Still more articles from the Times...
Jan. 22nd, 2006 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on "indigo children"
Are They Here to Save the World?
By JOHN LELAND
AT a coffee shop in TriBeCa one morning two weeks ago, David Minh Wong, age 7, was in constant motion. He played with quarters on the table. He dropped them on the floor. He leaned on his mother and walked away.
"Tell him I'm strong," he said to his mother, Yolanda Badillo, 50. She sat in a booth with a neighbor, who was there with her goddaughter.
"I woke up at 2:16 this morning, and it wasn't raining," he said.
"I'm getting bored," he said.
At David's public school, where he is in a program for gifted and talented second graders, a teacher told Ms. Badillo that he is arrogant for a boy his age, and teachers since preschool have described him as bright but sometimes disruptive. But Ms. Badillo, a homeopath and holistic health counselor, has her own assessment. To her David's traits - his intelligence, empathy and impatience - make him an "indigo" child.
"He told me when he was 6 months old that he was going to have trouble in school because they wouldn't know where to fit him," she said, adding that he told her this through his energy, not in words. "Our consciousness is changing, it's expanding, and the indigos are here to show us the way," Ms. Badillo said. "We were much more connected with the creator before, and we're trying to get back to that connection."
If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent "perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented," Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in "The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived" (Hay House). The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children.
Hay House said it has sold 500,000 books on indigo children. A documentary, "Indigo Evolution," is scheduled to open on about 200 screens - at churches, yoga centers, college campuses and other places - on Jan. 27 (locations at www.spiritualcinemanetwork.com).
Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.
In "The Indigo Children," Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.
Offered as a guide for "the parents of unusually bright and active children," the book includes common criticisms of today's child rearing: that children are overmedicated; that schools are not creative environments, especially for bright students; and that children need more time and attention from their parents. But the book seeks answers to mainstream parental concerns in the paranormal.
"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin."
To skeptics the concept of indigo children belongs in the realm of wishful thinking and New Age credulity. "All of us would prefer not to have our kids labeled with a psychiatric disorder, but in this case it's a sham diagnosis," said Russell Barkley, a research professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. "There's no science behind it. There are no studies."
Dr. Barkley likened the definition of indigo children to an academic exercise called "Barnum statements," after P. T. Barnum, in which a person is given a list of generic psychological characteristics and becomes convinced that they apply especially to him or her. The traits attributed to indigo children, he said, are so general that they "could describe most of the people most of the time," which means that they don't describe anything.
Parents who attribute their children's inattention or disruptive behavior to vibrational energy, he said, risk delaying proper diagnosis and treatment that might help them.
To indigos and their parents, however, such skepticism is the usual resistance to any new and revolutionary idea. America has always had a soft spot for the supernatural. A November 2005 poll by Harris Interactive found that one American in five believes he or she has been reincarnated; 40 percent believe in ghosts; 68 percent believe in angels. It is not surprising then that indigo literature, which incorporates some of these beliefs along with common anxieties about child psychology, has found a receptive audience.
Annette Piper, a mother of two in Memphis, said that she had planned to go to medical school until she realized she was an indigo, able to tell what was wrong with people by touching them. Like a lot of others who describe themselves as indigos, she was also sensitive to chemicals and fluorescent lights. Instead of going to medical school, she became an intuitive healer, directing the energy fields around people, and opened a New Age store called Spiritual Freedom.
Her daughter Alexandra, 10, is also an indigo, she said. They play games to cultivate their telepathic powers, but at school Alexandra struggles, Ms. Piper said. "She has trouble finishing work in school and wants to argue with the teacher if she thinks she's right," Ms. Piper said. "I don't think she's found out what her gifts are. From the influence in school and friends she lays off these abilities. She's a little afraid of them."
Problems in school are common for indigos, said Alex Perkel, who runs the ReBirth Esoteric Science Center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a bilingual (Russian-English) center dedicated to "the knowledge of ancient esoteric schools and Eastern science," according to its Web site (www.esotericinfo.com).
Last year the center organized a class for indigo children but canceled it when families dropped out for economic reasons.
"A lot of people don't understand the children because the children are very smart," Mr. Perkel said. "They have knowledge like our teachers. They don't want to go to school, No. 1, because they don't need the knowledge they can get from school. So parents bring them to psychologists, and psychologists start giving them pills to take out their will and memory. We developed a special program to help them understand that they came to this planet to change the consciousness because they have guides from a higher world."
Stephen Hinshaw, a professor and the chairman of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that "there is a legitimate concern that we are overmedicalizing normal childhood, particularly with A.D.H.D." But, he said, research shows that even gifted children with attention-deficit problems do better with more structure in the classroom, not less.
"If you conduct a very open classroom, kids with A.D.H.D. may fit in better, because everyone's running around, but there's no evidence that it helps children with A.D.H.D. learn. On the other hand if you have a more traditional classroom, with consistent tasks and expectations and rewards, kids with A.D.H.D. may have a harder time fitting in at first, but in the long run there's evidence that it helps their learning."
Julia Tuchman, a partner in Neshama Healing in Manhattan, who works with a lot of indigo children and adults, said it was important for their families not to turn away from traditional psychology and medicine.
"I'm very holistically oriented, but many people who come here I send to doctors," she said. "I'm not against medication at all. I just think it's overused." When parents take children to her for treatment - she practices electromagnetic field balancing, a touch-free massage that purports to tune a person's electromagnetic field - she said that just telling the children that they have special gifts is often a healing gesture.
"Can you imagine a child going up to his parents and saying, 'I'm talking to an angel,' or 'I'm talking to someone who's deceased'?" Ms. Tuchman asked. "A lot of them have no one to talk to." She, like others who see indigos, sees them as a reason for hope.
Even disruptive behavior has a purpose, said Marjorie Jackson, a tai chi and yoga teacher in Altadena, Calif., who said that her son, Andrew, is an indigo. Andrew, now 25, was not disruptive as a child, she said, but in her practice she sees indigos who are.
"The purpose of the disruptive ones is to overload the system so the school will be inspired to change," Ms. Jackson said. "The kids may seem like they have A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. What that is, is that the stimulus given to them, their inner being is not interested in it. But if you give them something that harmonizes with the broad intention that their inner self has for them, they won't be disruptive."
She said that schools should treat children more like adults, rather than placing them in "fear-based, constrictive, no-choice environments, where they explode."
Ms. Jackson compared people who do not recognize indigos to Muggles, the name used by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books to describe ordinary people who have no connection with magic. "I would say 90 percent of the world is like the Muggles," she said. "You don't talk about this stuff with them because it's going to scare them."
In the TriBeCa coffee shop, David Minh Wong continued to play with his coins and talk to his mother. Ms. Badillo and her neighbor Sandra McCoy said they have family members who don't believe in the indigo idea. Ms. McCoy sat with her goddaughter, Jasmine Washington, 14. In contrast to David, Jasmine listened serenely, waiting for questions.
Yet Jasmine too is an indigo child, Ms. McCoy said: "I always knew there was something different about her. Then when I saw something about indigos on television, I knew what it was." Like many other indigos Jasmine is home-schooled.
For Jasmine, who often sensed she was different from other children, especially in the public schools, the designation of indigo is a comfort.
"The kids now are very different, so it's good that there's a name for it, and people pay attention to what's different about them," Jasmine said. Like the women at the table she said that indigos have a special purpose: "To help the world come together again. If something bad happens, I always think I can fix it. Since we have these abilities, we can help the world."
On text messaging
The Pleasures of the Text
By CHARLES McGRATH
There used to be an ad on subway cars, next to the ones for bail bondsmen and hemorrhoid creams, that said: "if u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd job & mo pa." The ad was promoting a kind of stenography training that is now extinct, presumably. Who uses stenographers anymore? But the notion that there might be value in easily understood shorthand has proved to be prescient. If u cn rd these days, and, just as important, if your thumbs are nimble enough so that u cn als snd, you can conduct your entire emotional life just by transmitting and receiving messages on the screen of your cellphone. You can flirt there, arrange a date, break up and - in Malaysia at least - even get a divorce.
Shorthand contractions, along with letter-number homophones ("gr8" and "2moro," for example), emoticons (like the tiresome colon-and-parenthesis smiley face) and acronyms (like the ubiquitous "lol," for "laughing out loud"), constitute the language of text-messaging - or txt msg, to use the term that txt msgrs prefer. Text-messaging is a refinement of computer instant-messaging, which came into vogue five or six years ago. But because the typical cellphone screen can accommodate no more than 160 characters, and because the phone touchpad is far less versatile than the computer keyboard, text-messaging puts an even greater premium on concision. Here, for example, is a text-message version of "Paradise Lost" disseminated by some scholars in England: "Devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war. pd'off wiv god so corupts man (md by god) wiv apel. devl stays serpnt 4hole life&man ruind. Woe un2mnkind."
As such messages go, that one is fairly straightforward and unadorned. There is also an entire code book of acronyms and abbreviations, ranging from CWOT (complete waste of time) to DLTBBB (don't let the bedbugs bite). And emoticonography has progressed way beyond the smiley-face stage, and now includes hieroglyphics to indicate drooling, for example ( :-) . . . ), as well as secrecy ( :X), Hitler ( /.#( ) and the rose (@{rcub};-- ). Keep these in mind; we'll need them later.
As with any language, efficiency isn't everything. There's also the issue of style. Among inventive users, and younger ones especially, text-messaging has taken on many of the characteristics of hip-hop, with so much of which it conveniently overlaps - in the substitution of "z" for "s," for example, "a," for "er" and "d" for "th." Like hip-hop, text-messaging is what the scholars call "performative"; it's writing that aspires to the condition of speech. And sometimes when it makes abundant use of emoticons, it strives not for clarity so much as a kind of rebus-like cleverness, in which showing off is part of the point. A text-message version of "Paradise Lost" - or of the prologue, anyway - that tries for a little more shnizzle might go like this: "Sing hvnly mewz dat on d :X mtntp inspyrd dat shephrd hu 1st tot d chozn seed in d begnin hw d hvn n erth @{rcub};-- outa chaos."
Not that there is much call for Miltonic messaging these days. To use the scholarly jargon again, text-messaging is "lateral" rather than "penetrative," and the medium encourages blandness and even mindlessness. On the Internet there are several Web sites that function as virtual Hallmark stores and offer ready-made text messages of breathtaking banality. There are even ready-made Dear John letters, enabling you to dump someone without actually speaking to him or her. Far from being considered rude, in Britain this has proved to be a particularly popular way of ending a relationship - a little more thoughtful than leaving an e-mail message but not nearly as messy as breaking up in person - and it's also catching on over here.
Compared with the rest of the world, Americans are actually laggards when it comes to text-messaging. This is partly for technical reasons. Because we don't have a single, national phone company, there are several competing and incompatible wireless technologies in use, and at the same time actual voice calls are far cheaper here than in most places, so there is less incentive for texting. But in many developing countries, mobile-phone technology has so far outstripped land-line availability that cellphones are the preferred, and sometimes the only, means of communication, and text messages are cheaper than voice ones. The most avid text-messagers are clustered in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore and the Philippines.
There are also cultural reasons for the spread of text-messaging elsewhere. The Chinese language is particularly well-suited to the telephone keypad, because in Mandarin the names of the numbers are also close to the sounds of certain words; to say "I love you," for example, all you have to do is press 520. (For "drop dead," it's 748.) In China, moreover, many people believe that to leave voice mail is rude, and it's a loss of face to make a call to someone important and have it answered by an underling. Text messages preserve everyone's dignity by eliminating the human voice.
This may be the universal attraction of text-messaging, in fact: it's a kind of avoidance mechanism that preserves the feeling of communication - the immediacy - without, for the most part, the burden of actual intimacy or substance. The great majority of text messages are of the "Hey, how are you, whassup?" variety, and they're sent sometimes when messenger and recipient are within speaking distance of each other - across classrooms, say, or from one row of a stadium to another. They're little electronic waves and nods that, just like real waves and nods, aren't meant to do much more than establish a connection - or disconnection, as the case may be - without getting into specifics.
"We're all wired together" is the collective message, and we'll signal again in a couple of minutes, not to say anything, probably, but just to make sure the lines are still working. The most depressing thing about the communications revolution is that when at last we have succeeded in making it possible for anyone to reach anyone else anywhere and at any time, it turns out that we really don't have much we want to say.
On the death of "Welcome to the Neighborhood - was it because of the gay family?
Television Cul-de-Sac Mystery: Why Was Reality Show Killed?
By JACQUES STEINBERG
AUSTIN, Tex. - A year ago, Stephen Wright and his partner, John Wright, embarked on a sociology experiment that only a reality show producer could concoct: theirs was one of seven families competing to persuade the residents of a cul-de-sac here to award them a red-brick McMansion purchased on their behalf by the ABC television network.
