MUSIC

RING MY BELL: The expensive pleasures of the ringtone.
by SASHA FRERE-JONES (New Yorker)

In 1997, your cell phone could make two kinds of sounds. It could “ring”-our anachronistic word for the electronic trill that phones produce when you receive a call-or it could play a single-line melody, like “Für Elise.” If you’ve ever heard a cell phone bleep out Beethoven without the harmony, you’ll understand that this wasn’t much of a choice. At about this time, Nokia, the Finnish cell-phone company, introduced “smart messaging,” a protocol that allowed people to send text messages to one another over their phones, and Vesa-Matti Paananen, a Finnish computer programmer, realized that it would work equally well for transmitting bits of songs. Paananen developed software called Harmonium that enabled people to program their cell phones to make musically complex sequences-melodies with rudimentary harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment-that they could forward to friends using smart messaging.

Those familiar with Linux, the freely available, open-source operating system developed by Linus Torvalds, another Finnish programmer, will not be shocked to learn that Paananen, in a nationally consistent fit of altruism, put Harmonium on the Internet for anyone to download, thus passing up a shot at becoming a billionaire. Companies called aggregators, which collect and distribute digital content, capitalized on Paananen’s innovation, using his software to create what is today known as the polyphonic ringtone: a small packet of code that plays the phone as if it were a music box, producing a synthesized approximation of a song that often sounds less like the original it emulates than a gremlin making merry inside a video game. Recently, the polyphonic ringtone acquired a competitor. Called a master tone, or true tone, it is a compressed snippet of actual recorded song, and emanates from the cell-phone handset as if from a tiny radio.

Ringtones of either variety cost about two dollars and are typically no more than twenty-five seconds long. Nevertheless, according to Consect, a marketing and consulting firm in Manhattan, ringtones generated four billion dollars in sales around the world in 2004. The United States accounted for only three hundred million of these dollars, although Consect predicts that the figure will double this year. Fabrice Grinda, the C.E.O. of Zingy, a company in New York that sells ringtones and cell-phone games, told me that in parts of Asia ringtones now outsell some types of CDs. “In 2004, the Korean ringtone market was three hundred and fifty million dollars, while the CD market for singles was just two hundred and fifty million,” Grinda said.

But America is catching up. Anyone who watches MTV has probably seen ads for a company called Jamster.com, which sells polyphonic ringtones as well as cruder, monophonic versions for older handsets. For a small fee (about six dollars a month), you can buy ringtones from Jamster by entering numerical codes on your phone’s keypad. This method is popular in Europe and is generally faster than the standard American approach: using your phone’s Web browser to scroll through pages of song titles. Most companies allow you to sample a tone before you buy it, but not all ringtones are compatible with all cell phones, so don’t get too excited if your favorite band is offering ringtones on its Web site. The song snippets may work only on that old phone you gave away to your nephew.

Consect reports that fifty-six per cent of the ringtones bought in the United States during the first half of 2004 were hip-hop, and Mark Freiser, Consect’s C.E.O., says that the vast majority of ringtone users are under the age of thirty. Teens like to assign different ringtones to different callers: something classical for Mom, an old hip-hop song for the roommate, a more recent track for the new boy in town. Since teens are fond of both hip-hop and cell phones, and have more friends than parents, it’s no wonder that hip-hop ringtones rule. Of course, what’s available to customers determines what they’ll buy. Marketers in the mobile-media industry call these purchases “preferences.” And they are right: ringtones, like the screen savers and plastic face plates that you can use to customize your phone, constitute a form of self-expression, though what you choose to tell the world about yourself is limited by a finite library of images and sounds.

A kid I met on the subway told me that his mother doesn’t like his new 50 Cent ringtone, “Candy Shop,” not because it features explicitly sexual rhymes but because it’s not as cool as “In Da Club,” a previous 50 Cent ringtone, which received Billboard’s first Ringtone of the Year award, in 2004. A karate teacher in his thirties told me that he spends ten dollars a month on ringtones, and currently has about twenty, most of them polyphonic renditions of Led Zeppelin songs. An architect in her mid-thirties said, “I spent three days of productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone’s gonna go off-what are they going to hear?”

The ringtone also teaches us how songs work. Which clip best exemplifies a song? Did the ringtone’s maker select the right bit? Do you even need to hear the singing? Perhaps the part of the song that arouses our lizard brain is the instrumental opening. It may be stranger and more sublime to hear a polyphonic impression of George Michael’s voice than to listen to the real thing one more time. If a song can survive being transposed from live instruments to a cell-phone microchip, it must have musically hardy DNA. Many recent hip-hop songs make terrific ringtones because they already sound like ringtones. The polyphonic and master-tone versions of “Goodies,” by Ciara, for example, are nearly identical. Ringtones, it turns out, are inherently pop: musical expression distilled to one urgent, representative hook. As ringtones become part of our environment, they could push pop music toward new levels of concision, repetition, and catchiness. I spent more than a year sampling polyphonics, but felt stymied by the master tone, which has been trumpeted as superior because it is taken from the original recording. The first master tones I downloaded on my cell phone sounded terrible, like a transistor radio turned up to ten and stuffed inside a sock. I missed my primitive polyphonic tootles. When I finally upgraded to a newer phone, the master tones suddenly made sense. The sock was off and the radio was hi-fi. I felt the way I imagine someone who had a color TV in 1954 must have felt. I was hearing actual music, and I chose Kelis’s “Milkshake” as my ringtone, guessing that the song might not be audible above the clangor of the streets but knowing that the alliance would be brief and that I’d soon be switching.

In the United States, master tones can be played only on phones available for the last year and a half, yet they already account for nearly fifty per cent of ringtone sales. Musical genres that suffered as polyphonics-sonically thick guitar rock, country, and jazz-can now challenge the hip-hop hegemony. Record labels, convinced that they have lost millions of dollars in CD sales to MP3 file-swapping, have been especially attentive to ringtones, and they love master tones. Polyphonic ringtones are essentially cover versions of songs: aggregators must pay royalties to the publisher, who then pays the songwriter. But master tones are compressed versions of original recordings, which means that record labels-the entities that typically own recordings-are entitled to collect a fee, too.

That fee can be considerable: record labels get twenty-five per cent of every master-tone sale (though they must pass along a portion of their take to the performer and the publisher). “It’s an unbelievable mess,” Les Watkins, the vice-president of Music Reports, Inc., a music-licensing and accounting firm, said. “A lot of these aggregator companies were very early players, essentially beholden to the major record labels and the music publishers to get the rights they needed. And, in this country, the music business is a very mature and consolidated business-somewhat collusive, in fact. The aggregators accepted rates and terms that they really didn’t have to accept, and agreed to license the music in such a way that they’re overpaying by a tremendous multiple.”

This arrangement is unlikely to last. There are now Web-based companies, like Xingtone, for example, that will convert songs from your collection into master tones. Or you can do it yourself: some new cell-phone models can be connected to a computer by a data cable, allowing you to create master tones from MP3 files at home. However it is done, transferring music that you own to your phone is legal under copyright law.

Technically adept fans may thrill at the prospect of being able to make master tones for free. But the demise of the polyphonic will be a minor, and poignant, loss for music. The advent of film sound gave us the infinite blessing of composers like Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann, but it took away the perfect trinity of the oncoming train, the imperilled heroine, and the trembling upper register of an upright piano. Next time you hear your favorite song playing in full verisimilitude from someone’s pants, give a moment’s thought to the lowly, twinkling polyphonic. Transitional stages of technology often have their own imperfect charms, memorable in ways that no one could have predicted. Polyphonic-ringtone nostalgia is approximately six months away.

LIVES

My Ghetto Days
By RICHARD KAYE (NY Times)

I was 7 years old, a scrawny white kid, and I was standing in front of some 30 second graders, all of them black. One after the other, the boys and girls in the sun-drenched Miami classroom giddily peppered me with questions. What is it like to live in the ''nice'' part of town? How many swimming pools do you have? Are all of your brothers and sisters white, too? (The girl who asked this last question was roundly hooted by her classmates.) I tried to answer the rapid queries, but I became shy. As the only white person in the room, I felt painfully under scrutiny and downright weird. I might as well have been a snowman. When I began to stutter, the friendly lady teacher told me I could sit down.

What was I doing there? It was 1967, and it was show and tell -- more accurately, I was the show and tell. Along with a huge sunflower one girl brought to class and a firetruck that a boy had hooked up to a toy giraffe, I was the day's novelty item. The children of my family's housekeeper, Gladys, had taken me to school. Gladys was a lanky Bahamian, an ex-model and single mother who was a weekly presence in our house.

My parents, liberal emigres from New York, moved to Florida in the 40's. Like many other Easterners, my father and mother found in Miami an improbable setting for their progressive social ideals and entrepreneurial plans for self-advancement. ''I went to sleep in the winter darkness,'' Edmund Wilson wrote in a 1949 essay about his first train ride to this southern Florida city, ''and wake up to a dazzle of golden light on green palms and low-growing pines that drip with Florida moss.'' My parents must have felt something similar.

Although they were hardly wealthy (my father ran a small drug-and-cosmetics business), they decided that I was becoming impossibly spoiled. Too many handsome Swedish toys and swank bar mitzvahs were making me soft, they claimed, so off they sent me to Gladys's family in a poor section of Miami, the first time for a couple of weeks, later for sporadic weekends. In the 60's, it was very much a city with a racial divide. Public schools were segregated. Blacks lived in ghettos like Overtown, and well-off whites inhabited areas with mellifluous names like Coral Gables.

Gladys's two sons were friends of mine and had come to my house many times. But these sleepovers were different -- a strange reversal that raised eyebrows among some of my parents' friends. Although it never occurred to me at the time, I was a sort of civil rights social project for my parents. By today's standards, my parents were naive reformers, comic idealists, and their decision to send me into a ghetto was of a piece with their wacky idea of letting me attend a local production of ''Hair.'' (''What was the nude scene like?'' all my friends wanted to know.)

For me, staying with Gladys's family meant days of sheer pleasure. Gladys may have been a wonderfully efficient housekeeper in white South Miami, but her own house was, to a 7-year-old, fabulously messy, noisy and chaotic. Friends and relatives dropped by at all hours. There seemed to be no observance of bedtime curfew. And Gladys's two sons treated me like a wonderful treasure, an exotic animal they had taken in. They took me to other peoples' homes and showed me off to their friends. Sure, I was a pawn in their continuing show-and-tell game, but their guided tours introduced me to a marvelous counterworld.

My sojourn in Gladys's neighborhood was undoubtedly the first time I thought about myself self-consciously as white -- as inhabiting white skin -- the sort of self-consciousness that most blacks feel every day and that many white people don't. No particular social mechanism requires it today; nothing insists on it. For years I used to perplex my politically-minded friends when I argued on behalf of national service -- on the principle that there was something beneficial in whites and blacks, privileged and not, living together for periods of time.

Gladys's kids came to stay with me, too. If I loved the cheerful clutter of their house, they liked the relatively prosperous fun of my family's swimming pool (just one). But my sleepovers came to a sudden end after a year of visits. A riot broke out in one of Miami's poor neighborhoods during the 1968 Republican National Convention. I recall my mother, crying into the phone as she explained to Gladys (who had telephoned to set up a visit to her house), saying, ''But your people don't want us in your neighborhood.'' My mother tried to explain to me why I couldn't go to Gladys's for a while, why everything had become impossible. Then she sat down at the kitchen table and cried some more. It was all a little confusing for me, but it definitely felt like the end of something, a fragile, unlikely experiment in biracial friendship across neighborhood lines.



