BOOKS

A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
288pp, Viking, £17.99



Nick Hornby has grown up in public. Lad lit's original gang leader has written about football, music, parental responsibility and morality, his work organically evolving with maturity. This time, however, he's plumped for the subject of failed suicide.
Four characters are placed upon a tower block roof on New Year's Eve. They're about to fling themselves to their deaths, but they encounter each other instead and form a comically ill-matched alliance. After a bit of wire-cutting and pavement-gazing, the quartet exchange some end-of-the-line dialogue, then descend as one via the stairs with barely a whimper to search for a teenager's former boyfriend at a party. Not very likely, really, is it?

Our foursome - a disgraced former TV presenter, a downtrodden middle-aged mum, a foul-mouthed teen rebel and a solipsistic muso - then marry their destinies, squabble, and jet off on holiday together. Their half-hearted group exploits carry them through the rest of the novel. This is a chapterless three-acter in which four protagonists tell their tales in their own distinctive styles. As a breakfast TV star sacked in the wake of a sex scandal and now resident in the tabloids, Martin's cocky articulacy works best in contrast with the Young Person logorrhoea of Jess. To Jess, a decidedly troubled Labour minister's daughter, life is like totally shit but some stuff is really really lush, right. JJ is a slightly straining-to-be-American American, and Maureen is a heart-rending misfit with only a chronically disabled son for company.

The problem here is that these people are meant to be suicidal. Though later enlightened about their own levels of despair, they're at best a squealing bunch of parasuicides, and their rooftop farce and its ramifications becomes slapstick, all one-liners and wobbly furniture, with barely a glimmer of the mental pain required to underpin the decision to top themselves. Hornby can do searing social commentary and feel-good humour as well as ever, but initially there's an emotional component missing: comic effect is achieved at the expense of psychological veracity, and even if this is a stylised fictional approach to self-destruction, we do need to empathise with these losers through the screen of their gallows humour. As Maureen says of Jess: "It was like the whole how's-your-father on the roof was like a minor accident, the sort of thing where you rub your head and sit down and have a cup of sweet tea, and then you get on with the rest of your day."

Jess's former one-night stand sells the story of the attempted suicide to a tabloid, and the group has a few larks winding up the press with tales of a rooftop sighting of a redemptive angel resembling Matt Damon. What follows is a cynical appraisal of the fixations and disposable nature of contemporary culture, and this is where Hornby is at his best as he pins down the age in which we live with precision and comic brilliance. The "rubbish-strewn teenage bedroom of Jess's mind" can be laugh-out-loud funny, and both Martin's celebrity-fluffed ego and Jess's disinhibted obscenities make for addictively amusing car-crash reading as the gang agrees to a trial survival period before a Valentine's day crisis meeting.

By setting up the towering challenge of putting four depressed characters on a rooftop and sustaining their subsequent momentum, any writer will almost inevitably paint themselves into a corner. This is a high-concept theme stretched to breaking point: the film's drama-packed opening sequence is assured, but what can possibly follow without bathos? The novel spends much of its time disentangling itself from its own artificial constraints, but when the characters essentially shake off their suicidal bond and get on with their haphazard lives, the narrative blooms and the voices relax until they are truly funny, daring and affecting.

When the emotional wreckage of the past is glimpsed the plot truly thickens, and over a third of the way in Hornby finally gets into his stride. His chummy everyman confessionals become sharper and meaner, and a limping narrative breaks into a gallop. The protagonists attempt to help each other, grandly messing it up, but each reaches a fumbling form of resolution. This is a transcendent ending that entirely avoids mawkishness or touchy-feely epiphany, but convinces and inspires instead. A Long Way Down is a good novel struggling to find a way out of the limitations of its own gimmick, but ultimately the conceit is so off-beam that one can almost ignore it and flow with the farce. This is an enjoyably readable, bumpy ride of a book, paradoxically both dangerously contrived and genuinely moving. - from The Guardian

Read the first chapter here.

MIX TAPES
by Thurston Moore (Artist and musician Thurston Moore looks back at the plastic gadget that first let us make our own compilations.)

