MUSIC

Some of my favourite songs of 2004 (in no particular order):

Sometimes you can't make it on your own - U2
Each coming night - Iron & Wine
I wanted to be wrong - REM
Everybody's gotta learn sometime - Beck
Go On 1 - Chris Brown & Kate Fenner
Danko/Manuel - Drive-by Truckers
Twilight - Elliott Smith
One evening; Mushaboom - Feist
Tomorrow on the runway - Innocence Mission
Static on the radio - Jim White & Aimee Mann
Knock yourself out - Jon Brion
Muzzle of bees - Wilco
Just in time - Nina Simone
Shame - PJ Harvey
Everything is everything - Phoenix
Such great heights - Postal Service and Iron & Wine
From now on - Ron Sexsmith
Pendulums - Sarah Harmer
Gone for good - The Shins
Go - Sparklehorse and Flaming Lips

NEIL YOUNG

Neil Young's albums are far too good to require condensing into a greatest hits, but for those who buy these compilations, this tracklist is decent. The cover is one of my all-time favourite Neil pictures. First a review and then my greatest hits list for Neil.

pitchfork's review:

Neil Young
Greatest Hits
[Reprise; 2004]
Rating: 8.0

Neil Young is the kind of man that appreciates albums in the traditional sense: cohesive beginning-to-end statements, occasionally thematic if the mood suits him, and preferably experienced through big analog speakers on crackly old vinyl. His resistance to digital music has been well-documented, and until recently, several of his releases-- including 1974's classic On the Beach-- had never been made available on compact disc. So one can imagine him in an A&R office upstairs at Reprise Records, year after year, continually shooting down the concept of a compilation that attempts to condense his entire history onto a single disc. He's already been compiled once anyway-- with the 1977 double-disc retrospective Decade.

Regardless, we're now being offered Greatest Hits, although Young does seems begrudging: Its only liner notes are the obligatory song credits and one line from Young himself that simply states, "Greatest hits inclusion based on original record sales, airplay, and known download history." These criteria are not only anathema to his aesthetic (since when does the man behind "This Note's For You" care about airplay?), but here they comprise a collection that only skims the surface of his catalog: The tracklist features 16 songs from his 35-year career, ranging from 1969's "Down by the River" to 1991's "Harvest Moon".

Young's stubborn integrity extends beyond his politics-- which inform all of his songs, but only define a few like "Ohio" and "Rockin' in the Free World"-- and saturates his music. His catalog is riddled with sharp contrasts and sly contradictions, not least of which is the fact that this bearish-looking man sings with such a fragile falsetto. More crucially, Young moves from ragged guitar epics to jangly country ballads with impressive agility. He's also not one to rein in his songs, so they may often run for only two intense minutes ("The Needle and the Damage Done") or sprawl to upwards of nine ("Down by the River", "Cowgirl in the Sand").

These extremes make for a strange and strangely compelling Greatest Hits. Conceptually, it shouldn't work: Young has played many roles over 3½ decades, but indeed, he's never been a singles artist. In fact, he has only a passing acquaintance with the pop singles chart-- "Heart of Gold" went to #1, but he's had only two other solo top 40 singles-- and many of his most popular songs run much longer than the typical single's three minutes.

The disc begins, perversely and brilliantly, with the one-two punch of "Down By the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand", which together total almost 20 minutes. This seems less an act of rebellion than a simple stroke of luck, as the compilation is sequenced chronologically. Even so, the songs illustrate clearly that Young and the hits format aren't exactly perfect for each other, while still constituting an impressive introduction for newcomers. Which is precisely what this record is designed to do.

Greatest Hits is obviously intended mostly for curious initiates or casual listeners (although the remastered tracks will likely attract hardcore Young fans, too), and it achieves its goals sufficiently. Those unacquainted with his work will learn that Young was a tremendous guitar player who gave himself ample room to range; that Crazy Horse understood the need to provide a good backdrop for his solos and knew how to churn a drag-the-river momentum; that Young was an able songwriter who could craft a killer line like "The Needle and the Damage Done" clincher "every junkie's like a setting sun." What they won't learn is the difference between Young's work with Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills & Nash: All 16 tracks are presented as Young's solo work, which is misleading. Historical liner notes could have cleared this up and even introduced Young's collaborators. Instead, the package leaves it to listeners to infer these distinctions from the song credits.

Fittingly, Greatest Hits skews to Young's early material: Eleven of these tracks represent his 1969-71 output, and only two songs postdate the 1970s (and, therefore, the still-in-print, two-disc Decade). The implication is that Young more or less faded away, and that his first few albums far outshine his subsequent material. But such a view is surely reductive: Young has not only been actively releasing albums throughout the 90s and into the 00s, but several of them been unexpectedly solid as well. The sadly missed "Cortez the Killer" and "Tonight's the Night" are the set's most obvious exclusions, but the dismissal of late-era tracks like "This Note's for You", "Fuckin' Up", or even "From Hank to Hendrix" is unfortunate, too.

Of course, it's all too easy to nitpick any greatest-hits tracklist-- any of them could be said to carry grievous omissions or curious inclusions. On one hand, this type of cursory overview isn't supposed to give us a detailed portrait of the artist, only a general sketch; on the other, Young is too complex a musician to be adequately represented by a mere 16 songs. The music on Greatest Hits holds up undeniably well, but the concept itself-- perhaps inevitably-- falters, failing to capture the essence of one of rock's sturdiest and most ragged voices.



Alternative Greatest Hits List

Expecting to Fly
Everybody knows this is nowhere
Helpless
Only love can break your heart
I believe in you
Harvest
Old man
Alabama
Love in mind
See the sky about to rain
Ambulance blues
Tired eyes
Albuquerque
Cortez the Killer
Pardon my heart
Will to love
Hey babe
Goin' back
Lotta love
Thrasher
Powderfinger
Piece of crap
Too far gone
Over and over
You and me
I'm the ocean
Razor love




VANCOUVER: WHAT'S HAPPENING THERE, RIGHT NOW?



RECIPES FOR A WINTER WEEKEND DINNER

Braised Lamb Shanks with Wine and Herbs
Makes 8 servings servings

Ingredients

8 lamb shanks, trimmed 8
salt and pepper
2 tbsp olive oil 25 ml
3 onions,coarsely chopped 3
12 whole cloves garlic, peeled 12
2 cups dry red wine 500 ml
1 28oz/796mL tin plum tomatoes with juices 1
1 tbsp fresh thyme (or 1/2 tsp/2mL dried) 15 ml
2 tbsp fresh parsley, coarsely chopped 25 ml

Method

1 Pat lamb dry and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed pot. Brown lamb well on all sides-in batches, if necessary. Remove from pan. Add onions and garlic. Cook a few minutes. Add wine. Bring to a boil and reduce by half.
2 Add tomatoes and bring to a boil. Break up tomatoes with a spoon. Add thyme. Return the browned lamb shanks to the pan. Cover and cook in a 350F/180C oven for 2 1/2 to 3 hours or until very tender.
3 Remove shanks from pan. Skim any fat from surface of the sauce and discard. Puree sauce in a food processor or blender. Return sauce to pan. Remove lamb from bones in large chunks or leave whole and return to sauce. Heat thoroughly.
4 Garnish lamb shanks with parsley leaves.

Candied Carrots
Makes 6 servings servings

Ingredients

2 lb carrots, cut into 3/4"(2cm) chunks 1 kg
1/3 cup sugar 75 ml
3 tbsp vegetable oil 45 ml
3 tbsp lemon juice 45 ml

Method

1 Cook carrots in boiling water for 10 minutes. Drain well.
2 Place carrots back in saucepan and add sugar, oil and lemon juice. Bring to a boil and cook 1 1/2 hours, partially covered over low heat, stirring gently occasionally.

Golden Harvest Mash
Makes 8 servings servings

Ingredients

1/2 lb parsnips, peeled and cut into chunks 250 g
1/2 lb carrots, squash or turnips, peeled and cut into chunks 250 g
1/4 cup butter 50 ml
2 tsp salt 10 ml
1/4 cup hot milk or cream (optional) 50 ml
1 small bunch chives 1
2 lb sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks 1 kg
1 lb Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks 500 g

Method

1 Cook sweet potatoes in a large pot of boiling, salted water until tender, 10 to 15 minutes. Drain well. At the same time, cook potatoes, parsnips and carrots in another pot of boiling, salted water, 20 to 25 minutes until tender. Drain well and add to sweet potatoes. Add butter and salt and mash coarsely.
2 If mixture is too thick, add hot milk or cream. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary. Spoon into a serving dish and cut chives in 2"(5cm) pieces over mashed vegetables.

White Chocolate Pavlova
Makes Serves 6 to 8 servings

Ingredients

1 tsp pure vanilla extract 5 ml
3 egg whites 3
1 cup granulated sugar 250 ml
1 tbsp plain white vinegar 15 ml
1 tsp pure vanilla extract 5 ml
1 cup coarsely chopped white chocolate 250 ml
Topping
1 cup whipping cream 250 ml
2 tbsp icing sugar, sifted 25 ml
2 tbsp orange liqueur 25 ml
4 cups fresh berries 1 l
Fresh edible flowers

Method

1 Preheat oven to 250F(120C). Outline a 12 inch(30 cm) circle on parchment paper and place on an upside-down baking sheet.
2 Beat egg whites until light. Add sugar gradually and beat until firm. Beat in vinegar and vanilla. Fold in chocolate.
3 Spread meringue mixture onto the circle. Bake for 1-1/2 to 2 hours or until outside is crisp and barely beginning to color, if at all. Remove from oven and cool. (Freeze if not using immediately.)
4 Whip cream until light and beat in icing sugar, vanilla and orange liqueur.
5 Just before serving, place meringue on a large flat platter. Spread cream mixture over meringue. Top with berries and scatter with flowers. Serve immediately.

ART

Visit the Modigliani exhibit (AGO)



Terry Fox should have been voted The Greatest Canadian.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The parking-spot pull-through
You see the spot, you pull your car in. Then you see the pull-through opportunity. The spot in front of you, usually already occupied by someone who parked facing you, is open. It's not just sensible logistically to go right through and park facing out. It's plain good karma. A sign of good things to come.

The empty subway car
At 8:05 on most weekday mornings, a brand new subway car is launched from Davisville station. If I am lucky, I am waiting at Summerhill station three minutes later to reap the benefits, and not have to use a crow bar to get in the car as I usually do. This, like the aforementioned parking spot is a sign of good things to come. (As in Curious Incident, "Brown things are intolerable, while orange things are good. If he sees five red cars on his way to school, it becomes a Super Good Day (the emphasis is his), or, alternately, it could be a Black Day.")

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, out on DVD
Some people kind of hated this movie, citing its lack of sexual chemistry or disappointing ending, but those in an accepting and well-fed state of mind might just find it inspirational, insightful, and pretty. Plus, Jim Carrey's face looks almost normal for full minutes at a stretch. Beck's concluding song is beautiful.

The Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA
Startling by day, Santiago Calatrava's new searingly white, 217-foot "sundial" bridge is positively, gorgeously alien at night, with its glass, granite, and steel all glowing up in spotlights. There is also a full bar.


Edamame
Green vegetable soybean. Comes either in or out of the husk. Boil, salt, enjoy.

Hot tea with honey
Any type will do, but what you have is a spoon, some honey, and hot tea. The real deal is, it's a double delight: not just that honey is a fine, fine additive, but that the spoon used to stir the honey is removed with the slightest layer of residual sugar, and that Darjeeling-basted sweetness is pert near joyous. And did you read that article about local honey being good for allergies? Seems legit.

Not moving
Because have you ever had to pack your stuff? As if there were ever a more obvious recommendation.

Small pads of paper, maybe 4 inches by 4 inches
Lots of times, there are things I want to write down. These do the trick. I suggest using the categories Contact, Do, and Buy to segment your lists.

Many hours of daylight
I'm really looking forward to that. Maybe having a home in each hemisphere might be a champion idea.

Sunday NFL Football
I never appreciated it until I moved to Ontario.


Hang On Little Tomato by Pink Martini
Intoxicating songs of romance in French, Italian, Japanese, Croatian, Spanish, and English. As passionate as a thunderstorm. As precise and delicate as a porcelain teacup. China Forbes's voice is the audio equivalent of honey.

PS: Today is my mom's birthday

BOOKS

to read:

The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Norton; 567 pages; $10
A surprise bestseller of the year. Not only does the report provide an authoritative and well-written account of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, but it also offers wise words on the need for joined-up thinking in the West about how to win the war against radical Islamism.

Snow. By Orhan Pamuk. Knopf; 448 pages; $26. Faber and Faber
A novel about the tensions between Turkey’s urban, secularist elite and their long-derided Islamist opponents. By the leading interpreter of Turkish society to the western world, it deals with such familiar Pamuk themes as faith, identity and betrayal.

The Master. By Colm Toibin. Scribner; 352 pages; $25.
In this novel, short-listed for the Man Booker prize, the author insinuates himself under the skin of Henry James, covering not only the known episodes in the literary lion’s life, but also imagining the darker corners. One of a handful of recent novels that have to do with James, Mr Toibin’s portrayal of innocence, shyness and even wisdom confirms him as a master craftsman.

Chronicles: Volume One. By Bob Dylan. Simon & Schuster; 304 pages; $24
It is the best of books, it is the worst of books. The first volume of Bob Dylan’s projected autobiography begins and ends with a fascinating musician in a cold New York of the 1960s. The middle, however, drags with the musings of a self-important middle-aged man.

The Plot Against America. By Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin; 400 pages; $26.
A novel about what happens to one Jewish family—the Roths of Newark, indeed—when America’s welcome is gradually rescinded. The book imagines a nasty turn in American politics in the 1930s, when Charles Lindbergh, an aviator with strong Nazi sympathies, wins the presidential election on an isolationist ticket. An extraordinary description of how history can encroach upon ordinary lives.

In Tasmania. By Nicholas Shakespeare. The Harvill Press; 320 pages
For many people, Tasmania is an island of the imagination, distant and alluring. Nicholas Shakespeare weaves a cast of unlikely characters into 200 years of Tasmanian history.

BOOKS

The electrifying opening of James Frey's debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then 23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises "he will be dead within a few days" if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting "The Fury" head on:

I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.

One of the more harrowing sections is when Frey submits to major dental surgery without the benefit of anesthesia or painkillers (he fights the mind-blowing waves of "bayonet" pain by digging his fingers into two old tennis balls until his nails crack). His fellow patients include a damaged crack addict with whom Frey wades into an ill-fated relationship, a federal judge, a former championship boxer, and a mobster (who, upon his release, throws a hilarious surf-and-turf bacchanal, complete with pay-per-view boxing). In the book's epilogue, when Frey ticks off a terse update on everyone, you can almost hear the Jim Carroll Band's brutal survivor's lament "People Who Died" kicking in on the soundtrack of the inevitable film adaptation.

The rage-fueled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the surreal experience. The book could have benefited from being a bit leaner. Nearly 400 pages is a long time to spend under Frey's influence, and the stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut.

PHOTOGRAPHY IN TORONTO


OCAD


CN Tower glass floor


CN Tower, blue sky, airplane


TTC streetcar

MISCELLANEOUS

FAMILY, CARTOONS, NOSTALGIA, HUMOUR

THE COMFORT ZONE: Growing up with Charlie Brown
by JONATHAN FRANZEN


In May, 1970, a few nights after the Kent State shootings, my father and my brother Tom, who was nineteen, started fighting. They weren’t fighting about the Vietnam War, which both of them opposed. The fight was probably about a lot of different things at once. But the immediate issue was Tom’s summer job. He was a good artist, with a meticulous nature, and my father had encouraged him (you could even say forced him) to choose a college from a short list of schools with strong programs in architecture. Tom had deliberately chosen the most distant of these schools, Rice University, and he had just returned from his second year in Houston, where his adventures in late-sixties youth culture were pushing him toward majoring in film studies, not architecture. My father, however, had found him a plum summer job with Sverdrup & Parcel, the big engineering firm in St. Louis, whose senior partner, General Leif Sverdrup, had been a United States Army Corps of Engineers hero in the Philippines. It couldn’t have been easy for my father, who was shy and morbidly principled, to pull the requisite strings at Sverdrup. But the office gestalt was hawkish and buzz-cut and generally inimical to bell-bottomed, lefty film-studies majors; and Tom didn’t want to be there.

Up in the bedroom that he and I shared, the windows were open and the air had the stuffy wooden-house smell that came out every spring. I preferred the make-believe no-smell of air-conditioning, but my mother, whose subjective experience of temperature was notably consistent with low gas and electric bills, claimed to be a devotee of “fresh air,” and the windows often stayed open until Memorial Day.

On my night table was the “Peanuts Treasury,” a large, thick hardcover compilation of daily and Sunday funnies by Charles M. Schulz. My mother had given it to me the previous Christmas, and I’d been rereading it at bedtime ever since. Like most of the nation’s ten-year-olds, I had an intense, private relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a solitary not-animal animal who lived among larger creatures of a different species, which was more or less my feeling in my own house. My brothers, who are nine and twelve years older than I, were less like siblings than like an extra, fun pair of quasi-parents. Although I had friends and was a Cub Scout in good standing, I spent a lot of time alone with talking animals. I was an obsessive rereader of A. A. Milne and the Narnia and Doctor Dolittle novels, and my involvement with my collection of stuffed animals was on the verge of becoming age-inappropriate. It was another point of kinship with Snoopy that he, too, liked animal games. He impersonated tigers and vultures and mountain lions, sharks, sea monsters, pythons, cows, piranhas, penguins, and vampire bats. He was the perfect sunny egoist, starring in his ridiculous fantasies and basking in everyone’s attention. In a cartoon strip full of children, the dog was the character I recognized as a child.

Tom and my father had been talking in the living room when I went up to bed. Now, at some late and even stuffier hour, after I’d put aside the “Peanuts Treasury” and fallen asleep, Tom burst into our bedroom. He was shouting with harsh sarcasm. “You’ll get over it! You’ll forget about me! It’ll be so much easier! You’ll get over it!”

My father was offstage somewhere, making large abstract sounds. My mother was right behind Tom, sobbing at his shoulder, begging him to stop, to stop. He was pulling open dresser drawers, repacking bags he’d only recently unpacked. “You think you want me here,” he said, “but you’ll get over it.”

What about me? my mother pleaded. What about Jon?

“You’ll get over it!”

I was a small and fundamentally ridiculous person. Even if I’d dared sit up in bed, what could I have said? “Excuse me, I’m trying to sleep”? I lay still and followed the action through my eyelashes. There were further dramatic comings and goings, through some of which I may in fact have slept. Finally I heard Tom’s feet pounding down the stairs and my mother’s terrible cries, now nearly shrieks, receding after him: “Tom! Tom! Tom! Please! Tom!” And then the front door slammed.

Things like this had never happened in our house. The worst fight I’d ever witnessed was between Tom and our older brother, Bob, on the subject of Frank Zappa, whose music Tom admired and Bob one day dismissed with such patronizing disdain that Tom began to sneer at Bob’s own favorite group, the Supremes, which led to bitter hostilities. But a scene of real wailing and doors slamming in the night was completely off the map. When I woke up the next morning, the memory of it already felt decades-old and semi-dreamlike and unmentionable.

My father had left for work, and my mother served me breakfast without comment. The food on the table, the jingles on the radio, and the walk to school all were unremarkable; and yet everything about the day was soaked in dread. At school that week, in Miss Niblack’s class, we were rehearsing our fifth-grade play. The script, which I’d written, had a large number of bit parts and one very generous role that I’d created with my own memorization abilities in mind. The action took place on a boat, involved a taciturn villain named Mr. Scuba, and lacked the most rudimentary comedy, point, or moral. Not even I, who got to do most of the talking, enjoyed being in it. Its badness—my responsibility for its badness—became part of the day’s general dread.

There was something dreadful about springtime itself, the way plants and animals lost control, the “Lord of the Flies” buzzing, the heat indoors. After school, instead of staying outside to play, I followed my dread home and cornered my mother in our dining room. I asked her about my upcoming class performance. Would Dad be in town for it? What about Bob? Would he be home from college yet? And what about Tom? Would Tom be there, too? This was quite plausibly an innocent line of questioning—I was a small glutton for attention, forever turning conversations to the subject of myself—and, for a while, my mother gave me plausibly innocent answers. Then she slumped into a chair, put her face in her hands, and began to weep.

“Didn’t you hear anything last night?” she said.

“No.”

“You didn’t hear Tom and Dad shouting? You didn’t hear doors slamming?”

“No!”

She gathered me in her arms, which was probably the main thing I’d been dreading. I stood there stiffly while she hugged me. “Tom and Dad had a terrible fight,” she said. “After you went to bed. They had a terrible fight, and Tom got his things and left the house, and we don’t know where he went.”

“Oh.”

“I thought we’d hear from him today, but he hasn’t called, and I’m frantic, not knowing where he is. I’m just frantic!”

I squirmed a little in her grip.

“But this has nothing to do with you,” she said. “It’s between him and Dad and has nothing to do with you. I’m sure Tom’s sorry he won’t be here to see your play. Or maybe, who knows, he’ll be back by Friday and he will see it.”

“O.K.”

“But I don’t want you telling anyone he’s gone until we know where he is. Will you agree not to tell anyone?”

“O.K.,” I said, breaking free of her. “Can we turn the air-conditioning on?”