TALK CINEMA

Saint Ralph (Canada)
from www.mrqe.com

Saint Ralph is one of those kid-overcoming-obstacles kind of movie that I love. It's not syrupy; it's not preposterous; it's not corny. Instead, it's sweet, funny, smart and touching. The story, set in 1950s Hamilton, Ontario, follows 14-year-old Ralph Walker (Adam Butcher) in his bid to enter and win the Boston marathon. See, Ralph's father is dead and his critically ill mother (the aforementioned Gyllenhaal doppelganger MacDonald) has slipped into a coma. The doctors say it will take a miracle for her to ever regain consciousness, so Catholic-school student Ralph decides that him winning the Boston marathon will be the miracle to do the trick.

Helping him in his admittedly ambitious dream is Father Hibbert (the always wonderful Campbell Scott), who enjoys bucking the system by doing things like teaching Nietzsche in religion class and who was once an Olympic marathon runner himself. He takes on the job of coaching the scrawny Ralph (who, by the way, gets his motivation from a Santa suit-clad God) and tries to hide their training from the school's headmaster, the stern and humorless Father Fitzpatrick (Gordon Pinsent). "Fitz," as the students call him, thinks Ralph should abandon the miracle idea in favor of buckling down at school, and he forbids Ralph from even thinking about Boston. Also on hand is Ralph's mother's nurse (Jennifer Tilly), a sexy, savvy woman who not only offers emotional support, but teaches Ralph the right way to bench press.

Aside from the terrific performances from all involved, Saint Ralph possesses a distinct charm and a winning heart. Its characters are engaging, its story poignantly entertaining and its ending nicely subtle. It avoids clichés and doesn't hammer any kind of Important Message into the skulls of its audience. It reminded me a lot of Steven Soderbergh's Kind of the Hill (one of my fave films) in its tone and its central notion of a teenage boy who faces adversity in the name of family. It's a "little movie," but one that deserves a big round of applause.

READING

Currently reading: The Believer, New Yorker, Slate, Churchill, and The Writer's Almanac.

Christian, Lighthouse Park, West Vancouver, February 2005

Flying into Kamloops on the way to Sun Peaks for our week of skiing.

Friends Gary and Lo are sailing across the Pacific in a boat called Demelza. You can read about their adventures, periodically, here: http://www.saildemelza.blogspot.com

This photo was captured by Doug Sage from the Jericho Beach webcam. It shows Demelza on its way out of Vancouver's harbour this week.

Marine forecast for Washington/Oregon

Atrophy

So true, Jamie, so true:


Tofino, BC
J. Ross


Sunset over the Pacific
J. Ross

Also visit:
Jeff Harris
Stereogum
Jeff Johnson

MUSIC

Current iTunes Playlist

Aria from the Goldberg Variations - Julie Steinberg
Most of the Time - Bob Dylan
I only have eyes for you - The Flamingos
Ashes of American Flags - Wilco
Studying Stones - Ani difranco
By the time it gets dark - Yo La Tengo
Que Onda Guero - Beck
E-Pro - Beck
Trapeze Swinger - Iron & Wine
Iron Man - Four Tet
Blue Light - Mazzy star

U2
Bono on the seawall? The Edge doing the Grouse Grind? Larry Mullen Jr. trying to decide which Starbucks to go to? The Vancouver Province has learned that U2 -- the biggest band in the world -- will take over GM Place for a month of rehearsals before the first date of its Vertigo 2005 tour, March 28 in San Diego. The North American tour -- by far the hottest ticket in music today -- takes in 13 cities, including GM Place, April 28 to 29.

All the dates sold out in advance. Vancouver was typical: A first show sold out in eight minutes. The second was added and went clean almost as quickly. Tour promoter ClearChannel Entertainment and its vice-president, Shane Bourbonnais, would not confirm the Vancouver rehearsal. However, a formal announcement is expected to be made in the next few days and trucks started rolling into the lots outside the stadium yesterday.

Vancouver has hosted tour pre-production before. Sarah McLachlan, Cher and Janet Jackson have all prepped tours at GM Place. A source close to U2 said: "This is a great city, geography-wise. It's close to where the tour launches. And Vancouver's a cool city." Meanwhile, the city's excited about the lads being here for more than three weeks before they head to southern California.

At the Irish Heather in Gastown, proprietor Sean Heather loved the thought that he could see the Dublin quartet quaff a pint or two in his pub -- particularly with St. Patrick's Day coming March 17. "Oh yeah, that would be interesting," exclaimed Heather, who's had experience with the big bands. When REM was recording here in 2003, Heather often served them, sometimes sending chips to the Georgia legends at Bryan Adams' Warehouse Recording studio. He also hosted a brief drop-in by U2 two tours ago.

U2 might show up at the Gastown venue again, "because of its proximity and because we pour the best pint of Guinness," said Heather. "I would be thrilled, as an Irishman, to get them through the door." These are good times for U2 -- which has had more than 40 hit songs in its 26-year career. The latest album, How to Dismantle an Atom Bomb, has sold millions worldwide and its lead single "Vertigo" -- from which the tour gets its name -- scored three Grammys earlier this month. On March 14, Bruce Springsteen will induct U2 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

BECK
For the follow-up to 2002's melancholic Sea Change, Beck reunited with Odelay producers the Dust Brothers on a collection of guitar-heavy songs with party-friendly hip-hop beats. "There was a lot more freedom on this record," Beck says of Guero (Spanish slang for "white boy"), due out March 29th. "I even attempted a couple of rap things, which I didn't think I was gonna do."

The first single, "E-Pro," is a ragged, foot-stomping rocker that uses the drum sample from the Beastie Boys' "So What'cha Want," and "Que Onda Guero" evokes an East L.A. neighborhood with mariachi horns and street noise. Jack White sits in on bass on the sparse, bluesy "Go It Alone," just one of a number of tracks Beck recorded with the White Stripes frontman -- expect more collaborations from the pair in the future.

But Guero isn't just Odelay redux. Uptempo tracks like "Girl" are tempered with somber, even morbid lyrics. "Some Beatles songs are pretty dark," says Beck. "Or Brian Wilson's. Some of the cheeriest songs have that undercurrent."

OSCARS

Who I hope wins:

Imelda Staunton
Natalie Portman
The Sea Inside
Clint Eastwood
Martin Scorcese
Sideways
Morgan Freeman

NHL

An American perspective:
DATELINE: STUPID IRRELEVANCE

In a move which produced little more then an acre of crestfallen barbers and bartenders from Moose Jaw to Thunder Bay, Wednesday marked the end of the 2004/2005 National Hockey League season, for at least three days. When the reality of a year without puckery set in, two of the men who made the league a legitimate, if brief success, former superstars/current owners Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux were rumored to have been the driving force behind a truly last ditch effort. After meeting for six hours on Saturday, no agreement could be worked out, resulting in the second, and final cancellation of the week. The NHL is such a disastrous clusterfuck, they can’t even conduct a half-way decent season bagging.

In the dumbest labor move since that Brazilian hooker strike, team owners staged a lockout of their players mere weeks after the 2004 Stanley Cup finals. The rich guys weren’t making enough cash, and their collection of Canadian, Eastern European, and heavily mulleted American employees were not worth their price. This move was hot on the heels of, not only the lowest rated playoff and finals season in years, but their new national broadcast contract which was signed for the record sum of $0.00. Having watched Arena Football surpass the NHL in viewership, NBC agreed to forgo their regular slate of “Fear Factor” reruns in favor of showing the finals and a few, select playoff games. The arrangement was to result in a split of the ad revenue, carrying with it a low-tide stink of surrender.

The real problem with the NHL is that no one seems to care, in the US at least. The game has never translated well to television, despite the best efforts of the networks (see Fox’ comet puck, circa 1998) and in modern professional sports, the road to financial success goes right through TV. Under the tutelage of their misguided, Napoleonic commissioner, the league bloated faster then a frat boy’s liver, placing teams in every town with the potent combination of indoor plumbing and a microbrewery. Towns like Columbus, OH, Greensboro, NC and even Miami (fucking Miami?) were granted their own stupidly named teams with logos and uniforms designed to have guilt-ridden absentee fathers buying $200 jerseys for their Ritalin-juiced kids. Places like Winnipeg, Minnesota and Hartford were losing their franchises to hockey hotbeds like Phoenix, Dallas, and Tampa Bay. The league was blazing a trail towards the comforting swirl of a giant, shit-splattered toilet. This week, the last fecal morsel slipped down the pipe.

Whether or not you care for hockey, the current situation is regrettable. The Canadians are good people, and they deserve the simple pleasure of sitting on a stained recliner, having an ice cold O’Keefe, and watching a good old fashioned Friday night blood letting. The dedicated American Hockey fans are a small, but potent lot who also deserve far better then a cancelled season. By far, the worst outcome of the whole stinking mess is that the league didn’t seem to realize that they have lost more than they will ever regain. They’ve removed a niche product from the shelves, depriving the masses of something they didn’t want anyway.

When and if they ever settle their stupid arguments, it will take hockey some time to return to the fans. Maybe they will look to baseball for some guidance. Following their strike, Major League Baseball staged a nice mia culpa, pulling themselves out of a deep rut of fan weariness by featuring a couple of juiced up sluggers in a showdown to break one of sports most famous and hallowed records. They also built a couple of new ball parks, rekindled some nice rivalries, and most important, they said they were sorry. Maybe if hockey would only maybe, you know, do something like...well...they could. Hell, I don’t know. Oh, fuck it. Hockey sucks.

MUSIC

Kathleen Edwards

Kathleen Edwards really hits her stride with Back to Me. Flying on the wings of an ubiquitous electric slide guitar, a distinctive if quavering voice, and her acerbically accurate songwriting, the Ottawa songwriter has crafted what sounds suspiciously like a Canadian roots rock classic. Like Blue Rodeo, Sarah Harmer or Jim Bryson at their best, Edwards conjures what she needs from the sonic history of rock 'n' roll, pop, country and folk, then filters it through her own lyrical sensibilities to tell her story.

In Edwards' world, romance is invariably messy, the parent of ugly consequence and bitter, persistent memory. Whether it's revealed in criminal metaphors ("In State," "Independent Thief"); in the way it feels to live here or there ("Somewhere Else," "Copied Keys"); or in some current or former lover's bad behavior ("Old Time Sake" "Summerlong"), every affair will inevitably go very, very wrong. Rarely has such dark content surfed on such bright musical waves: "In State" describes the death of a relationship, but it sounds absolutely buoyant, with a hooky, propulsive guitar riff -- a ripe radio single if ever there was one. "Summerlong" begs someone to stay, against a sunny, jangling 12-string electric guitar; and when Edwards tells a grasping, twisted old flame, "You've gotta be fuckin' kidding me" on "What Are You Waiting For?," it's set to a punchy, uptempo beat.

The title track is a barrelhouse rocker, dripping attitude, about how she can use what she's got to get what she wants. On the other hand, the confessional ballad "Away" finds her trying to connect back with a hometown paramour, having been gone so long. "Do you think I've changed?" she asks, vulnerable as a five-year-old. It doesn't matter if she has -- not as long as she keeps making music this good.

