The Senate's bad intelligence - All Salon

Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson demands that Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee set the record straight.

Editor’s note: Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the U.S. intelligence community’s prewar assessments on Iraq. An appendix discusses the role taken by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson in determining whether Iraq had obtained uranium from Niger. The following is Wilson’s letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee pointing to errors in the Republican senators’ additional comments to the report and demanding corrections.

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July 15, 2004

The Hon. Pat Roberts, Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

The Hon. Jay Rockefeller, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

Dear Sen. Roberts and Sen. Rockefeller,

I read with great surprise and consternation the Niger portion of Sens. Roberts, Bond and Hatch’s additional comments to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessment on Iraq. I am taking this opportunity to clarify some of the issues raised in these comments.

First conclusion: “The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador’s wife, a CIA employee.”

That is not true. The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo Valerie Plame, my wife, sent to her superiors that says, “My husband has good relations with the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip. Indeed it is little more than a recitation of my contacts and bona fides. The conclusion is reinforced by comments in the body of the report that a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] reports officer stated that “the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’” (page 39) and a State Department intelligence and research officer stated that the “meeting was ‘apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.”

In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she [Valerie] departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. My bona fides justifying the invitation to the meeting were the trip I had previously taken to Niger to look at other uranium-related questions as well as 20 years living and working in Africa, and personal contacts throughout the Niger government. Neither the CPD reports officer nor the State analyst were in the chain of command to know who, or how, the decision was made. The interpretations attributed to them are not the full story. In fact, it is my understanding that the reports officer has a different conclusion about Valerie’s role than the one offered in the “additional comments.” I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement.

It is unfortunate that the report failed to include the CIA’s position on this matter. If the staff had done so it would undoubtedly have been given the same evidence as provided to Newsday reporters Tim Phelps and Knut Royce in July 2003. They reported on July 22 that:

“A senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked ‘alongside’ the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. ‘They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,’ he said. ‘There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,’ he said. ‘I can’t figure out what it could be.’ ‘We paid his [Wilson's] airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you’d have to pay big bucks to go there,’ the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses.” (Newsday article “Columnist Blows CIA Agent’s Cover,” dated July 22, 2003).

In fact, on July 13 of this year, David Ensor, the CNN correspondent, did call the CIA for a statement of its position and reported that a senior CIA official confirmed my account that Valerie did not propose me for the trip:

“‘She did not propose me,’ he [Wilson] said — others at the CIA did so. A senior CIA official said that is his understanding too.”

Second conclusion: “Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided.”

This conclusion states that I told the committee staff that I “may have become confused about my own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that the names and dates on the documents were not correct.” At the time that I was asked that question, I was not afforded the opportunity to review the articles to which the staff was referring. I have now done so.

On March 7, 2003, the director general of the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents that had been given to him were “not authentic.” His deputy, Jacques Baute, was even more direct, pointing out that the forgeries were so obvious that a quick Google search would have exposed their flaws. A State Department spokesman was quoted the next day as saying about the forgeries, “We fell for it.” From that time on the details surrounding the documents became public knowledge and were widely reported. I was not the source of information regarding the forensic analysis of the documents in question; the IAEA was.

The first time I spoke publicly about the Niger issue was in response to the State Department’s disclaimer. On CNN a few days later, in response to a question, I replied that I believed the U.S. government knew more about the issue than the State Department spokesman had let on and that he had misspoken. I did not speak of my trip.

My first public statement was in my article of July 6 published in the New York Times, written only after it became apparent that the administration was not going to deal with the Niger question unless it was forced to. I wrote the article because I believed then, and I believe now, that it was important to correct the record on the statement in the president’s State of the Union address which lent credence to the charge that Iraq was actively reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. I believed that the record should reflect the facts as the U.S. government had known them for over a year. The contents of my article do not appear in the body of the report and it is not quoted in the “additional comments.” In that article, I state clearly that “as for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors — they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government — and were probably forged. (And then there’s the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)”

The first time I actually saw what were represented as the documents was when Andrea Mitchell, the NBC correspondent, handed them to me in an interview on July 21. I was not wearing my glasses and could not read them. I have to this day not read them. I would have absolutely no reason to claim to have done so. My mission was to look into whether such a transaction took place or could take place. It had not and could not. By definition that makes the documents bogus.

The text of the “additional comments” also asserts that “during Mr. Wilson’s media blitz, he appeared on more than thirty television shows including entertainment venues. Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had ‘debunked’ the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.”

My article in the New York Times makes clear that I attributed to myself “a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa’s suspected link to Iraq’s nonconventional weapons programs.” After it became public that there were then-Ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick’s report and the report from a four-star Marine Corps general, Carleton Fulford, in the files of the U.S. government, I went to great lengths to point out that mine was but one of three reports on the subject. I never claimed to have “debunked” the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. I claimed only that the transaction described in the documents that turned out to be forgeries could not have occurred and did not occur. I did not speak out on the subject until several months after it became evident that what underpinned the assertion in the State of the Union address were those documents, reports of which had sparked Vice President Cheney’s original question that led to my trip. The White House must have agreed. The day after my article appeared in the Times a spokesman for the president told the Washington Post that “the sixteen words did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union.”

I have been very careful to say that while I believe that the use of the 16 words in the State of the Union address was a deliberate attempt to deceive the Congress of the United States, I do not know what role the president may have had other than he has accepted responsibility for the words he spoke. I have also said on many occasions that I believe the president has proven to be far more protective of his senior staff than they have been to him.

