brandon williamscraig

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 10 May 2010 22:41:00 +0000

an honorable mention (January 2010)
Thanks!

Dear Aiki Extensions Supporter -

Please consider posting this message on your dojo notice board or otherwise sharing with colleagues, along with your contact info. This message can also be found online at this link (http://www.aiki-extensions.org/newdecade.pdf), if that is an easier way for you to share.

---------------------------------------------
On behalf of Aiki Extensions, I would like to extend the greetings of the season - of the recent past: the festival of lights, of the winter solstice, and of the yuletide - and greetings of the immediate future: the birth of the next decade.

Greetings, in particular, to all of you who believe aikido can help improve the world we share. Greetings to those who would rather imagine the world as it should be, and then work to realize that vision, or support those already on the front lines wielding the practical wisdom and strategic insight of aikido to make the world better than it was . . .

Greetings to the heros already making a difference, and to all of those who just might have such a hero inside themselves ready to come out.

° Heros like Paul Linden - who uses aiki-principles as an award-winning somatic educator for victims of abuse (http://www.being-in-movement.com/)

° Heros like Jamie Zimron begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting - who uses aikido as the foundation for peace efforts in Israel and the West Bank (http://www.aikidomideastpeace.info/)

° Heros like Bill Leicht begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting - who as coordinator of AE's Peace Dojos International weaves martial arts schools of many styles together to work more effectively for peace. (http://aikiext.org/Projects/Peace_Dojos), who developed the original Bronx Peace Dojo and who helped found Peace Dojo Lua Branca in Columbia. (http://urbanvisions.us/)

° Heros like Jose Bueno Marinho - who established an aikido program for kids in the favela slums of Sao Paulo, Brazil
(http://www.aiki-extensions.org/projectsBrazil.asp)

° Heros like Brandon WilliamsCraig - who wields aiki-principles in his work networking community-builders (http://bdwc.net)

° Heros like Charles Colten begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting - who is implementing an aikido-in-the-schools curriculum for K-12 education (www.aikidointheschools.com)

° Heros like Tekele Tesfaye - the first yudansha in Ethiopia, who runs a multi-ethnic aikido and circus arts program for kids in the villages and refugee centers, where they put on shows of acrobatics and aikido to draw attention prior to distributing AIDS education material. (http://www.aiki-extensions.org/projectsAwassa.asp)

These people, and many other like them, are as close as most of us will get to a knight in shining armor. Each of these has embarked on their own quest, and they are all inspired by O Sensei's particular and powerful code of chivalry. Each is taking their understanding of aikido out of the dojo and into a non-traditional environment - an elementary classroom, a physical therapy clinic, an after-school program, a business consultancy, a psychology practice, a youth-violence prevention program, a recording studio, a police academy, etc.

Your dojo probably has someone who belongs on this list - and Aiki Extensions would like to hear about it.

Please email us about them (info@aiki-extensions.org), or give their information to any Aiki Extensions member (such as the one who posted this letter). We need to know about them because it is our mission to be the Round Table bringing all these aiki-knights together, providing them with support, and encouraging them to continue on their respective quests.

If you would like to know more about earning your way onto a list like this - join as at www.Aiki-Extensions.org.

If you want to help us continue to support all of this aiki-inspired activity - your tax-deductible contributions can be made online here:
(http://www.aiki-extensions.org/waysdonate.asp).

Yours,

Robert Kent begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting, President
Aiki Extensions Inc.
www.aiki-extensions.org
650.365.6432

Aiki Extensions is a nonprofit network of aikido practitioners who take aiki principles off the mat and into the world in areas like youth violence prevention, K-12 conflict-resolution curricula, business consulting, psychotherapy, and Israeli/Palestinian peace programs.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:23:00 +0000

Let it all Huang out!

One of my favorite people FINALLY got some real press. For those of you who may be confused, this is in fact the alter-ego of Philip Huang Chao-ming 黃兆明, who is the fourth and current Roman Catholic bishop of Hualien. He commutes to the Bay Area on his frequent weeks off to raise awareness about the evils of MMA, gay porn, and the lunar homosexuality crisis.

You gotta love a Roman Catholic Bishop whose genuine article includes the words "click to enlarge."

The Provocateur

Philip Huang foists art on an unsuspecting public.

By Rachel Swan

Article Tools

click to enlarge

Hali McGrath
Philip Huang.

Follow Philip Huang at Twitter.com/PhilipHuang

One of Philip Huang's forthcoming projects — and he has a slew of them — will involve a guerilla theater performance outside the 24 Hour Fitness in downtown Berkeley. He'll call it "Witness the Fitness." "It's like, 'What the fuck are those people looking at, on the treadmill?'" asked Huang, who was never one to shy away from a bemused audience. He's taken the public art concept to all sorts of unlikely places, including a bathroom stall at the Coppola vineyard, several gay marriage protests, and a construction site two blocks away from Ground Zero. When it comes to art, Huang confesses to being a bit of a free-market libertarian. He doesn't believe in grant applications or waiting around for someone else to curate your work. He's skeptical of third-party mediators. He also sees nothing wrong with foisting product on an unsuspecting public.

So you might call Philip Huang a living, breathing, walking piece of performance art. Last Tuesday he went to UC Berkeley — his alma mater — dressed in clothes he'd slept in the night before: a faux camel's hair coat from Banana Republic, Converse sneakers with flames, dark-blue long johns, and an orange scarf with tassels. Were it not for the get-up, Huang might have passed for a Cal student. He's 34 years old but looks younger, with his preppy bowl haircut and horn-rimmed glasses. A few months ago he left two part-time jobs — one as an HIV test counselor, the other slinging gelato. Now he writes and performs full time, often staying up until 5 a.m. to work on fiction. (He used to contribute book reviews to the Express.) Born in Taiwan, he grew up in Asia and later immigrated to Phoenix, then to a working-class neighborhood of Los Angeles. He's gay and proud of it, fascinated by all things camp, and into being outré. For Huang, the line between "art" and public disturbance is perilously thin.

"That's part of my thesis," said Huang. "Most art sucks, and most artists with careers shouldn't have careers."

Huang has performed in myriad venues throughout the Bay Area, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, TheGarage, CounterPulse, and Oakland Asian Cultural Center — where he premiered Semen and White Lace: A One Woman Show, last year. For the most part, Huang prefers to stage things in his own living room, where he maintains total creative control and collects all the proceeds. Last year Huang held two shows in his south Berkeley apartment building, redubbed "the Dana Street Theater." He said he collected roughly $300 a night. This year, he's organizing a Bay Area-wide home theater festival, which will include local choreographer Keith Hennessy, writer Kirk Read, and porn star Annie Sprinkle. "Artists have always made shows in their own houses," said Huang. "But I want to take it to the next level. Let's legitimize it. Let's call it 'theater.' Let's charge money for it, and let's make a festival out of it. My message to artists is 'You don't need an institution to have a career.'"

At this point, Huang seldom uses the imprimatur of a big company. He's the consummate free agent, and it goes beyond having a home theater. Huang subscribes to the philosophy that anything can be a performance, so long as you have the means to document it. Thus, he always leaves the house armed with a small Flip cam and digital recorder. He has a special talent for digesting life and creating spectacle.

His YouTube videos are a mirror reflection of that sensibility. In "Roe Vs. Wade Vs. Philip" he infiltrates a "Walk for Life" rally. "Let's hear it for 'pro life!'" Huang screams when the camera starts rolling. "Abortions suck. Screw abortions!" After six minutes he gets ejected by one of the organizers. In "Ave Maria" he sings an aria while sauntering down Santa Monica Boulevard. In "Philip Vs. Prop Church" — which was inspired by an Express story about Oakland Bishop Salvatore Cordileone — he stands across the street from the Cathedral of Christ the Light at Lake Merritt and asks passerby if it looks like a giant vagina. In "Mariah Audition Tapes for Precious" he arranges a towel on his head to look like a big mop of hair, and recites Mariah Carey's lines from the film. A minute and a half in duration, the video comprises several close-up shots of Huang, pretending to be a glamour queen, pretending to be a social worker. "Can we talk about the abuse in your household?" he croons. Huang's best video to date is "The Lunar Homosexual Agenda," in which he hijacks a Westboro Church anti-gay demonstration, carrying a sign that says "No Fags on the Moon."