The first time I ever heard of someone making a mix tape was in 1978. Robert Christgau, the "dean of rock critics," was writing in The Village Voice about his favorite Clash record, which just happened to be the one he made himself: a tape of all the band's non-LP B-sides. One aspect really struck me - Christgau said it was a tape he made to give to friends. He had made his own personalized Clash record and was handing it out as a memento of his rock-and-roll devotion.

In those days, tape decks were as essential as turntables and just as bulky. But then Sony came out with the Walkman. I suppose the record industry expected consumers to buy cassettes of the LPs, and some surely did, but hey - why not just buy blank cassettes and record tracks from LPs instead? Of course, this is what every Walkman user did, and before long there were warning stickers on records and cassettes, stating: home taping is killing music! It was a quaint forebear of today's industry paranoia over downloading and CD burning.

Around 1980, there was a spontaneous scene of young bands recording singles of superfast hardcore punk - Minor Threat, Negative Approach, Necros, Battalion of Saints, Adolescents, Sin 34, the Meatmen, Urban Waste, Void, Crucifucks, Youth Brigade, the Mob, Gang Green. I was fanatical and bought them all as soon as they came out. I was just a dishwasher at a SoHo restaurant - not exactly raking in the dough - but I needed these sides!

I also needed to hear these records in a more time-fluid way, and it hit me that I could make a mix tape of all the best songs. So I made what I thought was the most killer hardcore tape ever. I wrote H on one side, and C on the other. That night, after my love Kim had fallen asleep, I put the tape in our stereo cassette player, dragged one of the little speakers over to the bed, and listened to it at ultralow thrash volume. I was in a state of humming bliss. This music had every cell and fiber in my body on heavy sizzle mode. It was sweet.

On a Sonic Youth tour in the mid-'80s, we decided to get a cassette player for the van. One idea was to install a dashboard unit, but that was pricey. There was a street trend in NYC of hip hop heads blasting rap mix tapes through massive boom boxes, or "ghetto blasters." So I went into this Delancey Street store and, using the band's limited funds, bought the biggest boom box on display: a Conion that took 16 D batteries. The Conion - we nicknamed it "the Conan" - was almost like an extra body, about the size of a small kid. My solution was to stand it on end between the two front seats, facing the back. As we drove through the Holland Tunnel and began to distance ourselves from the city, I jammed in the first of the rap compilations I'd made, and the boom box sounded superb. We had it onstage with us when we played, and I miked it through the PA for between-song tape action. Kids gave us cassettes all across the US - some of them hopeful demos and some mix tapes, and we'd jam them all. By tour's end, there must have been hundreds of tapes strewn about the van, with their plastic cases stomped and cracked.

These days, CD technology has displaced the cassette in the mainstream, and mix CDs have become the new cultural love letter/trading post. For those of us who think that digital delivers a harsher sound than analog, it's a sonic nightmare dealing with the new world reality of MP3s. They're even more compressed and harsh than CDs, and in the case of vintage grooves - be it Led Zeppelin, Bad Brains, or Pavement - sound even more detached from musical vibration.

But even if MP3 music sounds lame, as long as it's recognizable in form, free, and shareable, it's here to stay. It will get better as more sophisticated methods of replication emerge. For now, its clunk is glamorized by celebrity iTunes playlists. ITunes has become the Hallmark card of mix tapes - all you gotta do is sign your name to personalize it.

Once again, we're being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it's not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing - by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along - is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.



Is homework worth it? Maybe kids who fire up video games when they come home from school will end up just as smart.

MUSIC AND FINANCE
New Yorker

In the summer of 1924, a Kansas City band called the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra did something unusual: it went on tour. Popular as live music was, bands in those days tended to serve as house orchestras or to play long stands in local clubs; there was hardly even a road to go on. But Jules Stein, a booking agent from Chicago, convinced the Nighthawk Orchestra that it could make more money by playing a different town every night. The tour, which lasted five weeks, was a smash. Soon, bands all over the country were hitting the road to play ballrooms and dance halls.