I was unaware of it, but an epidemic had broken out across the country. Late adolescents in suburbs like ours had suddenly gone berserk, running away to other cities to have sex and not attend college, ingesting every substance they could get their hands on, not just clashing with their parents but rejecting and annihilating everything about them. For a while, the parents were so frightened and so mystified and so ashamed that each family, especially mine, quarantined itself and suffered in isolation.

When I went upstairs, my bedroom felt like an overwarm sickroom. The clearest remaining vestige of Tom was the “Don’t Look Back” poster that he’d taped to a flank of his dresser where Bob Dylan’s psychedelic hair style wouldn’t always be catching my mother’s censorious eye. Tom’s bed, neatly made, was the bed of a kid carried off by an epidemic.



In that unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape, Charles Schulz’s work was almost uniquely beloved. Fifty-five million Americans had seen “A Charlie Brown Christmas” the previous December, for a Nielsen share of better than fifty per cent. The musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” was in its second sold-out year on Broadway. The astronauts of Apollo X, in their dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing, had christened their orbiter and landing vehicle Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Newspapers carrying “Peanuts” reached more than a hundred and fifty million readers, “Peanuts” collections were all over the best-seller lists, and if my own friends were any indication there was hardly a kid’s bedroom in America without a “Peanuts” wastebasket or “Peanuts” bedsheets or a “Peanuts” gift book. Schulz, by a luxurious margin, was the most famous living artist on the planet.

To the countercultural mind, a begoggled beagle piloting a doghouse and getting shot down by the Red Baron was akin to Yossarian paddling a dinghy to Sweden. The strip’s square panels were the only square thing about it. Wouldn’t the country be better off listening to Linus Van Pelt than Robert McNamara? This was the era of flower children, not flower adults. But the strip appealed to older Americans as well. It was unfailingly inoffensive (Snoopy never lifted a leg) and was set in a safe, attractive suburb where the kids, except for Pigpen, whose image Ron McKernan of the Grateful Dead pointedly embraced, were clean and well spoken and conservatively dressed. Hippies and astronauts, the Pentagon and the antiwar movement, the rejecting kids and the rejected grownups were all of one mind here.

An exception was my own household. As far as I know, my father never in his life read a comic strip, and my mother’s interest in the funnies was limited to a single-panel feature called “The Girls,” whose generic middle-aged matrons, with their weight problems and stinginess and poor driving skills and weakness for department-store bargains, she found just endlessly amusing.

I didn’t buy comic books, or even Mad magazine, but I worshipped at the altars of Warner Bros. cartoons and the funnies section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I read the section’s black-and-white page first, skipping the dramatic features like “Steve Roper” and “Juliet Jones” and glancing at “Li’l Abner” only to satisfy myself that it was still trashy and repellent. On the full-color back page I read the strips strictly in reverse order of preference, doing my best to be amused by Dagwood Bumstead’s midnight snacks and struggling to ignore the fact that Tiger and Punkinhead were the kind of messy, unreflective kids I disliked in real life, before treating myself to my favorite strip, “B.C.” The strip, by Johnny Hart, was caveman humor. Hart wrung hundreds of gags from the friendship between a flightless bird and a long-suffering tortoise who was constantly attempting unturtlish feats of agility and flexibility. Debts were always paid in clams; dinner was always roast leg of something. When I was done with “B.C.,” I was done with the paper.

The comics in St. Louis’s other paper, the Globe-Democrat, which my parents didn’t take, seemed bleak and foreign to me. “Broom Hilda” and “Animal Crackers” and “The Family Circus” were off-putting in the manner of the kid whose partially visible underpants, which had the name cuttair hand-markered on the waistband, I’d stared at throughout my family’s tour of the Canadian parliament. Although “The Family Circus” was resolutely unfunny, its panels clearly were based on some actual family’s life and were aimed at an audience that recognized this life, which compelled me to posit an entire subspecies of humanity that found “The Family Circus” hilarious.

I knew very well, of course, why the Globe-Democrat’s funnies were so lame: the paper that carried “Peanuts” didn’t need any other good strips. Indeed, I would have swapped the entire Post-Dispatch for a daily dose of Schulz. Only “Peanuts,” the strip we didn’t get, dealt with stuff that really mattered. I didn’t for a minute believe that the children in “Peanuts” were really children—they were so much more emphatic and cartoonishly real than anybody in my own neighborhood—but I nevertheless took their stories to be dispatches from a universe of childhood that was somehow more substantial and convincing than my own. Instead of playing kickball and foursquare, the way my friends and I did, the kids in “Peanuts” had real baseball teams, real football equipment, real fistfights. Their interactions with Snoopy were far richer than the chasings and bitings that constituted my own relationships with neighborhood dogs. Minor but incredible disasters, often involving new vocabulary words, befell them daily. Lucy was “blackballed from the Bluebirds.” She knocked Charlie Brown’s croquet ball so far that he had to call the other players from a phone booth. She gave Charlie Brown a signed document in which she swore not to pull the football away when he tried to kick it, but the “peculiar thing about this document,” as she observed in the final frame, was that “it was never notarized.” When Lucy smashed the bust of Beethoven on Schroeder’s toy piano, it struck me as odd and funny that Schroeder had a closet full of identical replacement busts, but I accepted it as humanly possible, because Schulz had drawn it.

To the “Peanuts Treasury” I soon added two other equally strong hardcover collections, “Peanuts Revisited” and “Peanuts Classics.” A well-meaning relative once also gave me a copy of Robert Short’s national best-seller, “The Gospel According to Peanuts,” but it couldn’t have interested me less. “Peanuts” wasn’t a portal to the Gospel. It was my gospel.

Chapter 1, verses 1-4, of what I knew about disillusionment: Charlie Brown passes the house of the Little Red-Haired Girl, the object of his eternal fruitless longing. He sits down with Snoopy and says, “I wish I had two ponies.” He imagines offering one of the ponies to the Little Red-Haired Girl, riding out into the countryside with her, and sitting down with her beneath a tree. Suddenly, he’s scowling at Snoopy and asking, “Why aren’t you two ponies?” Snoopy, rolling his eyes, thinks, “I knew we’d get around to that.”

Or Chapter 1, verses 26-32, of what I knew about the mysteries of etiquette: Linus is showing off his new wristwatch to everyone in the neighborhood. “New watch!” he says proudly to Snoopy, who, after a hesitation, licks it. Linus’s hair stands on end. “you licked my watch!” he cries. “It’ll rust! It’ll turn green! He’s ruined it!” Snoopy is left looking mildly puzzled and thinking, “I thought it would have been impolite not to taste it.”

Or Chapter 2, verses 6-12, of what I knew about fiction: Linus is annoying Lucy, wheedling and pleading with her to read him a story. To shut him up, she grabs a book, randomly opens it, and says, “A man was born, he lived and he died. The End!” She tosses the book aside, and Linus picks it up reverently. “What a fascinating account,” he says. “It almost makes you wish you had known the fellow.”

The perfect silliness of stuff like this, the koanlike inscrutability, entranced me even when I was ten. But many of the more elaborate sequences, especially the ones about Charlie Brown’s humiliation and loneliness, made only a generic impression on me. In a classroom spelling bee that Charlie Brown has been looking forward to, the first word he’s asked to spell is “maze.” With a complacent smile, he produces “M-A-Y-S.” The class screams with laughter. He returns to his seat and presses his face into his desktop, and when his teacher asks him what’s wrong he yells at her and ends up in the principal’s office. “Peanuts” was steeped in Schulz’s awareness that for every winner in a competition there has to be a loser, if not twenty losers, or two thousand, but I personally enjoyed winning and couldn’t see why so much fuss was made about the losers.

In the spring of 1970, Miss Niblack’s class was studying homonyms to prepare for what she called the Homonym Spelldown. I did some desultory homonym drilling with my mother, rattling off “sleigh” for “slay” and “slough” for “slew” the way other kids roped softballs into center field. To me, the only halfway interesting question about the Spelldown was who was going to come in second. A new kid had joined our class that year, a shrimpy black-haired striver, Chris Toczko, who had it in his head that he and I were academic rivals. I was a nice enough little boy as long as you didn’t compete on my turf. Toczko was annoyingly unaware that I, not he, by natural right, was the best student in the class. On the day of the Spelldown, he actually taunted me. He said he’d done a lot of studying and he was going to beat me! I looked down at the little pest and did not know what to say. I evidently mattered a lot more to him than he did to me.

For the Spelldown, we all stood by the blackboard, Miss Niblack calling out one half of a pair of homonyms and my classmates sitting down as soon as they had failed. Toczko was pale and trembling, but he knew his homonyms. He was the last kid standing, besides me, when Miss Niblack called out the word “liar.” Toczko trembled and essayed, “L . . . I . . .” And I could see that I had beaten him. I waited impatiently while, with considerable anguish, he extracted two more letters from his marrow: “E . . . R?”

“I’m sorry, Chris, that’s not a word,” Miss Niblack said.

With a sharp laugh of triumph, not even waiting for Toczko to sit down, I stepped forward and sang out, “L-Y-R-E! Lyre. It’s a stringed instrument.”

I hadn’t really doubted that I would win, but Toczko had got to me with his taunting, and my blood was up. I was the last person in class to realize that Toczko was having a meltdown. His face turned red and he began to cry, insisting angrily that “lier”was a word, it was a word.

I didn’t care if it was a word or not. I knew my rights. Toczko’s tears disturbed and disappointed me, as I made quite clear by fetching the classroom dictionary and showing him that “lier” wasn’t in it. This was how both Toczko and I ended up in the principal’s office.

I’d never been sent down before. I was interested to learn that the principal, Mr. Barnett, had a Webster’s International Unabridged in his office. Toczko, who barely outweighed the dictionary, used two hands to open it and to roll back the pages to the “L” words. I stood at his shoulder and saw where his tiny, trembling index finger was pointing: lier, n., one that lies (as in ambush). Mr. Barnett immediately declared us co-winners of the Spelldown—a compromise that didn’t seem quite fair to me, since I would surely have murdered Toczko if we’d gone another round. But his outburst had spooked me, and I decided it might be O.K., for once, to let somebody else win.

A few months after the Homonym Spelldown, just after summer vacation started, Toczko ran out into Grant Road and was killed by a car. What little I knew then about the world’s badness I knew mainly from a camping trip, some years earlier, when I’d dropped a frog into a campfire and watched it shrivel and roll down the flat side of a log. My memory of that shrivelling and rolling was sui generis, distinct from my other memories. It was like a nagging, sick-making atom of rebuke in me. I felt similarly rebuked now when my mother, who knew nothing of Toczko’s rivalry with me, told me that he was dead. She was weeping as she’d wept over Tom’s disappearance some weeks earlier. She sat me down and made me write a letter of condolence to Toczko’s mother. I was very much unaccustomed to considering the interior states of people other than myself, but it was impossible not to consider Mrs. Toczko’s. Though I never met her, in the ensuing weeks I pictured her suffering so incessantly and vividly that I could almost see her: a tiny, trim, dark-haired woman who cried the way her son did.



