pass the Minute Man Visitor Center (a pretty park) and the Hartwell Tavern (more "costumed interpreters") before reaching Concord, with its doubly explosive charge of American military and literary history. A cluster ofhouses holds memories of Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Alcott fami Iy, and Thoreau's Walden Pond is a few minutes away. Here is the distilled essence of that great Protestant culture of New England which dominated America for generations and is now barely a memory. My first night was spent at the excellent Colonial Inn, doubtless more comfortable today than when it was built, in 1716.

A few minutes' walk from the inn up Monument Street, past the fascinating Old Manse, a house built by Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather and once inhabited by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a path on the left that leads to the orth Bridge.

The site is now innocuous enough, but the mind's eye can picture that April day. After their sharp but inconclusive little engagement in Lexington, the British marched here to face down the rebels, and marched into disaster. The firefight at the 011h

F

Bridge has been compared to the "Black Hawk Down" debacle described in Mark Bowden's book of that name, when 99 elite American soldiers were helicoptered into Mogadishu, in Somalia, in October of 1993, and brought out after 18 of their number had been slaughtered.

What NOtih Bridge showed was that sheer technical superiority isn't everything in warfare. Historians have been telling us lately that the fabled Minutemen weren't such hotshots after all.

And it's true that the 18th-century musket, with its unrifled bore, was a highly inaccurate weapon; true, too, that the Massachusetts militiamen weren't trained soldiers at all. But then, neither were those Somali fighters, who made up for it with ferocity and sheer numbers. And so the British force, cut down by a hail of musket fire, pulled out of Concord and began a grim march to base, picked off by Minutemen firing from behind every hedge and hillock, until they reached Boston, less 274 men killed or wounded, to tInd that their troubles had only begun.

One other name synonymous with independence is now part of Boston. If you've been lunching in one of the good Italian restaurants of the North End, right behind The Atlantic Monthly's office, you can work off the effects of rigatoni and Valpolicella by walking briskly along North Washington Street, across the Charlestown Bridge, and up Breed's Hill, the actual site of most of the Battle of Bunker Hill and now a pleasant qUalier covered in what an English estate agent would call "des. res." (desirable residences). Finally, you can ascend the monumental obelisk that crowns the hill, all 294 steps of it, and, if you aren't panting too much, look down on what was once a battlefield and enjoy a glorious view of the city.

In 1775 the topography of the bay was quite different: three distinct peninsulas, like stubby fingers, stuck out seaward. To-the south was Dorchester Heights (one day to become part of Irish South Boston), where American artillery drove out the British in March of 1776 in another critical encounter of the New England campaign. The middle peninsula was Boston itself, almost an island, linked to the mainland by a narrow neck, with its road to the village of Roxbury. North of Boston was the third, small peninsula, between the Charles and Mystic Rivers. Here Breed's Hill looked down on Charlestown, at the end of the point, which the patriot militias had fortified.

June n of 1775 the Second Continental Congress was debating the next course of action, with Franklin, Jefferson, and Hancock among the debaters. They still held back from a formal declaration of independence, but they agreed to accept the Massachusetts militias as combatants, and appointed Colonel George Washington as commander in chief. Washington was preparing to arrive when he was brought the news of the Battle of Bunker Hill, on June 17. The lines of battle are anayed in a diorama next to the obelisk. Technically it was a victory for the British, who attacked the patriot fortifications-but a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was: out of 2,200 British soldiers 1,034 were killed or wounded, including one in nine of all the officers the British lost in the whole war.

I

The statue of the Minuteman at North Bridge commemorates the ultimately successfiil rebellion of the American colonists against their British masters.

For a complete contrast to the gentle landscape of those New England battlefields, I traveled on to the Hudson River Valley.

Nothing had prepared me for the gaunt beauty of Lake Champlain. Framed by the Adirondacks and the Green Mountains, the lake was, when I crossed it on a little ferry between the towns of Charlotte and Essex, covered with a shimmering veil of fall mist. Coming here brought home the enormous importance of this valley in the war, as a route from Canada to the sea and as a barrier dividing New England from the rest ofthe Colonies. A beautiful map hanging at Crown Point, one of the fOlis that dominate the upper Hudson, helped me to understand. Its text says that it was based on Lord Amherst's survey of 1762 and printed in London in August of 1776 at 53 Fleet Street (hard by a couple of bars where I used to dally, come to think of it). A little faliher down the valley is the magnificently imposing FOli Ticonderoga, restored and well preserved for family outings. Tnthe time between Concord and Bunker Hill it was captured by that somewhat dubious figure Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, who sent Ticonderoga's cannon to Massachusetts, further to tilt the military balance.

Eighty kilometers farther south is the haunting field of

in 1759, what is I think the greatest of all anti-colonial essays.

Johnson imagined an Indian chief watching an English army passing toward Quebec to fight the French, remembering the days when his people were masters of woods and lakes, before "a new race of men entered our country from the great ocean."

Those invaders ranged over the continent slaughtering in their rage those that resisted, and those that submitted, in their mirth ...and when ... [they] have destroyed the natives, they supply their place by human beings of another colour, brought from some distant country to perish here under toil and torture .... They have a written law among them, of which they boast as derived from him who made the earth and sea ....Why is not this law communicated to us? It is concealed because it is violated. For how can they preach it to an Indian nation, when I am told that one of its first precepts forbids them to do to others what they would not that others should do to them.

Saratoga. It was very still and lonely when I found it, on the What North Bridge last stage of my pilgrimage, only birdsong and crickets showed was disturbing the silence of the that sheer technical woodland and long grass, dotted with little memorials. superiority Here it was that "Gentleman isn't everything Johnny" Burgoyne retreated in warfare. with his harassed army, which had seemed only weeks before to be scattering the rebels; here that on October 17, 1777, he surrendered, in what was not only the turning point of the war but also one of the most desperate defeats in British history.

Here I sat and thought about the struggle. The War of Independence was a heroic contlict, but what one made of it depended on who one was: English, American, French, Indian (the French and Indian War was just a decade past when the new war began), black slave. This point was in effect made at the time by the greatest of all English Tories, Samuel Johnson. There was no more bitter critic of the American rebels in the 1770s than Johnson, who deplored their disloyalty to their rightful King. But with his hatred of slavery and of the oppression of the weak by the strong, Johnson had more to say than that. He had already written,

That was written some 16 years before the Declaration of Independence listed among its grievances that the King had encouraged "the merciless Indian Savages." And it was Johnson also who saw the great canker at the heart of the American cause: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers ofnegroes?" That isn't something you will find in more oldfashioned American accounts of the war, although the exhibits I visited were admirably fair-minded to all sides. It was gratifYing to learn that Gage gave orders not to "plunder the inhabitants" and that Pitcairn stopped his troops from bayoneting Minutemen.

In Concord one of the memorials is to those who fell in "The War of the Late Rebellion"-a phrase that a Tory might have used for the War ofIndependence but that here means the Civil War. Two more are for the great world wars of the 20th century, and one is for the Vietnam War, in which five Concord men died, one of them called Emerson. With almost any of these wars it is too easy to say that men on one side died "to keep the past upon its throne"-or that this is always the wrong thing to do. In his 1999 book Five Days in London, May 1940, which details the time when Winston Churchill had to decide whether to negotiate with Adolf Hitler or continue the war, John Lukacs contrasts Hitler, who was "not a traditionalist" but rather "the greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century," with Churchill, whose own great asset that epic spring was "the deep-seated conservatism of the British people," who were mutely determined not to yield to that horrible new tyranny. Wasn't "the past" the right side then?

Visiting these beautiful, poignant battlefields made me think of that. And of something else: what LF. Stone said when some pipsqueak, politically con'ect avant fa fettre, asked him how he could admire the notorious slave owner Thomas Jefferson. His response stands as an epitaph for that war from which the American nation was born: "Because history is a tragedy and not a melodrama." 0 About the Author: Geoffrey Wheatcroft, literary editor of the weekly Spectator from 1977 to 1981, frequently contributes to The Guardian, The Observer, The ew York Times, and The Atlantic.

xl

01

deas

It has been the debate of the year, ever since Napster hit the Net and the music business took it to court for copyright infringement.

Then followed the court injunction directing Napster to filter its files, blocking copyrighted music. But Napster still lives. And the battle between free ware supporters and the guardians of intellectual property continues, as does everincreasing sophistication of digital technology. The Information Highway led to a world without precedent, and the challenge, now, is to adapt to it. It is revolutionizing business transactions. It certainly means new kinds of legislation.

Keeping pace with development is the problem. But does giving away product increase profits?

Here is another angle on the ongoing argument.

T

he great cultural war has broken out at last.

Long awaited by some and a nasty surprise to others, the conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now being fought in earnest, thanks to that modestly conceived but paradigm-shattering thing called Napster.

What's happening with global, peer-topeer networking is not altogether different from what happened when the American colonists realized they were poorly served by the British Crown: The colonists were obliged to cast off that power and develop an economy better suited to their new environment. For settlers of cyberspace, the fuse was lit last July, when Judge Marilyn Hall Patel tried to shut down Napster and silence the cacophonous free market of expression, which was already teeming with more than 20 million directly wired music lovers.