The “additional comments” also assert: “The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador’s report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.” In fact, the body of the Senate report suggests the exact opposite:

In August 2002, a CIA NESA [Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis] report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities did not include the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium information. (page 48)

In September 2002, during coordination of a speech with an NSC staff member, the CIA analyst suggested the reference to Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa be removed. The CIA analyst said the NSC staff member said that would leave the British “flapping in the wind.” (page 50)

The uranium text was included in the body of the NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] but not in the key judgments. When someone suggested that the uranium information be included as another sign of reconstitution, the INR [State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research] Iraq nuclear analyst spoke up and said the he did not agree with the uranium reporting and that INR would be including text indicating their disagreement in their footnote on nuclear reconstitution. The NIO [national intelligence officer] said he did not recall anyone really supporting including the uranium issue as part of the judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, so he suggested that the uranium information did not need to be part of the key judgments. He told committee staff that he suggested, “We’ll leave it in the paper for completeness. Nobody can say we didn’t connect the dots. But we don’t have to put that dot in the key judgments.” (page 53)

On Oct. 2, 2002, the Deputy DCI [director of central intelligence] testified before the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]. Sen. Jon Kyl asked the Deputy DCI whether he had read the British White Paper and whether he disagreed with anything in the report. The Deputy DCI testified that “the one thing where I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch is on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations.” (page 54)

On Oct. 4, 2002, the NIO for Strategic and Nuclear Programs testified that “there is some information on attempts … there’s a question about those attempts because of the control of the material in those countries … For us it’s more the concern that they [Iraq] have uranium in-country now.” (page 54)

On Oct. 5, 2002, the ADDI [associate deputy director for intelligence] said an Iraqi nuclear analyst — he could not remember who — raised concerns about the sourcing and some of the facts of the Niger reporting, specifically that the control of the mines in Niger would have made it very difficult to get yellowcake to Iraq. (page 55)

Based on the analyst’s comments, the ADDI faxed a memo to the deputy national security advisor that said, “Remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from this source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory.” (page 56)

On Oct. 6, 2002, the DCI called the deputy national security advisor directly to outline the CIA’s concerns. The DCI testified to the SSCI on July 16, 2003, that he told the deputy national security advisor that the “President should not be a fact witness on this issue,” because his analysts had told him the “reporting was weak.” (page 56)

On Oct. 6, 2002, the CIA sent a second fax to the White House that said, “More on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British.” (page 56)

On March 8, 2003, the intelligence report on my trip was disseminated within the U.S. government, according to the Senate report (page 43). Further, the Senate report states that “in early March, the Vice President asked his morning briefer for an update on the Niger uranium issue.” That update from the CIA “also noted that the CIA would be debriefing a source who may have information related to the alleged sale on March 5.” The report then states the “DO officials also said they alerted WINPAC [Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control] analysts when the report was being disseminated because they knew the high priority of the issue.” The report notes that the CIA briefer did not brief the vice president on the report. (page 46)

It is clear from the body of the Senate report that the intelligence community, including the DCI himself, made several attempts to ensure that the president did not become a “fact witness” on an allegation that was so weak. A thorough reading of the report substantiates the claim made in my opinion piece in the New York Times and in subsequent interviews I have given on the subject. The 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union address, as the White House now acknowledges.

I undertook this mission at the request of my government in response to a legitimate concern that Saddam Hussein was attempting to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program. This was a national security issue that has concerned me since I was the deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in Iraq before and during the first Gulf War.

At the time of my trip I was in private business and had not offered my views publicly on the policy we should adopt toward Iraq. Indeed, throughout the debate in the run-up to the war, I took the position that the U.S. be firm with Saddam Hussein on the question of weapons of mass destruction programs, including backing tough diplomacy with the credible threat of force. In that debate I never mentioned my trip to Niger. I did not share the details of my trip until May 2003, after the war was over, and then only when it became clear that the administration was not going to address the issue of the State of the Union statement.

It is essential that the errors and distortions in the additional comments be corrected for the public record. Nothing could be more important for the American people than to have an accurate picture of the events that led to the decision to bring the United States into war in Iraq. The Senate Intelligence Committee has an obligation to present to the American people the factual basis of that process. I hope that this letter is helpful in that effort. I look forward to your further “additional comments.”

Sincerely,

Joseph C. Wilson IV, Washington, D.C.

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The Internet makes magic disappear

YouTube has killed the magician's art, and threatens the stores where tricks have been passed down for generations

By Santiago Wills

(Credit: Wallenrock and Maxx-Studio via Shutterstock/Salon)

Topics:Internet Culture, Art in Crisis, Editor's Picks

In 1998, my father riffled a red deck of playing cards while we attended a family reunion on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia. He asked me to pick one, and I told him to stop when his fingers reached the middle of the pack. As he closed his eyes, I pulled out the ace of hearts and placed it near the end. He ordered me to think hard about my random selection, and then pretended to write something on the inside of his left arm.

“Concentrate,” he said while I watched him roll up his sleeves. “This won’t work unless you focus on your card.”

He pretended to be lost. He looked around, shook his head and grabbed a newspaper by a fireplace. After selecting a faded page, he set it on fire, gathered the gray-white ashes and gently spread them over his slightly tanned arm. Two dark figures slowly appeared on his grayish skin: “A♥.”

I was fascinated. It wasn’t the first trick my dad had performed for me — since I was 8, coins had frequently come out of my “dirty ears” and ropes had disentangled themselves from impossible knots — but this was certainly the first one that captivated me. I begged him to tell me how he had done it. Like a parrot, he repeated over and over again a conversation-ending mantra that I would soon adopt. “A magician never reveals his secrets,” he stated sternly. Of course, that argument lacked prescriptive force for a 10-year-old, and several days of relentless questioning later, he finally caved in. He made me quite aware, however, that he wasn’t going to teach how me to do it.

Soon after, my father drove me to the School of Magical Arts of Bogota, an old, spacious edifice that housed a magic school, a theater and a remarkable shop crammed with variegated paper flowers, disappearing wands, jumbo decks, vintage posters and rabbit-size contraptions. There, he said, I would finally learn the secret.

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Since the late 19th century, when two German brothers named Francis and Antonio Martinka opened a conjuring store in New York, brick-and-mortar magic shops have played a central role in America’s magical culture. For more than a hundred years, these often small, dark chambers have been a gathering place where traveling illusionists and celebrated performers like Houdini, Thurston and Kellar discussed their latest creations, shielded from the pestering presence of hobbyists and the general public. More important, up until a decade ago, they were the only places where magicians could teach eager teenagers like myself the right methods to produce ashen apparitions and the more complicated tricks that inevitably follow.

But then the Internet broke that monopoly. Today, any 10-year-old kid can type “magic tricks” into Google and gain access either via YouTube or other websites to the biggest trade secrets in a matter of minutes. He can watch a video or buy an expensive apparatus without leaving his house, seeing a live demonstration or talking to another human being.

