PHOTOGRAPHS



Grace Family, 1950

CANADIAN OF THE YEAR

Crusade for Life: Stephen Lewis spearheads a desperate battle against HIV/AIDS in Africa

THE STAKES are impossibly high, the cost of failure all too easily measured in the sick, the dead, and the children who are left behind. Stephen Lewis has a job no person in their right mind would envy, tasked with making indifferent governments and their seemingly uncaring citizens pay attention to a tragedy they have ignored for two decades. It is a wonder the United Nations' special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa does not break under the stress. It is miraculous that against such long odds, he seems to be succeeding.
The 66-year-old politician, diplomat and activist is Maclean's inaugural choice for Canadian of the Year because of his vision, perseverance, and above all his passion. Always articulate, he has devoted his energy, optimism and, occasionally, white-hot anger, to prodding the world to action. And after the hopeful developments of 2003 -- George W. Bush's pledge to spend US$15 billion over five years to fight AIDS, Canada's promise to change patent laws and make drugs available to those suffering overseas, a World Health Organization plan to put three million people into treatment -- the battle's tide might finally be turning in his favour. "When people are dying by the thousands every day, unnecessarily, when we've had this horrendous pandemic unfold for two decades while the world stands by and watches -- you'll do anything in your power to move the process," says Lewis. "I don't care what it takes. All I know is that every time I go to Africa, I am shaken to my core."

The evidence of Lewis's lifelong love affair with Africa is scattered throughout his Toronto home -- photos on end tables, a line of carvings on the mantel, paintings on the walls. When his friend Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, asked him to take the job -- technically a part-time position -- in 2001, he didn't hesitate. But Lewis was unprepared for the horrifying on-the-ground reality of a disease that could kill as many as 200 million people by the middle of the century. His voice quavers and his eyes mist when he recalls the already dead and soon-to-die who haunt his days. On the latest trip -- Lewis travels to Africa at least once a month -- it was a grandmother he met near Johannesburg. She has lost all five of her adult children to AIDS, and now cares for her four grandchildren, all of them infected with HIV. "That's Africa. That's the reality of AIDS," he says.

At the beginning of 2003, frustrated and disheartened by Western nations' willingness to ignore the crisis and commit "mass murder by complacency" while they devoted billions to ousting Saddam Hussein, Lewis agonized over whether he could continue. But he decided to turn his despair and anger to advantage, and push all the harder. "I'm still at the end of my rope because I find myself not handling things well when I travel. I get too distraught, too quickly," says Lewis. "But what is my emotional disarray compared to the hell that is happening? I'm in a great rage now, as I understand how many lives we have lost. But I don't want to leave until I see the breakthrough." In the past few months, he has helped harness the power of celebrity to raise awareness of the cause, meeting with U2's Bono, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. In December, Lewis brought Oprah Winfrey to Zambia to see some of the growing number of AIDS orphans -- 11 to 14 million under the age of 15 in sub-Saharan Africa -- and witness the devastation first-hand. At home, he has started the Stephen Lewis Foundation (www.stephenlewis foundation.org), devoted to providing small-scale funding to communities dealing with the ravages of AIDS. In nine months, it has raised close to $900,000, mostly from individual donations. In Namibia, the money will pay for funerals and coffins; in Kenya, for home care for the dying; in Zambia for a prevention program. Lewis says he has been humbled and revitalized by the outpouring of support. "If our governments were one-tenth as generous as average Canadians, the problem would be solved," he says. "Truthfully, when I see what we can accomplish with money on the ground, it's the only time in my life I have wished I was Bill Gates."

ART



Tom Thomson
"Northern River"
1914-15
Oil on canvas
115.1 x 102 cm (45 3/4 x 40 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

FILM

Cold Mountain
(from New Yorker)

In many ways, 2003, with its extensive dead zones, was a terrible year for big Hollywood movies. But it will also be remembered as a year in which a group of remarkable large-scale productions hit the theatres in its last couple of months like brilliant guests arriving late at a party. Among them are Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River,” Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander,” and, now, Anthony Minghella’s “Cold Mountain,” which is not only a stunning popular entertainment but also, if you’re keeping score, a much better movie about the South during the Civil War than “Gone with the Wind”—visionary, erotic, and tragic where the older movie is flossy, merely ambitious and self-important.

Minghella’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel is about the backwash of warfare—the lawless, scrappy life that struggles to take shape behind the lines in an atmosphere of uneasy freedom. The frame of the story is simple enough. In 1861, in Cold Mountain, a town in the North Carolina Blue Ridge range, a young man known as Inman (Jude Law) meets Ada (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful and genteel minister’s daughter. After a few awkward encounters and one heart-stopping kiss, Inman, along with all the other young men in Cold Mountain, runs off to fight the war. Three gruesome years later, badly hurt and with his spirit in shreds, he deserts his company after the battle of the Crater, at Petersburg, and tries to make his way home to a woman he barely knows. Inman says that the war has destroyed him, but, in our eyes, he has gained in understanding and become a man. At the same time, Ada, whose father has died, leaving her with a three-hundred-acre farm to run, has put some color in her face and some fight in her belly. The movie is held together by the idea that two callow young people, inspired by a half-remembered but exalted image of each other, can grow more powerful as everything disintegrates around them.

An Englishman of Italian descent, Anthony Minghella has had his ups and downs over the years. Patricia Highsmith’s nasty thriller material in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was too calculating and narrow-focussed for him; the director of such dramas of infatuation and longing as “Truly, Madly, Deeply” and “The English Patient” is a star-dazed dreamer, and Frazier’s richly textured novel is more his kind of thing. “Cold Mountain” is charged with scenes of yearning and irrational faith—flickering portents glimpsed at the bottom of a well; a blind man making prophecies—yet Minghella brings off this cheesy stuff so poetically that he cuts away the mold. He is neither a gusher nor a mystic nor a decorator; he has the strength of a true romantic imagination, the conviction that realism needs a push to yield up its deepest terrors and glories. As the movie shifts back and forth between Inman and Ada, they send formal letters to each other that are like notes in bottles bobbing in the sea. Do such notes consecrate the water in some way? In “Cold Mountain,” they offer grace to the tormented landscapes that Inman tromps across. Minghella’s sense of spectacle is both more vivid and more abrupt than in the past. At Petersburg, the Union Army plants explosives below the Confederate positions. When the dynamite is ignited, the men are tossed in the air and torn apart, including Inman, who lands with a thud and is buried in silence beneath mounds of dirt. This cataclysm is followed by the charge of the Union Army, thousands of men enshrouded in gray smoke hurling themselves against the Confederate bulwarks like the massed bodies of the damned in a Renaissance painting. The style might be called hallucinatory realism—high-flown yet filthy with the mire and blood of war.

After the battle, Inman escapes to a different kind of hell, the open country behind the lines, and the movie becomes a picaresque—an American Odyssey crossed, perhaps, with Frazier’s or Minghella’s memory of those samurai narratives in which warriors trying to get home are set upon by bands of marauders. In this case, the marauders are a vicious group of Southern freebooters—the Home Guard—searching for deserters and terrorizing their families. As Inman avoids these corn-liquored furies, he undergoes one physical and moral trial after another. He has an ambiguous encounter with a terrified group of slaves in a ruined cornfield. He runs into a fornicating minister (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a backwoods scoundrel (Giovanni Ribisi), who lures Inman and the minister to his house, offers them women, and then turns them over to the Home Guard. As Inman and Ada, two chastely high-minded lovers, attempt to reach each other, predatory sex runs riot in hidden places.

Shaping these vignettes to bring out all their grotesque and boisterous life (and there isn’t a dud among them), Minghella demonstrates a talent for violence that he’s never suggested before. Even though I knew alarming things were coming, I was repeatedly startled by the power of his staging. There’s a near-sickening moment in which Inman and a group of other deserters, chained together like slaves, are shot, and Inman tries to drag the bodies of the others down a muddy hill. Yet Minghella is rooted in show business; he has given us the strongest kind of relief, filling out the vignettes with exceptional actors—including Eileen Atkins, as a witchy mountain woman who takes care of Inman when he’s half dead, and Brendan Gleeson, as a fiddle player whose scratchy tunes signal a return to life midway through the movie.

While Inman struggles to get home, Ada’s farm is revived by young Ruby (Renée Zellweger), an arrogant interloper with a strong back. Prune-faced and bossy, Zellweger stomps into the movie like a junior Mammy Yokum. At first she seems to be doing an easy comic turn—but then she grabs a rooster by the neck and breaks it with a snap of her wrist. Ruby teaches Ada to haul, plow, and plant, and to defend herself against the marauders, transforming her pale young mistress into a formidable woman. For a while, we seem to be watching the birth of a classless, all-female Southern society, but the romantic pull between the letter-writing lovers is too strong: the structure of the movie demands that they reunite, like the halves of a drawbridge falling into place.

In recent years, that male beauty Jude Law has developed into a hardworking actor who is willing to take big chances. At the beginning of “Cold Mountain,” Inman is a lazy, sensual boy; his consciousness develops slowly, and Law’s eyes, as the movie goes on, grow more inquiring and expressive, as if he could see clearly only at the end. And Law suffers without making us suffer for him. He does what only a good actor who is also a movie star can do—he makes the actions of his character pointedly individual and, at the same time, impersonal enough to resonate as a common desire. Nicole Kidman was miscast in “The Human Stain”; here, with her flashing eyes and stalk-like body, she’s on top of her game again as a minister’s daughter devoted to duty but eager to break out. Although Kidman has been in movies for twenty years, she seems utterly fresh, as if she’d just been hatched somewhere deep in the most extravagant moviegoer’s imagination.

“Cold Mountain” is strange in one way—the issue of slavery is barely mentioned, and black people are few and far between. One could point out that there weren’t many slaves in the plantation-free mountains, but that isn’t quite a sufficient answer. We never know, for instance, what the boys of Cold Mountain are running off to fight for, what Inman means when he says he was “lied to.” The absence is a flaw, but it isn’t a critical one. The backwash of war is as great a subject for art as it is a terrible experience to endure, and Minghella’s style of larger-than-life realism is right for a historical moment in which the fantastic becomes everyday matter. “Cold Mountain” insists that you respond to it fully. You either shut it out or go all the way into it and come out feeling both shaken and wildly happy.

