ALL MIXED UP

Finally saw Motorcycle Diaries on the weekend. Well worth the wait, and makes South America far more appealing a destination than it has been in the past for me (don't know why). We went snowboarding with Becky's work on the weekend -- beautiful sunshine and snow on Saturday. Went hiking on Sunday, near Penetanguishene and saw five grey owls along the way. ("The name "Penetanguishene" was given by an Algonquin tribe named the "Abinaki" who traveled frequently through this area. Their home was on the Northern Canadian Shield so it is thought that when they traveled here and viewed the shallow, soft, sandy shorelines they came up with the name "Penetanguishene". The name Penetanguishene means "place of the white rolling sands".")

One of the better, sadder books I've read in awhile:

The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury £12.99, pp324

In this, apparently the first Afghan novel to be written in English, two motherless boys who learn to crawl and walk side by side, are destined to destroy each other across the gulf of their tribal difference in a country of dried mulberries, sour oranges, rich pomegranates and honey.

It's a Shakespearean beginning to an epic tale that spans lives lived across two continents amid political upheavals, where dreams wilt before they bud and where a search for a child finally makes a coward into a man. The Kite Runner is the shattering first novel by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan doctor who received political asylum in 1980 as civil conflict devastated his homeland.

Whatever the truth of the claim to be the first English-language Afghan novel, Hosseini is certainly the first Afghan novelist to fictionalise his culture for a Western readership, melding the personal struggle of ordinary people into the terrible historical sweep of a devastated country in a rich and soul-searching narrative.

Over the last three decades, Afghanistan has been ceaselessly battered by Communist rule, Soviet occupation, the Mujahideen and a democracy that became a rule of terror. It is a history that can intimidate and exhaust an outsider's attempts to understand, but Hosseini extrudes it simply and quietly into an intimate account of love, honour, guilt, fear and redemption that needs no dry history book or atlas to grip and absorb.

Amir is a privileged member of the dominant Pashtun tribe growing up in affluent Kabul in the Seventies. Hassan is his devoted servant and a member of the oppressed Hazara tribe whose first word was the name of his boy-master. The book focuses on the friendship between the two children and the cruel and shameful sacrifice the rich boy makes of his humble, adoring alter ego to buy the love of his own distant father. 'I ran because I was a coward,' Amir realises, as he bolts from the scene that severs his friendship with Hassan, shatters his childhood and haunts him for the rest of his life. 'I actually aspired to cowardice.'

The book charts Amir's attempts to flee culpability for this act of betrayal, seeking asylum from his hellish homeland in California and a new life buried deep in black velvet portraits of Elvis. Amir's story is simultaneously devastating and inspiring. His world is a patchwork of the beautiful and horrific, and the book a sharp, unforgettable taste of the trauma and tumult experienced by Afghanis as their country buckled.

The Kite Runner is about the price of peace, both personal and political, and what we knowingly destroy in our hope of achieving that, be it friends, democracy or ourselves.



BECK

As a teenager, Beck Hansen would board the bus in a Latin neighborhood just south of downtown Los Angeles, where he lived with his mother and brother. He was a pale, blond, slightly built kid, with narrow shoulders and no hips. Mostly, he was ignored, but occasionally, someone on the street would shout, ''Guero!'' (''White boy!''). In his late teens, he grew his hair long. ''Sometimes they would whistle at me,'' he recalls. ''They would think I was a girl.''

The bus was coming from the South Central ghetto, heading north toward Hollywood. By the end of the ride, it would be filled with people from disparate worlds, side by side, on their way to school or work. When Beck, who is 34, talks about it now, instead of a city bus it might be his own eclectic music he is describing: an assortment of wildly incongruous cultures, jostling and colliding, intent on getting somewhere.

Had he been born a generation earlier, Beck (he dropped the Hansen when he started performing) would most likely have been a folk singer with a guitar strapped over his shoulder and a penchant for wryly autobiographical or protest songs. Instead, even after releasing five far-ranging and well-received major-label CD's, he is still best known for his early single, ''Loser,'' from 1993. ''Loser'' is a white-boy rap song, with an infectious recurring melody that vaguely recalls the close of the Beatles' ''Hey, Jude.'' Its deadpan refrain -- ''I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me'' -- became a slacker mantra of the 90's. Was he serious or joking? The question itself seems generationally dated. Every either-or inquiry that you put to Beck or apply to his songs is resolved with a ''maybe'' or a ''both.''

