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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: US PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES 2008 (93%); VOTERS & VOTING (92%); PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS (92%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (90%); US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS (90%); PRIMARY ELECTIONS (89%); POLITICS (78%); US DEMOCRATIC PARTY (78%); CAUCUSES (78%); POLITICAL CANDIDATES (78%); POLITICAL PARTIES (78%); WOMEN (78%); POLLS & SURVEYS (72%); BLOGS & MESSAGE BOARDS (72%) PERSON: BARACK OBAMA (95%); HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (94%); ARIANNA HUFFINGTON (56%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (54%) GEOGRAPHIC: IOWA, USA (93%) UNITED STATES (93%) LOAD-DATE: December 2, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTOS (PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN LEWIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. PROP STYLIST: MARK CHANDLER. STYLIST: COURTNEY WEINBLATT.) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1113 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Where the Capitalism Is (Always on Display) BYLINE: By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN SECTION: Section B; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; MUSEUM REVIEW; Pg. 7 LENGTH: 1392 words A few years ago, when irrational exuberance reigned, opening a handsome museum devoted to the history and celebration of money just a block from the New York Stock Exchange might have seemed somewhat vulgar. In times of enthusiasm and plenty, celebration is superfluous. Why devote reverential attention to something when its powers are so omnipresent that they provide daily fodder for gossip? Now, of course, it's a different story. At a time of uncertainty -- as the market quavers, the dollar sinks, sub-prime lenders go belly up, and the Federal Reserve Bank rapidly twists its dials -- money becomes more puzzling and more unpredictable, demanding closer scrutiny. So while opening the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street last month might at first have seemed like bad timing -- like buying a stock at its top, or selling at its bottom -- there was actually no better moment to mount this tribute to the ''forces that have made New York City the financial capital of the world'' (as one of the museum's displays puts it). And if our city's status and the currency that backs it are more contested than they once were, that only makes the enterprise more urgently intriguing. In fact, the museum was founded just after the 1987 market crash, because John Herzog, chairman of a trading firm that has since become part of Merrill Lynch, said he felt that there was no ''institutional memory'' on Wall Street. Moments of crisis require that expanded perspective, and, as the museum's founding shows, they also inspire it. Once housed in a much smaller space at the United States Customs House (where it also had the more ponderous title of Museum of American Financial History), the institution has now come into its own, leasing 30,000 square feet of the former Bank of New York building. And since the nearby New York Stock Exchange has been closed to the public since Sept. 11, this museum may also become a de facto visitors' center. After $9 million in costs (and with a $3 million annual budget), the museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, now has a library and an auditorium, along with 10,000 square feet of exhibition space on what was once the imposing ''private banking'' mezzanine. It is a magisterial space, its grand murals celebrating American industrial achievements -- powered, presumably, by the investments of many who once banked here. Unfortunately, the bank was completed just before the 1929 market crash, which must have left many clients in straitened circumstances. But this museum is not shy about such vagaries in financial fortune. It sees its mission as both celebratory -- paying tribute to the ''American democratic open market system'' -- and educational, depicting just how that system evolved and the ways it works and sometimes falters. So little is taught about this subject in the public schools, and so much still needs to be learned by those who have not quite figured out the nature of derivatives and other financial instruments, that the museum is both welcome in what it attempts and disappointing in how it falls short. In some cases it is too obvious (a wall display of the objects lying behind the trade of pork belly and grain futures doesn't add much); in other cases too compressed (being taught about the nature of bonds is one thing, understanding junk bonds is something else). There are other problems as well. We wait to see how all of this will congeal into a clear understanding of the ways American markets differ from others, or why capitalism, in this particular form, has become so immensely successful. There might also have been more exploration of the debates that have raged over the last 150 years. Winston Churchill's quotation is left to speak for itself without commentary: ''The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.'' What is needed is a better strategy