POETRY

May 16, 1973
by Wislawa Szymborska - c.1993

One of those many dates
that no longer ring a bell.
Where I was going that day,
what I was doing - I don't know.
Whom I met, what we talked about,
I can't recall.
If a crime had been committed nearby,
I wouldn't have had an alibi.
The sun flared and died
beyond my horizons.
The earth rotated
unnoted in my notebooks.
I'd rather think
that I'd temporarily died
than that I kept on living
and can't remember a thing.
I wasn't a ghost, after all.
I breathed, I ate,
I walked.
My steps were audible,
my fingers surely left
their prints on doorknobs.
Mirrors caught my reflection.
I wore something or other in such-and-such a color.
Somebody must have seen me.
Maybe I found something that day
that had been lost.
Maybe I lost something that turned up later.
I was filled with feelings and sensations.
Now all that's like
a line of dots in parantheses.
Where was I hiding out,
where did I bury myself?
Not a bad trick
to vanish before my own eyes.
I shake my memory.
Maybe something in its branches
that has been asleep for years
will start up with a flutter.
No.
Clearly I'm asking too much.
Nothing less than one whole second.

HUMOUR

Commencement Speech to the Harvard Class of 2000
by Conan O'Brien

I'd like to thank the Class Marshals for inviting me here today. The last time I was invited to Harvard it cost me $110,000, so you'll forgive me if I'm a bit suspicious. I'd like to announce up front that I have one goal this afternoon: to be half as funny as tomorrow's Commencement Speaker, Moral Philosopher and Economist, Amartya Sen. Must get more laughs than seminal wage/price theoretician.

Students of the Harvard Class of 2000, fifteen years ago I sat where you sit now and I thought exactly what you are now thinking: What's going to happen to me? Will I find my place in the world? Am I really graduating a virgin? I still have 24 hours and my roommate's Mom is hot. I swear she was checking me out. Being here today is very special for me. I miss this place. I especially miss Harvard Square - it's so unique. No where else in the world will you find a man with a turban wearing a Red Sox jacket and working in a lesbian bookstore. Hey, I'm just glad my dad's working.

It's particularly sweet for me to be here today because when I graduated, I wanted very badly to be a Class Day Speaker. Unfortunately, my speech was rejected. So, if you'll indulge me, I'd like to read a portion of that speech from fifteen years ago: "Fellow students, as we sit here today listening to that classic Ah-ha tune which will definitely stand the test of time, I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: "I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority." "I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule." "I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography." "And finally, I believe that one day I will have a television show on a major network, seen by millions of people a night, which I will use to re-enact crimes and help catch at-large criminals." And then there's some stuff about the death of Wall Street which I don't think we need to get into....

The point is that, although you see me as a celebrity, a member of the cultural elite, a kind of demigod, I was actually a student here once much like you. I came here in the fall of 1981 and lived in Holworthy. I was, without exaggeration, the ugliest picture in the Freshman Face book. When Harvard asked me for a picture the previous summer, I thought it was just for their records, so I literally jogged in the August heat to a passport photo office and sat for a morgue photo. To make matters worse, when the Face Book came out they put my picture next to Catherine Oxenberg, a stunning blonde actress who was accepted to the class of '85 but decided to defer admission so she could join the cast of "Dynasty." My photo would have looked bad on any page, but next to Catherine Oxenberg, I looked like a mackerel that had been in a car accident. You see, in those days I was six feet four inches tall and I weighed 150 pounds. Recently, I had some structural engineers run those numbers into a computer model and, according to the computer, I collapsed in 1987, killing hundreds in Taiwan.

After freshman year I moved to Mather House. Mather House, incidentally, was designed by the same firm that built Hitler's bunker. In fact, if Hitler had conducted the war from Mather House, he'd have shot himself a year earlier. 1985 seems like a long time ago now. When I had my Class Day, you students would have been seven years old. Seven years old. Do you know what that means? Back then I could have beaten any of you in a fight. And I mean bad. It would be no contest. If any one here has a time machine, seriously, let's get it on, I will whip your seven year old butt. When I was here, they sold diapers at the Coop that said "Harvard Class of 2000." At the time, it was kind of a joke, but now I realize you wore those diapers. How embarrassing for you. A lot has happened in fifteen years. When you think about it, we come from completely different worlds. When I graduated, we watched movies starring Tom Cruise and listened to music by Madonna. I come from a time when we huddled around our TV sets and watched "The Cosby Show" on NBC, never imagining that there would one day be a show called "Cosby" on CBS. In 1985 we drove cars with driver's side airbags, but if you told us that one day there'd be passenger side airbags, we'd have burned you for witchcraft.

But of course, I think there is some common ground between us. I remember well the great uncertainty of this day. Many of you are justifiably nervous about leaving the safe, comfortable world of Harvard Yard and hurling yourself headlong into the cold, harsh world of Harvard Grad School, a plum job at your father's firm, or a year abroad with a gold Amex card and then a plum job in your father's firm. But let me assure you that the knowledge you've gained here at Harvard is a precious gift that will never leave you. Take it from me, your education is yours to keep forever. Why, many of you have read the Merchant of Florence, and that will inspire you when you travel to the island of Spain. Your knowledge of that problem they had with those people in Russia, or that guy in South America-you know, that guy-will enrich you for the rest of your life.

There is also sadness today, a feeling of loss that you're leaving Harvard forever. Well, let me assure you that you never really leave Harvard. The Harvard Fundraising Committee will be on your ass until the day you die. Right now, a member of the Alumni Association is at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery shaking down the corpse of Henry Adams. They heard he had a brass toe ring and they aims to get it. Imagine: These people just raised 2.5 billion dollars and they only got through the B's in the alumni directory. Here's how it works. Your phone rings, usually after a big meal when you're tired and most vulnerable. A voice asks you for money. Knowing they just raised 2.5 billion dollars you ask, "What do you need it for?" Then there's a long pause and the voice on the other end of the line says, "We don't need it, we just want it." It's chilling.

What else can you expect? Let me see, by your applause, who here wrote a thesis. (APPLAUSE) A lot of hard work, a lot of your blood went into that thesis... and no one is ever going to care. I wrote a thesis: Literary Progeria in the works of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. Let's just say that, during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn't come up much. For three years after graduation I kept my thesis in the glove compartment of my car so I could show it to a policeman in case I was pulled over. (ACT OUT) License, registration, cultural exploration of the Man Child in the Sound and the Fury...

So what can you expect out there in the real world? Let me tell you. As you leave these gates and re-enter society, one thing is certain: Everyone out there is going to hate you. Never tell anyone in a roadside diner that you went to Harvard. In most situations the correct response to where did you to school is, "School? Why, I never had much in the way of book larnin' and such." Then, get in your BMW and get the hell out of there.

You see, you're in for a lifetime of "And you went to Harvard?" Accidentally give the wrong amount of change in a transaction and it's, "And you went to Harvard?" Ask the guy at the hardware store how these jumper cables work and hear, "And you went to Harvard?" Forget just once that your underwear goes inside your pants and it's "and you went to Harvard." Get your head stuck in your niece's dollhouse because you wanted to see what it was like to be a giant and it's "Uncle Conan, you went to Harvard!?"

But to really know what's in store for you after Harvard, I have to tell you what happened to me after graduation. I'm going to tell you my story because, first of all, my perspective may give many of you hope, and, secondly, it's an amazing rush to stand in front of six thousand people and talk about yourself.

After graduating in May, I moved to Los Angeles and got a three week contract at a small cable show. I got a $380 a month apartment and bought a 1977 Isuzu Opel, a car Isuzu only manufactured for a year because they found out that, technically, it's not a car. Here's a quick tip, graduates: no four cylinder vehicle should have a racing stripe. I worked at that show for over a year, feeling pretty good about myself, when one day they told me they were letting me go. I was fired and, I hadn't saved a lot of money. I tried to get another job in television but I couldn't find one.

So, with nowhere else to turn, I went to a temp agency and filled out a questionnaire. I made damn sure they knew I had been to Harvard and that I expected the very best treatment. And so, the next day, I was sent to the Santa Monica branch of Wilson's House of Suede and Leather. When you have a Harvard degree and you're working at Wilson's House of Suede and Leather, you are haunted by the ghostly images of your classmates who chose Graduate School. You see their faces everywhere: in coffee cups, in fish tanks, and they're always laughing at you as you stack suede shirts no man, in good conscience, would ever wear. I tried a lot of things during this period: acting in corporate infomercials, serving drinks in a non-equity theatre, I even took a job entertaining at a seven year olds' birthday party. In desperate need of work, I put together some sketches and scored a job at the fledgling Fox Network as a writer and performer for a new show called "The Wilton North Report." I was finally on a network and really excited. The producer told me the show was going to revolutionize television. And, in a way, it did. The show was so hated and did so badly that when, four weeks later, news of its cancellation was announced to the Fox affiliates, they burst into applause.

Eventually, though, I got a huge break. I had submitted, along with my writing partner, a batch of sketches to Saturday Night Live and, after a year and a half, they read it and gave us a two week tryout. The two weeks turned into two seasons and I felt successful. Successful enough to write a TV pilot for an original sitcom and, when the network decided to make it, I left Saturday Night Live. This TV show was going to be groundbreaking. It was going to resurrect the career of TV's Batman, Adam West. It was going to be a comedy without a laugh track or a studio audience. It was going to change all the rules. And here's what happened: When the pilot aired it was the second lowest-rated television show of all time. It's tied with a test pattern they show in Nova Scotia.

So, I was 28 and, once again, I had no job. I had good writing credits in New York, but I was filled with disappointment and didn't know what to do next. I started smelling suede on my fingertips. And that's when The Simpsons saved me. I got a job there and started writing episodes about Springfield getting a Monorail and Homer going to College. I was finally putting my Harvard education to good use, writing dialogue for a man who's so stupid that in one episode he forgot to make his own heart beat. Life was good.

And then, an insane, inexplicable opportunity came my way . A chance to audition for host of the new Late Night Show. I took the opportunity seriously but, at the same time, I had the relaxed confidence of someone who knew he had no real shot. I couldn't fear losing a great job I had never had. And, I think that attitude made the difference. I'll never forget being in the Simpson's recording basement that morning when the phone rang. It was for me. My car was blocking a fire lane. But a week later I got another call: I got the job.

So, this was undeniably the it: the truly life-altering break I had always dreamed of. And, I went to work. I gathered all my funny friends and poured all my years of comedy experience into building that show over the summer, gathering the talent and figuring out the sensibility. We debuted on September 13, 1993 and I was happy with our effort. I felt like I had seized the moment and put my very best foot forward. And this is what the most respected and widely read television critic, Tom Shales, wrote in the Washington Post: "O'Brien is a living collage of annoying nervous habits. He giggles and titters, jiggles about and fiddles with his cuffs. He had dark, beady little eyes like a rabbit. He's one of the whitest white men ever. O'Brien is a switch on the guest who won't leave: he's the host who should never have come. Let the Late show with Conan O'Brien become the late, Late Show and may the host return to Conan O'Blivion whence he came." There's more but it gets kind of mean.

