Paralipomena (1)

Aha!

At last I found out why this blog was not coming up. The “theme” or template that it was using has been deleted. Pesky that no-one told me despite various enquiries. I had to figure it out myself by fiddling around.

While this blog was off air, however, I got impatient and transferred the more recent posts to a blogspot host HERE.

I will continue with the blogspot site now but may come back here later.

Does Sir Alan Ayckbourn actually enjoy the theatre? The fact is, the great man of the British stage, the first playwright to be knighted after Terence Rattigan, can’t stand most of it. It makes him cringe. “It’s a love-hate thing,” he says. “I love that moment when a show is firing on all cylinders in a room full of people who are having a great time. But the rest of it is really irritating. Come on … why are we sitting in the dark? We all know it’s only a play - so get on with it! I hate what Stephen Daldry once called ‘burglar’s theatre’ - you know, suddenly everything goes dark and people in black called stage hands creep on and steal vases and things. If you are going to ask people to be stuck in the dark you’ve got to surprise them. I try to make my plays events, not plays, with lots of things happening.” There’s a trait here. Ayckbourn’s father, Horace, disliked music and thought Beethoven was rubbish - a drawback for the first violinist of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Young Ayckbourn ruled the West End by writing the sort of plays he wanted to see. In one year alone (1975) he had five plays on in London simultaneously. He was - and still is - a purveyor of laughter to the middle classes, who found themselves reflected, judged and found wanting in plays full of broken hearts and malfunctioning household gadgets.

His experimental plays (The Norman Conquests was three plays all set on the same weekend seen from three different parts of the house; Intimate Exchanges has 16 plot variants) were as daring as they were commercially successful. His Noël Coward-like grip on the public taste made him a fortune, much of which he ploughed back into his own theatre - his train set, he called it - on the Yorkshire coast, where he first went in 1957.

He’s still there, working as a playwright and artistic director (unsalaried by choice) of the Stephen Joseph Theatre. Ayckbourn, twice as prolific as Shakespeare, will be 70 in April. He was lucky to make 69 after a serious stroke two years ago, which has slowed him up.

“I have yet to write my stroke play but I dare say it will come,” he says. On the other hand, death is at the front of his mind. “When you get older, you go to a few funerals. You don’t know what to say to the woman - and it’s usually a woman. You start this awful business, ‘He was a terrific bloke’, and they look at you as if saying, ‘Yes, yes, get it over with’. My new play is about a woman who is just coming to terms with the death of her husband, and all her family are doing the crying on her behalf.”

Lady Ayckbourn (the former actress Heather Stoney) has her work cut out with his recuperation and his son (by his first marriage) and grandchildren living in the flat upstairs in their house in Scarborough’s Old Town. In hospital he took the decision to retire from running the theatre he’s been the head of since 1972.

“Before the stroke I had a blithe confidence in immortality - I thought, ‘Maybe He’ll miss me out’. I had cut back on my directing by not doing other people’s plays, which I found totally exhausting because of the responsibility. So I have now given up the administering and the planning and what I am left with is directing my own plays and writing them. It’s about as much as I can cope with”.

Next spring, the director Chris Monks will take over the running of the Stephen Joseph Theatre (formerly the Library Theatre). He has already asked Ayckbourn for a new play for 2009.

In the meantime another new Ayckbourn opens this week. Life and Beth - with Liza Goddard and Susie Blake - is about a widow facing her first Christmas alone. “It’s all about taking the famous Philip Larkin text, ‘They f*** you up, your mum and dad’ - the disastrous effect parents have on their children and sometimes the other way round. I describe it as my Blithe Spirit. It’s still quite sad. You can’t write a play about a recently widowed woman at Christmas without it getting sad.”

His own childhood was a lonely business after his father left his mother for the orchestra’s second violinist when Ayckbourn was young. His ciggie-toting, magazine-journalist mother took up with a bank manager - another unsatisfactory relationship which Ayckbourn has parlayed into umpteen plays.

Two things about this new play are typically Ayckbournian. Ticket prices are affordable, a belief instilled in him by his mentor Stephen Joseph in whose honour he renamed the in-the-round theatre and whose house he bought. Secondly, he writes superb parts for actresses. His plays are full of women: vivid, memorable, victimised. As so often in Ayckbourn, the laughter conceals the seriousness of the content.

He’s been in Scarborough so long people think of him as local. He’s not - he’s a southerner who went from Haileybury public school straight into theatre to meet girls. At a tender age he married and had two boys. He split from his first wife after ten years but didn’t divorce her for another 30, when he tied the knot in 1997 with Stoney.

