Saramago is dead

José Saramago Dies

By FERNANDA EBERSTADT

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation and a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, has died at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, his publisher said on Friday. He was 87.
The publisher, Zeferino Coelho, told the Portuguese newspaper Publico that Mr. Saramago’s health had been deteriorating after a recent illness, but gave no other details, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Saramago, a tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness.” (A film adaptation of “Blindness” by the Brazilian director Fernando Mireilles was released in 2008.)
Mr. Saramago was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, Mr. Coelho.
Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years, Mr. Saramago used his status as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.
read more To many Americans, Mr. Saramago’s name is indissolubly associated with a statement he made while touring the West Bank in 2002, when he compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.
As a professional novelist, Mr. Saramago was a late bloomer. (A first novel, published when he was 23, was followed by 30 years of silence.) He became a full-time writer only in his late 50s, after working variously as a garage mechanic, a welfare agency bureaucrat, a printing production manager, a proofreader, a translator and a newspaper columnist.
In 1975, a counter-coup overthrew Portugal’s Communist-led revolution of the previous year, and Mr. Saramago was fired from his job as deputy editor of the Lisbon newspaper Diário de Noticias. Overnight, along with other prominent leftists, he became virtually unemployable. “It was the best luck of my life,” he said in a 2007 interview. “It drove me to become a writer.”
His first major success was the rollicking love story “Baltasar and Blimunda.” Set in 18th-century Portugal, the novel portrays the misadventures of a trio of eccentrics threatened by the Inquisition: a heretic priest who constructs a flying machine and the two lovers who help him — a one-handed ex-soldier and a sorceress’s daughter who has X-ray vision.
The novel, published in an English translation in 1987, won Mr. Saramago a passionate international following. The critic Irving Howe, praising its union of “harsh realism” and “lyric fantasy,” described its author as “a voice of European skepticism, a connoisseur of ironies.”
“I think I hear in his prose echoes of Enlightenment sensibility, caustic and shrewd,” Mr. Howe wrote.
Asked in 2008 to assess Mr. Saramago’s achievement, the critic James Wood wrote: “Jose Saramago was both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist. His long blocks of unbroken prose, lacking conventional markers like paragraph breaks and quotation marks, could look forbidding and modernist; but his frequent habit of handing over the narration in his novels to a kind of ‘village chorus’ and what seem like peasant simplicities, allowed Saramago great flexibility.” On the one hand, Mr. Wood wrote, it allowed the writer to “revel in sheer storytelling,” while on the other, to “undermine, ironically, the very ‘truths’ and simplicities his apparently unsophisticated narrators traded in.”
Paradox was Mr. Saramago’s stock in trade. A militant atheist who maintained that human history would have been a lot more peaceful if it weren’t for religion, his novels are nonetheless intimately preoccupied with the question of God.
His novel “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” in which Jesus on the cross apologizes to mankind for God’s sins, was deemed “corruscatingly blasphemous” by some believers and deeply religious by others. When the Portuguese government, under pressure from the Catholic Church, blocked its entry for a European Literary Prize in 1992, Mr. Saramago chose to go into exile, setting up residence in the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession.
Mr. Saramago’s hard-scrabble origins did not seem to predestine him for a life of letters. Born in 1922 in the village of Azinhaga, 60 miles northeast of Lisbon, Mr. Saramago was largely raised by his maternal grandparents, while his parents sought work in the big city. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Mr. Saramago spoke admiringly of these grandparents, illiterate peasants who, in the winter, slept in the same bed as their piglets, yet who imparted to him a taste for fantasy and folklore, combined with a respect for nature.
One of Mr. Saramago’s last books — and one of his most touching — was a childhood memoir titled “Small Memories.” In it, he recounts the trauma of being transplanted from his grandparents’ rural shack to Lisbon, where his father had joined the police force. Several months later, his older brother Francisco, his only sibling, died of pneumonia.
Mr. Saramago loved to tell a story of how he came by his surname. His real family name was de Sousa. But when the 7-year-old boy showed up for his first day of school and was obliged to present his birth certificate, it was discovered that the clerk in his home village had registered him as José Saramago. “Saramago,” which means “wild radish,” a green that country people were obliged to eat in hard times, was the insulting nickname by which the novelist’s father was known.
“My father wasn’t very happy, but if that was his son’s official name, well, then he too had to take it,” he recounted in the 2007 interview. The family remained so poor, Mr. Saramago recalls in his memoirs, that every spring his mother pawned their blankets, hoping that she might be able to redeem them by the following winter. Despite being a good student, Mr. Saramago was obliged by his family’s financial straits to drop out of grammar school at 12 and switch to a vocational school, where he was trained as a car mechanic.
The most oppressive influence on Mr. Saramago, however, was one he rarely wrote about: the fascist regime that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974.
“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” regarded as his masterpiece, is his only novel to deal directly with the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Set in 1936 in a Europe darkened by the ascendancies of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar, the book tells the story of a doctor and poet living in Brazil who returns to fascist Lisbon when he hears of the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s great modernist poet. What gives the book its dreamlike blend of historical reality and illusion is the fact that the title character’s name was actually one of the aliases the fantastically prolific Fernando Pessoa used to publish much of his verse. The novel, consisting of increasingly macabre encounters between the ghost of Pessoa and his fictional alter ego Reis, is a delicate meditation on identity and nothingness, poetry and power.
In his later years, Mr. Saramago’s fiction became more starkly allegorical. In novels like “Blindness,” in which an entire city is struck by a plague of sightlessness that reduces most of its citizens to barbarism, readers have found a powerful parable about the fragility of human civilization.
“Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world,” the critic Harold Bloom said in 2008. “He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.”

NYT on Marriage

What Brain Scans Can Tell Us About Marriage

By TARA PARKER-POPE

THE sudden breakup of Al and Tipper Gore’s seemingly idyllic marriage was the latest and among the sharpest reminders that the only two people who know what’s going on in a marriage are the two people who are in it.
The truth is that most marriages, even our own, are something of a mystery to outsiders. Several years ago, a marriage researcher — Robert W. Levenson, director of the psychophysiology laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley — and his colleagues produced a video of 10 couples talking and bickering. Dr. Levenson knew at the time that five of the couples had been in troubled relationships and eventually divorced. He showed the video to 200 people, including pastors, marriage therapists and relationship scientists, asking them to spot the doomed marriages. They guessed wrong half the time. “People on the outside aren’t very good at telling how marriages are really working,” he said.
Even so, academic researchers have become increasingly fascinated with the inner workings of long-married couples, subjecting them to a battery of laboratory tests and even brain scans to unravel the mystery of lasting love. Bianca Acevedo, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studies the neuroscience of relationships and began a search for long-married couples who were still madly in love. Through a phone survey, she collected data on 274 men and women in committed relationships, and used relationship scales to measure marital happiness and passionate love.
read more Dr. Acevedo expected to find only a small percentage of long-married couples still passionately in love. To her surprise, about 40 percent of them continued to register high on the romance scale. The remaining 60 percent weren’t necessarily unhappy. Many had high levels of relationship satisfaction and were still in love, just not so intensely.
In a separate study, 17 men and women who were passionately in love agreed to undergo scans to determine what lasting romantic love looks like in the brain. The subjects, who had been married an average of about 21 years, viewed a picture of their spouse. As a control, they also viewed photos of two friends.
Compared with the reaction when looking at others, seeing the spouse activated parts of the brain associated with romantic love, much as it did when couples who had just fallen in love took the same test. But in the older couples, researchers spotted something extra: parts of the brain associated with deep attachment were also activated, suggesting that contentment in marriage and passion in marriage aren’t mutually exclusive.
“They have the feelings of euphoria, but also the feelings of calm and security that we feel when we’re attached to somebody,” Dr. Acevedo said. “I think it’s wonderful news.”
So how do these older couples keep the fires burning? Beyond the brain scans, it was clear that these couples remained active in each other’s lives.
“They were still very much in love and engaged in the relationship,” Dr. Acevedo said. “That’s something that seems different from the Gores, who said they had grown apart.”
Indeed, if there is a lesson from the Gore breakup, it’s that with marriage, you’re never done working on it.
“It’s not that you have to be constantly scared about your relationship, but you do have to renew it,” said Stephanie Coontz, a marriage historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “I think the warning we should take from this is not that marriages are doomed, but that you can’t skate indefinitely and be doing different things and not really be paying attention to the marriage itself.”
Research from Stony Brook University in New York suggests that couples who regularly do new and different things together are happier than those who repeat the same old habits. The theory is that new experiences activate the dopamine system and mimic the brain chemistry of early romantic love.
In a new study, the Stony Brook scientists will have couples playing either a mundane or exciting video game together while their brains are being scanned.. The goal is to see how sharing a new and challenging experience with a spouse changes the neural activation of the brain.
But for those of us without a brain scanner, there are simple ways to find out if your relationship is growing or vexed by boredom. Among the questions to ask yourself: How much does your partner provide a source of exciting experiences? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? In the last month, how often did you feel that your marriage was in a rut?
If the answers aren’t exactly what you hoped for, take heart. From a statistical standpoint, your risk for divorce begins to fall once you’ve passed the 10-year mark. According to Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, recent Census Bureau data show that only about 4 percent of recently ended marriages involved couples married for 40 years or more.
And it’s worth noting that the Gores married in 1970s, the beginning of a generation of couples that has consistently struggled with marriage more than any other group. Dr. Stevenson calls them the “greatest divorcing generation.”
Lost in the discussion about the Gore divorce is the inherent optimism that the decision represents. Professor Coontz recalls living next door to a couple in their 70s who disliked each other so much that during the summer, they sat outside in lawn chairs on the opposite sides of the house. “I think it’s good that people can go ahead and start over before they get to that level of anger and hostility,” she said.
Dr. Stevenson called the Gore breakup a “glass-half-full story.”
“They had 40 years of marriage, and they had what, by many dimensions, should be considered a successful marriage,” she said. “The fact that they both can look forward and see a promising future by not being married — it’s unfortunate that the answer is ‘yes,’ but it’s also somewhat a celebration about how much optimism they have for the rest of their lives.”

