Susan Sontag, the celebrated novelist, essayist and critic who has been a major force in American intellectual life for four decades, will be discussing her work with students and faculty in a series of events today.

Her latest book, “Regarding the Pain of Others,” which also serves as the title of her lecture in Graham Chapel, explores the emotions-sympathy, rage, indifference-elicited by images of violence and suffering.

Sontag’s writings on the topic have been informed by her own first-hand experiences with war. In 1968 she traveled to North Vietnam as a young war correspondent, giving Americans one of their first reports of life there with her essay “Trip to Hanoi” (1969).

She later filmed a documentary on the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and in 1993 she staged a rustic production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” amidst the rubble of war-torn Sarajevo, where she eventually spent three years teaching at a drama school.

“I guess I go to war because I think it’s my duty to be in as much contact with reality as I can be,” Sontag said in a recent interview on PBS. “And war is a tremendous reality in our world.”

Indeed, Sontag’s commitment to social and political activism has been a constant in her life and work. After her battle with breast cancer she wrote about her experiences in a memoir, “Illness as Metaphor” (1978), in which she hoped to “break the taboo” on talking openly about disease and death. In her influential essay “Why Are We in Kosovo?” (1999), she made a powerful moral case for American and European intervention in the Serbian campaign against ethnic Albanians.

Whether writing about war, pornography, cancer or vaudeville, Sontag has consistently sparked new discussions about values and ethics in areas as diverse as medicine, art criticism, journalism, and law.

“[Sontag has had] an enormous impact on art history, and on the interpretation of images,” said William Wallace, the Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History. “She’s one of the great intellectuals of our time, and she’s made us realize that images in modern culture need interpretation just as much as music, painting or film.”

At 2 p.m. today, Sontag will be joining Wallace and four other professors-including Leila Sadat of the School of Law, Jonathan Gitlin, Ph.D., of the School of Medicine, and Dennis Des Chene and Marilyn Friedman of the philosophy department-in the Women’s Building formal lounge to discuss issues that Sontag’s work has raised in their respective fields.

Sadat, whose research focuses on international criminal law and human rights, says she would like to discuss issues with an international slant.

“[I am interested in] the disconnect between the images we see and our ability to connect emotionally with people from other countries-how instantaneous global transmission of images doesn’t necessarily build understanding,” said Sadat.

Wallace hopes to engage Sontag’s notions about photography.

“[She believes that people] take photographs as evident truth when they’re not: they depend enormously on frame and context for meaning,” he said.

The interdisciplinary format of the discussion-mixing perspectives from art history, medicine, philosophy and law-reflects the mission of the Center for the Study of Human Values (CSHV), the new research center that is co-sponsoring Sontag’s visit.

“The problems that we face in the real world don’t appear in pockets,” said Stuart Yoak, executive officer of the CSHV. “The great issues of the day are inherently interdisciplinary, and the Center tries to address that by providing a venue where the different disciplines can work together.”

On the morning of January 16, 1991, at the height of the first Gulf Crisis, the White House called each of the major American news organizations with the message, “Everyone’s fine at home, but the kids have the sniffles.” For the few Western journalists still in Baghdad, on the wrong side of George H.W. Bush’s “line in the sand,” the meaning of the code words was clear: the promised American attack on Iraq was going to begin that night. Within hours, the representatives of ABC, NBC, CBS (Fox News didn’t exist yet), The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times all took their cue and “pulled the plug” on their offices in Baghdad.

In the end, only the five-person team from Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based upstart Cable News Network didn’t get wobbly knees. Their decision to stay in Baghdad turned out to be one of the most successful gambles in media history. When the attack began, viewers quickly learned that only one news source was still in Baghdad. Thousands of local American channels patched CNN through onto their regular programming, and eventually over a billion viewers worldwide tuned in to hear the voices of CNN’s Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett, and John Holliman, as they vividly described the destruction of the city from the vantage point of their hotel suite.

CNN’s triumph was monumental, and its primacy on the Iraq story launched the network into the grand echelon of major news sources. As the only channel with access to arresting footage of civilian deaths and the destruction of Iraqi cities, CNN also turned out to be a minor antidote to the jingoistic, fawning endorsements of military technology that characterized most other network coverage of the war.

More than anyone, it was Robert Wiener, executive producer of CNN Baghdad, who earned the network its media coup. A manic journalism junkie who styles himself after Hunter S. Thompson (complete with Hawaiian shirts, cigarette holder, and omnipresent sunglasses), Wiener fast-talked his way through Iraq’s innumerable bureaucratic hoops and patiently forged a key friendship with Iraq’s then-Minister of Culture and Information, Naji al-Hadithi.

One terrific scene in “Live from Baghdad,” the film based on Wiener’s experience, offers a striking example of this: we watch as he waits for sixteen hours outside of al-Hadithi’s office for their first appointment, calmly sipping gallons of tea and smoking hundreds of cigarettes, while other reporters come and leave in a huff after being made to wait for three or four hours. Wiener’s patience pays off, since al-Hadithi finally grants him an audience, and later accords CNN an interview with President Saddam Hussein as well as unique access to the transmitter that allowed CNN reporters to broadcast live onto American TV once the war started.