Needless to say, I took a lot of criticism, some of it deserved, some of it excessive. And it hurt like you wouldn't believe. But I'm telling you all this for a reason. I've had a lot of success and I've had a lot of failure. I've looked good and I've looked bad. I've been praised and I've been criticized. But my mistakes have been necessary. Except for Wilson's House of Suede and Leather. That was just stupid.

I've dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I'm as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.

So, that's what I wish for all of you: the bad as well as the good. Fall down, make a mess, break something occasionally. And remember that the story is never over. If it's all right, I'd like to read a little something from just this year: "Somehow, Conan O'Brien has transformed himself into the brightest star in the Late Night firmament. His comedy is the gold standard and Conan himself is not only the quickest and most inventive wit of his generation, but quite possible the greatest host ever."

Ladies and Gentlemen, Class of 2000, I wrote that this morning, as proof that, when all else fails, there's always delusion.

I'll go now, to make bigger mistakes and to embarrass this fine institution even more. But let me leave you with one last thought: If you can laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you're drunk.

Thank you.

CHRISTMAS RECOMMENDATIONS

Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line by David Kirp
A balanced, fascinating, and even frightening look at the influence of corporations and corporate thinking on higher education.

The Office
This BBC show has gotten a lot of press, but there are many people who haven't yet seen it. It's easily the best and smartest British comedy since Monty Python.

Brad Mehldau [contemporary] and Bill Evans [Canadian, died in 1980]
Jazz pianists -- perfect winter music

Spellbound
The best word-nerd movie ever. April, keep persevering.

The Winter Zoo by John Beckman
This book is frightening, intense, sorrowful, and awesome.

MUSIC

Songs to listen to this week:

Metric, "Combat Baby," from Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?
The New Pornographers, "The Laws Have Changed," from Electric Version
Broken Social Scene, "Lover's Spit", from You Forgot it in People
Eminem, "We are Americans", [Soulseek]

POLITICS


Jamie Ross, Environmental Innovator and Entrepreneur, listens to Prime Minister-in-waiting Paul Martin during the Western Canadian Environmental Technologies Forum.

ENVIRONMENT

On the rim of the nation, the new boss is looking good
By PAUL SULLIVAN (Globe and Mail)

He won't officially be prime minister for a few days, but when Paul Martin came to Vancouver last week, he was definitely the boss. The main item on the agenda was a fundraiser, which was enthusiastically attended by 1,500 Liberals and Liberal wannabes who came to tug their forelocks and get close to the power. It is the kind of thing we on the rim of the nation expect from our prime ministers: They come to town when they want something -- money, usually.

But then Mr. Martin did something that I (for one) would like to expect: He turned up the next morning, jet-lagged and gravelly voiced, at the Western Canadian Environmental Technologies Forum, held in the splendour of Simon Fraser University's Wosk Centre for Dialogue. His presence at what would otherwise be dismissed as a wonk-fest for people interested in alternative energy, "including fuel cells, clean-fuel technologies, small-scale hydro and biomass co-generation systems," brought out a strong showing of local MPs. Some, like Hedy Fry and Sophie Leung, need all the face time they can get with the new boss, as they're expected to encounter strong nomination challenges from freshly minted Liberals such as former NDP premier Ujjal Dosanjh.

Stephen Owen was there, comfortably installed at the boss's right hand, because he's secretary of state for Western economic diversification, the meeting's host. Environment Minister David Anderson was . . . elsewhere in the room. A fly on the wall at the meeting to arrange the seating would have been entertained throughout. But I want to suspend journalistic disbelief long enough to refer back to the last time I watched a prime minister interact with the locals. High-tech was hip, and Jean Chrétien was here to meet with the local community. His people set up a ridiculous photo-op in a trendy, crowded Yaletown bar. To demonstrate his own street cred, the "little guy" posed with a cue at a pool table, then was whisked off to a brief, private huddle with selected alpha high-tech types, leaving the media to bark for scraps outside the door. Friday, Mr. Martin hung in there for more than an hour discussing enviro-tech policy in full view of the media. If the new boss was trying to differentiate himself from the old boss, he succeeded.
This industry is actually the future, especially if we expect to hang onto our cushy lifestyles and not choke in our own waste. Yet, according to a 2003 Conference Board of Canada study, Western Canada ranks last in the nation for R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP, and has the lowest number of degrees in science and engineering. And because the West depends so heavily on resource industries, the impact of the Kyoto accord, which calls for a massive reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions (to which Canada and Mr. Martin are still committed, despite reports to the contrary), will come down hardest on us.

This forum was a good idea from Mr. Owen's people, and Mr. Martin's presence was a better idea. As well, his performance was gratifying -- folksy, attentive and knowledgeable. He was clear about what he wanted at the end of the day -- a few practical initiatives that don't just entail federal handouts. Then, as enviro-tech people from across the West rolled up their sleeves, he faced the media, again outlining his position on Kyoto -- he supports the accord, but Canada has no plan for making it work. Well, duh. Mr. Chrétien rushed Parliament into endorsing the accord before ascending into the clouds, and left his usurper to figure out the details. And meetings such as the Western Canadian Environmental Technology Forum are exactly the right places to hammer out such details, among people who know what they're talking about, what's at stake and what will work. One idea, for example, calls for using environmental technology to develop rural and remote communities, an idea that can be used as a model for similar developments in emerging nations. Sort of like Candu without the fallout.

In Nirvana, Jack Layton and Stephen Harper/Peter MacKay would be there as well, learning about the real challenges and opportunities presented by environmental technology. Unfortunately, this is Vancouver, not Nirvana, although we occasionally get the two confused. And it would have been nice if the new boss had stuck around and talked turkey for the rest of the day. But affairs of state, etc. However, if he wants to cure Western alienation, what we need is more of the same: the real -- not the posed -- presence of the prime minister of Canada, in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, wherever Western Canadians meet to wrestle with the real challenges we face every day. We need a PM like Bill Clinton without the bimbos, someone who actually understands and cares about policy. Could Paul Martin be that PM? If his turn at the enviro-tech meeting means anything, he can be. And after 10 years of tokens and trinkets from Ottawa, he'd better be.

MUSIC

Dan Rollman's 15 Favourite Songs:

Boo Radleys - Wake up Boo
Neil Young - Rockin' in the Free World
Crash Vegas - Inside Out
Eddie Grant - Electric Avenue
De La Soul - Jennifa
Tribe Called Quest - Scenario
ODB - Shimmy Shimmy Ya
Wu-Tang Clan - Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing Ta F' Wit
Beatles - Paperback Writer
Roni Size/Reprazent - Brown Paper Bag
Bryan Adams - Run to You
Spiritualized - Broken Heart
Yo La Tengo - Little Honda
Daft Punk - Daftendirekt
Yo La Tengo - Speeding Motorcycle

Bryce Tigert's 18 Favourite Songs:

Bob Dylan - Never say goodbye
Bob Dylan - Is your love in vain?
Bob Dylan - Meet me in the morning
Bob Dylan - Every Grain of Sand
The Band - Acadian Driftwood
The O'Jays - Emotionally yours
Bob Dylan - Not dark yet
The Band - Don't Do it
Vic Damone - All I Need Is A Girl Like You
Jimi Hendrix - Power to Love
Gordon Lightfoot - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Frank Sinatra - You are the Sunshine of my life
ACDC - Let's Get it up
Willie Nelson - You were always on my mind
James Brown - The Payback
Paul Anka - Nothing Stronger Than Our Love
Burt acharach - The Look of Love
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms

FOOD

FRESH PLUM TORTE *****

1 c. granulated sugar
½ c. butter
2 eggs
1 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. Baking soda
½ tsp. Almond extract
1 tsp. Lemon juice
3 c. pitted, halved, prune plums
¼ c. brown sugar
1 tsp. Cinnamon

Instructions:
Cream together sugar and butter
Add eggs and beat well
Mix flour & baking soda & add to creamed mixture, along with almond extract
Spread in well greased 9” spring-form pan
Sprinkle lemon juice over plums
Spoon them over batter lightly pushing them in
Mix brown sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over plums
Bake at 350 degrees for one hour
Serve warm

BOOKS

DUDE, WHERE'S MY COUNTRY?
By Michael Moore
(New York Times)

In his latest book, Michael Moore reveals the identity of his favorite political candidate: someone who bracingly advocates ''a free country, a safe country, a peaceful country that genuinely shares its riches with the less fortunate around the world, a country that believes in everyone getting a fair shake, and where fear is seen as the only thing we need to fear.'' Oh, wait a minute -- he's talking about himself. When ''we, the people'' enters the vocabulary of someone who likes to give marching orders, watch out. Our self-appointed spokesman may have an agenda of his own. At the end of ''Bowling for Columbine,'' Mr. Moore almost ruined an otherwise terrific documentary by grandstanding with Charlton Heston and a photograph of a dead child. As someone with a penchant for demagoguery, someone who thinks that the present political structure needs ''to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control,'' Mr. Moore plays to the camera even when he's doing it on the page.

Mr. Moore's previous book, ''Stupid White Men,'' was such a hit that it was last year's best-selling nonfiction book. It was in its 52nd printing when he completed the very timely ''Dude, Where's My Country?,'' a book eager to mention its author's accomplishments. Mr. Moore's antiwar outcry at last year's Academy Awards presentation is also immortalized, supposedly mentioned to him by a great-granddaughter named Anne Coulter Moore: ''Mom said you were once famous for a few minutes for yelling about something during one of the oil wars. Now all we have is this old photo of you with your mouth open and pointing at something.'' That sounds about right. ''Dude, Where's My Country?'' includes one chapter in which Mr. Moore adopts the voice of God -- only playfully, of course. In another chapter he invites you, the reader, to join what he calls Mike's Militia. And then he gives out instructions, ''as your commander in chief.'' The smart, subversive sense of humor that brings one million visitors a day (another number trumpeted here) to Mr. Moore's Web site (where they can relive his speeches and take more of his instructions) is seriously strained by the burden of so much self-promotion.