for teaching something about the economic system -- perhaps interactive displays outlining the way a market actually works. Instead too much space is devoted to freestanding touch-screen monitors offering extensive interviews with 16 entrepreneurs, including Robin Chase (Zipcar) and David G. Neeleman (JetBlue); many of these figures are far less interesting than what they accomplished. And there is such a thing as too much tribute: Citigroup gets an unnecessary, promotional display of objects and video, while a more detailed case history, demonstrating a single corporation's successes and failures, risks and ventures, would be far more revealing. So I hoped for more. The frustration is that this is not just a good story; it is a great story, an epic, and here it can be glimpsed only piecemeal. But there are so many fragments here, and so many compelling ones, that the individual parts actually end up greater than their sum. Unusual items from the museum's 10,000-object collection range from early adding machines to the ticker tape detailing the plummeting prices of the 1929 crash; from a 1720 South Sea Company stock certificate signed by Isaac Newton, who lost his investment in a speculative ''bubble'' of the 18th century, to a check signed by John D. Rockefeller. Some of the displays, designed by C&G Partners (which created the deft exhibits at the redesigned Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles), tell their story with humor, using touch screens to give the history of bank robbery, or showing a clip from ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' so that Jimmy Stewart can explain the virtues of a ''savings and loan.'' A small room devoted to the history of American money could have been twice as large and was easily the most coherent in the museum, aided by nearly $6 million in rare coins and bills and a 60-pound ingot from the California Gold Rush, found in a shipwreck. The armed guard outside that room served as a reminder of what this exhibition space once was. Such sensations make the museum far less staid than it appears. What is shown again and again, in the charts and anecdotes, is how difficult a partner fortune can be (though Fortune -- the magazine -- exhibited in a display of some classic issues from the 1930s and '40s, was clearly both lovely and powerful). The wheel of fortune is an ancient concept, and it can be seen revolving here, not just in the history of the room itself, but in tumultuous stories condensed into labels and objects. The distinctively American twist is the idea that the wheel can be manually turned -- and that anybody can spin it, even though some results may be unexpected. A board game from 1886 is like a do-it-yourself Horatio Alger story. ''Game of the District Messenger Boy,'' reads the faded box, ''or Merit Rewarded.'' Figures looking like racing Wall Street messengers move around the board as instructed by a spinning wheel: ''Advance to District Manager,'' reads one square; ''Drowsiness, go back to Reprimand,'' reads another. Elsewhere we read of the ''oracle of Omaha,'' Warren E. Buffett -- the only pupil of the renowned Columbia University economist Benjamin Graham to have ever earned an A+ in his graduate work -- but also of ''Enron's (Mis)Managers'' and of figures like William C. Durant, the founder of General Motors, who went from being a billionaire to (in the wake of the 1929 crash) becoming a dishwasher, running a bowling alley and selling a dandruff cure. Some wealth is created out of risk and labor; but so, too, is some poverty. Freedom has come from capital; so, too, has slavery. A scrap ofpaper becomes a fortune, and a fortune becomes worthless paper. One display reminds us that Willie Sutton famously explained that he robbed banks ''because that's where the money is.'' But we come to this former bank to see exactly what money is -- and what America has made of it. That doesn't really happen. But enough is seen so that money starts to seem less like a material object than like something more ethereal, affected by sea winds and psychology, faith and risk. And at this uncertain moment its mysterious powers seem all the more uncanny: it's a perfect time to see it in action. This museum is not a bad place to start. The Museum of American Finance is open Tuesdays through Saturdays at 48 Wall Street, Lower Manhattan; (212) 908-4110 or financialhistory.org.
Among the museum's collection of financerelated objects are antique games that convey a sense of an industrious, getahead- in-business mentality.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN FINANCE) Left, a museumgoer uses a touch-screen monitor to see interviews with business leaders above, a 60-pound ingot from the time of the California Gold Rush.