EXPLAINED

Giant squid?
This week, a British journal published the first-ever pictures of a giant squid alive in its natural habitat. A pair of Japanese researchers set up an apparatus that photographed the creature as it wrapped its tentacles around some bait attached to a deep-sea camera. How did the giant squid remain elusive for so long?

The difficulty of underwater exploration. The giant squid may be no harder to find than any other animal that lives at the bottom of the ocean. Submersibles that travel thousands of feet underwater have provided scientists with only a limited view of deep-sea life. Cameras can see only what's within range of an artificial light, and light can scare off some dark-adapted critters. Plenty of deep-sea animals other than giant squid have shown up in fishing nets without having been captured on film in their natural environment.

The giant squid seems especially mysterious for a couple of reasons. First of all, its incredible size—giant squids can be 40 feet long or more—makes it hard to believe that it can't be seen alive. Second, dead giant squids surface with surprising regularity. In the last few years, there's been a dramatic increase in the number of giant squid carcasses that have been discovered. So, why is it so hard to find a living giant squid when the dead ones are a dime a dozen?

For one, we don't really know where and how giant squid live. Specimens have been found all over the world, but it's not clear if they have regular migration patterns. We know sperm whales eat giant squid—remains have been found in the whales' stomachs—so some researchers have tracked the predators to find the prey. The Japanese researchers looked for the giant squid where sperm whales were known to congregate. Their camera-on-a-rope technique wasn't particularly innovative. (More adventuresome researchers have attached cameras to the sperm whales, for example.) Giant squid experts think they just got lucky.

What's with all the giant squid carcasses? Dead giant squids may be more buoyant than the carcasses of other deep-sea creatures because they have an unusually high concentration of ammonium ions. Since the ammonium is lighter than seawater, the carcasses tend to float, making them easy to spot. (Giant squids use the ammonium to keep from sinking while they're alive, too.) It's less clear why so many have turned up in the last few years. One theory suggests that an increase in deep-sea fishing—of orange roughy in particular—has disturbed the giant-squid habitat. Others say that the squid deaths have been caused by underwater seismic surveys using air guns. Or it could be global warming.

What's the difference between squid and giant squid? The giant squid isn't just a big ol' version of a regular squid—it has its own genus, called Architeuthis. (There may be several species of giant squid, but no one knows for sure.) The lesser-known "colossal squid," of the genus Mesonychoteuthis, may be even bigger and nastier than the giant squid. It has a larger beak than the giant squid and has hooks on its tentacles. While a few specimens of colossal squids have been discovered, no one has yet seen one in its natural habitat.



How do you measure sea level?
The mayor of New Orleans ordered mandatory evacuations over the weekend to protect residents from Hurricane Katrina. According to an emergency management expert, New Orleans is particularly vulnerable to flooding because parts of the city are 10 feet below sea level. How do you measure sea level?

With satellites and tide gauges. Satellites can record the level of oceans around the globe, while tide gauges are used to measure the height of water with respect to a fixed, nearby point on land. Oceanographers combine data from satellites and tide gauges to study global effects, like the rise in average sea level that results from climate change. But specific information about local features, like the relative depth of certain parts of New Orleans, derives from specific tidal-gauge readings. (Land can also rise and fall over long time periods, so changes in land level must also be taken into account.)

The simplest kind of gauge measures the height of a float in still water. A submerged column surrounds the float and prevents choppy waves from creating sudden fluctuations in sea level. The gauge keeps track of the float as it drifts up and down throughout the day and records its height (with respect to a land-based bench mark) at regular intervals. More advanced instruments use sound waves or pressure to measure the same thing.

Stable features such as underwater mountains can affect the local sea level. So can systematic variations in water temperature, air temperature, and currents. Topographical features and predictable weather patterns cause parts of the Atlantic Ocean, for instance, to be 40 centimeters lower than parts of the Pacific Ocean. (The Panama Canal spans a sea level difference of 20 centimeters.)

Changing tides and weather conditions can also create dips and swells in local tide-gauge readings. Since local readings can fluctuate so rapidly, most descriptions of "sea level" refer to an average value measured across many years. First, readings are collected over an interval that takes into account regular tidal patterns. (A standard 19-year cycle covers a full cycle of Earth-Moon and Earth-Sun interactions.) Then researchers filter out some of the short-term influences on the data, like extreme weather patterns and storm surges. The readings are averaged together to produce a "mean sea level" reading for a specific station or group of stations in a region. As determined by nearby tide gauges, much of New Orleans sits below the mean local sea level.

If New Orleans is below sea level, why isn't it underwater? Because it's protected by natural and artificial barriers. The city sits on the banks of the Mississippi, where sediment from the river had created areas of elevated land called "natural levees." New Orleans' earliest buildings sat on top of these levees, but as the population grew, houses were built farther inland at lower elevations. To create usable land, water had to be pumped out of the area, which in turn caused the ground to sink even lower. It's possible for part of New Orleans to exist below sea level because the levees that surround the city protect it (most of the time) from floods.



Who decides to wake up the president?

