MUSIC

Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA's Desert Origins
[Matador; 1994; r: 2004]
Rating: 10.0

In a 1994 interview with Option magazine, Steve Malkmus recalled his pre-Pavement band Straw Dog opening for Black Flag in Stockton, California. "I was backstage before the show and all those guys, they looked so scary, I was afraid of them," Malkmus told writer Jason Fine. "Like, Greg Ginn was mixing up this stuff in a glass. It was probably just protein powder or some healthy drink, but I thought it was heroin or something." Observing Henry Rollins squeezing a cue ball to pump himself up, Malkmus compared the Sisyphean ritual to smashing your head against a brick wall. "That's what I thought punk was, you know. That's when I knew that maybe I'm just not punk enough."

No maybes about it. The late-1993 press photos that accompany the lavish 62-page booklet included with this heavily augmented 2xCD reissue of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain tell the story. After original drummer Gary Young split earlier in the year and Steve West, Bob Nastanovich and Mark Ibold joined Malkmus and Scott Kannberg, Pavement looked like a scrubbed-up gang of packaging majors in search of a good tailgate party (jolly Nastanovich in U-Mass windbreaker, clean-cut S.M. in puffy red ski jacket; only West's Harry Carey-style specs suggest that these guys might be hanging with New York hipsters).

The dorkily collegiate look was of no concern to Pavement, because to them, appearances never mattered. That's what all the indie bands said back then, of course, even the ones who threw away the twin-blade, let their jeans wear through the knees, flew the flannel, and became world famous. But from the first Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain single ("Cut Your Hair") forward, Pavement, on the verge of the big time, opted out. Who knew why, really? Kannberg would do some soapboxing when pressed in interviews (he wouldn't deal with Rolling Stone because he didn't like how they covered the 80s), but Pavement was never about principles-- at least not ones you could easily name. An anti-fashion statement is still a fashion statement, but Pavement was on another trip. They liked to make fun of rock iconography, but they were smart enough to avoid offering an alternative. You never really knew where Pavement stood on anything, which kept an air of mystery and made their music malleable.

Pavement's sophomore outing does not contain 12 perfect songs but it is close to a perfect album. Each of the best half-dozen-- "Silence Kit", "Elevate Me Later", "Cut Your Hair", "Unfair", "Gold Soundz", and "Range Life"-- contain Malkmus' catchy and highly unusual melodies ("Silence Kit" cribs from Buddy Holly, but even that's an odd gesture) and would be career highlights for most rock bands. But even the songs that aren't necessarily brilliant work well in the context of the album, moving things along in their own way. The Dave Brubeck send-up "5-4=Unity", for example, is a perfect placeholder between two unbelievably great songs. And the closing "Fillmore Jive" ends an album at least partly about the music industry on an appropriately classic rock note, with an extended group-jam coda on par with "Hey Jude". Not many records are this easy to put on in the car and let play start to finish.

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain has been called one of the great California albums, but unlike most records slapped with that label, it avoids dreams and nightmares and focuses on the banal. This is a suburban California album, and since suburbs are exactly the same from Sacto to Levittown, it's an album to which all suburban kids can relate. To us, the imagery of "Elevate Me Later" ("underneath the fake oil burning lamps in the city we forgot to name") and "Range Life" (the kid on the skateboard is coasting through a winding subdivision, not Brooklyn) is instantly familiar.

But really, though Crooked Rain references the burbs and the music biz, with Pavement it's the sound and feel that matter, not the words or themes. Quoting lyrics to get to the heart of Pavement is misguided. Go online and print some out and you'll see that, taken on their own, they're generally meaningless. Read the track-by-track notes S.M. prepared for Melody Maker at the time of the record's release (reprinted in the booklet here) and it's clear just how unknowable these songs are. "Stop Breathin" is about tennis and the Civil War, of course; "Elevate Me Later" is about political correctness.

Judging from the several alternate takes of Crooked Rain songs included on Disc Two, it seems that Malkmus tinkered with words constantly, and that the final versions are those sung on the take that wound up in the can. The "I/they don't have no function" bit in "Range Life", which most people take to be a self-deprecating line to let Malkmus off the hook for ragging on the Smashing Pumpkins fans, was probably just a glitch that he didn't want to go back and fix. The early version of "Range Life" recorded with Gary Young (one of eight such unreleased tracks on the 25-track bonus disc) had no such sentiment, and lyrics-wise, it's a completely different song. "Ell Ess Two", an early version of "Elevate Me Later" from the Young sessions, is also completely different and yet unintelligible in the same way. It's the way words sound and the way Malkmus sings them that gives his songs meaning.

The remainder of the first disc is given over to the B-sides and compilation songs released during the period. I've always thought Pavement's celebrated B-side prowess to be a tad overrated, but certainly the gorgeous and quiet "Strings of Nashville" is one of the best songs in the band's catalog (love that synthesized traffic whoosh), and "Stare", "Raft", and "Nail Clinic" all rate alongside other original Crooked Rain tracks. The two R.E.M. knocks, on the other hand-- the half-cover of "Camera" and the "Tweeter & the Monkey Man"-style goof "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence"-- are in league with "Haunt You Down" as weeded-out experiments for only the most hardcore fans.

The second disc, containing period unreleased material, is an equally mixed bag that turns up a few true gems. The most anticipated tracks are the first eight, recorded in 1993 with Gary Young and never officially released in any form. "All My Friends" is by far the best of these, and could fairly be called a Pavement classic (it would have fit quite nicely on the Watery, Domestic EP), and "Soiled Little Filly" is almost as good. The three alternate versions of Crooked Rain songs from these sessions ("Ell Ess Two", "Range Life", and "Stop Breathin"), and one later re-recorded for Wowee Zowee ("Flux=Rad") are interesting but ultimately show how Pavement had outgrown Young's primitive studio set-up (speaking of Wowee Zowee, early versions of "Grounded", "Kennel District", and two takes on "Pueblo" were recorded at the New York Crooked Rain sessions as well. Since these are three of Wowee's best songs, this was a fertile period indeed.) Jokey experiments, a few strong songs, a couple instrumentals-- including a welcome no-vox version of "Strings of Nashville"-- and four Peel Sessions tracks round out the generous bonus disc. The perfect dusty trunk hauled down from the attic.

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was my introduction to Pavement and I loved it instantly. I was traveling a lot in '92 and '93 and was rarely close to a stereo, so somehow Slanted & Enchanted never made it on my radar. When I finally bought S&E, my first thought was, all right, sweet, some of these songs are as good as the ones on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. There's no question that S&E is a fantastic record, but to me, parts of it sound like Pavement wearing a costume. Listen to the brilliant "Summer Babe" and know that Malkmus loves Lou Reed, but East Coast cool ultimately isn't his style.

On Crooked Rain, Pavement became a band, opened up (as much as they ever could, anyway), and sounded like themselves: smart, funny, confident, West Coast, suburban. The confidence was key. Malkmus and Kannberg grew up loving bands loved by critics, and in their short history, the critics couldn't stop talking about them. In 1994, they were ready to take on the world, but chose to do so in their own quiet and unforgettable way.

POLITICS: New Yorker Editor letter

This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in American memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching its apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challenger—who in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the movement to end that war—as a coward and a traitor. The bitterness has been felt mostly by the challenger’s adherents; yet there has been more than enough to go around. This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck) will end on November 2, 2004, are rooted in the events of three previous Tuesdays. On Tuesday, November 7, 2000, more than a hundred and five million Americans went to the polls and, by a small but indisputable plurality, voted to make Al Gore President of the United States. Because of the way the votes were distributed, however, the outcome in the electoral college turned on the outcome in Florida. In that state, George W. Bush held a lead of some five hundred votes, one one-thousandth of Gore’s national margin; irregularities, and there were many, all had the effect of taking votes away from Gore; and the state’s electoral machinery was in the hands of Bush’s brother, who was the governor, and one of Bush’s state campaign co-chairs, who was the Florida secretary of state.

Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v. Gore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five justices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, while the four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and state law and in the Constitution itself. By ignoring them—by cutting off the process and installing Bush by fiat—the Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism.

A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual civic equality was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the damage would have been far less severe if the new President had made some effort to take account of the special circumstances of his election—in the composition of his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued his policy goals, perhaps even in the goals themselves. He made no such effort. According to Bob Woodward in “Plan of Attack,” Vice-President Dick Cheney put it this way: “From the very day we walked in the building, a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the election—full speed ahead.”

The new President’s main order of business was to push through Congress a program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor the very rich. The policies he pursued through executive action, such as weakening environmental protection and cutting off funds for international family-planning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside what became known (in English, not Arabic) as “the base,” which is to say the conservative movement and, especially, its evangelical component. The President’s enthusiastic embrace of that movement was such that, four months into the Administration, the defection of a moderate senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, cost his party control of the Senate. And, four months after that, the President’s political fortunes appeared to be coasting into a gentle but inexorable decline. Then came the blackest Tuesday of all.

September 11, 2001, brought with it one positive gift: a surge of solidarity, global and national—solidarity with and solidarity within the United States. This extraordinary outpouring provided Bush with a second opportunity to create something like a government of national unity. Again, he brushed the opportunity aside, choosing to use the political capital handed to him by Osama bin Laden to push through more elements of his unmandated domestic program. A year after 9/11, in the midterm elections, he increased his majority in the House and recaptured control of the Senate by portraying selected Democrats as friends of terrorism. Is it any wonder that the anger felt by many Democrats is even greater than can be explained by the profound differences in outlook between the two candidates and their parties?

The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities—political and, apparently, ideological—in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and—strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism—incompetence.



In January, 2001, just after Bush’s inauguration, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars. At the time, there was a lot of talk about what to do with the anticipated bounty, a discussion that now seems antique. Last year’s federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; this year’s will top four hundred billion. According to the C.B.O., which came out with its latest projection in September, the period from 2005 to 2014 will see a cumulative shortfall of $2.3 trillion.

Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates the looming fiscal disaster. In doing its calculations, the C.B.O. assumed that most of the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the legislation that enacted them. However, nobody in Washington expects them to go away on schedule; they were designated as temporary only to make their ultimate results look less scary. If Congress extends the expiration deadlines—a near-certainty if Bush wins and the Republicans retain control of Congress—then, according to the C.B.O., the cumulative deficit between 2005 and 2014 will nearly double, to $4.5 trillion.

What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The President says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after 9/11, thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaq’s collapse in April, 2000. It’s true that even badly designed tax cuts can give the economy a momentary jolt. But this doesn’t make them wise policy. “Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans,” Bush said during his final debate with Senator John Kerry. This is false—a lie, actually—though at least it suggests some dim awareness that the reverse Robin Hood approach to tax cuts is politically and morally repugnant. But for tax cuts to stimulate economic activity quickly and efficiently they should go to people who will spend the extra money. Largely at the insistence of Democrats and moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-class families some relief in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, and a smaller marriage penalty. Still, the rich do better, to put it mildly. Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington research group whose findings have proved highly dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person in the lowest fifth of the income distribution will get a tax cut of ninety-one dollars, a typical person in the middle fifth will pocket eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, and a typical person in the top one per cent will collect a windfall of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and ninety-two dollars.

These disparities help explain the familiar charge that Bush will likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net loss of American jobs. This Administration’s most unshakable commitment has been to shifting the burden of taxation away from the sort of income that rewards wealth and onto the sort that rewards work. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, another Washington research group, estimates that the average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate dividends and capital gains is now about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it’s about twenty-three per cent. The President promises, in a second term, to expand tax-free savings accounts, cut taxes further on dividends and capital gains, and permanently abolish the estate tax—all of which will widen the widening gap between the richest and the rest.

Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his term, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has been dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding a key provision of the Clean Air Act known as “new source review,” which requires power-plant operators to install modern pollution controls when upgrading older facilities. The change, it turned out, had been recommended by some of the nation’s largest polluters, in e-mails to the Energy Task Force, which was chaired by Vice-President Cheney. More recently, the Administration proposed new rules that would significantly weaken controls on mercury emissions from power plants. The E.P.A.’s regulation drafters had copied, in some instances verbatim, memos sent to it by a law firm representing the utility industry.

“I guess you’d say I’m a good steward of the land,” Bush mused dreamily during debate No. 2. Or maybe you’d say nothing of the kind. The President has so far been unable to persuade the Senate to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but vast stretches of accessible wilderness have been opened up to development. By stripping away restrictions on the use of federal lands, often through little-advertised rule changes, the Administration has potentially opened up sixty million acres, an area larger than Indiana and Iowa combined, to logging, mining, and oil exploration.

During the fevered period immediately after September 11th, the Administration rushed what it was pleased to call the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a compliant Congress. Some of the reaction to that law has been excessive. Many of its provisions, such as allowing broader information-sharing among investigative agencies, are sensible. About others there are legitimate concerns. Section 215 of the law, for example, permits government investigators to obtain—without a subpoena or a search warrant based on probable cause—a court order entitling them to records from libraries, bookstores, doctors, universities, and Internet service providers, among other public and private entities. Officials of the Department of Justice say that they have used Section 215 with restraint, and that they have not, so far, sought information from libraries or bookstores. Their avowals of good faith would be more reassuring if their record were not otherwise so troubling.

Secrecy and arrogance have been the touchstones of the Justice Department under Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft. Seven weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the Administration announced that its investigation had resulted in nearly twelve hundred arrests. The arrests have continued, but eventually the Administration simply stopped saying how many people were and are being held. In any event, not one of the detainees has been convicted of anything resembling a terrorist act. At least as reprehensible is the way that foreign nationals living in the United States have been treated. Since September 11th, some five thousand have been rounded up and more than five hundred have been deported, all for immigration infractions, after hearings that, in line with a novel doctrine asserted by Ashcroft, were held in secret. Since it is official policy not to deport terrorism suspects, it is unclear what legitimate anti-terror purpose these secret hearings serve.

President Bush often complains about Democratic obstructionism, but the truth is that he has made considerable progress, if that’s the right word, toward the goal of stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues. The Senate has confirmed two hundred and one of his judicial nominees, more than the per-term averages for Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Bush senior. Senate Republicans blocked more than sixty of Clinton’s nominees; Senate Democrats have blocked only ten of Bush’s. (Those ten, by the way, got exactly what they deserved. Some of them—such as Carolyn Kuhl, who devoted years of her career to trying to preserve tax breaks for colleges that practice racial discrimination, and Brett Kavanaugh, a thirty-eight-year-old with no judicial or courtroom experience who co-wrote the Starr Report—rank among the worst judicial appointments ever attempted.)

Even so, to the extent that Bush and Ashcroft have been thwarted it has been due largely to our still vigorous federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. Like some of the Court’s worst decisions of the past four years (Bush v. Gore again comes to mind), most of its best—salvaging affirmative action, upholding civil liberties for terrorist suspects, striking down Texas’s anti-sodomy law, banning executions of the mentally retarded—were reached by one- or two-vote majorities. (Roe v. Wade is two justices removed from reversal.) All but one of the sitting justices are senior citizens, ranging in age from sixty-five to eighty-four, and the gap since the last appointment—ten years—is the longest since 1821. Bush has said more than once that Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas are his favorite justices. In a second Bush term, the Court could be remade in their images.

The record is similarly dismal in other areas of domestic policy. An executive order giving former Presidents the power to keep their papers indefinitely sealed is one example among many of a mania for secrecy that long antedates 9/11. The President’s hostility to science, exemplified by his decision to place crippling limits on federal support of stem-cell research and by a systematic willingness to distort or suppress scientific findings discomfiting to “the base,” is such that scores of eminent scientists who are normally indifferent to politics have called for his defeat. The Administration’s energy policies, especially its resistance to increasing fuel-efficiency requirements, are of a piece with its environmental irresponsibility. Even the highly touted No Child Left Behind education program, enacted with the support of the liberal lion Edward Kennedy, is being allowed to fail, on account of grossly inadequate funding. Some of the money that has been pumped into it has been leached from other education programs, dozens of which are slated for cuts next year.



Ordinarily, such a record would be what lawyers call dispositive. But this election is anything but ordinary. Jobs, health care, education, and the rest may not count for much when weighed against the prospect of large-scale terrorist attack. The most important Presidential responsibility of the next four years, as of the past three, is the “war on terror”—more precisely, the struggle against a brand of Islamist fundamentalist totalitarianism that uses particularly ruthless forms of terrorism as its main weapon.

Bush’s immediate reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, was an almost palpable bewilderment and anxiety. Within a few days, to the universal relief of his fellow-citizens, he seemed to find his focus. His decision to use American military power to topple the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who had turned their country into the principal base of operations for the perpetrators of the attacks, earned the near-unanimous support of the American people and of America’s allies. Troops from Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Norway, and Spain are serving alongside Americans in Afghanistan to this day.

The determination of ordinary Afghans to vote in last month’s Presidential election, for which the votes are still being counted, is clearly a positive sign. Yet the job in Afghanistan has been left undone, despite fervent promises at the outset that the chaos that was allowed to develop after the defeat of the Soviet occupation in the nineteen-eighties would not be repeated. The Taliban has regrouped in eastern and southern regions. Bin Laden’s organization continues to enjoy sanctuary and support from Afghans as well as Pakistanis on both sides of their common border. Warlords control much of Afghanistan outside the capital of Kabul, which is the extent of the territorial writ of the decent but beleaguered President Hamid Karzai. Opium production has increased fortyfold.

The White House’s real priorities were elsewhere from the start. According to the former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, in a Situation Room crisis meeting on September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld suggested launching retaliatory strikes against Iraq. When Clarke and others pointed out to him that Al Qaeda—the presumed culprit—was based in Afghanistan, not Iraq, Rumsfeld is said to have remarked that there were better targets in Iraq. The bottom line, as Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said, was that the Bush-Cheney team had been planning to carry out regime change in Baghdad well before September 11th—one way or another, come what may.

At all three debates, President Bush defended the Iraq war by saying that without it Saddam Hussein would still be in power. This is probably true, and Saddam’s record of colossal cruelty--of murder, oppression, and regional aggression--was such that even those who doubted the war’s wisdom acknowledged his fall as an occasion for satisfaction. But the removal of Saddam has not been the war’s only consequence; and, as we now know, his power, however fearsome to the millions directly under its sway, was far less of a threat to the United States and the rest of the world than it pretended—and, more important, was made out—to be.

As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have made plain, Bush seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens to no outside advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome views are met with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a self-created bubble of faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his solipsism been more damaging than in the case of Iraq. The arguments and warnings of analysts in the State Department, in the Central Intelligence Agency, in the uniformed military services, and in the chanceries of sympathetic foreign governments had no more effect than the chants of millions of marchers.

The decision to invade and occupy Iraq was made on the basis of four assumptions: first, that Saddam’s regime was on the verge of acquiring nuclear explosives and had already amassed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; second, that the regime had meaningful links with Al Qaeda and (as was repeatedly suggested by the Vice-President and others) might have had something to do with 9/11; third, that within Iraq the regime’s fall would be followed by prolonged celebration and rapid and peaceful democratization; and, fourth, that a similar democratic transformation would be precipitated elsewhere in the region, accompanied by a new eagerness among Arab governments and publics to make peace between Israel and a presumptive Palestinian state. The first two of these assumptions have been shown to be entirely baseless. As for the second two, if the wishes behind them do someday come true, it may not be clear that the invasion of Iraq was a help rather than a hindrance.