GOLF

Re: Mike Weir, Call off the search--Mike Weir has been found. And judging by the results last weekend at Pebble Beach, both Weir and his golf game appear to be alive and well. Weir's second-place showing on the California coast was his best finish on the PGA Tour since September. And maybe, just maybe, it gives Canadian golf fans reason to believe this country's best player is ready to snap out of a stretch of indifferent play that has lasted far too long.

Just two short years ago, Weir was the hottest thing on the tour and had achieved the type of icon status across Canada usually reserved for his good buddy Wayne Gretzky. Weir showed every indication of becoming "the Great One on the Greens", a guy who, at the time, was not out of place when mentioned in the same sentence as Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, and Phil Mickelson. Two years ago, Mike Weir was heading straight for the top of the golf world. But up until last weekend, there had been very little straight about his game. While Woods, Singh, and Mickelson (twice now) have already posted victories on tour in 2005, Weir had been nowhere close. Instead of being part of a rekindled race for the number-one ranking in the world, Weir appeared ready to take a serious tumble out of the top 10--and likely the top 20.

As it is, his spot on the global golf scene is still shaky. The world rankings are based on results over a two-year period. In the first few months of 2003, Weir won the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, the Nissan Open in Los Angeles, and amassed all kinds of ranking points with his Masters victory at Augusta. His points from the Hope are already a distant memory, and soon the same will apply to those two other victories from 2003, leaving him with just one win since he slipped into the coveted green jacket in April of that year.

And not only has Weir barely won since that splendid spring two years ago, he really hasn't contended on a regular basis since the '03 Masters. His second-place showing at Pebble Beach should help his confidence, and it has certainly boosted his ranking: from ninth to sixth in the world. So the sweet-swinging southpaw from Southern Ontario is still considered among the best in the game, but he knows the guys ahead of him are getting better, meaning he'll have to pick up his game in order to keep pace.

"Last year I didn't feel my golf game was in a very good place, yet I was able to have the stats on the money list and have the win and have some good finishes that all looked good, but I know deep down that my game wasn't very good," Weir said recently during a conference call to promote his title defence at this week's (February 14-20) Nissan Open, the last tournament he won. "When I talk about last year not being very good, I wasn't happy with my ball-striking or my putting consistently, so that's what I want to get better at this year and, hopefully, my results will be much better as well." So far, that hasn't been the case. Once considered one of the best putters on tour and a guy who just could not miss en route to his win in the Masters, Weir just hasn't been able to make anything so far in 2005. Already this year, the 34-year-old has endured a stretch of 10 consecutive rounds in which he failed to break 70, and just one of his first 12 competitive rounds was in the 60s.

Two years ago, he ranked 11th on tour in putting and had the third-best scoring average overall (68.97). If a guy has success in those two categories, he's bound to make a whack of cash, and that's exactly what Weir did in 2003, collecting US$4.9 million. But early (and let's be clear that it's very early) here in 2005, Weir ranks 116th in putting and 105th in scoring average (71.56), numbers he knows aren't nearly good enough for a guy with his ability. However, based on last week, things may be looking up. With three of his four rounds at Pebble Beach in the 60s (including the low round of the day, with an impressive 67 in blustery conditions on Sunday), perhaps Weir's hibernation is over.

"I don't really look at money, but I do look at wins," he says about his definition of success. "I don't look at where I finish on the money list as the barometer for judging my performance for the year. I judge it by how I feel about my ball-striking and overall my confidence with all aspects of my game. I feel like the results will take care of themselves if my golf game is good."

Weir made a decision during the off-season to play a lot early in 2005, hoping to find his groove and ride it all the way to this year's Masters. He was hoping that would be the best way to add a second green jacket to his wardrobe. But the results weren't there early, forcing Weir to fight his way out of his funk, and it looks like he started down that road at Pebble Beach. If he can keep that up, Mike Weir might just be in a position to contend at Augusta once again. But if that doesn't happen, his supporters out here in Vancouver have to hope his game is in shape by the end of the summer so he can take a run at the Canadian Open when it's held at Shaughnessy in September.



NEWS

Bush Determined To Find Warehouse Where Ark Of Covenant Is Stored
WASHINGTON, DC—In a surprise press conference Monday, President Bush said he will not rest until the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant, the vessel holding the original Ten Commandments, is located. "Nazis stole the Ark in 1936, but it was recovered by a single patriot, who braved gunfire, rolling boulders, and venomous snakes," Bush said, addressing the White House press corps. "Sadly, due to bureaucratic rigmarole, this powerful, historic relic was misplaced in a warehouse. Mark my words: We will find that warehouse." Bush added that, after they are strengthened by the power of the Ark, U.S. forces will seek out and destroy the sinister Temple of Doom.

GOSSIP

Last night on Larry King, Growing Pains star Tracey Gold spoke about her felony arrest for driving drunk, injuring her husband and one of her young children:

KING: [After the accident], did you hear from people in the industry or, like, support from Growing Pains people?
GOLD: Yes. Absolutely. Well, the interesting thing was, we were doing publicity for the Growing Pains movie a month after the accident, so...
KING: There was a Growing Pains movie?
GOLD: Yes, we did a reunion movie when I was, like, nine months pregnant with my baby.
KING: When is that going to air?
GOLD: It aired.
KING: Oh.

And this concludes our lesson on the importance of checking IMDb before you do a celebrity interview.

Interview with Growing Pains star Tracey Gold [CNN - Larry King Live]

CAREER

From New York Magazine, James Atlas.

The year I turned 50 I was fired from a job. I hadn’t been doing well in the job. I didn’t have my heart in it, and it showed. I wasn’t making a significant contribution. I was superfluous. It was just a matter of time.

Anxious about my performance, I had already gone to see my boss once. “I don’t feel encouraged,” I said to him. “I’m not invited to meetings, I’m not given assignments.” He was new to the job; I had flourished under the previous boss, who had hired me and given me a lot of responsibility.

My new boss was gracious but perfunctory. “You work here, you belong here. There’s all kinds of stuff for you to do, but you’re the one who has to make it work.” He called out to his secretary. He was awaiting a report and wanted to know if it had arrived. “Stop worrying,” he said and rose from his chair to see me out.

Three months later, I got a call from his secretary asking if I could come in to see him the following week: Thursday at three o’clock.

Why had he summoned me? It was a call I’d been waiting for without quite knowing it. But when his secretary called, my stomach knotted up. My mind became strangely blank.

The days passed slowly. I could think of nothing else. Endless scenarios played themselves out in my head as I went about my work. He was going to propose that I take on a special assignment. He was going to ask for advice on some matter. But I knew what it was about. You always know. I got to his office at ten of three and sat down in the waiting area. I picked up a three-week-old issue of Newsweek and leafed through it without comprehending—something about the dangers of high cholesterol. I glanced at my watch every minute, sometimes twice a minute.

The secretary was young, in her early twenties. She sat at her desk talking on the phone in a low voice, her hand cupped over her mouth so that I couldn’t hear. Was she talking about me? At two minutes after three, my boss came out of his office, shook my hand, and invited me in.

It was a nice corner office, with slatted wood blinds over the windows, mahogany bookshelves, a table beside the desk piled high with magazines. The furniture was sleek but comfortable—white fabric everywhere—and the room had a casual, unpretentious air about it, more like a college dorm than an executive’s office. The books on the shelves weren’t for show; they were the books of a person who read books. The covers were scuffed; the lettering was faded. The newspapers scattered about on couches and tables and chairs looked as if they’d been gone through that morning. Clearly, work—intellectual work—got done here.

My boss motioned me toward a chair and sat down on a couch across from me. He had on khakis and a striped blue-and-white shirt open at the neck. I’d hardly ever seen him in a tie; he was confident, at ease with himself. This wasn’t a corporation and he wasn’t an executive, his dress-down style was meant to communicate. It was a place where creative, interesting people worked. Hierarchies didn’t matter. He’d never been a manager himself until he was tapped for the job; he’d been one of us, and the open-necked shirt made the statement that he was still one of us.

He was a handsome man, tall, vigorous, with tousled black hair. He was a full decade younger than me. (Nearly everyone I worked for was younger than me in those days.) He had distinguished himself on the other side of the desk, and this was a self-enclosed, intimate fiefdom. It was natural for management to be reluctant to “go outside” when the time came to recruit a new leader. Now he was management himself. He didn’t sit around like the rest of us, waiting for the boss’s attention: He was the boss.

He seemed uneasy. “I don’t want to drag this out,” he said. “I’m not going to renew your contract.” We didn’t have actual “jobs”—we had renewable contracts, usually by the year, and no benefits. But the fact remained: I was being fired.

He looked at me. I looked at him. “I can’t afford it,” he went on, brusque and efficient—or at any rate, trying to be brusque and efficient. This was all new territory. “I need to bring in people who can do the work.” He reached down and grabbed a can of Diet Coke off the table.

What was I supposed to say? What was the protocol for getting fired? Did you leap up and storm out of the room? Burst into tears? Be mature and help him out? I quite understand. I’m sure this must be tough for you. Don’t give it another thought. In some region of my mind, I thought he was just floating an idea; it was hypothetical. I was welcome to stay on if I wanted.

Something was happening to me that had happened to so many people before me. I was undergoing a nearly archetypal experience—like watching a child being born or losing a parent. This was one of the events that life threw your way. My chest tightened; I could hardly breathe. The small clock on the desk said five after three. Was it possible that I had been here for only three minutes? It felt like I’d been sitting in this chair for hours. I noticed that the cuff of my shirt was frayed.

The room had the eerie silence that comes over the landscape just before a storm, when the dark clouds are gathering in the distance: Birds cease their chirping, and everything is still. I could hear the bleat of traffic down below on 42nd Street, trucks grinding their gears at a light. I felt alert, aware of the panic clawing at my throat.

It was time to get up and leave, but I wasn’t ready. I thought of Willy Loman refusing to leave his boss’s office the day he’s fired. You’ll have to excuse me, Willy, I gotta see some people. Pull yourself together.

“Why can’t you just put me on a reduced contract?” I pleaded.

“Because I can’t afford it. I’m on a tight budget.” His predecessor had spent a fortune throwing lavish parties, hiring expensive consultants, handing out lucrative contracts. Our expense accounts had been limitless. It was a different company now. The new boss had been instructed by the owner to enforce a measure of fiscal discipline.

“But what am I going to do? I’ve got a family to support.”

“That’s why I asked you in now,” he said. His face softened. This was no fun for him either. “Your contract isn’t up for three months. That should give you time to find something.” He stood up. The interview was over.


That night, I took my 12-year-old son, Will, to a Rangers game. It was near the end of the season, and Madison Square Garden was two-thirds empty. The seats we had ended up with were the two worst in the house—the last row in the last tier. Will looked miserable. I couldn’t stand the idea of having both of us be miserable, and the idea of feeling pinched and poor was intolerable on a day when I had just lost my job. We descended the escalators to the box office and bought front-row seats behind the Rangers’ bench.