When ''Stupid White Men'' appeared, its brand of name-calling was more of a novelty on the best-seller list. Now it is luxuriantly in flower. Mr. Moore will no doubt share a readership with Al Franken's ''Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them'' (which is funnier), Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose's ''Bushwhacked'' (which is better informed) and Joe Conason's ''Big Lies'' (also better informed), if not with Bill O'Reilly's ''Who's Looking Out for You?'' (politically opposite, but no less self-serving). But Mr. Moore, through real conviction along with showboating personality, does make himself the most galvanizing and accessible of the lot. With any such book, you -- or ''the American people,'' as Mr. Moore repeatedly speechifies it -- can expect a certain amount of over-the-top invective. As he draws on earlier books, notably Robert Baer's ''Sleeping With the Devil,'' to identify connections between the Bush family and Saudi Arabian royalty, Mr. Moore exhorts: ''George, is this good for our national security, our homeland security? Who is it good for? You? Pops?''

But at the same time Mr. Moore is rounding off sums of Saudi money to the nearest trillion, he is being more precise in other areas. For instance, he identifies such members of the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq as Palau, a group of North Pacific islands, with a population smaller than the audience at many rock concerts. Palau has ''yummy tapioca and succulent coconut but, unfortunately, no troops.'' This isn't new information, but it is deployed effectively here. So is a demonstration of how unreadable the text of the U.S.A. Patriot Act is, and the fact that the Internal Revenue Service has a specific form for tax refunds of $1 million or more. (It is reprinted here.) And so is Mr. Moore's digging into underpublicized news events like a Taliban visit to Texas, for oil-related reasons, in 1997. He wonders why 20-year-old video images of Donald Rumsfeld embracing Saddam Hussein have been broadcast only by Oprah Winfrey. She, incidentally, is his draft pick for president in 2004 -- though he also sees Wesley Clark ''or any one of the Dixie Chicks'' as possibilities.

''Dude, Where's My Country?'' is much sharper about election strategy than it is about uncovering the Bush administration's transgressions. One chapter here, entitled ''Bush Removal and Other Spring Cleaning Chores,'' presents ways for Mike's Militia to get out the vote. (''We've got the people on our side.'') However outnumbered the left may feel (''go crawl into that phone booth with the Noam Chomsky fan club, you miserable loser!''), Mr. Moore devotes a chapter to arguing that American voters are more liberal than they know. In ''How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-Law,'' Mr. Moore has some specific hints. He recommends agreeing that men and women are different, that animals don't have rights, that granola is fattening and that a little sunlight is actually good for your health. ''We have a namby-pamby way of saying things,'' he writes, along with ''a hoity-toity view of religion.'' He asks readers to recognize that ''this arrogance is a big reason the lower classes will always side with the Republicans.'' Mr. Moore has marshaled all of his impassioned, populist bluster to effecting that change. That makes ''Dude, Where's My Country?'' a bumper sticker that doubles as a book.

MONEYBALL: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
By Michael Lewis

At the end of ''Moneyball,'' Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, is said to fear that no one will ever really know what revolutionary things his team has accomplished, or how this ingenious strategy was devised. Not to worry. Mr. Beane has caught the sharp, inquisitive eye of Michael Lewis, who has now immortalized him. And Mr. Lewis, like the A's under Mr. Beane's aegis, is playing at the top of his game.
As he has often demonstrated, most dazzlingly in ''Liars' Poker'' and ''The New New Thing,'' Mr. Lewis is a terrifically entertaining explicator. Like Tom Wolfe (whose enthusiasm for ''Moneyball'' is cited in its jacket copy), he can be trusted to make anything interesting, and to cast even the familiar in a bright new light. You need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of his thoughts about it. ''The mood is exactly what it would be if every person in the room was handed his own personal vial of nitroglycerine,'' he writes, describing the day of the team's 2002 amateur player draft.
Mr. Lewis has turned the story of one underfinanced baseball team into a showcase for his wide-ranging talents. Here he finds colorful characters, cutting-edge analytical data, the excitement of innovation and the thrill of the game, all bound together by the vigor of his prose. And in the person of Mr. Beane -- who, one of his former teammates said, ''could talk a dog off a meat wagon'' -- he has an irresistible underdog for a hero. ''At its center,'' Mr. Lewis writes of this story, ''is a man whose life was turned upside down by professional baseball, and who, miraculously, found a way to return the favor.''
In order to underscore the ingenuity of Mr. Beane's tactics, Mr. Lewis must summon some traditional approaches to baseball playing, recruiting and writing. In the view of old-fashioned scouts, he says, ''you found a big league ballplayer by driving 60,000 miles, staying in a hundred'' execrable ''motels, and eating God knows how many meals at Denny's all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you.''

And as for the kind of high seriousness that the game can inspire in writers: ''Baseball offered a comfortable seat to the polysyllabic wonders who quoted dead authors and blathered on about the poetry of motion. These people dignified the game, like a bow tie. They were harmless. What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence.'' The kind, in other words, that Mr. Beane and Mr. Lewis are ready to provide.
Once a player so promising that he was chased by scouts (''It got so that Billy would run from practice straight to some friend's house to avoid their incessant phone calls to his home''), Mr. Beane made the worst decision of his life for financial reasons. He chose sports over college, became a New York Met, and failed. Mr. Lewis describes how Mr. Beane eventually turned to coaching, and how his iconoclasm was born. ''The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball,'' Mr. Lewis writes. ''The eternal themes are precisely what Billy Beane wants to exploit for profit -- by ignoring them.''

Because the A's cannot afford superstars -- and because when they develop one, like Jason Giambi, he is liable to morph into a highly paid New York Yankee -- they need to think differently. And Mr. Beane does: he understands that a player's most expensive attributes, at least according to conventional wisdom, are not necessarily his most valuable. Relying on close statistical analysis, and on the innovative baseball handicapping of Bill James (who began with stapled, photocopied books that drew a ''cocktail party-sized readership,'' he develops a new set of hiring tactics. That way, a player like Mr. Giambi can be regarded as an amalgam of several different talents, and can effectively be replaced by several lesser players. ''He could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without,'' Mr. Lewis explains, ''and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself.''

''Moneyball'' follows the careful reassessment of how players are rated once computers and sophisticated statisticians begin dissecting the game. Traditional scoring of errors may mean nothing when it comes to a team's long-term record; on the other hand, the ability to get on base even if it means walking is a valuable asset. The recent emphasis on measuring each player's on-base percentage is one of the incremental changes that have revolutionized baseball strategy, at least in Oakland. ''Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking,'' one of the game's new breed of analysts has said. That neatly encapsulates this book's lessons.
While Mr. Lewis carefully explains and illustrates these developments, he also stays closely attuned to the spirit of the game. ''Somewhere in the night sky is a ball,'' he writes, watching one player. ''Where, apparently, he is unsure.''

''Moneyball'' moves nimbly between sheer exuberance and strategic wiles. Some sections of the book concentrate on particular players and games, capturing them with lively immediacy. Others show Mr. Beane in action as he horse-trades players and outfoxes the competition. ''Billy uses his poverty to camouflage another fact, that he wants these oddballs more than the studs he cannot afford,'' Mr. Lewis writes. And he must do this with fake ingenuousness, because ''it is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying'' to cheat.
The bottom line: in the American League West last year, the teams finished in inverse order to their payrolls. Oakland wound up ranking highest with the least money, demonstrating a principle that can be appreciated far beyond the realm of baseball. And Mr. Lewis has hit another one out of the park.

PHOTOGRAPHS


Making Lanterns, Hoi An, Vietnam (June 2003)

HUMOUR

(McSweeney's, Summer 2001)

The Secret Life of a Squirrel

6:30 am Wake up disoriented, with a funny taste in my mouth. Shift away from the sun and discover a chipmunk, fast asleep not two inches from my protruding belly. I whimper, curse, and then remind myself (again) not to go on any more blind dates. Fermented chestnuts will make anyone look good.
6:35 am Make myself scarce. Despite my weakened constitution, I roll blindly off the branch that cradled me (and my diminutive companion) in my unrest and trust that my fall won't result in any long-term harm. I land feet-first on one of those new Turbo VW Bugs, but fail to find equilibrium on its annoyingly curved and slick surface and proceed to slide off the back onto the pavement. I lose my breath and dry-heave. There aren't many pedestrians on the street, and I decide that my clumsy tumble has gone unnoticed. I hear a squeak from above me. I look up and make eye contact with the wee chippy. I blink once and then scurry.
6:37 am I hear the squeal of brakes and suddenly everything is dark. I smell gasoline. An eternity passes. Daylight. I breathe. I do not fail to notice that I have wet myself. I get out of the street and run west. Then north. Toward home.
8:15 am Adrenaline has forestalled my impending hangover for the better part of the morning, but I begin to drag when I reach Foster and Kedzie. I am nearly there. I try to remember how I could have come so far south. It occurs to me that I have no long-term memory. I am doomed to a life of making the same mistakes over and over. This makes my nose wiggle.
9:30 am Even though I am less than 400 yards from home, I decide to investigate a dumpster behind a Wendy's that I see out of the corner of my eye. I am at that stage of hangover where all I need is some fries. I get my front feet in the crevice between the dumpster and the dumpster cover. I press my face into the dumpster and thrash my tail wildly in order to gain some momentum. I fall several feet to the bottom of the dumpster.
9:31 am The empty dumpster. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust and for my head to clear, but almost immediately I realize my mistake: Wendy's has no breakfast menu and all the trash from the previous night has been removed. I am a stupid squirrel. I curse and bite my sharp front teeth into the flesh of my hairy chin. This self-abuse will get me nowhere. I realize that this is bad karma generated from the chipmunk incident. I breathe deeply and exit the dumpster.
10:00 am Almost home. I had promised myself to make serious progress on my winter hoard of chestnuts today, but the way I feel now, I'm like, "Forget it."
10:15 am Home. Waves of relief and nausea pass over me as I collapse against an unimpressive pile of nuts. I REALLY need to get some nuts today. Like the princess and the pea, I have a vague but insistent sense that instinct is trying to tell me something. I can't help but admit that I feel a bit of a nip in the air.
6:00 pm OK, it's getting dark. Clearly I didn't go out for nuts. I look at my impressive gut and think that even if I don't get enough before the snow starts falling, I should still be able to make it until Spring.
6:15 pm I'm kidding myself. I'm going to starve. Why do I always let myself procrastinate like this? I've got one job in this life, why can't I just do it?
6:20 pm All this fretting makes me tired. And hungry. I gnaw leisurely on a chestnut as my eyes begin to droop. Tomorrow, I think. I yawn (adorably) and settle into the cushion of my tail.