News of the death of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd reached the White House at 2:30 Monday morning. According to spokesman Scott McClellan, the president wasn't informed until he showed up for work at 7 a.m. When something happens in the middle of the night, who decides whether the president should get out of bed?

It varies from president to president, but the task usually falls to the national security adviser or the chief of staff. In the White House, a small team of "watch officers"—drawn from the CIA, the military, and the State Department—keeps an eye on incoming news and intelligence reports 24 hours a day. If something important comes up during the graveyard shift, the watch officer in charge gets in contact with the national security adviser or chief of staff, either via their deputies or a with a direct phone call. The watch officers typically have standing instructions on what sort of news merits a wake-up; President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, for example, has said he wants to be awakened for any overseas incident in which Americans are killed.

This procedure has been in place only since 1961, when John F. Kennedy ordered the construction of a permanent monitoring station on the site of what was once the West Wing bowling alley. (Before 1961, 24-hour war rooms were constructed and dismantled as needed.) The new facility became known as the "situation room."

It's not that unusual for a president to be awakened with news from the situation room. President Bush was alerted when a U.S. spy plane made an emergency landing in China in 2001 and for a deadly suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2002, among many similar events.*

But history remembers a snoozing president more than an alert one. When Henry Kissinger learned of a menacing letter from the Soviet premier in 1973, the White House chief of staff advised him not to wake up the president. (Former aides have said that Nixon, who was distraught over his domestic scandals, had drunk himself into a stupor by 10 the night before.)

Ronald Reagan, who famously slept during Cabinet meetings, also snoozed through two overseas military encounters. In 1981, his counselor Edwin Meese called a 3 a.m. staff meeting after learning that U.S. fighter jets had shot down a pair of Libyan planes earlier that night. They decided against calling Reagan in his Los Angeles hotel room. And in 1985, Reagan's National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane chose not to wake him when an American soldier was shot and killed in East Germany. (Reagan's reputation for snoozing even invited a protest: In 1983, steel and auto workers marched on the White House at 4 a.m. to "wake up the president" to the effects of his economic policy. Reagan said he slept through that, too.)

When George H. W. Bush took office, he announced that he'd be a "wake me, shake me" president, ready to spring into action in the middle of the night. His bedtime during the first Gulf War was 10:30, but National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft would rouse him with important news.

Bill Clinton received wake-up calls from Deputy National Security Adviser James Steinberg when necessary, but he slept through the racket when a gunman fired half a dozen shots at the White House one night in December of 1994. He also slumbered through congratulatory phone calls from foreign leaders after he won the election in 1992.


What Do Bombs Smell Like? And how do they train dogs to sniff them out?

How do dogs learn to smell bombs?

Classical conditioning techniques using food rewards and toys. In the United States, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Customs and Border Protection, and private dog trainers teach bomb-sniffing dogs. The preferred starting age is between 8 months and 22 months, and the Labrador retriever is a favored breed due to its lack of aggression in high-intensity situations.

The training programs derive many of their techniques from narcotics detection. During the ATF's 10-week program, a dog is exposed to an explosive up to 120 times a day, in amounts ranging from 1,000 pounds to 1 gram. In early phases of training, the dog is told to sit each time he finds the odor—that becomes the signal he uses to alert his handler when a bomb is present. The dog is fed only when in the presence of the explosive. Using a food reward instead of praise and play prevents an exclusive bond between dog and handler, which might prevent the dog from working well with others.

One upper-level training scenario uses a rotating wheel with slots for four containers. Some of the containers are empty; others hold explosives, a distracting object such as food, or an explosive combined with a distracting odor. By using the training wheel, the dog learns to ignore food in favor of explosives.

Some agencies avoid mixing food with work and infuse dog toys with explosive odors instead. The dogs learn to root out hidden explosives by simply playing fetch. This approach requires dogs that have a strong natural inclination for play. It also cements a canine-trainer bond, restricting the dog to working with only one handler.

The dog must learn to recognize thousands of active ingredients that might be used in an explosive. Trainers expose the canine to signature compounds that are found in many different types of explosives. In this way, a dog can be trained to detect all manner of bombs by memorizing a dozen or so smells. According to the Army's military working-dog training manual, canines are trained using dynamite, TOVEX, TNT, C-4 plastic explosives, detonating cord, and potassium chlorate, among other explosives.

Some bomb components are more odoriferous than others. C-4 has an incredibly strong scent; it's followed in decreasing order of smelliness by dynamite, TOVEX, detonating cord, and TNT.




Richter, Gerhard
Annunciation after Titian
1973
Oil on linen
49 3/8" x 6' 6 7/8" (125.4 x 200.3 cm)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington

PHOTOGRAPHY


a while ago (after the bombings in London), a lot of the heavy garbage bins were removed from toronto subway stations apparently in fear of terrorist threats.


by my office


brokeback mountain looks excellent

See more pictures here.