In Bush’s rhetoric, the Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, with precision bombings of government buildings in Baghdad, and ended exactly three weeks later, with the iconic statue pulldown. That military operation was indeed a success. But the cakewalk led over a cliff, to a succession of heedless and disastrous mistakes that leave one wondering, at the very least, how the Pentagon’s civilian leadership remains intact and the President’s sense of infallibility undisturbed. The failure, against the advice of such leaders as General Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, to deploy an adequate protective force led to unchallenged looting of government buildings, hospitals, museums, and—most inexcusable of all—arms depots. (“Stuff happens,” Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld explained, though no stuff happened to the oil ministry.) The Pentagon all but ignored the State Department’s postwar plans, compiled by its Future of Iraq project, which warned not only of looting but also of the potential for insurgencies and the folly of relying on exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi; the project’s head, Thomas Warrick, was sidelined. The White House counsel’s disparagement of the Geneva Conventions and of prohibitions on torture as “quaint” opened the way to systematic and spectacular abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American-run prisons--a moral and political catastrophe for which, in a pattern characteristic of the Administration’s management style, no one in a policymaking position has been held accountable. And, no matter how Bush may cleave to his arguments about a grand coalition (“What’s he say to Tony Blair?” “He forgot Poland!”), the coalition he assembled was anything but grand, and it has been steadily melting away in Iraq’s cauldron of violence.

By the end of the current fiscal year, the financial cost of this war will be two hundred billion dollars (the figure projected by Lawrence Lindsey, who headed the President’s Council of Economic Advisers until, like numerous other bearers of unpalatable news, he was cashiered) and rising. And there are other, more serious costs that were unforeseen by the dominant factions in the Administration (although there were plenty of people who did foresee them). The United States has become mired in a low-intensity guerrilla war that has taken more lives since the mission was declared to be accomplished than before. American military deaths have mounted to more than a thousand, a number that underplays the real level of suffering: among the eight thousand wounded are many who have been left seriously maimed. The toll of Iraqi dead and wounded is of an order of magnitude greater than the American. Al Qaeda, previously an insignificant presence in Iraq, is an important one now. Before this war, we had persuaded ourselves and the world that our military might was effectively infinite. Now it is overstretched, a reality obvious to all. And, if the exposure of American weakness encourages our enemies, surely the blame lies with those who created the reality, not with those who, like Senator Kerry, acknowledge it as a necessary step toward changing it.

When the Administration’s geopolitical, national-interest, and anti-terrorism justifications for the Iraq war collapsed, it groped for an argument from altruism: postwar chaos, violence, unemployment, and brownouts notwithstanding, the war has purchased freedoms for the people of Iraq which they could not have had without Saddam’s fall. That is true. But a sad and ironic consequence of this war is that its fumbling prosecution has undermined its only even arguably meritorious rationale—and, as a further consequence, the salience of idealism in American foreign policy has been likewise undermined. Foreign-policy idealism has taken many forms—Wilson’s aborted world federalism, Carter’s human-rights jawboning, and Reagan’s flirtation with total nuclear disarmament, among others. The failed armed intervention in Somalia and the successful ones in the Balkans are other examples. The neoconservative version ascendant in the Bush Administration, post-9/11, draws partly on these strains. There is surely idealistic purpose in envisioning a Middle East finally relieved of its autocracies and dictatorships. Yet this Administration’s adventure in Iraq is so gravely flawed and its credibility so badly damaged that in the future, faced with yet another moral dilemma abroad, it can be expected to retreat, a victim of its own Iraq Syndrome.



The damage visited upon America, and upon America’s standing in the world, by the Bush Administration’s reckless mishandling of the public trust will not easily be undone. And for many voters the desire to see the damage arrested is reason enough to vote for John Kerry. But the challenger has more to offer than the fact that he is not George W. Bush. In every crucial area of concern to Americans (the economy, health care, the environment, Social Security, the judiciary, national security, foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the fight against terrorism), Kerry offers a clear, corrective alternative to Bush’s curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and demagoguery. Pollsters like to ask voters which candidate they’d most like to have a beer with, and on that metric Bush always wins. We prefer to ask which candidate is better suited to the governance of our nation.

Throughout his long career in public service, John Kerry has demonstrated steadiness and sturdiness of character. The physical courage he showed in combat in Vietnam was matched by moral courage when he raised his voice against the war, a choice that has carried political costs from his first run for Congress, lost in 1972 to a campaign of character assassination from a local newspaper that could not forgive his antiwar stand, right through this year’s Swift Boat ads. As a senator, Kerry helped expose the mischief of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, a money-laundering operation that favored terrorists and criminal cartels; when his investigation forced him to confront corruption among fellow-Democrats, he rejected the cronyism of colleagues and brought down power brokers of his own party with the same dedication that he showed in going after Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal. His leadership, with John McCain, of the bipartisan effort to put to rest the toxic debate over Vietnam-era P.O.W.s and M.I.A.s and to lay the diplomatic groundwork for Washington’s normalization of relations with Hanoi, in the mid-nineties, was the signal accomplishment of his twenty years on Capitol Hill, and it is emblematic of his fairness of mind and independence of spirit. Kerry has made mistakes (most notably, in hindsight at least, his initial opposition to the Gulf War in 1990), but—in contrast to the President, who touts his imperviousness to changing realities as a virtue—he has learned from them.

Kerry’s performance on the stump has been uneven, and his public groping for a firm explanation of his position on Iraq was discouraging to behold. He can be cautious to a fault, overeager to acknowledge every angle of an issue; and his reluctance to expose the Administration’s appalling record bluntly and relentlessly until very late in the race was a missed opportunity. But when his foes sought to destroy him rather than to debate him they found no scandals and no evidence of bad faith in his past. In the face of infuriating and scurrilous calumnies, he kept the sort of cool that the thin-skinned and painfully insecure incumbent cannot even feign during the unprogrammed give-and-take of an electoral debate. Kerry’s mettle has been tested under fire—the fire of real bullets and the political fire that will surely not abate but, rather, intensify if he is elected—and he has shown himself to be tough, resilient, and possessed of a properly Presidential dose of dignified authority. While Bush has pandered relentlessly to the narrowest urges of his base, Kerry has sought to appeal broadly to the American center. In a time of primitive partisanship, he has exhibited a fundamentally undogmatic temperament. In campaigning for America’s mainstream restoration, Kerry has insisted that this election ought to be decided on the urgent issues of our moment, the issues that will define American life for the coming half century. That insistence is a measure of his character. He is plainly the better choice. As observers, reporters, and commentators we will hold him to the highest standards of honesty and performance. For now, as citizens, we hope for his victory.

MOVIES

Vera Drake

In "Vera Drake," a film from the English director Mike Leigh about a back-street abortionist, the moment invariably comes when the title character asks her client to bring her some boiling water. Vera's affect is so cozy, as nurturing as a maternal bosom, that it's always somewhat of a surprise when you remember that the water isn't for a warming cup of tea, but for the solution she dispenses. That's very much to Mr. Leigh's point since Vera wants nothing so much as to support the frightened, the dismayed and the impoverished who seek her help, who come to this tender dumpling of a woman because they believe they have no other choice. Here, the politics of abortion isn't a position that individuals can take and leave at will; it's what drives women underground to someone like Vera, with her clucks and smiles, her bar of lye and all that hot water. Set in London in 1950, and suffused with humanity rather than dogma, the film is easily Mr. Leigh's best work in a decade.

Ray

Ray, the new biopic directed by Taylor Hackford, satisfies in some wonderful ways: Jamie Foxx miraculously embodies Ray's soul; Ray's own musical voice sounds bigger and better than ever; and several of the supporting performances—Sharon Warren as Ray's mom and Regina King as Margie Hendricks—are heartfelt and powerful. The problem, though, is that Ray is a saccharine movie while Ray himself was anything but a saccharine man. He was a raging bull. Sentimentalizing his story may make box office sense, but, to my mind, it trivializes the compelling complexity of his character.

For example, the film focuses on Ray's relationship with his mother, Aretha. Yet the truth is that Ray had two mothers. According to what Ray told me and insisted we include in Brother Ray, an autobiography that I co-authored in 1978, two women dominated his early years: his biological mother, Aretha, and a woman named Mary Jane, one of his father's former wives. "I called Aretha 'Mama' and Mary Jane 'Mother,' " wrote Ray. After her 6-year-old son went blind, Aretha fostered his independence, while Mary Jane indulged him. For the rest of his life Ray was as fiercely self-reliant as he was self-indulgent. Two dynamic women, two radically different approaches to his sightlessness—you can imagine the impact on his character. Ray ignores this phenomenon completely.

Ray tries to explain Ray's blues—the angst in his heart—in heavy-handed Freudian terms. At age 5, Ray helplessly watched his younger brother, George, drown. The film insists that the guilt Ray felt for failing to rescue George is responsible for the dark side of his soul. Once the guilt is lifted, the adult Ray is not only free from his heroin habit but is liberated—in a treacly flashback—from his emotional turmoil. George's death was certainly traumatic for the young Ray, yet the only time Ray suffered what he termed a nervous breakdown had neither to do with the drowning nor the loss of his sight a year later. "It's the death of my mother Aretha," he told me, "that had me reeling. For days I couldn't talk, think, sleep or eat. I was sure-enough going crazy." That the film fails to dramatize the scene—we learn of Aretha's death in a quick aside from Ray to his wife-to-be—misses the crucial heartbreak of his early life. It happened when Ray was 15, living at a school for the blind 160 miles from home. "I knew my world had ended," he said. The further fact that Ray fails to include a single scene from his extraordinary educational experience is another grievous oversight. It was at that state school where he was taught to read Braille, play Chopin, write arrangements, learn piano and clarinet, start to sing, and discover sex. Ray shows none of that. Such scenes would have been far more illuminating than the unexciting story, which the film does include, of Ray changing managers in midcareer.

The minor characters are another major problem. Take David "Fathead" Newman, the saxophonist who, for over a decade, was Ray's closest musical and personal peer. In Ray, David is portrayed as little more than a loudmouthed junkie. While drugs were part of the bond between David and Ray, the key to their relationship was an extraordinary musical rapport. In real life, David is a soft-spoken, gentle man of few words. As Ray was boisterous, David was shy. Both were brought up on bebop. Like Lester Young/Billie Holiday or Thelonious Monk/Charlie Rouse, they complemented each other in exquisitely sensitive fashion. We neither see nor hear any of this in Ray. And while Hackford features a great number of Ray's hits, he ignores the jazz side of Ray's musical makeup. There's virtually no jazz in Ray, while in real life jazz sat at the center of Ray's soul.