When Wiener returned to the U.S., with dinars still in his wallet, five Hollywood studios immediately sought the rights to his story. Universal Studios eventually won the bid, and a year later, Wiener published “Live from Baghdad: Gathering News at Ground Zero,” a memoir based on his five months in Baghdad. Simultaneously, Wiener was working on the first drafts of a screenplay with Richard Chapman, now Senior Lecturer in the Film and Media Studies Department.

The book, peppered with Thompson-style gonzo exclamations and surreal situations, consists primarily of dialogue and descriptions, rather than inner-monologue, so Chapman said the transition to screenplay form was relatively simple. “He was really thinking filmically when he wrote it,” explained Chapman, “and the description lent itself to a filmic portrayal.”

The transition from screenplay to production, however, was not as smooth. The first drafts of the screenplay were completed shortly after “Live From Baghdad” was published in 1992, but 10 years elapsed before the TV movie version, starring Michael Keaton and Helena Bonham-Carter, finally saw its premiere on HBO.

In the interlude, Chapman explained, the project went through numerous incarnations, at one point flirting with black comedy, before settling on its final docu-drama form. Barry Levinson (“Sleepers,” “Wag the Dog”) was the director initially slated for the film, while Dustin Hoffman was set to play Wiener (which would have produced a bit of post-modern surrealism, since in his book Wiener describes an encounter with the real-life Carl Bernstein in Baghdad, and Hoffman himself already played Bernstein on the big screen in “All The President’s Men”). Through several rewrites and changes of staff, the project began languishing in Universal until Wiener, promoting Steven Spielberg’s “Band of Brothers” in northern France, ran into an HBO producer who expressed interest in putting his story on screen.

Momentum for the production picked up “when war drums were beating for the second war,” Chapman said. Suddenly, heightened interest in the first Iraq war and in Wiener’s unusual account of the American experience in Baghdad made the Baghdad project a hot commodity. Chapman himself admitted that the screenplay “would most likely have sat on the shelf had it not been for the second Gulf War” (the film eventually first screened on November 7, 2002, the day before the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1441 authorizing the return of arms inspectors to Iraq). It’s a historical detail full of irony of course, since, while falling short of being overtly anti-war, the film offers a touching and humanistic account of how the Iraqi people were (twice) caught in between the “battle of personalities” between a President Bush and Saddam Hussein. Without trying to persuade or using gory effects, Baghdad subtly tempers the American view of war as surgical and devoid of human casualties.

“Live From Baghdad” went on to garner three Golden Globe nominations and ten Emmy nominations, including one for Chapman’s writing-although he and his co-writers eventually lost to the writers of “Door to Door.”

Chapman, after working with Wiener, whom he described by saying, “He could sell a Persian rug to a Persian,” says he developed a deeper interest in the ways journalists cover war. His current project, a feature-length documentary called “Shooting the Messengers,” details the history of the Vietnam War through the “words, eyes, and lenses” of the print and photojournalists who covered it. The two-hour film will be culled from over sixty hours of interviews with personalities as diverse as celebrities like Walter Cronkite and David Halberstam, unknown North Vietnamese photojournalists, and the numerous unsung female journalists of the war. Their stories reveal the extent to which most journalists went in with a spirit of patriotism and hopefulness that the U.S. would succeed in Vietnam.

“It’s really a story of loss of innocence, and of the naivet‚ of the military, in thinking they could have a quick victory,” Chapman says of the film’s depiction of Vietnam. For Chapman, the Vietnam War was the end of a cordial entente between the military and the American media that culminated in the restrictions seen in the latest Iraq war. After the retreat from Saigon, the military brass blamed the media for “turning” the American public against the war effort, and vowed never again to allow journalists unrestricted access to the battlefield.

“We’re planning on going back and maybe interviewing some journalists from the latest Iraq war, to add to ‘Shooting the Messengers,’” Chapman said. “It should be interesting to see how their experiences compared.”

Ken Carroll has been traveling on foot for 146 days, but he doesn’t show it. His bright-red thermal shirt is clean, and his auburn hair pulled back into a neat ponytail beneath his cowboy hat. A hand-painted message on the hood of his backpack readswww.peacewalker.org,with a miniature flag flying out of the top of his pack bearing a picture of the globe.

Carroll left his home in San Diego on April 30, 2003, and recently walked through Missouri, the seventh state on the trail of his Peace Walk, an eight-month cross-country trek to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where he hopes to join others in his demand for world peace.

“We need to get beyond this mentality where we ask ourselves, ‘what’s good for me and mine?’ and turn to the goal of leaving a world worth inheriting for our children,” said Carroll.

Eighteen supporters joined him for the first three miles of his walk, though he has been on his own ever since.

Standing beside a row of cornfields along Highway 40, just outside of Highland, Illinois, Carroll looked fit and in good spirits.

“It was up in the triple digits until I got to Kansas. Now it’s been getting a little cooler, which makes walking easier, but it’s chilly at night, too” he said.