VENGEFUL PHILANTHROPY
from New Yorker

One afternoon a few weeks ago, Jennifer Philbin, a writer for “The O.C.,” was driving her BMW in heavy traffic on Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles, when she passed the remnants of an accident. She turned to look and promptly ran into the car in front of her—a Saab wagon. She and the Saab’s driver, a man in his late forties, pulled over to assess the damage. There didn’t seem to be any; she had hardly been moving. Nonetheless, the man insisted on summoning a police officer. Eventually, one came over from the other accident, examined the Saab’s bumper, and said, “I don’t really see anything here.” The driver of the Saab, citing possible “structural damage,” was adamant. The policeman filled out an accident report.

These particulars, and many that followed, came to light the other day, thanks to the efforts of Philbin’s fiancé, Michael Schur, a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard graduate and a writer for the NBC sitcom “The Office,” who converted his indignation over the fender bender into a campaign both to embarrass the Saab driver and to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In two mass e-mails, and then on a blog, he dissected the incident and its moral implications, striving to turn his inner Larry David into an inner Augustine, or, at least, an inner Oprah.

Schur’s involvement began several days after the accident, when Saab Guy, as Schur christened him, called Philbin to report that there was a crease in his bumper’s plastic cover and that it would cost $836.96 to fix. This news prompted Schur to commandeer the phone and demand digital photos.

The man responded, according to Schur, “It really isn’t the kind of thing that shows up in a photograph.”

So instead Schur paid a visit to the garage at Saab Guy’s office. (“It might not surprise you to find out that the man is a lawyer,” Schur’s e-mail said.) Together, the two men inspected the car. “I kid you not,” Schur wrote. “You have to be within six inches of the bumper to see the ‘crease.’ ”

Saab Guy told Schur, “Look, I could live with it, but I just don’t want to.” Schur pointed out that petty accident claims contribute to skyrocketing insurance rates.

“I don’t care about insurance rates,” the lawyer replied.

“You should care,” Schur said. “You’re a resident of this city, and it’s a huge problem.” Schur then thought of something about which the lawyer should care even more. He proposed, on the spot, to contribute the $836.96 to the Red Cross in Saab Guy’s name, to help provide relief to the victims of Katrina. The lawyer didn’t seem interested. He wanted his bumper fixed. But Schur kept after him. Finally, the lawyer said, “O.K., I’ll think about it.”

Schur went to meet some friends, who agreed that a creased bumper, when measured against a calamity like Katrina, was trivial indeed, and they, too, immediately pledged donations in Saab Guy’s name. Within an hour, Schur had raised $1,936, which inspired him to try for more. He wrote his first mass e-mail, asking for donations to the “Mike Schur Saab Guy Katrina Fund” from people who’d already given on behalf of the hurricane’s victims, from those who had not, or from those who merely, as he wrote, “just want to see Saab Guy shamed like the jerk he is.” If Saab Guy agreed to the arrangement, the donations would be made in his name. If he didn’t, the donations could be made under “Saab Guy Is an Asshole.” The e-mail shot out into the world. Within hours, friends, and friends of friends, had pledged nearly twelve thousand dollars. “This is the greatest thing ever,” Schur wrote. By the next day, the haul was up to thirty thousand.

But then came the qualms. Since launching the campaign, Schur and Philbin had occasionally looked at each other and said, “Why do I feel bad?” Of the hundreds of responses they received, only a few were negative, but one of those, from someone they didn’t know, put into words their sense of unease. Their campaign, the e-mailer wrote, was “extremely distasteful,” not only because they were exploiting the tragedy of Katrina but because Saab Guy had every right to his money, since his car had been damaged and he had been hit from behind. Schur and Philbin stayed up until 2 a.m. working over the ethical implications. Schur wondered, “Well, I drive a thirty-four-thousand-dollar Acura TL. Who am I to tell people that they should donate to charity?” He asked himself whether he should sell his watch, buy a cheap one, and donate the difference. “It’s a slippery slope,” he said.

The next morning, Schur found himself paralyzed by, and luxuriating in, his misgivings. Vengeful philanthropy: it was a category unto itself. He spent a couple of hours cold-calling ethics professors around the country. A consensus emerged that the problem lay in the desire to induce shame. Charity was good, but spite was not. He worked up the courage to call Saab Guy again, and he reiterated his offer, adding that some friends of his had also pledged money. “I don’t want to say he ignored it, but he kept going on with his thought process,” Schur recalled. “He did say, though, that he’d been thinking about whether he was being petty.” Saab Guy didn’t ask Schur how much had been pledged, and Schur didn’t go out of his way to tell him. Nor did Schur mention the sprawl of his campaign, the blog, or the fact that a charitable enterprise had been launched under the banner “Saab Guy Is an Asshole.”

At any rate, Saab Guy made a counteroffer: “What if I take some part of your money and give it to charity and use some part of it to fix my bumper?”

Schur said, “That sounds great,” and sent him a check for the full amount, restoring what Schur called “a fairly delicate balance in the universe.”

“It’s possible he thinks of me as a morally high-handed little snotnosed jerk who tried to tell him what to do with his money,” Schur reflected. “It’s also possible that he thinks the next time someone bumps into him he shouldn’t care as much.”

Neither, really. “He was a very thoughtful, nice young man,” Saab Guy said last Friday. He called the affair a “non-issue,” and noted that Schur’s check was still sitting next to his phone, uncashed. “I’m actually still trying to figure out whether to just send it back.”