If Fathead is painfully misrepresented, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, owners of Atlantic Records, suffer a similar fate. Among the most colorful characters in the colorful history of the music business, they are reduced to stereotypes. We don't get a glimpse of their quirky sophistication, sharp intellect, or salty wit. Same goes for Mary Ann Fisher, the first female singer to join Ray's band. Mary Ann was an engaging character—sometimes endearing, sometimes infuriating. In Ray she's just a manipulative tart.

Finally, though, Ray is about Ray, and its attempt to define his character. In many ways, the definition is accurate. Foxx brilliantly captures Ray's energy and contradictions. Yet those contradictions are not allowed to stand. The contradictions must be resolved, Ray must live happily ever after. The finale implies that, for all his promiscuity, he is back with Della, the true love of his life, and that, with his heroin habit behind him, it's smooth sailing ahead. The paradoxical strands of his life are tied up into a neat package, honoring the hackneyed biopic formula with a leave-'em-smiling Hollywood ending.

The truth is far more complex and far more interesting. Ray's womanizing ways continued. His marriage to Della ended in a difficult divorce in 1976. And while he never again got high on heroin, he found, in his own terms, "a different buzz to keep me going." For the rest of his life he unapologetically drank large quantities of gin every day and smoked large quantities of pot every night. While working on his autobiography he told me, "Just like smack never got in the way of my working, same goes for booze and reefer. What I do with my own body is my own business." Ray maintained this attitude until his health deteriorated. In 2003 he told me that he had been diagnosed with alcoholic liver disease and hepatitis C. "If I knew I was going to live this long," he added with an ironic smile, "I would have taken better care of myself." Whatever Ray was—headstrong, joyful, courageous, cranky—he was hardly a spokesman for sobriety.

The producers of Ray make much of the fact that Ray himself endorsed the movie. That's certainly true. He wanted a successful crossover movie to mirror his successful crossover music. He participated and helped in any way he could. In one of our last discussions, Ray reminded me that the process of trying to sell Hollywood began 26 years ago when producer-director Larry Schiller optioned his story. Since then there have been dozens of false starts. It wasn't until his son, Ray Jr., producer Stuart Benjamin, and director Hackford stayed on the case that cameras rolled.

"Hollywood is a cold-blooded motherfucker," said Ray. "It's easier to bone the President's wife than to get a movie made. So I say God bless these cats. God bless Benjamin and Hackford and Ray Jr. Weren't for them, this would never happen. And now that it's happening, maybe I'll have a better chance of being remembered. I can't ask for anything more."



ART

A.J. Casson


Casson Farm Orchard 1929
oil on canvas


Old Store at Salem 1931
oil on canvas
76.7 x 91.5 cm

MUSIC

U2 - Neon Lights

Neon lights
Shimmering neon lights
And at the fall of night
This city's made of light

BOOKS

The 2004 Man Booker Prize winner is Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty:

AAlan Hollinghurst was tonight (Tuesday 19 October) named as the winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, published by Picador. The British-born writer was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel, The Folding Star.

Alan Hollinghurst’s writing has been described as "stylish and poised, with generous cadences of sorrow and delight". The Line of Beauty follows the story of Nicholas Guest, a young innocent who gets caught up in the triumphalist, opulent world of the 80s as lived by Gerald Fedden, the Tory MP with whom he lodges and his circle. A wonderfully observed, effortless novel, The Line of Beauty has been described as a "masterpiece."

Chair of the judges, The Rt. Hon. Chris Smith MP, made the announcement at the awards dinner at the Royal Horticultural Halls, Westminster, which was broadcast live on BBC TWO and BBC FOUR. Harvey McGrath, Chairman of Man Group plc, presented Alan Hollinghurst with a cheque for £50,000.

The Rt. Hon. Chris Smith MP comments, “This was an incredibly difficult and close decision. It has resulted in a winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite 80s. The search for love, sex and beauty is rarely this exquisitely done.”

Over and above his prize of £50,000, Alan Hollinghurst is guaranteed an increase in sales and recognition worldwide. Each of the six shortlisted authors, including the winner, receives £2,500 and a designer-bound edition of their book.

The judging panel for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is: The Rt. Hon. Chris Smith MP (Chair); novelist, Tibor Fischer; writer and academic, Robert Macfarlane; journalist and writer, Rowan Pelling and literary editor of The Economist, Fiammetta Rocco.

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Picador, £16.99

"Hollinghurst's writing has a clarity, an unforced quality contained within the boundaries of a cool emotional reticence."
Peter Bradshaw, New Statesman

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. As the boom-years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, with its grand parties, its holidays in the Dordogne, its parade of monsters both comic and threatening. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.

Alan Hollinghurst, 50, was born in May 1954 in Gloucestershire.

He studied and then taught English at Oxford. His previous novels are The Swimming-Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Folding Star (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Spell.

For several years he was the Deputy Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and was one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 1993.

Alan Hollinghurst lives in London.

POLITICS

Bush flips out.

Jon Stewart flips out on Crossfire

T.V.

Nobody who has seen the BBC series “The Office” has anything bad to say about it, and there’s a reason for that: it’s perfect. It’s a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh, and at times it is close to unbearable; some people like it so much that they can’t watch it. That’s how good it is.

Created and directed by the writers Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, “The Office,” a pretend BBC documentary about a “typical workplace,” captures, with awful brilliance, both the details of day-to-day office life and what the larger landscape of working life has come to look like over the past few decades, since words such as “redundancy” and “downsizing” and the even more chilling “rightsizing”—“right” according to whom?—have forced their way into our vocabulary. Gervais also stars as David Brent, an insecure, infantile office boss, who wants to be popular with his employees, and who says at various times that he thinks of himself as the head of a family, a “chilled-out” entertainer, a comedian, and, so magnanimous is he to his charges, a foreign-aid worker.

David’s delusions and his defensive behavior—he is acutely aware of the camera, and he goes through endless contortions to try to kick sand over the obvious self-interest behind his every decision and declaration—are the heart of the show (both the character and Gervais himself have become household names in Britain), but Gervais and Merchant, who once worked together in the office of a radio station, are generous in their writing, and several other characters are just as vivid. The series consists of only two seasons—twelve half-hour episodes in all—which aired here, on BBC America, in 2003 and are now available on DVD. Gervais and Merchant decided, even before they began filming the second season of their deskumentary, that it would be the last; they didn’t want the quality to drop off. But they did leave their story open-ended enough to allow a return to it someday, and so it was that they came up with a Christmas special that aired in Britain last December and will be shown on BBC America later this week. (NBC, which failed miserably last year with a remake of the British show “Coupling,” is, bless its heart, now remaking “The Office” for next year, with Steve Carell as the star.)

“The Office” is set at a branch of a paper company called Wernham Hogg, situated in the industrial town of Slough, west of London. What we see of Slough in the opening credits—and that’s all we see of it, except for the parking lot and a local bar—is as dreary as the name promises: a leaden sky, a traffic roundabout, a bus station, an ugly office building. (“The Office” represents the second famous insult to Slough; the first was levelled in 1937 by John Betjeman, in a poem—called “Slough”—railing against rampant industrialization, whose opening lines invite destruction onto the town: “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! / It isn’t fit for humans now, / There isn’t grass to graze a cow. / Swarm over, Death!” David actually reads a bit of this to the camera, and then, dispensing some of the wisdom he believes he possesses in such quantity, he adds, “Right. I don’t think you solve town-planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place. So he’s embarrassed himself there.”)

Inside the office, the atmosphere is no less dreary, despite the bright lighting: there’s stained pinkish-gray carpeting and standard-issue file cabinets and desks set up in an open seating plan, with the occasional touch that David likes to think boosts morale, such as a toy monkey sitting on top of a coatrack and one of those singing-fish plaques (with dead batteries) on the wall. There’s no soundtrack (or laugh track), so all we hear besides voices is the rustle of paper, the ringing of phones, and the low chattering of copiers and printers. When we’re not in David’s office listening to him talk about his management techniques and his philosophy of life, most of our time is spent around the adjoining desks of Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), an officious team leader who is territorial about his space, and Tim (Martin Freeman), an unambitious sales rep, who, partly out of boredom and partly because he likes to undermine Gareth’s prissiness, embeds Gareth’s stapler in Jell-O, and later drops it out the window. (At home, staplers are just staplers, but in the office they have a totemic power; if you want to rip someone’s heart out, and remind him of his tenuous hold on his job, on his identity, on his very existence, just take his stapler. In the movie “Office Space,” which has a similar setting, a worker whose many humiliations include the filching of his stapler gets his revenge by burning down the building.) Tim, the smartest person in the office, is also the most passive about his career—he talks about going back to university and becoming a psychologist, but he is thirty and still lives at home, and when he is at work he often simply stares into the middle distance. He’s serious, but with drollery around the edges.

Halfway into the first season, Tim makes a romantic faux pas when he asks Dawn (Lucy Davis), the receptionist, out for a drink, thinking, mistakenly, that she has broken up with her fiancé, and for most of the rest of the series he has to act cool, so that neither his co-workers nor the camera will pick up on his pain. Freeman doesn’t do that much with his face, but there’s a spark of life in Tim that comes from the friction of his awareness of his own paralysis rubbing up against his inability, or lack of desire, to do anything about it. (Tim bears some physical resemblance, as it happens, to the earnest rocker Nigel Tufnel, the character played by Christopher Guest in “This Is Spinal Tap,” which Gervais has credited as his biggest influence in making “The Office.”) And because Dawn does feel something for Tim and also can’t show her feelings, the perforce small gestures and looks between them make it seem as though they were in their own private, silent movie.