Stein’s original vision hasn’t changed much, despite some modifications over the years—parking lots, hair spray, the disposable lighter. Consider Metallica, the Coon-Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra of our day. Though Metallica still sells a fair number of CDs from its back catalogue (it has made just one album in the past six years), it makes most of its money from concerts. Two years ago, the band brought in almost fifty million dollars with its Sanitarium tour. Last year, it brought in sixty million with its Madly in Anger with the World tour. God knows what it would take to make Metallica happy.

The music industry may be in crisis, what with illegal file-sharing, stagnant CD sales, and the decline of commercial rock radio, but the touring business is as sturdy as ever. In some ways, it is healthier than some of the mediums (radio, recorded music) that at one point or another were supposed to render it obsolete. Since 1998, annual concert-tour revenue has more than doubled, while CD sales have remained essentially flat. Last year, thirteen different artists grossed more than forty million dollars each at the box office. (Prince made eighty-seven million.) Consumers who seem reluctant to spend nineteen dollars for a CD apparently have few qualms about spending a hundred bucks or more to see a show.

There are still artists who make huge sums of money selling records, but they are the lucky few. A longtime recording-industry rule of thumb holds that just one in ten artists makes money from royalties. Today, it’s probably less than that. So the best model, if you’re in it for the money, may be the Grateful Dead. Although the Dead didn’t sell many records or get much airplay, they worked the big stadiums and arenas long enough and often enough to become one of the most profitable bands out there. As in politics and sales, nothing beats meeting the people face to face.

Most musicians, from a business perspective, at least, would wish it otherwise. Selling CDs is, as economists say, scalable: you make one recording, and you can sell it to an unlimited number of people for an unlimited amount of time, at very little cost. A tour, on the other hand, is work. You have to perform nearly every night, before a limited number of people, for hours at a time. You can knock a few seconds off each song, fire a percussionist, or sell more T-shirts, but in the end efficiencies are hard to come by.

The trick is that musicians get a much higher percentage of the money from concerts and merchandise than they do from the sale of their CDs. An artist, if he’s lucky, gets twelve per cent of the retail price of a CD. But he doesn’t get any royalties until everything is paid for—studio time, packaging costs, videos—which means that he can sell a million records and make almost nothing. On tour, though, he often gets more than half of the box-office, so even if he grosses less he can profit more.

Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour. The decline in record sales has shrunk the size of the pie for labels and artists to fight over, so they’ve had to find new ways to make money, and artists have come to see how lucrative touring can be, given what people will pay to see them live. (Ticket prices for the top hundred tours doubled between 1995 and 2003.) And, while high prices may be starting to put a dent in attendance, the dollars keep pouring in. Last summer’s concert season was considered a dismal one, yet, according to Pollstar, the industry’s trade magazine, concert revenues rose for the year.

Inevitably, touring rewards some artists better than others—graying superstars, for example, with their deep-pocketed baby-boomer fans and set lists full of sing-along hits. The economist Alan Krueger has estimated that the top one per cent of performers claim more than half of all concert revenues. But even indie rockers are reaping the benefits, with bands like Wilco and Modest Mouse selling out venues like Radio City Music Hall, at decidedly non-indie prices.

The upshot is that the fortunes of musicians and the fortunes of music labels have less and less to do with each other. This may be the first stage of what John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Dead, once called the shift from “the music business” to “the musician business.” In the musician business, the assets that once made the major labels so important—promotion, distribution, shelf space—matter less than the assets that belong to the artists, such as their ability to perform live. As technology has grown more sophisticated, the ways in which artists make money have grown more old-fashioned. The value of songs falls, and the value of seeing an artist sing them rises, because that experience can’t really be reproduced. It’s funny that, in an era of file-sharing and iPod-stealing, the old troubadour may have the most lucrative gig of all. But then Metallica knew it all along. “Send me money, send me green,” the group sang in “Leper Messiah,” twenty years ago. “Make a contribution, and you’ll get a better seat.”