Minutes from a Meeting of the Yearbook Staff

Secretary: Lisa Kline, Marshall Middle School, Class of '02
3:04 - First order of business: The writing of the acronym "T.E.A.M." on the chalkboard by Mrs. Karmann. Acronym is underlined. Twice. Explanation that it stands for "Together Everyone Achieves More." Nods of assent by the yearbook staff but an overall feeling that what we are doing here, however great, will probably be underappreciated by our fellow students.
3:08 - Mary Holt suggests that the frontispiece be a collage of particularly relevant action shots she has taken, to be entitled "Scenes From A Hallway." The suggestion is roundly accepted. Erika Yan proclaims, "What a great idea, Mary!" Awkward high-fives ensue.
3:11 - Mrs. Karmann reminds us that if we don't start going out there and doing the legwork, namely selling ads, this undertaking will never get off the ground. She asks us how we would feel being the first eighth-grade class in school history not to produce a yearbook. She also asks how we would feel if all the work we've done so far was for nothing. General agreement that, no, that would not be good.
3:12 - Responding to several muffled sobs, Mrs. Karmann assuages our fears of failure by reminding us that yearbook staffs are the future leaders of America. Back pats and shoulder rubs for all. The anticipatory euphoria of facing our bright futures leaves us with butterflies in our stomachs and distant, longing looks in our eyes.
3:15 - Several 2-liters of RC Cola are opened. The Dixie cups make us feel as though we are being treated as children, but God is it good. General hubbub as we sip our drinks. Mark Roth fidgets in his seat and appears to be attempting to conceal something in his lap.
3:23 - Back to business. As one, we express our concern that our fellow students aren't taking what we do seriously. Erika Yan claims that it's exactly how the staff of the school paper, "The Paper Pamphlet," has always felt. Other "Paper Pamphlet" journalists agree. Their tears beget our tears and Amir Sirijul stands up and proclaims that he "has never felt closer to a group of people in his life." He explains that in his native country, if your fellow students didn't appreciate the work done by newspaper and yearbook writing staffs, they'd... he trails off into a silence fraught with horrifying implications. Resolved: This is the greatest country on the planet.
3:29 - We are once again ready to take on the world. The ideas come like wildfire. We talk about doing questionnaires, polls and surveys. Favorite foods, favorite bands, favorite teachers—it's all happening so fast I can barely write it down! We decide we are going to give everyone the chance to put a quote under their name that adequately describes their feelings about our great school. James Bakersfield suggests that the theme of the yearbook should be "A Celebration of Musical Theater." Complete and total silence.
3:37 - Our exhilarating high from 8 minutes ago has given way to a crushing low. James Bakersfield is on the ground in the fetal position absolutely beside himself, smacking at the top of his head yelling, "Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" I think we all just want to know why we are not being taken seriously by the school. Jessica Chabot says that she's sick of notes getting taped to her back and getting locked in lockers. She says she gets enough of that at home. She then runs out of the room crying with her jacket tied around her waist. She is a woman now.
3:41 - Mrs. Karmann implores us to calm down and focus on the task ahead. In order to make us feel better, she tells us an uplifting story about a set of footprints on the beach. We remind her that that's just the sort of story that facilitated her "leave of absence" earlier in the semester. The tears well in her eyes and she becomes inconsolable. When Amir Sirijul attempts to comfort her, she screams, "Don't look at me! Get away from me!" It becomes clear that I, as the most mature, physically developed, and clear-minded staff member, must save the sinking ship. My den mother instinct kicks in.
3:42 - I requisition Mrs. Karmann's retractable pointer and set to work rebuilding our shattered egos. I know there's only one thing in the world right now that's going to cure this royal case of the uglies: a rondolet. I start up with the first verse of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" and point to the left side of the room in anticipation. When nothing comes, I start thinking, "Is this really the end? Are we giving up?" I won't believe that. I refuse to accept that. Luckily, I've got a Plan B.
3:46 - After getting the TV and VCR from across the hall, I plug it in and pop in The Tape. Sensing this breakdown in confidence weeks ago, I have been working on a moving montage of images and video clips set to the tune of Van Halen's "Right Now." The tape includes shots of us working, playing, and laughing. Above all, laughing. Smiles abound. I tell them that we will forever remember this time in our lives and that the bonds we make here will perhaps never be broken. Sean Bradley says, "God, what were we so upset about?" He's right to ask that.
3:53 - Our good cheer is shattered both literally and figuratively when a brick comes crashing through the streetside window. We huddle around the brick and the shards of glass. There is a note tied to it that has been partially ripped on the way in, but is nonetheless legible. We can all see that it reads "YEARBOOK FAGGETS!!!" but some of us read it aloud anyway, as if naming it will somehow bring sense to the whole awful spectacle. James Bakersfield runs weeping out of the room.
3:57 - Something fantastic happens. As we huddle still around the glass and the brick, a hand is placed in our collective center. It is the pale, sinewy hand of Jessica Chabot. Another hand goes in, then another, and another until we are a tentacled mass of junior achievers. We look deeply into each other's eyes as if to say, "Is this really happening?" We know it is. We know we're going to be all right. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks. This is our life and we are leading it.
4:00 - Pizza Party!!!

MUSIC

Songs of the Day:

Everything Reminds me of Her - Elliott Smith
Elvis Presley and America - U2
Let me Come Over - Wilco
Sinnerman - Nina Simone
Sara, Isis - Bob Dylan
The Drinks we Drank Last Night - Azure Ray
Big Ideas - Radiohead
Salvador Sanchez - Sun Kil Moon
I'm in Love with a Girl - Big Star

MUSIC

What Jon Isaak is listening to right now:

richard ashcroft - science of silence
broken social scene - cause=time
rjd2 - ghostwriter
the raveonettes - do you believe her
big star - thirteen
grandaddy - AM 180

LAW

Possible Closing Lines for a Defendent who Chose to Defend Himself
(McSweeney's)

"My client professes his innocence. And when I look in the mirror and see his eyes, I just have to believe him."

"The facts, which I will present to you, will show that the defendant is not guilty. My client was nowhere near the scene of the crime. My client was where I was, obviously, because he is me, and I'm definitely aware of our whereabouts that night."

"Truth be told, no one knows what really happened that night. Except me and my client."

"I have been accused of a terrible crime. This frightens me both as a defendant and a lawyer. I don't want to go to jail, and I'd hate to lose my first case."

"When all is said and done, you will have to take all the evidence and go into the room back there, talk about it, and decide amongst yourselves on a verdict and whatnot. Right?"

"I want you to take a good hard look at my client. I want you to ask yourself if he could be capable of such a heinous crime. But I don't want you to take that long hard look just yet, because it will distract me and I'm not finished talking."

BOOKS

Books I Read This Year:

American Pastoral by Philip Roth ****
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett ****
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson ****
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee ****
Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge **
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling ***
How to be Good by Nick Hornby ***
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson ***
Life of Pi by Yann Martel *****
Man and Wife by Tony Parsons **
Mandala and Catfish by Andrew X. Pham **
Moneyball by Michael Lewis ***
Navigator of New York by Wayne Johnston ****
Stupid White Men by Michael Moore ***
Sydney by Peter Carey **
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ****
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon ****
The Gate by Francois Bizot ***
The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier ***
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy ****
The Good Doctor by Damon Galmut ****
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene ****
The Hours by Michael Cunningham ***
The Human Stain by Philip Roth ****
The Quiet American by Graham Greene ****
The Road from Coorain by Jill Conway Kerr **
The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy ***
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder **
The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien ***
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey ***
Unless by Carol Shields **
You Cannot be Serious by John McEnroe **
You Shall Know our Velocity by Dave Eggers ****

FILM

Three movies to rent this weekend:

Before Sunrise - http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/b/before_sun.html

Richard Linklater, the creator of Slackers and Dazed and Confused, has succeeded where many before him have failed -- in fashioning a modern-day romance that is both original and enthralling. Before Sunriseis nothing short of movie magic, and the kind of film that deserves to be remembered one long year from now when 1996's Oscar nominations are handed out. Even the best romantic comedy/dramas tend to be formula-driven, frequently relying more upon actor chemistry than plot. Surprises are about as foreign to this genre as a pacifist hero is to a shoot-'em-up. Somewhere along the way, a storyteller originated the basic love story structure. Film makers have religiously followed this roadmap, rarely taking more than an occasional minor detour. With Before Sunrise, however, Linklater not only travels an entirely different route, but heads for a new destination. Frankly, this is not the sort of film one usually expects to find in multiplexes. In fact, if it weren't in English, it might be possible to mistake this for the work of someone like Eric Rohmer. The plentiful and varied dialogue has a richness that few screenplays manage to capture. Most of Before Sunrise is talking. The characters touch on subjects ranging from language and reincarnation to sexuality and cable access shows. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets Celine (Julie Delpy) on a train traveling through Europe. His destination is Vienna, where a flight back to America awaits him the next morning. She's on her way to Paris, where she starts classes at the Sorbonne next week. From their first moment of eye contact, they're drawn to each other. They share a meal in the lounge car, savoring the conversation more than the food, and when they arrive in Vienna, Jesse persuades Celine to disembark with him and keep him company wandering the streets until the time comes for his plane to depart. Thus begins an unforgettable screen romance. One of the first things to notice about Before Sunrise is how completely natural it all seems. Credit both director Linklater and his two leads. The rapport between Jesse and Celine is so lacking in artifice that at times the viewer feels like a voyeur. We are privy to everything, including the sort of "unimportant" dialogue that most films shy away from. Here, its inclusion is just one of many fresh elements.

Hawke and Delpy are nothing short of perfect. For this film to work, they have a threefold task: embrace their characters, attract each other, and connect with the audience. Needless to say, all are accomplished flawlessly. From the first stolen glance, there's never any question about their chemistry, and it takes no more time for the audience to be enraptured by Jesse and Celine than it does for them to fall for each other. Before Sunrise is about life, romance, and love. It magnifies the little things, paying scrupulous attention to the subtleties and mannerisms of body language. There's one scene where Jesse has to restrain himself from brushing away a stray lock of Celine's hair, and another wonderful moment in a music listening booth where the characters nervously avoid eye contact. This film is an amalgamation of such memorable scenes, yet, as they saying goes, the whole is more than a sum of its parts. Questions about fate and the transitory nature of relationships are raised, then left open for the audience to ponder. There are moments of unforced humor, and times of bittersweet poignancy. Before Sunrise speaks as much to the mind as to the heart, and much of what it says is likely to strike a responsive chord -- a rare and special accomplishment for any motion picture.