Carroll said he suffered from heat stroke and severe heart palpitations on a particularly scorching day in Arizona.

“I ran up a hill too fast, and the heat got to me,” said Carroll. “I fell down, and I was dying out there on the desert floor, my legs and arms flopping like a fish.”

He recovered, and has been healthy ever since, despite sleeping in a tent on most nights for more than four months.

“I get a hotel when I can afford it, but I’ve been mostly keeping my money for food,” he said.

Back home in San Diego, his partner Michele Little, who is president of Unite In Peace, the organization sponsoring Carroll’s project, said that “Kenny” contacts her regularly from the road.

“He calls me to let me know that he’s safe and in a hotel,” said Little. “So when I don’t hear from him, I know he’s not in one. At the beginning, he was in hotels a lot, but now, more times than not, he sleeps outside, because his funds are pretty much depleted. I can’t send him money, because we don’t know where’s going to be.”

Carroll left with very little cash, and now relies in great part on the generosity of people he meets along the road, both for money and food. That often means eating less than he needs. Little explained that he has lost at least 40 pounds since he left.

“A couple of people have invited him for huge meals,” she said. “But he’s lost so much weight that he can’t even eat it all.”

This generosity has taken other forms.

“I was walking along a highway in Texas, and a trucker drove by me,” said Carroll. “He saw me on the road, and then stopped and turned around, just to give [his cowboy hat] to me. I guess he figured I really needed it.”

Little said that Carroll hoped to receive donations through a post office box that he set up in San Diego, but so far has only received two checks, both over four months ago.

She said that for Carroll, an unaffiliated pastor and the author of “Remembrance of New Beginnings,” the decision to undertake his Peace Walk was spontaneous.

“I think he’s been touched by God, and God said ‘walk,’ so he did,” said Little.

Carroll is vague about what he will do once he arrives in New York City.

“Wouldn’t it be great if a million people in New York City all honked their car horns at the same time,” said Carroll. “”Don’t you think that would force world leaders at the U.N. to pay attention? I think it would.”

Little thinks Carroll should focus more on spreading his message by taking a return walk, drawing on the people he met along the way, rather than expecting a big event in New York.

“I don’t know if even he knows [what he'll do when he gets to New York City],” said Little. “I think he’s expecting New York City to open up, and millions of people are going to walk across the bridge with him, and he’ll walk right into the United Nations and speak his mind. Who knows what he’ll do. Maybe he’ll just fly back.”

Fortunately, the question of the draft doesn’t even need to be part of the debate because Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said we aren’t going to need one and the only lawmaker who has suggested bringing back the draft, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), meant it merely as a rhetorical, anti-war deterrent.

Other questions of a delicate, divisive nature, however, do need to be answered. But oddly enough, these are the questions least addressed when our generation discusses the war. Will the world be safer if Saddam Hussein is deposed? Do the potential benefits of the war outweigh the casualties and the financial burden that come with it? How will the Arab world react to a war on Iraq?

Instead of addressing these important questions, the average college student rambles on about the ulterior motives of the Bush administration. Of course this war is partially about access to oil (your SUV is at stake here). Of course there is some political motivation behind the war-in the sense that good politics involves eliminating threats to national security, and ensuring the nation’s economic health through cheap oil. But the debate over this war should not be about Bush and his intentions-it should be about right and wrong, and what actions that imperative demands of us.

Although I consider myself a liberal and disagree with President Bush on energy, tax cuts, education, health care, the environment, and farm subsidies, I support the coming war with Iraq under certain terms. If we do this right (with a strong international coalition and U.N. support), I believe that we can achieve great things. We could remove a dictator who uses professional rape squads to torture his political opponents, who starves his people and denies them the basic freedoms of speech and education, and who perpetuates backwardness and anti-American hatred in the Middle-East.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to oppose this war. If you believe, to paraphrase Ernest Gruening, one of the two Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that “all Iraq is not worth a single American boy,” then I can respect that position. Organize protests, educate people about why you think the war is wrong. But above all, do not shy away from the decision itself or from acting on your beliefs.

To oppose a draft unconditionally, however, is to declare indifference to the questions of right and wrong with which this war presents us. Yet this is exactly the spirit our generation has embraced. Just because politicians have cynical reasons to support or oppose this war does not eliminate its moral challenges. I believe that the sacrifices made in this war are justified by the higher goods it serves. Others believe that nothing justifies the death and destruction that the war will cause. But far too many people treat these matters as an abstract exercise. They are not.

If ours is a generation with ideals, now is the time to show them by confronting our enemies-whether Bush and Rumsfeld, or Saddam and Kim Jong Il. For you, the patriotic and moral thing may be to support the war and ensure that its higher, long-term goals are not lost amidst political opportunism. For someone else, it may be to protest it. But no one can afford to be uninformed about the first great challenge to our generation. We may not be risking our lives in this war, but plenty is at stake. Pro-war or anti-war, we cannot ignore our respective evils or choose inaction.