Lucinda Williams, Live at Fillmore (Lost Highway Records)

Lucinda Williams writes and performs heart-searing roots rock on the rarefied level of demigods like Tom Petty and Neil Young; she's also opened for Petty and Young. So the least she deserves is her own Seventies-rock-style double live album, recorded at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, no less. She and her impeccable three-piece band give her songs' meticulously recorded original versions a run for their money; led by Doug Pettibone's Crazy Horse-esque lead guitar, they deliver "Changed the Locks" (from 1988's Lucinda Williams) with the spiteful fury of Bob Dylan circa '66, and crack open the downcast title track of 2001's Essence, transforming it into a brawny rocker. The twenty-two-song collection suffers from bloat, uneven pacing and an overabundance of tunes from 2003's World Without Tears. But it's still an effective summary of Williams' career as a prophet of, as she puts it, "all that's alarming, raw and exposed."

OTHER

Struggling Towards a World of Services (On IBM)

Can the Police Commandeer Your Car?

Pitchfork skewers Weezer ("Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums."). A dissent from elvithprethley.com: Weezer - "Perfect Situation". "If you, like me, gave up on Weezer after listening to the Green Album more than a few times, tune in. This is pure Blue, to me, updated for this year. The guitars soar blue and shiny, Rivers sighs but then double-hikes it to full-blown emo longing, and the chorus has the cheer of a chicken-chested man proudly clucking at the hens. It's fantastically written and produced, with that downward scale of guitar notes, the homey ding-ding-ding of piano hiding in the mix for the choruses. And where elsewhere on Make Believe, Rivers' autotuning is frustrating, here it's just a guy who fussied himself up for his visit to the cliffs, so that the sirens might give him a second glance as he bellows at them."

As the iPod Stays Hot, It Risks Losing Its Cool.

I recommend this documentary.

Revenge of the Sith review.

The last days of Kurt Cobain's life (as rendered by Gus Van Zant).

The Wired 40: They're masters of technology and innovation. They're global thinkers driven by strategic vision. They're nimbler than Martha Stewart's PR team:

1. Apple Computer
2. Google
3. Samsung Electronics
4. Amazon.com
5. Yahoo!
6. Electronic Arts
7. Genentech
8. Toyota
9. Infosys Technologies
10. eBay
11. SAP
12. Pixar
13. Cisco
14. IBM
15. Netflix
16. Dell
17. General Electric
18. Medtronic
19. Intel
20. Salesforce.com
21. Vodafone
22. Flextronics
23. EMC
24. Nvidia
25. Jetblue
26. FedEx
27. Monsanto
28. Microsoft
29. Nokia
30. Costco
31. Comcast
32. Pfizer
33. Li &Fung
34. Taiwan Semiconductor
35. Gen-probe
36. Citigroup
37. L-3 Communications
38. Ameritrade
39. Exelon
40. BP




Mondrian
Ocean 5
1915
Charcoal and gouache on paper
87.6 x 120.3 cm (34 1/2 x 47 3/8 in)
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

HISTORY

The gun used to kill Thomas D'Arcy McGee in 1868 is to be sold at auction this month in Hamilton, Ont. Who was D'Arcy McGee? What role did he play in Confederation? Interestingly, I see that Mr. McGee was born on the same day (April 13) as my brother.


Thomas D'Arcy McGee

MUSIC

Annie
NYTimes

Late last summer, pop cognoscenti on both sides of the Atlantic began buzzing about a new song by a little-known 27-year-old Norwegian singer, Anne Lilia Berge Strand, who records under the less cumbersome moniker Annie. "Chewing Gum" had a mischievous lyric about toying with men's affections, but the song's real subject seemed to be, well, itself. Its title promised a sugary pop confection, and sure enough, the music - built around a chirpy lead vocal, a wash of background oohs and aahs, and a chugging, beeping beat that bowed in the direction of the Tom Tom Club's 1981 hit "Genius of Love" - was a scientifically perfect bubblegum anthem.

