Babel

According to Genesis, God gave Adam and Eve dominion over Earth and its creatures. He did so by giving them the power to name all things. The link between language and power, and language and God, is nowhere more apparent than in the story of the tower of Babel. It is commonly interpreted as a tale of ultimate human folly - an attempt to outdo God by constructing a way to reach Him physically and usurp His power. Two words we have inherited from the story testify to that: babble, confused or incoherent talk; nimrod - from Nimrod, literally "we will rebel," the hunter-king who is said to be the tower's chief architect - a term of abuse for a babbling idiot.

So thoughtful, that Brad! Brangelina's XY half made sure yesterday to re-re-remind the cosmos that he's expecting the "imminent arrival" of his Jolie-born-b?b? (fashionably late for its scheduled May 18 birthday). Pitt sent an intimate e-mail from Namibia - to be read at a Cannes Film Festival news conference - saying, "I am unable to join Alejandro [Gonz?lez I??rritu], Cate [Blanchett], Gael [Garc?a Bernal] and the rest of the cast and crew" in hawking his new film Babel, which "tackles" but apparently doesn't wrestle with "mankind's lack of communication.

It was April 2003, and the invasion of Iraq had just begun when Peter Clerke arrived in the United States for an artist residency at Rowan University in Glassboro. In between directing a student production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Clerke, the artistic director of the Scottish theater company Benchtours, found himself glued to the television. Channel-surfing through the cacophony surrounding the war, past the pundits, politicians and flak-jacketed correspondents, "you were bombarded with so much information, but no one was really telling you anything," Clerke said.

I was shaken, but not stirred, by Babel, a globalist melodrama that careens from Morocco to Mexico like a revved-up Crash. Babel's precipitating event is literally triggered by an incident of sibling rivalry between two Arab-speaking goatherds and has agonizing implications for a restless Tokyo teenager and a gringo brother and sister crossing the Tijuana-San Diego border. A collaboration of director Alejandro Gonz?lez I??rritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, Babel is a Debbie Downer illustration of the butterfly effect - you know, the theory that the flutter of monarch wings in San Francisco may result in a lethal weather system in New Delhi.

Peter Rose, who teaches at the Philadelphia Colleges of the Arts, is the Andy Kaufman of avant-garde movies, a filmmaker-performer who speaks in tongues to make us hear English with a clear ear. Over the next two weeks, Rose will be the star of local stage, screen and tube. Tonight through Sunday at 8 p.m, he's one of three multimedia soloists to perform, with his film and video works, at the Painted Bride Art Center. Tomorrow, Babel (1987), his video-in-progress, will screen at 8 p.m. at International House.

The Rosenbach Museum & Library, fabled storehouse of historical documents and literary treasures, has taken up contemporary art, and the result is immensely satisfying. For its first art project, the museum invited two artists and a performer to interact with its collection, a process that many art museums have found fruitful. The result is two mood-altering installations, one by ceramic artist Candy Depew and mezzo-soprano Martha McDonald and the other by Teresa Jaynes. In each case, the artists have transformed a Rosenbach gallery through addition and alteration.

Three artists with nothing in common but a love for language shared the stage last night at the Painted Bride Art Center in a program called "body/ language. " Organized by dancer and choreographer Ellen Forman, who was one of the participants, the program was invigorating for its bold mix of talent. Two of the artists - Forman and Steve Krieckhaus - are dancers who like to talk as they move. Peter Rose's body does not figure in his work (although he does indeed have one). He makes film and video.

It once was a given that immigrants learned English - the common tongue that, until lately, has held us all together. Thus, in decades past, a Sicilian-born seamstress in New York's Little Italy could have shopped in a bakery owned by a Warsaw native, then greeted her German-born postman on her way home. These simple transactions didn't descend into a Tower of Babel because grasping English was one of the first, and few, things immigrants were expected to do once they disembarked.

As a little girl, I was always fascinated by foreign languages. My grandmother, whose mother was born and reared in Italy, would resort to dialect when she didn't want these little ears to intercept and understand her sly comments to neighbors on porches and front steps. The nuns who taught me in second and third grade used their native Spanish to transmit messages that their pint-size, uniformed charges would not be able to decipher. And the Tower of Babel was my favorite biblical tale (the Old Testament was so much more colorful than its sequel)

In one of his final regulatory moves as president, George Bush last December capitulated to Washington-based consumer groups and endorsed a comprehensive plan mandating the relabeling of nearly 300,000 American food products. In announcing the administration's decision, Louis W. Sullivan, then secretary of the Department of Health and Human Sevices, declared, "The Tower of Babel in food labels has come down, and American consumers are the winners. " The new labeling rules require detailed information about fat and other ingredients, strictly defining such hyped terms as "light," "low fat" and "high fiber," and officially blessing specific health claims, including those purchased by food companies from health-related organizations, such as the American Heart Association.