MUSIC

Neutral Milk Hotel
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
[Merge; 1998; r: Domino; 2005]
Rating: 10.0
from pitchforkmedia.com

So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I've talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn't have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.

Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum's honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album's world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he's running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: "When you were young..." Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad's shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.

Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk, licking Bernadette Peters' entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.

Then there's the record's disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank's lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record's historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3" mentions "a synthetic flying machine" our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci's 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in "Two-Headed Boy" of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau's industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What's it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in "Oh Comely," where he sings, "I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/ and will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.

Seven years it's been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it's not unreasonable to think that we've heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after "Two-Headed Boy Part Two." Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and one of Dylan's truest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.



OTHER

After 43 years and $568 billion in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation. What’s wrong?

MELVILLE

His World and Work
By Andrew Delbanco
Knopf. 415 pp. $30
review from washingtonpost.com

The life and afterlife of Herman Melville (1819-1891) present the greatest illustration in American literature, perhaps in world literature, of the Psalm "The same stone which the builders refused is become the head-stone." After the popular success of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which led to the young Melville being dubbed "the man who lived among cannibals," he embarked on a literary career that went gradually, then precipitously, downhill. By the time he was 40 he had essentially abandoned fiction altogether, tried publishing poetry with comparable success (i.e., none), and finally resigned himself -- he was, after all, married, with four children and debts -- to spending the rest of his life as a customs inspector for the city of New York. When he died, the newspaper obituary misprinted his name as "Henry Melville."

His work was never entirely forgotten, though he was chiefly regarded as a writer of sea stories (Joseph Conrad, another specialist in "the watery part of the world," didn't think much of them). And then in the 1920s a Melville revival unexpectedly kicked into gear. In 1921, Raymond Weaver brought out the first biography ( Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic ); in 1923, D.H. Lawrence devoted more pages to Melville in his dithyrambic Studies in Classic American Literature than to any other writer ("a deep, great artist"); in 1924, the rediscovered Billy Budd was published; and by the 1930s the poet Charles Olson had begun to track down the dispersed volumes of Melville's library in New York's used bookshops. More and ever more scholarly work appeared as teachers and critics of every theoretical bent discovered an oceanic textual richness and complexity in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851). After World War II the suspicion, then conviction grew ever stronger that Melville's titanic meditation on Good and Evil, and almost everything else (except romantic love), just might be that elusive White Whale of our literature, the great American novel.

For anyone who cares about writing (or any of the arts), Melville's story is obviously both dispiriting and consoling. It is also a story that Andrew Delbanco tells surpassingly well.

Not that he hasn't had help in re-creating the writer's world. During the past 10 or 15 years we have seen no shortage of Melvillean biography, from the scholarly life's work of Hershel Parker (two daunting volumes) to the very brief Penguin volume (155 pages) by Elizabeth Hardwick. For the general reader, though, Delbanco offers a more satisfying book than either of these. First of all, this academic writes with exceptional clarity and wit (he possesses a taste for subtle, hardly noticeable wordplay). He also displays a masterly ability to summarize a book or an argument and is generous in acknowledging the scholarship of others. He periodically underscores the continued relevance of Melville's complex themes -- man's ambiguous relationship to Nature, the persistence of social and racial inequities, America's imperialistic sense of manifest destiny, the shiftiness of sexuality -- and yet he doesn't belabor the obvious or thump any tubs. This Columbia professor also surprises by including a page from a Mad magazine parody of Moby-Dick , a Gahan Wilson cartoon of Captain Ahab, and an exchange about Billy Budd (as a homosexual text) from an episode of "The Sopranos." When Delbanco writes about New York City and its importance to Melville's work, he reveals his own unambiguous but not unambivalent love for his hometown.

In short, it would be hard to imagine a more inviting overview of Melville for our time. I've admired Delbanco's work before, in particular, Required Reading , though that was essentially a collection of brief essays. This full-length study points up even more forcefully the truth of that earlier book's subtitle -- "Why Our American Classics Matter Now" -- by focusing on one major author. The result is humane and relevant scholarship at its best.

In little more than a decade -- between his mid-twenties and late-thirties -- Herman Melville produced eight or nine novels (at least one never published and now lost) and a half-dozen or so short stories. He could write with surprising speed, which may explain in part why so many of his books are rambling, disjointed, phantasmagoric, sententious and often boring. Aside from Melville scholars, who ever looks into Mardi or Israel Potter ? In recent years Pierre: or the Ambiguities has gained its champions (many critics view its incest motif as a mask for Melville's possible homosexuality), while The Confidence-Man almost seems a post-modern meditation on the slipperiness of identity. Melville's poetry has been championed too, especially by Robert Penn Warren. I myself remember when "On the Slain Collegians" was widely read -- back in 1970, shortly after the killings at Kent State.