Tara Parker-Pope writes the Well column for The New York Times and is the author of “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage,” which was released last month by Dutton.

NYT on Happiness

Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says
By Nicholas Bakalar

It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can’t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old. It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.
“It could be that there are environmental changes,” said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, “or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.”
The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.
The survey also asked about “global well-being” by having each person rank overall life satisfaction on a 10-point scale, an assessment many people may make from time to time, if not in a strictly formalized way.
Finally, there were six yes-or-no questions: Did you experience the following feelings during a large part of the day yesterday: enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger, sadness. The answers, the researchers say, reveal “hedonic well-being,” a person’s immediate experience of those psychological states, unencumbered by revised memories or subjective judgments that the query about general life satisfaction might have evoked.
The results, published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were good news for old people, and for those who are getting old.
read more On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.
In measuring immediate well-being — yesterday’s emotional state — the researchers found that stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85. Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off. Anger decreases steadily from 18 on, and sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85. Enjoyment and happiness have similar curves: they both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.
Other experts were impressed with the work. Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of psychology at Warwick Business School in England, who has published several studies on human happiness, called the findings important and, in some ways, heartening. “It’s a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s,” he said. “And it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.”
Dr. Stone, who is a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that the findings raised questions that needed more study. “These results say there are distinctive patterns here,” he said, “and it’s worth some research effort to try to figure out what’s going on. Why at age 50 does something seem to start to change?”
The study was not designed to figure out which factors make people happy, and the poll’s health questions were not specific enough to draw any conclusions about the effect of disease or disability on happiness in old age. But the researchers did look at four possibilities: the sex of the interviewee, whether the person had a partner, whether there were children at home and employment status. “These are four reasonable candidates,” Dr. Stone said, “but they don’t make much difference.”
For people under 50 who may sometimes feel gloomy, there may be consolation here. The view seems a bit bleak right now, but look at the bright side: you are getting old.

NYT on Citizenship

WASHINGTON — Amid mounting frustration over taxation and banking problems, small but growing numbers of overseas Americans are taking the weighty step of renouncing their citizenship.
“What we have seen is a substantial change in mentality among the overseas community in the past two years,” said Jackie Bugnion, director of American Citizens Abroad, an advocacy group based in Geneva. “Before, no one would dare mention to other Americans that they were even thinking of renouncing their U.S. nationality. Now, it is an openly discussed issue.”
The Federal Register, the government publication that records such decisions, shows that 502 expatriates gave up their U.S. citizenship or permanent residency status in the last quarter of 2009. That is a tiny portion of the 5.2 million Americans estimated by the State Department to be living abroad.
Still, 502 was the largest quarterly figure in years, more than twice the total for all of 2008, and it looms larger, given how agonizing the decision can be. There were 235 renunciations in 2008 and 743 last year. Waiting periods to meet with consular officers to formalize renunciations have grown.
Anecdotally, frustrations over tax and banking questions, not political considerations, appear to be the main drivers of the surge. Expat advocates say that as it becomes more difficult for Americans to live and work abroad, it will become harder for American companies to compete.
American expats have long complained that the United States is the only industrialized country to tax citizens on income earned abroad, even when they are taxed in their country of residence, though they are allowed to exclude their first $91,400 in foreign-earned income.
One Swiss-based business executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitive family issues, said she weighed the decision for 10 years. She had lived abroad for years but had pleasant memories of service in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Yet the notion of double taxation — and of future tax obligations for her children, who will receive few U.S. services — finally pushed her to renounce, she said.
read more “I loved my time in the Marines, and the U.S. is still a great country,” she said. “But having lived here 20 years and having to pay and file while seeing other countries’ nationals not having to do that, I just think it’s grossly unfair.”
“It’s taxation without representation,” she added.
Stringent new banking regulations — aimed both at curbing tax evasion and, under the Patriot Act, preventing money from flowing to terrorist groups — have inadvertently made it harder for some expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad.
Some U.S.-based banks have closed expats’ accounts because of difficulty in certifying that the holders still maintain U.S. addresses, as required by a Patriot Act provision.
“It seems the new anti-terrorist rules are having unintended effects,” Daniel Flynn, who lives in Belgium, wrote in a letter quoted by the Americans Abroad Caucus in the U.S. Congress in correspondence with the Treasury Department.
“I was born in San Francisco in 1939, served my country as an army officer from 1961 to 1963, have been paying U.S. income taxes for 57 years, since 1952, have continually maintained federal voting residence, and hold a valid American passport.”
Mr. Flynn had held an account with a U.S. bank for 44 years. Still, he wrote, “they said that the new anti-terrorism rules required them to close our account because of our address outside the U.S.”
Kathleen Rittenhouse, who lives in Canada, wrote that until she encountered a similar problem, “I did not know that the Patriot Act placed me in the same category as terrorists, arms dealers and money launderers.”
Andy Sundberg, another director of American Citizens Abroad, said, “These banks are closing our accounts as acts of prudent self-defense.” But the result, he said, is that expats have become “toxic citizens.”
The Americans Abroad Caucus, headed by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, has made repeated entreaties to the Treasury Department.
In response, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner wrote Ms. Maloney on Feb. 24 that “nothing in U.S. financial law and regulation should make it impossible for Americans living abroad to access financial services here in the United States.”
But banks, Treasury officials note, are free to ignore that advice.
“That Americans living overseas are being denied banking services in U.S. banks, and increasingly in foreign banks, is unacceptable,” Ms. Maloney said in a letter Friday to leaders of the House Financial Services Committee, requesting a hearing on the question.
Mr. Wilson, joining her request, said that pleas from expats for relief “continue to come in at a startling rate.”
Relinquishing citizenship is relatively simple. The person must appear before a U.S. consular or diplomatic official in a foreign country and sign a renunciation oath. This does not allow a person to escape old tax bills or military obligations.
Now, expats’ representatives fear renunciations will become more common.
“It is a sad outcome,” Ms. Bugnion said, “but I personally feel that we are now seeing only the tip of the iceberg.”