As a result, magic stores are slowly vanishing across America. With their gradual disappearance, as Jamy Ian Swiss — a leading card-expert and magic historian recognized for his brilliant technique and for his outspoken column in Genii, a conjuring magazine — has argued, one of the foundations of this ancient art form is disappearing.

“Magic has always depended on the control of information,” Swiss told me in an interview. “When I was young, you had to hang around a magic shop, and learn to ask, and ask politely. You would approach a guy and he would tell you, ‘Well, show me what you are working on, kid,’ and you’d show him. And then he might say, ‘Let me help you out with that,’ or ‘Let me show you something different than what you asked.’

“The biggest problem with DVD and YouTube exposure is that it has damaged the skill of learning through asking, and it has created the mistaken assumption, perhaps, that all knowledge and all wisdom is available to buy,” he said. “And there’s so much difference between those two acts, because asking involves a human experience, while buying is just sitting in your coach and passively absorbing countless secrets that you think constitute magic.”

In New York, the Yellow Pages listed 16 magic shops in 1960 but just three by 2003. Now there are only two, Fantasma and Tannen’s Magic, says George Schindler, the dean of the Society of American Magicians.

Fantasma and Tannen’s are lingering throwbacks where young magicians can still learn secrets directly from their elders, sidestepping DVDs and videos from online sites. They are sanctuaries where awkward 10-, 14- and 20-year-olds can meet and talk to each other and to older magicians without fearing ridicule or censorship. They are the last place where kids who mask their timidity through magic can find someone to help them overcome the challenges of art and life.

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On a recent visit to Fantasma, “Magic Mo,” a laconic 14-year-old who wouldn’t part with his real name, fanned the cards while he waited for his mentor. As he opened and closed a red-backed deck, Mo watched David Roth, a world-renowned sleight-of-hand artist, perform for an English couple.

After divining several cards and correctly naming a random word a woman mentally chose from a book, Roth walked to the cashier and added up the cost of tricks the couple had bought for their magic-obsessed godson. The woman waved as she disappeared through the main door. Roth closed the register with a sigh and returned to check on Mo.

With a soft and at times faltering voice, the teenager showed him a card-control technique he was working on. Roth corrected him and urged him to do it again.

“Don’t practice in front of the mirror,” he told him. “You get used to blinking when you are doing a pass, which is not good. Video is better. But then again, you should do it in front of your friends here. The camera doesn’t think.”

Roth stood behind a display case filled with DVDs, multicolored decks of cards and several types of coins in a 3,500-square-foot exhibition room on the corner of 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue. (Fantasma serves as a store and display room for one of the world’s leading magic manufacturers, according to Roger Dreyer, one of the owners.) Directly in front of him, just behind a caged pet rabbit named Rambo, lies a collection of original Houdini memorabilia, which includes handcuffs, locks, books and black-and-white photographs. A couple of bookshelves line a part of two walls to the left of the exhibition, near a table with four seats that are occasionally occupied by amateur and professional magicians spreading blue-backed Bicycle decks over a blood-red cloth lined by black felt.

“Magic shops are disappearing because of the Internet,” Roth said during one of my visits while he extended his calloused hands toward the roof. “This place is an oddity.”

He works at Fanstasma twice a week, demonstrating tricks to potential customers and holding court over the enthusiasts who come by to talk to him or to show him something they’ve developed. Roth, 69, has short white hair that contrasts with his rosy face.

As most magicians will tell you, Roth is a legend within the guild. An expert coin manipulator, he was mentored by Dai Vernon, a man revered by close-up magicians throughout the 20th century. Vernon was a Canadian sleight-of-hand artist known as “The Professor” who revolutionized card magic by developing techniques he learned from gamblers all around the country. He eventually adopted Roth as a protégé from the 1970s to the 1990s — the final years of his life — in the Magic Castle in Los Angeles.

Within the walls of the Hollywood private club of the Academy of Magical Arts, Vernon advised Roth on the importance of practice and highlighted the beauty of a flawless technique in which all movements seemed natural.

“There are terrible magicians online that do tricks as if they had just learned them in the schoolyard,” Roth told me when I asked him about people who posted magic videos on YouTube. “They don’t practice. They see something and think they can do it immediately.”

Lack of practice is a constant complaint. You hear it even from amateur magicians like Uriel Nashofer, 20, a New Jersey native now studying in Missouri who likes to hang out at Fantasma whenever he comes home.

“Kids don’t read books anymore. They just watch DVDs or download effects from websites like Penguin and Theory11. The problem is they don’t think about the presentation,” he said after showing me a series of card tricks. “The effects I just did, for example, it took me nearly eight months of practice to master.”

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Unlike Fantasma, Tannen’s Magic doesn’t sell toys, only items used by professionals. The store is located in the sixth floor of an unremarkable building near Herald Square. Three black-and-white rabbit silhouettes decorate a blank wall in the corridor that leads to the shop. The dimly lit quarters house six glass counters and several floor-to-roof shelves covered with an assortment of colorful cylindrical gimmicks, colossal dice, papier-mâché flora and countless DVDs and special kinds of playing cards inside transparent plastic bags.

Tannen’s moved its catalog online a couple of years ago, and now sales are split evenly between the shadowy locale on West 34th Street and its own website, according to Adam Blumenthal, 27, the young Broadway light-designer and magician who owns the place. (Balay calculated that in Fantasma 70 percent of the sales still took place in the shop.) The store, nevertheless, still attracts a loyal throng of kids, especially over the weekend.

On a Saturday afternoon, four teenagers and a 25-year-old stand-up comedian were practicing flourishes, spreading fans, cutting the deck in three smooth movements and making cards fly from one hand to the other, and showing each other new tricks on a table in the center of the room. After watching them for a while, I joined them and asked how they thought the Internet was affecting magic.

“I started by learning from YouTube and it messed up all my future performance,” Vlad Verba, 14, said while he kept on cutting a deck in his hand. “I’m a righty, so I have to hold the deck in my left hand. I didn’t know that and I learned all the sleights using the wrong hand. I had to start all over after I came here.”

Harrison Greenbaum, a stand-up comedian, magician and counselor at Magic Camp — an event that Tannen’s organizes each year in which magicians from all around the country fly to Philadelphia to mentor and teach kids about performance and the psychology of the art — emphasized the social aspect of the store.