Short Cuts - Los Angeles always seems to be waiting for something. Permanence seems out of reach; some great apocalyptic event is on the horizon, and people view the future tentatively. Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" captures that uneasiness perfectly in its interlocking stories about people who seem trapped in the present, always juggling. The movie is based on short stories by Raymond Carver, but this is Altman's work, not Carver's, and all the film really has in common with its source is a feeling for people who are disconnected - from relatives, church, tradition - and support themselves with jobs that never seem quite real. It is hard work, no doubt, to be a pool cleaner, a chauffeur, a phone-sex provider, a birthday cake decorator, a jazz singer, a helicopter pilot, but these are professions that find you before you find them. How many people end up in jobs they planned for? Altman is fascinated by the accidental nature of life, by the way that whole decades of our lives can be shaped by events we do not understand or even know about.

"Short Cuts" understands and knows because it is filmed from an all-seeing point of view. Its characters all live at the same time in the same city, and sometimes their paths even cross, but for the most part they don't know how their lives are changed by people they meet only glancingly. Imagine the rage of the baker (Lyle Lovett), for example, when he gets stuck with an expensive birthday cake. We could almost comprehend the cruel anonymous telephone calls he makes to the parents (Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison) who ordered the cake, if we didn't know their child missed his birthday because he was hit by a car. Imagine what they would say to the unknown driver (Lily Tomlin) who struck their child. But we know that she wanted to take him to a doctor; the boy refused because he has been forbidden to get into the cars of strangers, and besides, he seemed OK. If you knew the whole story in this world, there'd be a lot less to be angry about. The movie's characters all seem to be from somewhere else, and without parents. Their homes are as temporary as the trailer park two of the characters inhabit, where people come and go, no one knows from where, or to where. The grandparent (Jack Lemmon) of the injured little boy has disappeared for years. Faced with a son and grandson he hardly knows, he spends most of his time talking about himself. The jazz singer would rather drink than know her daughter.

Sad, insoluble mysteries seem right under the surface. Three men go on a fishing trip and discover the drowned body of a dead woman. They have waited a long time and come a long way for this trip, and if they report the woman, their trip will be ruined. So, since she's already dead, what difference will a few more days make? And what would the police do, anyway? There's a motorcycle cop (Tim Robbins) in the movie, who seems to be a free-lancer, responsible to no one, using his badge simply as a way to get his will, spending a lot of time cheating on his wife (Madeleine Stowe), who finds his lies hilarious. Almost everybody drinks all through this movie, although only a few characters ever get exactly drunk. It's as if life is a preventable disease, and booze is the medication. Sex places a very slow second. The pool cleaner's wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) supplements the family income by working as a phone-sex performer, spinning verbal fantasies to strangers on the phone, while sitting bored in her living room, changing her baby's diapers. Her husband (Chris Penn) is angry: "How come you never talk that way to me?" Think about that. He's married to her. They sleep in the same bed. He can have actual physical sex with her. But he envies the strangers who will never meet her - who value her inaccessibility: She services their fantasies without imposing her own reality.

Some of these characters, if they could find each other, would find the answers to their needs. The baker, for example, has unexplored reserves of tenderness. He could help the sad young woman (Lori Singer) who plays the cello, and waits for those moments when her mother (Annie Ross), the jazz singer, is sober. The cop would probably be happier talking with the phonesex girl than carrying on his endless affairs, which have no purpose except to anger his wife, who is past caring. He likes the deception more than the sex, and could get off by telling the stranger on the other end of the phone that he'd been cheating with "another phone-sex girl. Yet these people have a certain nobility to them. They keep on trying. They hope for better times. The hash-house waitress (Tomlin) loves her husband (Tom Waits), who is so good to her when he's not drinking that she forgives the dark times when he is drinking. The parents of the little boy find an unexpected consolation from the baker. The wife (Anne Archer) of one of the fly-fishermen finds a new resolve and freedom. Life goes on. Altman has made this kind of film before, notably in "Nashville" (1976) and "The Player" (1992). He doesn't like stories that pretend that the characters control their destinies, and their actions will produce a satisfactory outcome. He likes the messiness and coincidence of real life, where you can do your best, and some days it's just not good enough. He doesn't reproduce Raymond Carver's stories so much as his attitude.

In a Carver story there is typically a moment when an ordinary statement becomes crucial, or poetic, or sad. People get blinding glimpses into the real nature of their lives; the routine is peeled aside, and they can see they've been stuck in a rut for years, going through the motions. Sometimes they see with equal clarity that they are free to take charge, that no one has sentenced them to repeat the same mistakes. Carver died five years ago, at 50, of a brain tumor. He believed he would have died at 40, of alcoholism, if he hadn't found a way to stop drinking. When he knew the cancer would kill him, he wrote a poem about that bonus of 10 years, called "Gravy." Altman, who spent most of the 1980s in a sort of exile after Hollywood declared him noncommercial, continued to make films, but they didn't have the budgets or the distribution a great filmmaker should have had.

Chinatown - Chinatown" may be Roman Polanski's best film. It may be Jack Nicholson's best film as well, better than "Five Easy Pieces" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest". It starts out seemingly an ordinary detective story and murder mystery. However, the plot gets thicker and thicker as Nicholson unravels a massive real estate scheme and learns who is behind it. Nicholson plays a private investigator who works in Los Angeles during the 1930s. He is hired by a wife who suspects her husband is cheating.
Nicholson takes incriminating photos of him, which are used by the client to smear the husband, who then appears to have committed suicide. But nothing is as it appears, not the wife, the affair, or the suicide. Nicholson knows he has been duped, and is determined to learn the full story, which involves murder, real estate fraud, and an artificial water shortage. His investigation also uncovers terrible family secrets involving the murder victim's wife (Faye Dunaway) and her cantankerous, powerful father (John Huston).
Nicholson is well cast as the cynical and hard-working private eye. His character has similarities to Humphrey Bogart's in "The Maltese Falcon", but Nicholson's is not as sharp, and is more willing to con his way into gaining information. Likewise, Dunaway's character is similar to that of Mary Astor's in "The Maltese Falcon". Both characters seem unwilling to tell the full truth, and claim to love their hired detective, but Dunaway's is much softer and better intentioned. John Huston, more noted as a director than as an actor, gives a great performance as the grasping schemer who also wants the daughter he doesn't deserve to have. Roman Polanski has a great cameo as the enforcer with a knife. He will always be known more for his off-camera life than for the films that he has directed, but perhaps that isn't as it should be. "Chinatown" is an outstanding film, perhaps even the best film of the 1970s.

BOOKS

2003 Booker Prize Nominees

Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Brick Lane is an epic yet intimate novel set in the Asian community in London’s East End. Still a teenager, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man twenty years her senior. Away from the mud, heat and beauty of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block. Nazneen doesn’t speak a word of English, and is forced to depend on her husband. But unlike him, she is practical and wise, and befriends a fellow Asian woman who helps her change from a cautious and shy Asian girl to a bold and dignified woman.

The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut
When Laurence Waters arrives at his rural hospital posting, Frank is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not – young, optimistic and full of new schemes. The two become uneasy friends, while the rest of the staff in the deserted hospital view Laurence with a mixture of awe and mistrust. In a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last.

Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Hëller
Schoolteacher Barbara Covett leads a solitary existence. When Sheba Hart joins St. George's as the new art teacher, Barbara senses the possibility of a new friendship. It begins with lunches and continues with regular invitations to meals with Sheba's seemingly close-knit family. But as Barbara and Sheba's relationship develops, another does as well: Sheba has begun a sexual affair with an underage male pupil. When it comes to light and Sheba falls prey to the inevitable media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her friend's defence - an account that reveals not only Sheba's secrets but her own.

Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall
Caught in an over-vivid world, Kitty is tipped off-centre by the loss of ‘child that never was’. And as children all around become emblems of hope and longing and grief, she’s made shockingly aware of the real reason for pervasive sense of ‘non-existence’… Astonishing Splashes of Colour tells of identity problems in a large family, the sadness of lost children, the approach of breakdown and desperation – and also optimism.

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Vernon Gregory Little has secrets – but none of them, or so he assumes, have anything to do with the recent massacre of sixteen students at his high school. What he cannot see is that the quirky Texan backwater of Martirio is unable to face its role in the tragedy, and has become a deadly crucible as all eyes turn on Vernon. The media, his mother’s social circle, and the increasingly prosperous townsfolk lead Vernon a merry dance of self-incrimination, as he flees to Mexico and is captured and put on trial as Texas’ most notorious serial killer. Then on the afternoon of his execution, Vernon conceives a wholly modern solution to his dilemma – one that calls for the greatest crime of all.

MUSIC

Songs of the Day:

Sheela-na-gig (live, Peel Sessions) - PJ Harvey
Voice of Harold - REM
Father and Son - Johnny Cash
Heart of Gold - Johnny Cash
Hazey Jane I - Nick Drake
Moses (Live 2003) - Coldplay
Bang Bang - Nancy Sinatra
One More Cup of Coffee - White Stripes
Chiquitita - Sinead O'Connor
A Girl Like Me - Desert Sessions
The Earth Died Screaming - Tom Waits

MUSIC

The Guts of a New Machine (iPod)
(New York Times Magazine)

Two years ago this month, Apple Computer released a small, sleek-looking device it called the iPod. A digital music player, it weighed just 6.5 ounces and held about 1,000 songs. There were small MP3 players around at the time, and there were players that could hold a lot of music. But if the crucial equation is ''largest number of songs'' divided by ''smallest physical space,'' the iPod seemed untouchable. And yet the initial reaction was mixed: the thing cost $400, so much more than existing digital players that it prompted one online skeptic to suggest that the name might be an acronym for ''Idiots Price Our Devices.'' This line of complaint called to mind the Newton, Apple's pen-based personal organizer that was ahead of its time but carried a bloated price tag to its doom. Since then, however, about 1.4 million iPods have been sold. (It has been updated twice and now comes in three versions, all of which improved on the original's songs-per-space ratio, and are priced at $300, $400 and $500, the most expensive holding 10,000 songs.) For the months of July and August, the iPod claimed the No. 1 spot in the MP3 player market both in terms of unit share (31 percent) and revenue share (56 percent), by Apple's reckoning. It is now Apple's highest-volume product. ''It's something that's as big a brand to Apple as the Mac,'' is how Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, puts it. ''And that's a pretty big deal.''