The man himself has a calm, earnest manner that takes in much more than it gives out. His blue eyes seem as big as satellite dishes. He listens so intently that the auditory act is almost audible. He is quietly polite; and, much as the exquisite manners of the Japanese preserve their privacy from outsiders, his courtesy acts as a moat. In the ''Loser'' spirit of semi-serious self-deprecation, his latest album -- which will be released later this month -- is called ''Guero.'' Although he would have a hard time these days passing for a loser, as a rapper Beck remains, most definitely, a guero.

Beck's jokey, jivey sound is disarming, like the patter of a scrawny kid who can't make the football team but uses wit to insinuate himself into the in-crowd. The poetic associations of his rap owe more to Bob Dylan's ''Mr. Tambourine Man'' and ''Subterranean Homesick Blues'' than to the hip-hop of Jay-Z or Snoop Dogg. He is musically omnivorous. Having introduced his collagist style on ''Mellow Gold,'' the major-label debut album that revealed he was more than a one-hit wonder, he enriched things musically on his second major release, ''Odelay,'' with forays into blues, country and hard rock, overlaid with multiple scrims of synthesizer distortion and D.J. scratching, all refracted through his distinctive sensibility. Most of the instrumental tracks he laid down himself, playing not only guitar (acoustic, electric, slide, bass) but also drums and keyboards. In the studio, he is quietly professional, but onstage with a band, he transforms into a dervish of upbeat energy. ''He's not a virtuoso musician, but the stuff he plays is so soulful and emotional and meaningful,'' says Mike Simpson, one-half of the Dust Brothers team that helped produce ''Odelay'' and ''Guero.''

Is Beck original or derivative? It is a question that has dogged him from the beginning, and he responds with resigned exasperation: ''I don't think I've written a song where someone in my band or an engineer doesn't go'' -- and he whistles a few bars sarcastically -- '''Oh, that sounds like that Allman Brothers song.' In my defense, whatever it sounds like, I haven't heard. There's certain conventions if you're playing acoustic guitar and it's an open tuning, and you'll stumble on things that other people have done. I'm focused on imagery, on ideas that are important to me.'' While Beck incorporates the idioms of popular American music, especially black music, into his compositions, he manages to produce work that bears recognizable traces of its origins yet stays unmistakably his own. As his career advances, the question is shifting from ''How much does this record sound like other people's records?'' to ''How much does the new one sound like the old ones?''

A decade or so ago, when Beck emerged on the scene, the music industry was uncertain which would dominate the future -- the alternative rock of Nirvana and Pearl Jam or the rap of Public Enemy and Tupac. As a look at any week's Billboard will tell you, that confusion has ended. Rap rules. Whether Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes is the next Dylan is a debate topic for critics; whether the Game is the next Nelly is what matters to the broader, youth-driven culture and the industry executives who fuel it.

With precarious grace, Beck straddles both worlds. As a white man stretching the parameters of black hip-hop music, he is far from alone: both the Beastie Boys and Eminem, for example, dwarf him in the marketplace. But as an heir to the singer-songwriter tradition who is composing to a hip-hop beat, Beck is essentially unique. On ''Mellow Gold,'' he combined acoustic and slide guitar with rap rhythms in a style that was surprising back then and as ubiquitous as Muzak now. A decade later, in several songs on ''Guero,'' he is nudging his boundaries further, by exploring grown-up feelings of hurt, disillusionment and ambivalence, in the setting of a loop-generated beat.