“In a brick-and-mortar magic shop there is a sense of community,” he said. “You get to know other people and you have somebody who’s an expert, who can help you with specifics that you don’t know about. You meet incredible magicians and you are able to walk up to them and show them what you can do, so that they’ll critique you and give you some tips.”

For Danny Braff, 15, visiting Tannen’s at least once a week offered a related advantage. “I met my best friend here,” he told me. “He’s a magician named Ruben Moreland and he’s helped me a lot with everything. I wouldn’t be nearly as good as I am if it wasn’t for him.”

The kids talked about Magic Camp and Harrison joked about how videos would inevitably fall short when answering important questions.

“What do you do if the bar mitzvah boy starts crying?” he asked, shrugging. “What do you do if your pants rip during a show? That happened to me once, you know.”

Everyone laughed and after a long silence, Joshua Kurzbam, 20, a sinewy teenager with receding black hair who sat next to Braff, looked at me, as if asking for permission to speak. “Magic allows us to be social,” he said. “It gives us an excuse to talk to people.”

Two of his companions lowered their eyes and nodded. They kept on talking until it was closing time, ceaselessly shuffling the packs of playing cards in their hands.

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The online videos often resemble movie trailers. They range from around 45 seconds to almost two minutes, featuring cyan- or red-saturated images and original short-lived soundtracks. Typically, they start with the logo of the website or a fading title over dark backgrounds, and then feature fast, short frames in which viewers can catch a glimpse of the effects being sold.

There are now dozens of Internet-based companies that sell products online. Two of the biggest, as kids in shops will tell you, are Penguin Magic and Theory11. Penguin strives to project a youthful image by using cartoons and a bright color interface, while Theory11 reinforces the aura of mystery cultivated in its videos by using black and gray tones.

Penguin started in 2002 and has grown ever since to become one of the most visited magic sites. One of the company’s main strengths is the sheer amount and variety of effects that it sells. The same is true of Theory11, a website founded in 2007 by 11 magic industry insiders, which last year launched “The Wire,” a global marketplace that allows magicians to directly publish their creations online.

The philosophy behind both ventures was to offer their clients an ever-increasing inventory capable of fulfilling any kind of style or concentration.

“The idea was to start a store where magicians could actually see a demo of every trick in the shop,” Acar Altinsel, a co-founder of Penguin, wrote me in an email. “Walk into most magic shops and the magician behind the counter can only perform a handful of what you see. This was constantly disappointing for me as a kid.”

Videos are supposed to solve that problem, according to Altinsel. “A ‘good’ magic DVD will get as much into presentation as an in-person lecture or book. Further, online video chat ‘sessioning’ has put magicians in an even better position to get mentoring and correction,” he wrote.

Most professional conjurers would disagree. The difference between a live performance or even a live chat and an online interaction is qualitative. As any music lover will testify, there are essential differences between watching a live video of a concert and actually attending the concert. The feeling and the power of the experience are heightened by the use of all the other senses, by the crowd’s feelings and the immediate surroundings. The statement is equally valid for couples who try to rekindle their passion via Skype or for any other art-form that thrives on human responsiveness.

Eric DeCamps, a magician from Forest Hills who was the second man in 107 years to receive the Gold Medal of Excellence for Close Up Magic of the Society of American Magicians, put it in somewhat similar terms in a recent conversation.

“Magic is a performing art,” he said, “and while it is interesting and fun to solve magic problems on your own, the problem doesn’t take full life until you perform in front of a live audience. I can’t explain the feeling I get when you are in front of that audience and you communicate and you almost become one consciousness; I mean, you almost know what they are thinking and there’s a level of communication that is indescribable.”

- – - – - -

As Jamy Swiss points out, magic is timeless, perhaps the spawn of a single moment of ingenious play. “It is likely that even in ancient times someone in a cave took a stone and pretended to put it in one hand while keeping it in the other, and magic was born,” he said.

Nevertheless, just one trick, as my father knew, was worthless. He was aware that even though the ash effect I coveted was relatively simple, to perform it properly I would first have to learn to perfection certain card techniques. He also knew I rarely spoke to other people. He knew I would rather hide behind a book than talk to a classmate or participate in a social event that involved more than two people. I presume that in part that was why he decided that a brick and mortar magic shop was the only place where I would be able to acquire the skills I craved.

The two-story house was a gathering place for Colombian magicians and for quiet, awkward kids like myself. While dozens of doves cooed from cages in the second floor, a group of five teenagers would sit around a green felt table and watch Richard Sarmiento, the stout, bearded magician who ran the school, execute basic sleight-of-hand techniques twice a week. With exacting detail, Sarmiento would explain under a weak yellow light the essential hand movements, and correct our own poor attempts to mirror him, much like Roth had done with Mo in Fantasma.

We would rarely ask questions or talk to each other. We stifled our wavering voices as we concentrated on how to palm a coin or divine a card. As we got better, Sarmiento taught us more complicated effects and pressed us to speak. We had to shed our shared shyness, he said. Our low voices would not do, for it was important to control the stage, to act naturally while performing passes or using misdirection in front of a live audience.

After a year of study, my colleagues and I staged an evening of magic in the theater. I closed my act by inviting a woman from the audience to choose a card. I joked with her and the audience laughed while I grabbed a lighter from a top hat. I asked her to concentrate on her selection and pretended to write something with an imaginary pen on a silver tray, which I held over the inside of my left arm.

I burned a newspaper over the tray and triumphantly showed the audience the blackened silver. A couple of people clapped even though the darkened metal had no particular shape. After feigning panic for a couple of seconds, I spread the black ashes over my left arm while Sarmiento and my father watched me. A “2♥” appeared in bold letters on my skin.

: More Santiago Wills

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Book event with Noam Chomsky

Talking American Justice with the MIT Professor and political activist

VIDEO

By Glenn Greenwald

I’m in Boise today to deliver the keynote address to the annual Bill of Rights dinner of the ACLU in Idaho, and will be traveling back home tomorrow, so posting will be light to nonexistent over the next couple days. In the meantime, C-SPAN this weekend is broadcasting the book event I did last November in Boston with Noam Chomsky, and the one-hour discussion can be viewed online here.