(PHOTOGRAPHS BY CASEY KELBAUGH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. B11) DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1114 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Divisive Serbian Vote Offers Stark Choice of East and West BYLINE: By DAN BILEFSKY SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 4 LENGTH: 897 words DATELINE: BELGRADE As Serbia prepared to choose a president, 25,000 supporters of the nationalist challenger, Tomislav Nikolic, packed a stadium on Thursday where the warm-up performances included a haunting song celebrating Radovan Karadzic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb leader charged with genocide, enthusiastic tributes to Moscow and rousing speeches by former lieutenants of the late Slobodan Milosevic. The rally for Mr. Nikolic, 55, a charismatic former cemetery worker known as the Undertaker, underlined the stark choice Serbs face in a runoff on Sunday that could draw Serbia closer to the European Union or drag it back into the nationalism and isolation of the past. Mr. Nikolic's Radical Party edged out the Democratic Party of the pro-Western incumbent, Boris Tadic, in the first round of elections last week. The latest opinion polls show Mr. Tadic, 50, a telegenic but understated psychologist, who advocates closer ties with the European Union and Washington, ahead by three percentage points. ''Serbs face a choice between accepting or rejecting the economic and political renewal of Serbia that began after Milosevic was finally thrown out of power in 2000,'' said Marko Blagojevic, an analyst with the Center for Democracy and Free Elections, an election monitoring and polling group based in Belgrade. The vote has also become a test between determination by Russia to extend its sphere of influence to the Adriatic Sea and a campaign by the European Union and the United States to stabilize the Balkans. A critical element of that contest is Kosovo, which is expected to declare its independence from Serbia this month. Serbia, backed by Moscow, is vehemently opposed to independence and considers the territory, dominated by ethnic Albanians, its medieval heartland. Kosovo has been in limbo since 1999, when it came under United Nations control after NATO intervened to halt Mr. Milosevic's repression of Albanians there. The European Union and the United States support independence for Kosovo, and union officials have promised to offset Serbia's loss by rewarding it with generous financial aid, visa-free travel and the possibility of membership. Both candidates say Kosovo should remain part of Serbia. But Mr. Tadic has used the issue to press for closer ties with Europe and Washington, while Mr. Nikolic has argued that a Serbia shorn of Kosovo should turn to Russia instead. ''I want the E.U.'s help and I want investment for Serbia,'' Mr. Nikolic said at the rally Thursday night. ''But I have only one demand: do not touch our Kosovo.'' His pronouncement was made after a large screen showed a heroic report of his visit to Moscow this week, where, accompanied by the brother of Mr. Milosevic, he met with Russia's likely next president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and praised the deal last week in which the Russian state energy giant Gazprom gained control of Serbia's national oil company. Political observers here say Mr. Nikolic's message -- low on policy proposals and high on nationalism -- is resonating with Serbs, who are deeply disenchanted with the country's progress since Mr. Tadic's Democratic Party helped overthrow Mr. Milosevic eight years ago. Unemployment hovers around 21 percent, while the annual per capita gross domestic product of $7,400 ranks Serbia among Europe's poorest countries. The discontent was apparent this week at a crowded cafe in a poor neighborhood of New Belgrade, dominated by concrete apartment blocks and Nikolic posters. A Radical Party student leader, Raso Vucinic, 20, said Serbia would never relinquish Kosovo in return for European Union membership. ''We all want to live better,'' he said. ''But we will not give in to blackmail.'' Yet supporters of Mr. Tadic, who has made European Union membership a centerpiece of his campaign, say such sentiments reflect a collective amnesia about the 1990s, when Serbia suffered from international economic embargoes and the Radical Party backed Mr. Milosevic's wars. Since Mr. Tadic became president in 2004, his supporters say, he has improved relations with the West and helped Serbia rebuild the outward-looking image that the Radical Party helped destroy. Rade Maroevic, 38, a former professional basketball player, noted with pride that three Serbian tennis players -- Novak Djokovic, Jelena Jankovic and Ana Ivanovic -- had worked their way into the top 10 in the world. ''For once, people know us for something other than being war criminals,'' he said. ''We don't want to go back to the old days.'' Mr. Tadic made a similar point at his own rally Thursday night, saying, ''Never again can Serbia afford to be a place of conflict, war, isolation and discrimination.'' Businesspeople warned that a Nikolic victory would bring economic costs, including diminished foreign investment. ''If Nikolic wins, this will destabilize the economy,'' said Zoran Mandic, a leading entrepreneur. Analysts predicted that on Sunday economics would triumph over emotions and Mr. Tadic would win, if only by the slimmest of margins. Mr. Blagojevic, the political analyst, said the swing vote would come from Serbs who were unwilling to trade long-term economic welfare for hanging on to Kosovo. But he cautioned that choosing between Kosovo and Europe was excruciating: ''Serbs are being asked to choose between cutting off their right or left legs.''