Soon, more Annie songs were leaked onto the Internet. By the end of 2004, Annie's debut album was still commercially available only in Scandinavia, and none of her singles had been released in the United States. Yet she made a strong showing in American year-end best-of polls, most notably in the influential Web magazine Pitchfork - the online bible of indie-rock nerds - which ranked "Chewing Gum" its 11th best single of the year, and gave the No. 1 spot to another Annie track, "Heartbeat."

Sitting in a café on an overcast spring day here in her hometown of Bergen, Annie professes shock at this turn of events. In Norway, she is a huge star, a chart-topping winner of multiple music awards. "But I never, ever, ever thought my records would even get heard in the States," she says. On June 7, her album, "Anniemal," will finally get an American release - a chance to parlay the kind of hype no record company could manufacture into actual CD sales and, just possibly, a place in the pop diva firmament. By any measure, Annie is unlikely competition for the queens of American radio. A small, pretty, unassuming woman, Annie is a D.J., and she seems far more comfortable in that semi-anonymous role, half hidden behind the turntables in a club full of dancers, than strutting and singing in front of a worshipful audience. Indeed, she admits not only to a case of stage fright, but to also extreme self-consciousness about dancing in her music videos - hardly a match for the likes of Beyoncé or Gwen Stefani.

But what Annie lacks in bravura, she makes up for in songs. "Anniemal" is a true album, strong from top to bottom, whose dozen quirky, infectious songs flit from electro to Motown-tinged disco to stark, twitchy R&B that will appeal to American palates. Annie has a breathy wisp of a voice, and her vocal range is limited; but there is charm in her deadpan delivery, and her songwriting is full of the flair for melody for which Scandinavian pop is famous. Indeed, Annie's singular sound took shape in one of Scandinavia's most peculiar and vibrant musical corners. Bergen is a picturesque university city of just over 200,000 nestled between mountains on Norway's rain-lashed western coast. (Locals will cheerily inform visitors to Bergen that the city is Europe's dampest - on average, it rains about 280 days a year.) The weather is bad, but the town is lively, teeming with nightclubs and live music; in recent years, Bergen has produced a number of pop musicians of international stature, including the singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche (who recently relocated to New York), the celebrated indie-pop group Kings of Convenience, and the electronica duo Royksopp, who produced three tracks on "Anniemal."

On a recent Saturday evening, Annie and seemingly every other young pop musician in Bergen were packed into Café Opera, a tiny club just off of the city's main square. A group of bearded, lank-haired young musicians carrying banjos, pedal steel guitars and upright basses set up in the middle of the room and played a set of bluegrass songs. After midnight, D.J.'s started spinning records for an overflow crowd of dancers. Annie took her turn behind the decks, playing a lively mix of Norwegian techno, obscure 70's soul nuggets, and 80's radio pop. Annie is frequently compared to Kylie Minogue, Australia's pint-size answer to Madonna, but it's impossible to imagine Ms. Minogue cueing up Steve Miller's "Abracadabra" for a roomful of sweaty friends.

ANNIE'S musical career began in Bergen in the late 1990's, when she met a legendary figure on the local music scene, Tore Andreas Kroknes, who at the time was producing excellent electronic dance records under the name D.J. Erot. The pair became romantically involved, moved into Annie's mother's apartment, and began collaborating. "I played him Madonna's first album, a record I really love," Annie recalls. "He sampled a bit of the song 'Everybody,' and began making a track from it. I started singing a melody along with it, and it sounded really good." The resulting song, "Greatest Hit," was recorded in a tiny studio, borrowed from Royksopp, and released in 1999 in a limited edition of 500 7-inch singles. The records sold out in two days, the song became an underground club hit in Norway and Britain, and recording contract offers came flooding in. "Suddenly, I thought, 'Hey, maybe I will have a pop career,' " she says.