As I watched the players flying up and down the rink and downed my third Dewar’s in a plastic cup, queasy about what the $300 charge for our two tickets would do to my next month’s Visa bill, I tried to get my head around the fact that I had been in New York for more than twenty years. What a bumpy ride: Were all lives like this? Was it a condition of existence that it never reached a plateau of even momentary equilibrium? I had come here at the age of 28, the provincial staking out his literary fortune. I had been intoxicated by the city, a kingdom of limitless aspiration, of vast and uncharted possibility.

Rangers stomped in and out of the box, throwing open the low door and charging out on the ice. I was always comparing my life with the lives of others, and found myself thinking of Isaac Rosenfeld, a classmate of Saul Bellow’s at Tuley High School in the thirties. Rosenfeld, like his best friend Bellow, was a book-besotted Chicago boy with limitless ambition; Tuley classmates thought Rosenfeld was the one who would go the distance. He and Bellow attended the University of Chicago together and were in lockstep until Rosenfeld beat him to New York, the city that, then as now, represented the apotheosis of all cultural ambition. While Bellow was still brooding on park benches in Chicago, Rosenfeld was rapidly making a name for himself as a critic. But he ran into heavy mental weather, became a Reichian, left his wife, suffered crippling writer’s block, and came to a poignant end. “He died in a seedy, furnished room on Walton Street, alone,” wrote Bellow in an obituary for his friend, “a bitter death to his children, his wife, his lovers, his father.”

This story fascinated me. What would have happened if Rosenfeld had lived? Would the furnished room on Walton Street have come to be seen as the place where he’d weathered a crisis? That was a tough time when I was living on Walton Street; I thought I’d never get through it. Or would it have been the beginning of the end, the moment when his life took a turn from which he would never recover? Who could say? He brought to mind Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young”:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Why smart? Because he had escaped before the inevitable erosion of his early promise. He hadn’t had time to fail.

One night when they were maybe 9 and 13, I took my children to see Mr. Holland’s Opus. This is the movie, if you recall, where Richard Dreyfuss plays a high-school music teacher with a deaf child and major frustration over the fact that he didn’t end up a famous composer and had to settle for conducting an orchestra of pimply kids. I wept through the whole movie. Dreyfuss having a fight with his impaired son and then tearfully making up; Dreyfuss yelling at the orchestra’s hapless tympanist for losing the beat, then praising him tenderly when he gets it right; Dreyfuss being forced out of his job by a heartless principal.

The paper napkin I’d gotten with my popcorn was twisted and soggy. Mr. Holland hadn’t achieved all he might have wished to in life. He had, in his own eyes, failed. But he had also redeemed himself by giving something to the world. It was possible to survive the pain of falling short—and even to make something of it. At the end, when the stooped and white-haired music teacher, lured to the school auditorium on some pretext, walks in to find his former orchestra, now middle-aged themselves, on stage, instruments in hand, and the conductor brings down his baton with a swift and decisive chop and they begin to play the symphony on which Mr. Holland has been laboring for most of his life, it was too much. I broke down, my shuddering sobs causing people in the row in front of us to turn around and stare while my two mortified children gazed down at the grimy floor in mute alarm.

What’s with Dad? they must have thought. How could they begin to grasp the power of my identification with this man? In their eyes, I was Dad, a man who went to work, came home with his bulging briefcase, and seemed to make his way in the world. He talked on the phone in a loud, authoritative voice. He was no hollow-cheeked loser, disheveled, wan, his tie askew. He provided for them, sat upright at the dinner table, helped them with homework. He had a closet full of suits. How could they intuit his conviction that he was a failure? There was no way to explain it—either to them or to himself. It existed within him, a condition that had no cause, no reason. It made no sense, yet he believed it to be true. Don’t you see, children? Your dad thinks he’s Mr. Holland.

On a school night in the winter of 1965, I’m sitting in the basement of my parents’ house in Evanston, Illinois, transfixed by the black-and-white film on TV. Beside me on the couch are my father and mother. On the screen is Fredric March in the role of Willy Loman. The play is winding down as we sit there numb in a row, tears rolling down our cheeks. The last two hours have been wrenching, ghastly, like watching a car crash. At moments—the scene where Willy gets fired; the scene where Biff and Happy abandon Willy in the restaurant and go off with a pair of whores—I’ve been flooded with a desolation far beyond anything I could have imagined it was possible for a 16-year-old boy to feel. The house is still, and a funereal silence settles over the room as Linda, Willy’s wife, lays a wreath on his grave. I hear a car go by outside.

Then Charley, Willy’s friend, is speaking:

“Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

What is my father thinking, sitting there with his hands on his knees? Is he thinking of his father, a timid man who came over on the boat from Russia with an engineering degree and mastery of half a dozen languages, only to end up running a corner drugstore on the Northwest Side of Chicago? Or is he thinking of himself, not as timid as his father, but somehow not possessed of quite enough of that go-getter quality, prevented by his nature and his limitations from following his dream? What he had really wanted to be was a professional musician, to play the oboe in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But it was the Depression: He needed to make a living, and so he became a doctor, hardly a humiliating profession. After all, he didn’t go into advertising (which isn’t so humiliating either). His tragedy—or is that too strong a word?—was that he failed to achieve what he’d hoped to achieve. He wasn’t a defeated man; he was a thwarted man—one of the most common human conditions.


“We’re free,” Linda is saying as Biff, Willy’s other son, lifts her up and carries her off the stage as the lights go down. My mother and father and I are sobbing now, as devastated as if someone we love had died. I stumble upstairs to my room and sit at my desk, drained. I try to focus on my American-history textbook—what was Manifest Destiny, anyway?—but I’m too haunted by Happy Loman’s words to concentrate: “It’s the only dream you can have—to come out number-one man.”

Many years later, I read Arthur Miller’s memoir, Timebends, in which he gives an account of how he came to write Death of a Salesman. He had already experienced success with his first play, All My Sons, when he struck—or was struck by—his theme. As he wrote, hour after hour, day after day, he laughed and wept, stunned by the power of his discovery: that Willy Loman was a vessel designed to contain the essence of our human longing “to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count.” That Miller tapped something deep and powerful in the human psyche was evident from the audience’s response on opening night: “As sometimes happened later on during the run, there was no applause at the final curtain of the first performance . . . With the curtain down, some people stood to put their coats on and then sat again, some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping.”

Yet I wonder if his explanation for the play’s success is right. Miller, who died last week at 89, was at heart an optimist, blessed with the American belief that things work out in the end, and so perhaps oblivious to his own work’s darker side. (Just because he wrote it doesn’t mean he understood it.) Is it the play’s let’s-hear-it-for-the-little-guy message that makes people weep, or is it the experience of recognizing their own struggles with failure? The crushing reversals that Willy suffers—getting fired, being humiliated by his associates, watching his sons turn into losers—resonate because they’re so familiar. “I don’t know what to say,” the director Elia Kazan stammered when Miller showed him a draft of his play. “My father . . . ”

“He broke off,” Miller reports in his memoir, “the first of a great many men—and women—who would tell me that Willy was their father.” Their father and, eventually, them. Like father, like son. The story of literature—and thus of life—is a story not of success, but of failure.

I’m so obsessed with this theme that I actually keep a “failure file.” What stands out for me in the biographies of Faulkner and Fitzgerald are the months and years they wasted out in Hollywood, getting sodden over their squandered gifts. Cyril Connolly, one of the most distinguished critics of his day, made his name with a book, Enemies of Promise, that elegiacally bemoaned his lack of distinction. And the novelist Paul Auster writes in his memoir, Hand to Mouth, “In my late twenties and early thirties, I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure.” Ah!

Let’s see: Here’s Norman Mailer summing up his legacy in an interview with the New York Times: “Part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living with the expectation of disappointment . . . You just want to keep the store going. You’re not going to do as well this year as last year probably, but nonetheless let’s keep the store going.” If Norman Mailer feels this way about his achievement, imagine how the rest of us feel.

And here is Michael Eisner to illustrate how the power of failure to move us correlates with the power of the person who fails. Was there ever a guy more unlikely to acknowledge his failings than the CEO of Disney, destroying Michael Ovitz on the stand week after week in the severance case we’ve read more about than nuclear stockpiles in Iran? Yet in a memo to Tony Schwartz, co-writer of his autobiography, Work in Progress, Eisner sounds like Dr. Johnson on King Lear: “Most tragedy comes to those who simply make a mistake. The higher the position of the person making the mistake, the more interesting the fall, and the further the fall. That is drama and that is life.” The other day, I studied that hard, money-coarsened face in a photograph in the business section of the Times and thought, You, too?

Athletics is particularly fertile failure terrain. “All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser’s locker room,” wrote Pete Hamill in a review of A Pitcher’s Story, Roger Angell’s anatomy of David Cone’s agonizing decline. What if the Yanks had swept the Red Sox in four straight last fall? Sure, we would have cheered our invincible home team. But wasn’t it more incredible—and in the end more satisfying—the way they let victory slip from their grasp? “Losers are more like the rest of us,” observes Hamill. “They make mistakes they can’t take back.”

Lying awake one night rehearsing my own litany of mistakes—why didn’t you write the biography of Edmund Wilson when you had the chance? Why did you quit your job at the New York Times?—I recall a moment when I was 40 and between assignments. It was ten o’clock on a weekday morning, and I sat at the counter of the Four Brothers coffee shop, staring out the window at the stream of traffic. Buses, delivery trucks, taxis stormed by, jouncing over the rough pavement of Amsterdam Avenue. Everybody was on the way to somewhere, in a hurry, purposeful. The coffee shop was nearly empty. In a corner sat an elderly woman reading the Post, her cane leaning against the seat. Another booth was occupied by a middle-aged man in a windbreaker. He had long sideburns and thick glasses; his hair was thinning in front. A cigarette smoldered in a tin ashtray by his side. He was studying a letter, reading it over and over. I stirred my coffee. My heart was a stone in my chest. I had nothing to do. I thought, This is your life. You took a wrong turn, missed the boat, bet the wrong horse. Blew it.

That night, I was walking down a street in my neighborhood when I glimpsed, through a brightly lit window, a tableau of seeming harmony—a man hunched over a desk, reading a book by the soft light of an Oriental lamp. I was seized with envy. What a perfect life was framed by that window! The man was a well-known writer, a journalist putting the last touches on his weekly column for a prestigious journal of opinion; he was just back from a lively dinner party, looking up a reference to Yeats . . . I was making it up: For all I knew, he was an out-of-work accountant with a drinking problem; his wife wanted a divorce; his mother had just died; his son was into drugs. All of us, I suspect, imagine that a world exists from which we alone have been excluded; all of us have our noses pressed against the glass. But if we contemplate our own lives, not the phantom life on the other side, we might find things in them to envy—a family that’s intact; a job we like; excellent health (the thing we take for granted and on which all happiness depends). Good fortune is there, however sporadic, however modest, however difficult to achieve. The trick is to recognize it.



BASEBALL

The Final Countdown
By IRA BERKOW

It is one of the rites of early spring, for better or for worse. Many people envy journalists like me who receive an annual card each February from the Baseball Writers' Association of America that entitles the bearer, who, as it states on the front, ''is a duly qualified member,'' to ''press courtesies of the clubs of the National and American Leagues of professional baseball clubs.'' That is, with this wallet-size plastic card, you can get free admission to any major league baseball game in the world. Of course, you actually have to work once inside the ballpark, but that's another matter.