"Everything I do makes me feel guilty,” says Charlie Brown. He’s at the beach, and he has just thrown a pebble into the water, and Linus has commented, “Nice going. . . . It took that stone four thousand years to get to shore, and now you’ve thrown it back.”

I felt guilty about Toczko. I felt guilty about the little frog. I felt guilty about shunning my mother’s hugs when she seemed to need them most. I felt guilty about the washcloths at the bottom of the stack in the linen closet, the older, thinner washcloths that we seldom used. I felt guilty for preferring my best shooter marbles, a solid-red agate and a solid-yellow agate, my king and my queen, to marbles farther down my rigid marble hierarchy. I felt guilty about the board games that I didn’t like to play—Uncle Wiggily, U.S. Presidential Elections, Game of the States—and sometimes, when my friends weren’t around, I opened the boxes and examined the pieces in the hope of making the games feel less forgotten. I felt guilty about neglecting the stiff-limbed, scratchy-pelted Mr. Bear, who had no voice and didn’t mix well with my other stuffed animals. To avoid feeling guilty about them, too, I slept with one of them per night, according to a strict weekly schedule.

We laugh at dachshunds for humping our legs, but our own species is even more self-centered in its imaginings. There’s no object so Other that it can’t be anthropomorphized and shanghaied into conversation with us. Some objects are more amenable than others, however. The trouble with Mr. Bear was that he was more realistically bearlike than the other animals. He had a distinct, stern, feral persona; unlike our faceless washcloths, he was assertively Other. It was no wonder I couldn’t speak through him. An old shoe is easier to invest with comic personality than is, say, a photograph of Cary Grant. The blanker the slate, the more easily we can fill it with our own image.

Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists—and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.

Scott McCloud, in his cartoon treatise “Understanding Comics,” argues that the image you have of yourself when you’re conversing is very different from your image of the person you’re conversing with. Your interlocutor may produce universal smiles and universal frowns, and they may help you to identify with him emotionally, but he also has a particular nose and particular skin and particular hair that continually remind you that he’s an Other. The image you have of your own face, by contrast, is highly cartoonish. When you feel yourself smile, you imagine a cartoon of smiling, not the complete skin-and-nose-and-hair package. It’s precisely the simplicity and universality of cartoon faces, the absence of Otherly particulars, that invite us to love them as we love ourselves. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and, simplest of all—barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line—Charlie Brown.



Schulz only ever wanted to be a cartoonist. He was born in St. Paul in 1922, the only child of a German father and a mother of Norwegian extraction. As an infant, he was nicknamed Sparky, after a horse in the then popular comic strip “Barney Google.” His father, who, like Charlie Brown’s father, was a barber, bought six different newspapers on the weekend and read all the era’s comics with his son. Schulz skipped a grade in elementary school and was the least mature kid in every class after that. Much of the existing Schulzian literature dwells on the Charlie Brownish traumas in his early life: his skinniness and pimples, his unpopularity with girls at school, the inexplicable rejection of a batch of his drawings by his high-school yearbook, and, some years later, the rejection of his marriage proposal by the real-life Little Red-Haired Girl, Donna Mae Johnson. Schulz himself spoke of his youth in a tone close to anger. “It took me a long time to become a human being,” he told nemo magazine in 1987.

I was regarded by many as kind of sissyfied, which I resented because I really was not a sissy. I was not a tough guy, but . . . I was good at any sport where you threw things, or hit them, or caught them, or something like that. I hated things like swimming and tumbling and those kinds of things, so I was really not a sissy. [But] the coaches were so intolerant and there was no program for all of us. So I never regarded myself as being much and I never regarded myself as being good looking and I never had a date in high school, because I thought, who’d want to date me? So I didn’t bother.

Schulz “didn’t bother” going to art school, either—it would only have discouraged him, he said, to be around people who could draw better than he could. You could see a lack of confidence here. You could also see a kid who knew how to protect himself.

On the eve of Schulz’s induction into the Army, his mother died of cancer. She was forty-eight and had suffered greatly, and Schulz later described the loss as an emotional catastrophe from which he almost did not recover. During basic training, he was depressed, withdrawn, and grieving. In the long run, though, the Army was good for him. He went into the service, he recalled later, as “a nothing person” and came out as a staff sergeant in charge of a machine-gun squadron. “I thought, By golly, if that isn’t a man, I don’t know what is,” he said. “And I felt good about myself and that lasted about eight minutes, and then I went back to where I am now.” After the war, Schulz returned to his childhood neighborhood, lived with his father, became intensely involved in a Christian youth group, and learned to draw kids. For the rest of his life, he virtually never drew adults. He avoided adult vices—didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear—and, in his work, he spent more and more time in the imagined yards and sandlots of his childhood. But the world of “Peanuts” remained a deeply motherless place. Charlie Brown’s dog may (or may not) cheer him up after a day of failures; his mother never does.

Although Schulz had been a social victim as a child, he’d also had the undivided attention of two loving parents. All his life, he was a prickly Minnesotan mixture of disabling inhibition and rugged self-confidence. In high school, after another student illustrated an essay with a watercolor drawing, Schulz was surprised when a teacher asked him why he hadn’t done some illustrations himself. He didn’t think it was fair to get academic credit for a talent that most kids didn’t have. He never thought it was fair to draw caricatures. (“If somebody has a big nose,” he said, “I’m sure that they regret the fact they have a big nose and who am I to point it out in gross caricature?”) In later decades, when he had enormous bargaining power, he was reluctant to demand a larger or more flexible layout for “Peanuts,” because he didn’t think it was fair to the papers that had been his loyal customers. His resentment of the name “Peanuts,” which his editors had given the strip in 1950, was still fresh in the eighties, when he was one of the ten highest-paid entertainers in America (behind Bill Cosby, ahead of Michael Jackson). “They didn’t know when I walked in there that here was a fanatic,” he told nemo. “Here was a kid totally dedicated to what he was going to do. And to label then something that was going to be a life’s work with a name like ‘Peanuts’ was really insulting.” To the suggestion that thirty-seven years might have softened the insult, Schulz said, “No, no. I hold a grudge, boy.”

I never heard my father tell a joke. Sometimes he reminisced about a business colleague who ordered a “Scotch and Coke” and a “flander” fillet in a Dallas diner in July, and he could smile at his own embarrassments, his impolitic remarks at the office and his foolish mistakes on home-improvement projects, but there wasn’t a silly bone in his body. He responded to other people’s jokes with a wince or a grimace. As a boy, I told him a story I’d made up about a trash-hauling company cited for “fragrant violations.” He shook his head, stone-faced, and said, “Not plausible.”

In another archetypal “Peanuts” strip, Violet and Patty are abusing Charlie Brown in vicious stereo: “go on home! we don’t want you around here!” As he trudges away with his eyes on the ground, Violet remarks, “It’s a strange thing about Charlie Brown. You almost never see him laugh.”

My father only ever wanted not to be a child anymore. His parents were a pair of nineteenth-century Scandinavians caught up in a Hobbesian struggle to prevail in the swamps of north-central Minnesota. His popular, charismatic older brother drowned in a hunting accident when he was still a young man. His nutty and pretty and spoiled younger sister had an only daughter who died in a one-car accident when she was twenty-two. My father’s parents also died in a one-car accident, but only after regaling him with prohibitions, demands, and criticisms for fifty years. He never said a harsh word about them. He never said a nice word, either.

The few childhood stories he told were about his dog, Spider, and his gang of friends in the invitingly named little town, Palisade, that his father and uncles had constructed among the swamps. The local high school was eight miles from Palisade. To attend, my father lived in a boarding house for a year and later commuted in his father’s Model A. He was a social cipher, invisible after school. The most popular girl in his class, Romelle Erickson, was expected to be the valedictorian, and the school’s “social crowd” was “shocked,” my father told me many times, when it turned out that “the country boy,” “Earl Who,” had claimed the title.

When he registered at the University of Minnesota, in 1933, his father went with him and announced, at the head of the registration line, “He’s going to be a civil engineer.” For the rest of his life, my father was restless. He was studying philosophy at night school when he met my mother, and it took her four years to persuade him to have children. In his thirties, he agonized about whether to study medicine; in his forties, he was offered a partnership in a contracting firm which he almost dared to accept; in his fifties and sixties, he admonished me not to waste my life working for a corporation. In the end, though, he spent fifty years doing exactly what his father had told him to do.

My mother called him “oversensitive.” She meant that it was easy to hurt his feelings, but the sensitivity was physical as well. When he was young, a doctor gave him a pinprick test that showed him to be allergic to “almost everything,” including wheat, milk, and tomatoes. A different doctor, whose office was at the top of five long flights of stairs, greeted him with a blood-pressure test and immediately declared him unfit to fight the Nazis. Or so my father told me, with a shrugging gesture and an odd smile (as if to say, “What could I do?”), when I asked him why he hadn’t been in the war. Even as a teen-ager, I sensed that his social awkwardness and sensitivities had been aggravated by not serving. He came from a family of pacifist Swedes, however, and was very happy not to be a soldier. He was happy that my brothers had college deferments and good luck with the lottery. Among his patriotic colleagues and the war-vet husbands of my mother’s friends, he was such an outlier on the subject of Vietnam that he didn’t dare talk about it. At home, in private, he aggressively declared that, if Tom had drawn a bad number, he personally would have driven him to Canada.

Tom was a second son in the mold of my father. He got poison ivy so bad it was like measles. He had a mid-October birthday and was perennially the youngest kid in his classes. On his only date in high school, he was so nervous that he forgot his baseball tickets and left the car idling in the street while he ran back inside; the car rolled down the hill, punched through an asphalt curb, and cleared two levels of a terraced garden before coming to rest on a neighbor’s front lawn.

To me, it simply added to Tom’s mystique that the car was not only still drivable but entirely undamaged. Neither he nor Bob could do any wrong in my eyes. They were expert whistlers and chess players, phenomenal wielders of tools and pencils, sole suppliers of whatever anecdotes and cultural data I was able to impress my friends with. In the margins of Tom’s school copy of “A Portrait of the Artist,” he drew a two-hundred-page riffle-animation of a stick-figure pole-vaulter clearing a hurdle, landing on his head, and being carted away on a stretcher by stick-figure E.M.S. personnel; this seemed to me a masterwork of filmic art and science. But my father had told Tom: “You’d make a good architect, here are three schools to choose from.” He said: “You’re going to work for Sverdrup.”