“I came to Scarborough in 1957 as a sprog assistant stage manager playing small parts. I remember I got off the train packed with holidaymakers and this bracing air and smell of chips. I said, ‘Wow!’ Because I was an inland child living in north Sussex, one of the great treats as a child was a trip to the seaside - so, dear reader, I bought the sweet shop. I came to the seaside and stayed. I thought, ‘This can’t get better’.”

His old hits never go away. The Norman Conquests will be staged at the Old Vic in September. The pattern was for years that his new plays would go from Scarborough straight to the West End. Recently, however, he has grown disillusioned, refusing to allow his new plays into London because of the way a transfer a few years back was mangled.

“I know I sound blimpish but I do feel the straight play is a doomed species. And what I get really angry about is the terrible starvation of the theatre out of London. You can see it in insidious ways. The death of regional work is very serious. You pick up the programme of the average rep company and you find no individual voice - it’s all co-productions with other theatres. Or it’s ‘devised’ work, and most of that is rubbish.”

One day the Stephen Joseph Theatre will have to cope without Ayckbourn. For the time being, though, the house writer has no intention of stopping work.

“Two things I live for. One is being in a rehearsal room. The other is writing a new play. As soon as a new play comes out there’s a terrible moment of post-partum emptiness - and then another idea comes in, sometimes two or three. I just can’t imagine being alive without a play in me somewhere,” he says, getting up, pregnant with play No 72, his Christmas show.

Life and Beth opens at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough (01723 370541), tomorrow. The Norman Conquests trilogy previews from Sept 11 at the Old Vic, SE1 (0870 0606628) and opens on Oct 6

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article4358982.ece

Art deco was a strange phenomenon. In the grand history of 20th-century art, it has generally been assigned a fairly lowly place. None of its leading figures are very famous, in the way that Picasso or Jackson Pollock are famous. It produced no magisterial paintings. And yet art deco represents something important that we lack today: an ambitious and serious artistic style whose home ground is the daily life of mainstream society.

The art deco style flourished from about 1910 to the outbreak of World War II. It gets its name from a vast exhibition held in Paris in 1925, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels. The long French title was later reduced to the appealing diminutive: art deco. Conveniently, this name clicked with the big style that came just before: art nouveau. Nouveau was curving and slender and a little precious. Deco was chunky, solid and populist.

The perfect nouveau moment would be a young man with long hair and a huge bow tie, drinking tea from a tiny Japanese cup and writing a poem to a butterfly. The perfect deco moment is a woman with short hair, mixing a martini at a chrome-plated home bar while listening to a jazz band on the radio, only to be interrupted by her maid saying she is wanted on the telephone.

The great Paris exhibition wasn’t in the least like a modern biennale devoted to the latest quirks and turns of the art world; it was more like a world trade fair. The 1920s saw the dawn of mass production and consumerism. It was the age of Ford production lines; the vast halls of department stores were still new and exciting. The 1925 exhibition was devoted to showing objects that would sell and that could at the same time aspire to artistic meaning.

Art deco brings together a range of concerns that we don’t usually associate with art movements: decorative and industrial arts. This, and the fact that its central event was a trade fair, a kind of stimulus to world shopping, tells us a great deal about the phenomenon.

It was connected to everyday life: its representative objects were clothes, chairs, lamps and cocktail shakers. The show at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne includes surely the most stylish heating radiators ever created: gleaming chrome and fabulous to look at when not in use. I was particularly impressed by a sea-green Bakelite radio with a lightly classical front, and a chrome-plated record player. These are extremely charming. They take the little objects of life and connect them, visually and sensually, with our more noble aspirations.

The grandest objects of art deco were the skyscrapers of Manhattan, especially the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. They sought to contain the vastness of the constructions within the visual ambitions of classical style: the Empire State Building is organised (at the lower and higher levels) as a sequence of plain temple facades. Art deco is the ideal office style: the utopia of professional duties. It looks smart and efficient; it has understated luxurious qualities; it is gleaming and geometrically pure. You need to wear a suit and have short hair. Your heels click authoritatively along the polished stone floors of the lobbies and corridors.

These buildings remind us that art deco was often visually conservative. It took up all the modern conveniences — transport, office buildings, cinemas, hotels, dress, communications, swimming pools — and sought to make them elegant and refined. And a key strategy in this was to adopt and lightly modernise existing patterns of design.

A big influence was the refined middle-class German domestic tradition known as Biedermeier — a style of decoration, furniture making and, in fact, of living — that emphasised decency, comfort, simple classical motifs and pleasant, easy sociability. Art deco was a commercial style; even people who did not belong to the beau monde or the self-conscious avant-garde could buy art deco furniture in the leading high-street shops.