But Mr. Kroknes, born with a degenerative heart condition, soon became desperately ill. He was hospitalized for months, and died in April 2001, at the age of 23. "For a long time I was too depressed and exhausted to do anything," Annie says. "But then I thought, 'Tore would be quite upset with you if you just stopped making music.' " In fact, "Anniemal" is something of a posthumous triumph for Mr. Kroknes. "Greatest Hit" appears on the record, and it establishes the album's theme: celebrating the blippy sounds, and guileless spirit, of early 80's dance-pop. And therein, perhaps, lies the secret to Annie's appeal. Eighties revivalism is rampant in today's dance music, but the vast majority of acts approach the music from a chilly distance, wallowing, with barely concealed sneers, in the kitschiness and naïveté of it all. But along with her producers - including the Finnish musician Timo Kaukolampi and the British producer Richard X - Annie regards her 80's source material with reverence, as a repository of treasured sounds and an old-fashioned kind of pop-song innocence.

Smack in the middle of the album, sits Annie's very own song for the ages. "Heartbeat" is unlike anything else on "Anniemal": there are no electro pings, no rubbery synth bass lines or clattering drum machines and just the faintest hit of a keyboard. It's Annie Unplugged, scored for a rock band setup - a gorgeous, yearning song about the thrill of newfound love that moves between a mild funk groove and charging garage rock. The song is scheduled as the first American single, and if it sounds a bit retrograde next to the sonically visionary hip-hop songs that dominates hit radio, it has a tune to beat just about anything out there. In the meantime, Annie may soon discover a downside to being American indie rockers' favorite pop princess. Hipsters who hailed her when she was obscure singer from an exotic Northern land may recoil if and when she starts jostling for "TRL" airtime with the Simpson sisters. But Annie has a decent handle on the fickleness and absurdities of pop taste. "It's weird when people tell me that they like me but would never listen to Kylie Minogue or Britney. I'm not quite sure why, but I'm seen as, you know, somehow cool. My music is the pop that they're allowed to like." She smiles. "At least for the moment."

Download an Annie track here.

OTHER

Readers' questions to Michael Lewis re: Moneyball.

No matter how intelligent the students, generous the salary, lovely the setting, or light the teaching load, academics are always unhappy.

The Hot Docs Festival is over. Award winners.

Vietnam 30 years later.




Long thought to be extinct this ivory-billed woodpecker was recently rediscovered in the U.S. When is something considered extinct?

On Kingdom of Heaven. On Eva Green. On Bruce Springsteen (faux americana?).

Recommended reading:


THEATRE

NYTimes review of Glengarry Glen Ross

Who needs caffeine when you've got "Glengarry Glen Ross"? Watching Joe Mantello's high-octane revival of David Mamet's play about a dog-eat-dog real estate office in Chicago feels like having espresso pumped directly into your bloodstream.

This transfixingly acted production, which opened last night at the Royale Theater, leaves you with a case of happy jitters that may keep you up hours past bedtime. But what's a little lost sleep when you've had the chance to see and hear a dream-team ensemble, including Alan Alda and Liev Schreiber, pitching fastball Mamet dialogue with such vigor, expertise and pure love for the athletics of acting?

Mr. Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of nasty office politics according to Darwin may not deliver the same breathtaking blow it dealt theatergoers when it opened on Broadway in 1984. The four-letter fusillades that are the lingua franca of these shabby, strutting salesmen have, after all, become a staple on cable television in shows like "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood."

Nor are Americans who have endured seasons of competitive reality shows and the Enron and Tyco scandals likely to be shocked by the depiction of desperate men for whom honesty and honor are the real dirty words. Compared with younger playwrights like Neil LaBute and Patrick Marber, Mr. Mamet looks almost soft-hearted, since he actually seems to like the amoral losers and liars he writes about. And without its power to unsettle, "Glengarry" seems a shade more slender and contrived than it once did.

That this compact show (105 minutes) still retains such glorious freshness can partly be attributed to its harsh, gleeful ring of familiarity for anyone who has witnessed the instinctive cruelty of power struggles in the workplace - especially those involving scared old pros versus hungry neophytes.

But the play's enduring vitality has even more to do with what is, in artistic terms, Mr. Mamet's most important anatomical asset: his ear. Mr. Mamet hears American scheming with an exactitude and delight still unsurpassed by any other dramatist.

This very lively art is at work in everything from the play's beguilingly melodic title (a reference to two housing developments) to its use of trade jargon as blunt weapons. "Glengarry Glen Ross" makes hot- and cold-running music out of the banter, bluster and spiels practiced by the men who work out of a shabby storefront office on the North Side of Chicago.