Despite an appeals-court stay immediately granted the Napsterians, her decree transformed an evolving economy into a cause, and turned millions ofpolitically apathetic youngsters into electronic Hezbollah.

Neither the best efforts of Judge Patel-nor those of the Porsche-driving executives of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), nor the sleek legal defenders of existing copyright law-will alter this simple fact: No law can be successfully imposed on a huge population that does not morally support it and possesses easy means for its invisible evasion.

To put it mildly, the geriatrics of the entertainment industry didn't see this coming. They figured the Internet was about as much of a threat to their infotainment empire as ham radio was to NBC. Even after that assumption was creamed, they remained as serene as sunning crocodiles.

After all, they still "owned" all that stuff they call "content." That it might soon become possible for anyone with a PC to effortlessly reproduce their "property" and distribute it to all of humanity didn't trouble them at all.

But then along came Napster. Or, more to the point, along came the real Internet, an instantaneous network that endows any acne-faced kid with a distributive power equal to Time Warner's. Moreover, these were kids who don't give a flying byte

about the existing legal battlements, and a lot of them possess decryption skills sufficient to easily crack whatever lame code the entertainment industry might wrap around "its" goods.

Practically every traditional pundit who's commented on the Napster case has, at some point, furrowed a telegenic brow and asked, "Is the genie out of the bottle?" A better question would be, "Is there a bottle?" No, there isn't.

Which is not to say the industry won't keep trying to create one. In addition to ludicrously misguided (and probably unconstitutional) edicts like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, entertainment execs are placing great faith in new cryptographic solutions. But before they waste a lot of time on their latest algorithmic vessels, they might consider the ones they've designed so far. These include such systems as the pay-per-view videodisc format Divx, the Secure Digital Music Initiative, and CSS-the DVD enclyption system, which has sparked its own legal hostilities on the Eastern front, starting with the New York courtroom of Judge Lewis Kaplan.

Here's the present score: Divx was stillbom. SDMI will probably never be born owing to the wrangling of its corporate parents. And DeCSS (the DVD decryptor) is off and running, even though the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has prevailed in its lawsuit aimed at stopping Web sites from posting-or even linking to-the disc-cracking code.

While that decision is appealed, DeCSS will keep spreading: As the Electronic Frontier Foundation was defending three e-distributors inside Kaplan's court last summer, nose-ringed kids outside were selling T-shirts with the program silkscreened on the back.

The last time technlcal,copy protection was widely attempted-remember when most software was copy-protected?-it failed in the marketplace, and failed miserably. Earlier attempts to ban media-reproduction techriologies have also failed. Even though entertainment execs are exceptionally slow learners, they will eventually realize what they should have understood long ago: The free proliferation of expression does not decrease its commercial

value. Free access increases it, and should be encouraged rather than stymied.

The war is on, all right, but to my mind it's over. The future will win; there will be no property in cyberspace. Behold DotCommunism. (And dig it, ye talented, since it will enrich you.) It's a pity that entertainment moguls are too wedged in to the past to recognize this, because now they are requiring us to fight a war anyway. So we'll fatten lawyers with a fortune that could be spent fostering and distributing creativity. And we may be forced to watch a few pointless public executions-Shawn Fanning's cross awaits-when we could be employing such condemned genius in the service of a greater good.

Of course, it's one thing to win a revolution, and quite another to govern its consequences. How, in the absence of laws that turn thoughts into things, will we be assured payment for the work we do with our minds? Must the creatively talented start looking for day jobs?

Nope. Most white-collar jobs already consist of mind work. The vast majority of us live by our wits now, producing "verbs"-that is, ideas-rather than "nouns" like automobiles or toasters.

Doctors, architects, executives, consultants, receptionists, televangelists, and lawyers all manage to survive economically without "owning" their cognition.

I take further comfort in the fact that the human species managed to produce pretty decent creative work during the 5,000 years that preceded 1710, when the Statute of Anne, the world's first modem copyright law, passed the British Parliament.

Sophocles, Dante, da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, ewton, Cervantes, Bach-all found reasons to get out of bed in the morning without expecting to own the works they created.

Even during the heyday of copyright, we got some pretty useful stuff out of Benoit Mandelbrot, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, and Linus Torvalds, none of whom did their world-morphing work with royalties in mind. And then there are all those great musicians of the last 50 years who went on making music even after they discovered that the record companies got to keep all the money.

Nor can I resist trotting out, one last time, the horse I rode back in 1994, when I explored these issues in a Wired essay called "The Economy of Ideas." The Grateful Dead, for whom I once wrote songs, learned by accident that if we let fans tape concerts and freely reproduce those tapes-"stealing" our intellectual "property" just like those heinous Napsterians-the tapes would become a marketing virus that would spawn enough Deadheads to fill any stadium in America.

Even though Deadheads had free recordings that often were more entertaining than the band's commercial albums, fans still went out and bought records in such quantity that most ofthem went platinum.

My opponents always dismiss this example as a special case. But it's not. Here are a couple of others closer to Hollywood. Jack Valenti, head ofthe MPAA and leader of the fight against DeCSS, fought to keep VCRs out of America for half a dozen years, convinced they would kill the film industry.

Eventually that wall came down. What followed reversed his expectations (not that he seems to have learned from the experience).

Despite the ubiquity of VCRs, more people go to the movies than ever, and videocassette rentals and sales account for more than half of Hollywood's revenues.

The RIAA is unalterably convinced that the easy availability of freely downloadable commercial songs will bring on the apocalypse, and yet, during the two years since MP3 music began flooding the Net, CD sales have risen by 20 percent.

Finally, after giving up on copy protection, the software industry expected that widespread piracy would surely occur.

And it did. Even so, the software industry is booming. Why? Because the more a program is pirated, the more likely it is to become a standard.

All these examples point to the same conclusion: oncommercial distribution of information increases the sale of commercial information. Abundance breeds abundance.

This is precisely contrary to what happens in a physical economy. When you're selling nouns, there is an undeniable relationship between scarcity and value. But in an economy of verbs, the inverse ap-

plies. There is a relationship between familiarity and value. For ideas, fame is fortune. And nothing makes you famous faster than an audience willing to distribute your work for free.

A

II the same, there remains a general and passionate bel ief that, in the absence of copyright law, artists and other creative people will no longer be compensated. I'm forever accused of being an antimaterialistic hippie who thinks we should all create for the Greater Good of Mankind and lead lives of ascetic service. If only I were so noble.

While I do believe that most genuine artists are motivated primarily by the joys of creation, I also believe we will be more productive if we don't have to work a second job to support our art habit. Think of how many more poems Wallace Stevens could have written if he hadn't been obliged to run an insurance company to suppOli his "hobby."

Following the death of copyright, I believe our interests will be assured by the following practical values: relationship, convenience, interactivity, service, and ethics.

Before I explain further, let me state a creed: Art is a service, not a product.

Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to "content" is like praying in swear words. End of sermon. Back to business.

The economic model that supported most of the ancient masters was patronage, whether endowed by a wealthy individual, a religious institution, a university, a corporation, or-through the instrwnent of governmental suppoti-by society as a whole.

Patronage is both a relationship and a service. It is a relationship that supported genius during the Renaissance and supports it today. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli all shared the support of both the Medicis and, through Pope Leo X, the Catholic church. Bach had a series of patrons, most notably the Duke of Weimar. I could go on, but I can already hear you saying, "Surely this fool doesn't expect the return of patronage."

In fact, patronage never went away.

It just changed its appearance. Marc Andreessen was a beneficiary of the "patronage" of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications when he created Mosaic; CERN was a patron to Tim Berners-Lee when he created the World Wide Web. Darpa was Vint Cerf's benefactor; IBM was Benoit Mandelbrot's.

"Aha!" you say, "but IBM is a corporation. It profited from the intellectual property Mandelbrot created." Maybe, but so did the rest of us. While IBM would patent air and water if it could, I don't believe it ever attempted to patent fractal geometry.

Relationship, along with service, is at the heart of what supports all SOlis of other modern, though more anonymous, "knowledge workers." Doctors are economically protected by a relationship with their patients, architects with their clients, executives with their stockholders. In general, if you substitute "relationship" for "property," you begin to understand why a digitized information economy can work fine in the absence of enforceable property law. Cyberspace is unreal estate.

Relationships are its geology.

Convenience is another important factor in the future compensation of creation.

The reason video didn't ki II the movie star is that it's simply more convenient to rent a video than to copy one. Software is easy to copy, of course, but software piracy hasn't impoverished Bill Gates. Why? Because in the long run it's more convenient to enter into a relationship with Microsoft if you hope to use its products in an ongoing way. It's certainly easier to get technical support if you have a real serial number when you call. And that serial number is not a thing. It's a contract.

It is the symbol of a relationship.

Think of how the emerging digital conveniences will empower musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and writers when you can click on an icon, upload a cyberdime into their accounts, and download their latest songs, images, films, or chapters-all without the barbaric inconvenience currently imposed by the entertainment industry.