In the progressive narrative of art, art deco was rather embarrassing. This was happening after Marcel Duchamp and Dada, after Le Corbusier had built aggressively modernist buildings. Perhaps the best known designer from the period was Viennese craftsman Josef Hoffmann. His painted chairs and tables with little gold panels and simple elegant character are almost timeless. From the point of view of progressive art he should have known better. How could you paint white chairs with golden details when the cutting edge had already moved on?

But one might take the examples as teaching a reverse lesson: so much the worse for a progressive narrative of art history if it leads us to ignore so many lovely and worthwhile things.

One of the exhibits at the NGV that attracted most attention, on a busy Saturday, was some footage of the luxury French liner the Normandie (launched in 1932). The ship was a floating showcase of art deco. We see men in tailcoats and women in slender, shimmering gowns strolling about the cocktail bar. As we watched, one woman said aloud what I imagine a lot of us were thinking: “I was born in the wrong age.” It’s a longing for a more glamorous, elegant, smart and charming existence (rather than the desire to have lived through two world wars).

Is the exhibition a window on to another curious world, one that we cannot inhabit and in which we cannot participate? This is the fantasy of the art-historian as ethnographer: recording but not participating in the rituals of a vanished art deco tribe. The visitor can watch the film, but not be in it. The more radical and dangerous thought is to be loyal to the love. One may feel that the values of that era, as reflected in the objects, were in some respects finer and better than those of today.

The most poignant object is a poster advertising a new train, first run by the Victorian Railways on the Melbourne-Albury line in 1937. The poster carries the legend: Spirit of Progress (also presented by an illuminated sign on the rear of the train, which one could see as it raced away).

Today the slogan has a melancholy ring. The train that carried it is much more elegant and stylish than the trains we have had since. Its optimism was misplaced: it heralded the end, not the beginning, of progress.

An object as fine as the little Hoffmann table exists beyond time, as well as being an object originating at a specific time. It gives sense to John Keats’s dramatic claim: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

The finest achievements vault over their period boundaries; they have something elemental and perfect about them that can excite admiration and love even if one knows very little about the origins. There is some deeply appealing cutlery from 1925. It would be perfect to use today. Sometimes, we may feel the benefit of a little period information to get us going. But the worth of the object cannot be comprehended if one sees it only as belonging to its time.

Many artistic and intellectual movements aim at changing the world and yet are fundamentally marginal: they challenge and shock, but make no difference. Art deco did not aim to change the world and yet it touched and enriched the lives of millions.

What we could — and rather urgently need to — learn from art deco is that a large purpose of art is to beautify and give style to the ordinary conditions of life in modern societies. Art deco did not rail against the factories or social inequality or the political system. Which is not to say that artists making beautiful cutlery or a perfect radiator were indifferent to such large-scale social matters.

It’s just that they didn’t see any particular need to try to solve the problems of the world by chrome-plating a record player or by painting a picture, such as Tamara de Lempicka’s, of someone using a telephone (when that could still count as an exciting activity).

Exhibitions are very much governed by a set of scholarly art-historical assumptions. The most important official questions about a work of art are, first, how it came to be made at that time; and second, how did it fit into the evolving pattern of art?

Yet there are other more personal and perhaps more powerful questions that never seem to get raised. Why does this object matter to me now? What should you do if you love the art or style of the past more than you like the art or style of the present?

The point of encountering the art of the past is not so as to become well informed. Nor can it be as a way of understanding where we have come from. These are possible modes of curiosity, but they strike me as academic and intellectual. The real point, surely, is to find objects that speak intimately to one’s soul: that seem to know you better, and address you more engagingly, than more recent items.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24024030-16947,00.html

Some say that its 45 mysterious symbols are the words of a 4,000-year-old poem, or perhaps a sacred text. Others contest that they are a magical inscription, a piece of ancient music or the world’s oldest example of punctuation.

But now an American scholar believes that the markings on the Phaistos Disc, one of archaeology’s most famous unsolved mysteries, mean nothing at all — because the disc is a hoax.

Jerome Eisenberg, a specialist in faked ancient art, is claiming that the disc and its indecipherable text is not a relic dating from 1,700BC, but a forgery that has duped scholars since Luigi Pernier, an Italian archaeologist, “discovered” it in 1908 in the Minoan palace of Phaistos on Crete.

Pernier was desperate to impress his colleagues with a find of his own, according to Dr Eisenberg, and needed to unearth something that could outdo the discoveries made by Sir Arthur Evans, the renowned English archaeologist, and Federico Halbherr, a fellow Italian.