We've seen this type of protest art before, with the Yes Men, Reverend Billy, and even graphic designer Shepard Fairey — all of whom are famous for inverting hierarchical forms. And Huang sees himself as part of the same postmodern lineage. He cites the British graffiti artist Banksy as his main idol. To a certain degree, he's glommed onto the culture jamming phenomenon. But Huang is also a different species of provocateur. His motivations for doing things independently seem personal rather than ideological. He likes having complete control over his work, using theatrical shock tactics, and, above all, getting under people's skin. It wasn't satisfying enough to just get a few Lake Merritt joggers to agree that Christ the Light looked like a vagina. He had to ask if they'd finger it. For his last video, "Drunk White Girls Vs. Drunk Asian Girls," Huang went around Telegraph Avenue asking people which group is more irritating.

Last Tuesday's UC Berkeley excursion provided infinite opportunities for more video shoots. Huang had his camera and recorder in tow. He passed through Sather Gate Plaza and gazed into the window of a men's wrestling club. "That's super hot," he said pointing at the big window, as a pair of half-naked men pretzeled each other on the other side. "It's like when you're in a hotel room and you get the 24-hour porn option. You never know what you're gonna find."

Sproul Plaza was fertile terrain. Huang had hoped to find some Tea Party protestors at the lip of Telegraph and Bancroft avenues, but instead he found a more sedate group of sign-holders, promoting a blood drive. Members of the UC Berkeley Men's Octet were posted at Sather Gate, singing and passing out flyers. A gentleman in an American flag T-shirt held court outside Dwinelle Hall, lecturing about Communism. Huang waded through crowds of students advertising Haiti fund-raisers, Magic School Bus performances, and activist groups. None of them seemed quite worthy of provocation. The singers and blood donors were benign. The American flag guy was too crazy. He passed a "diversity wall" with black-and-white photographs, showing slices of the UC Berkeley population. "I always tell people this is a memorial for the students who died during terrorist attacks," he said.

It seemed like Huang wouldn't be able to leave his mark anywhere that day. Then a girl accosted him in Sproul Plaza. She complimented the orange scarf. She asked if he would pose for some type of student-club promotional photo. Huang conceded. The girl set him up next to a handsome young man and has them both hold signs. Huang lay down on the ground and wrapped himself around the other guy's legs. The guy rolled his eyes and laughed uncomfortably. Onlookers snickered. The girl snapped her picture.

Culture Spy archives »

Tags: Philip Huang, culture jamming, YouTube, Dana Street Theater, Sproul Plaza

Is There an Ecological Unconscious?

Smith doesn't really cover Ecopsychology because he ignores its origin in Archetypal Psychology and the work of Henry Corbin, for instance the anima mundi concept, but it is lovely to see beginning work along these lines in the mainstream media.

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html?emc=eta1&pagewanted=all

Artwork by Kate MacDowell; photograph by Dan Kvitka for The New York Times

By DANIEL B. SMITH

Published: January 27, 2010

About eight years ago, Glenn Albrecht began receiving frantic calls from residents of the Upper Hunter Valley, a 6,000-square-mile region in southeastern Australia. For generations the Upper Hunter was known as the “Tuscany of the South” — an oasis of alfalfa fields, dairy farms and lush English-style shires on a notoriously hot, parched continent. “The calls were like desperate pleas,” Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, recalled in June. “They said: ‘Can you help us? We’ve tried everyone else. Is there anything you can do about this?’ ”

Artwork by Kate MacDowell; photograph by Dan Kvitka for The New York Times

Residents were distraught over the spread of coal mining in the Upper Hunter. Coal was discovered in eastern Australia more than 200 years ago, but only in the last two decades did the industry begin its exponential rise. Today, more than 100 million tons of black coal are extracted from the valley each year, primarily by open-pit mining, which uses chemical explosives to blast away soil, sediment and rock. The blasts occur several times a day, sending plumes of gray dust over ridges to settle thickly onto roofs, crops and the hides of livestock. Klieg lights provide a constant illumination. Trucks, draglines and idling coal trains emit a constant low-frequency rumble. Rivers and streams have been polluted.

Albrecht, a dark, ebullient man with a crooked aquiline nose, was known locally for his activism. He participated in blockades of ships entering Newcastle (near the Upper Hunter), the largest coal-exporting port in the world, and published opinion articles excoriating the Australian fossil-fuel industries. But Albrecht didn’t see what he could offer besides a sympathetic ear and some tactical advice. Then, in late 2002, he decided to see the transformation of the Upper Hunter firsthand.

“There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land. What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.

In Albrecht’s view, the residents of the Upper Hunter were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” A neologism wasn’t destined to stop the mines; they continued to spread. But so did Albrecht’s idea. In the past five years, the word “solastalgia” has appeared in media outlets as disparate as Wired, The Daily News in Sri Lanka and Andrew Sullivan’s popular political blog, The Daily Dish. In September, the British trip-hop duo Zero 7 released an instrumental track titled “Solastalgia,” and in 2008 Jukeen, a Slovenian recording artist, used the word as an album title. “Solastalgia” has been used to describe the experiences of Canadian Inuit communities coping with the effects of rising temperatures; Ghanaian subsistence farmers faced with changes in rainfall patterns; and refugees returning to New Orleans after Katrina.

The broad appeal of solastalgia pleases Albrecht; it has helped earn him hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants as well as his position at Murdoch. But he is not particularly surprised that it has caught on. “Take a look out there,” he said, gesturing to the line of coal ships. “What you’re looking at is climate change queued up. You can’t get away from it. Not in the Upper Hunter, not in Newcastle, not anywhere. And that’s exactly the point of solastalgia.” Just as the loss of “heart’s ease” is not limited to displaced native populations, solastalgia is not limited to those living beside quarries — or oil spills or power plants or Superfund sites. Solastalgia, in Albrecht’s estimation, is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment. As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffering in return?

Albrecht’s philosophical attempt to trace a direct line between the health of the natural world and the health of the mind has a growing partner in a subfield of psychology. Last August, the American Psychological Association released a 230-page report titled “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” News-media coverage of the report concentrated on the habits of human behavior and the habits of thought that contribute to global warming. This emphasis reflected the intellectual dispositions of the task-force members who wrote the document — seven out of eight were scientists who specialize in decision research and environmental-risk management — as well as the document’s stated purpose. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting,” Janet Swim, a Penn State psychologist and the chairwoman of the task force, said, “in order to understand how to get people to act.”

Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief. It also disguised the unusual background of the eighth member of the task force, Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Doherty runs a private therapeutic practice called Sustainable Self and is the most prominent American advocate of a growing discipline known as “ecopsychology.”

There are numerous psychological subfields that, to one degree or another, look at the interplay between human beings and their natural environment. But ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts.

“If you look at the beginnings of clinical psychology,” Patricia Hasbach, a psychotherapist and prominent ecopsychologist based in Eugene, told me, “the focus was on intrapsychic forces” — the mind-bound interplay of ego, id and superego. “Then the field broadened to take into account interpersonal forces such as relationships and interactions between people. Then it took a huge leap to look at whole families and systems of people. Then it broadened even further to take into account social systems” and the importance of social identities like race, gender and class. “Ecopsychology wants to broaden the field again to look at ecological systems,” she said. “It wants to take the entire planet into account.”

The terms in which ecopsychology pursues this admittedly ambitious goal are steeped in the field’s countercultural beginnings. Ecopsychology emerged in the early 1960s, just as the modern environmental movement was gathering strength, when a group of Boston-area graduate students gathered to discuss what they saw as the isolation and malaise infecting modern life. It had another brief period of efflorescence, particularly on the West Coast and among practitioners of alternative therapies, in the early ’90s, when Theodore Roszak, a professor of history (he coined the word “counterculture”) published a manifesto, “The Voice of the Earth,” in which he criticized modern psychology for neglecting the primal bond between man and nature. “Mainstream Western psychology has limited the definition of mental health to the interpersonal context of an urban-industrial society,” he later wrote. “All that lies beyond the citified psyche has seemed of no human relevance — or perhaps too frightening to think about.” Ecopsychology’s eclectic following, which includes therapists, researchers, ecologists and activists, still reflects these earlier foundations. So does its rhetoric. Practitioners are as apt, if not more apt, to cite Native American folk tales as they are empirical data to make their points.

Yet even as it remains committed to its origins, ecopsychology has begun in recent years to enter mainstream academic circles. Last April, Doherty published the first issue of Ecopsychology, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to “the relationship between environmental issues and mental health and well-being.” Next year, M.I.T. Press will publish a book of the same name, edited by Hasbach and Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist, and Jolina Ruckert, a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Washington. The volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, among them the award-winning biologist Lynn Margulis and the anthropologist Wade Davis, as it delves into such areas as “technological nature” and how the environment affects human perception. Ecopsychology is taught at Oberlin College, Lewis & Clark College and the University of Wisconsin, among other institutions.