In truth, though, only four works live for us today, but what works they are! Moby-Dick , of course, but also Billy Budd , which Thomas Mann called "the most beautiful story in the world" and wished he could have written (which isn't surprising since Billy in his beauty and innocence could be the slightly more weather-beaten cousin of Tadzio in Death in Venice ). Recall the story's basic plot: A handsome and guileless young seaman is falsely accused of sedition by a ship's master-at arms; in the captain's cabin Billy, after a moment of stuttering frustration, lashes out at the evil Claggart and his single blow inadvertently kills the officer, while the sympathetic Captain Vere looks on in dismay.

From this scenario Melville constructs a drama of moral (and interpretative) complexity the equal of Sophocles' Antigone . Billy Budd is, for all its gnarled and even rebarbative syntax, astonishingly moving, as it takes up such ethical heartbreakers as the fate of purity and innocence in a fallen world, the conflicts between duty and desire, legality and human compassion, and the saintly example of unqualified forgiveness. No surprise that E.M. Forster made it the libretto for that rare thing, an almost equally great and moving work of art in another medium, Benjamin Britten's opera "Billy Budd."

Sailing ships offer a confined space, almost a stage, upon which to examine the human condition. But so do business offices. Long ago, Borges recognized in Melville a precursor of Kafka, especially in the great short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), that tale of the mousy clerk who one day, when asked to perform a simple clerical task, quietly says, "I would prefer not to." The result is an unforgettable account of existential loneliness and of our failure to connect with the less fortunate among us, but also a study in the (all too contemporary) frustration resulting when people in power, people of goodwill who view themselves as "civilized" or as upholders of propriety and tradition, must suddenly confront those who adamantly refuse to recognize their values, their authority.

Bartleby chooses a kind of civil disobedience in the face of the inhumane, but in "Benito Cereno" (1855) Melville takes this silence, this dumb-show recalcitrance, even further: He reveals what Delbanco calls "the mirroring relations between oppressor and oppressed." In this haunting masterpiece, a Capt. Delano comes to the aid of an obviously distressed slave ship, where he meets its Spanish captain and his black man-servant Babo. He is particularly impressed by the devotion demonstrated by Babo for his master -- the black man never leaves Don Benito's side. Nonetheless, the obtuse Delano feels that something on board the San Dominick isn't quite right. Today's reader will guess the truth long before he does: that the slaves have taken over the ship, and that Babo controls the captain, not the other way round.

This is, then, one of the first major works of American fiction to address the question of slavery and racial injustice, and Melville adumbrates much of our literature's exploration of this unhappy theme. Ralph Ellison, for example, took the epigraph for Invisible Man from this story:

" 'You are saved,' cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; 'you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?' 'The negro.' "

Readers will note that I have said nothing very much about Moby-Dick . But what can anyone say? Its quietly portentous first sentence is as famous as any in world literature ("Call me Ishmael"), and some of Ahab's monologues, like the one beginning "Is Ahab Ahab?," achieve an eloquence rivaling that of the Bible and Shakespeare. There are longueurs, but even in the midst of tedious cetological lore, one comes across such disturbing passages as that in which the Pequod's sailors squeeze and squeeze and squeeze handfuls of white spermacetti. Then there are the marvelous portraits of the crew -- the black cabin boy Pip, who goes mad and loses his sense of self, the well-meaning but weak Starbuck, the mysterious harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo. There are the haunting encounters with other ships, especially the Rachel "searching for her lost children." And throughout there is philosophizing that at times rises to a kind of prose poetry:

"All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side."

In Melville's lifetime few recognized or even suspected the writer's exceptional genius -- but Nathaniel Hawthorne came close, and the two men established a long-lasting friendship. After their first encounters, the writer of Polynesian adventures went back to his romantic tale about "Whale Fishery" and, in Delbanco's words, "tore it up from within." Melville deepened and amplified his novel, enlarged it in every sense, with the obvious hope of joining what he called, in an essay on Hawthorne, that fraternity where "genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." With wonderful appropriateness, then, the author of The Scarlet Letter -- which appeared in 1850 -- became the dedicatee of the following year's Moby-Dick .

In the end, perhaps the most important use of literary biography is to send us back to a writer's books with increased understanding and renewed excitement. This Andrew Delbanco certainly does for Herman Melville. We are his beneficiaries.



LYRICS

When the Ship Comes In
Bob Dylan

Oh the time will come up
When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin'.
Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Oh the seas will split
And the ship will hit
And the sands on the shoreline will be shaking.
Then the tide will sound
And the wind will pound
And the morning will be breaking.

Oh the fishes will laugh
As they swim out of the path
And the seagulls they'll be smiling.
And the rocks on the sand
Will proudly stand,
The hour that the ship comes in.

And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they're spoken.
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.

A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck,
The hour that the ship comes in.

Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.



It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding
Bob Dylan

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover
That you'd just be
One more person crying.

So don't fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing.

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright, Ma, I can make it.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him.

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.

A Letter From "The Power" to Public Enemy.
- - - -from mcsweeneys.net

Dear Chuckdee, Flavor Flavor, Professor Griffin, and everyone else,

Hey, guys! What's up? Or should I say "what up"? Is that how you hippity-hoppers and homeyboys and gangerbangers are saying it now? Never mind. I'll get right to the point.