Art Lecture
Yve Alain-Bois, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. professor of modern art, Harvard
University.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology
For information call 314-935-4523

Holmes Jazz Series
Tom Byrne, guitar.
Holmes Lounge
8-10 p.m.
Free

FRIDAY

The Friday Show
The Friday Show is a mix between Late Night with Conan O’Brian and Jackass. The show goes between monologues, guests, short bits, and short films. Come see it live!
Brown 100
7-7:30 p.m.

Black Anthology
Black Anthology has a fifteen year tradition on Washington University’s campus as a celebration of Black history and culture, consistently challenging notions of ethnicity and cultural division in the United States. This year’s theme is “Shattered Lens: Reconstructing the American Montage.” Also being performed Saturday.
Edison Theater
7 p.m.
$8

SATURDAY

International Championship of Collegiate A Capella
Midwest Regional Quarterfinal of the International Championship of Collegiate A Capella featuring 6 of the best midwest a capella groups including Washington University’s own Amateurs. This competition is for the midwest title, and the opportunity to advance to the International Championship, which is held on Broadway.
Hosted by WashU’s Stereotypes!
Brown 100
8 p.m.
Tickets: $5

CS40 Formal
7 p.m.-12 a.m.
Email smf4@cec.wustl.edu for information

SUNDAY

Jay Friedman
Sex week speaker.
7pm
Friedman Lounge

MONDAY

The Vagina Monologues
Graham Chapel
7:30pm

TUESDAY

Local Band Night
Battle of the bands. Winner is determined by audience vote.
Gargoyle
9:00pm
$2, free for WU students

WEDNESDAY

Ultimate Fakebook
w/ The People, The Rosewood
$7 General Public
$3 WU Students
Doors at 8:00pm

A Guy Thing
Paul (Jason Lee) runs into some trouble when he ends up in bed with his fianc‚’s cousin Becky (Julia Stiles) after his bachelor party. Hijinx ensue as he scrambles to cover up the truth. Half-hearted romantic comedy from the writer of Meet The Parents.
Cadenza rating: C+ Playing at the Esquire

Adaptation
Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, the screenwriter/director team that brought us Being John Malkvovich, deliver this inventive comedy about the artistic struggles of the screenwriter (Nicholas Cage) trying to adapt a book about orchids to the big screen. This film is simply blooming with original ideas about the process of film-making and the screenwriter’s artistic license.
Cadenza rating: A Playing at the Tivoli

Biker Boys
The Fast and the Furious on bikes. If you really want more, a young racer named “Kid” (Derek Luke) wants to take on the legendary “Smoke” (Lawrence Fishburne) and win his coveted helmet. He forms rival gang “the Biker Boyz” to take on Smoke’s “Black Knights.”
(Not yet reviewed) Playing at the Esquire

Chicago
Big screen adaptation of the Bob Fosse Broadway production. Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger) lands on murderess row, but a sleazy lawyer (Richard Gere) turns her sin into sensation, arousing the jealousy of established star Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Top-notch production and musical numbers make this a Windy City winner.
Cadenza rating: A- Playing at the Hi-Pointe

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
This quirky film proposes that 70s Gong Show host Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell) actually led a double life as a CIA operative. Drew Barrymore, Julia Roberts, and George Clooney (in his directorial debut) co-star in what promises to be an original movie by Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.
(Not yet reviewed)
Playing at the Chase Park Plaza

Darkness Falls
This goofy, self-aware horror flick puts a new spin on an old idea – the tooth fairy – with devilishly scary results. Chaney Kley stars as the local looney who must convince everyone that the things that go bump in the night have a sinister design. Emma Caulfield is the girlfriend with a little brother who sees dead people (and whom no one believes).
Cadenza rating: B+
Playing at the Esquire

Gangs of New York
Martin Scorsese’s big-budget, 30-years-coming historical revenge drama with Leo DiCaprio as Amsterdam Vallon, a young man returning to the Five Points neighborhood of 1860s New York City to avenge the death of his father. Flashy, three-hour epic is heavy on pizazz and light on character development.
Cadenza rating: B Playing at the Esquire

Narc
Narcotics officer Tellis (Jason Patric) comes out of an 18 month suspension and joins Lt. Oak (Ray Liotta) in the investigation of another narc’s death. As a struggling addict and an unpredictable hothead, they make a volatile team that nonetheless continues to dig deeper into the clues of the case.
(Not yet reviewed) Playing at the Esquire
The Recruit
James Clayton (Colin Farrell) hopes to join the CIA under the tutelage of experienced spy man Walter Burke (Al Pacino). Beautiful fellow recruit Layla (Bridget Moynahan) is thrown into the mix to keep things complicated for the adept new trainee. Expect much intrigue and espionage from this new thriller.
(Not yet reviewed) Playing at the Esquire

“What’s he doing?” Kate Eastwood asks, offering a grin, but also a tinge of anxiety. With her knitted sweater and sandy brown hair, Eastwood looks at least as much like a soccer mom as the assistant to the general manager of a performing arts organization, but in this case her maternal disapproval is entirely appropriate. There are 2,200 people and a 92-piece orchestra just beyond the door she’s holding, and they’re all waiting for a 20-year-old keyboard prodigy to walk through it.