And here is Cenk Uygur on his CurrentTV program this week discussing the poll showing liberal support for President Obama’s drones and due-process-free citizen assassinations as well as the continued use of Guantanamo:

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald. More Glenn Greenwald

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The case for a global currency

Would it make more sense to have one currency for the entire world?

By David Wolman

(Credit: Voloh via Shutterstock/Salon)

Topics:Economics, Editor's Picks, U.S. Economy

This article was adapted from the upcoming book, "The End of Money," in bookstores Feb. 14 from Da Capo Press.

In the age of globalization, what does it mean, really, to be from one country and not another? We have some easy answers, along the lines of language, shared history, cultural references, and geography. I grew up cheering for the Red Sox, not the Hiroshima Carp, so that adds to my American-ness. I had to learn about the Federalist Papers in high school. I pay taxes and vote here. All of these things, some minor, some major, contribute to my sense of being part of this country.

Greenbacks do too, whether I like it or not. The coins and banknotes of a place are one of the few remaining touch-points of national identity left in our increasingly digital world. The monuments, symbols, and famous people splashed on them help reinforce this sense of nationhood. But as representations of the currency, they do more than that, because the currency is both the fabric of the economy and the stitching of the state. Even Marco Polo saw this in China, as the currency pulled a vast kingdom together under one umbrella of economic organization.

In recent times, though, having a national currency, at least for smaller countries, is looking more and more anachronistic. At the minimum it should be up for debate. Benn Steil, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that when he lived in Europe in the 1990s, the old saying was that to be a country you needed an airline, a stock exchange, and a currency. By the twenty-ﬁrst century, that was hardly the case: airlines had merged or gone bankrupt, stock exchanges had consolidated, and the euro had become the dominant currency of the continent. In the years ahead, more and more small countries may decide to quit their currencies and adopt that of a more powerful neighbor (the Australian dollar in parts of Oceania, for instance), band together with nearby countries to form a currency block (e.g., the East African Monetary Union), or jump aboard an international powerhouse like the U.S. dollar or the euro.

All kinds of factors could sway this decision: runaway inflation, fear of currency crises, too little infrastructure to manage the cash supply, an unexpected rash of counterfeits, hope of greater competitiveness in global trade, and the wish to put an end to potentially dangerous speculation about the currency’s worth next week or next year. Steil points to relatively strong economic growth and stability in countries like Ecuador, El Salvador, and Panama, which have all officially adopted the U.S. dollar. Even where the local currency still reigns as far as officialdom is concerned, “spontaneous dollarization” is widespread. More than half of the bank deposits in Latin America are denominated in U.S. dollars.

Steil’s thesis hinges on the fact that most monies in the world are unattractive to people who live outside the countries where those currencies circulate. Notaphilists may keep Icelandic króna in their collections, and my dad still has the Samoan, Cuban, and Egyptian banknotes I once gave him, but investors won’t hold these currencies as a store of wealth, says Steil — “something that will buy in the future what it did in the past.” The same goes for the Argentine peso, and doubly so for currencies of absolute-shambles countries. Know any friends who are denominating their kids’ college savings accounts in Somali shillings? Exactly. At the same time, while all countries conduct trade to grow their economies, smaller ones eat extra costs for perpetually converting from the local currency into something else. There’s also the fact that countries generally need U.S. dollars to repay their creditors.

Dumping the national currency would also protect people from harmful manipulation of the currency’s value by corrupt or incompetent public officials. Which begs the question: would a handful of regional currencies, or even a single global currency, help to prevent such disruptions, and by extension improve prosperity?

As for citizens in the United States and Europe, when other countries adopt the dollar or the euro, we proﬁt from seigniorage—or the government does, anyway. By putting more money into circulation— inside or outside our borders—the Fed pockets the interest generated from this process, so it’s really no skin off our backs, provided those countries understand that the United States will never make monetary or economic policy decisions because of conditions in some other country that happens to use our currency.

This idea of pulling the plug on small-country currencies made all kinds of sense to me, right up until the insanity in Greece. Greece’s crushing debt was partly the fault of government officials who cooked the country’s books so that the nation could meet the standards of economic stability necessary to join the euro a decade ago. At the moment, the euro looks like a suit that is ﬁve sizes too small, and Steil’s Foreign Affairs piece calling for currency unions seems distinctly out of sync with the times. Maybe the króna and other tiny-country currencies have a future after all. But other leading currency experts assert that this is a short view of the euro situation, and that after this period of turmoil it’ll bounce back stronger than ever.

As Steil and his sympathizers see it, countries with their own currencies invariably walk in monetary step with their major trading partners: Mexico’s currency generally tracks to the U.S. dollar, Sweden’s krona closely follows the value of the euro, and so forth, and this is the case no matter how autonomous those countries’ central banks may think they are, and no matter how patriotic the artwork adorning their banknotes may be. As Olafur Isleifsson, a professor of business at Reykjavik University, told me: “We didn’t have monetary independence before. The central bank moves were all forced moves, like in chess. Monetary independence is a phantom.” I kept hearing this basic idea whenever I spoke with people about ending small sovereign currencies in favor of regional ones, but the debt ﬁascos in Europe show that this is anything but a deﬁnitive forecast of what lies ahead.

For economists, this dispute cuts to the core of the most macro question there is: what monetary system offers the best route to a more prosperous future for the most people? Starkly different answers to that question reveal how divided scholars are about what it takes to keep economies healthy, and even about the utility of sovereign currencies. As if the stability of the whole show wasn’t tenuous enough already.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that more countries, especially biggies like Turkey, want to adopt the euro. (Poland and the Czech Republic, also in line, slowed down their efforts to join in light of the debt crises, but analysts say these countries will eventually join as well.) Leaders in these countries and elsewhere are convinced that the advantages of getting hitched outweigh those of going it alone.

A third way to buttress the value of a national currency is to tether its value to that of another one that is more stable. This strategy has worked for a number of countries, and some experts argue that the availability of this tool can make the idea of regional currencies look like a moot point. Why terminate the central bank’s ability to manipulate the money supply in an emergency if you don’t actually have to? Steil says this approach is still precarious and can end up robbing people of their money: “Which would you prefer. One: I give you $100. Two: I give you a hundred pesos, with a promise to redeem them for $100 if you ask? Option two is a currency board or ‘hard peg,’ which is what Argentina did until 2002.” That was when the Argentine government reneged on its promise to redeem pesos for greenbacks. So much for your 100 bucks.