The unscripted series, "Welcome to the Neighborhood," was heavily promoted and scheduled to appear in a summer time slot usually occupied by "Desperate Housewives." Stephen Wright, 51, who was already living in a nice house a few miles away with his partner and adopted son, said he participated primarily for one reason: to show tens of millions of prime-time viewers that a real gay family might, over the course of six episodes, charm a neighborhood whose residents overwhelmingly identified themselves as white, Christian and Republican.
As it turned out, the Wrights did win - beating families cast, at least partly, for being African-American, Hispanic, Korean, tattooed or even Wiccan - but outside of a few hundred neighbors (who attended private screenings last summer) and a handful of journalists, almost no one has been able to see them do so.
Ten days before the first episode was to be shown, ABC executives canceled "Welcome to the Neighborhood," saying that they were concerned that viewers who might have been appalled at some early statements made in the show - including homophobic barbs - might not hang in for the sixth episode, when several of those same neighbors pronounced themselves newly open-minded about gays and other groups.
ABC acted amid protests by the National Fair Housing Alliance, which had expressed concern about a competition in which race, religion and sexual orientation were discussed as factors in the awarding of a house. But two producers of the show, speaking publicly about the cancellation for the first time, say the network was confident it had the legal standing to give away a house as a game-show prize. One, Bill Kennedy, a co-executive producer who helped develop the series with his son, Eric, suggested an alternative explanation. He said that the protests might have been most significant as a diversion that allowed the Walt Disney Company, ABC's owner, to pre-empt a show that could have interfered with a much bigger enterprise: the courting of evangelical Christian audiences for "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Disney hoped that the film, widely viewed as a parable of the Resurrection, would be the first in a profitable movie franchise.
In the months and weeks before "Welcome to the Neighborhood" was to have its premiere, as Disney sought to build church support for "Narnia," four religious groups lifted longtime boycotts of the company that had been largely prompted by Disney's tolerance of periodic gatherings by gay tourists at its theme parks. Representatives for two of those groups now say that broadcasting "Neighborhood" could have complicated their support for "Narnia." One, the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 16 million members, lifted the last of the boycotts against Disney on June 22, a week before ABC announced it was pulling the series.
When asked to respond to Mr. Kennedy's contention about "Narnia," Kevin Brockman, an ABC spokesman, said, "That's so ludicrous, it doesn't even merit a response." But Mr. Kennedy said he found ABC's stated reasons for canceling the series unconvincing. Although he acknowledged that he had "no smoking gun" to prove the link between "Narnia" and the fate of "Welcome to the Neighborhood," "I don't believe in coincidences," he said.
"Narnia," a joint venture with Walden Media, has gone on to earn almost $600 million since its release last month, on an investment of more than $150 million. "Neighborhood," by contrast, cost an estimated $10 million.
Now, nearly a year after production on "Neighborhood" concluded - and four months after the Wrights moved into the house - the couple, their new neighbors, Mr. Kennedy and another of the show's producers say they remain bewildered by the abrupt turn in the show's fortunes, including the statement by the network, which owns the rights to the series, that it has no plans either to broadcast it or allow it to be sold to another outlet.
The producers say that it is worth noting that a show that exists mainly to dispel people's tendencies to prejudge strangers was itself a victim of prejudgments. They also note that in a universe of failed reality-show relationships, this experiment has actually succeeded, yet only out of public view.
Since September, when the Wrights moved into their four-bedroom home in the Circle C Ranch development in southwest Austin, they have had standing Friday-night dinners with one neighborhood family (the Stewarts) and Sunday-night dinners with another (the Bellamys), whose twin teenage daughters are now their son's regular baby sitters.
Meanwhile, the neighbor who was the Wrights' earliest on-camera antagonist - Jim Stewart, 53, who is heard in an early episode saying, "I would not tolerate a homosexual couple moving into this neighborhood" - has confided to the producers that the series changed him far more than even they were aware.
No one involved in the show, Mr. Stewart said, knew he had a 25-year-old gay son. Only after participating in the series, Mr. Stewart said, was he able to broach his son's sexuality with him for the first time.
"I'd say to ABC, 'Start showing this right now,' " Mr. Stewart said in an interview at his oak kitchen table. "It has a message that needs to be heard by everyone." (Mr. Stewart first discussed his son publicly with The Austin American-Statesman.)
While other ABC shows have gay characters - including the new comedy "Crumbs" - "Neighborhood" features a real gay couple and their prospective neighbors in a continuing dialogue about homosexuality, including interpretations of the Bible.
In a recent interview, Richard Land, an official with the Southern Baptist Convention involved in the negotiations with Disney last year to end the group's boycott of the company, said he did not recall any mention of "Neighborhood." He added, however, that had the show been broadcast - particularly with an ending that showed Christians literally embracing their gay neighbors - it could have scuttled the Southern Baptists' support for "Narnia."
"I would have considered it a retrograde step," Mr. Land said of the network's plans to broadcast the reality series. "Aside from any moral considerations, it would have been a pretty stupid marketing move."
Paul McCusker, a vice president of Focus on the Family, which had supported the Southern Baptist boycott and reaches millions of evangelical listeners through the daily radio broadcasts of Dr. James Dobson, expressed similar views.
"It would have been a huge misstep for Disney to aggressively do things that would disenfranchise the very people they wanted to go see 'Narnia,' " he said.
Asked whether Disney's plans for "Narnia" had affected "Neighborhood," Mr. Brockman of ABC referred a reporter to comments made on July 26 by Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, to a gathering of television critics. At that time it was not widely known that a gay couple had won the competition. Instead, Mr. McPherson, a champion of the show until its sudden cancellation, was asked if he had been influenced by criticism by civil rights groups.
"If I stopped airing things just because advocacy groups had issues with it, we would run a test pattern," Mr. McPherson said. Rather, he said, he had begun to worry that some of the neighbors' most intolerant statements early on could confuse the audience's understanding of "the message you were trying to get across."
Hank Cohen, a former president of MGM Television Entertainment, a partner with ABC in "Neighborhood," said no one at the network had given him a direct answer as to what had transpired behind the scenes, and "the lack of any single coherent reason cited by them opens them up to all kinds of conjecture."
The full series, a copy of which was given to The New York Times by an advocate, is often raw, as contestants and judges speak openly about their preconceptions, only to observe in amazement as some of their ideas - though by no means all - melt away. Much of the give-and-take occurs in the series's version of the tribal council on "Survivor," as the three couples charged with giving away the house (bought by ABC for more than $300,000) meet to eliminate one family each episode.
Still, the neighbors' attitudes toward homosexuality constitute the dominant theme. That the tide may be shifting is telegraphed in an all-male scene in a hot tub, of all places, when one neighbor, John Bellamy, observes that Mr. Stewart appears to be softening his views toward gays. "I love you for that," Mr. Bellamy says, before cautioning, "Not in a weird kind of hot-tub love, with no chicks in the hot tub."
For Stephen Wright, who was recruited for the series through his church, which has a predominantly gay membership, the outcome has been bittersweet.
On the one hand, he has yet to achieve his goal of telling his family's story before a big audience. "We opened our souls and the life of our family, and we did it because we thought we could make a difference," he said.
But Mr. Wright said he took solace that through their participation in the series, he and his partner had had a positive impact on at least one relationship, that of Mr. Stewart and his son.
"We said at the outset that if we changed one person's heart or mind, it would be worth it," he said. "We have empirical evidence we did that."
"And," he added, "we won a house."
A Lives article on a woman in New Orleans
A Closer Walk With Thee
By SARAH M. BROOM
Before Aug. 29, my Creole mother, Ivory, six siblings and 13 nieces and nephews lived in my hometown, New Orleans. Today I have two brothers left in all of Louisiana. In New York, where I live, I've been homesick down to my gut and susceptible to every feeling of helplessness. So when I heard about a street parade in New Orleans on the Saturday after Thanksgiving - a parade to give thanks - I booked a ticket right then. But I was afraid of what I would find, and of what I might not be able to find anymore.
I'm in my rented S.U.V., coming from the airport on Friday afternoon, when I see the first wrecked house. I am less shocked by the car in someone's living room, or by the abundance of tennis shoes and boats on the tops of bent fences, than I am by the absence of people. I notice that the tires are too damn loud. Why am I driving on pebbles?
I tour the streets - Marigny, Roman, Burgundy, Mirabeau - with John Coltrane. He is chanting, "A love supreme, a love supreme. . .," when I see two people in masks and blue bodysuits cleaning out their homes. They wave, and I return the gesture. The only other movement that day is from a pack of scraggly dogs fighting over a plastic-foam to-go plate. When my car approaches, they don't bother to look up. They're hungry.
There's an evening curfew in the city, and with the encouragement of the patrolling National Guard, I head for Saint Rose, La., to my dead grandmother Amelia's house, 24 miles away, where my brother Carl now lives. I have to pass along St. Charles Avenue, where MTV's Real World was filmed and where most of the old-money mansions appear unscathed. I notice that one family is having a tea party on their porch. I feel an abiding sadness at my core.
The next day is the parade. I show up alone at 10 a.m. in front of Sweet Lorraine's, the jazz club, to join the crowds, some dressed to the nines in gold suits with shiny mahogany shoes. I spend an hour talking smack: "Where y'at?" "How's your mom and them?" "You gone cut up out here or what?" But soon the band chants, "Feet can't fail me now." And I don't believe they can. The tuba player is in front of me; I clap hard to match his beat. Then, after we have danced wild, the Hot 8 Brass Band plays "Just a Closer Walk With Thee": Daily walking close to Thee/Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
The trumpet wails its slow, sweet and with-plenty rhythm, just as Jelly Roll Morton once directed. It is a funeral dirge, and on the street we're swaying through there is barely a house standing. My heart is breaking into slivers. I fall off beat because I have to navigate piles of belongings: a moldy shoe, a brightly-dressed Barbie doll, a sewing machine.
At 1 p.m. we are three hours into a parade that will leave us at the foot of the Mississippi River. To break up the dancing, and to help the economy, we stop at bars along the parade route. By the time we make it to the river, I have had three rum-and-Cokes, which I drink out of plastic cups. I have also had a bowl of red beans and rice, which someone in a house with electricity has cooked for passers-by. At 3 in the afternoon, for the first time today, we start to feel our tired feet. So we limp. But it is worth it.
And I want more. A native has whispered that the Mardi Gras Indians, who dress regal in hand-sewn Indian costumes during Mardi Gras, are practicing their chants the next day. The location is Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon Avenue, at a bar called Tipitina's. The Indians are mostly African-American working people; there's a Big Chief, and young boys in clean sneakers with drums and tambourines play the beat. Imagine 15 sweating men with hard voices standing in a semi-circle, singing bare-bones songs. I think of the Haitian, the Creole, the Spanish, the voodoo, the Italian, in New Orleans history. It's as if I am at Congo Square in 1865, watching Marie Laveau, voodoo priestess, twirl in a spirit dance.
Near curfew, one man begins to sing. "Mighty cooty-fiyo," he calls. Tambourines rattle out a snake hiss. And then they chant in unison: "We are Indians/Indians of the nation/The wild, wild creation/We won't kneel down, not on the ground."
As they sing, they change the words: "We won't kneel down" becomes "We won't bow down." "The ground" becomes "the dirty ground."
I call my brother Michael in Texas and leave a taste of drum music on his voice mail. Outside it is pitch black - because it's night, but also because the electricity is still out. Out there is an awful quiet.
On my flight back to New York, I hum.
On a new Muslim comic
Comics to Battle for Truth, Justice and the Islamic Way
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 21 - For comic book readers in Arab countries, the world often looks like this: superheroes save American cities, battle beasts in Tokyo and even on occasion solve crimes in the French countryside. But few care about saving the Arab world.
If Naif al-Mutawa has his way, that is about to change. Young Arabs will soon be poring over a new group - and new genre - of superheroes like Jabbar, Mumita and Ramzi Razem, all aimed specifically at young Muslim readers and focusing on Muslim virtues.
Mr. Mutawa's Teshkeel Media, based in Kuwait, says that in September it will begin publishing "The 99," a series of comic books based on superhero characters who battle injustice and fight evil, with each character personifying one of the 99 qualities that Muslims believe God embodies.
A burly, fast-talking Kuwaiti with a dry wit, Mr. Mutawa, 34, said existing superheroes fell into two main genres: the Judeo-Christian archetype of individuals with enormous power who are often disguised or outcasts, like Superman, and the Japanese archetype of small characters who rely on each other to become powerful, like Pokémon.
His superhero characters will be based on an Islamic archetype: by combining individual Muslim virtues - everything from wisdom to generosity - they build collective power that is ultimately an expression of the divine.
"Muslims believe that power is ultimately God, and God has 99 key attributes," Mr. Mutawa said. "Those attributes, if they all come together in one place, essentially become the unity of God." He stresses that only God has them all, however, and 30 of the traits deemed uniquely divine will not be embodied by his characters.