Interactivity is also central to the future of creation. Performance is a form of interaction. The reason Deadheads went to

concerts instead of just listening to free tapes was that they wanted to interact with the band in meatspace. The more people knew what the concerts sounded like, the more they wanted to be there.

I enjoy a similar benefit in my current incarnation. I'm paid reasonably well to write, despite the fact that I put most of my work on the Net before it can be published. But I'm paid a lot more to speak, and still more to consult, since my real value lies in something that can't be stolen from me-my point of view. A unique and passionate viewpoint is more valuable in a conversation than the one-way broadcast of words. And the more my words selfreplicate on the Net, the more I can charge for symmetrical interaction.

Finally, there is the role of ethics. (I can hear you snickering already.) But hey, people actually do feel inclined to reward creative value if it's not too inconvenient to do so. As Courtney Love said recently, in a brilliant blast at the music industry: "I'm a waiter. I live on tips." She's right. People want to pay her because they like her work.

Indeed, actual waitpeople get by even though the people they serve are under no legal obligation to tip them. Customers tip because it's the right thing to do.

I believe that, in the practical absence of law, ethics are going to make a major comeback on the Net. In an environment of dense connection, where much of what we do and say is recorded, preserved, and easily discovered, ethical behavior becomes less a matter of self-imposed virtue and more a matter of horizontal social pressure.

Besides, the more connected we become, the more obvious it is that we're all in this together. If! don't pay for the light of your creation, it goes out and the place gets dimmer. If no one pays, we're all in the dark. On the Net, what goes around comes around. What has been an ideal becomes a sensible business practice.

Think of the Net as an ecosystem. It is a great rain forest of life-forms called ideas, which, like organisms-those patterns of self-reproducing, evolving, adaptive information that express themselves in skeins of carbon-require other organisms to exist.

Imagine the challenge of trying to write a song if you'd never heard one.

As in biology, what has lived before becomes the compost for what will live next.

Moreover, when you buy-or, for that matter, "steal"-an idea that first took form in my head, it remains where it grew and you in no way lessen its value by sharing it. On the contrary, my idea becomes more valuable, since in the informational space between your interpretation of it and mine, new species can grow. The more such spaces exist, the more fertile is the larger ecology of mind.

I can also imagine the great electronic nervous system producing entirely new models of creative worth where value resides not in the artifact, which is static and dead, but in the real art-the living process that brought it to life. I would have given a lot to be present as, say, the Beatles grew their songs. I'd have given even more to have participated. Part of the reason Deadheads were so obsessed with live concerts was that they did participate in some weird, mysterious way. They were allowed the intimacy of seeing the larval beginnings of a song flop out onstage, wet and ugly, and they could help nurture its growth.

I

the n future, instead of bottles of dead "content," I imagine electronically defined venues, where minds residing in bodies scattered all over the planet are admitted, either by subscription or a ticket at a time, into the real-time presence of the creative act.

I imagine actual storytelling making a comeback. Storytelling, unlike the oneway, asymmetrical thing that goes by that name in Hollywood, is highly participatory.

Instead of "the viewer" sitting there, mouth slack with one hand on a Bud while the TV blows poisonous electronics at him, I imagine people actually engaged in the process, and quite willing to pay for it.

This doesn't require much imagination, since it's what a good public speaker encourages now. The best of them don't talk at the audience, but with them, creating a sanctuary of permission where something is actually happening. Right now this has to happen in meats pace, but the immense popularity of chat rooms among the young natives of cyberspace presages richer electronic zones where all the senses are

engaged. People will pay to be in those places-and people who are good at making them exciting will be paid a lot for their conversational skills.

I imagine new forms of cinema growing in these places, where people throw new stuff into the video stew. The ones who are good enough will be paid by the rest of us to shoot, produce, organize, and edit.

People will also pay to get a first crack at the fresh stuff, as Stephen King is proving by serializing novels on the Web. Charles Dickens proved the same thing long ago with his economic harnessing of serialization. Though Dickens was irritated that the Americans ignored his British copyright, he adapted and devised a way to get paid anyway, by doing public readings of his works in the U.S. The altists and writers of the future will adapt to practical possibility.

Many have already done so. They are, after all, creative people.

It's captivating to think about how much more freedom there will be for the truly creative when the truly cynical have been dealt out of the game. Once we have all given up regarding our ideas as a form of property, the entertainment industry will no longer have anything to steal from us. Meet the new boss: no boss.

We can enter into a convenient and interactive relationship with audiences, who, being human, will be far more ethically inclined to pay us than the moguls ever were. What could be a stronger incentive to create than that?

We've won the revolution. It's all over but the litigation. While that drags on, it's time to start building the new economic models that will replace what came before.

We don't know exactly what they'll look like, but we do know that we have a profound responsibility to be better ancestors: What we do now will likely determine the productivity and freedom of20 generations of artists yet unborn. So it's time to stop speculating about when the new economy of ideas will arrive. It's here. ow comes the hard part, which also happens to be the fun part: making it work.

D About the Author: John Perry Barlow is the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and contributes to Wired.

-\I\[ ~

=-

'II!--..;.... \I

Reprinted by permission of The Saturday Evening Post.

All rights reserved.

"Finally, I'd like to thank the other nominees, whose performances were even more mediocre than mine. "

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE ~'1

Jj

"Pam here is the winner of our 'How small a salary can 1 live on?' essay contest. The rest of you are fired. " "And then 1 met some computer people who could make it look as if 1 were talking. "

His ideas have been in the air for years. On the air, that is, because Louis Banks is probably the most prolific song and jingle writer in India, if not the world. His tunes, which number in the thousands, have promoted countless products in the past decade. He pens musical scores for films. His gentle, amiable manner and tremendous talent have given him success in the tough world of both commercial and noncommercial music. He is without a doubt India'sforemost jazz exponent. And it is jazz that is his first love.

Born into a musical Nepalese family, he grew up in Darjeeling. His grandfather composed the music for Nepal's national anthem and his father was a band leader in the big band era.

It is no surprise that he lives and breathes music. Now based in Mumbai, Banks spoke to SPAN's Jazz Maven not long ago during one of his fleeting trips to Delhi. He talked about jazz, his fusion work with the band Silk, his duo with Sivamani, Rhythm Asia, and his goal to help young artists learn the ropes. Reproducing his comments on paper has one drawback.

It doesn't convey the jovial laughter and the twinkle in the eye of a man who loves what he does. But for that, we have his music.

JAZZ MAVEN: What is pure jazz?

LOUIS BANKS: Jazz is impure, to start with. That's the basic premise, yeah, that's what makes it interesting. If it was pure it would be boring. Impurity is the thing that gives it all that sou!'

What [ love about jazz ...wel!.

When I was growing up, of course, I studied classical music, piano. I studied trumpet, and played trumpet in my father's band.

So I learned the ropes right at an early stage. I was very lucky, because most youngsters don't get that kind of oppOliunity, to sit in with a professional band in a dance club and play dance music.

So I got that kind of training from the early age of 13. Besides that I was doing school and studying classical piano, because Dad wanted me to have a solid base. ['m thankful for that.

It was much later that I heard Oscar Peterson and George Shearing. And that was my turning point, actually, in music. I was totally blown by that music and I said: "I want'to play like this." And then I just shifted gears and began to copy them note for note. I used to copy their solos, analyze their solos. I just wanted to play like that. That was my initial thing, and then I just went on and on, and I'm still plugging away jazz, after all these years. Because I find it's the most interesting music, bec~use you can take it anywhere. That's what's lovely about it.

Is there ajazz capital of the world today?

No! It used to be America, of course. That's where it started.

But I think it's just taken root everywhere. In fact, I think most jazz is played in Japan today. On every street corner there is trio or a duo or a quartet playing. Every coffee shop has a duo or a trio playing jazz. Amazing. And they are very good. You close your eyes and you think it's Herbie Hancock or Chick Corea playing. They are so good.

You played in America. Who did you play with?

I took my own group. Silk, my fusion band, and we did Chicago, ew Jersey, Houston and San Jose. The audience was mixed: a half Indian audience and the Americans were there also.

And it was very fascinating for them to hear this combination of jazz and South Indian Carnatic music. Now this group, Silk, we are doing a lot of things. We are playing a lot of concerts and we are trying to project this music. I think it has great appeal, because it touches on everything from jazz to pure Indian classical music.

We've kept the Indian classical music very pure. We don't fool around with that. When our singer-who is a trained exponent of South Indian Carnatic vocal tradition-sings, he sings absolutely pure Carnatic music. And then we find points in the music where we can just take off and do other things. And sometimes both come together and we do riffs together. Then we have Sivamani on drums. We need a man like that who can just give us directions, spontaneous directions, changing of tempos and grooves and all that, so it's very interesting. That group has Sivamani on drums, Karl Peters on bass, and Shankar Mahadevan on vocals. Now thjs group is poised to take on the world, as it were. We are doing Singapore in the summer and U.K. and Europe in October. The U.S. may come later. I want to take this group around the world and put it on the international map.

This other thing, the Rhythm Asia group, is Siva and myself, which is a totally different concept. It's nice because it's very compact. It's only two people. Sometimes we add a third. But it is just a duo performance, so it's a lot of freedom and it's nice.