Steil is hardly the ﬁrst person to have thought about regional currencies, or to challenge the government imperative to issue money, but he’s one of the most vocal. The concept of optimal currency areas was coined by economist Robert Mundell in the early 1960s, and since then there have been a handful of campaigns to bring the idea into practice — a few of which are slowly moving forward, in Africa and the Middle East most notably.

On the one-world money front, there are scattered dreamers out there, outfits like the Single Global Currency Association, and supporters of something called the Terra TRC (for Trade Reference Currency). In the 1940s, the legendary John Maynard Keynes conceived of a supranational currency that he called the Bancor. The idea can be likened to the constructed language of Esperanto—one common tongue for all humankind. Why not one money for one world? Supporters of Esperanto believe it could someday reduce miscommunication and, by extension, promote world peace. Backers of a single Earth currency envision a great smoothing of transactions, an end to damaging currency speculation, and less economic turmoil, which could mean greater prosperity for all.

While Esperanto struggles for credibility, some economists seriously consider how a one-world currency might happen, albeit in a highly theoretical future. One idea is for this new currency to be an expanded version of something that already exists: Special Drawing Rights. SDR is really a crossbreed of four of the world’s most signiﬁcant currencies, and it’s used for particular kinds of settlements at the IMF. Perhaps the SDR is the embryo of a new global currency. Not that this would be a geopolitical walk in the park. “No global government . . . means no global central bank, which means no global currency. Full stop,” says UC Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen. And a world government, lest we forget, is an apocalyptic prospect to a hell of a lot of people.

At the same time, however, many Americans’ image of the future incorporates this idea of a global currency—one Tolkienesque coin to rule them all. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 31 percent of Americans think an asteroid will smack into Earth by 2050, but 41 percent of them said they expect to see a shift to a global currency. We have it in our minds that dramatic change is on the horizon, even if the variable currencies and colorful cash we currently trade in and travel with seems like a permanent aspect of modern life.

From the new book “The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers — and the Coming Cashless Society” by David Wolman. Reprinted courtesy of Da Capo Press.

: David Wolman is a frequent contributor to Wired and the author of the forthcoming book, "Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling" (HarperCollins). More David Wolman

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Bridging the Irish-Italian divide

A Jersey transplant shares the chicken Parmesan recipe his outcast aunt brought to the family

By Felisa Rogers

Clockwise from left: Aunt Sissy, Uncle Frank, Aunt Jonie and Aunt Rosie (Credit: Courtesy of Tom Gannon)

Topics:Heirlooms, Food

You wouldn’t want to tangle with Tom Gannon. When I look at Tom, I end up imagining his ribcage, which must be massive, like the stays in the hull of a galleon. He has a wide chest and meaty arms scrolled with tattoos: on one arm, a full sleeve of roses against a black background; on the other arm, a giant Ganesh winks from a swirl of peacock feathers and smoke. Tom is tall and balding with a neatly shaved head, a red goatee dusted with white, and no-nonsense blue eyes. But in the end, his fortress-like demeanor stems not so much from his appearance as from his attitude.

Maybe it’s the Jersey. Tom’s dad was a New York cop, and his mom worked full-time as a nurse, yet somehow found the time to give four boys a good Catholic upbringing. “It was different in the city,” Tom remembers. “We were surrounded by family and other people who had tons of kids. Childcare was not an issue.” When Tom was 9 the family moved from the city to Hackensack, N.J., where they lived in a close-knit neighborhood Tom describes as “very Irish and Italian, with some token Protestants.”

Listening to Tom talk about his family is like watching a nostalgic movie about growing up on the East Coast — one of those films that begins with a rueful voice-over as the camera pans in on the old neighborhood. Tom is not sure when his ancestors emigrated from Ireland to New York: “We don’t know. My father’s generation was the first generation that was literate. No one could read. I don’t think anyone kept track.” He describes his family as close; they ate dinner around the table every night (classic stuff: meatloaf, spaghetti with meatballs, roasted chicken), watched the game together and took care of their own, no questions asked. When I ask Tom if he can pinpoint a family philosophy, he answers immediately: “The philosophy of my family is family,” he says, and laughs a little as he unloads a shopping bag full of onions and canned tomatoes.

Tom’s chicken Parmesan recipe comes from his great aunt Rosie, who caused a huge family scandal when she married Tom’s great uncle Frank in 1914. Frank was 16 and Rosie was only 14, but the scandal had nothing to do with age. Tom’s densely Irish family disapproved of Frank marrying an Italian. “Their generation was, of course, very bigoted,” Tom remarks, rolling an onion onto the cutting board. “By the time my father’s generation rolled around, it was much more common. Some of my dad’s best friends married Italian women and nobody cared. But back in Rosie’s day, it was different, it was a huge deal. Until they got married — then you couldn’t say anything.”

Rosie and Frank moved into an apartment above Frank’s brother’s funeral parlor in Gramercy Park, where they would live for the next 70 years. As soon as Frank married and the family realized they were stuck with Rosie, everyone shut up about the Italian issue. “As a matter of fact,” Tom says, “she became like the most popular person in the entire family. I mean everybody loved Aunt Rosie. She was very gregarious. She was very opinionated. She liked to complain a lot, but in a funny way.” When I ask him what she looked like he says, in his thick Jersey accent, “She looked very stereotypical. She had a wide nose and hair like steel wool. Very sad eyes, kinda baggy, like some kind of basset hound or something like that. She liked to eat,” he adds, slapping his gut. He remembers Rosie pinching the kids’ cheeks, drinking Seven and Seven and “a fair amount of wine,” and cooking constantly, until her classic Italian-American recipes were adopted by every household in a proudly Irish family. In fact, half of Tom’s favorite family recipes are Italian-American.