Still, this is tricky territory. Muslim religious authorities reject attempts to personify the powers of God or combine the word of God in the Koran with new myths or imaginative renderings more typical of the West.
But Mr. Mutawa is seeking to reach youngsters who are straddling the cultural divide between East and West. They like comics and Western entertainment, and yet are attached to their roots and intend to hold on to their customs. He, too, faced that divide, going to summer camp in New Hampshire in the 1980's - he says his parents wanted him to lose weight - while grappling with Arab culture and pressures.
In his flowing white robe and traditional Arab headdress, Mr. Mutawa looks every bit the Kuwaiti; when he opens his mouth, however, he is every bit the New Yorker who spent his formative years reading comics and much of his adult life in the United States, training as a psychologist at Bellevue Hospital Center and writing a series of children's books on assimilation, race and prejudice.
"I was the kid that was thrown out of class for not being willing to accept what the teacher was teaching us about Jews," he said. "I had Jewish friends at camp, and I knew that they were not the stereotype." With three boys and a fourth child due soon, Mr. Mutawa says he wants his children to be able to find a balance between East and West.
Others, too, have seized on the opportunity for comics in the Middle East but not graphic representations of the principles of the Koran. In Cairo, AK Comics has published Middle East Heroes, four larger-than-life Arab characters who face the challenges of most Arabs by day and fight for them by night.
Mr. Mutawa, an avid reader of "Archie" and other comics, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and an M.B.A. from Columbia University, dreamed up his Muslim superheroes during a taxi ride in 2003 with his sister, Samar, in London.
The plot of the series, drawing on stories and history familiar to most Muslim youths, involves the great wisdom and learning that characterized the Muslim world at its apogee, when it reached from northern Pakistan to southern Spain in the late Middle Ages.
The story concerns 99 gems encoded with the wisdom of Baghdad just as the Mongols are invading the city in the 13th century - in his version, to destroy the city's knowledge. The gems are the source of not only wisdom but power, and they have been scattered across the world, sending some 20 superheroes (at least in the first year, leaving another 49 potential heroes for future editions) on a quest to find them before an evil villain does.
"To create the new, you have to tap into the old," Mr. Mutawa says of the deep historic connections in the comic. "The real goal is to teach kids that there's more than one way to solve a problem."
The characters in "The 99" are not all Arabs, but Muslims from all over the world. Jabbar, the enforcer, is a hulking figure from Saudi Arabia with the power to grow immense at a sneer; Mumita is a bombshell from Portugal with unparalleled agility and a degree of bloodlust; and Noora, from the United Arab Emirates, can read the truth in what people say and help them to see the truth in themselves. There is even a character who wears a burka, aptly called Batina, derived from the word meaning hidden.
But that is where religion stops and mythology begins, Mr. Mutawa says. "I don't expect Islamists to like my idea, and I don't want the ultraliberals to like it either," he says. So far, he has managed to get Kuwait's censors to approve the early mock-ups, he says. But to keep the orthodox at ease, he has included women in headscarves and plays it by the book as far as religion goes.
But what may give him the biggest edge is a seasoned team, including writers like Fabian Nicieza, who wrote for X-Men and Power Rangers comics, and a group of managers and advisers who are old hands in the industry.
In addition, "The 99" will piggyback on a distribution network Mr. Mutawa is setting up for a parallel project, publishing all manner of other comics in the region. Teshkeel has signed on with Marvel Comics to translate and distribute their comics in the Middle East, and will soon begin publishing Arabic versions of Marvel's Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, X-Men and others. He said he is in talks with Archie and DC Comics for similar deals. He says that Teshkeel has attracted $7 million from investors, based on the promise that he will turn his company into the largest comics publisher in the Middle East.
Last year, Teshkeel also bought Cracked, a defunct competitor of Mad magazine, which he plans to resume publishing in February pitched to a more mature audience in the United States. He hopes those publications will encourage other media companies to take him more seriously and back his Muslim superheroes concept.
"We got a sense that he was serious about this, and that it wasn't something he was pursuing on a whim," says Bruno Maglione, president of Marvel International, which signed a licensing agreement with Teshkeel last October.
English-language comics, though, are a tough sell in the Middle East; they are typically sold in specialty bookshops, and their distribution is spotty. So almost all of Teshkeel's will be in Arabic, with the expectation that they will be carried in supermarkets and newspaper stands.
Teshkeel will also have to compete against magazines like Space Toon Town, a monthly children's comic, as well as AK Comics.
The religious dimension is the biggest risk for a product whose main market, like all new products in the region, is oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where religion and entertainment rarely mix. Mr. Mutawa has already witnessed the frustration of having a book banned. "Get Your Ties Out of Your Eyes," a children's book featuring Bouncy, a ball who wears a tie - but differently than others - was banned in Kuwait because it seemed to be commenting on the Koran.
"When you're in a place where Bouncy Book 3 doesn't pass the censors, you have to be very creative," he said.
AK Comics' titles include figures like Aya, a Princess of Darkness; Zein, a time-traveling pharaoh; Jalila, an ancient Arabian swordsman who protects the City of All Faiths, and Rakan, a lone warrior entrusted with fighting evil. The characters must help bring order after 55 years of war between two unnamed superpowers, with political undertones running throughout. Unlike Teshkeel, AK's comic books have no mention of religion, based on a company policy that "no religion or faith be perceived as better than another."
Mr. Mutawa says he is taking a riskier path because he wants Muslim youngsters to have role models that fit both their Arab and Western sides. Last summer, his eldest son attended the same summer camp in New Hampshire - Robin Hood - and returned with a new discovery: Archie.
"I want my kids not to have to face the dichotomy all the time," Mr. Mutawa said. "I see this as a way to compete with hate."
On Harlem in the 40s.
Includes a slideshow
Jitterbug Days
By KEVIN BAKER
THE first thing you notice about Harlem is how wide the sky is. For a longtime New Yorker, so accustomed to being blinkered by ever more towers, the views along Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards are almost giddying. To the south, it feels as if you can see the rest of Manhattan below you, or at least down to the skyscrapers of Midtown, set like so many pickets against the horizon. Those structures offer a different tone poem every day, depending on the weather and the time of year; spectacular beneath the gaudy sunset of a summer evening, moody and contemplative on a drizzly winter afternoon.
The view is one of the few strands that tie the Harlem of today to what it was 60 years ago, and it is very welcome. When writing about the city as it was, one searches for any visual clue, however fleeting, to what people were seeing, feeling and hearing back then as they went about their daily lives.
Such moments are not easily forthcoming. New York is a wastrel with its past, shucking its skin like some giant snake as it slithers relentlessly into the future. Some of this is inevitable, of course, if a city is not to become a mausoleum, and the past is not something to be idealized. And yet it is easy to wish that what existed before had not been eradicated quite so quickly, or so thoroughly. That is certainly the case with the Harlem of the 1940's.
This nostalgia is ironic, because Harlem is a fluke. Those grand avenues give away what the neighborhood was intended to be, a hundred years ago: a wealthy, white suburb for the city growing explosively just to the south. But because of a combination of overspeculation, racism and pure chance, Harlem became something very different, the capital of black America, the locus of countless dreams - and a prison of sorts.
The swampy village that was Harlem had been intended as a home for the white elite, who had been retreating up Manhattan before one immigrant wave after another for most of the 19th century. Moving up the island almost simultaneously were New York's African-Americans, living together as a segregated community since the terrible lynchings of the Civil War draft riots. They were pushed on from one neighborhood to the next by assaults from the police, and by the same, white ethnic hordes that so frightened the nobs.
Deprived of their anticipated upper class, the landlords of Harlem turned to black tenants, knowing they could be charged double the standard rents for working-class New Yorkers because they had no place else to go. The result was New York's first real ghetto.
The word, ghetto, has come to be used almost interchangeably with slum, but it means something else. Where a slum implies simply poverty, a ghetto is a place where everyone, from all walks of life, rich or poor, is relegated by virtue of race or religion. By the 1920's, the convergence of blacks from every walk of life and region had brought about the Harlem Renaissance, the first great concentrated flowering of black culture in America. The Depression was hard on Harlem, and it ended the renaissance. Yet by 1943 Harlem was enjoying an edgy resurgence, infused with the new money generated by the war.
THIS was the last moment when Harlem was still a destination, an irresistible attraction for black and white servicemen alike who were on leave. Both the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm Little, later Malcolm X, were walking those broad avenues then, and they would scarcely recognize the Harlem of today.
Like the rest of Manhattan, it is an almost sedate place now. Much of the exuberant street life is gone, the vendors no longer hawking everything from ice to coal to sweet potatoes, with songs made up and sung to tunes from the hit parade. There are no more numbers runners, catching the nickels that slipped like quicksilver through the fire escape slits above; no more "Thursday girls," who strode out for a night on the town from beauty shops that were filled with smoke from the various, frightening hair-straightening processes of the day.
The Harlem of World War II was a vibrant place, a place well-honed by both disappointment and hope, where the music was harder and better than ever, where some of the best musicians who ever were competed against each other in midnight parties to raise rent money for the host. The music was best there, in those overcrowded, ordinary apartments, played by men who would never leave their best stuff in the downtown clubs.
Physically, most of Harlem is still built on a very human scale, and still has one of the city's largest collections of brownstones. Some of the old institutions remain from that time as well: the magnificently ponderous Y.M.C.A. on 135th Street, where Malcolm and so many other eager newcomers lived, and the stately Hotel Theresa, where more celebrated visitors stayed, from Joe Louis to Fidel Castro.
Yet the Harlem night scene has almost vanished, gone the way of the city's other fantastic entertainment districts, from the Latin Quarter to the old Coney Island to the German beer gardens that once lined the Bowery. The enormous dance halls, where the big bands played and jitterbugging came into its own, are long gone. The Cotton Club moved to Midtown before the 30's were out, and the fabulous Savoy Ballroom - "the home of happy feet," with its battles of the bands and its 250-foot-long dance floor - has been replaced by a housing project and a few stores.
The only physical remnant of the great halls is the gorgeous ruin of the Renaissance Casino, a hall that was big enough to hold one of New York's first great basketball teams, the New York Rens. It still runs the length of a city block on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and is somehow still majestic despite the layers of grime on its red-brick facade, the trees growing out of its roof, and its rusting marquees, one of them incongruously advertising "Chow Mein."
The great clubs are gone, too. Connie's Inn, where Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller played, has been replaced by something that looks like a garage. Small's Paradise, which had the best floor shows and, some say, the only working air-conditioning in Harlem, and where Malcolm met all the hustlers and pimps and burglars he would write about so lovingly in his autobiography, has now been subsumed by a school and an International House of Pancakes.
The old live theaters and the great movie palaces, the Lafayette, the Alhambra and the Victoria, have been plowed under as well, or changed beyond recognition. The Regent, considered the first truly "deluxe" movie theater in Manhattan, has long since been converted into a church.
Gone, too, are the less respectable establishments. The stretch of 133rd Street between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards was then known as Beale Street or Jungle Alley; this block of raucous clubs and after-hours bars was described rather melodramatically at the time as a place where "a knife blade is the quick arbiter of all quarrels, where prostitutes take anything they can get." Now it is a quiet block full of brownstone churches, and workmen rehabilitating brick town houses. West 144th Street, where a teenage Malcolm once worked as a "john-walker," escorting white tricks up to see black prostitutes, seems even more somnolent.
About all that remains of Harlem, the entertainment mecca, is the elegant Apollo. One can still stand on 126th Street and study the long, fire escape staircases on its back, wondering which one might have been used as a separate entrance for black patrons, confined to an upper gallery when the building was still the segregated Hurtig & Seamon's theater.
To the west of the Apollo stood the old Braddock Hotel, now demolished. For a while, it was the place leading black entertainers would stay, and in the 40's the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday could still be found in its bar - close enough so they could step over from the stage door of the Apollo for a quick drink. But by World War II, the hotel itself had become seedy. The race riot of 1943, the worst in Harlem's history, which would leave six people dead and the neighborhood ravaged, would begin there when a black serviceman was shot by a white cop in a fight that started over a complaint about a room.
Across 125th Street from the Apollo is the site of other battles. The old Kress's department store, where an earlier, more contained race riot began in 1935 after the false rumor that a shoplifter had been killed by store detectives, has been altered irretrievably. But the facade and name of a defunct department store just down the street, Blumstein's, is still in place. This was among the last great bastions of segregation in Harlem; the store had refused to hire black employees or even to allow black women to try on dresses. It was finally conquered by the "don't shop where you can't work" campaigns of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Those initiatives were a dramatic first step for Mr. Powell, who, while still holding the pulpit he had inherited from his father at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, went on to become the city's first black councilman, then its first black congressman. It was not surprising that the first black man to represent Harlem in Congress was a clergyman; no part of the old Harlem has survived as intact as its many, splendid churches. They stand like fortresses along its streets, as many of them have for the last 80 or even 90 years: the Abyssinian and St. Philip's, Salem Methodist and Mount Olivet, Mount Calvary and St. Mark's, to name only a few.