His last outing was ''Sea Change,'' a record of intimate ballads sung with a live band and produced with minimal studio manipulation. Released in 2002, it constituted -- as its title suggests -- a radical departure from Beck's previous albums. To make it, Beck came into the studio with songs, written a couple of years earlier, that chronicled his emotional depletion at the breakup of a nine-year relationship with Leigh Limon, a clothing designer. The songs on ''Sea Change'' are naked depictions of pain. So I was a little mystified when Mark Kates, a former Geffen Records executive, told me, ''With 'Sea Change,' I really feared his ability to reach people.'' What could he mean? How could the songs from ''Sea Change'' -- in which a typical line is ''Your sorry eyes, they cut through bone/They make it hard to leave you alone'' -- be less accessible than a lyric like ''Heads are hanging from the garbageman trees/Mouthwash, jukebox, gasoline,'' which comes from ''Odelay'' -- the disc that won him two Grammys? As it turned out, ''Sea Change'' was a critical and commercial hit, but Kates didn't worry alone. No one was more anxious than Beck. He had written such material before but hesitated to release it. ''I didn't think it was worthy or that people would be interested,'' he says.

The new record returns to the sound of ''Odelay'' -- but with a difference. Beck has retained the ambitions of ''Sea Change.'' ''I really wanted to bring that kind of vulnerability and emotional quality into this record,'' Beck says. ''My tendency when there's beats is to do something that's humorous and off the cuff and throwaway.'' Humor is a defense mechanism. It could be that Beck titled the new record with a derogatory slang term for ''white boy'' because he is still adjusting to the fact that he is an adult -- with a wife, a baby and a house -- who is ready to tackle grown-up themes in his music.

uring the nine-month recording of ''Guero,'' several significant events occurred in Beck's life: his girlfriend, Marissa Ribisi, became pregnant; they were married; their son, Cosimo, was born; and they moved out of Silver Lake, a trendy neighborhood near downtown, to a nearby district that boasts staider, grander houses.

When Beck moved to Silver Lake in the late 80's, it wasn't trendy at all. It was a backwater -- but it did offer cheap housing, a significant draw for a high-school dropout without a steady paycheck. You could measure how Beck and Silver Lake have gentrified (while holding onto a few scuff marks) at a concert he gave there in January in a club called Spaceland. He was trying out a new band with a few songs from ''Guero.'' Although the show was unannounced, word inevitably leaked out, and many fans were still waiting outside futilely for admission when it began. With a tangled gold nimbus of hair and a scraggly adolescent beard, wearing a black pinstripe jacket and black jeans, Beck sang and played guitar (and occasionally donned headphones to work a record on the turntable) with purposeful focus. At times, a big smile would flit across his face. He seemed to be having fun. The crowd was made up of college kids and young professionals, those who could afford to live in what is now a high-rent neighborhood or would be able to someday. Still, the vibe in Spaceland had not changed much since the time that Simpson of the Dust Brothers first saw Beck perform there, just before the ''Loser'' tour. ''I was blown away by the energy in the small club,'' Simpson recalls. ''It was like Bob Dylan fronting a punk-rock band.''

Beck comes from a distinguished line of penniless artists. His mother, Bibbe Hansen, has worked on the fringes of the performing arts, most notably as Edie Sedgwick's 13-year-old costar in Andy Warhol's film ''Prison.'' Bibbe's father, Al Hansen, was a founder in the early 60's of the Fluxus art movement, whose more celebrated exponents include Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik. Fluxus artists worked outside the commercial art galleries. They liked to send pieces through the mail and to create art kits that required active participation by users. They staged ''happenings,'' which we would now call performance art. They prized spontaneity. Al's specialty was collage and assemblage: he made countless female nudes out of materials like chocolate-bar wrappers and cigarette butts.

On the other side of the family, Beck's father, David Campbell, is the son of a Presbyterian minister. A classically trained violist and successful L.A. studio musician, he has composed string arrangements for artists as various as Jackson Browne, Celine Dion, Green Day, Hole and Linkin Park. When Beck was young, Bibbe and David were divorced. Beck took his mother's last name and lived with her until, as a teenager, he crossed the country to New York and tried without success to find a toehold in the alternative-music scene there.