Do we have to keep fighting like this? Or, more specifically, do you really want to keep fighting me? I don't mind indulging you if that's what you guys want. It's not hurting me, of course, since I am The Power after all. But I just wonder if you might consider giving it up. I mean, this has been going on for a while and I'm still very much here.

Do you realize that you've been fighting me since 1989? (What a crazy summer that was, huh? Whatever happened to that funky drummer?) Now, that's 16 years ago. Babies born that summer are driving cars now! So much has happened since then. Presidents have come and gone, the Soviet Union collapsed. But not The Power! Honestly, guys, I'd really like to be your friend and hang out with you at your rapping concerts. It's time to put this behind us.

And I wonder if I might offer you some constructive criticism. Among the problems, I think, has been your clarity of precisely why you were fighting me and how you intended to wage that fight. Like when you say: "As the rhythm designed to bounce / What counts is that the rhymes / Designed to fill your mind / Now that you've realized the pride's arrived / We got to pump the stuff to make us tough / from the heart / It's a start, a work of art." Pardon my frankness but what the hell are you talking about there? It rhymes, but what are people supposed to do with that information? If you're trying to fight someone, especially someone like me, you need clear action items. Maybe "Carjack The Power's limousine after an important board meeting" or "Expose The Power's malfeasance in a national publication" or maybe "Propose a better alternative to The Power and let the people decide." Those are just off the top of my head! Look, take this advice or don't, but before dismissing it just remember The Power must know what he's doing, right? Thus the name. Think about it.

Let's take a look at your other complaints. You don't care for Elvis Presley. That's fine. I would encourage you to rewatch the '68 comeback special, but whatever. And say what you want about Elvis (was he really a straight-up racist? I didn't know that!), but he's certainly not part of The Power. By the way, I agree with you on John Wayne. I've never seen the appeal. Where was the range? So we don't really have a quarrel there, do we?

And what do you have against Bobby McFerrin? Yes, "Don't Worry, Be Happy" was the No. 1 "jam," but honestly, it's a really great song—the things that man does just with his voice are amazing. It hit No. 1 because a lot of people really liked it! They found it fresh and innovative and not all Grumpy Gus like some people's music. It had nothing to do with me. I'm involved with a lot of things in this world but the charts aren't my department! I could introduce you guys to Bobby if you like. He's a super-nice fellow, and maybe you could record some music together! I'd buy a record of that!

Honestly, guys, I want to end this thing. I'd love to have you up to the country house for a weekend if you have the time. (I know you do, Flavor Flavor! With the big clock and all!) So what's it going to take? I'd be more than happy to call someone at the post office and get some more of your heroes on stamps. Who would we be talking about—Grandmaster Flashy? Eddy Murphy? M&M? I haven't been keeping up with your whole scene so just let me know.

OK, guys, I'll "rap" at you later!

Love,
The Power

SONG OF THE DAY

Grey Ice Water - Sun Kil Moon

you're standing by the grey ice water
out in the wind above ground out in the weather
you had yourself a crazy lover
becoming frozen trying hard to forget her
you got a job up in alaska
it's easy to save what the cannery pays
cause there ain't no way to spend it
at home on a boat, it's a fish trap
you took the path of least resistance
on the phone cutting out talking
short to long distance
you're standing by the grey ice water
out in the wind above ground out in the water
you had yourself a crazy lover
become unfrozen trying hard to forget her
you got a job up in alaska
it's easy to save what the cannery pays
cause there ain't no way to spend it
on the arctic blast

RUNNING

Why do we get stitches or cramps in our side when we run?

A side stitch is a piercing sensation just below the ribcage, usually felt when you're running. In the past, several different theories tried to explain the cause: trapped gas, swollen liver, stomach muscle cramps. However a recent and fairly conclusive theory holds that strain on the ligaments connecting the liver to the diaphragm is the cause.
The liver "hangs" from the diaphragm by fibrous bands called ligaments. Running exerts a steady downward force on your liver, stretching these ligaments. In addition, when you exhale (usually as your left foot hits the ground), your diaphragm is pushed up. That means your liver falls with gravity as your diaphragm rises, placing considerable strain on those poor ligaments.

The result? A stitch. The cure? Stop running immediately and press your hand just below the pain. This should raise your liver up, relieving the strain on the ligaments. Inhale and exhale evenly as you press down. As a preventive measure, take deep, full breaths while running. If you take shallow breaths, your diaphragm is consistently raised, which wreaks havoc on your ligaments. Exercise is great, but remember to be kind to the rubber bands keeping your organs in place.

SONG OF THE DAY

Elliott Smith - 13:
Elliott Smith remade Big Star's puppy love classic the only way he knew how-- as a textbook Elliott Smith anti-production. His "Thirteen" sounds more reincarnated than covered, as if it passed through the membrane of his melancholy and emerged transformed, swathed in delicate gauzes. Smith trims some hitches from the guitar line to reveal a more lugubrious essence, replaces the sturdy jauntiness of the original vocal with his usual pensive keening, and predictably yet beautifully apprehends the celebration as an elegy. There's a sweet eternity in this song, one endless summer of passion and discovery free-standing in time, but while Big Star reveled in the moment, Smith's version is a lament for everything precious that slips through the fingers too quickly and never returns.