The great churches have never been the be-all and end-all of religion in Harlem; the area has many humble storefront churches, and many cultists and revivalists. But the big churches played a special role. These were the "invisible institution" made manifest - the term dating to the days of slavery, referring to how black believers had often had to hide their services.
Over the decades these entities, some of them dating to Lower Manhattan in the late 1700's, had been painfully brought to life. They had been kept together as their communicants moved up the West Side of Manhattan, transferred to private homes, abandoned buildings, even old stables. Critics argued that these great structures were too heavy a burden on the community, but to finally establish large, impressive churches was to make a statement, to say that Harlem was where they would make a stand.
Mr. Powell, a determined democratizer, relentlessly mocked his fellow clerics, accusing them of hypocrisy and "churchianity," and ridiculing all pretensions on the basis of income, or background, or skin tone. His needling fell largely on deaf ears. Distinctions are always made within the ghetto, lighter skin vs. darker skin; old New Yorkers vs. Southern migrants vs. proud immigrants from the British West Indies.
And of course, there was money. Wealthy Harlemites gathered together in specific areas - on Sugar Hill, in the Dunbar Apartments, or on Strivers Row - as the rich always have. But in the ghetto these enclaves were more heterogeneous and interesting than they were in New York's white neighborhoods. On Strivers Row alone, there lived at various times the composers W. C. Handy and Eubie Blake; Dr. Louis T. Wright, a prominent surgeon; Henry Pace, the founder of Black Swan Records; the fine heavyweight Harry Wills; the comedian Stepin Fetchit - and Mr. Powell himself.
NO neighborhood better exemplifies both the triumph and the frustration of Harlem than Strivers Row, on 138th and 139th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. On its two blocks, lovely, ethereal yellow- and rust-brick Italianate town houses seem to almost float above the branches of the slender trees along the sidewalk.
Originally called the King Model Houses, they were designed by Stanford White and several other leading New York architects of the 1890's. One can still find gates on some of them with the ancient imprecation "Walk Your Horses," directed at the sports who liked to race their horses along the broad avenues. There are even back alleys, providing residents with those luxuries so rare in Manhattan, house decks and garages.
Yet Strivers Row was designed for white people. When not enough of them would stay, refusing to live in an increasingly black Harlem, the Equitable Life Insurance Company kept the buildings vacant for a year before finally giving in, and allowing African-Americans to buy them. Even in Harlem, black people had to be insulted before their money was accepted.
One other extant building tells the story of the Harlem of the 40's, and what lay in store for it: the vast Art Deco armory on 142nd Street. The armory was built for the 369th Regiment, the "Harlem Hellfighters," after their return from World War I. Forced to fight with French troops, the Hellfighters had distinguished themselves, serving longer in continuous combat than any other American fighting unit, and they had marched back up Fifth Avenue in triumph with their band breaking into "Here Comes My Daddy Now" as they crossed into Harlem.
But for World War II, most of the 369th was trained in the Deep South, under white officers, along with tens of thousands of other black soldiers. Throughout the war, the people of Harlem had been receiving letters from their young men telling of how shabbily they were being treated, both by their white commanders and by the sheriffs and the police of Southern towns.
The letters, combined with news reports of white police officers and white mobs assaulting and even killing black soldiers and black defense workers around the country, brought people of all classes in Harlem together by the summer of 1943. James Baldwin would remember seeing "the strangest combinations" of people, standing about in tense, silent groups, churchgoers and "the most flagrant disbelievers."
"Something heavy in their stance seemed to indicate that they had all, incredibly, seen a common vision," he wrote, "and on each face there seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow."
ALL that summer, the conflagration crept palpably closer, with every precaution taken against it only more enraging than the last. Military authorities had the Savoy closed, ostensibly to preserve the morals of our fighting men but mostly to prevent "racemixing," and motorcycle police patrols roared constantly through the streets, looking out for trouble. When the riot did come, with the shooting at the Braddock Hotel, Harlem would be permanently altered. Ultimately, the fury behind it would leave standing only a few suggestions of what had gone before, peeking out here and there.
This largely vanished Harlem may be most readily understood from the inside, looking out at those broad views of the looming city and its sentinel skyscrapers. So accessible and yet so unobtainable, still spurning those it had so arbitrarily driven out. To have looked upon that city every day, to understand the hatred and bigotry it represented even if you had no desire to join with it, must have been all but unbearable.
On a TV show for kids, sponsored by Hamas
Warm and Fuzzy TV, Brought to You by Hamas
By CRAIG S. SMITH
GAZA, Jan. 13 - Hey kids, it's Uncle Hazim time!
Hazim Sharawi, whose stage name is Uncle Hazim, is a quiet, doe-eyed young man who has an easy way with children and will soon preside over a children's television show here on which he'll cavort with men in larger-than-life, fake-fur animal suits on the Gaza Strip's newest television station, Al Aksa TV.
But Captain Kangaroo this is not. The station, named for Islam's third holiest site, is owned by Hamas, the people who helped make suicide bombing a household term.
"Our television show will have a message, but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood," said Mr. Sharawi, sitting in the broadcast studio where he will produce his show.
"I will show them our rights through the history," he said, "show them, 'This is Nablus, this is Gaza, this is Al Aksa mosque, which is with the Israelis and should be in our hands.' "
The new station is part of the militant Palestinian group's strategy to broaden its role in Palestinian politics and society, much as Hezbollah did in Lebanon. The station began broadcasting terrestrially on Jan. 7, and Hamas is working on a satellite version that would give it an even wider reach, like Hezbollah's Al Manar TV, which is watched throughout the Arab world.
"Their success encouraged us," said Fathi Hammad, Al Aksa TV's director. He said that Hamas had tried to find an existing broadcaster to accept its programming but that no one would take it.
"The Arab satellite broadcasters Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya both turned us down," he said, sitting beneath the seal of Hamas, which depicts the Dome of the Rock (which stands alongside Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem) between crossed swords and an idealized map of Palestine. "Even Iraq and Saudi Arabia refused."
In 2003, after the Palestinian Authority granted Hamas a broadcast license covering both radio and television, the group started the Voice of Al Aksa, which quickly became one of the most popular radio stations in the Gaza Strip. It took more than two years to assemble the expertise and equipment necessary to start the television station.
The current 12 hours of daily television programming, which has the unfinished look of public-access cable television in the United States, consists primarily of readings from the Koran, religious discourse and discussions of women's issues, such as Islamic fashion, child-rearing tips and the right of women to work, which Hamas supports. It will eventually feature a sort of Islamic MTV, with Hamas-produced music videos using footage from the group's fights with Israeli troops. There will even be a talent search show, a distant echo of "American Idol."
But its biggest star will be Mr. Sharawi, whose radio show for children was the Voice of Al Aksa's biggest hit.
Mr. Sharawi, 27, wearing a long black leather coat with a hood over a green suit and tie, fixed with a pin, looks like a straight-and-narrow Sunday school teacher. In fact, he got his start working with children at his mosque while studying geology at Islamic University in Gaza. His hair is parted in the middle, his beard trimmed as neatly as a suburban lawn.
He said the head of Hamas's radio station spotted him leading children's games at his mosque and asked him to do a children's radio show two years ago. The show has become so popular, his appearances at occasional Hamas-sponsored festivals draw as many as 10,000 children at a time.
Mr. Sharawi will not take visitors to see him do his radio broadcast because the studio's location is a heavily guarded secret. In 2004, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired three rockets into the station's previous studio not long after Mr. Sharawi and his colleagues had fled.
Everybody involved in the television station is worried about another attack, but Mr. Sharawi said he is ready to die if it comes. "The messengers don't care if they lose their lives for the sake of revealing the message," he said.
As he describes it, his television show, which begins in a few weeks, will teach children the basics of militant Palestinian politics - the disputed status of Jerusalem, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the Palestinian refugees' demand for a right to return to the lands they lost to Israel in the 1948 war - without showing the violence that Hamas's pursuit of those goals entails.
The show will alternate between Uncle Hazim and his animal characters in the studio taking live phone calls from children and video clips recorded outside. Mr. Sharawi said he would leaven the sober and pedantic material with fun and games, including such standards as egg-and-spoon races, eating apples on a string or "tug of war, which will show children that the more you cooperate with others, the more you win."
Mr. Sharawi said he would dress up in different costumes to suit the show's locale: a sailor suit while taping on the beach, a track suit when in the park, even a Boy Scout uniform while hiking through the small patches of empty land that serve as Gaza's wilderness.
"We will invite real Boy Scouts to come and talk to us about camping," Mr. Sharawi said, warming to his theme (the Palestinian Scout Association is a member of the World Organization of the Scout Movement).
Through it all, Mr. Sharawi will be accompanied by animal-costumed sidekicks to provide comic relief. Hamas will rent the Egyptian-made plush costumes - a fox, a rabbit, a dog, a bear and a chicken, already gray and matted from wear - from a production company run by a Hamas supporter who has just emerged from two years in Israeli jails.
When asked if the animals will have names, Mr. Sharawi looked slightly nonplussed and said: "Bob. Bob the Fox, for example."
He said he was inspired by a children's program on Saudi television in which a young veiled woman and a Mickey Mouse-like character take calls from kids. Fingering a string of bright green plastic prayer beads, a pale blue prayer rug lying on the chair beside him, he tries to reconcile Hamas's bloody attacks that kill innocent children with his role as mentor.
"These are one of the means used by the Palestinians against Israel's F-16's and tanks," he said of the suicide attacks, giving a stock answer. "We're doing our best to avoid involving children in these issues, but I cannot turn the children's lives into a beautiful garden while outside it's the contrary."
He gets up to fiddle with a magnesium light stand in the studio, which is furnished with five beige upholstered chairs and a dusty desk in front of a rattan screen decorated with plastic grape leaves.
The show, which will be broadcast on Friday mornings, the beginning of the Muslim weekend, will be preceded by an hour of cartoons, including a serialized life of the Prophet Muhammad, and that universal send-up of deadly conflict, Tom & Jerry.
Are They Here to Save the World?
By JOHN LELAND
AT a coffee shop in TriBeCa one morning two weeks ago, David Minh Wong, age 7, was in constant motion. He played with quarters on the table. He dropped them on the floor. He leaned on his mother and walked away.
"Tell him I'm strong," he said to his mother, Yolanda Badillo, 50. She sat in a booth with a neighbor, who was there with her goddaughter.
"I woke up at 2:16 this morning, and it wasn't raining," he said.
"I'm getting bored," he said.
At David's public school, where he is in a program for gifted and talented second graders, a teacher told Ms. Badillo that he is arrogant for a boy his age, and teachers since preschool have described him as bright but sometimes disruptive. But Ms. Badillo, a homeopath and holistic health counselor, has her own assessment. To her David's traits - his intelligence, empathy and impatience - make him an "indigo" child.
"He told me when he was 6 months old that he was going to have trouble in school because they wouldn't know where to fit him," she said, adding that he told her this through his energy, not in words. "Our consciousness is changing, it's expanding, and the indigos are here to show us the way," Ms. Badillo said. "We were much more connected with the creator before, and we're trying to get back to that connection."
If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent "perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented," Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in "The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived" (Hay House). The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children.
Hay House said it has sold 500,000 books on indigo children. A documentary, "Indigo Evolution," is scheduled to open on about 200 screens - at churches, yoga centers, college campuses and other places - on Jan. 27 (locations at www.spiritualcinemanetwork.com).
Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.
In "The Indigo Children," Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.
Offered as a guide for "the parents of unusually bright and active children," the book includes common criticisms of today's child rearing: that children are overmedicated; that schools are not creative environments, especially for bright students; and that children need more time and attention from their parents. But the book seeks answers to mainstream parental concerns in the paranormal.
"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin."
To skeptics the concept of indigo children belongs in the realm of wishful thinking and New Age credulity. "All of us would prefer not to have our kids labeled with a psychiatric disorder, but in this case it's a sham diagnosis," said Russell Barkley, a research professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. "There's no science behind it. There are no studies."
Dr. Barkley likened the definition of indigo children to an academic exercise called "Barnum statements," after P. T. Barnum, in which a person is given a list of generic psychological characteristics and becomes convinced that they apply especially to him or her. The traits attributed to indigo children, he said, are so general that they "could describe most of the people most of the time," which means that they don't describe anything.
Parents who attribute their children's inattention or disruptive behavior to vibrational energy, he said, risk delaying proper diagnosis and treatment that might help them.