Sportswriters, though, approach the card's arrival with a certain amount of dread, if not trembling. For they know it's a living symbol of the end of another game -- that game being life. Few people in any profession have a clearer indication of where they stand in relation to the eventual embrace of the maker. For printed on the top right-hand corner of my blue-and-white card this year is the number 20. The number is related to seniority. In other words, of the now nearly 800 active members in the association, only 19 writers have been in it longer than I have. Each year, the number gets lower, as in the mind's eye the jaws of eternity widen. I know some writers who refuse to tell their numbers, fearing they would seem old, never mind the bald pate and slowed stride.

Last year I was No. 22. That meager decline may mean -- in my imagination, anyway -- that time is slowing for me. The drops in the last three years have been the smallest I've experienced in my journey through the dugouts and clubhouses of the nation. I began as a 25-year-old baseball writer for The Minneapolis Tribune in 1965, when, according to Jack Lang, the retired longtime secretary-treasurer of the B.B.W.A.A., there were about 800 members. There is no record of the exact number I started at, and I have been saving the cards since only 1983. But in the last 40 years, some 780 newspaper baseball writers or columnists who cover baseball have either retired or died.

Here follows my march to cliff's end -- from 1983 the numbers go thusly: 142, 130, 121, 105, 100, 91 (double digits beginning in 1988), 86, 78, 71, 62, 56, 49 (broke the half-century mark in 1994), 45, 40, 36, 32, 31, 29 (broke 30 in 2000), 28, 24, 23, 22 and now 20.

I once asked a writer who had attained card No. 1 what that was like. ''Better than the alternative,'' he replied. Roger Angell, truthfully but mystically, has written in The New Yorker: ''Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.'' There has never been a game, of course, that went on forever (the major league record is 26 innings), although some, even those that go nine innings, feel as if they are going on forever -- with all the posturing and scratching of the pitcher and the diggings-in of the batter seemingly searching for buried treasure. But the baseball writer eschews this for a focus on the drama, the beauty, the ambience, the strategies of the contest and the people in the game.
I've seen the inevitable diminishing of skills, the careers gradually drawing to termination. Even the ''immortals,'' as those enshrined in Cooperstown are known, have not been spared mortality, including those I covered as players, including Mickey Mantle, Catfish Hunter and Hoyt Wilhelm, and those I covered as managers or coaches, like Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and Casey Stengel. And so, at some point, for the superstars as well as the journeymen, the writer must consider baseball players and his card not morbidly but objectively: there must be a conclusion.

A few years ago, there was an old sandlot player, an 87-year-old baseball fan named Harold, who lay in a Chicago hospital bed with severe heart congestion. The doctor took Harold's son aside and told him that his father had maybe a month or so to live. Should he tell the father? The son said yes, his dad could take the truth, and also, the son could never lie to his father or deal in subterfuge. His father would see right through it. With Harold propped up on a pillow, the doctor related the news to him as gently as he could and then departed.

The son, now sitting alone at bedside, looked at the man who had just been given a literal death sentence. ''How do you feel, Dad?'' he asked.

There was a brief silence. ''Like I told Ma,'' my father said to me, ''Nobody lives forever. I'm not scared, and I'm not depressed. I've tried to live a full and good life, tried to do the right thing. I hope I have.''

I told him, yes, he had, and then grew emotional. I believe, or want to believe, that Babe Ruth and Red Smith may have felt the same way as my father. As I hope I feel when the number on my baseball card is about to reach 0.

Ira Berkow is a sportswriter for The New York Times and the author of ''Court Vision: Unexpected Views on the Lure of Basketball.''

MUSIC

On Tuesday, April 5, 2005, Verve Records will release Verve Remixed 3; the newest collection in Verve’s popular series of jazz remixes. The album features some of the top producers, DJs, and bands from today’s contemporary music scene reinterpreting and reinvigorating classic songs from The Verve Music Group’s unparalleled archives. Each song presented here has been transformed from its original form into a modern hit stacked with irresistible beats. The re-workings range from reverent to surprising, from moving to mischievous. Verve Remixed 3 includes the following 13 songs:

Nina Simone “Little Girl Blue” - Postal Service Remix
Billie Holiday “Speak Low” - Bent Remix
Anita O’Day “Sing, Sing, Sing” - RSL Remix
Sarah Vaughan “Fever” - Adam Freeland Remix
Shirley Horn “Come Dance With Me” - Sugardaddy Remix*
Blossom Dearie “Just One of Those Things” - Brazilian Girls Remix
Astrud Gilberto “The Gentle Rain”- RJD2 Remix
Sarah Vaughan “Peter Gunn” - Max Sedgley Remix
Jimmy Smith “Stay Loose” - Lyrics Born Remix
Hugh Masekela “The Boy’s Doin’ It” - Carl Craig Remix
Nina Simone “Lilac Wine” - The Album Leaf Remix
Billie Holiday “Yesterdays” - Junior Boys Remix
Dinah Washington “Baby, Did You Hear?” - Danger Mouse Remix

"I'm very excited about Verve Remixed 3,” says co-producer and Verve Music Group A&R Director Dahlia Ambach Caplin. "The opportunity to make another record working with the Verve vocal catalogue, which continually yields gems that inspire the artists and producers to create such special collaborations, combined with all the things we learned from working on the previous albums, allowed us to make a record we’re very proud of."
“Verve Remixed 3 is a testament to the talents we worked with" says co-producer Todd Roberts. "They each transcended the idea of a remix by digging deep into the spirit of the original songs.” Verve Remixed 3 follows in the hallowed footsteps of its groundbreaking predecessors Verve Remixed (2002) and Verve Remixed 2 (2003). Those acclaimed collections featured the likes of Thievery Corporation, Tricky, DJ Spinna, and Felix Da Housecat reinterpreting works from the legendary artists of jazz such as Astrud Gilberto, Billie Holiday, Betty Carter, and Nina Simone, respectively. Combined, the two previous Verve Remixed releases have sold over a half-million units.

Verve Remixed 3 will be available on CD and as a triple-vinyl LP.

Song Information

Since its debut in 2002, Verve Remixed has paired some of the world’s most adventurous DJs and producers with some of the best jazz music in history. The pioneering series has achieved the rare feat of becoming both a critical and commercial success, culling the esteemed catalog of Verve Records and tapping into the creative visions of an influential generation of beat-makers. Verve Remixed 3 continues the series' mission of shaping jazz into vital contemporary music, this time with a new lineup of all-star beat-makers.

"Little Girl Blue" – Postal Service remix – Nina Simone
No other track on Verve Remixed 3 declares the new territory being explored than the opening track, a remix of Nina Simone's "Little Girl Blue," done by indie-pop darlings, Postal Service. "Little Girl Blue," was one of Simone's most cherished songs to perform, a lyrical number that was also the title track of her debut album. Simone introduced the world to her rich, spiritual blues on that song – and on the remix, Postal Service producer Jimmy Tamborello, incorporates the original’s melody (lifted from the traditional Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas”) and uses bubbling beats and a shape-shifting digital groove to evoke a dazzling, wintry wonderland.

"Speak Low" – Bent remix – Billie Holiday
In meeting the challenge of working with one of the most recognizable yet heart-wrenching voices in music, the English group Bent heap great reverence on Billie Holiday by preserving the intense intimacy that colored all her music. Bent, popular for their lush, organic dance-floor escapes, show a knack for nuance and instrumentation on their version of "Speak Low," gently smearing Holiday's muted tones and turning the song into part nighttime samba, part orchestral serenade.

"Sing, Sing, Sing" – RSL remix – Anita O' Day
Anita O' Day was one of the boldest voices of her day, male or female, and her lustrous swing helped shatter the image of women who sang with big bands. "Sing, Sing, Sing" was written by Louis Prima and was a favorite of Benny Goodman. But nobody gave it the sass that O' Day did, and on this delightful reworking, the Manchester production trio, RSL, tap into a motley mix of styles: big band strut, scatting be-bop funk and twisting Latin jazz. Like RSL's acclaimed dance 12"s, this cut was made with the DJ in mind.

"Fever" – Adam Freeland remix – Sarah Vaughan
"Fever" has been a favorite of jazz vocalists for decades, a vessel for their different personalities. Some craft it as a seductive plea; others, like Sarah Vaughan, treated the track as a bold emotional declaration. No version of the song, though, sounds like it does in the hands of Adam Freeland. The dance-music guru drives a thumping, relentless rhythm that's as moving as it is flamboyant. Jumpin' jack jive piano riffs tussle with snake-like horns and Vaughan's breathy release, making this an inimitable, lusty jazz come-on.

"Come Dance With Me" – Sugardaddy (Tom Findlay from Groove Armada and Tim Hutton) remix – Shirley Horn
Shirley Horn boasts one of the more unique stories in jazz history as a singer in her prime who sacrificed her career to raise her daughter. Horn "leaves" this song, too, a cover version of her sweet and seductive, "Come Dance With Me," by Sugardaddy, a collaboration between Groove Armada's Tom Findlay and producer/vocalist Tim Hutton. Under the direction of Findlay, "Come Dance With Me," is turned into a sumptuous, twilight house number that, perfect for – what else? – dancing.

"Just One Of Those Things" – Brazilian Girls remix – Blossom Dearie
The Brazilian Girls met in New York as four musical souls from different corners of the globe who coalesced under the auspices of one international groove. Like their individual back-stories, their worldly cover of this Cole Porter tune bears a certain cosmopolitan panache. With this track, it's easy to see how the Brazilian Girls ended up as a signature artist on the Verve/Forecast roster.


"The Gentle Rain" – RJD2 remix – Astrud Gilberto
Astrud Gilberto is the "Girl From Ipanema," and on this remake of her Brazilian folk song, taken from the singer's second album, visionary producer RJD2 shows why he's considered one of the most studied, ambitious producers of his time. RJD2 isn't just a beat-maker, he's a thoughtful composer, and he crafts Gilberto's original into a six-minute epic love song that breathes with movement and life. Gilberto is re-contextualized as a voice of the '70s pop and soul era (think Steely Dan) and, like he's done on his own two albums, RJD2 imaginatively defies the bounds of geography and time.

"Peter Gunn" – Max Sedgley remix – Sarah Vaughan
Newcomer Max Sedgley was paid the highest compliment last year when, after releasing his 12" dance single, "Happy," big beat wizard – and no stranger to dance floors himself – Fatboy Slim called and asked if he could remix the tune. Listening to Sedgley's take on "Peter Gunn," one of Henry Mancini's most iconic tunes, as sung here by Sarah Vaughan, it's not difficult to see why Fatboy Slim was intrigued. Sedgley puts a premium on the beat, crafting a bounce from a barrage of percussion, big brassy knuckles from the original and the bombast of Vaughan's original.

"Stay Loose" – Lyrics Born remix – Jimmy Smith
Lyrics Born is known mostly for the robust rhymes he delivers as part of the Quannum collective, one of indie hip-hop's most revered crews. As charismatic an MC Lyrics Born has proven to be, he's just as distinctive behind the boards. Here, he plays with Jimmy Smith's, "Stay Loose." The 1968 original found the legendary organ grinder singing vocals in front of a soul-struttin' big band. With a funky barrage of drums, brassy horn stabs and hip-shakin' organ riffs, Lyrics Born creates a frolicking, feel-good jam smothered with Smith's own saucy blues-beat poetry.