Won't you let me walk you home from school?
Won't you let me meet you at the pool?
Maybe Friday I can
Get tickets for the dance
And I'll take you

Won't you tell your dad, "Get off my back"?
Tell him what we said about "Paint It, Black"
Rock 'n Roll is here to stay
Come inside where it's okay
And I'll shake you

Won't you tell me what you're thinking of?
Would you be an outlaw for my love?
If it's so, well, let me know
If it's "no," well, I can go
I won't make you


Pyramid Mountain, Jasper Alberta

U2 Concert, Toronto September 12, 2005

Vertigo, I Will Follow, The Electric Co. / Bullet With Butterfly Wings (snippet) / See Me, Feel Me (snippet), Elevation, Beautiful Day / Many Rivers To Cross (snippet), In A Little While, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, City Of Blinding Lights, Miracle Drug, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, Love And Peace Or Else, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bullet The Blue Sky / Please (snippet) / The Hands That Built America (snippet) / When Johnny Comes Marching Home (snippet), Miss Sarajevo, Pride (In The Name Of Love), Where The Streets Have No Name, One, Ol' Man River
encores: Zoo Station, The Fly, With Or Without You / All You Need Is Love (snippet), All Because Of You, The First Time, Fast Cars, Yahweh, 40

BIZNESS

from economist.com

ONE morning, about a year ago, a doctor told Steve Jobs that a cancerous tumour in his pancreas would kill him within months, and that it was time to start saying his goodbyes. Later that night, an endoscopy revealed that the tumour could be cut out. But for one day Mr Jobs, the boss of Apple Computer, as well as Pixar, the world's most successful animation studio, stared death in the face.

The experience seems to have invigorated him. Last week, gaunter but otherwise undiminished, he was on a stage in San Francisco, putting on a show (for that is what Apple product launches are) that was as flashy and dynamic as any as he has ever thrown. When businessmen try to rub shoulders with pop stars, the effect is usually embarrassing. But “Steve” had arranged to have his pal, Madonna, pop up on screen and kidded around with her with panache. Does she have an iPod? Of course she has! “That's so duh,” said the superstar playfully. Then Mr Jobs segued into his announcements—a new mobile phone from Motorola that has iTunes, Apple's music software, pre-installed and that represents a beachhead into the world of phones; and the “iPod nano”, a new digital music-player that is thinner than a pencil, but still holds 1,000 songs.

For Mr Jobs, the product launch seemed mainly to be an opportunity to drive home the message that his hold on downloaded and portable music now seems overwhelming. iTunes sells 2m songs a day and has a world market share of 82%—Mr Jobs reckons that it is the world's second-largest internet store, behind only Amazon. And the iPod has a market share of 74%, with 22m sold. For a man who helped launch the personal-computer era in 1976 with the Apple I, but then had to watch Microsoft's Bill Gates walk away with, in effect, the monopoly on PC operating systems (Apple's market share in computers today is less than 3%), this must be some vindication.

The odd thing about near-death experiences—literal or metaphorical—in Mr Jobs's life is that he seems actually to need them sporadically in order to thrive. Mr Jobs himself suggested as much when he addressed the graduating class at Stanford University in June. Until he turned 30 in 1985, Mr Jobs led a life that fits almost every Silicon Valley cliché. He dropped out of college (like Bill Gates and Michael Dell); he started a company with a friend in a garage (like everybody from Hewlett and Packard to the founders of Google); he launched a revolution (the PC era). Big deal. The interesting event occurred when he was 30 and got fired from his own company, after Apple's board turned against him. He was “devastated”. His career seemed dead.

Characteristically, though, Mr Jobs bounced back, once he realised, as he said at Stanford, that “the heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.” He did something uninterrupted success might have made impossible: he became more creative. In 1986 he started two new companies, NeXT, a computer-maker that was always too far ahead of its time, and Pixar, an animation studio that went on to have a series of box-office hits. A decade later, ironically enough, NeXT was bought by Apple, and Mr Jobs was brought back to run the company he had founded.

Mr Jobs, a pescatarian (ie, a vegetarian who eats fish) with a philosophical streak and a strong interest in the occult, interprets these reversals as lessons. As befits a man who grew up in California in the 1960s, he proclaims his belief in karma and in love. Not necessarily love of his employees, apparently—some of whom have found working for him a nightmare—but love of one's ideals. Always do only what you love, and never settle, he advised the students at Stanford. His brush with cancer, in particular, seems to have focused his mind. “Death is very likely the single best invention in life,” Mr Jobs told his young audience. “All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Do not get the impression that Mr Jobs is now hugging strangers in random acts of kindness. He is still testy, irascible and difficult; he is still prepared to sue teenagers who publish Apple gossip on their websites for alleged abuses of trade secrets. But the reminders of mortality have changed him. “He was already softened” after his public humbling in 1985, says Bruce Chizen, the boss of Adobe Systems, a software company that is a long-time partner of Apple's. After the cancer, he says, “he's even softer” and, Mr Chizen reckons, even more creative.