To indigos and their parents, however, such skepticism is the usual resistance to any new and revolutionary idea. America has always had a soft spot for the supernatural. A November 2005 poll by Harris Interactive found that one American in five believes he or she has been reincarnated; 40 percent believe in ghosts; 68 percent believe in angels. It is not surprising then that indigo literature, which incorporates some of these beliefs along with common anxieties about child psychology, has found a receptive audience.
Annette Piper, a mother of two in Memphis, said that she had planned to go to medical school until she realized she was an indigo, able to tell what was wrong with people by touching them. Like a lot of others who describe themselves as indigos, she was also sensitive to chemicals and fluorescent lights. Instead of going to medical school, she became an intuitive healer, directing the energy fields around people, and opened a New Age store called Spiritual Freedom.
Her daughter Alexandra, 10, is also an indigo, she said. They play games to cultivate their telepathic powers, but at school Alexandra struggles, Ms. Piper said. "She has trouble finishing work in school and wants to argue with the teacher if she thinks she's right," Ms. Piper said. "I don't think she's found out what her gifts are. From the influence in school and friends she lays off these abilities. She's a little afraid of them."
Problems in school are common for indigos, said Alex Perkel, who runs the ReBirth Esoteric Science Center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a bilingual (Russian-English) center dedicated to "the knowledge of ancient esoteric schools and Eastern science," according to its Web site (www.esotericinfo.com).
Last year the center organized a class for indigo children but canceled it when families dropped out for economic reasons.
"A lot of people don't understand the children because the children are very smart," Mr. Perkel said. "They have knowledge like our teachers. They don't want to go to school, No. 1, because they don't need the knowledge they can get from school. So parents bring them to psychologists, and psychologists start giving them pills to take out their will and memory. We developed a special program to help them understand that they came to this planet to change the consciousness because they have guides from a higher world."
Stephen Hinshaw, a professor and the chairman of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that "there is a legitimate concern that we are overmedicalizing normal childhood, particularly with A.D.H.D." But, he said, research shows that even gifted children with attention-deficit problems do better with more structure in the classroom, not less.
"If you conduct a very open classroom, kids with A.D.H.D. may fit in better, because everyone's running around, but there's no evidence that it helps children with A.D.H.D. learn. On the other hand if you have a more traditional classroom, with consistent tasks and expectations and rewards, kids with A.D.H.D. may have a harder time fitting in at first, but in the long run there's evidence that it helps their learning."
Julia Tuchman, a partner in Neshama Healing in Manhattan, who works with a lot of indigo children and adults, said it was important for their families not to turn away from traditional psychology and medicine.
"I'm very holistically oriented, but many people who come here I send to doctors," she said. "I'm not against medication at all. I just think it's overused." When parents take children to her for treatment - she practices electromagnetic field balancing, a touch-free massage that purports to tune a person's electromagnetic field - she said that just telling the children that they have special gifts is often a healing gesture.
"Can you imagine a child going up to his parents and saying, 'I'm talking to an angel,' or 'I'm talking to someone who's deceased'?" Ms. Tuchman asked. "A lot of them have no one to talk to." She, like others who see indigos, sees them as a reason for hope.
Even disruptive behavior has a purpose, said Marjorie Jackson, a tai chi and yoga teacher in Altadena, Calif., who said that her son, Andrew, is an indigo. Andrew, now 25, was not disruptive as a child, she said, but in her practice she sees indigos who are.
"The purpose of the disruptive ones is to overload the system so the school will be inspired to change," Ms. Jackson said. "The kids may seem like they have A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. What that is, is that the stimulus given to them, their inner being is not interested in it. But if you give them something that harmonizes with the broad intention that their inner self has for them, they won't be disruptive."
She said that schools should treat children more like adults, rather than placing them in "fear-based, constrictive, no-choice environments, where they explode."
Ms. Jackson compared people who do not recognize indigos to Muggles, the name used by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books to describe ordinary people who have no connection with magic. "I would say 90 percent of the world is like the Muggles," she said. "You don't talk about this stuff with them because it's going to scare them."
In the TriBeCa coffee shop, David Minh Wong continued to play with his coins and talk to his mother. Ms. Badillo and her neighbor Sandra McCoy said they have family members who don't believe in the indigo idea. Ms. McCoy sat with her goddaughter, Jasmine Washington, 14. In contrast to David, Jasmine listened serenely, waiting for questions.
Yet Jasmine too is an indigo child, Ms. McCoy said: "I always knew there was something different about her. Then when I saw something about indigos on television, I knew what it was." Like many other indigos Jasmine is home-schooled.
For Jasmine, who often sensed she was different from other children, especially in the public schools, the designation of indigo is a comfort.
"The kids now are very different, so it's good that there's a name for it, and people pay attention to what's different about them," Jasmine said. Like the women at the table she said that indigos have a special purpose: "To help the world come together again. If something bad happens, I always think I can fix it. Since we have these abilities, we can help the world."
On text messaging
The Pleasures of the Text
By CHARLES McGRATH
There used to be an ad on subway cars, next to the ones for bail bondsmen and hemorrhoid creams, that said: "if u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd job & mo pa." The ad was promoting a kind of stenography training that is now extinct, presumably. Who uses stenographers anymore? But the notion that there might be value in easily understood shorthand has proved to be prescient. If u cn rd these days, and, just as important, if your thumbs are nimble enough so that u cn als snd, you can conduct your entire emotional life just by transmitting and receiving messages on the screen of your cellphone. You can flirt there, arrange a date, break up and - in Malaysia at least - even get a divorce.
Shorthand contractions, along with letter-number homophones ("gr8" and "2moro," for example), emoticons (like the tiresome colon-and-parenthesis smiley face) and acronyms (like the ubiquitous "lol," for "laughing out loud"), constitute the language of text-messaging - or txt msg, to use the term that txt msgrs prefer. Text-messaging is a refinement of computer instant-messaging, which came into vogue five or six years ago. But because the typical cellphone screen can accommodate no more than 160 characters, and because the phone touchpad is far less versatile than the computer keyboard, text-messaging puts an even greater premium on concision. Here, for example, is a text-message version of "Paradise Lost" disseminated by some scholars in England: "Devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war. pd'off wiv god so corupts man (md by god) wiv apel. devl stays serpnt 4hole life&man ruind. Woe un2mnkind."
As such messages go, that one is fairly straightforward and unadorned. There is also an entire code book of acronyms and abbreviations, ranging from CWOT (complete waste of time) to DLTBBB (don't let the bedbugs bite). And emoticonography has progressed way beyond the smiley-face stage, and now includes hieroglyphics to indicate drooling, for example ( :-) . . . ), as well as secrecy ( :X), Hitler ( /.#( ) and the rose (@{rcub};-- ). Keep these in mind; we'll need them later.
As with any language, efficiency isn't everything. There's also the issue of style. Among inventive users, and younger ones especially, text-messaging has taken on many of the characteristics of hip-hop, with so much of which it conveniently overlaps - in the substitution of "z" for "s," for example, "a," for "er" and "d" for "th." Like hip-hop, text-messaging is what the scholars call "performative"; it's writing that aspires to the condition of speech. And sometimes when it makes abundant use of emoticons, it strives not for clarity so much as a kind of rebus-like cleverness, in which showing off is part of the point. A text-message version of "Paradise Lost" - or of the prologue, anyway - that tries for a little more shnizzle might go like this: "Sing hvnly mewz dat on d :X mtntp inspyrd dat shephrd hu 1st tot d chozn seed in d begnin hw d hvn n erth @{rcub};-- outa chaos."
Not that there is much call for Miltonic messaging these days. To use the scholarly jargon again, text-messaging is "lateral" rather than "penetrative," and the medium encourages blandness and even mindlessness. On the Internet there are several Web sites that function as virtual Hallmark stores and offer ready-made text messages of breathtaking banality. There are even ready-made Dear John letters, enabling you to dump someone without actually speaking to him or her. Far from being considered rude, in Britain this has proved to be a particularly popular way of ending a relationship - a little more thoughtful than leaving an e-mail message but not nearly as messy as breaking up in person - and it's also catching on over here.
Compared with the rest of the world, Americans are actually laggards when it comes to text-messaging. This is partly for technical reasons. Because we don't have a single, national phone company, there are several competing and incompatible wireless technologies in use, and at the same time actual voice calls are far cheaper here than in most places, so there is less incentive for texting. But in many developing countries, mobile-phone technology has so far outstripped land-line availability that cellphones are the preferred, and sometimes the only, means of communication, and text messages are cheaper than voice ones. The most avid text-messagers are clustered in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore and the Philippines.
There are also cultural reasons for the spread of text-messaging elsewhere. The Chinese language is particularly well-suited to the telephone keypad, because in Mandarin the names of the numbers are also close to the sounds of certain words; to say "I love you," for example, all you have to do is press 520. (For "drop dead," it's 748.) In China, moreover, many people believe that to leave voice mail is rude, and it's a loss of face to make a call to someone important and have it answered by an underling. Text messages preserve everyone's dignity by eliminating the human voice.
This may be the universal attraction of text-messaging, in fact: it's a kind of avoidance mechanism that preserves the feeling of communication - the immediacy - without, for the most part, the burden of actual intimacy or substance. The great majority of text messages are of the "Hey, how are you, whassup?" variety, and they're sent sometimes when messenger and recipient are within speaking distance of each other - across classrooms, say, or from one row of a stadium to another. They're little electronic waves and nods that, just like real waves and nods, aren't meant to do much more than establish a connection - or disconnection, as the case may be - without getting into specifics.
"We're all wired together" is the collective message, and we'll signal again in a couple of minutes, not to say anything, probably, but just to make sure the lines are still working. The most depressing thing about the communications revolution is that when at last we have succeeded in making it possible for anyone to reach anyone else anywhere and at any time, it turns out that we really don't have much we want to say.
On the death of "Welcome to the Neighborhood - was it because of the gay family?
Television Cul-de-Sac Mystery: Why Was Reality Show Killed?
By JACQUES STEINBERG
AUSTIN, Tex. - A year ago, Stephen Wright and his partner, John Wright, embarked on a sociology experiment that only a reality show producer could concoct: theirs was one of seven families competing to persuade the residents of a cul-de-sac here to award them a red-brick McMansion purchased on their behalf by the ABC television network.
The unscripted series, "Welcome to the Neighborhood," was heavily promoted and scheduled to appear in a summer time slot usually occupied by "Desperate Housewives." Stephen Wright, 51, who was already living in a nice house a few miles away with his partner and adopted son, said he participated primarily for one reason: to show tens of millions of prime-time viewers that a real gay family might, over the course of six episodes, charm a neighborhood whose residents overwhelmingly identified themselves as white, Christian and Republican.
As it turned out, the Wrights did win - beating families cast, at least partly, for being African-American, Hispanic, Korean, tattooed or even Wiccan - but outside of a few hundred neighbors (who attended private screenings last summer) and a handful of journalists, almost no one has been able to see them do so.
Ten days before the first episode was to be shown, ABC executives canceled "Welcome to the Neighborhood," saying that they were concerned that viewers who might have been appalled at some early statements made in the show - including homophobic barbs - might not hang in for the sixth episode, when several of those same neighbors pronounced themselves newly open-minded about gays and other groups.
ABC acted amid protests by the National Fair Housing Alliance, which had expressed concern about a competition in which race, religion and sexual orientation were discussed as factors in the awarding of a house. But two producers of the show, speaking publicly about the cancellation for the first time, say the network was confident it had the legal standing to give away a house as a game-show prize. One, Bill Kennedy, a co-executive producer who helped develop the series with his son, Eric, suggested an alternative explanation. He said that the protests might have been most significant as a diversion that allowed the Walt Disney Company, ABC's owner, to pre-empt a show that could have interfered with a much bigger enterprise: the courting of evangelical Christian audiences for "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Disney hoped that the film, widely viewed as a parable of the Resurrection, would be the first in a profitable movie franchise.
In the months and weeks before "Welcome to the Neighborhood" was to have its premiere, as Disney sought to build church support for "Narnia," four religious groups lifted longtime boycotts of the company that had been largely prompted by Disney's tolerance of periodic gatherings by gay tourists at its theme parks. Representatives for two of those groups now say that broadcasting "Neighborhood" could have complicated their support for "Narnia." One, the Southern Baptist Convention, with more than 16 million members, lifted the last of the boycotts against Disney on June 22, a week before ABC announced it was pulling the series.
When asked to respond to Mr. Kennedy's contention about "Narnia," Kevin Brockman, an ABC spokesman, said, "That's so ludicrous, it doesn't even merit a response." But Mr. Kennedy said he found ABC's stated reasons for canceling the series unconvincing. Although he acknowledged that he had "no smoking gun" to prove the link between "Narnia" and the fate of "Welcome to the Neighborhood," "I don't believe in coincidences," he said.