The overarching drama in the Slough branch is that the company plans to create redundancies; David finds this out from his boss at the beginning of the first series, but instead of working to make his branch shine he spends his days making jokes and trying way too hard to get his employees to like him. He isn’t the boss from hell; he’s the boss from middle-management purgatory. He’s not tyrannical, just puffed-up and ineffective, and none of his employees have enough gumption to quite hate him. They’re almost zombie-like at times—David has a few moments of shtick that probably would make employees laugh, but these drones never respond. David, for better and mostly for worse, is the most spirited person in this Slough of Despond. Gervais draws on a battery of grins and feints and verbiage to convey his need to gain and maintain stature at every turn. You don’t really want to be in the same room as David Brent, but at the same time you can’t take your eyes off him.

The special that follows the series is a departure from the approach that the series itself took. The filmmakers have returned, three years later, to see what the denizens of the Slough branch are up to, and the resulting footage has a self-consciousness that is now a common feature of documentaries and where-are-they-now follow-ups to reality shows. In the series proper, the documentary technique didn’t call attention to itself; in the special, Gervais and Merchant make fun of it. (We hear a Scottish interviewer asking solemn questions such as “Do you miss being in the office environment?”) At the same time, they seem to have bowed under the pressure of the series’ success and given viewers what they thought they wanted: happy endings. Before that, though, we see a lot of shots of David driving in his car and talking to the camera—naturally, he complains about the way he was depicted in the original fake documentary—and of Dawn sitting around in Florida with her fiancé. David, who is no longer at Wernham Hogg, has had a few minutes of minor celebrity—as “that awful boss”—and he makes embarrassing public appearances that end badly. If anything, David has become more full of himself over time: he has upgraded himself to “anecdotalist,” and keeps dropping by his old office without noticing the lack of enthusiasm that greets him each time. He has also cut a pop single, and we see the whole video for it. (At two and a half minutes, it’s a slog.) The special underscores, with a deliberate lack of subtlety and with a clear intent to be funny, the ponderousness that the documentary form is prone to, but that quality also occasionally infects the show itself. The special is funny, if in a less satisfying way than the series, and it would be churlish to deny happiness to characters who have come to seem real to us. Still, one can’t help wishing that Gervais and Merchant had left well enough—great enough—alone. We needed a sequel to “The Office” as much as we need a sequel to “Pride and Prejudice.”



http://www.bbcamerica.com/genre/comedy_games/the_office/clips/the_office_video_clips.jsp

MUSIC: songlist for October 13, 2004

Go On 1 - Chris Brown and Kate Fenner
Lonely Town, Lonely Street - Bill Withers
Danko/Manuel - Drive-by Truckers
Pieces of a man - Gil Scott Heron
The Day After Tomorrow - Tom Waits
Bye bye badman - Stone Roses
Like a monkey in the zoo - Vic Chesnutt
Uncle Alvarez - Liz Phair

POLITICS
slate.msn.com

Several times, John Edwards accused Cheney of rhetorically combining Iraq and 9/11.

"I have not," replied Cheney, "suggested there is a connection between Iraq and 9/11."

Hm.

"His regime has had high-level contacts with al Qaeda going back a decade and has provided training to al Qaeda terrorists." - Cheney, 12/2/02

"His regime aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. He could decide secretly to provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists for use against us." - Cheney, 1/30/03

"I think there's overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government." - Cheney, 1/22/04

"There's been enormous confusion over the Iraq and al-Qaeda connection, Gloria. First of all, on the question of - of whether or not there was any kind of a relationship, there was a relationship. It's been testified to. The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s...There's clearly been a relationship." - Cheney, 6/17/04

One could argue, perhaps, the definition of "is" on this matter. Cheney did not state specifically in any of the above quotes that Iraq was involved with 9/11. But the repeated claim that Iraq was connected to al Qaeda, a claim that has been shot to pieces dozens of times over, establishes enough of an Iraq-9/11 connection to satisfy a man who appears to believe that a frightened populace is a happy populace.

George W. Bush doesn't even believe Cheney on this point. An article by Reuters from September 18, 2003, had Bush telling reporters, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in September 11." Bush was forced into this scramble because his Vice President had, again, made this discredited connection between Iraq and 9/11 on 'Meet the Press' the previous Sunday by claiming, "more and more" evidence was being found to justify the connection. It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now.

BOOKS

'Small Island' by Andrea Levy

It is 1948 in an England that is still shaken by war. At 21 Nevern Street, London, Queenie Bligh takes into her house lodgers who have recently arrived from Jamaica. She feels she has no choice. Her husband, Bernard, whom she married to escape her dreary upbringing on a farm in the Midlands, was posted to India with the RAF during the war, but when the conflict was over he did not return. What else could she do?

Among her tenants are Gilbert and his new wife Hortense. Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England after the war he finds himself treated very differently now that he is no longer in a blue uniform. It is desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock on her door.

Hortense shared Gilbert’s dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life – that’s why she married him. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London’s shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.

Queenie’s neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. England may be recovering from a war but at 21 Nevern Street it has only just begun.

'Small Island' won the Orange Prize for Fiction (http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/2004prize/winner/index.html)



'The Plot Against America' by Philip Roth

Throughout his career, Philip Roth has imagined alternate fates for characters very much like himself: bright, sensitive boys who grow up to become self-conscious, conflicted men, torn between duty and desire, a longing to belong and a rage to rebel - artists or academics, estranged from their lower-middle-class Jewish roots and beset, at worst, by narcissistic worries, literary disappointments and problems with women.

In his provocative but lumpy new novel, "The Plot Against America," Mr. Roth tries to imagine an alternate fate for the United States with the highest possible stakes. What if, he asks, the flying ace Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election, and what if Lindbergh (who in real life articulated anti-Semitic sentiments and isolationist politics) had instituted a pro-Nazi agenda?
Of course, this brand of historical fiction (or "counterfactual" history) is hardly new. In "It Can't Happen Here," Sinclair Lewis created a portrait of the United States as a fascist dictatorship under the rule of a New England demagogue. In "The Man in the High Castle," Philip K. Dick conjured up a Japanese- and-Nazi-occupied America in which slavery was legal again and Jews hid behind assumed names. In "SS-GB," Len Deighton imagined a Nazi-occupied Britain in which Churchill had been executed. And in "Fatherland," Robert Harris postulated a world in which the Nazis had won World War II and covered up the Holocaust.

What sets Mr. Roth's historical nightmare apart is that it is narrated by a boy named Philip Roth and that it describes the day-by-day fallout of an anti-Semitic administration on members of an ordinary American family who happen to be Jews. But while the portions of the book depicting the fictional Roth family of Newark do an understated - and at times, deeply affecting - job of showing how violently public events can intrude upon the private realm of family and dent the shiny daydreams of a young boy, Mr. Roth never, even momentarily, persuades the reader to set aside the knowledge that Roosevelt won a third term in 1940 and that Nazism did not triumph in the United States. This failure stems, in large measure, from the fact that the novel is based not on a war going one way instead of another, but on a nation's social machinery producing a very different result than it actually did, and Mr. Roth's reluctance to spend a lot of energy on imagining exactly how and why that might have happened.

While the author tries, as he did in his "American Trilogy" novels ("American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain"), to turn a wide-angled camera lens on the United States by creating a parable about the loss of innocence and the costs of "the indigenous American berserk," "The Plot Against America" hurries toward a preposterous (albeit clever) ending and takes place in a political landscape that remains cartoony in the extreme - a sort of high-concept, comic-book landscape that might work in a big-screen extravaganza or satiric potboiler but that feels oddly flimsy here, especially when foregrounded with characters as realistic and psychologically vivid as members of the Roth family. "The Plot Against America" is a novel that can be read, in the current Bush era, as either a warning about the dangers of isolationism or a warning about the dangers of the Patriot Act and the threat to civil liberties. Yet it is also a novel that can be read as a not-altogether-successful attempt to mesh two incompatible genres: the political-historical thriller and the coming-of-age tale.

The language Mr. Roth employs in this novel is the allusive, decorous prose of "The Ghost Writer" and "Letting Go," not the manic, uproarious voice of "Portnoy," and the Roth family described in these pages is very much the same family that the author described in his 1988 book "The Facts" and his 1991 memoir "Patrimony": young Philip, a third grader, still "the good child, obedient both at home and at school - the willfulness largely inactive and the attack set to go off at a later date"; his brother, Sandy, several years older and already an accomplished artist; their doting, ever vigilant mother, Bess; and their feisty, tenacious father, Herman, a man his son once described as possessing "absolutely totalistic notions of what is good and what is right."In "The Facts," Mr. Roth wrote about his childhood idyll in Newark: though World War II was a booming, distant threat, it was faraway and vaguely abstract, and young Philip felt his world to be "as safe and peaceful a haven for me as his rural community would have been for an Indiana farm boy." The family, he grew up believing, "was an inviolate haven against every form of menace, from personal isolation to gentile hostility."In "The Plot Against America," all that has changed. With Lindbergh in the White House and anti-Semitic violence on the streets, Philip suddenly sees his parents scared, helpless and unable to protect him. He hears of friends and neighbors fleeing to Canada and sees others forced to move away under a government relocation program. He witnesses a violent fight between his idealistic father and a cynical cousin, and an equally bitter fight between his father and his aunt, who is married to a prominent rabbi who has become a Lindbergh collaborator.

"A new life began for me," Philip recalls. "I'd watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood." He has seen, he says, "the unfolding of the unforeseen." Like so many Roth characters before him, Philip has been unmoored from his roots, but in this case not by any willful, rebellious act of his own, but by the convulsions of history, caroming through his family's life and that of the nation.

Scenes of the Roth family at home are intercut with long, newsreel-like accounts of Lindbergh's pro-Hitler presidency (wildly extrapolated from historically documented accounts of the real Lindbergh's anti-Semitic statements and involvement in the isolationist America First movement). We're told that Lindbergh has signed accords with Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, that the radio personality Walter Winchell has emerged as the president's most vociferous opponent and that anti-Semitic riots have erupted around the country.