Returning to his hometown, Los Angeles, he made the rounds of rock clubs with his acoustic guitar and received a similarly disheartening response. ''Usually, they would just take one look and turn me flat down,'' he says. ''At that time, acoustic music was associated with more of a 70's, singer-songwriter scene that was out of fashion. It was a punk ethos, people playing on oil drums and being as loud and heavy as possible. Eventually, the bands took pity and said, 'Come and play while we set up.' I always had a guitar with me. I would play songs I had written over the last couple of weeks. They were novelty-esque compositions, so I'd get a laugh.'' His quirky mini-sets won Beck a local reputation. ''Before 'Loser' came out, there was the legend of Beck among all of us in Silver Lake,'' says Simpson, who shared a house in the neighborhood with his fellow Dust Brother, John King. For one of his fabled gigs, Beck covered the stage with leaves and hooked up a leaf-blower, which belched out smoke and then noisily blew the leaves into the audience; at that point, Beck read a friend's poem and improvised his own versions of it. ''I was coming at it from a performance aspect, but it would get translated into 'wacky,''' he says. ''I think this was when record companies were starting to come along.'' It was, he said, ''a way of frightening them off. A couple of them who weren't asphyxiated stayed around.''

''Loser'' was released as a 12-inch vinyl single on a tiny label and provoked a local radio sensation. Three major record companies went after Beck. He signed with Geffen in part because its executives agreed to his unorthodox demand for permission to issue experimental records with small independent labels. He took advantage of that freedom on the two albums immediately after ''Mellow Gold,'' but, finding that he could genre-hop promiscuously without alienating his audience, he released all the subsequent ones on Geffen. He has established his identity as a chameleon who changes color but maintains his shape. For ''Mutations,'' which followed ''Odelay,'' he worked with Radiohead's producer, Nigel Godrich, venturing into such far-flung territories as blues-inflected rock, Brazilian pop, art rock (with a harpsichord and string ensemble arranged by his father) and Gram Parsons-style country. Somehow it all sounds like Beck. The most memorable song on the album is one that Beck says he mistrusted and didn't plan to record -- ''Nobody's Fault But My Own,'' a heartfelt ballad with a nostalgic trippy drone that in its emotional immediacy foreshadowed ''Sea Change.''

Conforming to what has settled into a pendulum oscillation, he followed ''Mutations'' with an album that radiates fun -- ''Midnite Vultures,'' an R&B party record that, maybe because fans and critics misguidedly worried whether it was serious or a goof, never won the audience it deserved. (A D.J. subsequently ''mashed'' its outstanding track, the sexy and hilarious ''Debra,'' into a duet with the hip-hop singer Pharrell Williams's ''Frontin,' '' and with Beck's encouragement released it on iTunes as ''Frontin' on Debra,'' to remarkably good effect.) For ''Midnite Vultures,'' Beck worked concurrently in different studios with different producers (including the Dust Brothers). But on the mournful ''Sea Change,'' he completely changed the pace. He recorded it with one producer (Godrich) in a room with other musicians. ''Some songs are live as you hear it,'' Beck says. ''If you blow a vocal or sing a wrong note, that's the way it's going to be.''

Going back to work with the Dust Brothers for ''Guero'' ensured he would end up with an album very different from ''Sea Change.'' (Typically, Beck has already begun recording his next release, which is another collaboration with Godrich.) Instead of showing up at the studio with a list of songs, Beck came each day with a sense of a sound he was seeking and then set out to find the right beat. ''D.J.'s or hip-hop producers will have tons of beats, a kick from here and two snares from there,'' he explains. ''It's put into a MPC-2000'' -- a sampling drum machine -- ''and it becomes an abstract hybrid. We'd go through those and find a beat. I'll think, I want . . . something greasy and choppy, or like old soul but really modern.'' The three would build the song up, layer by layer. (They share the writing credits.)

''John's and my forte is finding a one- or two-bar groove off someone's record and repeating it over and over,'' says Simpson, whose duo produced the Beastie Boys' ''Paul's Boutique'' as well as tracks by Coolio, Korn and other rappers and rock bands. ''Working with rappers, that was enough to get a song started: we left it up to a vocalist to define a verse and chorus. The thing that was so beautiful with Beck is he brought all these musical dimensions. They matriculated and became real songs.'' As King says: ''He'll take something that most other artists wouldn't know what to do with but which we think sounds really cool. He's so talented and open-minded, he could just run with anything we gave him.''