Ecopsychologists are not the first to embrace a vital link between mind and nature. They themselves admit as much, emphasizing the field’s roots in traditions like Buddhism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism. They point to affinities with evolutionary psychology — to the idea that our responses to the environment are hard-wired because of how we evolved as a species. They also point to biophilia, a hypothesis put forward by the eminent Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, in 1984, that human beings have an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” Though Wilson’s idea has been criticized as both deterministic and so broad as to be untestable, the notion that evolution endowed humans with a craving for nature struck a lasting chord in many sectors of the scientific community. Over the past quarter-century, Wilson’s hypothesis has inspired a steady flow of articles, books, conferences and, last year, the E. O. Wilson Biophilia Center in northwest Florida.

But unlike Wilson and his followers, ecopsychologists tend to focus on the pathological aspect of the mind-nature relationship: its brokenness. In this respect, their project finds echoes in the culture at large. Recently, a number of psychiatrically inflected coinages have sprung up to represent people’s growing unease over the state of the planet — “nature-deficit disorder,” “ecoanxiety,” “ecoparalysis.” The terms have multiplied so quickly that Albrecht has proposed instituting an entire class of “psychoterratic syndromes”: mental-health issues attributable to the degraded state of one’s physical surroundings. Ecopsychologists, many of whom are licensed clinicians, remain wary of attributing specific illnesses to environmental decline or of arguing that more-established disorders have exclusively environmental causes. Rather, they propose a new clinical approach based on the idea that treating patients in an age of ecological crisis requires more than current therapeutic approaches offer. It requires tapping into what Roszak called our “ecological unconscious.”

LAST JUNE, I PAID a visit to Doherty, who works in a stone-fronted building in northeast Portland, in an office decorated with a sweeping topographical map of Oregon and a fountain that trickles water onto a pile of stones. He has receding red hair and a red mustache and beard; a small silver hoop dangles from the cartilage of his left ear. Doherty was raised in a working-class neighborhood in Buffalo and then went to Columbia University, where he majored in English. Afterward, he worked in a variety of jobs that reflected his interest in the environment: fisherman, wilderness counselor, river-rafting guide, door-to-door fund-raiser for Greenpeace.

As a therapist with activist credentials in a “green” city on the West Coast, Doherty is fairly representative of ecopsychologists today. He is also typical in that he was inspired to enter the field by Roszak’s “Voice of the Earth.” To some extent Doherty remains under Roszak’s spell. When we met, he talked about “an appropriate distrust of science,” and the “dualistic” character of empiricism — the mind/body split — which gives society “free rein to destroy the world.” But he recognizes that ecopsychology endorses a few dualisms of its own. “A more simplistic, first-generation ecopsychology position simplifies the world,” he said. “Either you’re green or you’re not. Either you’re sane or you’re not. It conflates mental health and/or lack of mental health with values and choices and the culture.” His mission, he said, is to spearhead a “second-generation ecopsychology” that leaves these binaries behind.

The bulk of his work is therapeutic. Like any therapist, Doherty, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, sees patients and discusses routine concerns like sex and family dynamics. Unlike most therapists, he asks about patients’ relationships with the natural world — how often they get outdoors, their anxieties about the state of the environment. He recently developed a “sustainability inventory,” a questionnaire that measures, among typical therapeutic concerns like mood, attitudes and the health of intimate relationships, “comfort with your level of consumption and ecological footprint.”

The ways in which clinicians perform ecotherapy vary widely. Patricia Hasbach often conducts sessions outdoors; she finds that a natural setting helps to broaden a client’s perspective, has restorative benefits and can serve as a source of powerful metaphors. “Ecotherapy stretches the boundaries of the traditional urban, indoor setting,” she told me. “Nature provides a live and dynamic environment not under the control of the therapist or client.” Often this leads to revelatory sensory experiences, as in the case of one client who struggled with a sense of emotional numbness. The feeling dissipated after he put his feet in an icy mountain stream.

Doherty, who teaches a class on ecotherapy with Hasbach at Lewis & Clark, places less emphasis on the outdoors — not only because his office is located in an especially urban section of Portland but also because he worries about perpetuating a false dichotomy between the wilderness and the city. His Sustainable Self practice attracts a clientele that is typically self-selecting and eager to inject an ecological perspective into their sessions. Usually, his clients don’t come to him with symptoms or complaints that are directly attributable to environmental concerns, but every so often he has to engage in what he calls “grief and despair work.” For example, one client, Richard Brenne, a climate-change activist and an avid outdoorsman, came to Doherty because he was so despondent about the state of the planet and so dedicated to doing something to help that it was damaging his relationship with his family. In an e-mail message to me, Brenne praised Doherty for helping him face the magnitude of the problem without becoming despairing or overwrought. Some would argue that treating Brenne’s anxiety about the environment and the negative effect it had on his family life is no different from treating a patient whose anxieties about work cause problems at home. But for Doherty, treating an obsession with ecological decline requires understanding how the bond between the patient and the natural world may have been disrupted or pathologized. Doherty is currently working on a theoretical model in which a person’s stance toward environmental concerns can be categorized as “complicated or acute,” “inhibited or conflicted” or “healthy and normative.”

Doherty is eager to test his therapeutic ideas in a broader arena by urging the field to back up its claims with empirical data. Many subfields of clinical psychology have had to make this transformation in the past decade as calls have grown louder and louder for therapeutic systems to prove their efficacy in quantifiable ways. This shift is arguably harder on ecopsychology than it is on others: in the past, the field hasn’t just sidestepped science; it has denigrated it as a system of inquiry that objectifies the natural world.

Doherty’s journal, Ecopsychology, sometimes feels like an awkward marriage of Orion Magazine and The American Journal of Psychology, combining personal essays about communing with nature with more theoretical articles. In the first issue, Martin Jordan, a psychologist at the University of Brighton in Britain, evoked Kleinian attachment theory to warn against the “naïve” mind-set that sees the natural world as some “perfect . . . benevolent parent.” Such an outlook, he argues, isn’t just untruthful — nature is as harsh and inhospitable as it is salubrious and inviting — it’s a form of escapism, a sign that someone is less in love with nature than out of love with society.

It is not that Doherty is unfriendly to the spiritual thrust of ecopsychology; the shelves in his office are filled with volumes of nature poetry and mythology. But he hopes to press his colleagues to realize that “tending data sets and tending souls are not mutually exclusive,” as he writes in his inaugural editorial. “The idea that personal health and planetary health are connected, that’s not just an idea,” Doherty told me. It is a proposition, he said, and that proposition can and should be tested.

SUPPORT FOR ecopsychology’s premise that an imperiled environment creates an imperiled mind can be found in more established branches of psychology. In a recent study, Marc Berman, a researcher in cognitive psychology and industrial engineering at the University of Michigan, assigned 38 students to take a nearly three-mile walk — half in the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor and half along a busy street. His purpose was to validate attention-restoration theory (A.R.T.), a 20-year-old idea that posits a stark difference in the ability of natural and urban settings to improve cognition. Nature, A.R.T. holds, increases focus and memory because it is filled with “soft fascinations” (rustling trees, bubbling water) that give those high-level functions the leisure to replenish, whereas urban life is filled with harsh stimuli (car horns, billboards) that can cause a kind of cognitive overload. In Berman’s study, the nature-walkers showed a dramatic improvement while the city-walkers did not, demonstrating nature’s significant restorative effects on cognition.

Peter Kahn, the developmental psychologist and a member of Ecopsychology’s editorial board, has been more explicitly testing some of ecopsychology’s underlying principles. “If you look at psychology today,” Kahn told me recently, “it still often focuses on behavior” — understanding and changing how people act toward their environments. This is an explicit aim of a branch of psychology known as conservation psychology, and it has obvious practical value. Ecopsychology, Kahn said, asks a different question: how does nature optimize the mind?

Recently, Kahn set out to study how we respond to real versus digital representations of nature. In an experiment reported in The Journal of Environmental Psychology, Kahn and his colleagues subjected 90 adults to mild stress and monitored their heart rates while they were exposed to one of three views: a glass window overlooking an expanse of grass and a stand of trees; a 50-inch plasma television screen showing the same scene in real time; and a blank wall. Kahn found that the heart rates of those exposed to the sight of real nature decreased more quickly than those of subjects looking at the TV image. The subjects exposed to a TV screen fared just the same as those facing drywall.

