MISCELLANY



The fantastic story of the 2004 Boston Red Sox


Big Papi


The curse of the Big Papi

There were 7,258 multinationals in 1969. By 2000, there were 63,000, with 80% of the world’s industrial output. And that’s just for starters, says Peter Drucker.

GUERO

After the final out of the 2004 World Series, NBC played Beck's "The Golden Age" during the closing credits. It was a weird choice -- they obviously picked the song to celebrate the Red Sox victory, judging it by the title but ignoring the fact that it's a heinously depressing breakup ballad. Jesus, talk about a buzz-kill. But it was a perfect Beck moment, given the strange way he's spent his career foraging through American junk culture. On Guero, his eighth album, he returns to what he does best, hopping from genre to genre, hustling for scraps of beat and rhyme. He has reunited with the Dust Brothers, the producers behind his 1996 masterpiece, Odelay, for his liveliest and jumpiest music in years. Suggested ad slogan: The slack is back!

Ever since Beck hit his peak with Odelay, he's stood firm in refusing to make a sequel, or even an album that sounded remotely like one. His MO has been to push one of his tricks all the way to album length. So he became a morose folkie on Mutations, a comedy-funk party yutz on Midnite Vultures and a broken-down love junkie on Sea Change. All these records had their good and bad moments, and all had their fervent admirers. But they erred too far on the side of consistency, and whoever wanted consistency from Beck? Guero is the first record since Odelay where Beck mixes up the medicine the way he did in his Nineties prime -- we get stun-gun rock guitar ("E-Pro"), cracked country blues ("Farewell Ride"), psychedelic bossa nova ("Missing"), goth atmospherics ("Scarecrow") and laid-back fire-hydrant-Seventies R&B ("Earthquake Weather").

Throughout Guero, Beck dips deeply into Latin rhythms, reveling in the street culture of the East L.A. neighborhood where he grew up. "Que Onda Guero" is a walk through the barrio, with traffic noises and overheard Spanglish voices over Latin guitars and hip-hop beats. Guero is slang for "white guy"; Beck's an outsider here. The song ends with some stranger saying, "Let's go to Captain Cork's -- they have the new Yanni cassette!" "Hell Yes" and "Black Tambourine" sound like they were knocked off in a session that began, "Hey, let's do some of those wacky, zany numbers we used to do," but they're still pretty great.

Guero will get Beck accused of copying Odelay, but it has a completely different mood. Tune in "Missing" or "Earthquake Weather," and you can't miss the melancholy adult pang in the vocals. The closest he comes to a funny line on the album is "The sun burned a hole in my roof/I can't seem to fix it." Which isn't too close. Beck is thirty-four now and can't pretend to be the same wide-eyed, channel-surfing kid who buzzed with wiseass charisma on Mellow Gold, Odelay and Stereopathetic Soulmanure. On Guero, he sounds like an extremely bummed-out dude who made it to the future and discovered he hates it there. The lyrics are abstractly morbid -- lots of graves, lots of devils. Nearly every song has a dead body or two kicking around. At times, Guero feels as emotionally downbeat as Mutations or Sea Change. But there's a crucial difference: The rhythmic jolt makes the malaise more compelling and complex, with enough playful musical wit to hint at a next step. Beck isn't trying to replicate what he did ten years ago; instead, on Guero he finds a way to revitalize his musical imagination, without turning it into a joke.




Goodman, Sidney
The Elements - Water
1983-84
Oil on canvas
96 x 76 in (243.8 x 193 cm)


Goodman, Sidney
The Elements - Air
1982-83
Oil on canvas
96 x 75 in (243.8 x 190.5 cm)

The Office, redux/regress
from slate.msn.com

Remember that scene near the end of Annie Hall, when Woody Allen (as Alvy Singer) tries to recreate a fun date he once shared with his ex-girlfriend Annie (Diane Keaton), chasing live lobsters around the kitchen in an attempt to catch them and boil them for dinner? He gamely tells the same jokes that made Annie giddy with laughter, but his new girlfriend just leans against the counter, smoking and staring with deadpan incomprehension. That's sort of how fans of the BBC series The Office will feel about the new American remake premiering tonight on NBC. The harder it tries (and even, at times, succeeds) in amusing us, the more melancholic we'll feel, remembering how magical things used to be.

I don't think this is just snobbery, the "one-upmanship of memory" that Alessandra Stanley speaks of in today's New York Times review of the American Office. It's love. The Office 's fans love their show with a fierce conviction, and I doubt most of them will take kindly to the idea of simply transplanting the alienated crew of Wernham Hogg paper company to new digs in Scranton, Pennsylvania. For those still in mourning for the BBC series (which wrapped up earlier this year with a two-hour special), seeing the roles already recast with American actors is like waking up to find your beloved has been abducted, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style, and replaced by a random stranger. Luckily for NBC, the constituency of hardcore Office-heads hardly represents a significant audience demographic in the U.S. That leaves two categories of potential viewers: those who have never seen the BBC version, and those who have seen it and didn't like it. Since it's hard to imagine the latter bunch choosing to tune in ("Gee, that British show with the deliberately bad jokes and the long, excruciating pauses was really dull, but let's give this Yank remake a spin!"), NBC is probably placing its bets on the vast majority of Americans who will experience tonight's pilot as original, even groundbreaking programming. Unlike me, they'll be able to judge it on its merits alone.