Tom was gone for five days before we heard from him. His call came on a Sunday after church. We were sitting on the screen porch, and my mother ran the length of the house to answer the phone. She sounded so ecstatic with relief I felt embarrassed for her. Tom had hitchhiked back to Houston and was doing deep-fry at a Church’s Fried Chicken, hoping to save enough money to join his best friend in Colorado. My mother kept asking him when he might come home, assuring him that he was welcome and that he wouldn’t have to work at Sverdrup; but there was something toxic about us now which Tom obviously wanted nothing to do with.

Charles Schulz was the best comic-strip artist who ever lived. When “Peanuts” débuted, in October, 1950 (the same month Tom was born), the funny pages were full of musty holdovers from the thirties and forties. Even with the strip’s strongest precursors, George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” and Elzie Segar’s “Popeye,” you were aware of the severe constraints under which newspaper comics operated. The faces of Herriman’s characters were too small to display more than rudimentary emotion, and so the burden of humor and sympathy came to rest on Herriman’s language; his work read more like comic fable than like funny drawing. Popeye’s face was proportionately larger than Krazy Kat’s, but he was such a florid caricature that much of Segar’s expressive budget was spent on nondiscretionary items, like Popeye’s distended jaw and oversized nose; these were good jokes, but the same jokes every time. The very first “Peanuts” strip, by contrast, was all white space and big funny faces. It invited you right in. The minor character Shermy was speaking in neat letters and clear diction: “Here comes ol’ Charlie Brown! Good ol’ Charlie Brown . . . Yes, sir! Good ol’ Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!”

This first strip and the seven hundred and fifty-nine that immediately followed it have recently been published, complete and fully indexed, in a handsome volume from Fantagraphics Books. (This is the first in a series of twentyfive uniform volumes that will reproduce Schulz’s entire daily oeuvre.) Even in Schulz’s relatively primitive early work, you can appreciate what a breakthrough he made in drawing characters with large, visually uncluttered heads. Long limbs and big landscapes and fully articulated facial features—adult life, in short—were unaffordable luxuries. By dispensing with them, and by jumping from a funnies world of five or ten facial expressions into a world of fifty or a hundred, Schulz introduced a new informational dimension to the newspaper strip.

Although he later became famous for putting words like “depressed” and “inner tensions” and “emotional outlets” in the mouths of little kids, only a tiny percentage of his strips were actually drawn in the mock-psychological vein. His most important innovations were visual—he was all about drawing funny—and for most of my life as a fan I was curiously unconscious of this fact. In my imagination, “Peanuts” was a narrative, a collection of locales and scenes and sequences. And, certainly, some comic strips do fit this description. Mike Doonesbury, for example, can be translated into words with minimal loss of information. Garry Trudeau is essentially a social novelist, his topical satire and intricate family dynamics and elaborate camera angles all serving to divert attention from the monotony of his comic expression. But Linus Van Pelt consists, first and foremost, of pen strokes. You’ll never really understand him without seeing his hair stand on end. Translation into words inevitably diminishes Linus. As a cartoon, he’s already a perfectly efficient vector of comic intention.

The purpose of a comic strip, Schulz liked to say, was to sell newspapers and to make people laugh. Although the formulation may look self-deprecating at first glance, in fact it is an oath of loyalty. When I. B. Singer, in his Nobel address, declared that the novelist’s first responsibility is to be a storyteller, he didn’t say “mere storyteller,” and Schulz didn’t say “merely make people laugh.” He was loyal to the reader who wanted something funny from the funny pages. Just about anything—protesting against world hunger; getting a laugh out of words like “nooky”; dispensing wisdom; dying—is easier than real comedy.

Schulz never stopped trying to be funny. Around 1970, though, he began to drift away from aggressive humor and into melancholy reverie. There came tedious meanderings in Snoopyland with the unhilarious bird Woodstock and the unamusing beagle Spike. Certain leaden devices, such as Marcie’s insistence on calling Peppermint Patty “sir,” were heavily recycled. By the late eighties, the strip had grown so quiet that younger friends of mine seemed baffled by my fandom. It didn’t help that later “Peanuts” anthologies loyally reprinted so many Spike and Marcie strips. The volumes that properly showcased Schulz’s genius, the three hardcover collections from the sixties, had gone out of print. There were a few critical appreciations, most notably by Umberto Eco, who argued for Schulz’s literary greatness in an essay written in the sixties and reprinted in the eighties (when Eco got famous). But the praise of a “low” genre by an old semiotic soldier in the culture wars couldn’t help carrying an odor of provocation.

Still more harmful to Schulz’s reputation were his own kitschy spinoffs. Even in the sixties, you had to fight through cloying Warm Puppy paraphernalia to reach the comedy; the cuteness levels in latter-day “Peanuts” TV specials tied my toes in knots. What first made “Peanuts” “Peanuts” was cruelty and failure, and yet every “Peanuts” greeting card and tchotchke and blimp had to feature somebody’s sweet, crumpled smile. (You should go out and buy the new Fantagraphics book just to reward the publisher for putting a scowling Charlie Brown on the cover.) Everything about the billion-dollar “Peanuts” industry, which Schulz himself helped create, argued against him as an artist to be taken seriously. Far more than Disney, whose studios were churning out kitsch from the start, Schulz came to seem an icon of art’s corruption by commerce, which sooner or later paints a smiling sales face on everything it touches. The fan who wants to see an artist sees a merchant instead. Why isn’t he two ponies?

It’s hard to repudiate a comic strip, however, when your memories of it are more vivid than your memories of your own life. When Charlie Brown went off to summer camp, I went along in my imagination. I heard him trying to make conversation with the fellow-camper who sat on his bunk and refused to say anything but “Shut up and leave me alone.” I watched when he finally came home again and shouted to Lucy “I’m back!” and Lucy gave him a bored look and said, “Have you been away?”

I went to camp myself, in the summer of 1970. But, aside from an alarming personal-hygiene situation that seemed to have resulted from my peeing in some poison ivy, and which, for several days, I was convinced was either a fatal tumor or puberty, my camp experience paled beside Charlie Brown’s. The best part of it was coming home and seeing Bob’s new yellow Karmann Ghia waiting for me at the Y.M.C.A.

Tom was also home by then. He’d managed to make his way to his friend’s house in Colorado, but the friend’s parents weren’t happy about harboring somebody else’s runaway son, and so they’d sent Tom back to St. Louis. Officially, I was very excited that he was back. In truth, I was embarrassed to be around him. I was afraid that if I referred to his sickness and our quarantine I might trigger a relapse. I wanted to live in a “Peanuts” world where rage was funny and insecurity was lovable. The littlest kid in my “Peanuts” books, Sally Brown, grew older for a while and then hit a glass ceiling. I wanted everyone in my family to get along and nothing to change; but suddenly, after Tom ran away, it was as if the five of us looked around, asked why we should be spending time together, and failed to come up with many good answers.

For the first time, in the months that followed, my parents’ conflicts became audible. My father came home on cool nights to complain about the house’s “chill.” My mother countered that the house wasn’t cold if you were doing housework all day. My father marched into the dining room to adjust the thermostat and dramatically point to its “Comfort Zone,” a pale-blue arc between 72 and 78 degrees. My mother said that she was so hot. And I decided, as always, not to voice my suspicion that the Comfort Zone referred to air-conditioning in the summer rather than heat in the winter. My father set the temperature at seventy-two and retreated to the den, which was situated directly above the furnace. There was a lull, and then big explosions. No matter what corner of the house I hid myself in, I could hear my father bellowing, “leave the god-damned thermostat alone!”

“Earl, I didn’t touch it!”

“You did! Again!”

“I didn’t think I even moved it, I just looked at it, I didn’t mean to change it.”

“Again! You monkeyed with it again! I had it set where I wanted it. And you moved it down to seventy!”

“Well, if I did somehow change it, I’m sure I didn’t mean to. You’d be hot, too, if you worked all day in the kitchen.”

“All I ask at the end of a long day at work is that the temperature be set in the Comfort Zone.”

“Earl, it is so hot in the kitchen. You don’t know, because you’re never in here, but it is so hot.”

“The low end of the Comfort Zone! Not even the middle! The low end! It is not too much to ask!”

I wonder why “cartoonish” remains such a pejorative. It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons. And to become more perfectly a cartoon myself: what a victory that would be.

My father eventually applied technology to the problem of temperature. He bought a space heater to put behind his chair in the dining room, where he was bothered in winter by drafts from the bay window. Like so many of his appliance purchases, the heater was a pathetically cheap little thing, a wattage hog with a stertorous fan and a grinning orange mouth which dimmed the lights and drowned out conversation and produced a burning smell every time it cycled on. When I was in high school, he bought a quieter, more expensive model. One evening, my mother and I started reminiscing about the old model, caricaturing my father’s temperature sensitivities, doing cartoons of the little heater’s faults, the smoke and the buzzing, and my father got mad and left the table. He thought we were ganging up on him. He thought I was being cruel, and I was, but I was also forgiving him.

U2


New York, Nov. 22, 2004

SNL: I will follow surprise

Photos from Times Square

http://www.elevation-tour.com/

SNOW

Buried Alive
By JOAN NAPOLITANO as told to ERIK LUNDEGAARD [NY Times]

Last March, four friends and I decided to go snowshoeing one Sunday because it was supposed to be a bright sunny day. We drove to Barlow Pass in the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. Once we got on the trail, we didn't see any tracks. Nobody had been there since the last snowfall. The trail winds for about three miles through the woods with a 2,500-foot elevation. A pretty steady climb.

I don't see myself as a risk-taker, though I like to do things outdoors that people might think are risky -- like scaling rocks or climbing Mount Rainier. But when you're rock climbing, you're protected by ropes and gear. I like saying I've done dangerous things. But to me snowshoeing is just hiking in winter.

We were heading to Gothic Basin, but after three hours we reached a point where we had to cross an open slope. I don't know a lot about avalanches. I took only one class. It takes years to really know how to read the terrain, but there are certain basics. A dense bunch of trees can hold the snow in place -- not that they helped us that day. The three guys had already crossed the open slope by the time we got there, but Caroline and I decided not to risk it. We retraced our steps and sat down with some trees behind us and ate lunch. Caroline had Kyle's lunch, so we radioed him, and he walked back and joined us.

We were looking across the whole valley. A beautiful panorama. Caroline and I had our backs up-slope, and Kyle was standing taking pictures. He looked up the mountain and said, ''Here comes some small stuff behind you.'' I jumped up and saw these little snowballs coming down. For about a second. Then the whole slope gave way, and I knew we were doomed. I thought, Maybe I can grab this tree, and then I was slammed and found myself going headfirst down the mountain screaming in my head, ''I don't want to die.'' I could see my hands and my sunglasses, bouncing in front of me, but that was it. The snow above me was light blue -- I wasn't buried that deep -- and then my leg slammed into a tree or a rock and I was spun like a rag doll. The rumbling was so loud.