"Narnia," a joint venture with Walden Media, has gone on to earn almost $600 million since its release last month, on an investment of more than $150 million. "Neighborhood," by contrast, cost an estimated $10 million.
Now, nearly a year after production on "Neighborhood" concluded - and four months after the Wrights moved into the house - the couple, their new neighbors, Mr. Kennedy and another of the show's producers say they remain bewildered by the abrupt turn in the show's fortunes, including the statement by the network, which owns the rights to the series, that it has no plans either to broadcast it or allow it to be sold to another outlet.
The producers say that it is worth noting that a show that exists mainly to dispel people's tendencies to prejudge strangers was itself a victim of prejudgments. They also note that in a universe of failed reality-show relationships, this experiment has actually succeeded, yet only out of public view.
Since September, when the Wrights moved into their four-bedroom home in the Circle C Ranch development in southwest Austin, they have had standing Friday-night dinners with one neighborhood family (the Stewarts) and Sunday-night dinners with another (the Bellamys), whose twin teenage daughters are now their son's regular baby sitters.
Meanwhile, the neighbor who was the Wrights' earliest on-camera antagonist - Jim Stewart, 53, who is heard in an early episode saying, "I would not tolerate a homosexual couple moving into this neighborhood" - has confided to the producers that the series changed him far more than even they were aware.
No one involved in the show, Mr. Stewart said, knew he had a 25-year-old gay son. Only after participating in the series, Mr. Stewart said, was he able to broach his son's sexuality with him for the first time.
"I'd say to ABC, 'Start showing this right now,' " Mr. Stewart said in an interview at his oak kitchen table. "It has a message that needs to be heard by everyone." (Mr. Stewart first discussed his son publicly with The Austin American-Statesman.)
While other ABC shows have gay characters - including the new comedy "Crumbs" - "Neighborhood" features a real gay couple and their prospective neighbors in a continuing dialogue about homosexuality, including interpretations of the Bible.
In a recent interview, Richard Land, an official with the Southern Baptist Convention involved in the negotiations with Disney last year to end the group's boycott of the company, said he did not recall any mention of "Neighborhood." He added, however, that had the show been broadcast - particularly with an ending that showed Christians literally embracing their gay neighbors - it could have scuttled the Southern Baptists' support for "Narnia."
"I would have considered it a retrograde step," Mr. Land said of the network's plans to broadcast the reality series. "Aside from any moral considerations, it would have been a pretty stupid marketing move."
Paul McCusker, a vice president of Focus on the Family, which had supported the Southern Baptist boycott and reaches millions of evangelical listeners through the daily radio broadcasts of Dr. James Dobson, expressed similar views.
"It would have been a huge misstep for Disney to aggressively do things that would disenfranchise the very people they wanted to go see 'Narnia,' " he said.
Asked whether Disney's plans for "Narnia" had affected "Neighborhood," Mr. Brockman of ABC referred a reporter to comments made on July 26 by Stephen McPherson, the president of ABC Entertainment, to a gathering of television critics. At that time it was not widely known that a gay couple had won the competition. Instead, Mr. McPherson, a champion of the show until its sudden cancellation, was asked if he had been influenced by criticism by civil rights groups.
"If I stopped airing things just because advocacy groups had issues with it, we would run a test pattern," Mr. McPherson said. Rather, he said, he had begun to worry that some of the neighbors' most intolerant statements early on could confuse the audience's understanding of "the message you were trying to get across."
Hank Cohen, a former president of MGM Television Entertainment, a partner with ABC in "Neighborhood," said no one at the network had given him a direct answer as to what had transpired behind the scenes, and "the lack of any single coherent reason cited by them opens them up to all kinds of conjecture."
The full series, a copy of which was given to The New York Times by an advocate, is often raw, as contestants and judges speak openly about their preconceptions, only to observe in amazement as some of their ideas - though by no means all - melt away. Much of the give-and-take occurs in the series's version of the tribal council on "Survivor," as the three couples charged with giving away the house (bought by ABC for more than $300,000) meet to eliminate one family each episode.
Still, the neighbors' attitudes toward homosexuality constitute the dominant theme. That the tide may be shifting is telegraphed in an all-male scene in a hot tub, of all places, when one neighbor, John Bellamy, observes that Mr. Stewart appears to be softening his views toward gays. "I love you for that," Mr. Bellamy says, before cautioning, "Not in a weird kind of hot-tub love, with no chicks in the hot tub."
For Stephen Wright, who was recruited for the series through his church, which has a predominantly gay membership, the outcome has been bittersweet.
On the one hand, he has yet to achieve his goal of telling his family's story before a big audience. "We opened our souls and the life of our family, and we did it because we thought we could make a difference," he said.
But Mr. Wright said he took solace that through their participation in the series, he and his partner had had a positive impact on at least one relationship, that of Mr. Stewart and his son.
"We said at the outset that if we changed one person's heart or mind, it would be worth it," he said. "We have empirical evidence we did that."
"And," he added, "we won a house."
A Lives article on a woman in New Orleans
A Closer Walk With Thee
By SARAH M. BROOM
Before Aug. 29, my Creole mother, Ivory, six siblings and 13 nieces and nephews lived in my hometown, New Orleans. Today I have two brothers left in all of Louisiana. In New York, where I live, I've been homesick down to my gut and susceptible to every feeling of helplessness. So when I heard about a street parade in New Orleans on the Saturday after Thanksgiving - a parade to give thanks - I booked a ticket right then. But I was afraid of what I would find, and of what I might not be able to find anymore.
I'm in my rented S.U.V., coming from the airport on Friday afternoon, when I see the first wrecked house. I am less shocked by the car in someone's living room, or by the abundance of tennis shoes and boats on the tops of bent fences, than I am by the absence of people. I notice that the tires are too damn loud. Why am I driving on pebbles?
I tour the streets - Marigny, Roman, Burgundy, Mirabeau - with John Coltrane. He is chanting, "A love supreme, a love supreme. . .," when I see two people in masks and blue bodysuits cleaning out their homes. They wave, and I return the gesture. The only other movement that day is from a pack of scraggly dogs fighting over a plastic-foam to-go plate. When my car approaches, they don't bother to look up. They're hungry.
There's an evening curfew in the city, and with the encouragement of the patrolling National Guard, I head for Saint Rose, La., to my dead grandmother Amelia's house, 24 miles away, where my brother Carl now lives. I have to pass along St. Charles Avenue, where MTV's Real World was filmed and where most of the old-money mansions appear unscathed. I notice that one family is having a tea party on their porch. I feel an abiding sadness at my core.
The next day is the parade. I show up alone at 10 a.m. in front of Sweet Lorraine's, the jazz club, to join the crowds, some dressed to the nines in gold suits with shiny mahogany shoes. I spend an hour talking smack: "Where y'at?" "How's your mom and them?" "You gone cut up out here or what?" But soon the band chants, "Feet can't fail me now." And I don't believe they can. The tuba player is in front of me; I clap hard to match his beat. Then, after we have danced wild, the Hot 8 Brass Band plays "Just a Closer Walk With Thee": Daily walking close to Thee/Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
The trumpet wails its slow, sweet and with-plenty rhythm, just as Jelly Roll Morton once directed. It is a funeral dirge, and on the street we're swaying through there is barely a house standing. My heart is breaking into slivers. I fall off beat because I have to navigate piles of belongings: a moldy shoe, a brightly-dressed Barbie doll, a sewing machine.
At 1 p.m. we are three hours into a parade that will leave us at the foot of the Mississippi River. To break up the dancing, and to help the economy, we stop at bars along the parade route. By the time we make it to the river, I have had three rum-and-Cokes, which I drink out of plastic cups. I have also had a bowl of red beans and rice, which someone in a house with electricity has cooked for passers-by. At 3 in the afternoon, for the first time today, we start to feel our tired feet. So we limp. But it is worth it.
And I want more. A native has whispered that the Mardi Gras Indians, who dress regal in hand-sewn Indian costumes during Mardi Gras, are practicing their chants the next day. The location is Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon Avenue, at a bar called Tipitina's. The Indians are mostly African-American working people; there's a Big Chief, and young boys in clean sneakers with drums and tambourines play the beat. Imagine 15 sweating men with hard voices standing in a semi-circle, singing bare-bones songs. I think of the Haitian, the Creole, the Spanish, the voodoo, the Italian, in New Orleans history. It's as if I am at Congo Square in 1865, watching Marie Laveau, voodoo priestess, twirl in a spirit dance.
Near curfew, one man begins to sing. "Mighty cooty-fiyo," he calls. Tambourines rattle out a snake hiss. And then they chant in unison: "We are Indians/Indians of the nation/The wild, wild creation/We won't kneel down, not on the ground."
As they sing, they change the words: "We won't kneel down" becomes "We won't bow down." "The ground" becomes "the dirty ground."
I call my brother Michael in Texas and leave a taste of drum music on his voice mail. Outside it is pitch black - because it's night, but also because the electricity is still out. Out there is an awful quiet.
On my flight back to New York, I hum.
On a new Muslim comic
Comics to Battle for Truth, Justice and the Islamic Way
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 21 - For comic book readers in Arab countries, the world often looks like this: superheroes save American cities, battle beasts in Tokyo and even on occasion solve crimes in the French countryside. But few care about saving the Arab world.
If Naif al-Mutawa has his way, that is about to change. Young Arabs will soon be poring over a new group - and new genre - of superheroes like Jabbar, Mumita and Ramzi Razem, all aimed specifically at young Muslim readers and focusing on Muslim virtues.
Mr. Mutawa's Teshkeel Media, based in Kuwait, says that in September it will begin publishing "The 99," a series of comic books based on superhero characters who battle injustice and fight evil, with each character personifying one of the 99 qualities that Muslims believe God embodies.
A burly, fast-talking Kuwaiti with a dry wit, Mr. Mutawa, 34, said existing superheroes fell into two main genres: the Judeo-Christian archetype of individuals with enormous power who are often disguised or outcasts, like Superman, and the Japanese archetype of small characters who rely on each other to become powerful, like Pokémon.
His superhero characters will be based on an Islamic archetype: by combining individual Muslim virtues - everything from wisdom to generosity - they build collective power that is ultimately an expression of the divine.
"Muslims believe that power is ultimately God, and God has 99 key attributes," Mr. Mutawa said. "Those attributes, if they all come together in one place, essentially become the unity of God." He stresses that only God has them all, however, and 30 of the traits deemed uniquely divine will not be embodied by his characters.
Still, this is tricky territory. Muslim religious authorities reject attempts to personify the powers of God or combine the word of God in the Koran with new myths or imaginative renderings more typical of the West.
But Mr. Mutawa is seeking to reach youngsters who are straddling the cultural divide between East and West. They like comics and Western entertainment, and yet are attached to their roots and intend to hold on to their customs. He, too, faced that divide, going to summer camp in New Hampshire in the 1980's - he says his parents wanted him to lose weight - while grappling with Arab culture and pressures.
In his flowing white robe and traditional Arab headdress, Mr. Mutawa looks every bit the Kuwaiti; when he opens his mouth, however, he is every bit the New Yorker who spent his formative years reading comics and much of his adult life in the United States, training as a psychologist at Bellevue Hospital Center and writing a series of children's books on assimilation, race and prejudice.
"I was the kid that was thrown out of class for not being willing to accept what the teacher was teaching us about Jews," he said. "I had Jewish friends at camp, and I knew that they were not the stereotype." With three boys and a fourth child due soon, Mr. Mutawa says he wants his children to be able to find a balance between East and West.
Others, too, have seized on the opportunity for comics in the Middle East but not graphic representations of the principles of the Koran. In Cairo, AK Comics has published Middle East Heroes, four larger-than-life Arab characters who face the challenges of most Arabs by day and fight for them by night.
Mr. Mutawa, an avid reader of "Archie" and other comics, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and an M.B.A. from Columbia University, dreamed up his Muslim superheroes during a taxi ride in 2003 with his sister, Samar, in London.
The plot of the series, drawing on stories and history familiar to most Muslim youths, involves the great wisdom and learning that characterized the Muslim world at its apogee, when it reached from northern Pakistan to southern Spain in the late Middle Ages.
The story concerns 99 gems encoded with the wisdom of Baghdad just as the Mongols are invading the city in the 13th century - in his version, to destroy the city's knowledge. The gems are the source of not only wisdom but power, and they have been scattered across the world, sending some 20 superheroes (at least in the first year, leaving another 49 potential heroes for future editions) on a quest to find them before an evil villain does.
"To create the new, you have to tap into the old," Mr. Mutawa says of the deep historic connections in the comic. "The real goal is to teach kids that there's more than one way to solve a problem."