"The Boys Doin’ It" – Carl Craig remix – Hugh Masekela
For South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela, his 1975 album, The Boys Are Doin' It, was documentation of his love affair with the afro-beat sounds of Fela Kuti, whom he had played with in London just a short time before. The song – like the album – is a rich and raucous affair, full of vibrant life. Carl Craig is one of techno's preeminent composers and for his remix, he strips down the song into a mesmerizing, minimal groove. It's the eloquence of Craig's re-telling that is a testament to his genius: he's able to convey the rhythm, energy and robustness of Masekela's message with just a few beautiful sounds.

"Lilac Wine" – The Album Leaf remix – Nina Simone
Like Postal Service, Jimmy Lavalle's The Album Leaf moniker, turned the notion of indie rock upside down by using a new electronic language to communicate. With spare, bursting notes, The Album Leaf's music is a pastoral, digital lullaby. On one of Verve Remixed 3's most original-sounding tracks, the remix of "Lilac Wine," encapsulates all the tender, heartfelt and melancholy that made this a Nina Simone standard. One gets the sense that this is the kind of gripping, adventurous music Simone would have made were she still alive.

"Yesterdays" – Junior Boys remix – Billie Holiday
The Junior Boys turned in one of 2004's best indie-pop albums, Last Exit, creating a hybrid electronic sound that was influenced by a hodge podge of styles - jazz vocalists to Timbaland, house music to rhythm & blues. For Verve Remixed 3, they rework the jazz standard, "Yesterdays," a favorite of artists like Chet Baker and Cab Calloway but here sung by Billie Holiday, into a minimalist, ghostly lullaby. The Canadian duo amplify the smallest sounds into impressionistic rhythms, distorting Holiday's croon to compel both the sadness and beauty in her song.

"Baby, Did You Hear?" – Danger Mouse remix – Dinah Washington
Long before he imaginatively backed one of rap's greatest, street-savvy voices with music from the world's most popular band for his infamous bootleg, "The Grey Album," Danger Mouse was making home-tested musical alchemy in his bedroom laboratory that drew from a dynamic, diverse variety of genres. Here, the newest member of The Gorillaz tackles the versatile sass of Dinah Washington, whose "Baby, Did You Hear?" was one of her signature favorites. Danger Mouse paws with hyper-speed beats and a cobra-like bass-line that gives the song an urgent groove. His layering of background voices and ghostly distortion of Washington's verses only heighten the songs haunting charm.

EDUCATION
Economist

Is the MBA responsible for moral turpitude at the top?





SEVERAL of the corporate scandals that took place in the early years of this decade are currently being replayed in courtrooms from New York to Alabama. The trials of top executives at HealthSouth, Tyco International and WorldCom are reminding the public how unethical was the behaviour of some of the nation's top managers only a few short years ago.

The finger of blame for this behaviour is sometimes pointed at the MBA, the degree offered by business schools from Harvard to Hawaii. Perhaps this is not as odd as it sounds. After all, MBAs lay as thick on the ground at Enron as managerial hubris, and disinterested outsiders are not alone in asking whether there might have been some connection.


In an extraordinary mea culpa, Sumantra Ghoshal, a respected business academic who died last year, argued in a paper to be published shortly that the way MBA students are taught has freed them “from any sense of moral responsibility” for what they subsequently do in their business lives. This, he believed (and other respected academics, such as Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford, are carrying his argument forward), is because management studies have been hi-jacked intellectually by the dismal science of economics.

A stout defence of the virtues of economics from a publication called The Economist would hardly be a surprise. But, in fact, this is not necessary to refute the claim that business schools are responsible for moral turpitude at the top of corporate America. As it happens, most of the erstwhile corporate leaders currently appearing in the dock never went near one (see article), whereas many acknowledged champions of business ethics, such as Lou Gerstner at IBM, did.

What's more, many of the top business schools have taken steps to offset any ethically desensitising influence there may have been in their MBA coursework. They have greatly expanded their teaching of business ethics—some by introducing special courses, others in more memorable ways. Tuck School of Business, for example, persuades an ex-convict to come every year to tell its MBA students of his regrets.

The dubious claim that business schools are responsible for the moral failures of their graduates decades after graduation does, however, highlight one widespread misunderstanding about the role and purpose of an MBA.

Mr Ghoshal and his supporters are right that top business schools strive for academic respectability, and that this has led them to rely heavily on economic theory. But they are wrong to criticise this. As long as schools are teaching academic degrees (and, after all, the letters MBA stand for Master of Business Administration), they have to teach the most compelling business theories around. It may be a pity that these are mostly to be found in economics. But that is the fault of other disciplines for not coming up with ideas to rival, for example, agency theory or the maximisation of shareholder value.

The real problem arises when students, or their new employers, believe that an MBA is, somehow, a qualification for business leadership. It is not, nor could any academic degree provide this. Law or medical degrees are necessary but not sufficient for the making of outstanding lawyers or doctors. In a similar way, a good MBA degree can help provide a student with analytical skills and theoretical knowledge useful to a business career. But becoming a successful leader of men and women in a turbulent business world requires maturity and wisdom. Happily, there is no degree programme for those.

MUSIC

ANI DIFRANCO: Knuckle Down
The Volvo of rock, Ani DiFranco has always made reliability her strong suit. Since 1990, she’s been a hippie-rock assembly line, releasing approximately an album a year, purveying her potent “Fuck you/I love you” folk. Sometimes incorporating huge orchestras and other times flying solo, she consistently sends messages of independence, political awareness and heartbreak with finely crafted poetry. Though she lets her guard down (particularly in the wake of her fiercely solo Educated Guess) by allowing Joe Henry to co-produce, Knuckle Down is still Ani and her guitar finger-picking their way through fears and frustrations. Some of the album’s best material comes early, on two relationship-themed tracks: “Studying Stones” and “Manhole.” A master of intertwining melody and metaphor, DiFranco evokes the stresses between fighting friends and lovers with striking clarity. Maybe it’s the recent election or DiFranco’s maturity (she just turned 34), but shes seems a little somber on the rest of the record, singing her fiery lyrics without the fire that made her early work so appealing. Yet, in the thick of this downtempo Ani, slides the bone-chilling poem, “Parameters,” about fear and its power to unravel. DiFranco is still a great writer-better now than ever, perhaps-even if her guitar tricks are beginning to sound a bit familiar. But never fear, there’s always next year.



McSWEENEY'S

Dear McSweeney's:

Some kid last night tried to tell me that apple juice was the best juice ever. I almost spit out my orange juice onto his face. I'm serious, it was close to coming out. It would have ended up on his face had I not calmed myself before realizing his ignorance and preparing my battle. Orange juice cannot be touched as the pinnacle of all juices. While the other two mainstays (grape and apple) follow not far behind, orange juice will never be touched. There is nothing to debate. All these new, fake juices give real juice a bad name. I mean, who drinks cran-straw-grape-mango-mellon juice? Who can take the sweetness of cran-pineapple juice?

Orange juice is in its best form with lots of pulp. Anyone that drinks no pulp is, sorry to say, a baby. What, you can't take little bits of orange? Well then you don't really like oranges. You're just a fake orange-juice drinker. You give us die-hards a bad name. We like the pulp because it's real, it's from the orange. I mean, if you're going to cut up an orange to make juice, I'm pretty sure you're going to leave the pulp in and not take hours trying to pick out the little bits. That's how juice is supposed to be.

Orange juice is also best paired with a big bowl of cereal, preferably dry cereal, straight out of the box. If you're eating cereal with milk, along with the grape juice, that's a little too much liquid and you end up not being able to finish the juice and you also have to urinate every 12 minutes. It best goes with dry Cheerios. This is quite possiby the best snack combination ever. I insist that you try it sometime.

Sincerely,
Patrick Morris



Dear McSweeney's,

It is with great consternation that I write this letter. One Patrick Morris recently wrote, "Anyone that drinks no pulp is, sorry to say, a baby. What, you can't take little bits of orange? Well then you don't really like oranges. You're just a fake orange-juice drinker." I most respectfully say that Patrick Morris is a punk. If one wishes to eat little bits of orange, then one should go eat an orange. If one wishes to drink juice, then one must drink juice-not chucks of pulp and orange. However, I will agree with said punk that orange juice is the best juice to drink. Unfortunately, he should take a step back from his position on pulp vs. no pulp. Orange juice isn't meant to be divisive. We orange-juice drinkers must unite. Otherwise, the Cranberry Juice Council will win. And we all know that wouldn't be a good thing.

Respectfully yours,

Elizabeth Fullerton
Lewisburg, Tennessee



Dear Mr. John Fogerty,

Thanks again for your latest inquiry, and please accept my apologies for not getting back to you on your last several letters, phone calls, e-mails, and telegrams. I had thought this issue had been cleared up already but, judging by the volume of your inquiries, it has evidently not been.

Our position is unchanged: under no conditions will we allow you to play center field. Setting aside the fact that Bernie Williams and Kenny Lofton are performing quite well in that capacity, and that we have several talented prospects in our minor-league organization, the idea of a fifty-nine-year-old man with no demonstrable baseball experience playing center field for the Yankees is ludicrous. I’ve told you this in several previous replies. I wish you’d believe me.

Major-league-caliber players are, uniformly, incredibly talented athletes who have dedicated their lives to the game. They spend years working their way up through the system. They don’t just ask “the coach” to “put them in.” Another thing: I’m not a coach. I’m a manager. If you knew anything about baseball, you’d know that.

As to your arguments, I remain unconvinced. You claim to have “spent some time in the Mudville Nine,” but while we all enjoyed that poem, there is no such team. So you’re lying, Mr. Fogerty. And while you are clearly excited about your beat-up glove, homemade bat, and brand-new pair of shoes (thanks for the many photos), such acquisitions in no way qualify one to play center field for the Yankees. The team provides state-of-the-art equipment to all our players. Again, any understanding of pro baseball, or even simple logic, would have told you that.

I hope we can now put this issue to rest. I’ve included a Derek Jeter key chain as a token of goodwill.

Sincerely,
Joe Torre
Manager
New York Yankees

BASEBALL, continued
by Tom Watson

Darryl Strawberry was born on March 12, 1962 in Los Angeles - roughly three weeks after the New York Mets opened their first spring training camp ever in St. Petersburg, Florida, three weeks after John Glenn circled the globe, and the same three weeks after I slipped onto the planet in the hospital just across the street from the same suburban commuter station in Bronxville where I now catch the train every morning to Grand Central. With this week's announcement that the best everyday player in Mets history was rejoining the organization as an instructor, it seems apparent to me that Straw and I have both come full circle in the middle span of life.

I've always liked Darryl - from his introduction to New York fans as a top draft pick - the "black Ted Williams," a tall, stringy outfielder with a long, loping swing - to his final last-chance at bats with the Yankees. His were the plate appearances you didn't miss, the four or five times a game when conversation stopped, when you put down the book or the paper and really watched the game, pitch by pitch, swing by swing. The slightly open stance, the unquiet windmilling of the bat, the nervous glance back to the umpire with every pitch he took - these habits revealed the unsure Strawberry, the young man in the glare not quite comfortable with his talents, not quite sure if everyone liked him. Then the swing, that explosion of wood through the strike zone, and the sound when Darryl connected - a unique sound in those pre-steroid days - a deep, maple-tinged crack. And of course, the long, arcing moonshots to right-field.