In themselves, these findings may seem merely to support what many already hold to be true: the authentic is better than the artificial. Nature is more healthful than television. But for Kahn, the plasma-screen study speaks to two powerful historical trends: the degradation of large parts of the environment and the increasingly common use of technology (TV, video games, the Internet, etc.) to experience nature secondhand. “More and more,” Kahn writes, “the human experience of nature will be mediated by technological systems.” We will, as a matter of mere survival, adapt to these changes. The question is whether our new, nature-reduced lives will be “impoverished from the standpoint of human functioning and flourishing.”

Like Doherty, Kahn is aware that many scientists in the profession are apt to disapprove of concepts as seemingly unquantifiable as “human flourishing.” Several months ago, I called Alan Kazdin, a former president of the American Psychological Association and a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale, to ask his opinion of ecopsychology. Kazdin mentioned the discipline in a 2008 column, but when we spoke he was hazy and had to look it up. “Modern psychology is about what can be studied scientifically and verified,” he finally said. “There’s a real spiritual looseness to what I’m seeing here.”

Second-generation ecopsychologists would not necessarily disagree with this judgment. But they would dispute that “spiritual looseness” has no place in modern psychology. “Have you ever heard of rewilding?” Kahn asked me. Rewilding is a popular concept in conservation biology that was developed in the mid-1990s by Michael Soulé, an emeritus professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The idea is that the best way to restore and maximize the resilience of ecosystems is from the top down, by reintroducing and nourishing predatory “keystone” species like bears, wolves and otters. “We want to do the same thing,” Kahn said, “but from the psychological side — from the inside out. We want to rewild the psyche.”

As with much of second-generation ecopsychology, Kahn’s research into rewilding the psyche is still in its early stages; he has been exploring the idea on a blog he writes for the Web site of Psychology Today. But it rubs up against a fundamental problem of ecopsychology: even if we can establish that as we move further into an urban, technological future, we move further away from the elemental forces that shaped our minds, how do we get back in touch with them?

That question preoccupied Gregory Bateson, a major influence on ecopsychologists and something of a lost giant of 20th-century intellectual history. Bateson, an anthropologist by training, conducted fieldwork in Bali with Margaret Mead, his wife of 14 years, in the 1930s, but in midcareer he moved away from conventional ethnology and began conducting studies in areas like animal communication, social psychology, comparative anatomy, aesthetics and psychiatry. But what most interested Bateson, as the title of his 1972 book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” suggests, were complex systems.

It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. Writing several years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” at a time when the budding environmental movement was focused on the practical work of curbing DDT and other chemical pollutants, Bateson argued that the essential environmental crisis of the modern age lay in the realm of ideas. Humankind suffered from an “epistemological fallacy”: we believed, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other. In fact, nature was a recursive, mindlike system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.

“When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘what interests me is me or my organization or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure,” Bateson wrote. “You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” Our inability to see this truth, Bateson maintained, was becoming monstrously apparent. Human consciousness evolved to privilege “purposiveness” — to get us what we want, whether what we want is a steak dinner or sex. Expand that tendency on a mass scale, and it is inevitable that you’re going to see some disturbing effects: red tides, vanishing forests, smog, global warming. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Bateson wrote, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”

So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We needed to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.” In other words, to be ecological, we needed to feel ecological. It isn’t hard to see why Bateson’s ideas might appeal to ecopsychologists. His emphasis on the interdependence of the mind and nature is the foundation of ecotherapy. It is also at the root of Kahn’s notion that “rewilding” the mind could have significant psychological benefits. But it also isn’t hard to see how the seeming circularity of Bateson’s solution — in order to be more ecological, feel more ecological — continues to bedevil the field and those who share its interests.

Last year, Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosopher and an admirer of Bateson, began an investigation into what psychological elements might protect a given environment from degradation. In popularizing “solastalgia,” he drew widespread attention to the mental-health costs of environmental destruction; but like scientists who document the melting of the polar ice caps or mass extinction, Albrecht was studying decline. He wanted to study environmental success.

Albrecht began interviewing residents of the Cape to Cape region, a 60-mile-long stretch of land in southwestern Australia — a wine-country Eden, lush and bucolic and rife with sustainable industries, from organic agriculture to ecotourism. Numerous factors — geographic, political, historical, economic — most likely allowed the Cape to Cape region to remain relatively unsullied. But Albrecht proposes that the main factor is psychological. The people of the region, he told me, display an unusually strong “sense of interconnectedness” — an awareness of the myriad interacting components that make up a healthy environment. True to form, Albrecht has come up with a concept to encapsulate this idea. He has begun describing the Cape to Cape region as a study in “soliphilia”: “the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it.” He says he hopes that, like “solastalgia,” this neologism will spread and that it will change how people think about their relationship to the environment.

Will “soliphilia” have the broad appeal of “solastalgia”? It seems unlikely. “Solastalgia” described an emotional response to environmental degradation that, in the age of global climate change — not to mention in the age of such cultural touchstones as “Wall-E,” “The Road” and “Avatar” — feels universal. “Soliphilia” describes a psychological foundation for sustainability that seems to depend on already having the values that make sustainability possible: the residents of the Cape to Cape might have a “sense of interconnectedness,” but how do the rest of us gain, or regain, that sense?

At present, ecopsychology seems to be struggling with this question. Philosophically, the field depends on an ideal of ecological awareness or communion against which deficits can then be measured. And so it often seems to rest on assuming as true what it is trying to prove to be true: being mentally healthy requires being ecologically attuned, but being ecologically attuned requires being mentally healthy. And yet, in its ongoing effort to gain legitimacy, ecopsychology is at least looking for ways to establish standards. Recently, The American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, invited the members of the organization’s climate-change task force to submit individual papers; Thomas Doherty is taking the opportunity to develop his categorization of responses to environmental problems. His model, which he showed me an early draft of, makes distinctions that are bound to be controversial: at the pathological end of the spectrum, for example, after psychotic delusions, he places “frank denial” of environmental issues. The most telling feature of the model, however, may be how strongly it equates mental health with the impulse to “promote connection with nature” — in other words, with a deeply ingrained ecological outlook. Critics would likely point out that ecopsychologists smuggle a worldview into what should be the value-neutral realm of therapy. Supporters would likely reply that, like Bateson, ecopsychologists are not sneaking in values but correcting a fundamental error in how we conceive of the mind: to understand what it is to be whole, we must first explain what is broken.

Daniel B. Smith holds the Critchlow Chair in English at the College of New Rochelle. His last article for the magazine was on the writer Lewis Hyde.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 31, 2010, on page 36 of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Please comment here and then, if you like

Read All Comments on the New York Times site »

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:44:00 +0000

Process Arts

First version 3/31/09. Updated 1/28/2010

A member of Aiki Extensions asked me what I do out in the world so, after responding briefly, I offered to post this.

Imagine living at the point in the past before the term "martial arts" came into use. You notice that practicing the arts can also build character and good citizenship (relational) skills. Then you notice other people have already noticed this and begun to develop ways of teaching it, going by various names, or just calling it versions of The Stuff I Do. You have the feeling that the various ways would benefit from interaction and cross-pollination. When you suggest this you often run into resistance of various kinds, from simple denial to turf wars, to benevolently pretending you don't exist or are charming in your naiveté.

Change facilitation methods (including methods that extend aiki metaphors beyond the mat) are in their infancy, just beginning to realize they are process arts and relate to each other as equals and collaborators.

It might help to imagine what follows as if it were a conversation between marital artists discussing their disciplines.

I just completed a webinar with Harrison Owen (of Open Space) hosted by Steve Cady and the Nexus folks at Bowling Green State Univ. There are several more coming up, each on a different process art. I'm going to attend as many as I can, as I am writing the part of my dissertation that deals directly with the process arts.

If you'd like to participate in the next one or get more info and download slides check out http://tinyurl.com/nexuswebinars

After hearing Owen equate the Open Space approach with Life and declare it The Ultimate Method Which Always Works I had a few thoughts which the moderators chose not to allow until after the recording had been stopped and the webinar had officially ended.

I began to ask the following in the aftermath and then opted instead for the discussion area at http://tinyurl.com/c82dtu

What if our edge, as a field, may be sharpened into focus by honing the following two sides as though they were part of the same tool:
There is no method that is Best, only one that fits here and now, but there are core principles and best practices, which suggest a co-created ethics, which apply to the entire field of approaches and practices which facilitate behavior based on an increased consciousness of how we do what we do, and develop and deploy tools for changing systems.
These core principles will not be recognized as describing a whole field of study until that self-organizing field has a name that is non-proprietary (like sociology or psychology) and encourages the emergence of any approach that works best here and now.
The promo for this webinar wonders "Why does this "stuff" work when it shouldn't?" Even the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation frequently refers to what we do as "stuff." Aren't we ready to step into the professional world of business and academia as a discipline with a real name, and identify with and challenge each other as colleagues?