For the new album, the Dust Brothers retrieved a song they had started for ''Midnite Vultures'' but never completed. ''It was a masterpiece of sound, confusing and all over the place,'' King says. ''Beck really liked the chorus, and we planned on finishing it, but he said, 'This is what I like,' so we stripped away everything but the keyboard, and a bass that we eventually replaced. I pulled up a new beat, and something was happening that was infectious, and we felt we could listen to it all day. Beck began jamming acoustic guitar over it. That became 'Girl.' '' A sunny California-style pop song, ''Girl'' sounds nothing like the mass of sound -- King calls it ''a headache song'' -- that generated it. Indeed, the end result was so pleasant that Beck kept darkening the lyrics, until it is now seemingly narrated by a serial killer of women. ''I saw her with her black tongue tied round the roses,'' Beck sings affably, in that voice that manages to be both generic and instantly recognizable. ''Walking crooked down the beach she spits on the sand where their bones are bleaching.'' (Beck insists that it is ''supposed to be a romantic song with all this rough imagery, like Bukowski.'')

Far removed from the singer-songwriter cliche of composing on a guitar late at night in a hotel room, the beat-driven way of songwriting might seem impersonal, but that's misleading. What it really resembles is a painterly process. Francis Bacon, for example, would make marks on a canvas until, discerning something that intrigued him, he began to build up an image; the technique provided him with the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism inside a figurative format.

Starting with a beat and laying down tracks allows Beck to project a comparable feeling of spontaneity. The title song on his new album evokes the neighborhood he grew up in, which was largely Central American. ''In the park there were these strange characters with crosses carved on their foreheads,'' he says. ''Some of them had been in death squads, and now they were immigrants. I tried to write about it for years, but it didn't want to fit without sounding heavy. And it came out finally on this album in this fun song, 'Guero.''' Textured with horn honks, snippets of inane conversation and mariachi band riffs, the song was produced collectively in the studio, but it expresses Beck's vision. Beck's sensibility is composed of shards and polarities: notwithstanding his definite left-wing leanings, he has never possessed the single-mindedness to pen a protest song. ''I remember trying to write that kind of song, but there were so many different factors and ambivalences,'' he says. ''There are so many good things in the bad things and bad things in the good. The songs are fragmented, because you look at things from different angles to get 360 degrees. Maybe the message is more complicated and skewed.''

ike his wife and his father, Beck is a Scientologist. ''It's been useful,'' he says. ''My dad's been doing it since before I was born.'' In the Church of Scientology, members seeking what the church calls ''higher levels of spiritual awareness and ability'' are ''audited'' by a counselor and also by a device called an ''e-meter,'' which measures their physiological reactions. When reminded that the Church of Scientology provokes continuing controversy -- as much for its tight control over adherents as for its core program -- Beck fixes his huge blue eyes in an unwavering gaze and challenges the church's critics. ''Any kind of intolerance I have a distaste for,'' he says, especially when the intolerance is directed at ''something that helps teach kids how to read, addicts to get off drugs and convicts to start a new life.'' He continues: ''I've always appreciated other cultures and other ideas. Even music I didn't particularly enjoy. I always thought there was something interesting there, something to learn. I was such a lover of old blues music and scratchy old 78's, and I would hear new R&B and it sounded so glossy. But then the more I listened to it, the more I appreciated it.'' With the conversation drifting far from the topic, he is asked how Scientology helps him. ''It's a personal thing,'' he says. ''I'm a musician. I'm not, like, a personality. I've never really pretended to perform that kind of function.''

Although Beck's wide acquaintance includes many of the artists, poets and skateboarders he met growing up on the alternative-culture margins of L.A. and New York, his core group is a more affluent, insider crowd, many of them rising young actors. Like Marissa, her twin brother, Giovanni Ribisi, is an actor and a Scientologist. The actor-director Adam Goldberg appeared with Giovanni in Steven Spielberg's movie ''Saving Private Ryan,'' then directed him in a small film, ''I Love Your Work.'' Goldberg also acted with Marissa in ''Dazed and Confused.'' In turn, Goldberg's girlfriend, Christina Ricci, starred with Giovanni in ''I Love Your Work.'' It's an overdetermined group.