The summer of the real moonshot, just seven years after Glenn's orbit, was the time when baseball attached itself to my life like an anchor-bolt. Tommie Agee and Cleon Jones. Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. Bud Harrelson and Ken Boswell and Jerry Grote. And the others (all from eternal memory here, folks) Shamsky, Garrett, Gaspar, Swoboda, Dyer, McAndrew, Kranepool, McGraw, Taylor, Gentry, Ryan, Cardwell, Weis, Clendenon, Koonce, Charles. Gil Hodges on the bench, Joe Pignatano on the lines at first, Eddie Yost at third, and pitching coach/genius Rube Walker in the pen. Nelson, Kiner and Murphy in the booth for Channel 9. And in the stands, the New York glamour brigade of the day: Mayor Lindsay, Jackie Onassis, Pearl Bailey, Joe Namath, Leonard Bernstein. Shea Stadium was the gleaming five-year-old jewel of Robert Moses' World's Fair parkland, and the place to watch the Mets and be watched.

Strange, as Lou Reed says, how time turns around. Seven years from spring training in 1962 to a fairy-tale world championship - the time from birth to second grade for a couple of 7-year-olds - and then 17 years until the next title. At 24, Strawberry seemed to be on the edge of a Hall of Fame career. Still hidden were the demons, the alcohol and the drugs, and the violent anger. In 1986, I was the callow deputy editor of The Riverdale Press, the youngest newsroom denizen of that storied Bronx newspaper, learning the hard first lessons of management and responsibility. When she turned over the reins to me earlier that year, my predecessor - a brilliant community journalist - cracked laconically to this fresh-faced 24-year-old: "no more boy wonder, huh?" No kidding. My beat was Bronx politics and what an education the likes of Stanley Friedman, Mario Biaggi, and Walter Diamond provided on a weekly basis.

Over at Shea, Darryl Strawberry was being slowly brought along by veteran baseball man Jim Frey, who recognized his protege's sensitive nature and worried about the glare of New York. The kid showed plenty of promise and his homers were becoming legendary. The big numbers would come, if Darryl could "stay within himself." But by 1986, Frey was gone, Davey Johnson was in, the Mets clubhouse was the wild west of baseball, and the rollercoaster ride was on.

That year, my buddy Larry and I created our own partial season ticket plan at Shea, investing in tickets to a dozen games or so in advance. It was a good call. We were there all year, usually seated just above what Bob Murphy always called "the auxiliary scoreboard" just into fair territory in right-field, next to Strawberry. From those seats we watched him cover a lot of territory, fire the ball in the from the corner, send moonshots over our heads to the upper deck, and endure the growing taunts of fans he would never quite satisfy, the cowardly and mocking sing-song Darr-yl, Darr-yl. Even from the hometown guys. You could tell that Straw had rabbit ears; he heard those taunts and it hurt. In truth, the '86 Mets were the team of Hernandez and Carter and Gooden more than Strawberry. But Darryl was the force in that lineup. And he was clutch - hitting crucial homeruns in the crazed playoffs with the Astros and the landmark Series with the Red Sox. But he was hurt when Davey Johnson double-switched him out of Game 6 after a big homerun, and he was hurt in future years by the jeers and the taunts.

And he began to hurt himself, and - on occasion - others. His first wife Lisa complained that he broke her nose in a fight in 1986. He fathered a child with another woman. In 1990, he was arrested for alleged assault with a deadly weapon during an argument with his wife; he is alleged to have hit her in the face with an open hand and also to have threatened her with a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun, but charges are dropped. He goes to Smithers to dry out. He leaves the Mets for the Dodgers. In 1993, Darryl is arrested for allegedly striking Charisse Simons, the 26-year-old woman he lived with; charges were dropped. An IRS investigation ensues. He disappears from a Dodgers game and enters drug rehab. In 1994, he's indicted for failure to pay Federal income taxes and pays a $350,000 fine. A year later, he is suspended for 60 days for failing a drug test. More rehab. In 1995, he's charged with failure to pay child support. The Yankees offer a chance for a comeback. He battles colon cancer and chemo in '98 and '99, often heroically.

But the demons got worse. Three more drug suspensions and the cancer came back. More surgery and treatment. More arrests and charges. And then jail for two years - a real stretch. And always the promises with Darryl: this is the year I'll lead the team, this is the year I'll hit 50 homers, this time I'll stay straight, this time I'll be faithful, this time I've found the Lord.

And so it goes. When he was in jail in Florida a year or so ago, his last chances run out and his promises dim, I wrote him a quick letter. Just to say he wasn't forgotten. And because, as another 40-year-old with a different set of miles, I was well aware of the "there but for the grace of God" factor at play. Darryl could hit a fastball a mile, and I could write a line or two. His talents produced an arc of success and failure like the creaky, wooden rollercoaster at Coney Island - loud and scary and sudden. Mine produced what has been, comparatively, a series of more gently rolling hills. Who knows why.

Darryl Strawberry had the best year of his life in 1987, when he hit 39 homeruns, drove in 104, stole 36 bases, and hit .284. He was only 25, already in trouble off the field, with nowhere to go but down. He has two more similar years - in '88 and '90. He finished his career with 335 homers and an even 1,000 runs batted in. But there were more arrests than All Star appearances, more rehab stints than pennants.

It would be easy to point to Strawberry's upbringing in a tough LA neighborhood and his early success as factors in his downfall; these are the oft-cited reasons. Poor black guy from Compton had too much too soon and crashed. This is simple, too simple, and life is more complex, all myriad shades of gray. As I told Strawberry in that letter, everyone has demons, we're all in the midst of a titanic battle against them almost every day. The only path is forward. Because of his talents, Darryl's were played out in public, in the rocket's glare of his moonshots. Springsteen wrote: "Nothing is forgotten or foregiven when it's your last time around." But we're also a society of comebacks and, it seems, it's almost never too late, unless the pilot light goes out. Darryl Strawberry and I are a couple of children of the late winter of 1962, when everything seemed possible. And I'm glad that the Straw is back with the Mets.

READING

A whizz with words
Daily Telegraph

Despite becoming the subject of more books than she probably ever read, it is Marilyn Monroe who most accurately expresses my ideal reading state. In the song Lazy, she invokes a luxuriously languid day in which she stretches out, yawning, under a "honey lake" of a sky, "With a great big valise full of books to read / Where it's peaceful / And I'm quarantined… being laaaaaaaa-zzzyyyy." And yet, for too many of us, reading has become a rushed affair.

No honey lake skies open up as we gobble down the latest John Grisham or Jonathan Franzen. Books must be polished off before we reach our train station, before the book club next meets, or before they are due back to the library. And there are so many prize-winning, shortlisted and shockingly-pipped-at-the-post masterpieces on which we are expected to have opinions that bibliophiles seem to exist in a perpetual state of guilt over what remains unread or partially digested.

But this isn't a modern paranoia. In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill's contemporaries must have felt a similar pang when he claimed that he could read faster than he could turn pages. The American commentator HL Mencken boasted that he could breeze through a 250-page work within an hour, and it is said that Theodore Roosevelt somehow found time to devour two or three books a day while he was in office.

These people might have been regarded as freakishly fast readers had not a schoolteacher called Evelyn Wood "discovered" speed-reading shortly after the Second World War. Ever since, we have been bombarded with advertisements chiding us for not acquiring the revolutionary technique that could make Roosevelts of us all.

Wood was a student in Utah when she got the idea. She submitted an 80-page paper to her professor and watched in amazement as he read and graded it in under 10 minutes. His "untrained" reading rate was a dizzying 2,500 words per minute, although he could not explain how he did it. Over the next two years, Wood rooted out 50 people of all sorts of backgrounds and ages – from teenagers to an octogenarian – who could read at between 1,500 and 6,000 words per minute, and understand and remember what they had read. By studying their habits, she found that they absorbed more than one word at a time, seeing words in meaningful patterns as they guided their gaze smoothly down the page. Wood taught herself to speed-read by watching them, and in 1959 she opened the first Evelyn Wood Institute in Washington DC.

A Wood course begins by getting readers to follow words along the page by pointing at them, and gradually opening up the field of vision until the reader is taking in pages in widescreen. It sounds like an exercise undertaken by a character in John Irving's novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. He is advised that "instead of following the elusive next word with my finger… I should highlight a spot on the page by reading through a hole cut in a piece of paper. It was a small rectangle, a window to read through; I moved the window over the page – it was a window that opened no higher than two to three lines. I read more comfortably than I had ever read with my finger; to this day I read through such a window."

According to the Evelyn Wood Institute, the average person reads between 200 and 400 words a minute. "By at least tripling your reading speed," it claims, "you would possess a much wider and more flexible range of reading rates and experience for the first time the thrill of dynamic comprehension. It is like watching a movie. As Mrs Wood said after reading a book set in the rain forests of Brazil, 'It was, oh, so wonderful. I had no direct awareness of reading, but I could see the trees, smell the warm fragrances of the forest, feel the touch of the vines and leaves against my skin, hear those magnificent bird melodies. Reading this new way enables me to project myself into the experience, not just read about it.' "

I am not sure that Wood's comments add much credibility. She may have smelled the rainforest, but what was the book about? Did she gain any real grasp of plot, character, prose and theme, or did the 'dynamic comprehension' simply give her the flavour of a dish that would never nourish her more deeply? Her response to the South American novel reminds me of Woody Allen's joke: "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia."

In his Telegraph column last month, Andrew Marr blithely referred to his annual winter ritual of a "swim" through War and Peace. I hoped it was a joke. As the BBC's political correspondent, Marr appears on our television sets most evenings, offering insight into the latest 250-page government report, or the polysyllabic findings of an independent inquiry. He also presents Radio 4's Start the Week programme every Monday morning, on which he cheerily discusses books on politics, literature, science and philosophy with their authors. He also reviews new books for this newspaper. Surely the War and Peace ritual was a joke? It was not.

When I spoke to Marr, he was on his way back from the World Economic Forum in Davos with Tolstoy on his knee. "I just do read fast," he says. "If I'm reading books where I'm already familiar with the argument, I'll certainly concentrate more on the middle of the page than on the edges, but I do make an effort to read every page. Unless something has gone horribly wrong, then if somebody comes on Start the Week I will have read the book."

He doesn't think that speed-reading is especially virtuous, just a useful tool in his profession. He acknowledges different "gears" for different occasions and confesses that "the penalty for fast reading is quick forgetting. People say to me, 'Gosh, you read so much, you must know so much,' and I say, 'Only up a point'."

Professor John Stein of Oxford University's Sensorimotor Control Lab and Dyslexia Unit agrees. "Most speed-read material isn't committed to long-term memory," he says, "unless there is some incentive to store that information. Temporary information – things like seven-digit phone numbers we only need for a morning – pass through the working memory."

Slow readers can take comfort in the fact that there's an awful lot of brain activity involved in the reading process. Stein explains that "it all happens in the cortical [top] part of the brain. You have an auditory system that needs to detect the different sounds and a visual system to detect the different forms of the letters. The visual side of things starts in the occipital [back] cortex, which moves forward to meet the auditory information that's coded just in front of your ears in the temporal cortex. They meet at the angular gyrus.