The secret reason behind Lindbergh's actions is unceremoniously dropped on the reader, and the overall novel, too, is brought to an abrupt conclusion that only underscores the slapdash contrivance of Mr. Roth's historical projections. The real drama in this book does not concern the Lindbergh presidency or World War II, but rather the effect that these huge, clanging events have on the Roth family and on Philip's boyhood consciousness. The drama lies in him watching his frightened but resourceful mother try to keep her family safe in the face of events completely beyond her control, and in watching his furious but determined father try to reconcile his expectations of the world with a terrible new reality. In the end, this novel tries to link the personal concerns of so much of Mr. Roth's early fiction with the sweeping, historical tableau of his American trilogy. If the telescope turned on America in this novel sorely lacks the verisimilitude and keen social observation found in "American Pastoral" and "The Human Stain," the microscope it turns on the Roths still provides an intimate glimpse of one family's harrowing encounter with history.



This heavily revised page is from the first of five typescript and holograph revisions for the ending of Patrimony, Philip Roth's 1991 non-fiction work about his father's last years and death. Roth, one of the most important American novelists of the last half of the century, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for this book. Roth donated all the drafts of his early works, including Goodbye Columbus, to the Library in 1969. The Library now holds his complete collection of manuscripts and correspondence.

MUSIC: SONGLIST FOR OCTOBER 7, 2004

Go On - Chris Brown & Kate Fenner
The Darker Days of Me and Him - PJ Harvey
Breakfast in Bed - Dusty Springfield
Are you Down? - Lucinda Williams
Fast Cars - U2
This Could be my Moment - The Verve
Cold, Cold Heart – Hank Williams
Somebody Somewhere (Don’t Know What he’s Missing Tonight) – Loretta Lynn
Goodbye to Love – Carpenters
I Didn’t Mean to Hurt You – Spiritualized
I Don’t Know – Beastie Boys
I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself – Dusty Springfield
Lover Man – Billie Holiday
Martha – Tom Waits
Scatterbrain – Radiohead
You Do - Aimee Mann
The Day After Tomorrow - Tom Waits
Twilight - Elliott Smith

POLITICS: DAILY REASON TO DISPATCH BUSH

The Supreme Court's current membership came together 10 years ago; the court has not gone so long without a new jurist since 1823. Eight of the nine Supreme Court justices are now 65 or older; John Paul Stevens, part of the court's liberal minority, is 84, and Sandra Day O'Connor, who has voted with the liberals to form majorities on several occasions, is 74. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel to George H.W. Bush and founder of the Committee for Justice, has said that the next president "will appoint at least two and as many as four justices to the Supreme Court." Ralph G. Neas, the president of People for the American Way, a progressive organization, has made the same prediction.

If President Bush is re-elected and a liberal justice retires, it is likely that his appointee—or appointees—will move the court toward a willingness to restrict abortion and affirmative action and overturn civil rights protections.

Bush has said that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the court's most conservative members, are the models for his appointments. Samuel Alito, a 3rd Circuit Appeals Court judge believed to be a potential Bush nominee, has voted to uphold abortion regulations, including one requiring women to tell their husbands before having an abortion. That law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1992. Miguel Estrada, whose nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001 was blocked by Democrats after the Bush administration refused to release memos Estrada had written as a government lawyer and Estrada refused to articulate the positions he had taken in the memos, is also thought to be a possible nominee.

Other judges considered contenders for a Bush nomination have similarly divisive records. Emilio Garza, a 5th Circuit Appeals Court judge, has criticized Roe v. Wade and said that abortion regulation should be left to the states. Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel, wrote a memo in 2002 arguing that foreign fighters captured in Afghanistan were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. And Michael Luttiga, a 4th Circuit Appeals Court judge, allowed a Virginia ban on "partial-birth" abortion to take effect while it was being challenged as unconstitutional, and later voted to uphold the law. It was invalidated after the Supreme Court struck down a similar ban in 2000.

The next president will also appoint many federal-appeals-court and trial judges, who also serve until they choose to retire. In his first term, Bush appointed 201.

ART


Paul Cezanne
Mont Sainte-Victoire (Le Mont Sainte-Victoire)
1902-04
Oil on canvas
27 1/2 x 35 1/4 in (69.8 x 89.5 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art


Paul Klee
Southern Gardens
1936
Oil on paper, mounted on cardboard
10 3/8 x 12 1/4 in.
Collection Norman Granz, Geneva


Anselm Kiefer
March Heath
1974
Oil, acrylic, and shellac on burlap
46 1/2 x 100 in. (118 x 254 cm)
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

MUSIC: WHO WAS GLENN GOULD?

Among classical performers of the last half-century, only perhaps Arturo Tos- canini, Vladimir Horowitz, and Maria Callas were the subjects of as much adulation, controversy, and speculation as Glenn Gould. Even so, Gould's popularity was different. He was part of a new era, and addressed a new audience. Coming along at a time when music conservatories and piano contests were producing increasing numbers of pianists of indistinguishable proficiency and uniform style, Gould seemed both to produce his own unique sound and also to appeal to a new audience of listeners. Claiming a taste for his playing, like the fashion for Marshall McLuhan or for semiotics, became a sign of sophistication during the 1960s and 1970s.

His fame for a while was nearly comparable to Elvis's—a Gould recording of a Bach prelude and fugue was launched into space on Voyager in 1977 to instruct aliens about human culture, should they ever be able to decipher how to turn on the spacecraft's phonograph. Since Gould's death in 1982, caused by a stroke shortly after his fiftieth birthday, his prestige seems only to have grown. A 1990s reissue of his 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations sold nearly two million copies, a virtually unheard-of number for a serious classical album. That recording has since been repackaged once again and become another best seller.

Kevin Bazzana's Wondrous Strange, following books like Geoffrey Payzant's semi-official biography of 1978 and Otto Friedrich's fine, authorized biography from 1989, is the best account so far of his life: lucid, balanced, intelligent, and wide-ranging. Like Gould a resident of Canada, Bazzana concentrates on Gould's Canadian origins. He investigates Gould's medical history (Gould was a hypochondriac whose worst fears came true). He analyzes Gould's radio and television productions for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in which he exper- imented with contrapuntal speech and which he took as seriously as his musical recordings. And he reviews the Gould discography in some detail.

The book joins an already vast industry. A French scholar has cataloged Gould's physical tics and proposed a study of his eyebrow move-ments. There are poems and feature films about Gould, novels inspired by him. There are traders in Gould's scores and memorabilia; Web sites and fan clubs; dances choreographed to his peculiar stage mannerisms and to his recorded performances; soundtracks of movies using his Goldberg recording. There is a Glenn Gould Foundation, a Glenn Gould Prize, a Glenn Gould Park, and music composed in his honor. A tourist industry in Toronto caters to pilgrims wishing to glimpse the house in which he lived as a boy, his grade school, the hotel where he holed up in later years and kept in touch with friends through long late-night–early-morning monologues on the telephone, and even the diners where, sometimes during the middle of the night, he would take his only meal of the day, by himself.

As for his playing, among recorded pianists only Horowitz, whom Gould claimed to disdain but with whom he has much more in common than he ever cared to admit, may be as instantly recognizable on disc to a broad musical public. You usually know when you are listening to Gould, even if, from one performance to another of the same piece, his tempos and articulation change. The opening theme in his second version of the Goldberg Variations, from 1981, is nearly twice as slow as the theme in the version from 1955, the one that made Gould a celebrity. But both albums are unmistakably his. So are his recordings of Mozart, the best of which are far more sympathetic toward the composer than even Gould, who enjoyed attacking Mozart, conceded, but the worst of which are mischievous and hostile, intended to be perverse.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Good or bad, Gould's playing derived its strange and vital power partly from the conflict between his own stupendous virtuosity and his intense feelings for music—or to be more precise, the power derived from his neurotic struggles to tame and sublimate these enviable traits. After recording the Goldbergs the second time, he spoke disappointedly to the music critic Tim Page about the earlier version, lamenting its lack of deliberation and rhythmic architecture and its posturing excess of dynamic dips and tempo shifts—"things that pass for expressive fervor in your average conservatory." The slow variation, No. 25, missed "the dignity to bear its suffering with a hint of quiet resignation," Gould asserted. "There's a lot of piano playing going on there and I mean that as the most disparaging comment possible."[*] Or so he said. Was this itself a pose? In any case, it was exactly this emotive playing that many people admired about the performance.

There were other young pianists of his day as gifted (Sviatoslav Richter, Dinu Lipatti, William Kapell) but none had Gould's peculiar, electric sound. To detractors this sound was monotonous and unpleasant. Alfred Brendel, another important contemporary and a very different sort of player, called Gould an "eccentric"— as opposed, Brendel said, to a "serious performer"—and he omitted any mention of Gould in an interview some years ago about playing Bach on the piano. The French psychologist and musicologist Michel Schneider claimed to know people for whom Gould's playing "makes their flesh creep, makes them clench their fingers." Schneider described Gould's "remoteness, terror, disproportion... this over-transparent sound, this sublimated piano playing" as if the playing were a pathology.

And, in its way, it was. The distinguishing features of Gould's style— the exaggerated tempos and dryness of attack combined with sustained tension, ostentatious indications that he had thought out his own new approach, a sometimes cavalier disregard for composers' markings, and a distaste for anything he deemed too Romantic or too flamboyant—all of this seemed to suggest a calculated, which is not to say insincere, theatrics on Gould's part and had the effect of a psychological spectacle. Spiky, crisp, full of odd accents, his playing could also be astonishingly graceful, breathless, achingly beautiful. His rigor, concentration, and technique were wonderfully, almost spiritually exhilarating.