Of course, as anyone who knows the basic outline of Apple's history is aware, there is no guarantee that today's innovation leader will not be copycatted and undersold into tomorrow's niche player. Apple's recent and highly publicized move to make the iPod and its related software, iTunes, available to users of Windows-based computers is widely seen as a sign that the company is trying to avoid that fate this time around. But it may happen anyway. The history of innovation is the history of innovation being imitated, iterated and often overtaken. Whether the iPod achieves truly mass scale -- like, say, the cassette-tape Walkman, which sold an astonishing 186 million units in its first 20 years of existence -- it certainly qualifies as a hit and as a genuine breakthrough. It has popped up on ''Saturday Night Live,'' in a 50 Cent video, on Oprah Winfrey's list of her ''favorite things,'' and in recurring ''what's on your iPod'' gimmicks in several magazines. It is, in short, an icon. A handful of familiar cliches have made the rounds to explain this -- it's about ease of use, it's about Apple's great sense of design. But what does that really mean? ''Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,'' says Steve Jobs, Apple's C.E.O. ''People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.'' So you can say that the iPod is innovative, but it's harder to nail down whether the key is what's inside it, the external appearance or even the way these work together. One approach is to peel your way through the thing, layer by layer.

The Aura

if you want to understand why a product has become an icon, you of course want to talk to the people who dreamed it up and made it. And you want to talk to the design experts and the technology pros and the professors and the gurus. But what you really want to do is talk to Andrew Andrew. Andrew Andrew is a ''highly diversified company'' made of two personable young men, each named Andrew. They dress identically and seem to agree on everything; they say, among other things, that they have traveled from the future ''to set things on the right course for tomorrow.'' They require interviewers to sign a form agreeing not to reveal any differences between Andrew and Andrew, because to do so might undermine the Andrew Andrew brand -- and since this request is more interesting than whatever those differences might be, interviewers sign it. Among other things, they do some fashion design and they are DJ's who ''spin'' on iPods, setting up participatory events called iParties. Thus they've probably seen more people interact with the player than anyone who doesn't work for Apple. More important, they put an incredible amount of thought into what they buy, and why: In a world where, for better or worse, aesthetics is a business, they are not just consumers but consumption artists. So Andrew remembers exactly where he was when he first encountered the iPod: 14th Street near Ninth Avenue in New York City. He was with Andrew, of course. A friend showed it to them. Andrew held the device in his hand. The main control on the iPod is a scroll wheel: you spin it with your thumb to navigate the long list of songs (or artists or genres), touch a button to pick a track and use the wheel again to adjust the volume. The other Andrew also tried it out. ''When you do the volume for the first time, that's the key moment,'' says Andrew. ''We knew: We had to have one.'' (Well, two.)

Before you even get to the surface of the iPod, you encounter what could be called its aura. The commercial version of an aura is a brand, and while Apple may be a niche player in the computer market, the fanatical brand loyalty of its customers is legendary. A journalist, Leander Kahney, has even written a book about it, ''The Cult of Mac,'' to be published in the spring. As he points out, that base has supported the company with a faith in its will to innovate -- even during stretches when it hasn't. Apple is also a giant in the world of industrial design. The candy-colored look of the iMac has been so widely copied that it's now a visual cliche.

But the iPod is making an even bigger impression. Bruce Claxton, who is the current president of the Industrial Designers Society of America and a senior designer at Motorola, calls the device emblematic of a shift toward products that are ''an antidote to the hyper lifestyle,'' which might be symbolized by hand-held devices that bristle with buttons and controls that seem to promise a million functions if you only had time to figure them all out. ''People are seeking out products that are not just simple to use but a joy to use.'' Moby, the recording artist, has been a high-profile iPod booster since the product's debut. ''The kind of insidious revolutionary quality of the iPod,'' he says, ''is that it's so elegant and logical, it becomes part of your life so quickly that you can't remember what it was like beforehand.'' Tuesday nights, Andrew Andrew's iParty happens at a club called APT on the spooky, far western end of 13th Street. They show up at about 10 in matching sweat jackets and sneakers, matching eyeglasses, matching haircuts. They connect their matching iPods to a modest Gemini mixer that they've fitted with a white front panel to make it look more iPodish. The iPods sit on either side of the mixer, on their backs, so they look like tiny turntables. Andrew Andrew change into matching lab coats and ties. They hand out long song lists to patrons, who take a number and, when called, are invited up to program a seven-minute set. At around midnight, the actor Elijah Wood (Frodo) has turned up and is permitted to plug his own iPod into Andrew Andrew's system. His set includes a Squarepusher song. Between songs at APT, each Andrew analyzed the iPod. In talking about how hard it was, at first, to believe that so much music could be stuffed into such a tiny object, they came back to the scroll wheel as the key to the product's initial seductiveness. ''It really bridged the gap,'' Andrew observed, ''between fantasy and reality.''

The idea of innovation, particularly technological innovation, has a kind of aura around it, too. Imagine the lone genius, sheltered from the storm of short-term commercial demands in a research lab somewhere, whose tinkering produces a sudden and momentous breakthrough. Or maybe we think innovation begins with an epiphany, a sudden vision of the future. Either way, we think of that one thing, the lightning bolt that jolted all the other pieces into place. The Walkman came about because a Sony executive wanted a high-quality but small stereo tape player to listen to on long flights. A small recorder was modified, with the recording pieces removed and stereo circuitry added. That was February 1979, and within six months the product was on the market. The iPod's history is comparatively free of lightning-bolt moments. Apple was not ahead of the curve in recognizing the power of music in digital form. It was practically the last computer maker to equip its machines with CD burners. It trailed others in creating jukebox software for storing and organizing music collections on computers. And various portable digital music players were already on the market before the iPod was even an idea. Back when Napster was inspiring a million self-styled visionaries to predict the end of music as we know it, Apple was focused on the relationship between computers and video. The company had, back in the 1990's, invented a technology called FireWire, which is basically a tool for moving data between digital devices -- in large quantities, very quickly. Apple licensed this technology to various Japanese consumer electronics companies (which used it in digital camcorders and players) and eventually started adding FireWire ports to iMacs and creating video editing software. This led to programs called iMovie, then iPhoto and then a conceptual view of the home computer as a ''digital hub'' that would complement a range of devices. Finally, in January 2001, iTunes was added to the mix. And although the next step sounds prosaic -- we make software that lets you organize the music on your computer, so maybe we should make one of those things that lets you take it with you -- it was also something new. There were companies that made jukebox software, and companies that made portable players, but nobody made both. What this meant is not that the iPod could do more, but that it would do less. This is what led to what Jonathan Ive, Apple's vice president of industrial design, calls the iPod's ''overt simplicity.'' And this, perversely, is the most exciting thing about it.

The Surface
I’ve introduces himself as Jony, but really he seems like more of a Jonathan: Friendly and soft-spoken, almost sheepish at times, but also, with his shaved head and English accent and carefully chosen words, an extremely precise man. We spoke in a generic conference room in Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters, decorated mostly with the company's products.
Before I really had a chance to ask a question, Ive spent about 10 minutes talking about the iPod's packaging -- the way the box opens, how the foam is cut. He talked about the unusually thin and flexible FireWire cable, about the ''taut, crisp'' cradle that the iPod rests in, about the white headphones. ''I remember there was a discussion: 'Headphones can't be white; headphones are black, or dark gray.''' But uniform whiteness seemed too important to the product to break the pattern, and indeed the white headphones have become a kind of secondary, unplanned icon -- as Apple's current ads featuring white-headphoned silhouettes now underscore. It's those details, he said, that make the iPod special: ''We are surrounded by so many things that are flippant and trivial. This could have been just another self-important plastic thing.'' When it came to pinning Ive down on questions of how specific aspects of the product came to be, he stressed not epiphanies but process. Asked about the scroll wheel, he did not mention the Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones that use a similar radial dial; rather, he talked about the way that his design group collaborates constantly with engineers and manufacturers. ''It's not serial,'' he insisted. ''It's not one person passing something on to the next.'' I'd push for a lightning bolt moment, and he'd trail off. Finally, at one point, he interrupted himself and said, with sudden energy, ''It's almost easier to talk about it as what it's not.''

The surface of the iPod, white on front and stainless steel behind, is perfectly seamless. It's close to impenetrable. You hook it up to a computer with iTunes, and whatever music you have collected there flows (incredibly fast, thanks to that FireWire cable) into the iPod -- again, seamless. Once it's in there, the surface of the iPod is not likely to cause problems for the user, because there's almost nothing on it. Just that wheel, one button in the center, and four beneath the device's LCD screen. (The look, with the big circle at the bottom, is reminiscent of a tiny stereo speaker.) ''Steve'' -- that would be Steve Jobs -- ''made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,'' Ive says. ''It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device -- which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren't obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.'' Later he said: ''What's interesting is that out of that simplicity, and almost that unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product. But difference wasn't the goal. It's actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.''
Before Ive came to Apple, he worked independently, often on projects that never got out of the prototype phase; one working model would be made, and then it would sit on a shelf in his office. You can think of innovation as a continuum, and this phase is one end of it. The dreams and experiments that happen outside of -- and in a state of indifference toward -- the marketplace. At the other end of the continuum are the fast followers, those who are very attuned to the marketplace, but are not particularly innovative. They let someone else do the risky business of wild leaps, then swoop in behind with an offering that funnels some aspect of the innovation into a more marketable (cheaper? watered down? easier to obtain?) package -- and dominates. Fairly or not, the shorthand version of this in the technology world would have at one end of the continuum Xerox PARC, the famous R&D lab where all manner of bleeding-edge innovations (including some of the ''look and feel'' of the Mac) were researched but never developed into marketable products. And at the other end you'd have companies like Microsoft and Dell.
Apple presents itself as a company whose place on this continuum is unique. Its headquarters in Cupertino is a series of connected buildings arranged in a circle. Behind this surface is a kind of enclosed park. It looks like public space, but of course it isn't: You can't get to it unless you're an Apple employee or are accompanied by one. Along one side of this hermetic oasis are a bunch of tables, set just outside the company cafeteria, and a sign that says Cafe Macs. Here I sat with my P.R. minder and watched Steve Jobs approach in long, energetic strides. It was a perfect day, and he wore shorts with his black turtleneck, and sneakers.

He was very much on message, and the message was that only Apple could have developed the iPod. Like the device itself, Apple appears seamless: it has the hardware engineers, the software engineers, the industrial designers, all under one roof and working together. ''As technology becomes more complex, Apple's core strength of knowing how to make very sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand.'' This is why, he said, the barrage of devices made by everyone from Philips to Samsung to Dell that are imitating and will imitate the iPod do not make him nervous. ''The Dells of the world don't spend money'' on design innovation, he said. ''They don't think about these things.''
As he described it, the iPod did not begin with a specific technological breakthrough, but with a sense, in early 2001, that Apple could give this market something better than any rival could. So the starting point wasn't a chip or a design; the starting point was the question, What's the user experience? ''Correct,'' Jobs said. ''And the pieces come together. If you start to work on something, and the time is right, pieces come in from the periphery. It just comes together.''