"Speed-readers work by training their eyes to scan and pick up key words. They have a template in the mind of the visual structure of words they are looking for and they don't read the other words. If you present them with a completely new passage on a subject about which they have no previous knowledge then they wouldn't be much faster than you or I. It's perhaps controversial of me to say this, but in my opinion they're not really 'reading'. They're picking up the gist."

The beautiful phrases Stein uses – "angular gyrus", "occipital cortex", "parietal lobe" – make me want to savour their sounds as I struggle to make scientific sense of them. I feel sorry for the world's fastest reader, Howard Berg, who claims to scoff down 25,000wpm. That's binge reading, surely?

Instead, I find myself envying those the psychoanalytical thinker James Strachey refers to as "sotto voce" readers, "persons who, though not reading aloud, always say every word to themselves as they go on", forever hindered by "abortive movements of the tongue and lips". As Mary Jacobus argues in Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading: "The `hindrance' of an auditory imagination is an essential ingredient in poetic pleasure and even understanding."

Simon Armitage seconds that. He says that, as a poet, he does read slowly, measuring words and syllables against each other, seeking musicality. "I think you get used to reading in the way you write. Poetry happens all over the place," he says, "and as a poet I'm always wondering what to pinch." For a literary type, Armitage doesn't read many novels. "Only about 20 a year now," he says, "and I always feel I don't read them properly. I'm sure I skim."

Those who have to read vast amounts of fiction find it a struggle. The MP Chris Smith, who chaired last year's panel of Man Booker prize judges, found the experience "a nightmare". "I've just whizzed through Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, which is a great thriller. But when the writing is really good, as it was for books we read last year, like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, then I really want to slow down and savour every word. The reading ate up my whole summer. I went on holiday, and while everybody else was out for lunch, seeing the sights and wandering the galleries, I was stuck in a hotel room with a suitcase of books."

As Marr stresses, it is all about finding the right pace for the right situation. Peter Jacobs of Rapid Reading, who teaches speed-reading seminars for professionals, says that the skills he hones are designed only to help us navigate the vast tracts of information we have to deal with at work. His aim is to help us save time, avoid the junk of badly written documents and fish out the bits we need. He has also given seminars for librarians with a limited amount of time to choose which books to stock. "They should be able to make that choice in under a minute," he says. "A bit of skimming and scanning – taking in samples of prose like pondwater."

He talks to me about the fact that the tops of lower case letters tell us most of what we need to know. He says that if most readers can process one word at a time there's no reason the eye can't expand that to three or four. He also reminds me that many people had bad experiences of reading at school, and that fear of the written word prevents those people absorbing the information they need at speeds that would make them most effective. But he doesn't believe skimming and scanning techniques should influence reading for pleasure.

"Mariella Frostrup wanted me to go on Radio 4 and speed-read War and Peace," he sighs, "and Woody Allen was right. That's just a joke."

NBA

I watched the Raptors lose last night in Air Canada Centre. I haven't missed the NHL for one second this winter. I hope it leaves the newspapers for six months. Can't wait for baseball season. My favourite NBA players:

Steve Nash
Andrei Kirilenko
Jermaine O'Neal
Dirk Nowitzki
Yao Ming
Stephon Marbury

FILM

Nobody Knows

Hirokazu Kore-eda is the Japanese director whose breakthrough movie, After-Life, is gradually assuming cult status. It is a fantasy based on the idea that, after your death, you are asked to recall the most purely happy moment in your life so that it can be eternally re-created for your enjoyment. His follow-up, Distance - at Cannes in 2001 - was widely considered disappointing. However, his latest film, Nobody Knows (in Japanese, Daremo Shirinai) is a satisfying reminder of this director's talent for extending a single moment with superbly poised artistry.

Keiko is a single mum with four kids by different fathers, played here by the Japanese columnist and TV personality known simply as You. Flaky and irresponsible, she effectively sub-contracts parental duties to her eldest boy, 12-year-old Akira (Yuya Yagira) while she takes off with various boyfriends for days at a time. And then one day she simply never comes back, leaving Akira quite alone with his little sisters Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura), Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) and brother Shigeru (Hiei Kimura).

Akira has to provide for them as best he can while concealing the situation from any adult authority, especially the landlord, who is aware of only one child in their apartment. The others have had to be smuggled in, hiding in suitcases: a stratagem that is recalled in the movie's terrifying and heart-stoppingly sad ending.

Kore-eda patiently tracks the children's secret existence as un-adult adults, minute by minute, with gentleness and acute observation. They do not become feral, but maintain, with a weird and moving dignity, the best semblance of family life possible as their flat becomes more and more run down. They are four souls alone in their own universe, abandoned and unloved like believers whose Creator has turned his back on them. Kore-eda gets miraculously fresh performances from the children and the film is absorbing, humane and deeply moving.



TREES

Be sure to read the quiet, contemplative article on redwood trees in this week's New Yorker. It profiles Professor Steve Sillett’s research in the canopy of old-growth redwood forests. It describes his efforts as the first scientist to map the canopy that the 2000-year-old redwoods create. (On July 30, 2000, an amateur redwood researcher discovered what is currently believed to be the world’s tallest tree, now measuring 372 feet, 2 inches. It is currently growing roughly four inches taller a year. Crazy.)



MARRIAGE

Worthwhile article in this week's Boston Globe about the tough first year of marriage:
I Do. Now What?

INNOVATION: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW'S ANNUAL LIST

As the breadth of this year's Harvard Business Review's List demonstrates, innovation comes in myriad forms. It can be, for instance, a new idea that resonates with familiar truth, such as anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson's suggestion that midlife sabbaticals would reinvigorate employees and ward off stagnation. Or it can be an old inspiration given fresh life, such as Professor Roderick Kramer's reminder that great leaders aren't afraid to flip-flop when change is the wisest course. Great ideas need time to develop. Rarely do they spring from deities' heads fully formed and suited up for battle. The brainstorming for these 20 began with a klatch hosted last summer by HBR and the World Economic Forum, and it continued through the fall, as several insights took on greater definition and others emerged.

1 Flipping Without Flopping
The 2004 U.S. presidential campaign made "flip-flop" a dirty word. Great leaders, though, understand that changing course is sometimes the smartest thing to do. The trick to pulling off a reversal? Prepare the ground well in advance, and cast correction as courage.

2 Everybody into the Gene Pool
Many managers eager to pursue ambitious growth strategies suspect that their organizations lack the right stuff to deliver. These leaders want desperately to crack the code of high-performance DNA. But performance anatomies are highly individual and delicately balanced. New research initiatives are making the je ne sais quoi of success more decodable, teachable, and learnable.

3 The Velcro Organization
When your customers are located around the world, it's not enough to have effective, efficient functions. You also need to know the people and relationships that make business work in particular locales. The rigid organizational structure of most multinationals gets in the way. "Velcro organizations" do better, with managers who can quickly and easily rearrange their roles to meet the challenges of specific tasks.

4 Demand-Side Innovation
Each new generation of products and services has half the shelf life of the previous one. To secure a lasting competitive advantage, try shifting your innovation efforts to the demand side. Ultimately, it's how companies orchestrate customer interactions, not just what firms bring to market, that determines whether they live or die.

5 You Heard It Here First
Although visual technology has about a 20-year jump on audio, the ears are coming into their own. Industries stand to benefit from a host of breakthroughs in sound. Music that influences which wines we buy? Billboards that talk to one person at a time? Believe the buzz.

6 Seek Validity, Not Reliability
Six Sigma, customer relationship management, and most other corporate systems crank out consistent results, often through analysis of objective data. The outcomes are reliable, but they don't necessarily mean much. Companies that aim for validity instead-by embracing fuzzy data, variability, and inconsistency--open the door to innovation and growth.

7 "When" Is the New "What"
Marketers spend so much time fretting over which people to target with what message that they largely ignore the question of when. Identifying when needs or desires change and determining when customers want help are the best ways to get through. "Dialogue" marketing helps companies spot the hot irons-and strike.

8 Swapping Your Country's Risks
How can investors in developing countries diversify their risks if capital controls prohibit them from exporting capital overseas? And how can their countries' governments diversify their economies without sinking billions into new industries? By creating an equity swap, which enables domestic and foreign investors to manage risks separately from investments.

9 Wanted: A Continuity Champion
Change is sexy, challenging, a job for heroes. It also has a way of swallowing a company's attention and resources. Continuity needs and deserves champions, too. The core business, after all, is what got you where you are.

10 Blog-Trolling in the Bitstream
Blogs have the grassroots credibility to influence what people think, do, and buy. Because the blogosphere doesn't rely on marketers as other media branches do, companies that want to tap into its selling power have to play by its rules.

11 No Risk Is an Island
Big man-made risks without owners--think of an agricultural disaster sparked by genetically modified food - render traditional risk management all but worthless. When assessing risks of this type, companies must involve a broad community that includes experts and all those who might feel the repercussions.

12 Let Them All Be Power Users
Companies load up employees with lap-tops, PDAs, cell phones, and other gadgets for managing personal information but give little guidance on how best to use them. The result? Knowledge workers, the drivers of the global economy, are far less effective than they could be.

13 A Taboo on Taboos
Organizations tiptoe around politically or socially risqué subjects-especially perennial cringe inducers like sex, death, and God. But if a subject makes you uncomfortable, chances are it's exactly what you should be discussing.

14 Toward a New Science of Services
Services contribute even more to the global economy than products do. So shouldn't the science of services be an academic field in its own right? Whether it becomes one may depend on the same criteria-including the extent of corporate support-that set computer science apart from engineering, math, and physics.

15 The Coming Crisis over Intellectual Property Rights
Although many executives recognize a deteriorating respect for intellectual property rights globally, few see the particular threat posed by recent developments in China. Companies there have started flooding the world's markets with pirated versions of everything from DVDs to airplane parts-and a national emphasis on fostering economic growth at any cost makes it hard to weed out corruption. To keep IPR protections intact, global firms must wake up and take action.

16 Biometrics Meets Services
Biometric devices that scan fingerprints, palms, retinas, and faces are already revolutionizing security. The killer app, however, may be locking in business, not locking out bad guys. Singapore Airlines has begun using biometrics to enhance customer service. Other companies could do the same, customizing and streamlining the way people buy clothing, health care, financial services-even a cup of coffee.

17 Getting Time on Your Side
People are living longer, so we picture them spending more time in retirement. That's the wrong way to look at longevity. Instead, we should capitalize on it, giving employees in midlife a year or two to renew their energy and pursue new passions. Many would return to their jobs motivated to embark on a second stage of high performance.

18 Inversion of Privacy
Europeans worry about corporate data surveillance. Americans worry more about government prying. And the young have fewer qualms than their elders about sharing consumer information. Companies wrestling with privacy issues take note: A single policy may never suit all.

19 In Praise of Feedership
It's easy to understand how corporate Darwinism works: Eat before you're eaten. A closer look at biology, though, shows parasitism to be a far more subtle wand cunning strategic model. Businesses would do well to take a lesson from the fig wasp.

20 Don't Believe Everything You Read (Except for This)
Publishers churn out around 3,500 business titles a year, and--wonder of wonders--not all of them offer good advice. Managers who can't afford to waste time on dreck need help navigating the ideas marketplace. Some rules of thumb: Be skeptical of anything touted as "new," keep an eye out for half-truths, and if someone calls himself a guru, run the other way.