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He believes that Pernier’s solution was to create a “relic” with an untranslatable pictographic text. If it was a ruse, it worked. Evans was so excited that he published an analysis of Pernier’s findings. For the past century innumerable attempts have been made to decipher the disc. Archaeologists have tried linking them to ancient civilisations, from Greek to Egyptian.

Dr Eisenberg, who has conducted appraisals for the US Treasury Department and the J. Paul Getty Museum, highlighted the forger’s error in creating a terracotta “pancake” with a cleanly cut edge. Nor, he added, should it have been fired so perfectly. “Minoan clay tablets were not fired purposefully, only accidentally,” he said. “Pernier may not have realised this.”

Each side of the disc bears a bar composed of four or five dots which one scholar described as “the oldest example of the use of natural punctuation”.

Dr Eisenberg believes that it was added to lead scholars astray — “another oddity to puzzle them, and a common trick among forgers”. The Greek authorities have refused to give Dr Eisenberg permission to examine the disc outside its display case, arguing that it is too delicate to be moved.

His misgivings could be laid to rest by a thermoluminescence test — a standard scientific dating test — but the authorities had refused, he said. In Rome, this test cast doubt recently on the provenance of another iconic archeological object.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4318911.ece

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: Queen was ‘exquisite’ and I love the eccentric British
By Andrew Pierce
Last Updated: 9:06PM BST 11/07/2008
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, France’s First Lady, has described for the first time her admiration for the eccentric British and the “exquisite” Queen who spoke perfect French on her State visit to Britain.
In an interview to promote her new album Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy, who married President Nicolas Sarkozy only four weeks before the State visit in March, said that she took advice from the British embassy in Paris on how to behave.

Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy, 40, who had a whirlwind romance with the president, feared that she would not make the grade.

She thought that the British would be judgmental about her past life which had included a string of relationships with pop stars including Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger.

Her worse fears were confirmed when on the day she arrived a nude photograph from her previous life as a model was splashed over the front pages of two British newspapers. It was later auctioned by Christie’s for £46,000.

While Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy feared the photograph it might damage her husband in the political arena she never felt any regret as she said she had no shame over what she had done in the past.

But any fears over the reaction of the British were forgotten after the warm reception from the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall who met the French party at Heathrow Airport. They the escorted them to Windsor Castle where they were guests of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh.

The Duke showed the couple to their bedroom which he had explained had been the same room where his mother and grandmother had been born.

Despite the imposing regal surroundings the couple had felt at ease at all times because of the kindness of the Royal Family.

The First Lady had said that the “exquisite” Queen was everything she had imagined a Monarch would be. “Her intelligence, her perfect French - and she looked so well.”

The President, at one point, had asked the Queen if she ever felt tired. The Queen, in faultless French, replied that while she often did she would never let it show.

In the interview in the Sunday Times, Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy, whose style and dress sense won her rave reviews in France and Britain, had loved the British for their “eccentric” and traditional behaviour despite her initial misigivings before she arrived.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/2287048/Carla-Bruni-Sarkozy-Queen-was-’exquisite’-and-I-love-the-eccentric-British.html

By Paola Totaro

The gates outside Buckingham Palace are a delightful place to sit and people-watch. In summer and winter, in the rain or bright sunshine, tourists climb the railings like ivy over a stone wall. Young and old, monarchists and not, they clamber and peek and crane, cameras at the ready, just in case.

Last week, as the palace opened its gates for the investiture of 120 men and women on the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List, the heavens opened in typical London style. Hundreds of top hats and tails, silks and high heels, feathered hats and sequined fascinators, all heavy with water, soggy and limp.

Huddled under a patently inadequate umbrella at the palace’s north gate, three of us Aussies had been asked to wait for an escort who would take us into the palace courtyard for a promised post-ceremony press conference with Kylie Anne Minogue, OBE. Press and TV cameras were there already but when the royal media person arrived we were whisked past our bedraggled colleagues to the Queen’s ballroom. There, guests fanned themselves with their programs, seated stiffly on gilt-backed chairs upholstered in red-striped satin. Some chatted softly, others adopted a fabulously studied nonchalance. The enormous chandeliers shot shards of rainbow light onto the walls while aides in knickerbockers and tails ushered in even more guests, stopping to reassure the nervous and encourage the shy.

Like clockwork, at 11am, the Queen’s bodyguards arrived. As we passed them earlier, waiting outside with their horses and coach, I heard one whisper: “Kylie’s inside … that’ll be a sight for sore eyes.” The ballroom stood as Prince Charles entered the archway. His face and demeanour are so reassuringly familiar that it felt more like seeing an old friend arrive than a king in waiting.