Eastwood walks up to the ornate double doors of the “Green Room,” the vast suite backstage at the St. Louis Symphony’s Powell Hall reserved for soloists and guest conductors, and raises her hand to rap at the door. Suddenly a brilliant cascade of glissandos and descending runs-an early passage from Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4, which the young virtuoso Lang Lang will be playing tonight-bursts from inside the room. Eastwood drops her hand and smiles approvingly.

A few moments later the music stops, and an unbelievably young man, dressed in impeccable concert tails, steps out and smiles sheepishly at the small crowd gathered outside his door. Ambling absent-mindedly through the stage door, Lang Lang makes his way into the dark, wire-strewn corridor, and preceded by a rattle of backstage pre-applause, strides confidently into the bright lights of the main stage.

The young Chinese native turns out to be one of the biggest hits of the Symphony season so far. At twenty, he’s already an international star, with engagements from most of the world’s top symphonies, and his playing tonight justifies the hype. After the final bang of his dazzling concerto performance, he rewards the audience’s ecstatic standing ovation by executing as an encore a virtuoso arrangement of “Stars and Stripes,” presumably in honor of the seven astronauts whose tragic death was announced earlier in the day. Powell Hall’s 2717 seats are filled nearly to capacity, and the crowd loves it.

In all, it’s a remarkable showing for an organization that, barely a year and a half ago, had drained its endowment to a scant $18 million, and months later saw its key figure, Music Director and Conductor Hans Vonk, resign because of health problems.

“It’s pretty amazing, all things considered,” says Carter Dunkin, Director of Communications at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO). “When I go see the Blues, there’s lots of empty seats. Paul McCartney didn’t sell out, ‘The Producers’ didn’t sell out. When Hillary Hahn played here we sold out two nights in a row.”

Part of the Symphony’s success this season has been its ability, despite financial pressure, to keep bringing in top-billing guests like Hillary Hahn, Yo-Yo Ma, and Garrick Ohlsson. And the dazzling procession of guest conductors (i.e. potential suitors for the now vacant Music Director spot) has made Symphony shows more fun, more spontaneous, and definitely more diverse.

“It’s a great time for the Symphony,” says Concertmaster David Halen, who recently performed Saint-Sa‰ns’ Violin Concerto No. 3 with the Symphony. “There’s a lot of young talent in the orchestra, and there has been an incredible groundswell of support from the community that has made it very clear how much the orchestra means to this area.” And support is particularly important now as the Symphony goes through some significant personnel changes that will require time and effort to make effectively.

Besides the Music Director search, which will likely take another two to three years, Halen and newly-appointed Music Adviser Itzhak Perlman have been auditioning musicians from all over the country to fill several vacant chairs (endowed positions) in the orchestra’s ranks. Filling the chairs, which include three principle or assistant positions, will “bring new creativity, and new vitality to the organization,” says Halen. As for the more high-profile attempt to find a replacement for Hans Vonk, the task is somewhat more daunting.

The Symphony plans to bring in several dozen guest conductors over the next couple of years, but among that pool, very few will likely even meet the basic prerequisites for the job, most notably availability. “Even if we find the perfect conductor,” says Dunkin, “they could be in Hamburg or Seattle, booked until 2006.” And the standards for the position are extremely elevated. Besides being a consummate musician, a Music Director must be equally comfortable pressing the flesh and socializing with potential donors-particularly in a financially uncertain time for most major orchestras.

In any case, whatever financial troubles the symphony had of late seem to be fading into the background. In the summer of 2001, spurred by low revenues and donation levels, the administration was spending from the SLSO’s already small endowment, eventually bringing it to below $20 million (as a comparison, most equivalent symphonies have endowments upwards of $100 million). But thanks to a matching $40 million gift from the Andrew Taylor fund (the single largest gift ever made to an orchestra), $27 million of which the Symphony has already raised, the SLSO’s finances look to be on an upward swing. Within three or four years, the Symphony will likely have its endowment safely above the $100 million mark.

The SLSO is also doing remarkably well compared to its peers around the country. The Pittsburgh Symphony, which is in danger of declaring bankruptcy, has been asking its guest artists to take pay cuts, and has replaced more expensive, large-ensemble pieces on its programs with smaller, lower-budget ones, to save money. The San Jose Symphony and the Colorado Springs Symphony have shut down. The orchestras of Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and Houston have all announced multi-million dollar losses.

Most of the current crises in these organizations are attributed to the overall ill health of the economy. Concertmaster David Halen suggests that because the SLSO was already dealing with financial problems before the economy went sour, the organization may have partially pre-empted the troubles that were to come. Whatever the process, the Symphony looks to be climbing back up the financial ladder while several of the nation’s orchestras are still groping for rock bottom.

Despite all of the various upheavals in the personnel and administration of the Symphony, the experience of attending a concert has not changed. The lavish, welcoming atmosphere of Powell Hall is the same. The audiences are as unpretentious and diverse as ever. And the orchestra itself still exudes an aura of extended family.