NYT: Best Coffee

From Dung to Coffee Brew With No Aftertaste
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

SAGADA, the Philippines — Goad Sibayan went prospecting recently in the remote Philippine highlands here known as the Cordillera. He clambered up and then down a narrow, rocky footpath that snaked around some hills, paying no heed to coffins that, in keeping with a local funeral tradition, hung very conspicuously from the surrounding sheer cliffs.
Reaching a valley where coffee trees were growing abundantly, he scanned the undergrowth where he knew the animals would relax after picking the most delicious coffee cherries with their claws and feasting on them with their fangs. His eyes settled on a light, brownish clump atop a rock. He held it in his right palm and, gently slipping it into a little black pouch, whispered:
“Gold!”
Not quite. But Mr. Sibayan’s prize was the equivalent in the world of rarefied coffees: dung containing the world’s most expensive coffee beans.
Costing hundreds of dollars a pound, these beans are found in the droppings of the civet, a nocturnal, furry, long-tailed catlike animal that prowls Southeast Asia’s coffee-growing lands for the tastiest, ripest coffee cherries. The civet eventually excretes the hard, indigestible innards of the fruit — essentially, incipient coffee beans — though only after they have been fermented in the animal’s stomach acids and enzymes to produce a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.
read more As connoisseurs in the United States, Europe and East Asia have discovered civet coffee in recent years, growing demand is fueling a gold rush in the Philippines and Indonesia, the countries with the largest civet populations. Harvesters are scouring forest floors in the Philippines, where civet coffee has emerged as a new business. In Indonesia, where the coffee has a long history, enterprising individuals are capturing civets and setting up minifarms, often in their backyards.
Neither the Indonesian government nor the Association of Indonesia Coffee Exporters breaks down civet coffee’s tiny share of Indonesia’s overall coffee production. The Association of Indonesian Coffee Luwak Farmers, created in 2009 to handle the rising demand for civet coffee, or kopi luwak, as it is called in Indonesian, said most civet producers were small-time businessmen who exported directly overseas.
Given the money at stake, fake and low-grade civet coffee beans are also flooding the market.
“Because of its increasing popularity, there is more civet coffee than ever, but I don’t trust the quality,” said Rudy Widjaja, 68, whose 131-year-old family-owned coffee store in Jakarta, Warung Tinggi, is considered Indonesia’s oldest.
Competition is touching off fierce debates. What is real civet coffee, anyway? Does the civet’s choice of beans make the coffee? Or is it the beans’ journey through the animal’s digestive tract? Can the aroma, fragrance and taste of beans from the droppings of a caged civet ever be as tasty as those from its wild cousin?
Vie Reyes, whose Manila-based company, Bote Central, entered the civet coffee business five years ago, said she bought only from harvesters of the wild kind. Ms. Reyes exports to distributors overseas — Japan and South Korea are her biggest markets — and also directly sells 2.2-pound bags for $500, or about $227 a pound.
Maintaining quality was a constant challenge because distinguishing the real stuff from the fake was never easy. One time, harvesters sold her regular beans glued to unidentified dung.
“I washed it,” she said. “But the glue wouldn’t come off.”
One of her suppliers, Mr. Sibayan, 37, buys beans from collectors throughout the Cordillera, a mountainous region in the north that can be reached only after a punishing 12-hour drive from Manila. On a recent day, he dropped by to see the Pat-ogs, who own a 1.7-acre lot just outside this town.
Until Mr. Sibayan began buying their civet coffee four years ago, the Pat-ogs had never given much thought to the droppings left behind by the civets that came to munch on the family’s coffee trees at night. They discarded the beans or mixed them with regular beans they sold to agents. Now, they were getting about $9 a pound for the civet beans, or about five times the price of regular coffee beans, which, furthermore, required labor-intensive harvesting.
Mr. Sibayan inspected their batch and said he would pay just under top-grade price. He had found some impurities — inferior beans that the civet had spat out; beans chewed on, not by civets, but bats — that were indiscernible to all but Mr. Sibayan’s expert eye or, rather, tongue.
Licking one bean, he explained that real civet coffee beans should have lost their natural sweetness and acquired a rough texture. “This is pure, good quality,” he said, adding, “Once, some farmers tried to fool me by slightly roasting regular beans to remove the sweetness.”
Alberto Pat-og, 60, a retired school principal, said he did not understand why foreigners were willing to pay so much for a cup of the stuff.
“We are a bit surprised,” he said. “A bit perplexed.”
His son, Lambert, 20, added, with a big grin, “We are ignorant.”
The Pat-ogs wished they could expand their business but said there were simply not enough civets around. Compounding the problem, farmers around these parts tended to trap civets, which also have a taste for chicken. Local residents still prized civets less for their coffee-picking ability than their meat, which was typically dried before being prepared adobo-style.
“It’s very difficult to convince my neighbors not to kill civets because they’re considered such a delicacy here,” the father said.
In Indonesia, too, a shrinking civet population is creating obstacles for those hoping to ride the civet coffee boom. Civet coffee has long been centered in the western island of Sumatra, where a growing human population, economic development and deforestation have eroded their habitats.
Mr. Widjaja, the Jakarta store owner, said that the Dutch, who ruled Indonesia for more than three centuries, and Japanese soldiers, who occupied the country during World War II, were the most die-hard drinkers of civet coffee. But the coffee all but disappeared after the late 1950s, he said, and resurfaced on the market only after its reputation began spreading overseas. After he began fielding inquiries in 2007 from interested buyers in the United States, Japan and Taiwan, he secured a regular supply of wild civet coffee and began selling it only last year — at $150 a pound.
In Liwa, a small town in southwestern Sumatra, more than 30 families were involved in civet coffee.
Mega Kurniawan, 28, entered the business two years ago by setting up shop in the backyard of his family home. He had already expanded to three other locations and was now in civets full time. With a total of 102 civets, he gathered about 550 pounds of beans a month.
During the day, Mr. Kurniawan’s civets slept inside their small wooden cages before growing active at dusk. At night, the animals ate from fresh plates of coffee cherries, replenished every two hours, or paced back and forth at a brisk, caffeinated clip.
Though caged, the civets ate only about half of the beans placed before them, choosing only the best specimens, Mr. Kurniawan insisted. He dismissed connoisseurs’ criticism that stress felt by the caged animals invariably affected the taste of the beans.
“It’s the same,” he said, acknowledging, however, that some buyers preferred wild civet coffee. “Maybe it’s the prestige.”
A few blocks away, Ujang Suryana, 62, had his own firm opinions about what constituted real civet coffee. A reflexologist, Mr. Suryana began moonlighting in civets three months ago after catching a local television report on the brew’s popularity abroad. He pooled $1,000 to buy three civets and cages.
He had already found a way to increase the civets’ output exponentially by mechanically stripping the coffee beans from the cherries and mixing them in a banana mash. The civets gobbled it all up. This way, no beans were wasted. What is more, he had raised the dung production from 2.2 pounds a week to a whopping 6.6 pounds a day.
But wasn’t Mr. Suryana denying the civet its renowned ability to sniff out the best beans?
He scrunched up his face as if to wave away the suggestion. “The most important thing is that the beans go through its stomach and are fermented,” he said. “It all tastes the same, anyway.”

NYT on The Good Old Drugs

Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again
By JOHN TIERNEY
As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.
Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.
Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness.
After taking the hallucinogen, Dr. Martin put on an eye mask and headphones, and lay on a couch listening to classical music as he contemplated the universe. “All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” he recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.”
Today, more than a year later, Dr. Martin credits that six-hour experience with helping him overcome his depression and profoundly transforming his relationships with his daughter and friends. He ranks it among the most meaningful events of his life, which makes him a fairly typical member of a growing club of experimental subjects.
read more
Researchers from around the world are gathering this week in San Jose, Calif., for the largest conference on psychedelic science held in the United States in four decades. They plan to discuss studies of psilocybin and other psychedelics for treating depression in cancer patients, obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs or alcohol.
The results so far are encouraging but also preliminary, and researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits.
Because reactions to hallucinogens can vary so much depending on the setting, experimenters and review boards have developed guidelines to set up a comfortable environment with expert monitors in the room to deal with adverse reactions. They have established standard protocols so that the drugs’ effects can be gauged more accurately, and they have also directly observed the drugs’ effects by scanning the brains of people under the influence of hallucinogens.
Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.
In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.
To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug like Ritalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.
The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group.
The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.
Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.
In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.
“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”
The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.
“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”
Although federal regulators have resumed granting approval for controlled experiments with psychedelics, there has been little public money granted for the research, which is being conducted at Hopkins, the University of Arizona; Harvard; New York University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and other places.
The work has been supported by nonprofit groups like the Heffter Research Institute and MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”
Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses. Dr. Charles S. Grob, a psychiatrist who is involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as “existential medicine” that helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression.
“Under the influences of hallucinogens,” Dr. Grob writes, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change.”

New Talent

On last Friday’s broadcast of Taiwan’s “One Million Star” show, Lin Yu-chun, a 24-year-old shop worker, stunned the audience and judges with his performance of “I Will Always Love You,” Agence France-Presse reported. (The song begins at about 1:10 in the video above.) Adding to the accomplishment of Mr. Lin, who has been affectionately nicknamed Little Fatty, is his decision to perform the song in the bombastic style of Whitney Houston. (And given Ms. Houston’s own recent difficulties, this might be the closest you’ll come to hearing her version of the song in a live setting.)