And so began a very strange experience, one that I thought would arouse a reporter’s innate cynicism (and republican spirit) but which elicited a different, funny kind of affection I did not expect.

For close to two hours we observed Prince Charles close up as he sashed and pinned, gave out medals, shook hands, and even created a couple of new knights. Not once did he falter in this practised and choreographed centuries-old dance of congratulation and reward and genteel small talk. Every now and then he touched his cufflinks with one hand in a gesture that is so innately Prince Charles that it should be trademarked.

The people he rewarded were as varied in background, in achievement, in education and in class as the modern City of London itself. There were professors of medicine and bobbies, architects and former soldiers, ex-cabinet secretaries and veteran civil servants, retired diplomats and septuagenarian charity workers. There were community leaders from Pakistan, Muslim teachers, several veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. And of course, there was Kylie Minogue. What was striking was the humanity of the event: the genuine, almost childlike joy that these men and women displayed as they received their honour, watched by their children, their partners or like Minogue, by a proud mother and father. All had achieved in their lives and had been marked for reward.

The monarchy has outlived its role in our political system, there is no doubt. But a public thank you for a life well lived is a precious thing indeed. As God Save The Queen played and Prince Charles left the ballroom, I caught myself hoping that one day we might still get to hear God Save The King.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/a-princely-day-in-the-british-rain/2008/07/11/1215658131544.html

By TAMAR SNYDER

People often compare dating to interviewing for a job. In the Orthodox Jewish world, this notion is taken almost literally.

Upon returning from post-high-school studies in Israel, young Orthodox women (such as myself) meet with recruiters, commonly known as shadchanim (matchmakers). After determining whether the young woman wishes to marry a “learner” (a man studying full time in yeshiva), an “earner” (a professional) or a combination of the two, the shadchan collects the prospective bride’s “shidduch résumé,” detailing everything from education and career plans to dress size, height, parents’ occupations and synagogue memberships. The shadchan then approaches a suitable single man or, most likely, his parents — who add the woman to their son’s typically lengthy “list.”

Before agreeing to a noncommittal first date, the man’s parents begin a thorough background check that puts government security clearance to shame. Phoning references isn’t enough — of course they’ll say good things — so they cold-call other acquaintances of the potential bride, from camp counselors to college roommates. The questions they ask often border on the superficial: “Does she own a Netflix account?”; “Does she wear open-toed shoes?” (The correct response may vary depending on how Orthodox a woman the man is looking for.)

Just as the economy is headed to recession, the shidduch system is in crisis mode. Or so the rabbis moan, noting the surplus of women eager to marry and the corresponding shortfall in the quality and quantity of available Jewish men. It’s not that there are more Orthodox women than men out there; experts instead attribute the shortage to the broader sociological trend of postponing marriage, which works to the disadvantage of women looking for spouses their own age or just a few years older. Men who are 30 will date women as young as 18 and may turn their noses up at dating any woman past the age of 25. The 20% or 30% of women who don’t get hitched right away begin to worry they’ll be left out in the cold for good.

Sensing this shift of power, mothers of sons who remain in the matchmaking system increase their demands: Any prospective daughter-in-law must be a size two, or a “learner” son must be supported indefinitely by the girl’s parents. For men, “it’s a buyer’s market,” says Michael Salamon, a psychologist and author of “The Shidduch Crisis: Causes and Cures” (2008). “And the pressures of dating are creating all kinds of social problems, such as eating disorders and anxiety disorders. It’s frightening.”

I used to shrug off this talk. Genocide in Darfur is a crisis; being single at 23 is not. But the communal pressure is hard to ignore. Orthodox Judaism, like most traditional faiths, is geared to families; singles lack a definitive role.

Then there’s what social worker Shaya Ostrov calls the “popcorn effect.” During the first two to three years following high-school graduation, 70% to 80% of Orthodox women get married; weddings then peter off. “The system works for a very limited period of time,” says Mr. Ostrov, the author of “The Inner Circle: Seven Gates to Marriage.” Friends of mine compare dating to musical chairs; nobody wants to end up an “old maid,” and so they get engaged, hoping doubts will prove unfounded. “Young women,” notes Sylvia Barack Fishman, professor of contemporary Jewish life at Brandeis University, “are often made to feel that they are damaged goods if they have not married — and married well — by their early 20s.”

Part of the problem is the increased number of “serial daters” who, as Ms. Fishman says, are “shopping for perfection.” When Mr. Ostrov runs workshops, he asks male participants in their early 30s how many girls they have dated. “One hundred seventy-five is not an unusual number,” he says. “Dating” in these cases usually ends after just one or two meetings with each girl.