Gould could, however, play Bach perfunctorily (as with the Toccatas), and some of his greatest recordings are not what's commonly associated with him: his Brahms intermezzi, for instance (despite his disparaging remarks about Brahms), his recordings both of early composers like Byrd and Gibbons and of modernists like Berg and Prokofiev. In these renditions, one hears, besides the usual percussive and tensile sound, a suppleness of pulse, subtlety of coloration, and alacrity in responding to changes of tempo, as well as charm, even tenderness and vulnerability—qualities Gould might almost have wished to disown. But then, he was, as he had to concede, a Romantic despite himself. He once made an admission about Horowitz that was revealing. He couldn't help admiring, he said,

the sense of space that very often infiltrated his playing, the way in which, sometimes very unexpectedly, an alto voice or a tenor voice would appear that you weren't aware of.... It suddenly gave a sense of a three-dimensional aspect to the playing.
He could have been describing his own playing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He was born Glenn Herbert Gold on September 25, 1932, an only child in a Protestant family of furriers who by the late 1930s had begun to call themselves Gould, perhaps to avoid being mistaken for Jews. The Toronto where Gould grew up, Bazzana recounts, was a small, peaceful, puritanical, Anglophilic city. Canada was achieving a degree of cultural independence in those decades, increasingly through the radio and television. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was pioneering and experimental. Gould was among the few classical musicians (Toscanini and Leonard Bernstein were others) who, early on, recognized and exploited the potential of the new technologies.

As a boy, he was a loner, polite, gangly, and disheveled, already an insomniac, amusing when he chose to be but also a young fogy, intolerant of his friends' smoking, drinking, and flirting. There has been some speculation about Asperger's syndrome. He was the sort of teenager who affected a German accent after reading Nietzsche and who claimed to identify with Tonio Kröger, Mann's fictional aesthete.

His parents coddled him. His mother, Florence, in whose bed he slept at their summer cottage on alternate nights with his father, became his first piano teacher, and her Scottish heritage, Bazzana writes, fostered in him a strict and evangelical view of music. Bert, his father, spent heavily on newer, better instruments and, after Gould's talent compelled the family to look beyond his mother's instruction, on a formal music education.

Gould studied at the Toronto Conservatory with a Chilean-born pianist, Alberto Guerrero, one of the heroes in Bazzana's book, previously slighted because Gould, who lacked Guerrero's generosity, did not want to be seen as anyone's disciple, which in the end he wasn't. Even so, Bazzana shows, Guerrero excited the young Gould's interest; he taught him how to analyze a score, how to memorize music away from the keyboard; he fostered Gould's contrapuntal style, with its stress on independent voices and a sturdy bass line. He even encouraged Gould's peculiar, low-seated posture at the piano (but not his other onstage shenanigans, such as warming his hands in water and crossing his legs): Guerrero pointed out that sitting low gave Gould's fingers greater independence from his arms and shoulders. When, as an adult, Gould dismissed Guerrero, Guerrero responded: "If Glenn feels he hasn't learned anything from me as a teacher, it's the greatest compliment," meaning that a successful student is one who comes to think for himself. Still, Guerrero observed, "Al maestro cuchillada." To the teacher goes the knife.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gould's friend the writer Robert Fulford recalled him even as a boy having "the most breathtaking confidence I've ever known." It was combined with a repressive sense that music, or at least good music, as he eccentrically defined it, must be a spiritual refuge from "worldly grime," which is how Gould described the sonatas of Scarlatti. Fulford added that "in Glenn's mind," music was "refined and bodiless, almost entirely separated from the physical."

So Gould embraced the rationalism of Schoenberg but hated Stravinsky (Rite of Spring was, he said, "a very offensive work" and Soldier's Tale "a piece of trash"). Bach was his paragon of order, the master of beloved counterpoint, which meant Gould conveniently ignored Bach as a man of the theater. Mozart was too melodious for him, and Gould played him as if he were a failed contrapuntalist, grossly exaggerating the bass lines in homophonic music, rather than treating them as accompaniments. He admired the pianist Artur Schnabel partly because, as Theodor Leschetizky, Schnabel's famous teacher, said about him, "you will never be a pianist; you are a musician"—that is, Schnabel was an idealist who transcended the hurly-burly of playing. Gould might have preferred not to acknowledge that Schnabel was, like Schoenberg, also a Romantic at heart.

He was a bundle of absurd contradictions. His favorite conductors included Leopold Stokowski and he loved Humperdinck's Hänsel and Gretel. He told an interviewer that his taste was "roughly demarcated by The Art of the Fugue on one side and Tristan on the other," while almost everything in between was "at best, the subject of admiration rather than love." But this was not true. He despised Schubert for being repetitive, and middle-period Beethoven as bombastic. The first movement of Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, one of the glories of music, was, for him, "a bad piece," but he revered Haydn. He played Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies and also, for his pleasure, piano transcriptions of Mahler, Bruckner, and Elgar. Meanwhile, he wrote off nearly all Spanish music and Italian opera, which he found cloyingly melodious and too sensuous (it made him "intensely uncomfortable," he once said, revealingly). About the music of France, he considered Fauré's music "junk" but declared Bizet's forgettable and rarely played Variations chromatiques as "one of the very few masterpieces for solo piano to emerge from the third quarter of the nineteenth century." His recording of it, from 1971, while brilliant, is humorless and thereby a lost argument for the composition's resuscitation.

And then there was Richard Strauss. "Seeing Gould through his current Richard Strauss phase," Gould's friend the composer and critic John Beckwith said, was "a little like seeing a difficult child through mumps." Gould recorded Strauss's Five Piano Pieces, Op. 3. They are, not surprisingly, absolutely gorgeous—proud, unmistakably Romantic, a little stentorian but with a fugue that shows Gould at his best—all of which only amplifies the irrationality of his position. There is no logical reason he could not have taken the same approach toward, say, Schumann, whom he found intolerable.

2.
The music world was small enough during the mid-1950s that word had already begun to spread about a talented young Canadian pianist before Gould made his United States debut, in January 1955, in Washington, D.C. That recital received a clairvoyant review from the critic Paul Hume ("We know of no pianist anything like him of any age"). His Town Hall recital a week later in New York attracted pianists like Kapell and Paul Badura-Skoda, and also the record producer David Oppenheim of Columbia's Masterworks division. He signed Gould to a contract. For his first album, Gould elected a lengthy, esoteric piece by Bach, and then spent a balmy week in June 1955 in a former church turned recording studio in midtown Manhattan, wrapped in muffler and mittens, soaking his hands and arms in hot water to warm up, haranguing the air-conditioning engineer, drinking bottled spring water, munching arrowroot biscuits and popping pills, singing and rocking along as he played the Goldberg Variations. It was released in January 1956, for $3.98, with thirty black-and-white photographs on the cover, one for each variation, showing Gould mugging at the keyboard.

How calculating were Gould's antics? He and his promoters capitalized on them during his concert career. There were the rumpled suits and mismatched socks and untied shoes; the shuddering and moaning and clucking and the flopping tousle of hair like one of the Beatles before the fact; the sitting, hunched, only a foot off the ground, eyeballs level with the keyboard, legs crossed, on a rickety folding chair that his father had cobbled together for him, with blocks under the piano legs, a little rug, a glass of water.

Keith MacMillan, a Canadian record producer, recalled a performance in Toronto of the Beethoven C-minor Concerto. Gould walked on stage with the conductor, Walter Susskind, barely acknowledging the audience as he sat down, cross-legged, as usual, eyes buried in a pocket score he held in his hands, never mind that he obviously knew every note by heart. "As his own opening scales drew near," MacMillan remembered,

his head remained in the score and his legs remained crossed, until the merest fraction of a second before his first entry, when he snapped the score shut and tossed it into the air; it landed flat on the piano's downturned music rack simultaneously with the downbeat of his first entry. The timing was perfect, the legs were still crossed, and the opening scales were impeccable.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But while Gould clearly was a ham (that's what he called himself), his mannerisms were not just affectations —he couldn't help them, he insisted. They never overshadowed his musicianship, and they also helped to deflect closer scrutiny of his personality. Desperately private, Gould could, as it were, hide behind his reputation, which distracted the public from himself.

Columbia publicized Gould as an oddball, but before it was acquired by Sony, it was an enlightened company, giving Gould first the liberty to gamble on an obscure work for his debut album and then in later years letting him record whatever he wished. It helped that his records sold. Still, Gould was treated with a respect that would be nearly unimaginable for a classical player in the recording business today.

It also helped that Gould arrived at the right moment. What would become the modern era's early-music movement was in its infancy, thanks to groups like Virtuosi di Roma and New York's Pro Musica Antiqua, when Gould came on the scene. The long-playing disk was just coming into its own. Before Gould, the lengthy Goldberg Variations was an obscure work studied mostly by musicologists; in playing it, Gould exploited this new technology brilliantly. It turned out to be one of those rare pop monuments, as if there had been a huge, previously unrecognized desire for a young piano whiz to resuscitate Baroque music, and it landed Gould in the pages of Glamour and Vogue. Based on its success, he toured Western Europe, where the conductor Herbert von Karajan was so staggered by his playing that after just a few notes at the first rehearsal of Bach's D-minor Concerto, Karajan left the podium and listened dumbstruck from the auditorium.

In Moscow and Leningrad (this was before Van Cliburn), Gould's playing, along with his endorsement of Bach, an ecclesiastical composer, and of Schoenberg, defying atheistic, anti-modernist Soviet officialdom, inspired an almost religious veneration in young Russian musicians; it awed colleagues like Sviatoslav Richter, who thought Gould a genius but, being even more of a fanatical musician, privately questioned whether Gould truly loved Bach sufficiently. If he did, Richter wrote in his diary, he would have played the repeats in the Goldberg recording.

The more Gould performed, the more miserable he became. "At live concerts I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian," he announced. "I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil." He said he equated the concert hall with "a comfortably upholstered extension of the Roman Colosseum" and he preferred that audiences not applaud—he considered the automatic ovation after a performance "an easily induced mob reaction," which of course it can be.