Since Friday night, video of Mr. Lin’s performance has been viewed nearly 500,000 times on YouTube and drawn comparisons to Ms. Boyle, the Scottish woman who became a sensation after her appearances on “Britain’s Got Talent.”

In an interview, Mr. Lin told Agence France-Presse he was flattered by the comparison. “I am inspired and encouraged by her, because she proved that even a person who’s seen as an underdog and who has average looks can shine on the stage,” he said.

NYT: Air, Showers etc in NYC

Bathing, but Not Alone

There are some things it is better just not to think about. Like the 10,000 bacteria you inhale with each breath in the average office building. Or the 10 million bacteria in each glass of tap water. Microbiologists have now added something else to the list of things too gross to contemplate: the deluge of bacteria that hit your face and flow deep into your lungs in the morning shower.
Showers in New York carry a particularly high dose of a microbe related to tuberculosis called Mycobacterium avium. The bacterium and its close cousins can cause a variety of exotic chest complaints, including lifeguard’s lung, hot tub lung and Lady Windermere’s syndrome.
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This unwelcome peek behind the shower curtain has been provided by a group of microbiologists headed by Norman R. Pace of the University of Colorado. As part of a project to measure microbes in the indoor human environment, they looked at shower water, in part because in showers bacteria are incorporated into fine droplets that can be breathed deep into the lungs.
Conventional tests depend on growing cultures of the bacteria to be identified, but because most species cannot be grown in the laboratory, a majority of bacterial species are missed. Dr. Pace’s method examines the genetic material directly, without the need for culturing bacteria.
He has turned up more than 15 kinds of bacteria in showers across the country, from Tennessee to Illinois, Denver and New York City, he reports this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Aside from the thought of being sprayed in the face by a bacterial cocktail every morning, the shower bacteria present no serious danger, with the possible exception of the M. avium. Dr. Pace said this microbe could be a risk to people whose immune system was compromised.
The bacteria get into shower heads from the water and build up there, so the dose is highest when the shower is first turned on. Running the water for 30 seconds before stepping in would mean fewer bacteria in one’s face, Dr. Pace observed. Also, the bacteria seem to find metal shower heads a less hospitable niche than plastic ones.
M. avium tends to be a particular problem in municipal water supplies, Dr. Pace said. The reason is that cities treat their water with chlorine, a poison that kills most bacteria but gives avium a selective advantage.
Dr. Pace’s news for New Yorkers is not all bad. He has also been testing the air in the city’s subways. Apart from a lot of aerosolized iron particles, presumably ground off the track by the wheels, the subway air is remarkably fresh and like outdoor air. The reason is that the movement of the trains pumps fresh outdoor air into the tunnels.
Another paradox of city life: it seems it is healthier to inhale the subway’s air than the shower’s mist.
Dr. Pace explained that his shower and subway projects arose from a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which was interested in how to detect microbes that might be used in a bioterrorist attack.
The foundation’s officers decided that it was first necessary to understand the natural microbial background in people’s houses and public places. They commissioned Dr. Pace, a distinguished microbiologist, to determine what these background levels might be.
Dr. Pace said he was still taking showers, which he deemed no more dangerous than getting out of bed in the morning. “The yuck factor isn’t nearly as great as people may think it is,” he said.
But after the findings about showers, he did throw away his scummy plastic shower head and got a metal one instead.

NYT: New Amsterdam

April 6, 2009
Proud Amsterdam Celebrates New York, and Itself
By SAM ROBERTS
AMSTERDAM — Relegated by history to a mostly forgotten footnote, the government and people of the Netherlands proudly stepped forward last week to remind the world that if America begins in New York, then New York began 400 years ago thanks largely to the Dutch.
A weeklong cultural celebration of New York, including a hip-hop competition and the inauguration of what will be an ongoing walking tour, was highlighted by the unveiling of the rarely exhibited original letter informing the Dutch parliament of the purchase of Manhattan.
Frans Timmermans, the Dutch minister for European affairs, hailed it as “New York’s birth certificate.”
The 1626 letter from Peter Schaghen, a representative of the parliament, said that the crew of a ship returning from New Amsterdam reported that several colonists had given birth and delivered other prosaic news before disclosing that, by the way, they had also bought “the Island Manhattes.”
The price was 60 guilders’ worth of tools and cloth — much later, famously estimated to equal $24. In comparison, the crew returned from the New World with nearly 8,000 animal skins worth 45,000 guilders.
The Schaghen letter, which is kept in the National Archives here, is being exhibited at the Rijksmuseum in a room flanked by Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and the museum store.
Also on display here are the Dutch East India Company’s instructions to the captain (misidentified as “Thomas Hudson”); Adriaen Bloch’s 1614 map, which is the oldest known to show Manhattan as an island; Johannes Vingboons’s charming 1665 watercolor of New Amsterdam’s skyline (which Vingboons adapted from a much less complimentary sketch intended to portray how decrepit the colony was becoming); and the 1667 Treaty of Breda, which ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War and allowed for the exchange of territories, including Dutch New York for British Surinam.
Those and other artifacts, some never before seen in the United States, are to go on display at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York beginning on Sept. 12 to commemorate the anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival. A New Amsterdam Trail walking tour, a companion to one that has started here, will be offered in Lower Manhattan starting next month, sponsored by Henry Hudson 400 and the National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy.
The many celebrations of Hudson’s departure from Amsterdam — he left the city on April 4, 1609, and set sail from an island in the North Sea two days later — were tied by a single theme.
“We share the same DNA,” said Mayor Job Cohen of Amsterdam. “Both are cities where you live and let live.”
“Amsterdam is not the same as the Netherlands,” he added, “just as New York is not the same as the United States.”
The Amsterdam that Hudson sailed from in 1609, said Geert Mak, a Dutch historian, “would blossom into the 17th-century version of New York, a city of novelty, bubbling with life and creativity, linked with all parts of the known world — if only for a while.”
A special issue of Time Out Amsterdam, the listings magazine, compiled 10 slightly tongue-in-cheek commonalities between the two cities, from the fact that their inhabitants are more direct and sophisticated (“at least, we think we are”) to their great mass transit systems (the subway in New York, and ubiquitous bicycles — no helmets — in Amsterdam).
“Amsterdammers and New Yorkers both live at the center of the universe,” the magazine said. “Of course.”
Dutch traditions of free trade and tolerance were transplanted to New York, said Russell Shorto, the author of “The Island at the Center of the World” and the director of the John Adams Institute here, which sponsored a town hall meeting on Saturday night to mark Hudson’s departure.
Among the 750 attendees was Jerry Thundercloud McDonald of the Mohawk Nation in upstate New York. He praised the Dutch for maintaining a covenant of “peace, respect and friendship” with the Mohawks in the 17th century, but cautioned that 400 years later the legacy of native Americans should not be overlooked.
Michelle Paterson, the wife of Gov. David A. Paterson, represented New York at a dinner in The Hague held by the Holland America Friendship Foundation and at several other events.
The celebration of both cities’ diversity also confronted a more challenging theme: how to absorb the latest influx of immigrants. People of Dutch descent now constitute a bare majority of Amsterdam’s population.
Most immigrants are from Morocco and Turkey, many of them guest workers who arrived decades ago and never left. Their children attend classes in what are commonly referred to as “black schools” — and schools in which children of Dutch heritage predominate are known as “white schools.” Learning the Dutch language is a requirement for citizenship and for receiving a work permit.
Eric ten Hulsen, principal of the Calvijn met Junior College, a vocational secondary school where 80 percent of the students are Muslim, said, however: “You don’t see Muslims; you see Dutch kids.”
Still, as Mayor Cohen explained, “the Dutch have difficulty describing what makes them Dutch,” and that ambiguity is even more true for immigrants and their children. “When they go back to Morocco, they feel Dutch,” he said.
“We are admiring the easy way in which immigrants in New York become part of New York and the United States,” Mayor Cohen said. “Here we have the impression it takes more time.”
How long until people of Dutch heritage consider the newcomers and their families Dutch? “It takes some generations,” Mr. Cohen said, “but it will be the case.”
Houda Riffi teaches English at Mr. ten Hulsen’s school. Her parents are from Morocco. Five years ago, she began wearing a head scarf not as a political statement, she said, but because she believed her religion required it. She describes herself culturally as “somewhere in the middle area,” but flatly predicts that her children “will be more Dutch than me.”
Dutch heritage and pride in Hudson (an English navigator presciently hired by the Dutch) was much in evidence last week. But until then, had most of the students ever heard of Henry Hudson? Given all the hoopla, Mr. ten Hulsen said, “they have now.”