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1115 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Correction Appended Late Edition - Final
E-mail: shortcuts@nytimes.com SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; SHORTCUTS; Pg. 6 LENGTH: 1167 words I LIKE hearing marriage proposal stories, and I like telling about ours. All right, since you asked, my husband-to-be proposed in Paris in the back of a taxi. He had planned to do it on the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge there, but it was raining and he got flustered and blurted it out in the back of the cab with a bored driver smoking in the front. It was great. Some of our friends have very romantic tales of proposals on mountaintops in Tibet or at sunset on the beach, while others are more mundane. One friend recalls eating Chinese food with her boyfriend in bed when he turned to her and said, ''So, are we going to get married or what?'' Another said she knew her boyfriend was going to ask something important because he asked her to turn the TV down. I guess it was not necessary to actually turn the set off. The common link in these stories is that they are two-character plays -- but that is so last century. Now, they can involve a cast of three, four or dozens. I am thinking of proposals because it is almost Valentine's Day -- the most depressing or the most romantic of holidays, depending on your view -- one of the big four holidays to propose. The others, according to Anja Winikka, associate editor of the WeddingChannel.com, are Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. An estimated 40 percent of proposals, or about a million, occur over those holidays each year. Proposals are becoming increasingly elaborate and expensive, with proposal planners, proposal photographers and others getting into the act of helping men -- and it is still overwhelmingly men who do the asking -- create an over-the-top presentation. This goes along with the growing tendency to turn every experience surrounding the marriage ritual into a spectacle, from rehearsal dinners to the ceremony itself. ''Weddings are culturally valorized as incredibly significant events in our lives,'' said Cele Otnes, professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-author of ''Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding'' (University of California Press, 2003). ''Upping the ante gives it legitimacy.'' Jenifour Jones, founder of Go Get It Events, said that during her busiest time, she can plan three or four proposals a week. For one, she staged a fake show, which the bride-to-be assumed was real. The concierge of a hotel was in on it, as was a comedy troupe and 150 actors playing audience members. When the time came to kiss the frog, the girlfriend was ''chosen'' to come on stage and, unbeknownst to her, her boyfriend was smuggled backstage. He changed into a frog suit and when she kissed him, he took off the costume and presented the ring, while the audience waved lanterns. The average cost of her proposals is $5,000 to $15,000, Ms. Jones said, but something like the frog play can run more. Ms. Jones's typical client is in his 30s or 40s, and, she said, she has helped same-sex couples, too. ''People are older, they're waiting longer, they have more disposable income,'' Ms. Winikka said. Richard Heyderman, who hired Ms. Jones to help him, is 41, and getting married for the second time on Valentine's Day. He knew that his fiancee, Tara Pokotilow, a teacher, loves the book ''Madeline'' by Ludwig Bemelmans. So with Ms. Jones's help, he rewrote the story as ''Tara's Greatest Adventure.'' ''I had someone drop a clue at her door,'' said Mr. Heyderman, who is president and chief executive of Multi Dimensional Resources. Then a character dressed as Madeline showed up. During Ms. Pokotilow's surprise day out, which included a shopping trip, a spa treatment and serenading with one of her favorite Broadway songs, she was given pages of the book, not knowing exactly what was going on. The coup de grace was when she was handed a first edition of ''Madeline'' with a love note inside ''written by me,'' Mr. Heyderman said -- and taken on a helicopter ride to a sculpture garden in New Jersey, where he proposed. Mr. Heyderman did not want to reveal how much he paid for the day, though he did confide that some of his friends later told him, ''Rich you made our lives impossible, because how do we top that?'' Indeed, Ms. Winikka said one appeal of such proposals is the guy ''wants bragging rights with his friends.'' Does the woman like it as much? Elaine Pursey of Barkshire, England, whose husband planned a day that culminated in a private proposal on the Wollman Rink in Central Park in Manhattan, loved it. ''He had been secretly taking skating lessons for months,'' she said. I can't help being a little cynical about some of this because it seems to be one more effort by the $70 billion dollar wedding industry to get a piece of the pie, or wedding cake, as it were. But Ms. Otnes said it was not clear which came first -- the entrepreneurs or the grooms-to-be -- or even if it stems from men or women. She does see a few factors at play. ''There is an increasing fetishizing of luxury,'' she said. In addition, wedding movies like ''Runaway Bride,'' or the newly released ''27 Dresses,'' magnify everything. Proposal photographers are also an option. Terry Gruber, owner of Gruber Photographers in Manhattan, said he has done about 15 such shots and charges $750 for each one. But surreptitiously shooting the moment of asking without the woman knowing is not always the best idea, Mr. Gruber said. ''You don't want the bride to think its creepy,'' he said. It's better to come up with a pretext, like 'my mom wants pictures of you and me,' '' he said. Then, when the photographer is snapping away, the man pops the question. The marriage proposal is as ritualized as any tribal custom. A paper published last year in the journal Sex Roles found that people -- or at least the 2,174 university students in the Midwest whom the researchers surveyed -- associated more conventional proposals with stronger relationships. If the hypothetical proposal adhered to a traditional script -- the man asking the woman's father first; the man asking the woman; the man getting down on one knee and giving a diamond ring -- then the students thought that the relationship would be stronger, said Alicia D. Cast, associate professor of sociology at Iowa State University and a co-author of the study. Nontraditional would be if the woman asked the man, there was no ring, a plain band or an alternative gem like a ruby or sapphire. There was no statistical difference in answers between men and women. This research helps demonstrate that participants in a ritual like a proposal want to convey a certain message, creating ''in the minds of others that we are a legitimate and serious couple,'' Ms. Cast said. Often those who want elaborate proposals are entering their second marriage, perhaps in the hope that if they start this one right, it will last. Both Ms. Pursey and her husband had been married before. How did the ice rink proposal compare with her first? ''I can't remember it,'' she said. Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length Download 3.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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