Parallel in importance and depth with the liberal arts, more and more facilitators of this "stuff" are being specific about their methodologies but are also realizing that they practice one of many process arts.

While in conversation with Founders of Methods at the beginning of making a field of study it is difficult to make room for this kind of open space. It is difficult to self-organize and use your two feet when an approach claims to be Life and the Ultimate Method. Continuing to call our work "stuff", or insisting our method is the only method is choosing not to organize such that more organized agendas gain power-over that is not helpful.

What if our field really is at least as wide as The Change Handbook suggests on page 14 (below), crossing the development of organizations, psychology, complexity theory, and so much more? How to frame that so we may work together so deeply that individual strengths and weaknesses become clear and methods adopt a bit of epistemological humility - becoming better able to work and grow together? Even more importantly, imagine the impact process arts may have in the making of cultures of peace and collaboration, as soon as we go ahead and identify as colleagues and grow the field as a whole community of understanding.

Brandon WilliamsCraig bdwc.net

Just wondering...

Process Arts mentioned in The Change Handbook

and In Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest

http://processarts.net/

http://grouppatternlanguage.org

http://ourpla.net/cgi/pikie?ProcessArts

P.S.

After the session was thoroughly over, Steve and I corresponded so he might have the opportunity to read a transcript of his words and correct any misconceptions I might harbor. Here is his response to my concerns about monotheistic thinking in our field:

The thing that I have learned, as I have made it my passion of the last six or seven years to really study these founders, is that, in order for them to solve a very critical issue they care about in the world, they, in some fantastic way, created something that got a name, got a community of practice around it, and is being used. The very skill set they needed to make it concrete, so that people would be able to hold it and use it, is the same skill set that sometimes holds them back from blending it with others. What I have found is that, for me, personally (and I identify with the Third Generation), I'm very interested in learning about all of them, in understanding that process of how people develop a method, learn a method, blend methods, and come back to inventing new ways. I'm very interested in how to facilitate that - so we all can find ways to do that as well, but more fluidly, allowing things to have their own identity and yet realize the overlaps.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:51:00 +0000

Wonderful...

reproduced from Discussion Group for Psychology and the Arts
by Norman Holland
date Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 6:27 AM
subject Sitting

For those of us who sit in front of our computers much of the day--

One Australian study showed that for every additional hour a woman sits in front of the TV, her risk of metabolic syndrome - a precursor to diabetes and cardiovascular disease - increases by 26%, irrespective of how much moderate exercise she does.

And the health of people who already do too little exercise will suffer even more if combined with prolonged bouts of sitting, say the authors.

More research is needed to establish a causal effect between prolonged sitting and ill health, say the authors, but some underlying mechanisms have already been identified, including an enzyme (lipoprotein lipase) that has a key role in the regulation of key blood fats.

Accordingly, the authors propose a new model or paradigm of “inactivity physiology” which recognises that sitting and non-muscular activity may independently boost the risk of ill health, and that sedentary behaviour is a distinct class of behaviour with specific consequences for ill health, which are not the same as those sparked by taking too little exercise.

The molecular and physiological responses of the body prompted by too much sitting cannot simply be cancelled out by taking additional exercise, say the authors.

“In the future, the focus in clinical practice and guidelines should not only be to promote and prescribe exercise, but also to encourage people to maintain their intermittent levels of daily activities [that involve movement],” they add. “Climbing the stairs, rather than using elevators and escalators, five minutes of break during sedentary work, or walking to the store rather than taking the car will be as important as exercise.”

Contact: Dr Elin Ekblom-Bak

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:39:00 +0000

For the next time somebody suggests to you that "myth" no longer applies.

from: http://blog.peaceworks.net/2010/01/super-heroes-for-the-muslim-world-and-beyond/

Super-Heroes for the Muslim World – and beyond

a compelling series of Comics, headquartered out of Kuwait and primarily aimed at Muslim youth – creating positive role models with a foundation from Islamic religion. The 99 is a group of super-heroes, each of whom possesses a super-power derived from the 99 attributes of Allah in the Koran.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:46:00 +0000

I dig pretty much everything about this. Love, B

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Explicitly value conflict training

Training in any martial art can be character building, teach one to deal more calmly with fear, and increase the chances that conflicts will be averted or end up less violently than in the hands of somebody who panics and either runs or escalates without thinking. Extending this beyond physical conflict, the principles shared by martial training and authentic relationship or good citizenship have been explored around the world through time, from ancient empires to contemporary nation-states. Believe it or not, this relationship is not obvious to everyone and needs to be made explicit in order to increase the number of people ready and able to work through conflict toward a best outcome for everyone involved, in short, to make peace.

Though martial arts can increase the capacity for peace-making they can also increase the tendency to respond with casual aggression to any and all conflict. They can also build in the habit of treating all conflict as a simple win-lose equation where rapid victory at any cost is the most highly valued approach. This depends on how a martial art is taught and practiced.

Making the peace-building qualities of martial training "explicit," in this case, means a series of clear (martial) choices -- hours, dollars, and attention must be devoted to the teachers, students, and practitioners who explicitly teach, learn, and practice even the most dynamic and physical of arts as though the highest value of the training involves changing the rules of conflict as a whole so that even the most difficult differences are an opportunity to learn while insisting that nobody loses their soul, heart, or life in the process. This defeats the cycle of violence in a way that uncomplicated Victory and Defeat cannot. The martial arts do this with physical conflict, with subtle undertones reaching into all areas of life as arts do, while the process arts facilitate this rule-changing processing of conflict while differences in groups are not actively being expressed as physical violence.

If you value the peace-building qualities of the arts of conflict, then make this explicit. Become an active member of Aiki Extensions, get involved with Nonviolent Communications, Processwork, or Association Building Community. If you are looking for a dojo, ask out loud if the teaching is explicitly oriented toward peace-making and choose to support the teachers who not only know what this means but can clearly demonstrate their process arts skills off the mat. Celebrate them with posts to your blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts and review them on Google Maps, Yelp, and other sites.

Make the connection explicit between your thirst for peace and honest conflict work. Ask for it. Talk it up. Use whatever means are at your disposal. Today. Please.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:56:00 +0000

Don't go to Don's Automotive Repair

2144 San Pablo Ave, Berkeley, CA

‎

The shop has changed hands. All historical information no longer applies. I bought in my vehicle, which was dying in the middle of the street while being driven. I did my best to communicate despite serious language difficulties. When he is not playing PC solitaire or surfing the net, the new owner, Tom, almost communicates through a friend who is his diesel mechanic. They replaced a part, charged fully, sent me away without telling me of other codes/potential problems.

When I dragged it back in after the problem recurred one month later, it turns out the shop has sold a half interest to another group of guys, one of whom speaks both Spanish and English and is quite friendly and seems to have it together. None the less, it is Tom and his mate who weren't around when I dropped the van off so their repairs can be finished. Later, by email (my request to be able to have a clue what he is actually saying) Tom recommended (based on error codes only) a new alternator and sensors, and labor at full price, in the process mentioning more error codes and leaving the door open for more charges.

Lindsey Kerr, saint that she is, hooked me up with her Dad (and family contacts) who told me precisely what to ask and how to tell (using actual diagnostics) if the repairs were required.

Apparently Tom didn't like when I asked obviously well informed questions instead of immediately approving his expensive recommendation. He kept the van for another day before telling me his mechanic got called back to Vietnam and instructing me to remove my vehicle by 5pm the same day.

More later when the next mechanic makes or breaks his reputation.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:02:00 +0000

Always fun to make live music. Thanks for the invite, All Stars!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:26:00 +0000

Brandon here. The Paula Craig mentioned below is my mother. Prayers, please, for recovery and gratitude that the dog didn't get through to her neck and head.
Appreciating you all,
B

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 1:37 PM
Subject: Paula Craig Attacked by Rottweiler

Paula Craig was attacked and mauled on Monday morning by a Rottweiler. That is why she was not at Community Monday night. Thanks to Donna for forwarding the news copied below. I just talked to Paula, and she is at home and doing better. She asked that you keep her in your prayers, but would prefer not to have calls, food drop-offs, etc. The mothers of her students are taking very good care of those things, and Paula needs to conserve her energy. She will tell us all about the incident at the next meeting. Meanwhile, please pray for her continued recovery.