An album of ours is coming out, "Telepathy." We have to have telepathy or else this group doesn't work. Nothing is written down. I have some themes in my head and it is just a takeoff point. And it all just happens in performance.

Gershwin. Following that thousands of tunes were written. So these are a few things and these are disciplines, of course, but beyond that you can do anything. In jazz there is no such thing as a wrong note. You can't playa wrong note.

Indian music is modal. There is a style of jazz which is modal also. Miles Davis, after the beebop era, found himself tired of playing little five-one changes all the time. He wanted to get out of that and try something. And he discovered these Greek scales, which are modes, Aeolian and Ionian and Lydian and Mixolydian and all that and he found that very fascinating. Then he wrote pieces just based on those scales. And that period became known as "cool jazz." Then he brought out that album called "Kind of Blue," which was a milestone, actually. That is very much like Indian music. You just follow those seven notes.

You don't deviate from those notes. It has a sound, a different sound-a tonality that Indian music has, you know? In Indian music they are so concerned about tonality and the mood of a piece or a concert that they will establish a tonal center for that evening. And they will not change it. So tonight I will play in the key ofD, so the sound ofD will resonate in the hall right through the concert. Everything has to be tuned to that D. And you can use different scales, but the root will always be D. So Indian music's like that. They don't want to break it, yes, it's like kind of a magic spell on the audience, on your listeners. Then if somebody changes the root, you'd be shocked, actually.

What is the metaphysical level of jazz? Does it have a spiritual component?

Yes. Sometimes we get into that kind of a thing. A set of notes creates a hypnotic effect and we like to maintain that, and just try and explore that. And there is a certain angle of spirituality that comes in, also. John Coltrane was one who was There are some commonalities between the improvisational . moved by that. His music totally changed. He just was into nature of jazz and Indian classical music, aren't there? playing a thousand notes, fast passages and a lot of chord Oh, very much, very much. That's why fusion works. Just the changes. Then suddenly he discovered this other, spiritual styles are different and the way of approach, the accents. aspect of music. Then he was playing these single notes, long Syncopation is different from jazz. In jazz we sort of accent the notes, creating such an aura in the music. It's beautiful. Indian two and the four of a bar-the second and the fourth beat. We music has a lot of that. The way they approach music is spiriaccent that and make it strong. But the Indians don't do that. It's tual. Their approach is absolutely spiritual. They will do their nonexistent, that kind of accenting. prayers and everything-obeisance to god. In fact, Vikoo Vinayakam, the great ghatam player from the South, you can An Indian classicist might say, "We are much more discisee him do this on stage. His instruments are here and he has plined. " Do you think jazz has a discipline of its own? pictures of gods and goddesses, tilak and prayer books there Yeah, but it's broad. There are norms, of course, in jazz inter- beside him when he plays. pretation, definitely. You have to follow them. You cannot just I like this getting into Indian music. Their scales are very fastake off anywhere. The roots, the blues ...the blues has a structure. cinating. I write all my tunes for this fusion thing from Indian You cannot get out of that. It's a 12 bar structure. So within that ragas. I want those notes. It gives me that sound, and I can there is a certain kind of discipline and you have to stay with it. explore those notes. I just take the ragas, then do things our way.

A whole lot of harmonic progression was involved, with people By doing that we get a very strong Indian element in our comlike Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. So when you play positions. So for me, after playing mainstream jazz for many, beebop, you've got to follow that kind of progression, or else it many years ...I mix that with something different. doesn't sound like beebop-the sound, the changes, what we call the 2-5-1 changes in harmony, and there are thousands of tunes.

What is fusion doing to jazz?

The most significant tune for this is "I Got Rhythm," by George It is adding a new dimension to jazz. It's never going to come on

"Beebop, blues, mainstream and all that, it was just going round and round. Now I'm discovering new things. "

the mainstream. Mainstream jazz will remain mainsh'eam jazz. It will go on, people playing standards, playing "Summertime" and "Someday My Prince Will Come," "Green Dolphin Street," and all that. There are people who will play mainstream jazz like that.

There are people who will take those tunes to another dimension and another level, and explore that tune and change everything, so that after a time you don't even recognize that the tune is there.

Have you felt this same excitement each time you have progressed to a new phase?

Yes, but I always like to have jazz there, always ingrained in my music. Because I feel the notes and the way the harmonies and the chords sound. I love that sound. Most of the time the rhythm takes us to different areas in the music. Rhythm is always the starting point. So having a guy like Sivamani there gives me a lot of ideas. It triggers things in my brain. It affects all my compositions, exploring different rhythmic structures. And India is so full of that. They have an encyclopedia of rhythm, really.

There is nothing they have not touched on. It's mind-boggling.

So I've discovered that I was very happy because I was not restricted in my frame-jazz forms were limiting. Beebop, blues, mainstream and all that, it was just going round and round. Now I'm discovering new things.

How is jazz doing in India? Jazz certainly has a great appeal to many Indians.

One reason is that Indian music has improvisation and jazz has improvisation. That's fascinating. They like that. But jazz needs to get more recognition and support from institutions and record companies, and that has not come. We can get together and play for the fun of it. But nobody can survive playingjazz in India. That is final. You cannot survive.

Now a jazz band is not even hired in restaurants. Indian restaurants used to hire a jazz band, but now they only want pop bands to play pop music. That's sequenced music, note for note the same thing that you hear on the record, you have to reproduce that. Robotic music has taken over. The record company won't give deals. Survival is really tough. There are a lot of youngsters who want to get into it, but it's an uphill task. We want, of course, to try and change that.

Some of the youngsters really want to play and learn. So we have to help them. Now what is happening, there is a light in the dark. Berklee College of Music, in Boston, is very interested in getting foreign students to come there. Japan has the largest representation. Korea and Malaysia have a big representation. They are interested and they have money also, and they are looking at India. Recently I was with the Berklee representative when he visited Mumbai. He used to be a student, and now he's on the administrative staff at Berklee, and he initiated this and they sent him here to put this together. In Mumbai, of course, he came to me, since I'm an advocate for jazz. And he said he would like to set up an audition base in Mumbai. Students who want to get into Berklee, they've got to find an audition base and there is none in India. The closest is in Kuala Lumpur. They have to go there. So Berklee is looking at that. We need an auditorium to hold workshops and training and things like that, to get students prepared for the audition.

He said even a genius can fail in Berklee entrance because of the rules for entry. You can be a fantastic musician, but if you don't get your 2.5 point credit rating, you won't get in. So we, hope to get a bona fide Berklee audition center in India. That will really give youngsters the benefit of working with professionals. The training they will get! They can become world class musicians.

0

~

M

Life in space begins in earnest as astronauts move into the space station

an moved into what amounts to a three-room apartment in outer space and quickly found himself at odds with the landlord~ground control in Moscow~over how to fix a faulty air conditioner.

With the job tougher and taking longer than planned, the conversation soon grew heated. Finally, a Russian ground controller broke the tension.

"Guys, don't swear at me," he begged. It wasn't, he was saying, his fault that the Earth-bound controllers didn't understand how long it takes to do chores in space.

The exchange was proof-positive that astronauts

Top: International Space Station Alpha For the Alpha crew, the astronauts installing the solar array must have seemed much like contractors around the house. This hatchway (above) between Endeavour and Alpha was the scene of floating traffic as supplies for the space station were brought aboard.

Toilet Tech The toilet is a partial recycling system. Urine is distilled into potable purified wate/; though most astronauts won't drink it.

So the recovered water goes to the Electron unit, which passes electricity through wata The resulting hydrogen, a waste product, is vented and the oxygen revives the air in the space station. Solid waste is kept in airtight bags to be offloaded onto fi'eighters destined to incinerate in the Earth's atmosphere.

Hair-Raising Tales The activities that we take for granted can become hair-raising adventures in space. Something as common as putting on socks or struggling into pants~not to mention brushing your hair~can take real effort when you are not anchored to the floor by gravity.

are in space to stay, and like many new homeowners, find that some things don't work as advertised.

A little grumpiness may be unavoidable. The new residents are 370 kilometers up and stuck for a four-month stay. They can't step into the backyard to cool down. Life aboard the newly christened space station Alpha is characterized by free-floating objects and people whizzing around in very tight quarters.

As with a lot of long-distance movers, the Expedition J crew-American mission commander William Shepherd and cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko- found the first order of business was to flick on the lights and use the toilet when they arrived in November after a two-day journey. rikalev had been aboard before as part of the crew that linked the Unity module to the Russian-built Zarya module. Zarya, Krikalev knows, isn't the most comfOliable spot in space. At 12.5 meters long, it's about the size of a motor home and about as hospitable as a boiler room.

Ultimately, Zarya will become a storeroom and an external fuel depot. For now, living quarters are the comparatively luxurious Zvezda service module in orbit since July. About the size of a bus, Zvezda has its own set of solar wings for power. Contrmy to expectations, it wasn't as noisy and smelly as predicted. The air filtration system works admirably and the noise level is comparable to that aboard a Navy ship, Shepherd told the ground controllers. Temperatures are comfortable, and he proved the point by drifting before a television camera in just shorts and a T-shirt.