The danger in performing Mamet these days is that he has become so widely known, so endlessly imitated. It takes a careful, skillful ensemble to render his characters without making them sound like jacked-up dirty robots. Making them sound spontaneous requires something like brilliance. Which is indeed what is achieved by the protean Mr. Mantello (who won Tonys for "Take Me Out" and "Assassins") and the actors playing Mr. Mamet's band of backstabbers.

Performers whose tricks you think you know inside-out surprise you here - faces familiar from television (Mr. Alda, Jeffrey Tambor of "Arrested Development" and the terrific Gordon Clapp of "NYPD Blue") as well as from the stage (Mr. Schreiber, Tom Wopat and Frederick Weller). As an ensemble, they nail degrees of desperation with the snap and synchronicity of precision tap dancers.

These actors all understand that the alpha-male animals of "Glengarry" never just mean what they say. Language is always camouflage or subterfuge, used in the lonely, nasty mission of staying afloat. Even the most loutish of the salesmen are as aware of semantics and its subtexts as linguistics professors. Try counting the variations on the words "speak" and "say" and "talk." Depending on when and how they are uttered, these basic monosyllables convey primal shifts in the balance of power: who's up, who's down, who for all practical purposes is dead.

The plot of "Glengarry," which was made into an all-star movie with Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon in 1992, is a typical spiked Mamet cocktail of deception, crime and corkscrew twists. It takes place in a Chinese restaurant, where the boys hang out and woo customers, and in the office ruled with bureaucratic smugness by a young man of ice named John Williamson (here played by Mr. Weller).

Santo Loquasto's fake wood-paneled office is dead-on (though his immaculate Chinese restaurant, with its immense fish tank, looks a bit grand for the neighborhood). Laura Bauer's costumes unobtrusively and perfectly match the men wearing them. And in a play that doesn't call for elaborate lighting, Kenneth Posner pulls off a quiet coup de théâtre at the end of the first scene, in which Williamson, buttoning up his trench coat after lunch with the Willy Loman-like Shelly Levene (Mr. Alda), fleetingly becomes a nightmare vision of a fascist executioner.

But it's the performers, who also include Jordan Lage as an impatient police detective, who keep "Glengarry" spinning so convincingly, especially Mr. Alda and Mr. Schreiber, who have the juiciest parts. For a man who achieved his greatest fame as one of America's most loved television figures (on "M*A*S*H"), Mr. Alda has since shown a welcome affinity for snakes and weasels (most recently in the film "The Aviator").

Here he exudes the sweaty pathos of a man who seems to believe that if he stops speaking, he'll die. It is Levene who appropriately begins the play - in repetitive midspeech, stalling for time. And throughout, Mr. Alda rattles off words with the wrenching momentum of an old jalopy, low on gas but moving as fast as it can.

As for the brilliant Mr. Schreiber, who plays the preening master salesman of the moment, it seems he can conquer pretty much any style of theater. Having shone in Pinter, Shakespeare and LaBute, he now reinvents the Mamet pitchmeister. Looking like a sleek hybrid of Rudolph Valentino and Rodney Dangerfield, Mr. Schreiber employs a precise battery of self-adjusting mannerisms, from making his shirt cuffs shoot out to realigning his shoulders.

His style speaks of conscientious hours before a mirror. The seductive spiel with which his character, Richard Roma, woos a spineless pigeon (Mr. Wopat, unrecognizable and excellent) has the same studied suaveness. When Roma erupts in anger, it's only a quick tearing of a silken fabric that instantly mends itself. To say that Mr. Schreiber gives an artificial performance would be mistaken. It's Roma who lives that artificial performance; it's his own form of survival gear.

Of course, this impeccably realized production makes clear what Roma chooses not to acknowledge - that his day of destruction, too, will come, if not in the immediate future. And like Mr. Alda's dying dinosaur, he will no doubt go out talking, gasping for words as if they were oxygen.



Bhutan weather.