The characters in "The 99" are not all Arabs, but Muslims from all over the world. Jabbar, the enforcer, is a hulking figure from Saudi Arabia with the power to grow immense at a sneer; Mumita is a bombshell from Portugal with unparalleled agility and a degree of bloodlust; and Noora, from the United Arab Emirates, can read the truth in what people say and help them to see the truth in themselves. There is even a character who wears a burka, aptly called Batina, derived from the word meaning hidden.
But that is where religion stops and mythology begins, Mr. Mutawa says. "I don't expect Islamists to like my idea, and I don't want the ultraliberals to like it either," he says. So far, he has managed to get Kuwait's censors to approve the early mock-ups, he says. But to keep the orthodox at ease, he has included women in headscarves and plays it by the book as far as religion goes.
But what may give him the biggest edge is a seasoned team, including writers like Fabian Nicieza, who wrote for X-Men and Power Rangers comics, and a group of managers and advisers who are old hands in the industry.
In addition, "The 99" will piggyback on a distribution network Mr. Mutawa is setting up for a parallel project, publishing all manner of other comics in the region. Teshkeel has signed on with Marvel Comics to translate and distribute their comics in the Middle East, and will soon begin publishing Arabic versions of Marvel's Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, X-Men and others. He said he is in talks with Archie and DC Comics for similar deals. He says that Teshkeel has attracted $7 million from investors, based on the promise that he will turn his company into the largest comics publisher in the Middle East.
Last year, Teshkeel also bought Cracked, a defunct competitor of Mad magazine, which he plans to resume publishing in February pitched to a more mature audience in the United States. He hopes those publications will encourage other media companies to take him more seriously and back his Muslim superheroes concept.
"We got a sense that he was serious about this, and that it wasn't something he was pursuing on a whim," says Bruno Maglione, president of Marvel International, which signed a licensing agreement with Teshkeel last October.
English-language comics, though, are a tough sell in the Middle East; they are typically sold in specialty bookshops, and their distribution is spotty. So almost all of Teshkeel's will be in Arabic, with the expectation that they will be carried in supermarkets and newspaper stands.
Teshkeel will also have to compete against magazines like Space Toon Town, a monthly children's comic, as well as AK Comics.
The religious dimension is the biggest risk for a product whose main market, like all new products in the region, is oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where religion and entertainment rarely mix. Mr. Mutawa has already witnessed the frustration of having a book banned. "Get Your Ties Out of Your Eyes," a children's book featuring Bouncy, a ball who wears a tie - but differently than others - was banned in Kuwait because it seemed to be commenting on the Koran.
"When you're in a place where Bouncy Book 3 doesn't pass the censors, you have to be very creative," he said.
AK Comics' titles include figures like Aya, a Princess of Darkness; Zein, a time-traveling pharaoh; Jalila, an ancient Arabian swordsman who protects the City of All Faiths, and Rakan, a lone warrior entrusted with fighting evil. The characters must help bring order after 55 years of war between two unnamed superpowers, with political undertones running throughout. Unlike Teshkeel, AK's comic books have no mention of religion, based on a company policy that "no religion or faith be perceived as better than another."
Mr. Mutawa says he is taking a riskier path because he wants Muslim youngsters to have role models that fit both their Arab and Western sides. Last summer, his eldest son attended the same summer camp in New Hampshire - Robin Hood - and returned with a new discovery: Archie.
"I want my kids not to have to face the dichotomy all the time," Mr. Mutawa said. "I see this as a way to compete with hate."
On Harlem in the 40s.
Includes a slideshow
Jitterbug Days
By KEVIN BAKER
THE first thing you notice about Harlem is how wide the sky is. For a longtime New Yorker, so accustomed to being blinkered by ever more towers, the views along Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards are almost giddying. To the south, it feels as if you can see the rest of Manhattan below you, or at least down to the skyscrapers of Midtown, set like so many pickets against the horizon. Those structures offer a different tone poem every day, depending on the weather and the time of year; spectacular beneath the gaudy sunset of a summer evening, moody and contemplative on a drizzly winter afternoon.
The view is one of the few strands that tie the Harlem of today to what it was 60 years ago, and it is very welcome. When writing about the city as it was, one searches for any visual clue, however fleeting, to what people were seeing, feeling and hearing back then as they went about their daily lives.
Such moments are not easily forthcoming. New York is a wastrel with its past, shucking its skin like some giant snake as it slithers relentlessly into the future. Some of this is inevitable, of course, if a city is not to become a mausoleum, and the past is not something to be idealized. And yet it is easy to wish that what existed before had not been eradicated quite so quickly, or so thoroughly. That is certainly the case with the Harlem of the 1940's.
This nostalgia is ironic, because Harlem is a fluke. Those grand avenues give away what the neighborhood was intended to be, a hundred years ago: a wealthy, white suburb for the city growing explosively just to the south. But because of a combination of overspeculation, racism and pure chance, Harlem became something very different, the capital of black America, the locus of countless dreams - and a prison of sorts.
The swampy village that was Harlem had been intended as a home for the white elite, who had been retreating up Manhattan before one immigrant wave after another for most of the 19th century. Moving up the island almost simultaneously were New York's African-Americans, living together as a segregated community since the terrible lynchings of the Civil War draft riots. They were pushed on from one neighborhood to the next by assaults from the police, and by the same, white ethnic hordes that so frightened the nobs.
Deprived of their anticipated upper class, the landlords of Harlem turned to black tenants, knowing they could be charged double the standard rents for working-class New Yorkers because they had no place else to go. The result was New York's first real ghetto.
The word, ghetto, has come to be used almost interchangeably with slum, but it means something else. Where a slum implies simply poverty, a ghetto is a place where everyone, from all walks of life, rich or poor, is relegated by virtue of race or religion. By the 1920's, the convergence of blacks from every walk of life and region had brought about the Harlem Renaissance, the first great concentrated flowering of black culture in America. The Depression was hard on Harlem, and it ended the renaissance. Yet by 1943 Harlem was enjoying an edgy resurgence, infused with the new money generated by the war.
THIS was the last moment when Harlem was still a destination, an irresistible attraction for black and white servicemen alike who were on leave. Both the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm Little, later Malcolm X, were walking those broad avenues then, and they would scarcely recognize the Harlem of today.
Like the rest of Manhattan, it is an almost sedate place now. Much of the exuberant street life is gone, the vendors no longer hawking everything from ice to coal to sweet potatoes, with songs made up and sung to tunes from the hit parade. There are no more numbers runners, catching the nickels that slipped like quicksilver through the fire escape slits above; no more "Thursday girls," who strode out for a night on the town from beauty shops that were filled with smoke from the various, frightening hair-straightening processes of the day.
The Harlem of World War II was a vibrant place, a place well-honed by both disappointment and hope, where the music was harder and better than ever, where some of the best musicians who ever were competed against each other in midnight parties to raise rent money for the host. The music was best there, in those overcrowded, ordinary apartments, played by men who would never leave their best stuff in the downtown clubs.
Physically, most of Harlem is still built on a very human scale, and still has one of the city's largest collections of brownstones. Some of the old institutions remain from that time as well: the magnificently ponderous Y.M.C.A. on 135th Street, where Malcolm and so many other eager newcomers lived, and the stately Hotel Theresa, where more celebrated visitors stayed, from Joe Louis to Fidel Castro.
Yet the Harlem night scene has almost vanished, gone the way of the city's other fantastic entertainment districts, from the Latin Quarter to the old Coney Island to the German beer gardens that once lined the Bowery. The enormous dance halls, where the big bands played and jitterbugging came into its own, are long gone. The Cotton Club moved to Midtown before the 30's were out, and the fabulous Savoy Ballroom - "the home of happy feet," with its battles of the bands and its 250-foot-long dance floor - has been replaced by a housing project and a few stores.
The only physical remnant of the great halls is the gorgeous ruin of the Renaissance Casino, a hall that was big enough to hold one of New York's first great basketball teams, the New York Rens. It still runs the length of a city block on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and is somehow still majestic despite the layers of grime on its red-brick facade, the trees growing out of its roof, and its rusting marquees, one of them incongruously advertising "Chow Mein."
The great clubs are gone, too. Connie's Inn, where Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller played, has been replaced by something that looks like a garage. Small's Paradise, which had the best floor shows and, some say, the only working air-conditioning in Harlem, and where Malcolm met all the hustlers and pimps and burglars he would write about so lovingly in his autobiography, has now been subsumed by a school and an International House of Pancakes.
The old live theaters and the great movie palaces, the Lafayette, the Alhambra and the Victoria, have been plowed under as well, or changed beyond recognition. The Regent, considered the first truly "deluxe" movie theater in Manhattan, has long since been converted into a church.
Gone, too, are the less respectable establishments. The stretch of 133rd Street between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards was then known as Beale Street or Jungle Alley; this block of raucous clubs and after-hours bars was described rather melodramatically at the time as a place where "a knife blade is the quick arbiter of all quarrels, where prostitutes take anything they can get." Now it is a quiet block full of brownstone churches, and workmen rehabilitating brick town houses. West 144th Street, where a teenage Malcolm once worked as a "john-walker," escorting white tricks up to see black prostitutes, seems even more somnolent.
About all that remains of Harlem, the entertainment mecca, is the elegant Apollo. One can still stand on 126th Street and study the long, fire escape staircases on its back, wondering which one might have been used as a separate entrance for black patrons, confined to an upper gallery when the building was still the segregated Hurtig & Seamon's theater.
To the west of the Apollo stood the old Braddock Hotel, now demolished. For a while, it was the place leading black entertainers would stay, and in the 40's the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday could still be found in its bar - close enough so they could step over from the stage door of the Apollo for a quick drink. But by World War II, the hotel itself had become seedy. The race riot of 1943, the worst in Harlem's history, which would leave six people dead and the neighborhood ravaged, would begin there when a black serviceman was shot by a white cop in a fight that started over a complaint about a room.
Across 125th Street from the Apollo is the site of other battles. The old Kress's department store, where an earlier, more contained race riot began in 1935 after the false rumor that a shoplifter had been killed by store detectives, has been altered irretrievably. But the facade and name of a defunct department store just down the street, Blumstein's, is still in place. This was among the last great bastions of segregation in Harlem; the store had refused to hire black employees or even to allow black women to try on dresses. It was finally conquered by the "don't shop where you can't work" campaigns of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Those initiatives were a dramatic first step for Mr. Powell, who, while still holding the pulpit he had inherited from his father at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, went on to become the city's first black councilman, then its first black congressman. It was not surprising that the first black man to represent Harlem in Congress was a clergyman; no part of the old Harlem has survived as intact as its many, splendid churches. They stand like fortresses along its streets, as many of them have for the last 80 or even 90 years: the Abyssinian and St. Philip's, Salem Methodist and Mount Olivet, Mount Calvary and St. Mark's, to name only a few.
The great churches have never been the be-all and end-all of religion in Harlem; the area has many humble storefront churches, and many cultists and revivalists. But the big churches played a special role. These were the "invisible institution" made manifest - the term dating to the days of slavery, referring to how black believers had often had to hide their services.
Over the decades these entities, some of them dating to Lower Manhattan in the late 1700's, had been painfully brought to life. They had been kept together as their communicants moved up the West Side of Manhattan, transferred to private homes, abandoned buildings, even old stables. Critics argued that these great structures were too heavy a burden on the community, but to finally establish large, impressive churches was to make a statement, to say that Harlem was where they would make a stand.
Mr. Powell, a determined democratizer, relentlessly mocked his fellow clerics, accusing them of hypocrisy and "churchianity," and ridiculing all pretensions on the basis of income, or background, or skin tone. His needling fell largely on deaf ears. Distinctions are always made within the ghetto, lighter skin vs. darker skin; old New Yorkers vs. Southern migrants vs. proud immigrants from the British West Indies.
And of course, there was money. Wealthy Harlemites gathered together in specific areas - on Sugar Hill, in the Dunbar Apartments, or on Strivers Row - as the rich always have. But in the ghetto these enclaves were more heterogeneous and interesting than they were in New York's white neighborhoods. On Strivers Row alone, there lived at various times the composers W. C. Handy and Eubie Blake; Dr. Louis T. Wright, a prominent surgeon; Henry Pace, the founder of Black Swan Records; the fine heavyweight Harry Wills; the comedian Stepin Fetchit - and Mr. Powell himself.
NO neighborhood better exemplifies both the triumph and the frustration of Harlem than Strivers Row, on 138th and 139th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. On its two blocks, lovely, ethereal yellow- and rust-brick Italianate town houses seem to almost float above the branches of the slender trees along the sidewalk.
Originally called the King Model Houses, they were designed by Stanford White and several other leading New York architects of the 1890's. One can still find gates on some of them with the ancient imprecation "Walk Your Horses," directed at the sports who liked to race their horses along the broad avenues. There are even back alleys, providing residents with those luxuries so rare in Manhattan, house decks and garages.