And The Office is not without merits. Steve Carell, a former correspondent on The Daily Show (he was invited back for a guest segment on that show last night, in what must have been an effort at cross-promotion) is truly funny as the hopelessly unfunny boss, now renamed Michael Scott. No living human could reproduce the precise blend of vanity, pathos and smarm that Ricky Gervais, the co-creator and star of the British series, brought to the character of David Brent, but Carell wisely re-imagines the role from the ground up; his version is less a buffoon than a dickhead, with the knitted brow and aggressive physicality of Ben Stiller. He also wears his self-loathing closer to the surface than his predecessor did; where Gervais was wrapped in a cocoon of self-regard, Carell seems constantly on the verge of a temper tantrum, or possibly tears. Carell understands the needy, unlovable Michael Scott from the inside out. But some characters belong to the actor that created them; stepping into such a role, any other performer is as doomed as a singer covering a Bob Dylan song.

Besides Carell, almost every other casting choice is a gross miscalculation. The smoldering office romance between Dawn and Tim, which was the emotional motor of the British series, has been downsized to a pallid flirtation between Pam (Jenna Fischer) and Jim (John Krasinski). The writers intelligently abandoned all hope of finding someone with the bizarre physiognomy of Mackenzie Crook, who played the office toady Gareth in the original series. But his replacement, Dwight (Six Feet Under's Rainn Wilson), lacks a comic hook of his own. He's irritating, yes, but generically so – the kind of office scourge who operates a paper shredder at top volume inches from his coworkers' desks and chats with the boss in insufferable management-speak.

Tonight's pilot episode repeats, almost joke-for-joke, the first episode of the British series, as the boss calls a meeting to announce an impending round of job cuts, sowing suspicion and fear in the normally deadening atmosphere of the Dunder Mufflin paper company. Future episodes will cease to rely so heavily on pre-existing scripts: in next week's, "Diversity Day," a racial sensitivity training session degenerates into an ethnic-slur-slinging free-for-all. The superiority of the second episode to the first is an indication that this show may get better with time. NBC must be betting that The Office will attract the kind of viewer that used to watch Seinfeld (and is now failing to watch Arrested Development); it's a sitcom for people who are totally over sitcoms.

In an interview about a new series he's developing, Extras, Ricky Gervais recently said, "I'd rather it be 1 million people's favorite show than watched by 8 million who thought it was OK." This quality-over-quantity philosophy may work in a country with a partially socialized television system (it did at least once, with the original Office on BBC), but it's at odds with the business practices of American network executives. As explained by a media analyst discussing NBC's battle to win back its long-held slot as the great sitcom network: "It's hard to be unique and appealing to the mass audience at the same time." If the American Office does manage to pull off good ratings, the irony is that it will be hailed as one of the most original shows on television.

FILM

Distant

"Distant" is a slow but stunning Turkish film, a beautifully crafted work that tells the kind of story only a movie can manage quite so well. A triple prize winner at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, the movie is written and directed by the brilliant young Turkish filmmaker, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It's the tale of two relatives in the city, one sophisticated, one naïve, and how they try and fail to live with each other.

"Distant" (or "Uzak") is set in Istanbul, which here seems a city of sadness and isolation, a place of minarets and drugstores, ancient streets and modern cafes, all bathed in a cold clear light that touches everything with wintry melancholy.

In that city, two male cousins share an apartment. One, Mahmut (Muzaffer Ozdemir) is a divorced and embittered commercial photographer, whose ex-wife Nazan (Zuhal Gencer Erkaya), is about to emigrate to Canada with her new husband. His cousin from the country, Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) is a callow, jobless young man dreaming of emigration himself-to America.

To Mahmut, Yusuf is an undisciplined slob who doesn't clean his share of the apartment or know the urban score. Yusuf, who can't find work, sees Mahmut as tyrannical and cold. But in truth, both are taking out on each other the tensions of their days.

Mahmut is pining for the wife he has never stopped loving, and his tawdry sex life (video porn and a detached lover) leave him empty. Yusuf cannot find work and is too shy to approach a neighborhood beauty (Ebru Ceylan). His dreams are slowly dying; Mahmut's, perhaps, are already dead.

Soon, too soon, these two will be apart. And the movie suggests a profound but uncomfortable truth: We rarely appreciate people near to us until afterwards. Sometimes, we only come to understand them-and the consequences of our own selfishness and short-sightedness-after they are gone.

It's a simple story. But Ceylan (whose lovely "Clouds of May" played at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2002), tells it with compassion, perception and sometimes mesmerizing visual beauty. A photographer like Mahmut, Ceylan shot this film and his images make Istanbul come alive in ways few films or filmmakers have managed.

The way the light falls on distant windows or glints on the breaking waves begin to reflect bottled emotion and moods that cannot be expressed as fully in language.

In addition, few recent movies have expressed so well the pressure and grief of a great city. "Distant" won the best actor award at Cannes for both Ozdemir and Toprak (who tragically died in a motorcycle accident after winning the Turkish Oscar for the same role). It also won the Cannesrunner-up and FIPRESCI International Critics' prizes and was runner-up at the 2003 Chicago International Film Festival. Among the actors Ozdemir and Toprak beat at Cannes were this year's American Oscar winners Sean Penn and Tim Robbins of "Mystic River."

Truth to tell, I thought Penn and Robbins deserved to win at Cannes too. But "Distant" and its actors and director deserved their recognition. In their fine portrayal of people apart, they have proven that they are artists apart as well. In our commerce-obsessed time, "Distant" may be a movie of minor economic impact. But it is also a Chekhovian tale of major artistic power.