Hanging out backstage after a show, it’s almost impossible to move from point A to B because of the solid wall of audience members blocking the narrow hallway, chatting with the musicians, inviting them out for a drink, or exchanging reports about the other’s kids. The musicians are approachable enough even for complete strangers who want to introduce themselves and offer a complement or just chat.

Darwyn Apple, a violinist who has been with the Symphony for over thirty years, says that part of the organization’s staying power has been the loyalty of the orchestra’s rank and file members, who volunteered to take a salary cut when things were looking bad a year ago. “For many musicians, whether they stay with an orchestra is pure economics, but I think a lot of the people who decide to stay with the [St. Louis] Symphony do so because they think the people here are friendlier than in other big cities, because it’s a nice place to raise your kids, because they feel like this organization is special.”

There’s plenty of action left in the Symphony season. Here’s are some highlights, with highly recommended concerts denoted by a *.

Highlights of the SLSO 2003 Spring Schedule

>> 2/7 at 10:30 am, 2/9 at 3 pm
Martin Concerto for Seven Wind Instruments
Stravinsky Suite from Pulcinella
Bartok Concerto for Orchestra
Jun M„rkl, conductor

>> * 2/14 at 8 pm, 2/15 at 8 pm
Wagner Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde
Berlioz Selections from Romeo and Juliet
Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Ravel Suite No. 2 from Daphnis et Chlo‰
Emmanuel Villaume, conductor
Andrew von Oeyen, piano

Ravel’s Daphnis et Chlo‰ is beautiful, ethereal fairy music, and the Wagner is gushing, overwhelming, utterly romantic.

>> * 2/16 at 3 pm
Special Event Concert
Itzhak Perlman, conductor
Program TBA

We don’t know yet what the great violinist and recently appointed Music Adviser to the Symphony is going to conduct-or how good a conductor he is-but it’s bound to be an interesting program.

>> 3/7 at 8 pm, 2/8 at 8 pm
Ligeti Lontano
Bartok Piano Concerto No. 3
Brahms Symphony No. 4
David Robertson, conductor
Orli Shahm, piano

>> * 3/22 at 8 pm, 3/23 at 3 pm
Haydn Overture to Windsor Castle
Haydn Symphony No. 94, “Surprise”
Haydn Mass No. 9, “Heiligmesse”
Nicholas McGegan, conductor
St. Louis Symphony Chorus
Amy Kaiser, conductor

Nic McGegan must be the most exuberant conductor working today (he actually runs on and off stage). He’s also a master of the baroque/early classical repertoire, and this all-Haydn program will be a delight.

>> 3/28 at 8 pm, 2 29 at 8 pm
Mozart Piano Concerto No. 26 “Coronation”
Elgar/Payne Symphony No. 3
Sir Andrew Davis, conductor
Louis Lortie, piano

>> 4/ 3 at 8 pm 4/4 at 8 pm
Berlioz Le Corsaire Overture
Ravel Piano Concerto in G major
Stravinsky The Fairy’s Kiss
William Eddins, conductor
Stewart Goodyear, piano

>> 4/11 at 10:30 am, 4/12 at 8 pm,
4/13 at 3 pm
Beethoven Violin Concerto
Beethoven Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral”
Stefan Sanderling, conductor
Leonidas Kavakos, violin

>> * 5/2 at 8 pm, 5/3 at 8 pm,
5/4 at 3 pm
Beethoven Symphony No. 1
Beethoven Symphony No. 9, “Choral”
Joseph Swensen, conductor
St. Louis Symphony Chorus
Amy Kaiser, director

Everybody knows the “Ode to Joy” by heart, but what about the glistening, blissful third movement? Or the military parody in the fourth? For anyone who has only experienced Beethoven’s 9th through a recording, this is a must.

For a complete schedule and information on $10 student tickets visit www.slso.org

My boyfriend gives really great head. But I have a hard time getting to the point where I can have an orgasm. It’s not him – I’ve always had this problem. To get myself to come I have to close my eyes and fantasize about something else. Not someone else, mind you, but a different scenario, usually involving physical force or aggression. Whenever I ask my boyfriend to hit me during sex he refuses. He spanks me, but that’s it because he doesn’t want to hurt me. Is there anything I can do to resolve this?

Sincerely,
Make Me

Dear Make Me,

There is nothing inherently wrong with being submissive – you want to be dominated, you want to play with the idea of being forced or controlled in a situation that you know is safe. With a loving a respectful partner, your desires and fantasies are normal and healthy.
Your partner’s timidity is also normal and healthy. Good men should have second thoughts about smacking their girlfriends around, even if that’s what their girlfriends want. There is a fine line between kinky sex and sexual abuse. His fear is a rational one – that you or he will get carried away amidst the throes of passion, and that he will hurt you.
However, if you two want to have a healthy sexual relationship, then you reaching orgasm should be a priority. I’m sure that when you tell your boyfriend the only way you can come while he’s giving you oral sex is to fantasize about being somewhere else (whether it’s with someone else or not) he will have second thoughts about fulfilling your aching desire to be slapped. If so, set some ground rules, and problem solved.
If not, you need to decide how important making your fantasy a reality is to you. You can always imagine or fantasize yourself to orgasm – it’s not cheating and it’s not sick or twisted. And as long as the game stays in your mind, you will never risk crossing the line and getting hurt. Besides, most sexual fantasies never materialize quite as well in real life as they do in your mind. It’s like trying to make a good movie out of a really good book.