New York Hate Crime

New York Times, December 8, 2008

Attack on Ecuadorean Brothers Investigated as Hate Crime
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
The two brothers from Ecuador had attended a church party and had stopped at a bar afterward. They may have been a bit tipsy as they walked home in the dead of night, arm-in-arm, leaning close to each other, a common tableau of men in Latino cultures, but one easily misinterpreted by the biased mind.
Suddenly a car drew up. It was 3:30 a.m. Sunday, and the intersection of Bushwick Avenue and Kossuth Place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a half-block from the brothers’ apartment, was nearly deserted — but not quite. Witnesses, the police said, heard some of what happened next.
Three men came out of the car shouting at the brothers, Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay — something ugly, anti-gay and anti-Latino. Vulgarisms against Hispanics and gay men were heard by witnesses, the police said. One man approached Jose Sucuzhanay, 31, the owner of a real estate agency who has been in New York a decade, and broke a beer bottle over the back of his head. He went down hard.
Romel Sucuzhanay, 38, who is visiting from Ecuador on a two-month visa, bounded over a parked car and ran as the man with the broken bottle came at him. A distance away, he looked back and saw a second assailant beating his prone brother with an aluminum baseball bat, striking him repeatedly on the head and body. The man with the broken bottle turned back and joined the beating and kicking.
“They used a baseball bat,” said Diego Sucuzhanay, another brother. “I guess the goal was to kill him.”
At least five calls were made to 911. As police sirens wailed in the distance, the assailants, described only as black men by the police, jumped into their maroon or red-orange Honda sport utility vehicle and sped away. Jose Sucuzhanay was listed on Monday in very critical condition at Elmhurst Hospital Center, where he was on life support systems and in a coma after an operation for skull fractures and extensive brain damage.
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As word of the ferocious attack spread on Monday, an outpouring of anger and protest swept the city, from members of the City Council, the State Legislature and Congress; from religious, labor and civil rights organizations; from Latino and gay groups; and from the Ecuadorean and Hispanic communities.
“This won’t be tolerated,” Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, said at a news conference on the steps of City Hall that drew dozens of public officials and leaders of civil rights groups. “We cannot and we will not let hate go unchecked in our city.”
The condemnations were amplified by Council members Diana Reyna, Rosie Mendez, Melissa Mark-Viverito, G. Oliver Koppell, David Yassky, Miguel Martinez, Gale A. Brewer, Daniel R. Garodnick, David I. Weprin and Letitia James; by Representative Nydia M. Valazquez, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, State Senator Tom Duane, Assemblywoman Carmen E. Arroyo, officials of the New York City Central Labor Council, the NYC Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, and by Jewish, Catholic and Protestant leaders.
A spokesman for Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, said the prosecutor was “shocked and appalled by this senseless, bigoted, brutal act,” and vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Because of the antigay and anti-Latino epithets shouted by the assailants, the police said they were investigating the case as a hate crime.
“Once more, we hear hate crimes,” said Carlos Zamora, president of the Ecuadorean Civil Center of New York. He recalled the fatal stabbing of Marcelo Lucero, a 37-year-old Ecuadorean, in Patchogue, N.Y., on Nov. 8, in an attack by seven teenage boys who said they had driven around looking for Latinos to beat up. Seven youths have been arrested in that case and have pleaded not guilty to various charges.
The victim, Jose Osvaldo Sucuzhanay, the co-owner of Open Realty International, a real estate agency in Bushwick, was described by family members as a gentle, generous man, a father of two children who live with his parents in Azogues, Ecuador, his native town. He lives on Kossuth Place, in a building that is also home to his brother Diego and a sister, Blanca Naranjo. The victim’s girlfriend, Amada, arrived about six months ago and has been staying with Mr. Sucuzhanay.
Diego Sucuzhanay said that his brother, one of 12 siblings, came to New York 10 years ago “because there were job opportunities.” He said Jose worked as a restaurant waiter for seven years, and founded his real estate agency several years ago. “He helped this community,” he said. “He loved Bushwick.”
On Saturday night, Diego Sucuzhanay said, Jose and Romel, who had been staying with Jose, went to a party at St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church on Linden Street at St. Nicholas Avenue in Bushwick, a neighborhood with a large Ecuadorean community, and later had dinner at a restaurant and then drinks at La Vega, a bar at 1260 Myrtle Avenue, near Cedar Street, five blocks from the victim’s home.
They left the bar before 3:30 a.m., said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, and were walking arm-in-arm. Despite the cold, the men were dressed lightly: Romel wore a tank top and Jose was wearing a T-shirt. One or both may have had a jacket slung over their shoulders, officials said.
They reached the intersection of Bushwick and Kossuth as the assailant’s car drew up at a stoplight. As the driver and two other men got out, Romel Sucuzhanay and another witness heard the shouted slurs. Romel Sucuzhanay, who was not seriously injured, had a cellphone but did not know the number for calling the police. He shouted to the attackers that he was calling the police.
One of those who called 911, Hiram Nieves, a retired store owner, said that he and his wife heard loud noises in the street.
“We heard bang, bang, bang,” as Mr. Sucuzhanay was being pounded with the bat, “and people were running from one side to the other,” he said. After the attack, he said, he saw one of the men throw something into the S.U.V. and get in with the others. The victim, he said, “was laying there, he wasn’t moving.”
Then a lot of people emerged from their homes on Kossuth Place, Mr. Nieves said, moving around the man lying in the street.
Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, David W. Chen, Kareem Fahim, Ann Farmer, Karen Zraick.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 11, 2008
An article on Tuesday about an attack on two Ecuadorean brothers in Brooklyn that is being investigated as a hate crime misspelled the given name of a city councilwoman who condemned the attack and the given name of another Ecuadorean immigrant who was fatally stabbed last month on Long Island in what prosecutors say was also a hate crime. The councilwoman is Melissa Mark-Viverito, not Merlissa, and the Long Island victim was Marcelo Lucero, not Marcello.


New York Post February 27, 2009
The NYPD is hoping to get the last laugh in the case of a savage anti-gay hate crime.
An image from a chilling video released yesterday shows a Bronx man giggling to his heart's content - just 19 minutes after he allegedly beat a man to death with a baseball bat.
Keith Phoenix, 28, was all smiles as he pulled into a cash-toll lane at a Triborough Bridge tollbooth on Dec. 7 after he beat Ecuadorian immigrant José Sucuzhanay to death on a Brooklyn street, police said.
As cops hunted Phoenix, his alleged accomplice, 25-year-old Hakim Scott, also of The Bronx, was charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime and held without bail.
The duo apparently believed that Sucuzhanay, 31, and his brother Romel - who were huddling as they walked home in the cold - were homosexual and yelled anti-gay slurs before setting upon them with a beer bottle and an aluminum baseball bat.
"We know that the arrest will not bring my brother back, but at least we know that justice is on its way," said Diego Sucuzhanay, another brother of the victim, at a rally with Ecuadorian diplomats and NYPD brass outside the Central American nation's consulate in Manhattan.
Diego said he delivered the good news about the arrest to his mother, who takes care of José's two children back in Ecuador. One of the kids has Down syndrome.
"Thank God we have someone behind bars, so he won't hurt anyone else," was her response, Diego said.
A team of detectives tracked down Scott, thanks to an eyewitness who jotted down the license plate of the car in which the attackers fled. Cops pulled vehicle records to determine that Phoenix's girlfriend was the car's owner.
Scott was collared near his home on East 161st Street and allegedly admitted to the attack - but denied they were looking to beat up Hispanics or gays.
He was identified in a lineup by an eyewitness, cops said.
"We're going to wait and see what the evidence is," Scott's lawyer, Craig Newman, told reporters at Brooklyn Criminal Court.
Citing the "extreme viciousness of this crime," Assistant DA Josh Hanshaft asked Judge Stephanie Zaro to lock Scott up without bail.
Meanwhile, friends of the victim, who worked as a real-estate agent to send money back home to his children, have set up a fund to aid his family.
Information is available by sending an e-mail message to mail@arrufatlaw.com.
douglas.montero@nypost.com

NYT: Love Potion

Anti-Love Drug May Prevent Foolishness
by JIM DATZ

In a recent issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding, Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.
The good news is that we might reverseengineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself. This is what humans have sought ever since Odysseus ordered his crew to tie him to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. It was clear that love was a dangerous disease.
Dr. Young conducted research with prairie voles at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. These mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals — less than 5 percent — who share humans’ propensity for monogamy. When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, createsurges forbonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex).
After Dr.Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married. In his Nature essay, Dr. Young speculates that human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events” that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother child bonding, which is stimulated in mammals by the release of oxytocin during labor, delivery and nursing.
Dr. Young noted that sexual foreplay and intercourse stimulate the same parts of a woman’s body that are involved in giving birth and nursing. This hormonal hypothesis would help explain a couple of differences between humans and less monogamous mammals: females’ desire to have sex even when they are not fertile, and males’ erotic fascination with breasts. More frequent sex and more attention to breasts, Dr. Young said, could help build long-term bonds through a “cocktail of ancient neuropeptides,” like the oxytocin released during foreplay or orgasm. Researchers have achieved similar results by squirting oxytocin into people’s nostrils. It seems to enhance feelings of trust and empathy.Dr.Young said there could be drugs that increase people’s urge to fall in love.
But a love vaccine that can prevent infatuation seems simpler and more practical. “If we give an oxytocin blocker to female voles, they become like 95 percent of other mammal species,” Dr. Young said. “They will not bond no matter how many times they mate with a male or how hard he tries to bond. They mate, it feels really good and they move on if another male comes along. If love is similarly biochemically based, you should in theory be able to suppress it in a similar way.”