One night Goldberg and Ricci stopped by the Dust Brothers' own recording studio, nicknamed ''the Boat,'' in Silver Lake, where Beck was working. Beck had been trying to get a sample of a Japanese-accented voice saying, ''Please enjoy,'' to use in his hip-hop-style song ''Hell Yes.'' When the producers sent out assistants to tape waitresses in Japanese restaurants, they returned empty-handed. Without preparation, Ricci offered to try it. ''She just stepped up to the mike and killed it,'' John King says. ''She was sounding so good and it was so funny to all of us that we just kept feeding her lines.'' Her uncredited contribution is very droll.

The musical traditions that Beck esteems -- blues, punk, hip-hop -- thrive on spontaneity. Beck is an exceptionally self-aware artist who is searching for ways to short-circuit self-consciousness. To create the cover art for ''Guero,'' he selected an artist, Marcel Dzama, who is a member of the Royal Art Lodge, a collective in Winnipeg that produces childlike art. In January, Beck stopped by a group exhibition of their work at a satellite branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art, in the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. He was wearing a black pinstripe jacket, black jeans and a white undershirt, just as at the Spaceland show a couple of nights before. None of the few other visitors noticed him, but the young woman behind the counter moonlights as a writer, and she had interviewed him recently for a small magazine. They engaged in a long conversation, animated on her part, attentive on his, before he went to look at the art.

The drawings had been tacked up unframed on the walls, like children's pictures in a schoolroom. Beck approved. ''I always loved art shows at schools,'' he said. ''My friends with kids would go, and I would go with them. It's some of my favorite art. . . . It's more about creativity than the grand statement of an agenda.'' He also likes its rawness.

One reason Beck enjoys collaborating with the Dust Brothers is their use of high-tech measures to achieve a low-fi sound. He engaged them originally for ''Odelay'' after listening with disappointment to the tracks he had already prepared for the ''Mellow Gold'' follow-up. ''It sounded really lifeless and dull and uninteresting to me,'' he says. ''And I would have these shaggy four-track tapes from Radio Shack that had all this life and personality to them.''

He goes to great lengths to keep his music from sounding slick. For one song on ''Guero,'' he brought in his father to do a string arrangement, and they had the players record it not at ''the Boat'' in Silver Lake but at the former A&M recording studio in Hollywood, which is said to have the best sound rooms in town. And then, when they got this sonically perfect recording, he was unhappy. So the Dust Brothers processed it in an Echoplex, an old analog tape reverb device about the size of a lunchbox. As Simpson says: ''It makes it sound like a truck ran over your cassette. We did this high-tech recording and ran it through a transistor radio. It sounded too good, that was the problem. It's distracting when it sounds all audiophile and smooth.''

At the recording sessions, after they found a beat and worked out a melody, Beck would start typing lyrics on his Apple laptop. In the old days, he wrote on notepaper; on a computer, he can now edit more rapidly and even -- as when he was searching for Spanish slang terms for the song ''Qué Onda Guero'' -- wirelessly surf the Internet. Once he had something workable, he would set up the computer on a music stand and, singing off the screen, lay down a track. Yet even those lines, composed on the spur of the moment, might seem stiff. And other lyrics that he has been carrying with him for years often prove hopeless. ''I could write something ahead of time,'' he says, ''and once you get on the mike and hear it back, you think: That's terrible. Try it again.'' But then there are those moments, standing at the mike, improvising lyrics like a rapper, when he can find the words he was seeking without knowing how he came up with them. It's as if all the countless styles, songs, words and ideas swirling in his head fall into place without his deliberately arranging them. That's what he is after, to let his preconceptions drop away so he can respond directly to what is happening at that instant in the room. ''That's usually the time when you're not trying to say something anymore,'' he explains. ''You're just saying it.''

He's a Mighty Good Leader

SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES

"What we saw on the monitor looked more like a cinematic alien than a 20-week-old fetus. Instead of arms, there were truncated flippers, and it looked like those drawings I've seen demonstrating how close man and dolphin are on the evolutionary scale. The legs were gnocchi-shaped buds that barely protruded from the pelvis. The chest cavity was deformed as well, although we wouldn't know that until later.