Still, the situation is confining. Unity was mostly off-limits for the first month because the solar wings didn't generate enough electricity to keep it warm. It wasn't until the arrival of the space shuttle Endeavour crew in December that living space increased.

Endeavour docked with Alpha for five days while astronauts Joe Tanner and Carlos Noriega did three spacewalks to install a huge 73-meter solar wing, giving Alpha another 60 kilowatts of electricity. Concern over a possible electric shock during deployment of the solar wing was dispelled when a new device called a plasma contactor unit worked as designed. The suitcase-size PCU neutralizes electrostatic electricity that can build up on metal surfaces and discharge like a lightning bolt by emitting a stream of xenon gas into the electrically charged environment around Alpha. When one wing didn't deploy stiffly, the spacewalkers fixed it two days later in an unplanned repair job that further proved man's growing capabilities in space.

During the spacewalk, cabin pressure aboard the two vessels had been different. Once the spacewalks ended, Endeavour and Alpha equalized their

K

atmospheres, and the crews got together for a day of housewarming, with the Endeavour crew welcomed aboard to the traditional sound of a Navy brass bell.

The Endeavour crew brought more supplies and were thanked with trash for return to Earth. Gidzenko, who sleeps in a corner due to a shortage of accommodations aboard Zvezda, got a new sleeping bag. The Unity module now had all the power it needed, and Shepherd opened it up for daily use.

Life in space is a mixed lot. The pluses are extravagant.

Without gravity, Alpha's residents float through the compartments. There's no up or down, beyond the visual cues of how equipment is installed, so floor, ceiling, and walls are all equally accessible. The e-mail computer station, for instance, is inverted on one end of Zvezda at what earthlings might call the ceiling.

All three use it to stay in touch with friends and family-not much different from when they were gone from home on extended training sessions on Earth.

But still, Expedition J faced severe communications restrictions that won't bother later crews. Alpha had to be within range of Russian tracking sites, and a 20-minute conversation with ground controllers was a luxury. Houston took charge in late January, and by the end of March, communications were to be full-time through NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System.

Across the way from the e-mail station, and "right-side up," there's a ward room table that Shepherd put together in his spare time from odds and ends, leftover brackets, and spare pieces of metal. The trio take their meals there and sit around the table in the evening watching movies or chatting whenever possible with mission control in Moscow.

Getting around is wonderfully easy. "It takes very little energy," Krikalev says. A finger-flick against a bulkhead is enough to propel him down the broad Zvezda aisle, and a hand barely touching almost anything is enough to put on the brakes.

But that kind of freedom has a penalty in loss of muscle mass and bone density. Daily exercise is a key part of Alpha's plans.

On a typical day, each of the three spend an hour before lunch and another hour before dinner working out. However, the demands of moving in can supersede exercise. Early on, the crew once worked 13 hours straight without exercise and did without their usual eighthour sleeping time.

Gidzenko, meanwhile, griped frequently about the landlords back on Earth. "They plan an activity to take one hour and we all know it wi II take five hours." It's part of the learning process in how to live full-time in space.

By late December, the routine

American multimillionaire Dennis Tito, 60, realized a cherished dream when he became the first space tourist in May. He has since called for revival of a citizens-in-space program allowing ordinary people, not just millionaires, to experience the "final ji-ontiel: " NASA:S-program to fly private citizens on the space shuttle was shelved in 1986 after the Challenger exploded killing the crew and one civilian, teacher Christa McAuliffe. Of his eight-day space trek Tito said, "The big surprise was that, despite a small bout of space sickness the first day, which didn't ruin the day, the rest of the trip was a major high, no pun intended. " Citing obvious dangers, NASA took a dim view of his venture, though withdrew objections after asking him to sign an agreement to pay for anything he broke on the $96-billion space station and waive any liability. A joint decision by all ISS partners exempting Tito could pave the way for future space tourists. Here Tito is seen in a photo taken during his zero-gravity training in a Russian Il-76 aircraft.

was back in place. Endeavour delivered a treadmill, and the daily schedule called for as much as 90 minutes of strenuous exercise for each man. "The gym is open for business," declared Shepherd. It takes that kind of hard work to slow down muscle atrophy and osteoporosis. Even with exercise, on-orbit residents lose about 1 to 1.5 percent of bone density a month.

Merely getting through the day takes a lot of personal focus and commitment in space. There's no typical schedule, beyond waking up at 0600 Greenwich Mean Time and taking the next 40 minutes for what NASA calls "post-sleep"-the normal morning ablutions and getting dressed for the day.

One day the inhabitants will spend the next 45 minutes taking body mass measurements and relaying them to medics on the ground. Calf diameter, for instance, is a good indicator of how muscles are holding up. On another day, they'll go straight to breakfast, followed by a planning conference with mission control.

Setting up a meal, eating, and cleaning up afterward is more time-consuming in space than at home in your kitchen. Most days, the schedule sets aside 90 minutes for each meal.

Everything must be held down by Velcro or some other restraint to keep it from floating away. There's a refrigerator (cold milk is on the menu), a microwave oven, and a freezer stocked with vegetables, meat entrees, and even real ice cream.

A typical breakfast includes scrambled eggs (made from a dry mix), sausage, oatmeal, a waffle, orange juice, and coffee. But the diners aren't required to follow the prescribed menus and needn't tell mission control what they actually ate.

In the weightless environment, every move must be choreographed, and spills are an absolute no-no. So preparing even the simplest menu takes time, and post-meal cleanup is very meticulous.

Shepherd, Krikalev, and Gidzenko assert that nothing about their mission is boring, but Expedition 1 lacks the glamour that later crews may experience, when the daily schedule includes a wide variety of scientific and technological research, including telescopic studies of Earth, other planets, the moon, and stars.

Ground control is sending directives for Earth sites they want the crew to snap photographs of, says flight director Jeff Hanley. The photos will be analyzed later to gain better information on

Earth's resources. When nothing else is happening, Moscow beams up 15 or 20 minutes of local radio.

Their primary job is not much different from the finish work needed on any other residence. For now, the crew spend much of the day installing hardware brought up by Endeavour, fixing or troubleshooting devices (an electrical bus in Unity failed and was finally found to be unrepairable; a replacement will be brought up in January), taking readings-temperature, humidity, radiation, and more-of the interior enviromnent, and generally putting Alpha into order.

T

hey get most weekends off, to putter and catch up, to enjoy short phone calls with their families, or just to stare out one of Zvezda's 13 windows. There would be less downtime after late January, when the shuttle was due to arrive with Alpha's true heal1, the Destiny laboratory module. The fourth big room at the space station, Destiny will house a wide variety of rack-mounted science gear and will be Alpha's ultimate command and control center.

Shepherd, Krikalev, and Gidzenko have completed their fourmonth-plus stay at the station. Their trip home, and the arrival of their replacements, was delayed by several weeks, until midMarch, when ground crews were forced to replace thrusters on the shuttle DiscovelY. Shepherd took the news in stride-or perhaps, given the realities of life in zero gravity, in float. "We're up here for the duration," he said. "Anything up to six months is going to be fine. We are prepared for that."

One chore his crew won't have to face is installing even more racks and scientific hardware aboard Destiny. Mission protocol calls for Americans and Russians to alternate in command and staffing positions. So getting Destiny ready to go to work falls to Expedition 2. Following them will be the Expedition 3 crew, scheduled to launch in August. Mankind has a new home in space. And if there is a bit of griping along the way, it'll sound positively human.

D About the Author: Jim Schefter is a consulting Science.

editor of Popular

Easing the nation's growing traffic congestion has experts all backed up ooming over a NASA-style control room in a windowless industrial building in Atlanta is the X-Wall, a ticktacktoe grid of nine giant video screens displaying live feeds from video cameras along the city's highways. At computer consoles here in the nerve center of the Georgia Department of Transportation's traffic division, murmuring operators dispense traffic tips to motorists and dispatch roadside-assistance trucks to move stalled vehicles out of the way. Like nothing else, the X-Wall distills the sluggish, motorized essence of the modern American metropolis: an endless succession of cars and trucks, often moving very slowly or not at all.

Surrounded by chain-link fences, guard posts and camouflaged humvees (the building happens to adjoin a military base), the facility has the air of a command post. But the drivers who are monitored on all these screens aren't troops under anyone's command. They're citizens exercising their free will to drive whenever and wherever. The personnel monitoring the X-Wall are essentially powerless. I gaze up at an overturned tractor-trailer that's been causing tie-ups near the airport for hours. "Yeah," says morning supervisor Brad Mann, "we're fighting a losing battle here."

Traffic congestion is one of the chief irritants of modern American life. Over

L

the past 20 years, our highway system has barely expanded at all, yet the total number of miles driven annually has nearly doubled. The family car is a memory: there are now more motor vehicles in the United States (200 million) than drivers.

According to one University of Maryland study, parents spend twice as much time behind the wheel on weekdays as they spend with their children. Trips by mass transit, meanwhile, have dropped steadily.