He wanted to quit performing. He developed a fear of flying. He banned friends from concerts, saying they made him nervous. He canceled months of engagements, meanwhile devising bizarre ways of behaving, as when he sprawled across the piano lid while giving a lecture in Canada. When a technician at Steinway in New York patted him on the back, he sued for damages, claiming injury (the case was settled out of court). Then came the flap over the Brahms D-minor Concerto with the New York Phil-harmonic, when Leonard Bernstein announced to the audience, good-humoredly, that while he disagreed with Gould's interpretation, he would go along with it anyway, "because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist." Newspapers twisted this into a feud and mocked Gould's playing. "Between you, me and the corner lamppost, Ossip, maybe the reason he plays it so slow is maybe his technique is not so good," wrote Harold Schonberg in The New York Times, stupidly. Gould became fed up. On April 10, 1964, he gave his last recital, in Los Angeles. He would be offered huge sums to perform again but he never did. He had given fewer than two hundred concerts in his career; some colleagues, Claudio Arrau, for example, played more in a year. Gould retired from the stage at thirty-one, the most famous and influential pianist to emerge during the second half of the twentieth century.

About Gould's stage mannerisms, Bazzana cites an annoyed music reviewer for Le Soir in Brussels who wrote: "His orang-utang style may please admirers of Elvis Presley but it irritates or leastwise fatigues a classical audience." On the other hand, his unconventional manner pleased a generation of jazz musicians and beat poets, who hung out at places like the Purple Onion and the Co-Existence Bagel, and claimed him as a kindred spirit. Tim Page, in liner notes for the most recent Goldberg reissue, compares Gould's musical personality to the "tough/tender dichotomy [of] Marlon Brando and James Dean," adding that

if you were young in the 1950s, and you attended the films of Bergman and Fellini, were hip to the Existentialists in Paris and the "Beats" on the road, and followed the daunting stylistic twists and turns from John Coltrane, Miles Davis and other modern jazz artists, it was more than likely that you were a Gould fan as well.
To teenagers and technophiles, in particular, he became a peculiar sex symbol because of his apparent (but, in fact, misperceived) sexlessness, a nerdish symbol of rebellion, defying the stodgy music establishment, and a moralizing missionary for new media. By choosing to leave the stage and live more or less monkishly, he became, as it were, classical music's New Age yogi, and Toronto became his ashram. Disdaining the gladiatorial stage and all forms of competition also put him in harmony with Sixties peace and love culture.

"I sought to challenge the zeitgeist," Gould insisted. But really he encapsulated it, as much as any other classical musician had, at the same time that he was a throwback to Romantic pianism. This combination, above all, was what distinguishes him. He "was a rare, fascinating case," Bazzana writes, of someone "who combined high-modernist traits" with "an utterly Romantic approach to interpretation." The Beatles shared his enthrallment with the technological possibilities of recordings and his being fed up with the stage. "Bless Glenn Gould for throwing the concert audience into the junkyard," wrote McLuhan, who happens to have been a friend of Gould's.

Gould's attitude toward his recordings, as Bazzana points out, was actually akin to McLuhan's toward his books, which McLuhan once described to Playboy as "the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight." Likewise, Gould approached the studio, or at least liked to say that he approached the studio, without fixed ideas about a performance, trying out different approaches—this is what he enjoyed about recordings as opposed to concerts, notwithstanding that his various takes might be nearly indistinguishable to anyone except him—while he regarded the finished album as something listeners could modify according to their whims by fiddling with the hi-fi. "Dial twiddling," he pointed out, is "an interpretative act."

He imagined producing kits of variant recordings for listeners to assemble their own preferred version of a performance. He had the Brechtian idea of recording Scriabin's Fifth Sonata with pairs of microphones around the studio in order to produce an album in which the sound would be perceived as shifting from one place to another, as if to simulate someone moving through the room, making the physical space of the studio part of the recording.

He compared this concept with a filmmaker's mixing of long shots, close-ups, and zooms. But this was also the era of Conceptual art, of Rauschenberg's collages, of Fluxus and John Cage. Sol LeWitt was devising works consisting merely of instructions for other people to follow. Donald Judd was asserting the inextricable relationship between sculpture and the space around it. Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg and Yoko Ono were staging happenings. Gould, enough aware of what was going on in the art world, called the performance in which he sprawled across the piano lid the first happening in southern Ontario.

Like pianists of an earlier era, he composed and, like them, felt he therefore could take liberties with other people's music. "You play like a composer," Aaron Copland once told him. Copland added, after hearing Gould play Bach, that it was "as though Bach himself is actually performing." To Gould, performing Bach's music invited splicing—the music consisted of what he regarded as changeable parts, voices, tempos, dynamics, instruments. He treated it almost like collage. Other pianists at the time were playing Bach with verve and distinction: Wilhelm Kempff, Richter, Rosalyn Tureck, Kapell, Lipatti—and who knows, by the way, how different the piano landscape of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would have looked had the last two not died young? But Gould was still different. He made Bach sound like a new composer.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Walter Benjamin predicted that the proliferation of reproductions of art would eradicate the aura of the original. Following Benjamin, Gould believed that musical recordings would vitiate the public's longing for live performance. "When Aunt Minnie can turn on her four-screen television and watch the Berlin Philharmonic we will have reached total inwardness on the part of the audience," he told a reporter in 1962.

Just a few months after Gould left the concert stage, Horowitz ended a dozen-year sabbatical and made a widely publicized return, at Carnegie Hall, after which Columbia Records, which was also Horowitz's producer, rushed out a "live" version of the recital. Gould disdained everything about Horowitz's recital and the recording—he despised the Horowitz cult, Horowitz's choice of music (Scarlatti, Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninoff), not to mention the spectacle of his return. For some years he pondered making a parody album of Horowitz's comeback. He speculated about his own historic return someday being a recital filmed in an empty Carnegie Hall. He felt live recordings mixed up the art of performing with the art of recording. The two were distinct. The recording studio, Gould said, had "its own laws and its own liberties, its quite unique problems and its quite extraordinary possibilities." It even had, he believed, a higher moral purpose than a concert, which celebrated a player's ego. "I think that the finest compliment one can pay to a recording is to acknowledge that it was made in such a way as to erase all signs, all traces, of its making and its maker"—which of course applied to no recording ever made by either Horowitz or Gould.

Like Benjamin, Gould was wrong. That live recording of Horowitz's return was itself a technological fiction. In the studio Horowitz rerecorded passages he had muffed on stage. But now Sony has reissued the album and restored the mistakes, arguing that the public wants the real experience, the authentic performance. The aura of the original, it turns out, has only increased, not diminished, with the proliferation of reproductive technologies.

"Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it," Max Frisch once observed. At home or in a car or on an iPod, we listen to recordings differently from the way we listen in a concert hall, where the collective task at hand is to listen. Listening to recordings is often a solitary pastime. Recorded music is a companion for when we are alone or, with headphones on, when we wish to feel alone. For Gould, solitude was clearly part of the allure of recordings. Isolation, which included the relative isolation of the recording studio as opposed to the bustle of the crowded concert hall, was to Gould almost a form of ecstasy. He wrote in a letter to a friend in 1971 that "for me all music which lacks that ability to isolate its listeners from the world in which they live is intrinsically less valuable than that which manages the feat." Once, Bazzana relates, while touring during the late 1950s, Gould was laid up with a fever and convalesced for weeks in a hotel in Hamburg, alone. It was, Gould later recalled, the best month of his life, and he happily compared himself to Hans Castorp in the sanitarium. About recording, he also remarked:

I discovered that in the privacy, the solitude and (if all Freudians will stand clear) the womb-like security of the studio, it was possible to make music in a more direct, more personal manner than any concert hall would ever permit.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In later years, he increasingly preoccupied himself with television and radio features for the CBC, projects as technically virtuosic as his piano recordings and which he regarded as quasi-musical compositions. They allowed him to live his life away from live audiences, mostly in privacy. He produced shows about Newfoundland, the Mennonites, Richard Strauss, Stokowski, improvisation, all subjects that in the end were really about him. He used montages of sound and voices, contrapuntal radio, he called it, a new kind of radio art, a documentary cross between Bach and electronic music.

The last chapters of Bazzana's excellent book recount the years of dwindling health and solitary life. Selfish but endearing, sweet-natured but increasingly fearful, fragile, for several years he carried on an affair with a married woman, who left him. Shy and alone amid the unstudied clutter of his apartment, he kept himself busy watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show, brooding when his father remarried after his mother died, nervously preparing notes for conversations with friends on the telephone, obsessively recording his ailments in a diary. He was a narcissist, Bazzana writes, but he also declined to play the prima donna; he enjoyed the company of many colleagues, and he liked making people laugh, as long as he controlled the relationship. He once told the filmmaker and musician Bruno Monsaingeon that he planned to stop making records by 1985, quit the city for the country, and communicate with people only by telephone.

Bazzana suggests that he became stuck in his ways, rehashing the same bugaboos, complaining about having "done all that." He was at a turning point when he died. He talked about trading the piano for conducting, although he didn't know how to conduct. His hands had begun to fail him, he felt. People who had recalled him as a handsome young man found he had become paunchy and wrinkled, with a pasty face and bloodshot eyes. He complained of musculoskeletal pains, hypertension, gastrointestinal problems. He popped Valium, Aldomet, and Librax. Bazzana has discovered receipts for more than two thousand pills Gould ordered from a local pharmacy between January and September 1982, when he died.

He had been a superstitious man. He always believed in omens and telepathy and ESP. That his last album, like his first, was of the Goldberg Variations was a twist of fate, a fluke. He did not mean for the work to end his career. He didn't even like some of it. He found parts of it silly. "As a piece, as a concept, I don't really think it quite works," he told the writer Joseph Roddy at the time of his second recording. His playing is nonetheless exalted, ecstatic. This time he takes a few of the repeats.

"He said ridiculous things," Rudolf Serkin once remarked, "but then at the end he played, and everything was all right."


See Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould; by Kevin Bazzana; Oxford University Press, 528 pp.