Illusion

Monet's atmospheric canvas, Houses of Parliament, Effect of Fog is about much more than a gothic building dissolving into a ghostly landscape. It's about an artist brave enough to walk the narrow and treacherous ledge between reality and illusion. I first saw the painting, which is now on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, during a Monet exhibit presented 10 years ago at the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum had arranged a 7:30 a.m. showing for a group of arts journalists before the galleries opened for the day. Because I had previously lingered over the earlier parts of the exhibition, I quickly moved to the final galleries, leaving my colleagues behind.

PHILADELPHIA - While TV cameras zoom in on Israeli settlers leaving Gaza, the real story remains blurred. The real story is what will happen after Israel leaves. Will Israel's exit lead to renewed talks on peace or to a new wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence that will shake the Middle East? The signs look bleak. Israelis, Palestinians and U.S. officials hold unreal expectations about the pullout's aftermath. Unless reality takes hold, such illusions spell big trouble in Gaza and beyond.

RAFAEL PALMEIRO, on the road to baseball's Hall of Fame, instead arrives at the junction of ignorance and ignominy. He may have lied to the U.S. Congress, or he may simply be lying to himself. Whom the gods would make immortal, they sometimes give feet of clay. And bodies artificially enhanced. At Oriole Park yesterday, they put on a game of baseball that seemed a kind of glum afterthought to drug allegations. While the Orioles played the White Sox, Palmeiro played defendant. While his huge congratulatory banner continued to hang from the Oriole Park warehouse, Palmeiro took reporters' questions and tried not to hang himself.

At the end of the day, the $1,250 "Lighter Than Air" levitation illusion remained unsold. So Annapolis magician Wayne Alan dragged it back into his house. Thing weighs about 300 pounds. Now, the Sword in the Neck kit, the Double Sawing a Lady in Half, the Tip-Over Trunk, the Zigzag Box, they all sold. All told, about $10,000 worth of tricks and illusions vanished, not so much because of magic, but commerce. "No, I'm not retiring," said Alan, 54. "Magicians just accumulate so much stuff over the years."

WASHINGTON - While conditions in Iraq may seem different from Vietnam, the differences are misleading. More important, how the United States has interpreted these differences and created an illusion about Iraq is critical. The striking similarities between the two are in Washington policy-making, not in Iraq itself. Until the hubris and illusion in U.S. policy are gone, Iraq will remain a deepening quagmire. U.S. policy-makers have seriously misinterpreted the domestic history, politics and economics of Iraq, making the differences with Vietnam seem real.

Postmodernism has put photography in the somewhat uncomfortable position of having been the most volatile of all the arts of the past three decades. It has become a bridge between the modernist project of the early 20th century and the reaction against modernism that set in during the 1970s. Among the former may be counted such "straight" photographers as Eugene Atget, Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson; the latter would include Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. Postmodernists reject photography's claim to truthfulness.

Have you ever wanted to fly? You might get some semblance of that feeling of freedom watching Air Dance Bernasconi, a Baltimore-based aerial dance company that is presenting three performances of "Aerial Illusions" tomorrow through Sunday at Towson University. With its roots in gymnastics, modern dance and circus performance, much of what is accomplished in aerial dance is made possible using apparatuses such as the lower trapeze. Differing from a circus trapeze, which is rigged from two points high in the air and swings back and forth, the lower trapeze hangs approximately 4 feet from the ground with both lines attached to one point.

The polka-dot giraffe in the window leaves Josh Gelfand cold. No laugh. Ditto for the happy elephant, the Clown Alley wigs, the goofy Steve Forbes photo or any of the other knickknacks packed into Ken-Zo's Yogi Magic Mart. But then the glum artist from California meets the man in the sky-blue clown suit. And Ken-Zo has an ace up his sleeve - so to speak. "You guys want to see a couple of tricks?" Ken-Zo asks Gelfand and his friend. Why not? "What do you guys like? Cards? Coins?" Ken-Zo asks.

Cozy Baker is, well, kaleidoscopic. Aficionados call her "the grande dame of kaleidoscopes," "the first lady of American kaleidoscopes" and even "the patron saint of kaleidoscopes." She looks marvelous in a red-plum pantsuit as she shows off the largest collection of kaleidoscopes in the world - more than 1,000 and growing - at her home on a wooded hillside near the Potomac River in Bethesda. She's a handsome, youthful woman with beautifully coifed silver-white hair. She's of a certain age, which she charmingly declines to disclose.

Nine vendors whose companies include major names in the U.S. food industry were charged in federal court in New York yesterday with helping Columbia-based U.S. Foodservice Inc. perpetrate an $800 million accounting fraud that illustrated the pressure on suppliers to engage in a cover-up to maintain lucrative business relationships, attorneys said. The vendors, whose companies included General Mills Inc. and Tyson Foods Inc., were charged with aiding executives of U.S. Foodservice in producing false records that created the illusion of $800 million in added revenues over three years.