Lynn

_____________________________________________
Lynn -- this is about our own Paula. Do what you will with the information. Ann Sanchez is my daughter and is involved in RCPTA a parent group supporting Rosemont Elementary (I think). I suppose that is where Ann got her information. -- Peace, Donna

----- Forwarded Message ----
Sent: Thu, November 5, 2009 5:14fa:45 AM
Subject: Ms Paula news

Ms. Paula attacked by dog!

Dear Fellow Members,

First let me say that Ms. Paula, our neighborhood Musikgarten teacher and
Montessori mentor, is healing at home and is already seeing this event as a
blessing. Yesterday morning she was going to visit a friend from church who
is infirmed and, currently, using a cane when the woman's dog, a Rottweiler,
attacked her. The friend dropped her cane and was able to pull the dog back
before it managed to get ahold of Paula's throat. Unfortunately, on his way
to her throat, he bit her multiple times from her ankles up to her thighs
and her right forearm.

She drove herself to the E.R. and they were able to treat her and send her
home yesterday in the late afternoon.

I was blessed to be able to spend most of the day with her today (her
birthday!) and was able to get her to tell me what we can do to give her
some assistance while she heals.

Tracy Wehrmann

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:14:00 +0000

Gotta love the Mom...

Forgot your Password?
Aha!!
Enter your logineye email and fill in the security check.
B5%%'/ t^zz- scruntched, upside down and sideways
Oh, can't read the words below:
try different words or an audio gotcha.
(Course, that won't work but do it anyhow cause you're a dunce.)
Have you a confirmation code? already?
Don't know? too bad.
The text you entered never matches the security check and you can wait and click forever to link into all adolescents worldwide because
YOU FORGOT YOUR PASSWORD
"Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life."
God help us.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:46:00 +0000

Parenting 101 - my VT family provides an excellent example

Val: (after a socially frustrating art class)

"Do you know how you tame people?

You say "Hi, excuse me, can I work with you?"
The main problem is they could say no."

bdwc said...: Wise boy. All the steps mentioned are necessary in taming people (including yourself). 1) Neutral Open Greeting, 2) Empathic Courtesy, 3) Clear Process Request, 4) Presence/ Ambivalent Readiness 5) Freedom for difference/ disconnection. My nephew the Zen Master.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:50:00 +0000

Martial arts for Peace with Dr. Terrence Webster-Doyle

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:50:00 +0000

The use and misuse of "Myth" volume 942

reproduced from:

The Washington Post

5 myths about our land of opportunity

By Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Americans have always believed that their country is unique in providing the opportunity to get ahead. Just combine hard work with a bit of talent and you'll climb the ladder -- or so we've told ourselves for generations. But rising unemployment and financial turmoil are puncturing that self-image. The reality of this "land of opportunity" is considerably more complex than the myths would suggest:

1. Americans enjoy more economic opportunity than people in other countries.

Actually, some other advanced economies offer more opportunity than ours does. For example, recent research shows that in the Nordic countries and in the United Kingdom, children born into a lower-income family have a greater chance than those in the United States of forming a substantially higher-income family by the time they're adults.

If you are born into a middle-class family in the United States, you have a roughly even chance of moving up or down the ladder by the time you are an adult. But the story for low-income Americans is quite different; going from rags to riches in a generation is rare. Instead, if you are born poor, you are likely to stay that way. Only 35 percent of children in a family in the bottom fifth of the income scale will achieve middle-class status or better by the time they are adults; in contrast, 76 percent of children from the top fifth will be middle-class or higher as adults.

The United States is exceptional, however, in the opportunity it offers to immigrants, who tend to do comparatively well here. Their wages are much higher than what they might have earned in their home countries. And even if their pay is initially low by American standards, their children advance quite rapidly.

2. In the United States, each generation does better than the past one.

As a result of economic growth, each generation can usually count on having a higher income, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the previous one. For example, men born in the 1960s were earning more in the 1990s than their fathers' generation did at a similar age, and their families' incomes were higher as well. But that kind of steady progress appears to have stalled. Today, men in their 30s earn 12 percent less than the previous generation did at the same age.

The main reason today's families have modestly higher overall income than prior generations is simple: More members of the household are working. Women have joined the labor force in a big way, and their earnings have increased as well. But with so many families now having two earners, continued progress along this path will be difficult unless wages for both men and women rise more quickly.

3. Immigrant workers and the offshoring of jobs drive poverty and inequality in the United States.

Although immigration and trade are often blamed, a more important reason for our lack of progress against poverty and our growing inequality is a dramatic change in American family life. Almost 30 percent of children now live in single-parent families, up from 12 percent in 1968. Since poverty rates in single-parent households are roughly five times as high as in two-parent households, this shift has helped keep the poverty rate up; it climbed to 13.2 percent last year. If we had the same fraction of single-parent families today as we had in 1970, the child poverty rate would probably be about 30 percent lower than it is today.

Among women under age 30, more than half of all births now occur outside marriage, driving up poverty and leading to more intellectual, emotional and social problems among children.

In addition, we have seen a growing tendency among well-educated men and women to marry each other, exacerbating income disparities. If we add to these family changes the fact that wages for low-skilled workers have stagnated or declined in recent decades, we can explain most of the increase in poverty and much of the increase in the income gap as well.

4. If we want to increase opportunities for children, we should give their families more income.

Of course money is a factor in upward mobility, but it isn't the only one; it may not even be the most important. Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent. (We define middle class as having an income of at least $50,000 a year for a family of three.)

Many American families need supplements to their incomes in the form of food stamps, affordable housing and welfare payments. But such aid should not be given unconditionally. First, the public is concerned that unconditional assistance will end up supporting those who are not trying to help themselves. Second, new research in economics and psychology has shown that individuals frequently behave in ways that undermine their long-term welfare and can benefit from a government nudge in the right direction.

And third, policies with strings attached have had considerable success. One example is the 1996 welfare reform law, which required most adult recipients to get jobs, and dramatically increased employment and lowered overall child poverty. In the midst of a recession, we can't expect everyone to work. But social policies will be more successful if they encourage people to do things that bring longer-term success.

5. We can fund new programs to boost opportunity by cutting waste and abuse in the federal budget.

Can we cut enough ineffective programs or impose enough new taxes to put better teachers in classrooms, expand child-care assistance for working families and provide more financial aid to disadvantaged students while reducing projected deficits? The answer is a resounding no. Certainly, we should eliminate fraud, waste and abuse; raise new revenues; and scrub the budget for additional savings. But these alone won't get the job done. Just three rapidly growing programs -- Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid -- along with interest on the debt threaten to crowd out all other spending in a few decades.

So we also need to revise the contract between the generations in a way that gradually reallocates resources from the more affluent elderly to struggling younger families and their children. Such a shift would not only help create more opportunity, it would improve the productivity of the next generation, making its members better able to contribute to the costs of retirement -- including their own.

Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins are co-directors of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and the co-authors of "Creating an Opportunity Society."

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:13:00 +0000

GO SEE Ghosts of the River

From Brandon and Lisa

We went Thursday night to see a performance in the premier of Octavio Solis' Ghosts of the River.
We admit the existence of theater that you go to see primarily because you value the experience of live performance and want to encourage its continuance. That kind of theater attendance is very important but not everyone finds it essential. Ghosts of the River, however is the kind of event you want to become a part of because it is singular, will never happen again in just this way, and represents a Best of the Best experience, overlapping performance forms like shadow work, puppetry, live music, acting, staging and lighting magic, in order to tell stories honestly which play with myth, convey something vital about the Mexican-American relationship, and struggle beautifully with the human side of injustice. All this it does with respect for the audience and a profound capacity for depth of feeling.

Clear reasons to go:
If you feel unsure what to skip and which opportunities to seize and wish you could know in advance which events are The One not to miss. This is one.
If you enjoy living in an area with some of the best live theater in the world but don't seem to go as much as you'd like. It is an easy walk from the 24th and Mission BART.
If you want to attend live theater but find that you are usually priced out of the audience. This is VERY affordable.
If you ever feel curious to know a big piece of what it is like to grow up on either side of the border. Take it from Texans (natural and naturalized), this is the side of the story that seldom gets told and even more seldom in such a universally accessible and beautiful way.

PLEASE DON'T WAIT. Tell your friends. Blog. Facebook. Twitter. If we don't fill the house when amazing art emerges, we have no right to whine when our education, polity, and neighborhoods feel like they are losing their soul.

http://www.shadowlightghosts.org/brava.html

Design by Favianna Rodriguez

A project by ShadowLight Productions

WORLD PREMIERE

by Octavio Solís
directed by Larry Reed
art direction by Favianna Rodriguez
music by Cascada de Flores
produced by ShadowLight Productions

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

BRAVA Theater Center
2781 24th St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 641 7657

Ghosts of the River Dates
Oct 28 - Nov 8
$5 - 35 (see box office for details)
Tickets:
Online Box Office (24/7)

By Phone: (415) 647-2822
(3PM - 6PM, Mon - Fri)
In Person: 2781 24th St., SF, CA 94110
(3PM - 6PM, Mon - Fri)
*Student, Senior and Group Discounts available by Phone & In Person

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:32:00 +0000

Another page from the Whence Brandon file...