Many men admit that their refusal to commit themselves to a woman stems from fear of making a mistake. The only thing worse than being an “older single” male, it seems, is being a 25-year-old divorcé with two children. It is women, though, who are usually more stigmatized by a split. Indeed, one big problem in the Orthodox community is the “Post-Shidduch Crisis.”

“We’re seeing more and more recently married, young Orthodox Jews getting divorced,” says Mr. Salamon, who estimates that the divorce rate among the Orthodox has risen to an alarming 30% in the past five to 10 years. (Hard data are difficult to come by, Mr. Salamon says, because the Orthodox shun research studies for fear of harming their own or their children’s shidduchim.)

The core of the problem is that young marrieds don’t know how to accommodate each other, says Mr. Salamon. And singles need to start asking the right questions. “Family history has nothing to do with whether you’ll make a good husband or wife,” he says. The rigid, interview-style questioning is only wreaking havoc: “They’re looking for some sort of guarantee. But who can guarantee happiness?”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121573322186344195.html

Poor farming practices in the 3rd world is an old, old story - which is why most agricultural production for export is in the developed world — though China is learning fast. Good to see that someone is trying to help the African farmers but moving the crop to areas in the 1st world and to China is what is most likely to happen rather than a shortage developing. Tropical Australia already grows good coffee and the scope for expanding that to cocoa is large. Australia’s high rainfall areas are greatly underused at the moment because of protectionism in other countries

“I think that in 20 years chocolate will be like caviar,” says John Mason, executive director and founder of the Ghana-based Nature Conservation Research Council (NCRC). “It will become so rare and so expensive that the average Joe just won’t be able to afford it.”

The prospect of a future without a ready supply of chocolate is not a pleasant thought for anyone with a sweet tooth, but it’s an even more terrifying prospect for producer countries that depend on cocoa beans for a huge portion of their GDP. Yields are declining all across the cocoa plantations of West Africa, where two thirds of the world’s supply is grown, as soils are degraded and the area able to support the crop retreats, according to Mason.

“The way we farm is just not sustainable,” he says. “I’m afraid by the time we wake up to that fact it will be too late. I’ve worked in Ghana for 25 years and I can show you huge areas that can no longer support a crop.” The problem is that cocoa is naturally a rainforest plant that grows in shady conditions surrounded by a high biodiversity, but recently hybrid varieties have been grown on cleared land as mono-cultures and in full sun. While this will give higher short term yields, the soil quickly becomes degraded and the lifespan of plants can be cut from 75 or 100 years, to 30 or less. When the trees die and the land is exhausted the farmers must move on and clear more rainforest to plant cocoa.

But the looming decline of West African cocoa is not only a problem for farmers and chocolate producers - Cadbury sources 100 percent of the beans they use for UK chocolate production from Ghana - environmentalists are increasingly concerned about the destruction of the rainforest for short-term gain. The forest is not only an important habitat in its own right, but its removal is also affecting the microclimate and changing rainfall patterns, compounding the negative effects of global warning, according to the NCRC.

But a new project seems to show that farmers, environmentalists and multinationals can find strength in their common cause. “They were worried about the future, and we were worried about biodiversity,” says Dave Hillyard, Director of Program Operations for the international environmental charity Earthwatch. “We were coming together at the same point from different directions.” In response to these concerns Earthwatch formed “Earthshare” in partnership with Cadbury and the NCRC.

Earthshare is a scientific research project that aims to explore ways of creating sustainable cocoa farming. Currently it works with 60 farms but negotiations are underway to scale up the initiative. “We want to understand the effect of different farming systems on the environment,” says Hillyard. Intensively farmed landscapes need a lot of inputs — such as water and chemical fertilizers - and their fertility tends to degrade rapidly. Whereas a mixed farming landscape, where other flora can shade the cocoa trees and provide habitats for the birds, mammals, reptiles and invertebrates that both eat pests on the cocoa and help pollinate the crop, not only increases biodiversity, it reduces the need for inputs and retains its fertility.

For Cadbury, Earthshare also helps address another problem: the declining number of people wanting to be cocoa farmers. “They’re coming at sustainable supply from two angles,” says Mark Harper, Program Manager for Earthwatch. “It’s not just about increasing yields; it’s also about decreasing the number of farmers leaving the business. “They are focused on making it a more attractive crop by improving the livelihoods of cocoa farmers, whether that’s by providing better sanitation, improved access to markets to get a better price for their crop, or helping establish new revenue streams, such as eco tourism.”