The Guts
what, then, are the pieces? What are the technical innards of the seamless iPod? What's underneath the surface? ''Esoterica,'' says Schiller, an Apple V.P., waving away any and all questions about the iPod's innards. Consumers, he said, don't care about technical specs; they care about how many songs it holds, how quickly they can transfer them, how good the sound quality is.
Perhaps. But some people are interested in esoterica, and a lot of people were interested in knowing what was inside the iPod when it made its debut. One of them was David Carey, who for the past three years has run a business in Austin, Tex., called Portelligent, which tears apart electronic devices and does what might be called guts checks. He tore up his first iPod in early 2002. Inside was a neat stack of core components. First, the power source: a slim, squarish rechargeable battery made by Sony. Atop that was the hard disk -- the thing that holds all the music files. At the time, small hard disks were mostly used in laptops, or as removable data-storage cards for laptops. So-called 2.5-inch hard disks, which are protected by a casing that actually measures about 2 3/4 inches by 4 inches, were fairly commonplace, but Toshiba had come up with an even smaller one. With a protective cover measuring just over 2 inches by 3 inches, 0.2 inches thick and weighing less than two ounces, its 1.8-inch disk could hold five gigabytes of data -- or, in practical terms, about a thousand songs. This is what Apple used.

On top of this hard disk was the circuit board. This included components to turn a digitally encoded music file into a conventional audio file, the chip that enables the device to use FireWire both as a pipe for digital data and battery charging and the central processing unit that acts as the sort of taskmaster for the various components. Also here was the ball-bearing construction underlying the scroll wheel. (The newer iPod models got slimmer by replacing that wheel with a solid-state version and by using a smaller battery.) It is, as Carey notes, an admirable arrangement. Exactly how all the pieces came together -- there were parts from at least a half-dozen companies in the original iPod -- is not something Apple talks about. But one clue can be found in the device itself. Under the Settings menu is a selection called Legal, and there you find not just Apple's copyright but also a note that ''portions'' of the device are copyrighted by something called PortalPlayer Inc. That taskmaster central processing unit is a PortalPlayer chip. The Silicon Valley company, which describes itself as a ''supplier of digital media infrastructure solutions for the consumer marketplace,'' has never publicly discussed its role in the iPod. Its vice president for sales and marketing, Michael Maia, would talk to me only in general terms.

PortalPlayer was founded a little more than four years ago with an eye toward creating basic designs for digital computer peripherals, music players in particular. Specifically, the company wanted to build an architecture around tiny hard disks. Most early MP3 players did not use hard disks because they were physically too large. Rather, they used another type of storage technology (referred to as a ''flash'' chip) that took up little space but held less data -- that is, fewer songs. PortalPlayer's setup includes both a hard disk and a smaller memory chip, which is actually the thing that's active when you're listening to music; songs are cleverly parceled into this from the hard disk in small groups, a scheme that keeps the energy-hog hard disk from wearing down the battery. More recently, PortalPlayer's work has formed the guts of new players released by Samsung and Philips. A trade journal called Electronics Design Chain described PortalPlayer as having developed a ''base platform'' that Apple at least used as a starting point and indicated that PortalPlayer picked other members of the iPod ''design chain'' and helped manage the process.

Interestingly, the legal section in the first version of the iPod used to include another copyright notice on behalf of a company called Pixo, which is reported to have created the original operating system for the iPod. Pixo has since been bought by Sun Microsystems, and the credit has disappeared from both newer iPods and even more recent software upgrades for the original model. Apple won't comment on any of this, and the nondisclosure agreements it has in place with its suppliers and collaborators are described as unusually restrictive. Presumably this is because the company prefers the image of a product that sprang forth whole from the corporate godhead -- which was certainly the impression the iPod created when it seemed to appear out of nowhere two years ago. But the point here is not to undercut Apple's role: the iPod came together in somewhere between six and nine months, from concept to market, and its coherence as a product given the time frame and the number of variables is astonishing. Jobs and company are still correct when they point to that coherence as key to the iPod's appeal; and the reality of technical innovation today is that assembling the right specialists is critical to speed, and speed is critical to success.

Still, in the world of technology products, guts have traditionally mattered quite a bit; the PC boom viewed from one angle was nothing but an endless series of announcements about bits and megahertz and RAM. That 1.8-inch hard disk, and the amount of data storage it offered in such a small space, isn't the only key to the iPod, but it's a big deal. Apple apparently cornered the market for the Toshiba disks for a while. But now there is, inevitably, an alternative. Hitachi now makes a disk that size, and it has at least one major buyer: Dell.

The System
My visit to Cupertino happened to coincide with the publication of a pessimistic installment of The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column pointing out that Apple's famous online music store generates little profit. The more interesting point, noted in the back half of the column, is that Apple doesn't expect it to generate much profit -- it's a ''Trojan horse'' whose real function is to help sell more iPods. Given that the store was widely seen as a pivotal moment in the tortuous process of creating a legitimate digital music source that at least some paying consumers are willing to use, this is an amazing notion: Apple, in a sense, was willing to try and reinvent the entire music business in order to move iPods.
The column also noted that some on Wall Street were waiting to see what would happen to the iPod once Dell came out with its combination of music store and music player. (The Dell DJ is slightly bigger than the iPod but claims a longer battery life, which the company says is what its consumer research indicated people wanted; it costs $250 for a 15-gigabyte version, $300 for 20 gigabytes, or nearly 5,000 songs.) Napster's name has been bought by another company that has launched a pay service with a hardware partner, Samsung. But it was Dell that one investor quoted in the Journal article held out as the rival with the greatest chance of success: ''No one markets as well as Dell does.'' This was causing some eye-rolling in Cupertino; Dell is not a marketer at all. Dell has no aura; there is no Cult of Dell. Dell is a merchandiser, a shiller of gigs-per-dollar. A follower. Dell had not released its product when I met Jobs, but he still dismissed it as ''not any good.''

About a week later Jobs played host to one of the ''launch'' events for which the company is notorious, announcing the availability of iTunes and access to the company's music store for Windows users. (In what seemed an odd crack in Apple's usually seamless aura maintenance, he did his demo on what was clearly a Dell computer.) The announcement included a deal with AOL and a huge promotion with Pepsi. The message was obvious: Apple is aiming squarely at the mainstream.

This sounded like a sea change. But while you can run iTunes on Windows and hook it up to an iPod, that iPod does not play songs in the formats used by any other seller of digital music, like Napster or Rhapsody. Nor will music bought through Apple's store play on any rival device. (The iPod does, of course, work easily with the MP3 format that's common on free file-swapping services, like KaZaA, that the music industry wants to shut down but that are still much more popular than anything requiring money.) This means Apple is, again, competing against a huge number of players across multiple business segments, who by and large will support one another's products and services. In light of this, says one of those competitors, Rob Glaser, founder and C.E.O. of RealNetworks, ''It's absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market.'' Glaser says he admires Apple and likes Jobs, but contends that this is simply the latest instance of the company's tendency, once again, to sacrifice commercial logic in the name of ''ideology.'' Not that Apple can't maintain a business by catering to the high end and operating in a closed world. But maintaining market leadership, while easy when the field of competitors is small, will become impossible as rivals flood the market with their own innovations and an agnostic attitude about what works with what. ''The history of the world,'' he says, ''is that hybridization yields better results.'' With Dell and others aiming a big push at the Christmas season, it's even possible that Apple's market share has peaked. Jobs, of course, has heard the predictions and has no patience for any of it. Various contenders have come at the iPod for two years, and none have measured up. Nothing has come close to Apple's interface. Even the look-alike products are frauds. ''They're all putting their dumb controls in the shape of a circle, to fool the consumer into thinking it's a wheel like ours,'' he says. ''We've sort of set the vernacular. They're trying to copy the vernacular without understanding it.'' (The one company that did plan a wheel-driven product, Samsung, changed course after Apple reportedly threatened to sue.)

''We don't underestimate people,'' Jobs said later in the interview. ''We really did believe that people would want something this good, that they'd see the value in it. And that rather than making a far inferior product for a hundred dollars less, giving people the product that they want and that will serve them for years, even though it's a little pricier. People are smart; they figure these things out.''

The point that companies -- like Dell -- that have no great reputation as innovators but a track record of winning by playing a price-driven, low-margin volume game was dismissed. The iPod has already been improved several times, Jobs said, and will keep improving in ways that keep it ahead of the pack. (He wouldn't get specific.) ''For whatever reason,'' he said with finality, ''the superior product has the largest share. Sometimes the best product does win. This may be one of those times.''

The Core
Actually, Jobs seemed a little annoyed. Looking back at my notes, I found it remarkable how many of his answers begin with some variation of ''No,'' as if my questions were out of sync with what he wanted to say. (Before I could finish a question about the significance of Apple's pitching a product to Windows users, for instance, he corrected me: ''We're not pitching the Windows user. We're pitching the music lover.'') After half an hour of this, my inquiries really did start to fall apart, so I didn't expect much when I resorted to asking, in so many words, whether he thinks consciously about innovation.
''No,'' he said, peevishly. ''We consciously think about making great products. We don't think, 'Let's be innovative!''' He waved his hands for effect. '''Let's take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let's put them up all over the company!''' Well, I said defensively, there are people who do just that.
''Of course they do.'' I felt his annoyance shift elsewhere. ''And it's like . . . somebody who's not cool trying to be cool. It's painful to watch. You know what I mean?'' He looked at me for a while, and I started to think he was trying to tell me something. Then he said, ''It's like . . . watching Michael Dell try to dance.'' The P.R. minder guffawed. ''Painful,'' Jobs summarized. What I had been hoping to do was catch a glimpse of what's there when you pull back all those layers -- when you penetrate the aura, strip off the surface, clear away the guts. What's under there is innovation, but where does it come from? I had given up on getting an answer to this question when I made a jokey observation that before long somebody would probably start making white headphones so that people carrying knockoffs and tape players could fool the world into thinking they had trendy iPods. Jobs shook his head. ''But then you meet the girl, and she says, 'Let me see what's on your iPod.' You pull out a tape player, and she walks away.'' This was an unanticipated, and surprisingly persuasive, response. That's thinking long-term, I said. ''No,'' said Steve Jobs. ''That's being an optimist.''