NYT: Indulgences, again?

For Catholics, Heaven Moves a Step Closer
By PAUL VITELLO

The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”
In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.
The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of indulgences except in high school European history (where Martin Luther denounces the selling of them in 1517 and ignites the Protestant Reformation) simply makes their reintroduction more urgent among church leaders bent on restoring fading traditions of penance in what they see as a self-satisfied world.
“Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”
Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.
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The indulgence is among the less-noticed, less-disputed traditions to be restored. But with a thousand-year history and volumes of church law devoted to its intricacies, it is one of the most complicated to explain.
According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.
There are partial indulgences, which reduce purgatorial time by a certain number of days or years, and plenary indulgences, which eliminate all of it. You can get one for yourself, or for someone else, living or dead. You cannot buy one — the church outlawed the sale of indulgences in 1857 — but charitable contributions, combined with other acts, can help you earn one. There is a limit of one plenary indulgence per sinner per day.
It has no currency in the bad place.
“It’s what?” asked Marta de Alvarado, 34, a bank cashier in Manhattan, when told that indulgences were available this year at several churches in New York City. “I just don’t know anything about it,” she said, leaving St. Patrick’s Cathedral at lunchtime. “I’m going to look into it, though.”
The return of indulgences began with Pope John Paul II, who authorized bishops to offer them in 2000 as part of the celebration of the church’s third millennium. But the offers have increased markedly under his successor, Pope Benedict, who has made plenary indulgences part of church anniversary celebrations nine times in the last three years. The current offer is tied to the yearlong celebration of St. Paul, which continues through June.
Dioceses in the United States have responded with varying degrees of enthusiasm. This year’s offer has been energetically promoted in places like Washington, Pittsburgh, Portland, Ore., and Tulsa, Okla. It appeared prominently on the Web site of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which announced that any Catholic could receive an indulgence at any of six churches on any day, or at dozens more on specific days, by fulfilling the basic requirements: going to confession, receiving holy communion, saying a prayer for the pope and achieving “complete detachment from any inclination to sin.”
But just a few miles west, in the Archdiocese of New York, indulgences are available at only one church, and the archdiocesan Web site makes no mention of them. (Cardinal Edward M. Egan “encourages all people to receive the blessings of indulgences,” said his spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, who added that he was unaware that the offer was missing from the Web site, but would soon have it posted.)
The indulgences, experts said, tend to be advertised more openly in dioceses where the bishop is more traditionalist, or in places with fewer tensions between liberal and conservative Catholics.
“In our diocese, folks are just glad for any opportunity to do something Catholic,” said Mary Woodward, director of evangelization for the Diocese of Jackson, Miss., where only 3 percent of the population is Catholic. At church recently, she said, parishioners flocked to her for information about indulgences. “What all do I have to do again to get one of those?” she said they asked.
Even some priests admit that the rules are hard to grasp.
“It’s not that easy to explain to people who have never heard of it,” said the Rev. Gilbert Martinez, pastor of St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan, the designated site in the New York archdiocese for obtaining indulgences. “But it was interesting: I had a number of people come in and say, ‘Father, I haven’t been to confession in 20 years, but this’ ” — the availability of an indulgence — “ ‘made me think maybe it wasn’t too late.’ ”
Getting Catholics back into the confession booth, in fact, was one of the underlying motivations for reintroducing the indulgence. In a 2001 speech, Pope John Paul II described the newly reborn tradition as “a happy incentive” for confession.
“Confessions have been down for years and the church is very worried about it,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a Jesuit and former editor of the weekly Catholic magazine America. In a secularized culture of pop psychology and self-help, he said, “the church wants the idea of ‘personal sin’ back in the equation. Indulgences are a way of reminding people of the importance of penance.
“The good news is we’re not selling them anymore,” he added.
To remain in good standing, Catholics are required to confess their sins at least once a year. But in a survey last year by a research group at Georgetown University, three-quarters of Catholics said they went to confession less often or not at all.
Under the rules in the “Manual of Indulgences,” published by the Vatican, confession is a prerequisite for getting an indulgence.
Among liberal Catholic theologians, the return of the indulgence seems to be more of a curiosity than a cause for alarm. “Personally, I think we’re beyond the time when indulgences mean very much,” said the Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame who supports the ordination of women and the right of priests to marry. “It’s like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube of original thought. Most Catholics in this country, if you tell them they can get a plenary indulgence, will shrug their shoulders.”
One recent afternoon outside Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Forest Hills, Queens, two church volunteers disagreed on the relevance of indulgences for modern Catholics.
Octavia Andrade, 64, a retired secretary, laughed as she recalled a time when children would race through the rosary repeatedly to get as many indulgences as they could — usually in increments of 5 or 10 years — “as if we needed them, then.”
Still, she supports their reintroduction. “Anything old coming back, I’m in favor of it,” she said. “More fervor is a good thing.”
Karen Nassauer, 61, a retired hospital social worker who meets Mrs. Andrade almost daily for Mass, said she was baffled by the return to a practice she never quite understood to begin with.
“I mean, I’m not saying it is necessarily wrong,” she said. “But I had always figured they were going to let this fade into the background, to be honest. What does it mean to get ‘time off’ in Purgatory? What is ‘five years’ in terms of eternity?”
The latest indulgence offers de-emphasize the years-in-Purgatory formulations of old in favor of a less specific accounting, with more focus on ways in which people can help themselves — and one another — come to terms with sin.
“It’s more about praying for the benefit of others, doing good deeds, acts of charity,” said the Rev. Kieran Harrington, spokesman for the Brooklyn diocese.
After Catholics, the people most expert on the topic are probably Lutherans, whose church was born from the schism over indulgences and whose leaders have met regularly with Vatican officials since the 1960s in an effort to mend their differences.
“It has been something of a mystery to us as to why now,” said the Rev. Dr. Michael Root, dean of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, S.C., who has participated in those meetings. The renewal of indulgences, he said, has “not advanced” the dialogue.
“Our main problem has always been the question of quantifying God’s blessing,” Dr. Root said. Lutherans believe that divine forgiveness is a given, but not something people can influence.
But for Catholic leaders, most prominently the pope, the focus in recent years has been less on what Catholics have in common with other religious groups than on what sets them apart — including the half-forgotten mystery of the indulgence.
“It faded away with a lot of things in the church,” said Bishop DiMarzio of Brooklyn. “But it was never given up. It was always there. We just want to people to return to the ideas they used to know.”

NYT: Sexy Scandinavia??