An era has passed.

from: http://artsblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/10/paul-baker-has-died-at-age-98.html

Paul Baker has died at age 98

10:05 AM Mon, Oct 26, 2009 | Permalink
Lawson Taitte

Paul Baker, founding artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, died from complications of pneumonia Sunday in a hospital near his Central Texas ranch. He was 98.

Baker gained national fame for his innovative program at Baylor University in the 1950s, and Dallas leaders asked him to organize the new regional theater they were building. His unique approach fostered multi-faceted theater artistry and new work, and he led the Theater Center until its board replaced him with Adrian Hall in the early 1980s.

Baker also laid the groundwork for the Booker T. Washington School for the Performing and Visual Arts and wrote extensively on his ideas about creativity. His daughter Robyn Flatt, once a company member at the Theater Center, went on to found the Dallas Children's Theater, now the city's second-largest regional theater. Many of Baker's students and company members have led other Dallas arts organizations and have gone on to national careers.

A local memorial will be held in early December at the Children's Theater's Rosewood Center for Family Arts. Donations to the Children's Theater or other charity are requested in lieu of flowers.

from: http://www.dallastheatercenter.org/Page.aspx?WP_I314

THEATER CENTER HISTORY

Dallas Theater Center's birth did not take place in a theater-poor city. The greatest actors and actresses of the times had toured through Dallas as soon as there were railroads to bring them. There were "opera" houses, then real theaters with orchestra pits and production facilities for vaudeville which, when vaudeville was replaced by motion pictures, were available to resident or touring theater companies. It is probably impossible to list accurately the number of theater groups and organizations of all degrees of professionalism, which have lived—and died—in this city. It is certainly impossible to over-estimate their value to the life of Dallas, Texas.

The Dallas Little Theater, founded in 1920, rode the crest of the vogue for community theater, built its own facility, and before its final curtain in 1943, twice captured the nation's major annual award for the Best Little Theater in the United States. Margo Jones arrived in 1946 to open her innovative theater-in-the-round and it was in full bloom in 1954.

That was the year Beatrice Handel moved to Dallas from Cleveland, determined to organize a civically supported theater oriented to presenting fine drama and teaching people how to do it. Margo Jones chose to concentrate solely on production; no other active Dallas theater group would buy Mrs. Handel's concept.

But John Rosenfield did. He was the powerful amusements editor for The Dallas Morning News and he was just as interested in making art happen in his native city as he was in covering it. He called a meeting of ten people on Mrs. Handel's porch on August 19, 1954. Less than a week later a second meeting took place. The Dallas Theater Center, as it later became known, was conceived.

That its gestation took five years became only a footnote in history. Its importance lies in the fact that after the long and tortuous years of securing the land, negotiating and working with the architect and actually getting the building built, support for the theater was even stronger than it had been in the beginning. Timing was its blessing. The business and personal leadership for this theater was at hand, ready to be called. Robert Stecker demonstrated that leadership shortly after he was elected president of the board. Retired from his executive position with Sanger Brothers (the great department store and another Dallas pillar), he came to devote all his time to the Dallas Theater Center. Variations of this same kind of passion have illuminated every Theater Center board since.

The services of the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, were not difficult to procure. If Dallas had the money, he said, he would design the theater. He was delighted with the site and for him the project would mean the triumphant realization of a plan he had first conceived in 1915, but for which two cities had not had produced in funding.

The building, which came to be known as the Kalita Humphreys Theater, was a tour de force for Wright and a coup for the city. It was well worth the money and the effort. The stunning building, set in among the trees on a steep slope above Turtle Creek, was full of elegant spaces and filled with intricate Wrightian detail. Wright said proudly that there was not a right angle in it. It brought renown to the city and satisfaction to the populace. It was not a particularly efficient building for theater production.

Finding a new director was, surprisingly, the easiest part. The presumption was that this name, too, would be a celebrated import. But theater experts in the East, who the search committee members consulted, sent them home saying the best bet was in their own backyard.

Beatrice Handel's idea had been to create a civically-supported theater, to present fine performances and to train people to do it. As head of the drama department at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Paul Baker was building a growing reputation doing almost exactly that.

Paul Baker was brilliant, stubborn and an educator to the core. The principle of an educational/professional theater in which everyone did everything was his article of faith and he never abandoned it. It served the theater well for many years. Baker never favored union affiliation, feeling it would threaten this kind of freedom. But new winds blowing through regional theaters everywhere in the 1980s compelled some accommodation. He signed, without enthusiasm, a League of Regional Theaters contract which allowed guest appearances by Equity actors although it would put limits on backstage activities. Another unwelcome development nationwide was the new collegial status between artistic and managing directors, dividing the business and artistic pursuits of the theater which, in the Baker concept, remained as a single element. Paul Baker left the Dallas Theater Center in the spring of 1982.

Longtime DTC company member Mary Sue Jones served as interim artistic director during the year-long search for Baker’s replacement. An actress and director, Jones was a colleague of Paul Baker’s at Baylor, migrating with him to DTC. She became his associate artistic director in 1980, and co-artistic director in 1981. When a new artistic director was identified in 1983, Mary Sue left DTC. She was the only female artistic director in the theater’s history.

The catholicity of programming, a hallmark of the Baker era, would be continued by his successors. Dallas audiences may well have seen, over the past 50 years, as broad a range of new and old, conventional and innovative theater in uninterrupted seasons by one organization as any city—certainly any of comparable size—in the country.

Baker’s successors have built on what he achieved but moved in a direction that reflected the newcomer from the outside. Adrian Hall, the first, was hardly that—he was a native of Van, Texas, and had worked at the Alley Theatre in Houston and with Margo Jones. But his national reputation rested principally on his work with the Trinity Square Repertory Theatre, which he had founded in Providence, Rhode Island, 21 years before—a position he retained when he came to Dallas.

With his managing director, Peter Donnelly, fresh from the Seattle Repertory Theater, Hall first addressed the most pressing physical needs of the theater: a renovation of the original Wright building to improve the backstage area, the basement floor facilities and the traffic flow; to find or build a second playing house with wide open space to accommodate innovative productions; to develop broader audiences and to keep more actors working with simultaneous or overlapping play runs.

The Arts District Theater, designed by Hall’s associate, the distinguished stage designer Eugene Lee, opened in 1984 and turned out to be an engaging metal barn which adapts to virtually any staging a director may devise. It was the most flexible performance facility in the country at the time. The space was closed in the spring of 2005.

The idea of a permanent company was another major priority and Hall assembled DTC’s company by bringing some people from Trinity Repertory, using some local actors and importing others. He opened with a brilliant production of Brecht’s Galileo in the Kalita Humphreys Theater and, as soon as he could, staged his own adaptation of the Robert Penn Warren novel All The King’s Men, which inaugurated most of the facilities the new Arts District house could provide.

By the time Hall left in 1989, he had established a new philosophy of professionalism and a stable company. He had produced a strong range of highly accomplished seasons. He also promoted a bright, ambitious and able young director to be his artistic associate. Ken Bryant was the unanimous choice of the board to be the Center's fourth artistic director.

Bryant was electric. He had a solid relationship with the acting company. He had a warm way with people and sensed the importance of making himself a presence in the Dallas community. Ken was always interested in learning and was already very good at what he did. A tragic mishap ended his life less than a year after he took the job.

Everyone soldiered ahead, led by managing director Jeff West and interim artistic consultant Gregory Poggi, but the situation required a season of guest directors. The Hall company dispersed and the previous sense of union and continuity began to unravel.

When Richard Hamburger, not much older than Bryant and with a solid set of directing credits from all over the country, was named artistic director in 1992, he faced some of the same problems Hall had met, as well as a few new ones. Hamburger had served for five years as artistic director of the Portland Stage Company in Maine but he knew he would need time to lay out his seasons and assemble a profile of the Theater to match the times. He also knew what he wanted when he came to Dallas–-to work in a big, multicultural city where unselfconscious inclusion of the talents of diverse people would be a given in a theater where both writers and actors could be developed.