The snow grew heavier and started to encase me. I remembered that in an avalanche you're supposed to swim like you're in the ocean. So I pushed my body up and shot out of the snow. And the sky was so blue, the sun was right there, and I could feel the avalanche slowing down. So I thought: I'm out, I'm safe.

But it picked up speed again. I could feel myself being shifted, and there was nothing I could do. Finally I managed to grab a tree and stop myself. The avalanche flowed around me for about five more seconds before stopping completely. I was facing up-slope. There were ski poles sticking out of the snow at weird angles, and I could see Caroline and Kyle. She was screaming, and he was moaning. Then he passed out. She ran to him on snowshoes. All of our snowshoes stayed on. Despite the fact that mine came off on the trail, they stayed on during the avalanche.

My leg wasn't bloody, but when I tried standing, it gave way. If I moved slowly with no twisting, I could walk. I managed to reach Kyle and Caroline. He was coming around, holding his ribs, and he said, ''Your face is scratched.'' I took a clump of snow and put it against my face, and it came away bloody. When I saw it later, it looked as if I'd been clawed at by some animal.

I was cursing and giving orders. I didn't feel as if I was in shock. I was probably just talking to keep shock away and stay focused on the present. Our backpacks and radios were buried, but Caroline wrote ''ALIVE'' in the snow for the others, and we hurried down. Half an hour later, they caught up to us. They made a splint for my knee by taking apart a hiking pole and helped carry me out. Besides tearing a ligament in my knee, I had also cracked a bone.

When people found out about the accident, the first thing they would ask was ''Was it a big avalanche?'' That just shocked me, because it implied they had no idea of what we had been through. So I'd tell them, ''When you're in an avalanche, they're all big.'' But I guess it wasn't that big, because it didn't kill me. There wasn't enough snow, so it petered out in the end.

For a couple of months, every time I'd think about the avalanche, I'd start crying. That's the way my body coped. The tears were always just below the surface. It was partly the trauma and partly how it left me. Injured. The wilderness has always been my safe place -- the place I'd go to step out of society and process things -- but now the wilderness did this to me.

Sometimes there's a part of me that says: ''Wow, you're pretty tough. You survived an avalanche.'' Then immediately another part of me says, ''Don't you ever brag about this.'' Bragging implies that you actually did something; you set a goal and accomplished it. But surviving had nothing to do with me. It's not as if I could say: ''Watch me. I'll do it again.''

INTERESTING WEBSITES

www.instructoart.com

www.jeffharris.org

www.stereogum.com

www.pitchforkmedia.com

www.oddjobjack.com



www.stylusmagazine.com

www.obriengallery.com/index.html

www.tenbyten.org/10x10.html

"10x10™ ('ten by ten') is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10x10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10x10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

10x10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10x10 takes note and remembers.

Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other.

10x10 runs with no human intervention, autonomously observing what a handful of leading international news sources are saying and showing. 10x10 makes no comment on news media bias, or lack thereof. It has no politics, nor any secret agenda; it simply shows what it finds.

With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it's important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we're lucky, gives us pause to think. If you'd like to learn more about 10x10, you can read how it works."

MUSIC

U2: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb

Halfway through the excellent new U2 album, Bono announces, "I like the sound of my own voice." Well-said, lad; well-said. Ever since U2 started making noise in Dublin several hundred bloody Sundays ago, Bono has grooved to the sound of his own gargantuan rockness. Ego, shmego -- this is one rock-star madman who should never scale down his epic ambitions. As the old Zen proverb goes, you will find no reasonable men on the tops of great mountains, and U2's brilliance is their refusal to be reasonable. U2 were a drag in the 1990s, when they were trying to be cool, ironic hipsters. Feh! Nobody wants a skinny Santa, and for damn sure nobody wants a hipster Bono. We want him over the top, playing with unforgettable fire. We want him to sing in Latin or feed the world or play Jesus to the lepers in his head. We want him to be Bono. Nobody else is even remotely qualified.
U2 bring that old-school, wide-awake fervor to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. The last time we heard from them, All That You Can't Leave Behind, U2 were auditioning for the job of the World's Biggest Rock & Roll Band. They trimmed the Euro-techno pomp, sped up the tempos and let the Edge define the songs with his revitalized guitar. Well, they got the job.

On Atomic Bomb, they're not auditioning anymore. This is grandiose music from grandiose men, sweatlessly confident in the execution of their duties. Hardly any of the eleven songs break the five-minute mark or stray from the punchy formula of All That You Can't Leave Behind. They've gotten over their midcareer anxiety about whether they're cool enough. Now, they just hand it to the Edge and let it rip.

During the course of Atomic Bomb, you will be urged to ponder death ("Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own"), birth ("Original of the Species"), God ("Yahweh"), love ("A Man and a Woman"), war ("Love and Peace or Else") and peace ("City of Blinding Lights"), which barely gives you time to ponder whether the bassist has been listening to Interpol. "Vertigo" sets the pace, a thirty-second ad jingle blown up to three great minutes, with a riff nicked from Sonic Youth's "Dirty Boots." "City of Blinding Lights" begins with a long Edge guitar intro, building into a bittersweet lament. "Yahweh" continues a U2 tradition, the album-closing chitchat with the Lord. It's too long and too slow, but that's part of the tradition.

Like all U2 albums, Atomic Bomb has false steps, experimental bathroom breaks and moments when the lofty ambitions crash into the nearest wall. As America staggers punch-drunk into another four-year moment we can't get out of, it would be a real pleasure if the political tunes had any depth. (How long? How long must we sing this song?) But Bono scores a direct hit on "One Step Closer," an intimate ballad about his father's death from cancer in 2001; "Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own" is the song U2 did at the funeral. When Bono sings, "You're the reason why I have the operas in me," his grief and his grandiosity seem to come from the same place in his heart. It's a reminder that what makes U2 so big isn't really their clever ideas, or even their intelligence -- it's the warmth that all too few rock stars have any idea how to turn into music.



NIRVANA: With the Lights Out

The release of Kurt Cobain's Journals in 2002 may have taught us that nothing is sacred when you're dead, but that doesn't make listening to this exhaustive three-disc compilation of Nirvana ephemera feel any less intrusive. Certain things were just never meant for public consumption -- to wit, the rudimentary introductory recordings on disc one (1987-89), which simply highlight the fact that the most influential rock band of the 1990s began as a sacrilegious altar for Led Zep worship, be it in the form of cruddy "Heartbreaker"/"Moby Dick" covers or promising early originals like "Blandest." But the mid-disc emergence of the signature Cobain voice on the hushed "Clean Up Before She Comes" is startling, and the peak-period demos on disc two (1990-92) show how effortlessly his songwriting could be translated from solo pieces (an acoustic "Sliver") into raging rockers (the blistering rough mix of "Breed").

The most intriguing discoveries, however, are found on disc three (1992-94), which focuses on the post-success Cobain's increasing fascination with suicide -- at least of the commercial variety. Beyond a punishing nine-minute jam on "Scentless Apprentice," sprawling curios like "Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through the Strip" and "The Other Improv" represent Nirvana's most outré excursions, marked by repetitive, Sonic Youthian refrains and cryptic a capella interludes. But the Guided by Voices-esque whimsy of "Do Re Mi" (allegedly Cobain's final composition) shows he was a romantic to the end. And that is, ultimately, With the Lights Out's biggest revelation: for someone who ended his life with a shotgun, Cobain often did his most deadly work with an acoustic guitar.

MUSIC LIST

I Can't Go To Sleep - Wu Tang Clan
Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check - Ol' Dirty Bastard
Boy in the Well - R.E.M.
You've been Loved - Joseph Arthur
Born in the 70's - Ed Harcourt
Monte Carlo - The Verve
Penthouse in the Woods - Scud Mountain Boys
Sometimes you can't make it on your own - U2
Love's in need of love today - Stevie Wonder
Pure bug beauty - Wilco
Such great heights - Postal Service
Free man in Paris - Joni Mitchell
Electric Relaxation - A Tribe Called Quest
Between the bars - Elliott Smith
I Heart Huckabees - Jon Brion
Extraordinary Machine - Fiona Apple
Maps - Yeah yeah yeahs
When things was cheap - Mike Mills
This here - Bobby Timmons

POLITICS AND WAR

Reporting for Duty [New York Magazine]

Who enlists the week U.S. troops invade Fallujah? New York Magazine stopped by the recruiting station in Times Square to find out.

David Chen
22, Construction Worker
Bush or Kerry? Can’t vote, Taiwanese citizen.
Why enlisting: Chen has been trying to get into the armed forces ever since he immigrated two years ago. “If I die, I am asleep and I don’t have to worry about anything. The government takes care of my family. They never have to work again.”

Marc Policastro
25, Electronics Salesman
Bush or Kerry? Didn’t vote, but liked Kerry.
Why enlisting: Policastro comes from a family of vets. “I’m not a fighter, I’m a lover. But I want to have a sense of accomplishment. Instead of being that schmuck walking down the street looking for a $10-an-hour job, you can come back and make $25 an hour.”

Fernando Blanco
30, Club Bouncer
Bush or Kerry? Didn’t vote, but likes Bush.
Why enlisting: “If you’re a Hispanic male between 20 and 30 in New York and you don’t have a college degree, you sell drugs or work in a department store. I just want to get out of the city. Working security here is too dangerous.”

Lukasz Przybylo
24, Civil Engineer
Bush or Kerry? Can’t vote, Polish citizen.
Why enlisting: Joining will speed up Przybylo’s citizenship. “In the real world, my job would be boring. I’d probably be sitting at a computer, designing buildings. This is for myself, for personal satisfaction, for helping the country. It isn’t for Bush.”

Moses Laboy
30, Bar Manager
Bush or Kerry? Nader. “I figured it didn’t matter. We’re not a swing state.”
Why enlisting: His brother is shipping out the day before Thanksgiving, “and no matter whether we have an asshole chief commander, he still needs our support. My parents will be fine with it. My friends are gonna freak.”

MUSIC: U2 INTERVIEW 2004

We are on the Côte d'Azur, at one of those restaurants on the beach, on a balmy summer evening — in all senses of the word. Bono, 44, holds court with a man who would like to build a cathedral for all faiths. U2's drummer Larry Mullen, 43, is tucking into tempura and chips enthusiastically. He's stuck beside a woman who has close links to Tony Blair. Sometimes he despairs of Bono's appetite for the political arena; sometimes they argue about it. Mostly, Bono makes it work out.

You wonder all the time how he manages to straddle between the rock stadium and the politician's ear.What's clear now is that the band of 25 years has survived a thousand tantrums or more and several heart-breaking dramas because of the love and respect they all have for each other. It's a very elegant co-dependency.Adam Clayton, 44, the bass player, is not with us tonight — partly because he lives on the wrong side of Nice and doesn't like to drive in the dark after the laser operation he had on his eyes. And partly, I suspect, because he doesn't torture himself by being around alcoholic beverages. He was so nearly lost to addiction some years ago that he is now careful in the other extreme.