OSLO — Despite its irresistible title, the show here called “Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?” turns out to be not quite as advertised. It’s as erotic as pickled herring. It’s a good question, though. What did happen to the image of Scandinavia as the frigid tundra of hot sex? The show is organized by the Office for Contemporary Art. Call it a virtuous mess, really an essay masquerading as an exhibition, unearthing a wealth of historic information. It tracks the roots of sexual liberation in Scandinavia to longstanding state-sponsored socialmovements, like women’s rights, sex education, health care and freedom of expression. Naturally, when the cold war arrived, the United States began casting an increasingly wary eye on this calm, liberal, peace-loving region of saunas, socialism and smorgasbord, neighboring the Soviet Union. In some countries just the idea of showing naked sculptures in public would invite a scandal. Here, Gustav Vigeland filled a park in the middle of Oslo during the early decades of the last century with hundreds of his sculptures of naked men and women, young and old. A “lack of moderation discernible on all fronts” is how Dwight D. Eisenhower assessed Sweden in 1960, seeing Scandinavia in general as a cautionary tale about extended social welfare. “We don’t sin any more than other people, but we probably sin more openly,” responded an irate Swedish baker, when approached by a journalist. Other Swedes noted that the Kinsey Reports, studies of sexual behavior done in the 1940s and 1950s, exposed an America no less fixated on sex than Scandinavia, only more furtive and hypocritical about it. But calling out American criticism of Scandinavia for its hypocrisy missed one point: to many Americans, procreation aside, sex was supposed to be naughty. Making it wholesome spoiled the fun. While Eisenhower was taking his swipe at Scandinavia, Federico Fellini was casting the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain in “La Dolce Vita.” Too bad the show doesn’t deign to examine sexploitation films like “The Seduction of Inga,” “Maid in Sweden” and “My Swedish Cousins,” which flooded the American marketplace. Now dimly recalled for the American censorship battle over its full-frontal male nudity, “I Am Curious (Yellow),” released in 1967, became the ultimate Scandinavian sex film. Its naked couplings were punctuated by ponderous disquisitions on Swedish labor law. How did Scandinavia turn from “Maid in Sweden” to Ikea, from the purveyor of earnest free love into the purveyor of affordable love seats? Berge Ragnar Furre, a Norwegian historian, theologian and a politician in the Socialist Left Party, now on the Nobel Committee, offered this thought: “You have toremember that here in Norway we have also had a strong tradition of liberal democracy that is against sexuality, so we are historically divided as a liberal society.” In other words, Norwegians have long split between being sexually liberated and puritanical, while remaining politically liberal in both cases. Havard Nilsen, a fellow historian specializing in Wilhelm Reich, the psychiatrist and sexologist, nodded. “There has always been a moral high-mindedness here about sexuality, connected, like the labor movement and teetotaling, with issues of reform and salvation,” he said. But already by the late 1970s, as Wencke Mühleisen, who teaches women’s studies at the University of Oslo, pointed out, “feminism in Norway turned against sexuality and toward the family, the winning political line cooperating with the state in looking for equality laws that meant a gradual cleansing of sexual promiscuity.” Culture generally became more globalized in the following years, along with patterns of social behavior, meaning that “while it was normal to see women here in the ’70s on the beach without a bikini top, now it is very seldom,” Ms. Mühleisen added. “The commercial ideal body has replaced the desexualized healthy body.” At the same time the role of the blueeyed blond in the sexual pantheon of pornographic commerce has been diluted by the Web and multiculturalism. Which is to say that Scandinavia has becomemore like everywhere else.

NYT: on Machu Picchu

Debate Rages in Peru: Was a Lost City Ever Lost?
By SIMON ROMERO
CUSCO, Peru — From the postcards bearing his swashbuckling, fedora-topped image to the luxury train emblazoned with his name that runs to the foot of the mountain redoubt of Machu Picchu, reminders are ubiquitous here of Hiram Bingham, the Yale explorer long credited with revealing the so-called Lost City of the Incas to the outside world almost a century ago.
But in recent months, a confluence of contrary events has threatened to upend the legacy of Mr. Bingham, the ostensible model for the fictional Indiana Jones. Peru has threatened legal action against Yale to recover thousands of artifacts Mr. Bingham removed. Evidence has emerged suggesting that a German adventurer may have arrived there first. And a dispute has been grinding on over who owned the site when Mr. Bingham supposedly discovered it.
Scholarly circles in Peru have been abuzz with revisionist debate. Not only may Mr. Bingham not be quite the heroic pioneer that he has been portrayed as, but it may well be that the Lost City of the Incas was never really lost after all.
The disputes over who discovered or rediscovered the sacred site have become so contentious they have been living up to the phrase “the fights of Machu Picchu,” coined by the American writer Daniel Buck in an allusion to a Pablo Neruda ode, “Heights of Machu Picchu.”
No one in the field of Machu Picchu studies seriously challenges the fact that Mr. Bingham arrived at the jungle-shrouded ruins in 1911, excavated and photographed them, and largely introduced them to the world.
But his claims have been challenged over time.
“Hiram Bingham never thought someone would doggedly investigate his path,” said Mariana Mould de Pease, a Peruvian historian.
Soon after Mr. Bingham led his expeditions to Machu Picchu, claims surfaced that a British missionary, Thomas Payne, and a German engineer, J. M. von Hassel, had beaten him there. And maps found by historians show references to Machu Picchu as early as 1874.
The latest challenge comes from recently publicized claims raising the possibility that a German adventurer arrived at Machu Picchu and looted it decades before Mr. Bingham even set foot in Peru. Records show that the German, Augusto R. Berns, purchased land in the 1860s opposite the Machu Picchu mountain, built a sawmill on his property and then tried to raise money from investors to plunder nearby Incan ruins, all with the blessing of Peru’s government.
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“The Berns information is a matter that has to be investigated further,” said Jorge Flores Ochoa, a prominent Peruvian anthropologist. “Hiram Bingham painted himself as a great explorer who ventured to the ends of the Earth, but that was a fantasy. The truth is that others, perhaps many others, arrived at Machu Picchu long before he did.”
Mr. Berns, an engineer, went to Peru to work on the Southern Peruvian Railway. An article this year in the magazine South American Explorer by Paolo Greer, an Alaska-based cartographer, offered additional detail on Mr. Berns, showing how he stopped cutting railroad ties on his property in the 1880s and started trying to lure investors into ventures for prospecting the area for gold and silver.
“Berns’s mining claims proved worthless,” Mr. Greer said in an e-mail message. “However, he spent years purposely searching for Inca sites, employing local guides who were intimate with the area.”
Moreover, some scholars say, Mr. Bingham may have known about Mr. Berns’s activities. Ms. Mould de Pease said she found in Yale’s own archives an 1887 Peruvian government document authorizing Mr. Berns to remove treasure from areas that may have included Machu Picchu. She reported the find in a 2003 book.
“If this document was in Bingham’s own papers, then he knew that Berns could have arrived there first,” she said.
Others scoff at the possibility that Mr. Berns set foot on Machu Picchu, pointing to discrepancies in the richly worded prospectuses that he sent out to investors. In one document Mr. Berns referred to an “ancient gold-washing apparatus” called “llamajcansha,” which “in the ancient Indian languages, means ‘gold yard.’ ”
“It is unlikely that readers of his prospectus in the United States spoke Quechua,” Mr. Buck wrote in an essay published in the Lima newspaper La República, referring to the indigenous language spoken in this part of Peru. “Otherwise they would have figured out that llamajcansha meant ‘llama yard.’ ”
Mr. Buck added, “Berns was selling a load of llama dung.”
Skeptics also say that no substantive proof has emerged that Mr. Berns ever spirited away artifacts from Machu Picchu.
Meanwhile, in an effort to assert greater control over its cultural heritage, Peru’s government said last month that it would take legal action against Yale in an effort to secure the return of thousands of artifacts Mr. Bingham took to the university. Peru claims the artifacts had been lent to Yale and therefore should have been returned. The threat of legal action is an abrupt turnaround from a recent preliminary understanding between Yale and Peru that appeared to put the parties on the road to resolving the dispute.
Both sides in the case have seized on the revelations about Mr. Berns as supporting evidence.
An aide to Cecilia Bákula, director of the National Institute of Culture in Lima, which manages the Machu Picchu site, said she was unavailable for comment. But in the view of Ms. Mould de Pease, the historian, the authorization given to Mr. Berns shows that Peru had sovereignty over Machu Picchu before Mr. Bingham arrived there.
For Yale, revelations that an earlier adventurer had designs on Incan ruins may reinforce its view that the items removed by Mr. Bingham are neither unique treasures nor critically important artifacts. “It is quite possible that all the treasures were removed by the German, Augusto Berns, many years before Bingham arrived,” said R. Scott Greathead, a lawyer representing Yale.
Complicating matters further, property records indicate that tracts of land including Machu Picchu were repeatedly bought and sold by families in the Cusco area before Mr. Bingham arrived.
“My great-grandfather, Mariano Ignacio Ferro, owned Machu Picchu when Hiram Bingham claimed to have discovered it, and even helped the American find his way there,” said Roxana Abrill Nuñez, a museum curator in Cusco who is waging a high-profile legal battle to be compensated for her family’s loss of Machu Picchu. She claims that the state expropriated the site from her family without payment.
For others here in Cusco, the actions of a German once forgotten to history offer insight into a city that may have been lost and found repeatedly since the Incas abandoned it, even if it took Mr. Bingham’s work to lodge it in the public imagination.
“All I know is that anything was possible in the turbulent years before Bingham made it to Machu Picchu, with others probably arriving even before this German,” said David Ugarte Vega, an anthropologist at the National University of San Antonio Abad in Cusco.
“What is certain is that the image of Bingham is at last being challenged,” Mr. Ugarte Vega said, “while the descendants of those great builders who assembled Machu Picchu are working as porters for the newest wave of travelers who come to see the site from afar.”