Dear Lucky,

Is there any surefire way I can tell if my girlfriend is faking her orgasms?

Sincerely,
Did She Come?

Dear Did She Come,

Did she or didn’t she? The oldest question in the world – right after, “What did you say your name was?”
There are medical ways you can tell – something about monitoring heart rate and body temperature.
A better and less complicated idea is to ask her. Don’t be an idiot about it and say something like, “Hey baby, um, are you coming? I can’t really tell.” She will roll her eyes at you and rightly so. Instead, be the sensitive lover that you know you are: “Sweetheart, you seem to be having ok orgasms but I know we can do better. I want to drive you crazy, I want you to have orgasms with me that make you fall apart.” This will hopefully open a dialogue about consummation.
Whether or not your girlfriend admits to faking is beside the point. Once you start talking about her coming, she will know you’re making an effort. If you can talk about it before sex, try talking about it during sex. Ask her what she wants, how she wants it, whisper into her ear how much you want to make her come and seal it with a kiss.
If she’s not coming for you at this point, you can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you inspire Oscar-winning fakes. There are worse things than being a muse for theatrical greatness.

It’s unfortunate that Jonathan Franzen is such a curmudgeon, because he’s also a terrific writer. His new collection of essays, “How To Be Alone,” foregrounds his talent for pointed observations and grumbled asides-in one essay he calls the media coverage of the first Gulf War “a thousand-hour infomercial for high technology”-that capture, and help to temper the often inscrutable spectacle of American media, politics, and culture.
But Franzen also too often makes the reader a captive of his obsessions. About half of the essays in “How To Be Alone” seem to have been conceived, researched, and written in the confines of Franzen’s musty apartment, composed from what Franzen calls his “place of anger and despair.” As Franzen himself admits in the book’s introduction, he used to think that our “American political economy was a vast cabal whose specific aim was to thwart my artistic ambitions, exterminate all that I found lovely in civilization, and also rape and murder the planet in the process.” And as much as he jokes about this period of clinical depression and apocalyptic pessimism, it’s still on tiring display in a good chunk of the book.
Essays like “Scavenging,” in which he waxes nostalgic about rotary telephones and books, and launches on tiresome tirades against CD-ROMs and videos, or “The Reader In Exile,” an occasionally enlightening, but mostly tedious attack on digital technology, are pessimistic in the extreme, and simply rehash critiques of mass media that we’ve already heard a dozen times over.
But along with his hang-ups and phobias, Franzen is also a passionate and insightful critic of consumerism, the dissolution of personal responsibility, and social injustice. The essays of “How To Be Alone” that find him out in the thick of American absurdity, immersing himself in it before lacerating it, remind us why we need social commentators.
In “Control Units,” for example, he travels to central Colorado to visit an odd cluster of high-security prisons and the withering, depressed towns nearby that mistakenly put their economic hopes on their economic coattails. From the tailor, whose loss of a contract for prison uniforms pushes him towards bankruptcy, to the small-time investors whose all-out fundraising effort to buy up the land for the prison site ends in a last-minute change of mind by the buyers, Franzen sketches a poignant image of people left in the cold by the big, impersonal machinery of the state and the national bureaucracies.
In “Lost In The Mail,” which like several of the essays in “Alone” was originally published in The New Yorker, Franzen takes another look at bureaucracies, this time chronicling the astonishing incompetence and corruption that led to the mid-90s collapse of the Chicago postal system. As part of his research for the article, Franzen shadowed a delivery man, hung out with postal workers after-hours (“They revel in dog lore,” he writes, “I’m advised that if I’m ever set upon by a pack of strays I should Mace the one that barks first.”), and interviewed dozens of administrators, irate citizens, and journalists. The piece isn’t full of broader social messages, but Franzen’s meticulous details reek of authenticity, and his writing brings to life a whole fascinating constellation of industrial and bureaucratic mechanisms that normally remain hidden to us.
In fact many of Franzen’s essays seem aimed at demystifying the odd relationship between the individual and the crowd created by an increasingly privatized, paranoid, asocial age. In “Imperial Bedroom” he argues that instead of the “loss of privacy” prophesied as inevitable with the proliferation of digital information databases, privacy has in fact reached new heights:

‘The right to be left alone’? Far from disappearing, it’s exploding. It’s the essence of modern American architecture, landscape, transportation, communication, and mainstream political philosophy. The real reason that Americans are apathetic about privacy is so big as to be almost invis ible: we’re flat-out drowning in privacy.