Despite many incentives, carpooling remains unpopular. With more Americans than ever both living and working in widely scattered suburbs, we're wedded to our cars, it seems. No wonder traffic jams have become as unavoidable as death and taxes. The Texas Transportation Institute calculates that Americans collectively waste more than 4.6 billion hours stuck in traffic annually and bum enough gas to fill 134 supertankers.

Viewed merely as a physical flow, a traffic jam seems as simple as water moving slower through a constriction. Yet for decades, the behavior of heavy traffic has stymied a think tank's worth of highway engineers, city planners, fluid dynamicists and social scientists. Even adding a lane to a highway, for reasons no one quite understands, sometimes creates new tieups. (And, of course, that's after a year or two of jams caused by the lane-widening work itself.) Traffic, like weather and the stock market, turns out to be surprisingly complex and devilishly unpredictable.

A Iittle historical perspective is in order. Traffic in ancient Rome was bad enough to warrant a downtown ban on daytime chariot-driving. Tn ew York City in 1900, horses deposited one million kilograms of manure on the streets every day, along with 227,000 liters of urine.

"Cars were seen as cleaner and more compact than a horse and caITiage," says

Northeastern University historian Clay McShane, who unearthed these statistics.

But the Model T soon helped turn busy urban intersections into dangerous freefor-ails. The traffic light and the stop sign, both appearing in 1914, were more effective than a cop with a whistle, but urban traffic was still a mess.

General Motors' Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair predicted an end to congestion and collisions.

Under automatic guidance from traffic control towers, cars would shoot through high-speed intersections in all four directions at once, just missing one another like bullets whizzing through the propeller of a biplane. In his 1940 book Magic Motorways, the Futurama's proud designer, Norman Bel Geddes, described lanes of 80-, 120- and 160-ki lometer-anhour traffic swooping down from the Rockies on a huge national highway and approaching Portland, Oregon, where "they meet the great Pacific Coast Motorway and merge in a sweeping nonstop intersection."

Bel Geddes' automotive utopia seems quaint if not comical today. He failed to anticipate the postwar population explosion. Nor did he imagine what a city dominated by roaring, fume-spewing 20-lane highways would be like. (The miniature roadways in the GM model were a chaste and blemish-free white.) Bel Geddes certainly never foresaw a market for the Road Rage Protection Package.

"It's a fairly inexpensive system," says David Applegate, owner of Bulldog Direct, a Cincinnati company that will armor your car for $4,000 and up. "You can even hit the glass with a baseball bat all day long." Applegate takes a nonutopian view of U.S. vehicular traffic. He goes out every morning to get coffee in his armored pickup. "It's a three-kilometer

round-trip. I can't go out without seeing someone run a red light or cut someone else off." Yes, people are testy out there, he says, and they're getting testier every year. "Our sales show that."

Traffic is more than machines in motion.

It's people interacting with one another, often in weird and antisocial ways.

Frustration builds when obstacles appear suddenly and unexpectedly: the dreaded mystery jam. At the tail end of rush hour one morning 32 kilometers north of Manhattan, I watch a young woman with curly blonde hair in a white sedan who's late for work. Racing northbound on the Sprain Brook Parkway, she's weaving in and out of heavy but fast-moving traffic like a slalom racer. "The subject is traveling at approximately 125 kilometers an hour, and she's tailgating," says Andre Bailey into a body mike, dictating his observations onto videotape for the record.

He then radios Charles Byer, who sits five kilometers up ahead in a patrol car. Bailey is coordinating a four-car New York State Police aggressive-driving patrol this morning. His unmarked van has hidden video

cameras mounted front and rear to record what he calls auto high jinks. "When people exhibit aggressive behavior-excessive speed, following too closely, failing to signal, unsafe lane changes-it can lead to what we call road rage on the part of other drivers," he tells me. "The aggressive driver is the catalyst."

Above: Georgia transportation officers monitor remote cameras and radar guns at the Atlanta Management Center s X-Wall in order to alert motorists to traffic tie-ups. Right: A half-dozen roads and 14 ramps create the tangle of aerial concrete in Atlanta known as Spaghetti Junction, which has become one of America s busiest interchanges.

P ahead, a sea of red brake lights suddenly rolls toward us. In the sedan we're tailing, the blonde woman throws one arm up in fury as she, too, hits the brakes. What had been an almost uniformly fast but dense flow has inexplicably crystallized into a near-solid mass of crawling traffic. A mystery jam!

Physicists have lately been studying the phenomenon, using data from sensors embedded in highways and applying the arcane tools of chaos theory to try to predict why it occurs. Less abstract thinkers suggest most mystery jams aren't really very mysterious. A motorist glances at something at the side of the road and taps the brakes for an instant. The motorist behind does the same but a bit longer, and

so on. The distraction could be a dog trotting along the shoulder, a wind-blown piece of paper-or, in this case, Byer's idling patrol car over the next hill, which has moved into position to nab a certain white sedan. The blonde woman hasn't figured it out yet, but she caused this jam herself.

The underlying problem is that America's roadways are funneling more vehicles than they were ever meant to.

With perverse pride, residents give nicknames to major urban choke points: the Orange Crush in Orange County, California; the Hillside Strangler in Chicago; the Mixing Bowl outside Washington, D.C. A typical motorist in Washington, in fact, now loses more hours to traffic delays-

U

82 each year-than one in any other city, including Los Angeles (76). After Dick Cheney suffered a heart attack last November, one of his surgeons had to race along the highway's shoulder to get to George Washington University Hospital's operating room in time.

Fed by frustrated commuters, a market for onboard gadgets to outwit traffic jams is exploding. "The reason you have bottlenecks is because you have uninformed motorists," says Tim Lavoie of Tim's Car Electronics in Springfield, Massachusetts, after he wires a $1,600 Clarion Auto PC into the hole in my car's dashboard where the FM radio normally fits. The borrowed gizmo is a Pentium computer, voice-controlled radio and CD player, and Global Positioning System (GPS) all rolled into one. Lots of fancy vehicles these days have GPS, which tracks yom position to within a few dozen meters and gives you turn-bytum instructions. The Auto PC, however, has software from a company called Infogation that receives radioed traffic updates and then uses this information to reroute you automatically around tie-ups. hus armed, I ventme onto Boston's rusting elevated highway, the Central Artery, during a typically nightmarish evening rush hour. My destination is north and home. Auto PC's computerized voice orders me to get off at the next exit, then make a left onto North Street. Is this thing kidding? That's a cobblestoned street in Boston's mazelike North End. In the interests of research, I do what I'm told.

"Make a right to go onto Hanover Street," says the cyber voice. Mystified, I follow orders. I'm heading for the tip of a peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. How is this getting me home?

"Make a left to go onto Commercial Street." I'm now doubling back along the harbor. Then I notice that for the past several minutes I've seen no other moving cars, and it's the heart of rush hour. Within minutes, by obeying the gremlin in my dashboard, I'm flying along the northbound highway, headed for home. Did the Auto PC, knowing that my original route was obstructed, find me an ingenious

T

radio reports for the Total Traffic Network. Interstate 85, well outside the perimeter, is already a frozen river of metal reflecting the smog-filtered afternoon sun. Rising like a hazy apparition is Spaghetti Junction, a huge tangle of airborne ramps where 1-85 meets 1-285. ÂŤ !!5 Traffic, as usual, is backed up for miles in .~ every direction.

8 To prepare for the crowds drawn to the 1996 Olympics, the city encouraged rapid-transit use, telecommuting, satellite offices, staggered work hours, company-run vanpools and other measmes to keep the city's traffic arteries from congealing fatally. "The best traffic we ever had was during the Olympics," Kalland booms. "It was beautiful. Rush hours were nonexistent!" Atlantans, however, soon resumed their old ways. Part of the trouble is a rapid-transit system that serves only two of greater Atlanta's 13 counties. Plus, he says, "we don't carshortcut? Or was it so dumb that it picked pool real well here. We've got three and a cockamamy zigzag that no sentient human would ever dream of? Either way, a half million people, and 2.4 million of them are one to a car." it worked for me.

The exhaust from these vehicles has Devices like this, and Web sites that display traffic maps, don't solve congestion contributed heavily to Atlanta's abysmal problems. They just promise you a slight air pollution: the city suffered a record 70 edge over people who don't use them yet. days of excessive smog in 1999, including Eventually, when all roads are equally 37 in a row. That year, Governor Roy clogged, we'll have nowhere left to go. Barnes pushed through legislation creatAtlanta may arrive at this point first. ing a new superagency, which gave power Drivers there now have the longest average to the state to block new highways, malls, commute in the nation-56 kilometers a and commercial building complexes day. And more than half of its drivers spend approved by the region's often fi'actious an additional hoW' or more in the car runlocal authorities. ning errands as well. In a recent survey, Just the same, I'm amazed by all the Atlanta voters named traffic congestion as construction going on below us: high-rise skeletons topped with cranes, several the city's number one problem four times as often as any other issue. Web sites have giant malls abuilding, and everywhere bulldozed expanses of red Georgia clay popped up to let motorists vent, especially like raw wounds. "See, they're still about Interstate 285, the perimeter highway. A visitor to www.285sucks.com putting up more buildings," Kalland tells reported seeing a hearse traveling in one of me after delivering a rapid-fire litany of Atlanta's little-used high-occupancy vehi- wrecks and tie-ups to his television audicle (HOY) lanes. "Does the body in the ence through a cockpit video camera, back count as the second person?" he "and these roads are not nearly big asked. "Is that really fair?" enough for the traffic we already have."