Each member of U2 is a little of an outsider — either because their mothers were lost to them at a young age, as with Bono and Larry, or because, in Adam's case, he was lost to boarding schools. He'd grown up in East Africa. When he arrived in Ireland he felt bad, because although he was the only one in the class who spoke Swahili, he couldn't speak Gaelic. The Edge, 43, the guitarist, had a different kind of displacement. He was born in Wales, moved to Ireland and was cursed by not sounding like he fitted. He's careful now to have an accent that reveals little because of that sense of alienation.

The girlfriend of Ash's lead singer is talking to Bono about clubs in Dublin. He's looking a little distracted, as he's trying to earwig on the Edge's conversation. "What are you talking about Wales for?" he keeps on. Later on he tells me it's his performer's ear: he can hear everything that is going on in the room. More likely he heard his name being mentioned. The Edge was saying how Bono is different from other people, because other people get in a pattern of thinking and he never thinks there are any parameters. That's why he thinks there's nothing wrong with phoning George Bush.

Some Brazilian rhythms are playing. It's past midnight and the restaurant is shutting. It's a short walk along the beach to the twin villas in which the Edge and Bono live, separated only by two swimming pools. People find it odd that they actually live next door to one another. There's not even a fence between them. The problem with the walk across the beach is that it is a stone beach, not a speck of sand in sight, and I am wearing stiletto-heeled mules. Bono offers to carry me. I opt for bare feet. It's painful. I'm almost yelping. Then Bono offers me his shoes.

They are Japanese-inspired flip-flops, and a godsend. Now he is in pain, but he doesn't yelp: he says it's like an intense reflexology.When we get back to his place he puts on U2's new CD, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Bono sings, karaoke-style, along with it. One track begins with the line "Take my shoes", which he sings directly into my ear. The Edge is looking solemn and worried. "Look at him," says Bono. "He's going through all those mixes, assessing it all in his head." Bono sings the line "I know that we don't talk but can you hear me when I siiiiing". It's a weird cry that vibrates into the night after the already-vibrating note from Bono's voice on the album. "I am hitting a note a man of my age shouldn't be hitting," he says. "I don't know what's happened to me. I have a different voice. Where did that come from?"

One theory is that How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb is about dismantling the life and death in 2001 of his father, Bob Hewson, who was a big-time opera fan and a perfect tenor. Since he's gone, Bono walks in a different way; maybe it's his father's walk — maybe he swallowed him. "Or maybe something just lifted," he says, "like a very strange weight, and I am more at ease with myself. And this is as easy as I'll ever get, and this is pretty good. He is the atomic bomb in question and it is his era, the cold-war era, and we had a bit of a cold war, myself and him. When he died, I had no idea what would happen. I did start behaving a little odd, took on more and more projects. Looking back, now I've finally managed to say goodbye, I think that I did do some mad stuff. I got a letter from a friend of mine that said, '1) Don't leave your job, 2) your wife, 3) take large sums of money out of the bank.' I wasn't doing any of that, but what he was saying was, when fathers die, sons do mad stuff. I thought I was ready for it."

Can you ever be ready for death? "Well, he'd been ill for a long time [with cancer and Parkinson's disease] and I would go and visit him in hospital, take the night watch." He was on tour for the final stages of his father's life, but would fly back to the hospital. "I didn't know that grief affects you in surprising ways. I didn't know that two years later, when you're walking down the street, there's tears going down your face and you don't know why."

Bono has much to say to everybody — George Bush, Tony Blair, swing voters, peacekeepers, warmongers and the rock'n'roll world — but he didn't have much to say to his dad. "We didn't talk. I don't think I spent enough time with him, and it's always awkward with Irish males, what you talk about." Most of the time he drew him lying there. "I drew all the equipment. I found it fascinating, with all those wires and tubes. "I didn't have the wherewithal to deal with things: my brother did all the heroic stuff, organising everything, the medical stuff. I was just drawing to try and figure it out rather than twitching and looking away. That's when I wrote Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own. He wasn't an easy man to help, and I sang it at his funeral. It sounded like the Righteous Brothers, something from a very different age. What will the young people make of it?" he laughs. He wonders where the drawings are. Perhaps they are upstairs. He will show them to me later. He says: "I have recently had to let go of grief and thank God for the gift my father gave me, even if I turned out like a Johnny Cash song. His whole thing was, 'Don't dream, because dreams end in disappointment.' And that's it, right there. That's when the megalomania started." He waves his finger as if he is his father, and bursts out laughing, as in that moment he knows he is the biggest rock star in the world because he wanted to be.

The next morning, everyone has a hangover. Bono has a nonspecific angst. Could be because the photographer Greg Williams is prowling in the gardens with a few hundred kilos of sugar. He is shooting an ad campaign for Oxfam, with Bono photographed underneath a sugar mountain. But life for U2 isn't always a cosy sugar cocoon. After the initial struggle, they used to worry if they were too biblical to be cool. Then it was simply, were they too sated? The period around the albums Achtung Baby and Pop, in the 1990s, was their most turbulent and arid. That was when Adam went off the rails with drugs and other excesses. And when Larry, after three years of touring, ended up in Japan and was so removed from the idea of home, he tried to persuade the Edge it was a good idea to motorcycle across America for six months.

Bono refers to Adam and Larry as the rock police. He says that Adam has an ear equivalent to a third eye. And Larry has an amazing instinct. Everything in Mullen world is black and white: there is never any grey. He is the stroppiest and the most straightforward, and the most handsome. I first met Larry earlier on in the summer, in my first visit to the south of France.

The day I arrived, the just-finished, not-fully-completed CD had been stolen from a photo session. The real French police enjoyed questioning all of U2, and the record company was in a panic. But Mullen seemed laid-back. "What can you do?" he shrugged. And when he shrugged, his arms, special drummer's arms, rippled very nicely. In daylight he has an orange-bronze shimmer. I've seen him referred to before as Dorian Gray — he looks at least 15 years younger than he is. He says his father is in his eighties and looks 62. I wonder is he most like his father, then, or his mother? He says sadly he never found out how his mother would age. "She passed away in 1978."When I joined the band, it was like running away to the circus. My memory of early U2 is really hit and miss. Nobody was there to pick up the pieces. I was trying to do it myself. Impossible." He was just 17, and U2 became his replacement family. "Yes, my sister got married and the family unit was broken. Every Irish son is closest to their mother. She thought I'd make a priest one day. She'd be very disappointed." But now you're giving out a different kind of communion. "That's right." Do you think you were running away from loss all your life? "There may be some truth in that. There's a sense of running because you don't want to go through that loss again."

It becomes apparent that the reason U2 are still together is that they need each other more than other bands. Bono thinks Larry is the dad of the U2 family, because he's so good at making decisions. Mullen thinks he's the spoilt child. "Bono's the mum. No doubt. He's larger than life and he'll take on anything." Mullen doesn't schmooze. He's very direct and heartfelt. He says: "We don't fight, but we all have strong personalities. But in the end we want the same thing. You know, we're very competitive: we want to be on the radio, have big singles. We don't want to be thought of as a veteran band. We like the fact that people mention Coldplay as our contemporaries.

"Why are the four of you still together? "There's nowhere else to go. What kind of a band goes on holiday to the same place? What kind of families just mix?" We are sitting under a canopy on Bono's terrace by the pool, and several naked children, possibly belonging to the Edge, run squealing by. "We are a tight family, with all the pluses and disadvantages of that. But we don't have an ego problem in the band. We all are involved in the process. We all struggle together."

I would like to be in a band that still makes great albums, and I like the idea that I might take on a new challenge of doing some acting. I like the idea of going to it late. But the band is all I've ever wanted, and I get paid for it. I don't want to sound smug, but I've got the best job in the world. Different things come into play now that we've all got families. We don't have the freedom we once had." Mullen has an eight-year-old son, a five-year-old daughter and a three-year-old boy. Bono has two daughters and two sons. Edge has four daughters and a son. So even rock'n'roll must revolve around school holidays. Sometimes it seems Adam Clayton has always been an outsider, even within the band. But in the world of U2, extremes always meet. In many ways he is the driving force. It was he who, out of "blind faith and undeniable ignorance", said "We are going to be bigger than the Beatles" when they'd only played a couple of gigs and were at their wildest and most disparate. We meet in a rooftop cafe in Nice. He orders a double espresso even though he has recently given up caffeine. That's just who he is. Worried about revealing too much, but anxious I get to the core of him.

He has a very unlined face, but eyes that are much older. No longer the peroxide blond, he has arrived armed with designer shopping bags. He's in search of the perfect T-shirt. He says this album "was a very different experience. It wasn't like we were running around crazy with no sleep". The time of Clayton throwing down his bass guitar and telling Bono, "You play it, then!" and storming off to some drug-fuelled heaven or hell is long gone. Has something happened to make you more harmonious? "We all turned 40 in the last two or three years, and that does make a change. You can look back at how well the band has done and what a great band it is," he says, fidgeting. The waitress forgot his coffee order and he's already feeling guilty about the double espresso. He says he felt he needed an altered state for the interview.

The coffee arrives. He seems calmed. "Not many people get to 25 years in a marriage or business partnership. We've come up with a few stinkers of bad decisions. We've survived them, and survival is how you deal with your bad decisions as much as it is with your good ones."What was your biggest stinker? "The one I'm most uncomfortable about is how we went off on one with the Pop album. We focused so much on going out on tour and designing the stage show, which was amazing, that we forgot to finish the record." Was that when you lost your way? "No, I was fine then — that came much earlier."

The much earlier period was the engagement to Naomi Campbell. You know, rock star needs supermodel. I always feel it was a shame they met when he was off the rails. But the real Clayton is nurturing and polite, super-sensitive, and in many ways they were good together. The affair made him the celebrity he's always tried not to be, although I point out there was that time for the art work of Achtung Baby where he appeared naked to show the girls exactly what a supermodel gets. "Yes, but people still didn't recognise my face. I have always been a little shy of the camera." So obviously the way you deal with that is to appear naked? He laughs at his own contradictions, a lot more comfortable in his own skin these days. He breaks the chocolate that you get with the coffee into four pieces and enjoys each miniature bite. Very controlled. Each of the four knows each other's strengths, weaknesses and extremes very well. "We are not hugely intimate with each other, yet there is tremendous tolerance, room and understanding and love. There is intimacy, but a lot of the time it is a work situation and then everyone goes back to their families. It's more adult." In all of your families there are some elements missing that you found in each other? "Yes, we are our own survival mechanism.