You've seen this before: a young couple staring in wonder at an ultrasound monitor, getting a first, magical glimpse of their unborn child. It wasn't like that for us. ''What I'm seeing is a fairly significant abnormality,'' Dr. Eddleman said, shaking his head sympathetically. Tears ran from my wife Liz's closed eyes as she wiped the blue goop off her swelled belly.

We walked on rubber legs down the hall to Dr. Eddleman's office, where he emerged from behind his veil of jargon just long enough to impart that we hadn't done anything wrong. Osteogenesis imperfecta type II was his diagnosis, a freak mutation over which we had no control. I could see in Liz's expression that it would take some time for her to believe him.

The fetus might make it to term or die in the womb. Either way, it wouldn't survive for long after birth. This disease, the doctor said, is ''fatal in infants.'' You know you've arrived in a different universe when the word ''fatal'' comes as a relief. Because until that moment, I had been trying to extrapolate what the flesh-and-blood version of this baby would look like in the maple crib we'd ordered, asking myself if we had it in us to raise such a severely compromised baby. Liz would later tell me that she was also sadly relieved. ''Fatal'' was our absolution -- we would not have to learn darker truths about ourselves.

Up to that point, no one in either of our families had ever known serious illness; no cancer; no heart attacks; no major injuries. When my grandmother had a bypass at 80, her doctors were stunned to find out she hadn't been admitted to a hospital since she'd had her last child, some 40 years earlier. We didn't think of ourselves as lucky. We just were.

You've seen this scene too: a young husband and a pregnant wife arriving at the hospital to deliver their baby. I've never liked the word ''deliver'' in this respect, as it connotes a second party that will receive. You go to the hospital to give birth to and take home your baby, not to deliver it. But in this case, we were truly there to deliver our baby. Or fetus. I was no longer sure which it was. Seven years later, I'm still not. The recipient was the genetics department at Mount Sinai Hospital, which required an intact fetus-baby to run its tests and rule out any risk of recurrence for us. So we entered the birthing ward, two sad, somber people engulfed in the miasma of nervous, sweaty joy emanating from all of the spanking-new parents.

Nothing can prepare a woman for 18 hours of labor to deliver something she knows will be dead on arrival. Inducing labor at 20 weeks takes longer than at full term. When it came time to push, they gave Liz a Valium-Demerol drip. She would remember nothing. No one offered me a drip, so I still remember what came out of her that day. We didn't want to know the sex -- we hadn't all along -- but there it was on a form: Baby Boy Tropper. I'd always thought it might be.

It felt strange, returning home the next day. We didn't know how to mourn, how to categorize what we'd lost. Certainly, it had been a traumatic event, but had we lost a baby or a pregnancy? It felt different on an hourly basis. When we were sad, we wept. When we were O.K., we felt inexplicably guilty. But as those first, long days wore on, we slowly began to treat it more like a late miscarriage and not a lost baby; a painful setback, but not quite a tragedy. Still, we couldn't help feeling we were somehow shortchanging our fetus-baby a measure of grief in the name of our own emotional well-being.

Two months later, we were expecting again. But this pregnancy was not accompanied by the innocent wonder of our ill-fated one. There were high-risk screenings and amnio, and I had recurring dreams in which the doctor handed me a baby with shocking deformities. The first time around, it hadn't occurred to me that something might go wrong. Now, even after we were assured at our midterm screening that the baby was perfect, I couldn't fathom the reality of a normal baby. The spell had been broken, and from here on out, I would always be afraid.

Almost 11 months to the day our previous pregnancy ended, we returned to the very same birthing room, this time at full term. I watched as the very same doctor delivered my son, Spencer. He came out long and pink and impossibly whole, urinating a golden arc into the air to herald his arrival. I counted his fingers and toes as the nurses cleared his airway. Then, at long last, he took his first breath. A few seconds later, so did I."

HOCKEY, CONTINUED

Aside from the usual consortium of Zamboni drivers and Don Cherry fanatics, few people mourned when the National Hockey League cancelled its season, a few weeks ago, after the owners and the players failed to come to a new labor agreement. But the fact that people are uninterested doesn’t mean they don’t have an interest. Businessmen should be paying attention to the N.H.L., because its troubles could soon be theirs. The impasse is less about hockey than it is about history—and being on the wrong side of it.

