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.