To see what all the vitriol is about, I In the long run, even if tailpipe emisjoin Keith Kalland for a helicopter tour of sions weren't a problem, adding new roads and widening old ones wouldn't the city's afternoon rush hour. A bmly man with the high-decibel voice of an necessarily ease congestion. Says Michael Replogle of the advocacy group Environopera singer, Kalland does on-air TV and

"Congestion is an unavoidable part of modern life in any urban area

in the world."

mental Defense, "Trying to build your way out of traffic congestion is like trying to deal with being overweight by buying bigger pants." With fresh asphalt beckoning, people start driving who used to take trains and buses (or stayed home); they make a point of driving the new route, and they drive more often. In other words, if you build it, they will come. Economists call this "latent demand."

Traditionally, planners have had to oversimplify traffic flow in order to study it. Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are now piecing together an elaborate model called TRANSIMS, or Traffic Analysis and Simulation System, that simulates the whole caboodle, latent demand and all.

The Los Alamos lab, best known for its atom bombs, is tucked away on a set of remote finger mesas n0l1hwest of Santa Fe (an area not noted for its traffic jams).

With the Cold War over, the lab has been looking for new uses for its computer hardware and expertise.

"Traffic turns out to be a wonderfully hard thing to simulate," says project leader Chris Barrett. "There are lots of different things running around, and they have people in them." Using true-to-life details gleaned from census forms, travel surveys and other sources, TRANSIMS can now generate a synthetic population for the entire city of Portland, Oregon. Says project coordinator Ron Smith, "These synthetic individuals go to work, go to school, go shopping, go out to eat. Some drive, some walk, some take the bus, some park and ride." TRANSIMS follows them through their day, as they look for parking spaces or miss their buses.

The model doesn't actually show little animated Portlanders doing these things.

What it does show is where each hypothetical person and vehicle is at one-second intervals throughout a generic weekday. Researcher Phil Romero shows me a fast-motion model of Portland's streets on one of the monitors crowding his office. In this bird's-eye view, cars are dots. With thousands of dots in motion, it reminds me of a gigantic ant farm.

Romero clicks his mouse to zoom in on an intersection.

"That little rectangle

moving along the street is a bus," he says. We watch it stop at a bus stop. The rectangle is half purple and half white.

Now the purple section shrinks to a sliver, like mercury dropping in a fast-cooling thermometer. "Those are people getting off. When a bus empties out, it goes all white." Behind the bus, cars are bunching up. I don't hear any horns, but I'm sure it could be arranged.

TRANSIMS' imaginary motorists are cellular automata. That is, they're not following a script. They're making their own decisions from moment to moment, all the while trying to accomplish a set of tasks, time and traffic permitting, such as dropping children off at school or visiting a mall. Tasks vary according to an individual's income, occupation and so forth.

On the road, everyone abides by a simple set of rules. One is that every driver will slow down occasionally for no reason whatsoever.

Oddly enough, the Los Alamos group has found this mimics admirably the real-life behavior of a road full of motorists, some fraction of whom are always struggling to decipher road signs, wondering if they've forgotten something, eating and, of course, talking distractedly into cell phones. commercial version ofTRANSIMS will soon be available to city planning offices. Before widening a road, planners could see how many people have to-do lists that would prompt them to start using it-and how the change would affect emissions. In the long run, it could help planners predict the ways in which a city and its suburbs will grow.

There are other traffic technologies aimed not at city planners but at cars and drivers themselves-"maximizing throughput," as the engineers say. High-tech improvements such as electronic message boards on highways, automated toll collection and variable traffic lights that keep tabs on who's waiting can help limit traffic congestion. In a test by a public-private consot1ium in 1997, a string of eight driverless Buicks sped down a stretch of closed freeway in San Diego separated only by a few meters. Onboard computer controls, wireless transmitters and anticol-

A

lision sensors kept the cars in line as though linked by invisible tow bars. "It was really exciting for the first 15 or 20 seconds," says Jim Rillings, program manager of General Motors' intelligenttransportation group, who rode in one of the cars. "After that, it was boring."

Platooning, as it's called, could obviously pack more vehicles onto a highway by closing up gaps, but for now carmakers aren't following up on this technology.

If American motorists continue to participate in h'affic jams (and those who cause them and those who suffer them are largely the same people), it may be that drivers-despite their often vocal protestations-don't really find them all that unendurable. In a recent national survey, 45 percent of respondents agreed that "driving is my time to think and enjoy being alone." In another study, drivers preferred a commute of at least 30 minutes each way. A shorter trip kept them from falling into road zen, the flip side of road rage.

"The car is less a foml of transpot1ation now and more an extension of the living room," says Gridlock Sam, aka Sam Schwat1z, the former New York City traffic commissioner who coined the term "gridlock" during the city's 1980 transit strike.

"You've got a speaker phone, a fax, e-mail, television." Not to mention bucket seats, an ashtray, music of your choice, maybe the Odyssey on tape. "It lets people do things they shouldn't in their right minds tolerate." Like sit in traffic for hours a day.

Perhaps we need traffic congestion. It keeps us from putting more cars on the road than we already do. In any case, says Anthony Downs, a Brookings Institution economist and author of Stuck in Traffic, "congestion is an unavoidable pat1 of modern life in any urban area in the world." If you think Seattle or Houston is bad, he says, try Bangkok. The average speed at rush hour there is IS ki lometers an hour. Gas stations sell brightly colored portable urinals to motorists expecting to be stuck in traffic for several hours. "Our traffic isn't that bad," says Downs. "We may as well get used to it."

D About the Author: Doug Stewart is aji-equent contributor to Smithsonian.

Abasis of

Noguchi S bas-relief NEWS over entrance to the Associated Press Building, Rockefeller Center, New York City. 20 X 17feet

acknowledge that he had a half-Caucasian son. It was a defining moment in Noguchi's life.

"Well, 1 was going back to the place where 1 was a child, you might say," he reminisced to Ashton. "There was a sort offeeling on my part that my future had some connection with the Orient, probably because I spent my childhood there. Or that I was not completely at home in America, or that my fate as an artist at least could not be entirely determined in America."

But Noguchi's initial reaction to Japan, colored in part by his father's rejection, was one of active dislike, according to Ashton.

"Japan is a violent country," she quotes him as saying, "the weather and nature pressed in upon you." He left Tokyo for Kyoto, where he worked for a time in the studio of a master potter before departing for New York.

Noguchi would not set foot in Japan again until 1950. When he did return, his reception was very different. He had acquired an international reputation by then, and Japanese artists were eager to meet him. He stayed long enough to take on several projects-including a memorial room and garden at Keio University for his father, who had died in 1947-and from that time on went back to Japan often.

During the years before his 1950 visit to Japan, Noguchi had already begun to design his first public projects, had produced his first stage design for the renowned dancer Martha Graham, had spent eight months working on a 22-meter-Iong relief mural in Mexico City, had designed and executed in stainless steel the bas-relief News for the front of the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center, and had moved to Hollywood, where he was living when the United States entered World War II. After organizing the Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy, Noguchi voluntarily entered an internment center

Art

continued from page

18

for Japanese Americans in Poston, Arizona, with the naive hope that he could design a better environment for the internees. The War Relocation Authority, however, made any such ideas impossible to carry out, and Noguchi, after seven months, was finally allowed to return to his work outside.

From that time until his death it is hard to keep up with him.

He buzzed with energy, traveled constantly, became more and more engaged in public projects, and designed gardens in France, Japan, Israel and the United States. In 1952, at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, he married the Japanese actress Yoshiko "Shirley" Yamaguchi. The couple lived alternately in Japan and the United States, but divorced in 1957. Throughoutthe years, Noguchi continued exploring with different forms, techniques and materials.

A walk through the museum is a voyage, carefully delineated

by Noguchi himself, through his creative life. There are balsa wood and clay sculptures cast in bronze, sheet aluminum pieces, white marble pieces, and works banded in different colored marble that he made in the quarries of Querceta and Pietrasanta in Italy from 1968 to 1973.

A film in the museum shows the extraordinary sets that Noguchi designed for Martha Graham and her dance company over a period of nearly three decades. His first set, for her 1935 piece Frontier, began his exploration of how one could sculpt space. He did it, simply, by taking a rope and stretching it downward from the two top corners ofthe proscenium to a center point at the back of the stage. By articulating the space in this way, Noguchi had defined volume, made it tangible, made it sculptural.

For another stage work, Graham's Cave of the Heart, he created a sculpture of gleaming brass wires. Graham, in the role of Medea, approaches it, and in one fluid motion, dons the glimmering costume as she goes on with the dance.