NYT: The Dark ages at the Met

Art Review | 'Choir of Angels'
Illuminating the Dark Ages
By ROBERTA SMITH
Of the three great artistic histories that extend for many centuries, and galleries, from the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Byzantine-Medieval epic is the most discreet. The Egyptian and the Greek and Roman wings are signaled by highly visible statues and tombs that start waving hello almost before you clear security. In contrast, the story of art starting in Bronze-Age Europe lies mostly out of sight in galleries that lie beside and behind the Grand Staircase.
These days, if you stand in the right spot in the Great Hall and look down the broad corridor gallery on the right of the stairs, the unmistakable blaze of a tall, slim stained-glass window from 13th-century France glows like a beacon from about a half a football field away. With wattage like that, who can resist medieval art?
The window is one of many new displays in the Met’s deliriously dense, newly restored and reinstalled Gallery for Western European Medieval Art from 1050 to 1300. A fairly extreme makeover, this renovation began with a boldly geometric floor of red slate and black and white marble that duplicates the one that was in place when the Met opened its first building in 1895. The walls are lined with spare new cherry wood vitrines based on ones used by J. P. Morgan, one of the Met’s chief medieval-art patrons. His name appears frequently among the labels for the works inside: the enamels, ivories, bejeweled book covers and metalwork from all over Europe. And above and beyond the vitrines, carved stone sculptures, capitals, reliefs, crucifixes and stained-glass windows continue almost to the ceiling.
This renovation has been accompanied by smaller adjustments and changes in adjacent galleries. The displays in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art, which opened in 2000 beside and behind the stairs, have been refined to improve the chronological flow. The Medieval Sculpture Hall, which lies just beyond the new medieval space — where the Met’s popular Christmas tree resides at this time of year — has been startlingly improved with nothing more than new lighting and fresh paint. At the moment the sculpture hall also contains “Choirs of Angels: Italian Painting and Choir Books 1300-1500,” a sumptuous little holiday show that will last into the spring.
In all this spiffing up, little-seen works have emerged from storage; others have come from galleries elsewhere in the museum. A few have arrived from the Cloisters, the Met’s magnificent medieval assemblage in Washington Heights.
These include a relief of the Nativity and Annunciation that was never uncrated after its arrival in the 1940s, and the 12th-century Italian ciborium, or altar canopy, that the Met has owned since 1909. Made from limestone with hardstone and glass inlay, it has spent the last 60 years at the Cloisters. Now it stands at the center of the new medieval gallery like a walk-through crown.
New gifts and loans add substance and delight. Mr. and Mrs. Jaharis are the chief donors of an early-12th-century Byzantine Lectionary, a rare liturgical manuscript believed to have been made for the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary is lending a monumental Hebrew prayer book with outsize calligraphy that has a Persian snap.

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Nearby is an enormous cross, probably from 12th-century Armenia and on loan from the History Museum of Armenia in Yerevan, that country’s capital. Carved in pumicelike basalt, it teems with reliefs suggesting intricate, knotted strap work (or macramé) in at least five patterns. Don’t miss the face of the prophet Matthew peering through a slot beneath the cross as if manning the door at a speakeasy.
The medieval art gallery is the first major renovation of any medieval gallery at the Met in more than half a century — eons, even in the slow-motion time of museums. Even discounting the intoxication of the new, it is hard to think of another gallery in the museum — at least of Western art — where there is more going on historically and aesthetically and on such an even playing field in terms of art mediums.
The brimming, light-flooded presentation has been orchestrated by Peter Barnet, curator in chief of the museum’s medieval art department and the Cloisters, his curators and the museum’s designers. They seem to have wanted to mount a final assault on the notion of the medieval period as backward, antiquated or benighted. This misconception started in the full-of-itself Renaissance, which condescendingly christened the previous era the Dark or Middle Ages. Medieval, as the Enlightenment tagged it, only sharpened the bite.
With an effect that is at once artistic, archaeological and devotional, this gallery recasts medieval art as a mammoth, busy and fast-moving project translating the Holy Scriptures into visual form, making them accessible to largely illiterate populations. It resulted in a free-for-all of constant themes and boundless variations. The stories recur again and again: Jonah and the Whale, Adam and Eve, the Annunciation, the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion, the Entombment. (If your knowledge of the Bible is scant, medieval art is an excellent makeup option.)
But there is nothing fixed about the techniques, styles and materials of medieval art. Painting had not yet established its dominance; every medium had its storytelling role. Classicism was not yet the Ideal, but only one of many influences, which included barbaric ornamentation and Persian motifs. And space, not yet locked into one-point perspective, was subject to individual skill and imagination, regardless of medium; ingenious stabs at it abounded.
For an idea of monastic productivity, immerse yourself in the corner devoted to the champlevé enamel crucifixes, reliquaries, candlesticks and much else that issued from the Grandmont monastery near Limoges, France, and set the European standard. For quickness of evolution from the Romanesque to the Gothic phases of medieval art, start with a late-12th-century Spanish-stone capital of Samson fighting the lion, which has the jutting, angular forms of early Modernism. Compare it with “The Betrayal and Arrest of Jesus,” a large relief of strikingly naturalistic struggling figures made in France less than a century later.
In one vitrine a line of small Virgins, mostly with Child, and French, in wood, ivory or gilt and enamel copper, recapitulate the same transition. Some things attract by sheer opulence, like the two gilded-silver Spanish book covers with cabochon jewels and ivory crucifixes, which belong to a bookbinding tradition that, coincidentally, is traced up to the present in an exhibition now on view at the Morgan Library. Other pieces draw you with unexpected resonances. A vitrine devoted entirely to Southern Italian ivories includes a small relief of Christ creating the animals that is surely the DNA strand for Edward Hicks’s many “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings.
In the Medieval Sculpture Hall, the “Choir of Angels” show provides a rare glimpse of gemlike illuminations that were once part of books of religious music and used daily; their ornate initials would adorn a composition’s opening page. Most were cut from these pages long ago, which is why they are often referred to as cuttings. Together they present a thumbnail history of one of the most exciting periods in Italian painting, ranging, for example, from a letter inset with a rendering of the battle of the Maccabees against a nearly vertical pink and red Sienese landscape, to one that contains a suavely detailed, spatially correct scene of Joseph being sold into slavery.
The initials are sometimes a little hard to read. They frequently have an animalist or at least vegetal life of their own and may be further distorted in their roles as proscenium stages. A double-peaked initial containing stacked scenes of Easter is not an M but a stretched A. Sometimes, but not always, the letters relate to the chief characters, as with the elongated P that frames a heart-rending depiction of the martyrdom of St. Peter in rich, dark browns and blues that depart from the generally cheery sunshine palette of these works.
The stories told by the choir book illuminations often echo in the seven large South Netherlandish tapestries that have hung in the sculpture hall since who knows when. The effect of these works under new lighting and against blue-gray walls can be summed up in two words: absolutely spectacular. I could spend a week in front of the early-15th-century Annunciation (first on the left), with its bright, quiltlike tile floor; hallucinatory plant life; finely feathered angel; and, in the foreground, sturdy two-handled blue-and-white jug that most likely came from Italy or Spain.
Mr. Barnet and his team are not quite finished. Over the next month or two they will complete the reinstallation of the two Medieval Treasury galleries that lead from the sculpture hall toward the American Wing. It will be more tweaking than renovation from the floor up, but it will include facing walls inset with stained-glass windows that visitors will pass between, as through a gantlet of color and light.
As part of the Met’s original, central structure, the new Medieval Art gallery has always been a heavily trafficked intersection. It shouldn’t really work as a gallery of sacred art and yet it does. Its many small objects draw you close, away from the bustle, into a realm where craft, faith and narrative were one. The magic of this fusion is alive and well.
“Choir of Angels: Painting in Italian Choir Books, 1300-1500” is on view through April 12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. The Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Byzantine Art and the Gallery for Western European Art from 1050 to 1300 will be open indefinitely.