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/07/06/eco.chocolate/index.html

On Wed., July 2, 2008, an Arab started trying to kill people on a very packed busy street in Jerusalem with his work vehicle, a caterpillar type of huge bulldozer. He just drove it onto the adjacent packed street and started trying to crush cars. One of the first cars he attacked was ours. In our car were my husband in the front passenger seat, me the driver, and 3 of our girls in the back; we were on our way to meet visiting friends.

As we drove toward the place, we were on the packed street called Sarei Yisrael, when suddenly, several workmen suddenly ran into the street gesturing vehemently that we should clear out. This was really impossible with the very packed traffic! And anyway, just behind them came a huge bulldozer at an impossible-seeming speed. In the first seconds as he bashed into a car to the left of us, it was not entirely clear whether the vehicle or driver was out of control. But then after flattening car #1, he crushed a second car next to us, and turned his attention to us, as I was already trying to reverse our car, as the only direction possible to attempt to distance ourselves from him, hoping that the drivers behind me would also back up.

So there we were stuck in our car, staring into the face of this man determined to kill us. He was around 30, looked somewhat overweight, with a fixed, purposeful look on his face, but unbelievably was using his bulldozer as a deadly weapon. I still feel how bizarre this was - a bulldozer! I have read since then, that later he was screaming Allah is great, but at the moment he was staring at us, determined to crash into us next, he was unsmiling and silent, with only what I thought was a look of
determination and concentration on his face.

He crashed his dozer into the front of our car 2 or 3 times after having successfully crushing the 2 near us with one blow each. Those 2 other cars I saw which he attacked before us were pancaked but amazingly the drivers were able to escape since he couldn’t crush the drivers’ sides quickly enough and noone else was in those cars. One driver was the woman whom he had diabolically motioned to proceed and then bashed into her car and as she dashed out of her destroyed car he tried to run her down! A second vehicle, a taxicab was flattened next. The 2 drivers both escaped from their cars virtually unscathed. The woman who was dressed unreligiously and we stayed together into the hospital - she declared that God must exist here after all. At any event, within seconds we were attacked.

We were immobilized in our car by his repeated violent crashing into us. Was he frustrated that our car didn’t collapse with his first blow like the first 2 and yet it was full of people to kill? Over the next period of what was probably really only a minute or so, he bashed the front of our car repeatedly and bashed our roof with the shovel at least once, all to no avail!!!. Unlike the 2 other cars he had attacked first, our car would not crush. He then drove ONTO the roof of our car trying to crush the 5 of us in the car with the full weight of the dozer. This is truly a miracle - our inexpensive Mazda 5 minivan still did NOT collapse. The sides of the frame were so distorted that we could barely open only 1 door, the front of the car was crushed, and the front window in smithereens but the roof only a little caved in! I was the driver and as the bulldozer rammed us, I put the car into reverse - no other direction to go. His ramming pushed the car back against the one behind me but at least that movement absorbed some of his impact that might otherwise have further crushed the car with us in it.

Since I was unable to do anything at the moments of his attacking us, I don’t think now that my thoughts were really prayer. They consisted of just a realization that when we can do nothing, then everything is in HaShem’s hands. We couldn’t try to get out until he stopped ramming our car. Then as we tried to open the doors, we discovered that the front passenger door was the only one that could be opened by my husband, but 1 of my kids had her window completely open so we all got out in the 2 ways quickly. We wondered whether we should have tried to escape while he was still attacking the car but he had already tried to crush another driver as she got out of her car [his first intended victim] and later we were told that he had a pistol which he used to try to kill others. It was hard to get out as fast as maybe we needed to because we were trembling so much. It took me a few minutes to be sure my legs wouldn’t buckle under me if I tried to stand up. One of my kids has a bruised arm but it is a miracle that we were otherwise unscathed. Is this a recommendation for the Mazda 5? I don’t know, our air bags NEVER opened But they would not have helped us and the sturdiness of the frame did! Does Mazda design the minivan 5 to withstand a dozer driving into and over it? My brilliant husband had picked that car as the safest and best model for the money for us. We walked away from the attack!

We feel so glad to be alive. After his rampage including our car, he continued on to other cars, pedestrians, and at least 1 full bus behind, having finally given up trying to destroy us in our car. After driving over us, he apparently killed a new mother and rammed at least 1 bus effectively and turned it onto its side. 3 people were killed before a policeman and I think a soldier were able to jump into the dozer’s cab and grapple with him. I think that is when he started shooting. Another man grabbed the gun of the policeman fighting the Arab [because he couldn't take his hands off him to reach his own pistol] and shot him and killed him.