Joined by managing director Robert Yesselman, Hamburger soon introduced Dallas audiences to a broad range of new works such as Santos & Santos and Angels in America, and launched the very successful Big D Festival of the Unexpected. This informal and exciting assemblage of new (sometimes very new) works––presented not only on stage but in every corner of the Kalita Humphreys Theater––gave local writers, actors and performers an arena to present their work. One of Hamburger's greatest audience successes at the Theater Center was his innovative production of South Pacific. This conclusion to the 1998-1999 season broke all previous box office records and was enthusiastically received by Dallas citizens and critics alike.

Richard Hamburger renewed the Theater Center's commitment to reinterpreting the classics for modern audiences, and to discovering and developing thought-provoking new plays. Edith H. Love joined the Dallas Theater Center as managing director in 1997. She had long been recognized as one of the best theater managers in the country. Ms. Love and Mr. Hamburger worked together closely to ensure the continued financial and artistic success of the Dallas Theater Center, until her departure in 2002. In 2003, Mark Hadley, former General Manager of DTC, was appointed Managing Director.

During Hamburger's tenure as the Theater Center's fifth artistic leader the company saw some of its most provocative and important productions to date. Throughout this period many distinct and compelling programs were introduced such as The Big D Festival of the Unexpected and the new works series FRESH INK/Forward Motion. Notable in the list of his artistic achievements was the creation of the DTC Internship Program, a nationally recognized forum for training young theater artists. Under Hamburger’s leadership, DTC’s educational outreach flagship program Project Discovery celebrated its 20th consecutive season in 2006-2007. More than 200,000 middle and high school students from across North Texas have attended mainstage productions at Dallas Theater Center through this outstanding program. In 2007 after 15 years, Richard Hamburger left DTC and was named artistic director emeritus.

In September 2007, Kevin Moriarty became DTC’s sixth artistic director, and he will lead Dallas Theater Center into its bright future in the Rem Koolhaus-designed Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in the new Dallas Center for the Performing Arts, set to open in 2009. Moriarty brought with him an extensive resume of artistic achievement at such prestigious institutions as the Tony Award-winning Trinity Repertory Company in Providence Rhode Island, where he was an Associate Director; Brown University, where he was the founding head of the MFA Directing Program; and the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, New York, where he was the Artistic Director for seven years. His artistic excellence, his commitment to education, his strong vision for the future of Dallas Theater Center, and his enthusiasm for building community connections make Kevin Moriarty the ideal person to lead DTC for many years.

The Dallas Theater Center, with its roots deeply implanted in the community, continues to grow in stature as one of the most exciting regional theaters in the country today. The Theater Center remains fully responsive to the time and place in which we live; to the issues that shape our lives and thoughts; and to the rhythms, images and contradictions of contemporary American life.

For assistance in the production and research of Our Story, Dallas Theater Center would like to thank Patsy Swank, Preston Lane and Richard Franco.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:11:00 +0000

Interesting Medications from the past

(this post is circulating widely around the net and is not original here)

Bayer’s Heroin

A bottle of Bayer’s heroin. Between 1890 and 1910 heroin was sold as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. It was also used to treat children with a strong cough.

Coca Wine

Metcalf Coca Wine was one of a huge variety of wines with cocaine on the market. Everybody used to say that it would make you happy and it would also work as a medicinal treatment.

Mariani wine

Mariani wine (1875) was the most famous Coca wine of its time. Pope Leo XIII used to carry one bottle with him all the time. He awarded Angelo Mariani (the producer) with a Vatican gold medal.

Maltine

Produced by Maltine Manufacturing Company of New York . It was suggested that you should take a full glass with or after every meal. Children should take half a glass.

A paper weight

A paper weight promoting C.F. Boehringer & Soehne ( Mannheim , Germany ). They were proud of being the biggest producers in the world of products containing Quinine and Cocaine.

Opium for Asthma

Cocaine tablets (1900)

All stage actors, singers’ teachers and preachers had to have them for a maximum performance. Great to “smooth” the voice.

Cocaine drops for toothache

Very popular for children in 1885. Not only they relieved the pain, they made the children happy!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:17:00 +0000

Happy Birthday, Dad!

David Williams:
admirable man
excellent father
best friend

(click to enlarge - the image not the Dad)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:16:00 +0000

Hands down. One of my favorite pictures of all time.

My Mom came from Texas for my 40th Birthday! What a fabulous surprise!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:46:00 +0000

Health care means everyone
1) not just "coverage" but care
2) for anyone
3) no matter what

from: http://oaklandnorth.net/2009/09/16/healthcare-reform-rally-brings-protesters-to-lake-merritt/trackback/

Healthcare reform rally brings protesters to Lake Merritt

Submitted by rpalmstrom on September 16, 2009 – 5:44 pm

by Laurel Moorhead and Becky Palmstrom /Oakland North

Dozens gathered at Lake Merritt in Oakland Sunday afternoon at a rally for healthcare reform. First-time protest organizer Jeremy Gameros from Healthcare Reform Now said he felt the momentum of people in support of a reform has dwindled and that he is eager to see those numbers pick back up. The small Oakland rally came the day after an anti-reform protest in Washington DC drew tens of thousands to the west lawn of the White House. Oakland protesters marched around the lake, prompting honks of support from cars and cheers from passersby. Organizers cited Centers for Disease Control statistics indicating that nearly 45 million Americans (1 in 7) lacked health insurance in 2008, and that health care costs are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy.

An audio slideshow from the event follows, plus an interview with one protester.

Lindsay Germain, below, is 25 years old and says she is unable to obtain health insurance. According to Germain, she left her job because the tendinitis she developed became so severe she could not fulfill her duties. After losing her health insurance through work she went in search of a plan on the individual market. Germain says three major health policy companies, including Kaiser Permanente, denied her coverage outright because of her preexisting condition. According to Lucy Johns, a healthcare planning and policy consultant, it is not illegal for insurance companies to deny individuals coverage outright for preexisting conditions. Click Play to hear Lindsay Germain’s story.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:23:00 +0000

Where much of Jung and Hillman began: C.G. Carus

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:06:00 +0000

Susan Gittler performing "Hiroshima" at Epworth United Methodist Church.

Gittler danced with Martha Graham and continues to contribute to contemporary dance in the United States. She appeared recently to perform this piece at the 2009 American Dance Festival in Durham North Carolina.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:58:00 +0000

Clown aikido!

from: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/09/03/clowns-kicked-kkk-asses/

Clowns Kicked KKK Asses

Posted by Alex in Pictures, Politics on September 3, 2007 at 2:26 pm

Here’s an excellent example of pwnage: when the white supremacist group VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK tried to host a hate rally in Knoxville, Tennessee, they were foiled by … clowns!

Unfortunately for [VNN] the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.

Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns. http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/7704982.html

“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:39:00 +0000

Top scholar Gates arrested in Mass., claims racism

from: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jNR4dcq5sivgbez2rttRVWtTMXoAD99ICMF01

By MELISSA TRUJILLO (AP) – 20 hours ago

BOSTON — Henry Louis Gates Jr., the nation's pre-eminent black scholar, is accusing Cambridge police of racism after he was arrested while trying to force open the locked front door of his home near Harvard University.

Cambridge police were called to the home Thursday afternoon after a woman reported seeing a man "wedging his shoulder into the front door as to pry the door open," according to a police report.

An officer ordered the man to identify himself, and Gates refused, according to the report. Gates began calling the officer a racist and said repeatedly, "This is what happens to black men in America."

Officers said they tried to calm down the 58-year-old academic, who responded, "You don't know who you're messing with," according to the police report.

Gates was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge after police said he "exhibited loud and tumultuous behavior." He was released later that day on his own recognizance and arraignment was scheduled for Aug. 26.

Gates referred comment to his lawyer, fellow Harvard scholar Charles Ogletree, who was not immediately available. Cambridge police declined to comment, and the Middlesex district attorney's office said it could not do so until after Gates' arraignment. The woman who reported Gates did not return a message Monday.

Many of Gates' African-American colleagues believe his arrest is part of a pattern of racial profiling in Cambridge, said Allen Counter, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard for 25 years.

Counter has said he was stopped on campus by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.

"We do not believe that this arrest would have happened if professor Gates was white," Counter said. "It really has been very unsettling for African-Americans throughout Harvard and throughout Cambridge that this happened."

Counter said he spoke to Gates, who told him police continued to question him after he showed them his license and Harvard identification.

"They did not believe him when he said that he was in his own home," Counter said. "He was totally mistreated in this incident."

Gates is the director of Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and served for 15 years as chairman of what is now the Department of African and African American Research. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1991 and holds one of 20 prestigious "university professors" positions at the school.

He also was host of "African American Lives," a PBS show about the family histories of prominent U.S. blacks. Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997.