Another film at the museum, in which Noguchi speaks of his life and work, shows the magnetic energy of the man, and his charm, of which all who had contact with him have spoken.

Though he was the embodiment of the elegant and sophisticated New Yorker, he also embraced the culture and ideals of traditional Japan. A 1970s photograph of him standing beside one of his late sculptures reveals an enigmatic, tensile, slim figure with the blocky hands of a stonecutter.

This spring an important addition to the museum will go on display-20 of Noguchi's last stone sculptures, recently arrived from his home and workplace on Shikoku. "This is it! This is the last of it," says the museum's curator, Bonnie Rychlak, who is also working on a catalog raisonne, which when complete will contain precise information on an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 works.

In an inconspicuous corner of the museum's garden lies a small grave marker, 3 centimeters in diameter and 15 centimeters tall at its highest point, masterfully cut and designed by Noguchi's assistant Masatoshi Izumi on Shikoku Island. It is engraved simply with the words "Isamu Noguchi" and his dates: "1904-1988." Beneath it lie half of his ashes. The other half are in Shikoku.

D About the Author: Smithsonian.

Bennett

Schiff

is a contributing

editor

of

Born at Home Traditional dais have much to offer the modern woman, and MATRIKA aims to preserve their wisdom

hen the lights dimmed in New Delhi's India International Centre theater and Sameera Jain's documentary film Born at Home filled the screen, it was the fruition of years of dedication, not only for the team behind the film, but for transplanted Janet Chawla, MATRlKA co-foundel; addresses American Janet Chawla. participants at a "dai mela."

Chawla is the project director of MATRlKA-the acronym for Motherhood and Traditional Reand often unwarranted intrusive surgery. sources, Information, Knowledge and It didn't appeal to her. She began to Action-the group whjch acted as midteach natural childbirth classes. wife for this finely crafted film about "Natural childbirth was not a feminist traditional birth practices. cause, there was not a consumer moveChawla has been the motive force ment to support any kind of questioning behind MATRlKA since its inception of obstetricians or obstetrical practice four years ago. The aim: to learn as much among middle and upper class women," as possible about the practices of tradishe recalls. Through her friends who tional Indian midwives, the dais. were activists and those involved in Working under the auspices of Barodawomen's health, she began learning based SARAJ, the Society for Alterabout indigenous natural childbirth. "So natives in Health and Development, and lest I be accused of importing an inapfunded by small grants from Rockefeller propriate technology-Lamaz, Leboyer Foundation, UNICEF and others, a dozen -I said 'let's go see what's happening MATRlKA researchers put together a there.' " She did her original research on fascinating profile of dais in rural dais about 12 years ago with Action Rajasthan, Bihar and urban Delhi.

India and Ankur. "I saw a sophistication "Everyone worked part time. It is domesin the practices. And it was particularly tic-based. A cottage industry, really!" intriguing to me because of what we say laughs Chawla. It was a coup when Ford in natural childbirth: what a woman Foundation agreed to fund the film. believes and has learned about birth and Chawla's involvement in midwifery women and women's bodies is just about as impOltant as the width of the has spanned most of her adult life. She pelvis in the outcome of the labor. And came to India 23 years ago, having met and married husband Kanwaljit in her here I was encountering rituals and native California. A mother of three demons and diagnostics and therapeuchildren, two of whom were born in tics that were related more to religion India, Chawla saw the "conservative than to medicine," she says, noting it practice of obstetrics" here which was no wonder medical practitioners included the acceptance of excessive didn't take it seriously.

W

MATRlKA's stated perspective is to view women, "specifically dais, as knowledgeable decision-makers who function within a different, but not inferior, cultural and cognitive system."

Chawla first taught natural childbirth to give people the safe, emotionally supportive bitth experiences they didn't feel they were getting from conservative medical practitioners. She feels that much of what the dais practice achieves just that. As documented in Born at Home, a combination of elements contributes to the well-being of the mother: affectionate, knowledgeable support that is both emotional and physical, and involves women in the family and community.

"When we look at good practices we're not only looking at how you massage or what herbs you give, but also the rituals and the diagnostics which are closer to ayurveda and other indigenous knowledge systems than they are to obstetricians," Chawla says, adding that these techniques are noninvasive. They don't involve puncturing or cutting open the body. The MATRIKA team, jointly coordinated

by Chawla and Deepti Priya Mehrotra and staffed by Madhu Aggrawal, Renuka Ramanujam and Lola Mathai, plan to continue their work. They have applied for NGO status for MATRlKA. Their goal is that the research, and subsequent appl ication, may help raise the veil of superstition shrouding ancient practices, many of which are practical and effective, and banish the stigma from the village midwife.

D

a ncouraged by the success of the courier pass back service and the off-site drop box collection at the Chennai consulate office during the past one year, the Consular Section of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi recently announced the extension of the service to north zone as well. Now a visa applicant needn't stand in long queues and wait for hours to get the visa. "The courier passback system is now in effect for all visas, whether the applicant applies in person at the Embassy or by drop box. The only exception is for official travelers," says John Nay, consul general in New Delhi.

provides extended time (between a.m. and 3:00 p.m.). TT Services

7:30 will

receive the application, enter the data, forward the application to the Consular Section for processing.

It will take the responsibility to return the visa-ed passports to the applicants.

Any applicant called for an interview will be informed by the Embassy.

However, applicants who do not meet the drop box criteria must continue to apply personally at the Embassy's

Consular

Section

between

All issued visas will be returned via courier to any address in northern India as

8:30 and 10:00 a.m.

Currently there is no set date to introduce the service in the Mumbai and Kolkata consulates, but according to Nay it is in the pipeline.

specified no longer stamped passback Business send up

Drop Box Criteria Applicants who fulfill the following criteria are eligible to apply for visa under the drop box category: I8J Applicants who have had a multiple

by the applicant. Applicants will have to personally collect these passports. The cost for courier is Rs. 300 per family/envelope; Express and other groups may to four passports per envelope.

"The service is already proving more convenient for many applicants because it eliminates the need to wait in a long line in the evening to pick up one's passport and visa from the Embassy," Nay maintains.

In case of drop box applicants, the visa forms along with the required documents should be submitted at the office of TT Services, located at 2E/23, Jhandewalan Extension, New Delhi 110055, which

ently U.S. visa in the past five years.

I8J Applicants and their spouses who are 60 years old or more.

I8J Employees of companies in the Business Express program.

I8J Applicants who can show multiple trips to Canada, Schengen countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherands, et al), United Kingdom, Australi~ New Zealand and Japan in the past five years.

I8J Applicants

or spouses who are over 55

years of age, have adult children in legal status in the U.S. who have provided a financial sponsorship, and can present proof of the child's legal status in the U.S. I8J Spouses or children (under age 16) ofa person with a valid multiple entry nonimmigrant visa. Children must provide birth certificates and a copy of the parent's visa.

I8J Handicapped people traveling with an immediate family member who holds a U.S. visa. A doctor's letter explaining disability must be submitted.

I8J Government officials, police or military officials traveling on diplomatic or official passports or traveling on documented official business.

I8J U.S. Government-sponsored applicants for "J -I" exchange visitor programs.

I8J Airline crew members serving on U.S.bound flights.

I8J Seamen with a previous C-l/D visa and a letter from an established shipping agency in the New Delhi area (or Chennai/ KolkatalMumbai as the case may be).

I8J Returning F, H, Land J visa applicants and their families (spouse, minor children).

I8J H I-B and L visa applicants who can present an original notice of approval and who are sending supporting materials in with their applications.

I8J Diplomats, IAS officers, military officers (rank of major or above), and their spouses and minor children, with proof of employment and position.

-A.V.N.

~- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~2"_"':;~Jto'~-X - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ---- - - - - -'- - - ---- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - ..â&#x20AC;˘..â&#x20AC;˘ --

nA ~

T

Sr1ll "I FORM

~-"::.~e~~-X ---

Mail today with remittance

to: Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine Post Box No. 89,GPO, New Delhi 110001 or 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 or deposit personally in AIRC (American Center)

Please send the next 6 issues of SPANat annual subscription rate of Rs. 125.

Change of address only, please till out this form; also attach the address label from a recent SPAN envelope.

Since four to six weeks are needed to process a change of address, please let us know about any change promptly. Or e-mail: AgrawaIR@state.gov

Name

Profession/Designation

Address

o o o

o

_

/ New Address

_

I am enclosing Bank

Draft/Postal

I am sending Money

Order

I am enclosing Local

Check

Order

No

dated

.for Rs. 125 in favor of 'f'lmerican Embassy, New Delhi."

for Rs. 125 payable to 'f'lmerican Embassy," American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 No

, dated

for Rs. 125 in favor of 'f'lmerican Embassy, New Delhi." or 'American Consulate, Mumbai"

or 'f'lmerican Consulate, Kolkata" or 'f'lmerican Consulate, Chennai" (checks must be drawn on Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai banks only) I am depositing

Cash

Rs. 125 in American Information Resource Center (American Center).

Signature

and date

Note There are no authorized agents for collecting SPAN subscriptions anywhere in India except American Embassy oHices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai.

We do not accept

checks

from

any other

city.

_