To make Rosie’s chicken Parmesan, Tom starts with the sauce. He shows me a neat way to peel a large quantity of garlic cloves: Put the unpeeled cloves in a lidded cook pot and shake vigorously. I’m amazed to see that half the cloves are peeled in the first rough shake; after a second session, all the cloves are skinless. He throws the garlic in with the onion, which is already sautéing in a cast iron pan. “This is about how you want them to look,” Tom remarks, gesturing to the pan full of translucent golden onions. He dumps two cans of whole tomatoes into the pot and mashes at the mixture with a potato masher.

Despite making a huge mess in the kitchen, Tom is not a haphazard cook. He takes his time as he slices each chicken breast into cutlets, and then dips the meat in eggs and bread crumbs. He’s a more precise cook than I am — his every motion betrays the typical New York obsession with exact culinary tradition. When I suggest we could use a preexisting bag of panko to coat the chicken filets for the Parmesan, he looks horrified. “No,” he says decisively. “We need the cheap stuff.”

While he’s making the Parmesan, he’s instructing me on how to make another family specialty, Uncle Frank’s meatballs. When I start rolling the mixture of pork, beef, eggs, panko and spices, he views my handiwork with a dubious expression — it’s clear that my meatballs are neither small enough nor round enough for Tom’s taste. When I later offer to help fry the chicken fillets for the Parmesan, Tom doesn’t allow me to bread the cutlets myself — he does it for me, and then hovers behind the stove to make sure I’m letting the cutlets get crispy enough before I flip them.

Tom’s concern doesn’t come across as fussy — he’s just the type of guy who likes to do things right. It makes me think about the difference between East Coast and West Coast culinary culture. I come from a culinary tradition that is primarily focused on innovation and substitution. “Sure, that’s good, but how can I make it with nettles?” Tom’s background is more old school — recipes were passed down from generation to generation, and changing things up was more likely to be viewed with horror than with admiration.

But Tom’s family story isn’t all about staying the same. During the course of our conversation, Tom affectionately describes his family as square and later says his parents were “straight as a pin.” The same could hardly be said for Tom: He says he always felt a little different, never liked suburbia or really bought into the whole Jesus thing. When I ask him how he “was led astray,” he laughs and answers: “rock ‘n’ roll”. After a deadhead phase, Tom moved to Seattle, where he fell in with a group of friends that reads like a who’s who of the grunge era. His family back home didn’t know much about his Seattle life. “They never saw my tattoos for years,” he says, taking a sip of beer and meditatively stirring the red sauce. “In those days I only went home for Thanksgiving, and I always wore long-sleeved shirts. I didn’t know how long I could keep it going, but I always figured as long as I could keep it going for that Thanksgiving, I’d be fine,” he laughs. “But then I got real sick with pneumonia — it was around 1998, and my lungs stopped working. I was in a coma. My parents flew out. They thought I was dying. That’s when they first saw my tattoos — I’m lying in a hospital bed, totally inked, and they’re like ‘what the hell?’ But I never got a lick of shit for it, because I lived — suddenly me having tattoos didn’t seem too important to anybody. Never any discussion about it — to the point when my mom eventually even started thinking she wanted a tattoo herself.”

Despite their dramatic tattoos and stereotypically West Coast behaviors (Tom manages the recycling program for the city of Seattle, his wife Becky eats organic) Tom and his wife are pillars within their East Coast family: In the summertime the entire extended family vacations in the Adirondacks, where Tom and Becky’s son Jack runs wild with his Jersey cousins. I hear shades of Aunt Rosie in Tom’s story, and both tales remind me of something that’s been on my mind lately: When we are forced to accept Italian Aunt Rosie or tattooed Uncle Tom or gay cousin Doug, we become a little less likely to jump to conclusions and, more often than not, our realities are enriched in untold ways. (In a best case scenario, this enrichment appears in the form of cheese-coated chicken cutlets.) On a grander scale, the way we are forced to evolve as families plays out in the way we see the world and the way we change as a nation.

But perhaps I’m getting too high-minded — when I’m sitting in the glow of candlelight spooning Aunt Rosie’s chicken Parmesan onto my plate, I’m just happy. The sauce is tangy and simple, the chicken is crunchy and coated in gooey cheese, and the company is solid. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Aunt Rosie’s Chicken Parmesan (Serves 6)

Ingredients

1 package spaghetti noodles (cooked, still hot)
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion (chopped)
3-4 garlic cloves (chopped)
1 32-oz can whole tomatoes
½ cup red wine
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon fresh oregano (minced)
1 tablespoon fresh basil (minced)
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt to taste
2 lbs chicken breasts (sliced into ½-inch thick fillets)
2-3 eggs (beaten)
1½ cups bread crumbs
1 small zucchini (sliced)
10 ounces baby spinach
1 tablespoon butter
Mozzarella cheese (sliced)
Grated Parmesan

Directions

In a large pan, heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil and sauté onion over medium low heat for 5-6 minutes. Add garlic. Continue to cook until onion is translucent. If necessary, turn heat down.
Add tomatoes, wine and bay leaf. Break up whole tomatoes as you stir. Simmer sauce for 30 minutes. Add water or stock if necessary.
Add spices, sugar and salt to taste. While sauce continues to simmer, slice chicken breasts into cutlets and preheat oven to 350.
Dip cutlets in eggs and then in bread crumbs. Brown cutlets in olive oil. When one side is thoroughly brown, flip and fry the other side.
While cutlets are frying, add zucchini, spinach and butter to sauce. Cook for a few minutes and remove sauce from flame.
Cover bottom of baking pan with sauce. Add chicken. Cover chicken with mozzarella and additional sauce. Bake in oven for 15 minutes.
Serve over spaghetti with Parmesan cheese.

: Felisa Rogers studied history and nonfiction writing at the Evergreen State College and went on to teach writing to kids for five years. She lives in Oregon’s coast range, where she works as a freelance writer and editor. More Felisa Rogers

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Paul Gauguin’s Polynesian “paradise”

An innovative new exhibition seeks to put the French artist's exotic voyages into greater context

SLIDE SHOW

By Emma Mustich

Paul Gauguin, "Arearea no Varua ino (Words of the Devil, or Reclining Tahitian Women)," 1894. (Credit: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen)

View the slide show

Topics:Five-Minute Museum, Art

The sun-dappled scenery and boldly beautiful figures native to some of Gauguin’s most famous Polynesian paintings are only half the story: That’s the thesis of an innovative exhibition currently making its only U.S. touchdown at the Seattle Art Museum.

“Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise” seeks to broaden our understanding of the artist’s exotic works through physical — rather than merely textual — explication. By allowing Polynesian art and artifacts equal exhibition space with Gauguin’s own creations, the show promises viewers an unprecedented aggregate understanding of this key moment in the artist’s career.

In separate interviews, Seattle Art Museum curators Chiyo Ishikawa and Pam McClusky — experts in European and African and Oceanic Art, respectively — discussed Gauguin, his Polynesian voyages, and the value of integrated exhibitions such as this. Click through the slide show for a preview.

What is the idea behind this exhibition? What makes it different from other showings of Gauguin’s work?

Chiyo Ishikawa: No exhibition or study has taken on [Gauguin's Polynesian works] in a full-blown way, as this one does. The goal of the exhibition is to understand this particular aspect of his career more fully. Gauguin was always drawing from a whole range of traditions — but nevertheless, there is a significant role that the Polynesian material plays in his work, even before he goes [to Tahiti].

An essay in the exhibition catalog proposes that Gauguin actually saw Polynesian material for the first time earlier than we thought, around 1884-85, when he was living with his wife in Denmark. This was after he had lost his job; he was trying to make his living in another way. They ran out of money and moved to Denmark, where her family was from. One of the things he did there was visit the national museum, which is sort of a museum of natural history and ethnography. They had an exhibition of pan-primitive art that included material from New Zealand and from Polynesia; we know that he went [to see it]. And so that is probably the first time he saw [Polynesian material] before he had the specific idea in his mind to go to Tahiti. The idea was further solidified after Gauguin visited the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, which had an individual Tahitian pavilion, and numerous works of art from Polynesia, which he saw and then incorporated after he’d actually been in Tahiti.

Pam McClusky: In some regards, art museums and curators tend to be segregated by specialization — so that European painting specialists, like Chiyo, and African and Oceanic Art experts, like me, never intersect. But artists do intersect, and they have for centuries. And so this is a chance for us to look at it a bit more through the artist’s eyes. To be able to put Polynesian art out there in conjunction with Gauguin’s vision is new, and to present them equally is new … Other exhibitions may reference Gauguin’s interest in Polynesian art, but it’s treated as an art historical footnote rather than a really thorough experience. We’re delivering on the notion that it is very helpful to look through an artist’s eyes, and see how he or she can draw from things in ways that surprise you.

What did the idea of “the exotic” mean to Gauguin? Where did he get the idea of it that he had, and when he was in Polynesia, did it live up to his expectations? My understanding is that it didn’t — but he may have depicted it as if it did anyway.

CI: This is a very complicated question that’s at the heart of Gauguin studies. I’m not going to formulate an exact answer, but I will put some things out there.

One of the things I’ve come to realize as I’ve been working on this is that the period of stability that Gauguin had as he was working in the stock market and building a family and building a collection and starting to paint — that was about a 10-year period that was an anomaly in a life that was full of travel and searching. I think [traveling] was a fundamental part of his personality; he was taken to Peru when he was around 1 year old, and lived there for seven years (his maternal grandmother was Peruvian), and then at 17 he joined the merchant marine, and immediately after that he joined the navy. He had sailed all around the world; he was unusually well-traveled for anybody today, let alone someone from the mid- or late-19th century. I think that there was something in him that always knew that if he was dissatisfied with something here, there must be something else out there.

Gauguin’s family and friends always talked about him as an eternal optimist. I think that was part of what fueled him too: the idea that “this might not be working out, but over there, it’s going to be great.”

The first time Gauguin goes to Tahiti, I think it’s a fairly conventional romantic quest for the exotic — for a more pure kind of society. He went there with a government grant to document the customs and people of Tahiti, and so in some of his work from that first period, there is a kind of — I don’t want to say “journalistic” quality — but there is a kind of effort to communicate routines of daily life, or what a village looks like — that kind of thing. After a little while, he leaves that behind (it isn’t very natural to him anyway), and he goes back to his idea of dreaming in front of nature, and creating a synthesis that makes an interesting painting whose colors are maybe unnatural but feel right to him.

Then he goes back to Paris for two years, because he wants to regain his footing in the art world, and he has numerous disappointments. Not many people are buying his paintings; he gets good reviews, but it’s just not finding a market. Then he breaks his ankle, and he gets syphilis, and he’s estranged from his family, and all these other things … And so he goes back to Tahiti with a vengeance, vowing not to return. That’s interesting to me because then I think it’s less a quest for the exotic, and more just looking for a hospitable place that doesn’t have the baggage that his life in Europe does. However, after he’s been there for about six years, he is still questing, and ends up in the Marquesas Islands.

Was Gauguin sending work back to Europe the whole time he was away? Does he always keep on eye on the European art market?

CI: Yes, he does. … He definitely wants to be part of the artistic dialogue that is going on in France; he wants people to see his paintings. He’s writing to people about his work, and he’s very much keeping track of what’s going on in the art world — he knows that younger people are coming up and he doesn’t want to be usurped, which is why he goes back eventually. I mean, it’s the bane of his existence that he’s not making a living as an artist. It’s the constant refrain, once he becomes a full-time artist, is that he’s not appreciated enough. Unfortunately, that appreciation didn’t come until after his death.

Do you have one or two favorite items that are in the show?

PM: [One] favorite is the Maori house-post. It has a man standing, and his two hands are each three-fingered (that’s an indicator that he is an ancestor); he has red sealing wax in his eyes, and his body is tattooed in a very kind of signature way. It is so compelling. Part of what I think is invested in that work is the memory of having the Maori courier come [to the museum] and introduce us to this figure. He played four instruments, and told us about who this ancestor was — that he was a living presence, that we’re to talk to him every day — and we all had to shake this courier’s hand and touch noses with him, to sign our commitment to take care of his relative. The whole encounter with this courier reminded me that we’re cultural activists, but sometimes we get caught in the more corporate model of business-like demeanor. This was an eye-opener, reminding us that these things came from — and are still cared for by — indigenous cultures who have something to teach us about how attached you can be to artwork.

“Gauguin & Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise” will be on display at the Seattle Art Museum through April 29, 2012.

View the slide show