Arika Okrent was studying languages at the University of Chicago. The languages people use and how they work. The rules, the changes, the charts. She was in the library, poking around. "And then," says Okrent, relaxing in her Germantown home recently, "I drifted down to the shelves with all the books on invented languages. It was a sad little collection. I felt sorry for it. " But something called to her. Tales of made-up languages and their makers. Esperanto, the most widely spoken of all; Volapük, once the most popular; Klingon, the bark of space invaders.

I was shaken, but not stirred, by Babel, a globalist melodrama that careens from Morocco to Mexico like a revved-up Crash. Babel's precipitating event is literally triggered by an incident of sibling rivalry between two Arab-speaking goatherds and has agonizing implications for a restless Tokyo teenager and a gringo brother and sister crossing the Tijuana-San Diego border. A collaboration of director Alejandro Gonz?lez I??rritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, Babel is a Debbie Downer illustration of the butterfly effect - you know, the theory that the flutter of monarch wings in San Francisco may result in a lethal weather system in New Delhi.

So thoughtful, that Brad! Brangelina's XY half made sure yesterday to re-re-remind the cosmos that he's expecting the "imminent arrival" of his Jolie-born-b?b? (fashionably late for its scheduled May 18 birthday). Pitt sent an intimate e-mail from Namibia - to be read at a Cannes Film Festival news conference - saying, "I am unable to join Alejandro [Gonz?lez I??rritu], Cate [Blanchett], Gael [Garc?a Bernal] and the rest of the cast and crew" in hawking his new film Babel, which "tackles" but apparently doesn't wrestle with "mankind's lack of communication.

It was April 2003, and the invasion of Iraq had just begun when Peter Clerke arrived in the United States for an artist residency at Rowan University in Glassboro. In between directing a student production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Clerke, the artistic director of the Scottish theater company Benchtours, found himself glued to the television. Channel-surfing through the cacophony surrounding the war, past the pundits, politicians and flak-jacketed correspondents, "you were bombarded with so much information, but no one was really telling you anything," Clerke said.

As a little girl, I was always fascinated by foreign languages. My grandmother, whose mother was born and reared in Italy, would resort to dialect when she didn't want these little ears to intercept and understand her sly comments to neighbors on porches and front steps. The nuns who taught me in second and third grade used their native Spanish to transmit messages that their pint-size, uniformed charges would not be able to decipher. And the Tower of Babel was my favorite biblical tale (the Old Testament was so much more colorful than its sequel)

The Rosenbach Museum & Library, fabled storehouse of historical documents and literary treasures, has taken up contemporary art, and the result is immensely satisfying. For its first art project, the museum invited two artists and a performer to interact with its collection, a process that many art museums have found fruitful. The result is two mood-altering installations, one by ceramic artist Candy Depew and mezzo-soprano Martha McDonald and the other by Teresa Jaynes. In each case, the artists have transformed a Rosenbach gallery through addition and alteration.

According to Genesis, God gave Adam and Eve dominion over Earth and its creatures. He did so by giving them the power to name all things. The link between language and power, and language and God, is nowhere more apparent than in the story of the tower of Babel. It is commonly interpreted as a tale of ultimate human folly - an attempt to outdo God by constructing a way to reach Him physically and usurp His power. Two words we have inherited from the story testify to that: babble, confused or incoherent talk; nimrod - from Nimrod, literally "we will rebel," the hunter-king who is said to be the tower's chief architect - a term of abuse for a babbling idiot.

It once was a given that immigrants learned English - the common tongue that, until lately, has held us all together. Thus, in decades past, a Sicilian-born seamstress in New York's Little Italy could have shopped in a bakery owned by a Warsaw native, then greeted her German-born postman on her way home. These simple transactions didn't descend into a Tower of Babel because grasping English was one of the first, and few, things immigrants were expected to do once they disembarked.

In one of his final regulatory moves as president, George Bush last December capitulated to Washington-based consumer groups and endorsed a comprehensive plan mandating the relabeling of nearly 300,000 American food products. In announcing the administration's decision, Louis W. Sullivan, then secretary of the Department of Health and Human Sevices, declared, "The Tower of Babel in food labels has come down, and American consumers are the winners. " The new labeling rules require detailed information about fat and other ingredients, strictly defining such hyped terms as "light," "low fat" and "high fiber," and officially blessing specific health claims, including those purchased by food companies from health-related organizations, such as the American Heart Association.

DOES AMERICA NEED ONE LANGUAGE - OR MORE? I was perturbed by the July 13 Commentary Page article by Roger Hernandez suggesting that the organization US English "just go away. " Specious reasoning, paranoiac forebodings, laughable arguments, silly, nonsense, absurd - all words used to deprecate the efforts to have English designated as the official language of this country. Since English has become the de facto language of the majority, it would seem to create a tempest in a teapot to battle to make it official.