For what it is worth, the perp was a 30 year old Arab, a citizen of Israel, had a well paid job with good government benefits, lived in his own house, and was married with children. His deed was praised fervently by his young widow who professed to be glad of his heroic action. The government says they MAY raze the perp’s home and MAY suspend the gov. benefits the family would have been entitled to. Given the attitude of his widow, I have no problem with the government’s plans. It remains to be seen whether they go through with them after the humanitarians of the world and our own bleeding hearts start protesting these reprisals as unacceptable cruelty to innocents. Besides, Saudi Arabia in particular sends checks for at least $25,000 to start to the survivor families and other benefactors send them money besides. The widow will be sitting and entertaining the numerous visitors come to congratulate her on her hero of a husband.

So we’ve received lectures about how we are going to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One person told us that we had to recount our ordeal at least 100 times in the first day to avoid PTSD. Another told us to immediately get psych counselling from an expert. So far we are all too numb to do more than go through our days on auto-pilot. My kids were called by everyone in their school, kids and teachers, by now I think they have retold their experience 100 times. Most of our friends and neighbors have found out we were at the terror scene and called us too. I broke out some chocolate for the kids that I usually save for Shabbat and the kids put on a funny movie. One of the girls’ friends had come over but didn’t inform her mom who finally calmed down when she tracked her down to our home.

What has so far been the most effective means of staving off PTSD is our neighbor Miriam’s chocolate chip cookies. She brought over a freshly baked batch. We have always thought they are probably the best in the world even when one isn’t trying to fend off PTSD. We know that we have to start counselling ASAP but are still too numb to initiate it yet.

Thursday is the first day of the new month, and with the Jewish calendar, also the new moon, a traditional holiday especially for women, so we will all be praying especially thankfully. We went to pray at the Wall. I have already started wondering why G-d made a miracle for us so that our inexpensive car somehow withstood the terrorist’s REPEATED blows while other cars were flattened at once [that would have killed all 5 of us]. We happened to have donated generously over the past year to Victims of Terror, but among the killed was a dedicated teacher of the blind and a warm wonderful early childhood teacher who had recently had a baby after years of fertility treatments. I think that our past mitzvot cannot measure up to this miracle saving our lives. HaShem clearly needs us to still do things - mitzvot here so we are needed to live.

Rochelle Eissenstat

PS. If anyone is interested, I can send you pictures of our car after the attack. It is truly a nes that we survived the terroist’s onslaught almost unscathed.

http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?eid=4360&ICJS=5849&article=1576

Florida Congressman John Mica has a radical idea: He wants to develop high-speed rail service between New York and Washington, D.C.

We know what you’re thinking – isn’t there already a high-speed train between New York and Washington? Unfortunately, nobody who’s taken the Amtrak Acela train would suffer from this confusion. The Acela service, much hyped before its launch, currently shaves only about 30 minutes off Amtrak’s regular service between the capital and the Big Apple, taking two hours and 48 minutes – when it’s on time. The high-speed train that connects Paris, France and Brussels, Belgium covers approximately the same distance in one hour, 22 minutes.

Mr. Mica’s idea is to tap the creative energies of the private sector to get the N.Y.-D.C. route down to under two hours. We wish him luck. The Republican’s idea is the best thing about the $14.4 billion Amtrak authorization bill the House recently passed, which is larded with union giveaways and grants for expanding money-losing service around the country.

If Mr. Mica’s proposal makes it into law, the Department of Transportation would solicit proposals from the private sector for building dedicated high-speed tracks within the right-of-way between the two cities. Amtrak could participate in the bidding, if it chose to. But the real benefit would be in seeing whether private rail companies can come up with a plan to do what Amtrak couldn’t – build a high-speed service that is competitive in cost and time with the airline shuttles that ply that route today.

The Senate version of the bill doesn’t contain a proposal like Mr. Mica’s, and Senators such as New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg are resisting the idea in the senior chamber. “I think it’s very difficult to privatize railroads and have it operate efficiently,” Mr. Lautenberg has said, apparently without irony.

But Mr. Mica’s provision doesn’t privatize anything; it merely asks the private sector to offer proposals for doing something Amtrak couldn’t do, despite spending billions trying. It might well be that entrepreneurs can’t come up with an economically viable plan for such a train, but even then we will have learned something about high-speed train travel in the U.S., and at minimal cost to the taxpayer.

On the other hand, if someone like Richard Branson, who’s building private high-speed train service in Britain, thinks he can make a go of it in one of the most heavily trafficked corridors in the world, there’s no harm in letting him try. It can hardly be worse than Amtrak.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121538809772631047.html