Yet Strivers Row was designed for white people. When not enough of them would stay, refusing to live in an increasingly black Harlem, the Equitable Life Insurance Company kept the buildings vacant for a year before finally giving in, and allowing African-Americans to buy them. Even in Harlem, black people had to be insulted before their money was accepted.
One other extant building tells the story of the Harlem of the 40's, and what lay in store for it: the vast Art Deco armory on 142nd Street. The armory was built for the 369th Regiment, the "Harlem Hellfighters," after their return from World War I. Forced to fight with French troops, the Hellfighters had distinguished themselves, serving longer in continuous combat than any other American fighting unit, and they had marched back up Fifth Avenue in triumph with their band breaking into "Here Comes My Daddy Now" as they crossed into Harlem.
But for World War II, most of the 369th was trained in the Deep South, under white officers, along with tens of thousands of other black soldiers. Throughout the war, the people of Harlem had been receiving letters from their young men telling of how shabbily they were being treated, both by their white commanders and by the sheriffs and the police of Southern towns.
The letters, combined with news reports of white police officers and white mobs assaulting and even killing black soldiers and black defense workers around the country, brought people of all classes in Harlem together by the summer of 1943. James Baldwin would remember seeing "the strangest combinations" of people, standing about in tense, silent groups, churchgoers and "the most flagrant disbelievers."
"Something heavy in their stance seemed to indicate that they had all, incredibly, seen a common vision," he wrote, "and on each face there seemed to be the same strange, bitter shadow."
ALL that summer, the conflagration crept palpably closer, with every precaution taken against it only more enraging than the last. Military authorities had the Savoy closed, ostensibly to preserve the morals of our fighting men but mostly to prevent "racemixing," and motorcycle police patrols roared constantly through the streets, looking out for trouble. When the riot did come, with the shooting at the Braddock Hotel, Harlem would be permanently altered. Ultimately, the fury behind it would leave standing only a few suggestions of what had gone before, peeking out here and there.
This largely vanished Harlem may be most readily understood from the inside, looking out at those broad views of the looming city and its sentinel skyscrapers. So accessible and yet so unobtainable, still spurning those it had so arbitrarily driven out. To have looked upon that city every day, to understand the hatred and bigotry it represented even if you had no desire to join with it, must have been all but unbearable.
On a TV show for kids, sponsored by Hamas
Warm and Fuzzy TV, Brought to You by Hamas
By CRAIG S. SMITH
GAZA, Jan. 13 - Hey kids, it's Uncle Hazim time!
Hazim Sharawi, whose stage name is Uncle Hazim, is a quiet, doe-eyed young man who has an easy way with children and will soon preside over a children's television show here on which he'll cavort with men in larger-than-life, fake-fur animal suits on the Gaza Strip's newest television station, Al Aksa TV.
But Captain Kangaroo this is not. The station, named for Islam's third holiest site, is owned by Hamas, the people who helped make suicide bombing a household term.
"Our television show will have a message, but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood," said Mr. Sharawi, sitting in the broadcast studio where he will produce his show.
"I will show them our rights through the history," he said, "show them, 'This is Nablus, this is Gaza, this is Al Aksa mosque, which is with the Israelis and should be in our hands.' "
The new station is part of the militant Palestinian group's strategy to broaden its role in Palestinian politics and society, much as Hezbollah did in Lebanon. The station began broadcasting terrestrially on Jan. 7, and Hamas is working on a satellite version that would give it an even wider reach, like Hezbollah's Al Manar TV, which is watched throughout the Arab world.
"Their success encouraged us," said Fathi Hammad, Al Aksa TV's director. He said that Hamas had tried to find an existing broadcaster to accept its programming but that no one would take it.
"The Arab satellite broadcasters Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya both turned us down," he said, sitting beneath the seal of Hamas, which depicts the Dome of the Rock (which stands alongside Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem) between crossed swords and an idealized map of Palestine. "Even Iraq and Saudi Arabia refused."
In 2003, after the Palestinian Authority granted Hamas a broadcast license covering both radio and television, the group started the Voice of Al Aksa, which quickly became one of the most popular radio stations in the Gaza Strip. It took more than two years to assemble the expertise and equipment necessary to start the television station.
The current 12 hours of daily television programming, which has the unfinished look of public-access cable television in the United States, consists primarily of readings from the Koran, religious discourse and discussions of women's issues, such as Islamic fashion, child-rearing tips and the right of women to work, which Hamas supports. It will eventually feature a sort of Islamic MTV, with Hamas-produced music videos using footage from the group's fights with Israeli troops. There will even be a talent search show, a distant echo of "American Idol."
But its biggest star will be Mr. Sharawi, whose radio show for children was the Voice of Al Aksa's biggest hit.
Mr. Sharawi, 27, wearing a long black leather coat with a hood over a green suit and tie, fixed with a pin, looks like a straight-and-narrow Sunday school teacher. In fact, he got his start working with children at his mosque while studying geology at Islamic University in Gaza. His hair is parted in the middle, his beard trimmed as neatly as a suburban lawn.
He said the head of Hamas's radio station spotted him leading children's games at his mosque and asked him to do a children's radio show two years ago. The show has become so popular, his appearances at occasional Hamas-sponsored festivals draw as many as 10,000 children at a time.
Mr. Sharawi will not take visitors to see him do his radio broadcast because the studio's location is a heavily guarded secret. In 2004, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired three rockets into the station's previous studio not long after Mr. Sharawi and his colleagues had fled.
Everybody involved in the television station is worried about another attack, but Mr. Sharawi said he is ready to die if it comes. "The messengers don't care if they lose their lives for the sake of revealing the message," he said.
As he describes it, his television show, which begins in a few weeks, will teach children the basics of militant Palestinian politics - the disputed status of Jerusalem, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the Palestinian refugees' demand for a right to return to the lands they lost to Israel in the 1948 war - without showing the violence that Hamas's pursuit of those goals entails.
The show will alternate between Uncle Hazim and his animal characters in the studio taking live phone calls from children and video clips recorded outside. Mr. Sharawi said he would leaven the sober and pedantic material with fun and games, including such standards as egg-and-spoon races, eating apples on a string or "tug of war, which will show children that the more you cooperate with others, the more you win."
Mr. Sharawi said he would dress up in different costumes to suit the show's locale: a sailor suit while taping on the beach, a track suit when in the park, even a Boy Scout uniform while hiking through the small patches of empty land that serve as Gaza's wilderness.
"We will invite real Boy Scouts to come and talk to us about camping," Mr. Sharawi said, warming to his theme (the Palestinian Scout Association is a member of the World Organization of the Scout Movement).
Through it all, Mr. Sharawi will be accompanied by animal-costumed sidekicks to provide comic relief. Hamas will rent the Egyptian-made plush costumes - a fox, a rabbit, a dog, a bear and a chicken, already gray and matted from wear - from a production company run by a Hamas supporter who has just emerged from two years in Israeli jails.
When asked if the animals will have names, Mr. Sharawi looked slightly nonplussed and said: "Bob. Bob the Fox, for example."
He said he was inspired by a children's program on Saudi television in which a young veiled woman and a Mickey Mouse-like character take calls from kids. Fingering a string of bright green plastic prayer beads, a pale blue prayer rug lying on the chair beside him, he tries to reconcile Hamas's bloody attacks that kill innocent children with his role as mentor.
"These are one of the means used by the Palestinians against Israel's F-16's and tanks," he said of the suicide attacks, giving a stock answer. "We're doing our best to avoid involving children in these issues, but I cannot turn the children's lives into a beautiful garden while outside it's the contrary."
He gets up to fiddle with a magnesium light stand in the studio, which is furnished with five beige upholstered chairs and a dusty desk in front of a rattan screen decorated with plastic grape leaves.
The show, which will be broadcast on Friday mornings, the beginning of the Muslim weekend, will be preceded by an hour of cartoons, including a serialized life of the Prophet Muhammad, and that universal send-up of deadly conflict, Tom & Jerry.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 05:14 am (UTC)Or, y'know, make them laugh hysterically at you.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 05:20 am (UTC)Anyway, clearly you're just jealous because of their l33t specialness.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 05:56 am (UTC)Or I could, you know, stop being lazy and try to learn Arabic.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:07 am (UTC)Interesting sidenote: most of the "classic" comic-book heroes were created by Jews. Superman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the original X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Atom, Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, Plastic Man, many of the Avengers... all were created by Jewish writers, artists, or both. Batman was not, nor was Wonder Woman(*). I'm not sure about the Flash or Green Lantern. I'm pretty sure that Hawkman was, and as I recall the Spectre was as well. Most of the "modern" heroes (post 1970) have come from gentiles, and although one of the last of the truly prominent comic-book superheroes - Spawn - was black, not one major comic-book character that I can think of was created by either a black creator or a female one (though Wonder Woman's creator credited his wife and girlfriend with co-imagining the character).
So yeah, it'd be interesting to see where this new blood flows... one hopes not in the gutters.
-------------
* + Wonder Woman was created by a BDSM submissive psychologist - not like you'd ever see fetish undertones in THAT series - who also invented the lie detector and had a polyamourous relationship with a woman outside his marriage.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:21 am (UTC)Were they? That *is* interesting. I wonder if there's a reason for that.... (Other than that Jewish people apparently rock more than I'd previously realized.)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 05:20 pm (UTC)(For some interesting factoids about Wonder Woman's creators William Moulton Marston and Elizabeth Holloway Marston - among them, how Women Woman was based on their mutual girlfriend Olive Byrne - see the following Wikipedia listings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Moulton_Marston, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_%28Sadie%29_Holloway_Marston, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman.)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:12 am (UTC)Am I a total plebe for thinking that the nature of the "next step in human development" is such that you don't recognize it at the time?
Probably.
*eyeroll*
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:22 am (UTC)Sometimes the image filter in my brain needs a good talking-to about propriety.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:37 am (UTC)It got pretty strange there, for a while. And considering one of the lists has someone who is schitzophrenic and doesnt take his meds and posts some really REALLY outrageous stuff...that says something.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:55 am (UTC)Schizophrenic, by the way. No t.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 05:30 pm (UTC)Indigo children generally sound like case studies in ADD-- random comments due to constantly shifting mental gears, highly active imaginations, generally intelligent....
Oops. Guess I'm an indigo child! *eyeroll*
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 10:59 pm (UTC)You can be green instead, if you like. It's not easy being green, though.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 05:14 am (UTC)Or, y'know, make them laugh hysterically at you.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 05:20 am (UTC)Anyway, clearly you're just jealous because of their l33t specialness.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 05:56 am (UTC)Or I could, you know, stop being lazy and try to learn Arabic.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:07 am (UTC)Interesting sidenote: most of the "classic" comic-book heroes were created by Jews. Superman, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the original X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Atom, Captain America, the Sub-Mariner, Plastic Man, many of the Avengers... all were created by Jewish writers, artists, or both. Batman was not, nor was Wonder Woman(*). I'm not sure about the Flash or Green Lantern. I'm pretty sure that Hawkman was, and as I recall the Spectre was as well. Most of the "modern" heroes (post 1970) have come from gentiles, and although one of the last of the truly prominent comic-book superheroes - Spawn - was black, not one major comic-book character that I can think of was created by either a black creator or a female one (though Wonder Woman's creator credited his wife and girlfriend with co-imagining the character).
So yeah, it'd be interesting to see where this new blood flows... one hopes not in the gutters.
-------------
* + Wonder Woman was created by a BDSM submissive psychologist - not like you'd ever see fetish undertones in THAT series - who also invented the lie detector and had a polyamourous relationship with a woman outside his marriage.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:21 am (UTC)Were they? That *is* interesting. I wonder if there's a reason for that.... (Other than that Jewish people apparently rock more than I'd previously realized.)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-23 05:20 pm (UTC)(For some interesting factoids about Wonder Woman's creators William Moulton Marston and Elizabeth Holloway Marston - among them, how Women Woman was based on their mutual girlfriend Olive Byrne - see the following Wikipedia listings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Moulton_Marston, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_%28Sadie%29_Holloway_Marston, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Woman.)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:12 am (UTC)Am I a total plebe for thinking that the nature of the "next step in human development" is such that you don't recognize it at the time?
Probably.
*eyeroll*
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:22 am (UTC)Sometimes the image filter in my brain needs a good talking-to about propriety.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:37 am (UTC)It got pretty strange there, for a while. And considering one of the lists has someone who is schitzophrenic and doesnt take his meds and posts some really REALLY outrageous stuff...that says something.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 06:55 am (UTC)Schizophrenic, by the way. No t.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 05:30 pm (UTC)Indigo children generally sound like case studies in ADD-- random comments due to constantly shifting mental gears, highly active imaginations, generally intelligent....
Oops. Guess I'm an indigo child! *eyeroll*
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 10:59 pm (UTC)You can be green instead, if you like. It's not easy being green, though.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-22 11:59 pm (UTC)