"Clayton is different from the others, who still like a bit of a party. He is the loner. "I don't go out very much, but I'm comfortable with that. When I was in party mode, I was out every night. Now I'm happy to watch the news, listen to music." Most of the time, he lives between Dublin and London, where his girlfriend works. "There was a time when I wasn't comfortable in England. But now I have a more positive approach to life. I used to feel gauche, as if I came from the provinces."Clayton has always felt he's been coming from somewhere else. When he was a child, his father worked for East African Airways, and they moved out to Kenya. Then it was Dublin. Then it was boarding school and Singapore for school holidays. "I still get jittery going to a new place. I don't like to lose control of the environment. I get twitchy. Sometimes I just feel abandoned, for want of a better word.

"What he has finally opened up to is frighteningly sensitive. "There is work to be done with some of my issues, but most days I move freely in the world and feel comfortable with it. What I've learnt about coming into recovery is about acknowledging sensitivity and turning it down a little bit, but that doesn't mean to say I can't feel exhilarated.

"Each U2 member is exhilarating to be with in different ways. Later that day, I was due to meet the Edge, but he was suffering. It had been his CD that was stolen and he had been interrogated by the police and wasn't up to being interrogated by me. The next time I saw him was two months later on the beach, in the restaurant, behind a bottle of rosé. His eyes are small but intense. He was born David Evans from Welsh parents in Barking, east London, and moved to Ireland with his family when he was one. He speaks very softly but precisely. And for a person named the Edge by Bono because of the sharpness of his mind and features, he is hugely gentle. A puzzling force, usually wrapped in a tight-knit hat, even in the summer. When we met to talk again, it was the morning after.

Even with a hangover, his mind loves detail.Last night, Bono was worried that you wanted to rerecord the entire album. "Yes. Listening to it made me want to rerecord everything. If you get it right, the song just sounds better. If you get it wrong, it makes the song sound different in a really bad way. Ten per cent of working in the studio is inspiration; 90% is a very analytical, painstaking process for us. And that's the science part of my brain."The Edge was almost lost to science. He promised his parents that if the band hadn't made it in his year off after school, he would start his natural-sciences course. He actually began it, sleeping on the U2 manager Paul McGuinness's floor, but he never bought the textbooks. "I didn't want to waste my parents' money, but felt I owed it to them to do what they wanted.

"The Edge is a person who assumes responsibility for everything. Bono's passion and political fervour have perhaps been hardest on him. But the reward is perhaps that the album sounds more like an Edge album than a Bono album. Any other person might have been deeply frustrated by Bono's absences to go and hang out with Bush and Blair and continue his work in Africa while they were recording. The Edge took it in his stride. "We've grown up being a political band. We never saw a need to separate religion and politics from everything we write about and care about. We have always been well aware that steaming in on any issue was liable to get us into trouble, or just come off as uncool. My own real fear was that Bono was going to lead us into doing things that were desperately uncool and we would regret. But even though I have winced on his behalf, I've had more times when I've just been so proud of him and blown away with the success of what he's done. Who would know that someone who stopped his formal education at 16, and had been writing songs and touring the world as a singer, can get stuck into the body politic and be listened to on the highest levels?

"We break for lunch of salad with couscous, salmon and chicken. Larry says Bono "will have lunch with the devil himself if it gets him what he needs. During the recording of the album, Bono was away a lot and it ended up having zero effect on the quality of the work. It just seemed he's a lot more active. He was able to speak to the Pope and record a lyric at the same time".Back by the pool with the Edge, we admire the blissful view and the bizarre fact that he and Bono have two houses side by side. The Edge also has a house in Malibu, because his wife, Morleigh, is native to LA. "And the kids love it because their cousins are there." He thinks one day he may buy a boat. Ultimately, though, "Possessions are a way of turning money into problems. I don't have a big car collection. I don't have anything that I'd miss if it got stolen. I bought this house because it was about timing. I was going through a low point because I was just separating from my first wife, Aislinn, and things were tough and this was laying down new beginnings of another sort.

"He met Morleigh when they were doing the Zoo TV tour in 1992. She's a dancer and came to help with the choreography. It was a slow burn. "We had known each other but were not very close for a while. Then a little spark happened." Last night in our drunken conversation, Bono had said that you know if you really love somebody if you can be yourself with them. Edge agrees: "Yes, I can be myself." From the slow, precise way he says that, you know it wasn't always the case. In relationships, do you prefer to be the person that is most loved or most loving? "I started out being the one who was most loving. Now, hopefully, it's more 50-50. There's a certain ego in that there's a control in being the one who's the most loving. To surrender and say 'I am going to be loved' requires a certain humility. The paradox is, it's generous to be loved." All of U2 love a bit of a paradox.

Suddenly there's a change of atmosphere, an adrenaline rush. Larry and Edge disperse and Bono tells me: "Tony Blair's just asked me to do an address at the conference." I tell him I don't think he should do that. He looks bemused and tells me that Mandela and Clinton had done this same spot for an international speaker. I tell him that they had everything to gain and nothing to lose, and why would he want to align himself with a party that is now alienating so many people? He says: "I am happy to stand alongside him and say I believe in him. I think he's one of the greatest leaders the UK has ever had. He has done extraordinary things for his country. There has to be applause. So far, it's my job to give him applause for what he's done, even though I didn't agree with the war. He believed in it, and isn't it extraordinary for a British prime minister to do something that was unpopular with the British people and his own cabinet and his Labour base? I believe that he is sincere... But sincerely wrong.

"He's on a roll. I point out that he's very useful to politicians who want to get the swing vote that they believe rocks with the 18-to-30 CD-buying public. Would he do an address for President Bush at a Republican convention? "Not so close to an election, but I've been in photographs with Bush after he made a commitment to the biggest increase in Aids assistance for many years. I am not a cheap date, but it's my job to turn up for the photograph if they're ready to cut the ribbon."He's looking a lot more wiry than the last time I saw him. He says that he was shaking off his Elvis period. There's nothing decadent, druggy, fat or Elvis-like about him. Even the shades are off, and the eyes are that extraordinary, piercing pale blue. They are at the same time ice and heat. He talks with clarity, in words that bypass cliché or pragmatism. It's a kind of passionate naivety. It doesn't surprise me he played Tony Blair's guitar. "I had to play it, because I wanted to check the tuning. I heard he played guitar every day, so I wanted to see if that was true. And it gives me some faith that I picked up the prime minister of England's guitar and it was in tune: he does play it.

"He also believes that under Blair's leadership and Gordon's — each mention of Blair's leadership comes with "and Gordon's" — thousands of Africans will live rather than die. More people than those who have unacceptably lost their lives in the war.Enough about Blair. Would you believe Bono moves on to say how impressed he is with Condoleezza Rice? "I have to say George Bush really did deliver on his promise to getting more help for Aids in Africa. I was told it would be unachievable, but it was not. And I have to say I found him very funny. There I am, sitting in his car next to him in his motorcade, chatting and thinking I could be arguing for the rest of my life with him on lots of subjects. So I just looked at the most powerful man in the free world as he waved at the crowd, and I said, 'So you are pretty popular round here?' and he goes, 'It wasn't always so. See, when I first came here, people used to wave at me with one finger.'

"Is that the Pope's rosary round your neck? "It wore out, so Ali [his wife] had this one made up exactly the same. You see, Bob Geldof did a deal with the Pope: he knew it would wear out; he asked for two. I didn't think, but Bob did." We laugh about that for a while, and he remembers that his feet hurt. Of course they do: they walked hundreds of yards over pointy stones. He rubs them a little and the mood has changed, as it often does so quickly.If the record is about faith and fear, it's because Bono is. Love and desire constantly inhabit him. "It's great when they combine. But sometimes they are very different, love and desire. Love, sex, fear and faith, and all the things that keep us here in the mysterious distance between a man and a woman.

"Just when you think you're having a conversation, you're having a song lyric. "My favourite relationships are always where there is that distance. The desire to occupy a person, and know their every broom closet, overpowers your sense of respect for who they are or that they have a life outside of yours.

"People have wondered over the years just how and what has been accepted with Mr and Mrs Bono Hewson. Ali is a childhood sweetheart. She has the thickest of thick black hair in a bob. I met her briefly on my first trip out. Friendly, kind of sophisticated, but accessible. Slim but curvy. A pin-up. They have had their ups and downs over the years, and she deserves to be a saint to have put up with him for so long.For the first time, they are going to work together on a project. "It's a clothing line which will be made using fair trade and the developing world. We are lining up with a designer called Rogan, who's brilliant, and he's not an arsehole and he wants to work with us.

"Christophe, Bono's Basque housekeeper-cum-chef, brings us glasses of wine, even though Bono says he is allergic to it, it makes him fall asleep. Sleep is something he hasn't time for: he rarely sleeps more than four hours a night. He asks me if I agree with Freud that sex is the centre of life. He thinks it's just close to the centre. "It's an extraordinary thing to relegate this subject to something that's prurient or humourless or deeply earnest and dull. Look how it is used to sell products.

"Do you think that romance is more interesting than sex? "I think sex without romance is... is..." Dull? "No, it's just not on my radar." Really? "I can't say it hasn't been. You know, there are times when you've got to if you've been in a long-term relationship, so I wouldn't lie. Actually, I might.

"Sex and death, love and desire all weave their ways into the melodies that haunt him. "If you meditate on life you start with death, and when somebody's not there for you, there's a sense of abandonment." It is this very abandonment that has created his need to bond with the world.Afternoon is blending into evening now. It seems as if we could have this conversation infinitely. He says: "You can exorcise your demons or you can exercise them. I don't know what I've discovered about myself from analysis. The thing to watch for is navel-gazing — and I do have a very nice one — but most of what I've learnt about myself you discover in other people."There's a song lyric that talks about being loved too much. "No, you can't love too much. You can't out-give God." He pauses. "But you should try, I think. That's where I'd like to spend the rest of my life." It's almost time for me to leave, but he's concerned that I think his life is too much of a bubble where nobody disagrees with him. "It's not just warm and fuzzy, it's gritty. Working with U2 can be just one big row. Part of the sexiness is the friction.

Rock-star disease is where you are in the company of people who agree with you all the time — although, personally, I might love a bit of that." At some other point, he quips that he needs to be told he's loved at least a dozen times each day. And he probably is, one way or another.



YAHWEH

Take these shoes
Click clacking down some dead end street
Take these shoes
And make them fit
Take this shirt
Polyester white trash made in nowhere
Take this shirt
And make it clean, clean
Take this soul
Stranded in some skin and bones
Take this soul
And make it sing

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

Take these hands
Teach them what to carry
Take these hands
Don't make a fist
Take this mouth
So quick to criticise
Take this mouth
Give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, Yahweh
Still I'm waiting for the dawn

Still waiting for the dawn, the sun is coming up
The sun is coming up on the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean
This love is like a drop in the ocean

Yahweh, Yahweh
Always pain before a child is born
Yahweh, tell me now
Why the dark before the dawn?

Take this city
A city should be shining on a hill
Take this city
If it be your will
What no man can own, no man can take
Take this heart
Take this heart
Take this heart
And make it break