Traditionally, owners haven’t had such a hard time. In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled. Toyota owes its success to its machines, its assembly lines, and its system of production. For Wal-Mart, it’s primarily store location, technological efficiency, and product selection. For Coca-Cola, it’s carbonated beverages and exceptional distribution. Workers for these companies are, for the most part, interchangeable, so their bargaining power is limited.

But in a host of industries—most notably in what we now call the knowledge economy—the arrangement is different. In Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in professional sports, hard assets matter far less than people. The employees—the so-called knowledge workers—make the difference between success and failure. (Difficult though it may be to think of pro hockey players as knowledge workers, that is essentially what they have become.) Capital is plentiful; it is skilled people who are scarce. The salient struggle, in this realm, is no longer capital versus labor but, in the words of the business professors Roger L. Martin and Mihnea Moldoveanu, capital versus talent. So when N.H.L. owners speak wistfully of old-time hockey, what they really mean is old-time economics—when the boys were labor, not talent.

The upshot is that in many knowledge businesses the employees often do better than the shareholders. Investors in the Hollywood studios have historically earned small returns, and yet directors and actors make tens of millions of dollars. In the N.H.L. the past two seasons, players reportedly took home seventy-five per cent of the league’s total revenue. Even in Silicon Valley, land of the inflated stock price, companies are so desperate to attract and keep the best and the brightest that workers often prosper at the expense of the capitalists. In 2000, according to a Business Week estimate, Cisco Systems employees earned between five and eight billion dollars in option profits alone—in a year when the company made only $4.6 billion. And, according to the 2003 book “In the Company of Owners,” during the tech boom a few years ago employees at the top hundred New Economy companies pocketed almost eighty billion dollars in compensation.

Talented workers were always in demand, but only recently did they recognize how much they could get for their services. In 1957, Mickey Mantle earned sixty thousand dollars. This year, Carlos Beltran (who is no Mickey Mantle) will make fifteen million dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about forty times as much. In the forties, Clark Gable made a hundred thousand dollars a picture—about eight hundred thousand dollars in today’s money. Tom Hanks makes closer to twenty million dollars a film. According to Martin and Moldoveanu, C.E.O.s now earn, on average, eight times as much per dollar of corporate profit as they did two decades ago. And on Wall Street traders and bankers now walk away with a much bigger cut than they ever have before. Things may be getting harder for traditional labor—real wages for most workers actually fell last year—but they’re getting better for the talent.

Businesses are still figuring out what to do about all this. Closing shop, as the N.H.L. has done, is hardly sustainable. In hockey, as in other sports, the owners have stayed in the game by coöperating to hold down salaries—by forming a kind of union of their own—but in most industries you can’t do that without violating antitrust law. Many companies have tried giving workers a greater stake, either through revenue-sharing or through stock options, but there’s little evidence that what’s good for the talent is good for the shareholder.

Some companies have succeeded at the talent game by increasing revenues. A bigger pie makes it easier to give out a bigger slice. Others have chosen to change the game—to call into question the central premise that talent is scarce. For instance, one reason that C.E.O.s are paid so much is the belief that there aren’t many potential good ones. But, as the Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana has shown, a company that broadens its definition of what constitutes a C.E.O. can find high-level talent at bargain prices. The same goes for companies that look abroad (to India, to Russia) for programmers and engineers; they’re finding that the talent pool is bigger than they thought.

Still, the trend is unmistakable; in the words of Martin and Moldoveanu, the “talent class has declared war on shareholder capitalists.” There are worse things. You don’t have to be a Marxist to think that if employees are creating most of the value then they should reap most of the rewards. The real problem arises when the rewards extracted vastly exceed the value created. Consider Ak Bars Kazan, a pro hockey team in the Russian republic of Tatarstan. Ak Bars fans pay five dollars for a seat and twenty cents for a cup of tea. The team will be lucky to gross a million dollars this year. And yet it shelled out roughly fifteen million dollars to recruit a handful of idle N.H.L. stars. Ain’t payback a bitch?