This ascendancy of privacy, he argues, also means the death of the joys of the public space, the place where one can see and be seen, and “announce to the world (not the little world of friends and family but the big world, the real world), that you have a new suit, or that you’re in love, or that you suddenly realize you stand a full inch taller when you don’t hunch your shoulders.”
The real historical oddity of the collection, though, is the 1996 essay “Why Bother,” which was originally published in Harper’s in slightly different form under the title “Perchance To Dream.” In the piece, which is really the centerpiece of the book, Franzen describes the process of conceiving and unsuccessfully trying to write his third novel, which he envisioned as a “big, uncompromising” work modeled after Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22″. As he explains in the essay, he eventually came to the realization that the novel was no longer capable of addressing the “big issues” of the day, as was once done by writers like Henry James and Herman Melville. Until he understood the impossibility of his project, Franzen writes, he found himself in the throes of depression, a social recluse, and seriously considering abandoning his career as a writer.
Of course, his third novel turned out to be a huge success, if not the grand social novel of which he once dreamed. “The Corrections,” which appeared some five years after “Why Bother” was published in Harper’s Magazine, won Franzen overwhelming critical acclaim, and eventually the National Book Award. It even led to a highly publicized spat with Oprah that put his name on yet more headlines; after “The Corrections” was chosen as an “Oprah’s Book Club” selection, Franzen made comments to the effect that the Oprah stamp was more of a stigma than an honor (she eventually retracted her selection).
And in the end, Franzen proved himself wrong on another count: even if he hasn’t written his “Catch-22″ yet, “How To Be Alone” is a bit like training for the “big, uncompromising” novel he is sure to one day write. Although Franzen would be loath to admit it, “How To Be Alone” bears some striking resemblances to Tom Wolfe’s 1968 collection “The Pump House Gang,” another exercise in social critique and investigative reporting that prefigured great social novels to come (“Bonfire Of The Vanities,” “A Man In Full”). If he picks up a bit of Wolfe’s intrepid, journalistic spirit, and loses a bit of his queasy writer’s conflicts, Franzen will be on his way to writing his own “Moby Dick.”

Instead, in April of this year, Congress passed the feeble Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE) act, which failed to take either of the important steps needed to reduce our energy problems, namely increasing fuel economy standards (which forces manufacturers to produce more efficient cars), or reducing subsidies to fossil fuel industries. Instead, the bill supports the maintenance of the low fuel-economy standards that keep us on a 12-million barrel a day diet of oil (and hence dependence on Persian Gulf exporters) and perpetuates the heavy favoritism of fossil fuel industries that keeps renewable energy-the only clean, safe, long-term solution to our energy problems-as a distant dream.

If this issue seems less than timely, it shouldn’t. Today, voters in 40 states, including Missouri, will go to the polls in 34 Senate and 15 House elections that will decide the direction of our energy policy at this critical juncture. This is an opportunity for us to express our support for a smarter, safer energy policy. And judging by a recent poll conducted by the Mellman Group-in which 71 percent of respondents named either alternative energy or energy efficiency as the best solutions to America’s energy problems-there should be broad electoral support on energy reform. Yet so far, legislators have shown themselves completely out of step with popular opinion.

Although on the whole, Republican candidates have voted against higher fuel economy standards and have supported drilling in the Arctic, while Democrats have voted the opposite, there are a number of notable exceptions in both directions, and voters should look closely at the records of each candidate in this regard (see www.vote-smart.org).

For example, in the relatively progressive voting atmosphere of Colorado, two Republican representatives, Scott McInnis and Joel Hefley, voted in support of a 2001 bill that would have increased Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for SUV’s and light trucks, reducing our dependence on foreign oil by 1.2 million barrels a day, or roughly the amount imported daily from Iraq. They were joined by 34 other House Republicans in support of the bill, but were overwhelmed by conservative opposition.

Missouri is currently host to one of the closest races in the country, between incumbent Jean Carnahan, and former congressman Jim Talent. Their views on energy are starkly different. Carnahan has stated that, “We need to promote renewable and alternative energy sources.We also need to find ways to help people conserve energy.” Talent has supported drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve as a corrective to our energy shortfalls and has expressed no support for pursuing alternative energy sources or conservation. On many other issues, Carnahan espouses traditionally conservative views, but her position on energy is a progressive one, and one that would make her an important addition to a reformist movement in Congress.

Since many are prone to thinking along stark party lines (present company included), it seems important to stress the bipartisan nature of this issue, even though it has hardly been treated as such by our representatives.

Specifically, higher fuel economy standards would benefit the consumer in terms of finance (reducing expenditures at the pump by from $3,000 to $5,000 over the lifetime of each car), health (promoting lower carbon dioxide emissions and cleaner air), and security (cutting off hostile Arab nations from billions of dollars in oil funds). While the alternative proposed to this-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve-has received support, in the next 50 years, it would still only produce one fifteenth the amount of oil as would a modest reduction in our fuel standards.

Politicians have long been dormant on issues of energy, fearful of startling with voters with a new direction policy, but we need a new direction, and fast. Let’s show our support for candidates who agree.