New toys on the way
Mr Jobs's rivals may feel the same way. The digerati in Silicon Valley, Redmond (Microsoft), Tokyo (Sony), Seoul (Samsung) and other places now simply take it for granted that Mr Jobs has a top-secret conveyor belt that will keep churning out best-selling wonders like the iPod. What could these toys be? A portable video player is rumoured. A new and cooler sort of television is possible. A user-friendly and elegant mobile-phone handset would be nice, perhaps called something like “iPhone”.

Hollywood and music studios are also increasingly frightened. The music studios, which barely took him seriously when he launched iTunes in 2001, are sick of his power and are pressuring him to change his 99-cents-per-song flat rate for music. Slim chance. Disney, a long-time partner of Pixar whom Mr Jobs broke with when he got tired of its former boss, is now trying to worm its way back into his favour.

In short, Mr Jobs currently seems vivacious by anybody's standards. There are even rumours that he might run for governor of California (as a Democrat, presumably; Al Gore is on Apple's board). For somebody famous in large part for a spectacular defeat—to Bill Gates and Microsoft—all this must feel like a new lease of life, in every respect.



POP CULTURE

from goldenfiddle.com

The lovely Jennifer Aniston was Oprah Winfrey’s first guest on her 20th season (that can’t be right, can it?) opener, yesterday, and what an opener it was! First off, Miss Oprah has a new set, and it reeks of evil doctor secret hideout layer. That is to say, it’s shiny, pointlessly spacious, built on a giant lazy susan, adorned with ridiculous spiral staircases, and located in a hollowed out volcano in the south Pacific. (It’s also faintly reminiscent of the old Arsenio Hall set.) Let’s just say that there’s plenty of room for Ms. Winfrey to stretch out and blow her O ring -er, or, share a special one on one with a celebrity? But enough about her ego. Jennifer Aniston is her first guest, and we must admit, she looks maybe better than she has ever looked. Impossibly skinny, perfectly dressed and somehow hiding her enormous hoover under a pound of expertly applied makeup that makes her look like she’s not wearing any makeup at all. Brilliant! She smiles, and it’s nothing but gleaming white. She brings Oprah a gift, which is easily unwrapped, and it’s two champagne flutes. The two old friends share some unmarked bubbly, and it’s onto the tough questions! Let’s see: Brad, Vince, Angelina, Maddox, Zahara, heartache, Office Space, pain, loneliness, yoga, suffering, depression, anxiety, Kimberly Stewart, shopping, nervous breakdowns, Ross, thoughts of suicide, drugs, drugs, drugs AND…

Oprah: What’s your favorite time of day?

Jen: Sunset.

WHAT THE?! IS SHE SERIOUS?? WHAT KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT??!! WTF-ING F!!!??!? DON’T FORGET ABOUT FAVORITE FOOD AND FAVORITE COLOR!!!!!

Oprah: What’s your favorite pig-out food?

Jen: Mexican.

Jennifer Aniston’s life goal, when it comes to interviews, is to appear normal. To be plain. Just one of the girls. She would like to convince the world that while you’re home watching TV picking your navel, she’s home watching TV picking her navel, too… and not telling her personal assistant, hairdresser, trainer, agent, therapist, dealer exactly what she wants and how she wants it. At one point, during the “interview” Aniston actually divulges that she has a really boring photo album full of sunsets. Just sunsets. Now most of the time, we would call just bullshit, but it’s Jennifer Aniston. So, congratulations. You have finally convinced us of your never-ending boringness. You want to know why Jennifer Aniston is boring? Because she says she is boring. Over and over and over. And that’s boring. She never tells a decent story. NEVER. So she likes to guard her privacy, fine! DON’T GO ON A TALK SHOW! She goes on Letterman and acts like she’s on the witness stand. She’s boring because she is constantly reminding us that she is boring. And that gets boring, eventually. Anyyawn, back to the “interview” where “anything can happen,” and doesn’t.

Oprah: (in a tone that suggests her guest is either a child or deaf in one ear) What’s your favorite party drink?

Jen: A dirty martini!

Oprah: Do you know how to make them?

Jen: Oh, yeah.

And that’s it. Over. Commercial break.

Oprah returns with the ceo of Hermes, who, after a good reaming from the O queen, puts forth the impossible notion that the rude employee that Oprah encountered while in Paris (and while looking like a Juicy Couture’d cocker-spaniel on its last hind leg) didn’t know who she was. The crowd does not take this well. They become restless and there is much “oh, c’mon-ing,” and mental hurling of rotten fruit salad. Nothing gets resolved, really, except they that they sort of agree not to see eye to eye. But, the O hole hugs him anyways, turns to the camera and gives the world the go ahead to continue buying $10,000 Birkin bags. Thanks, a lot. We’ll run out and not do that right now. Commercial break.

Oprah returns to let the us know exactly how much she is “committing” to Hurricane Katrina “relief.”

$10 million. wow.

Having a hard time with that figure? Just think of it as 9 million more than other obnoxiously rich super-generous celebrities have given to the effort. Again, we’re not really sure where exactly the money is going, (not the red cross and not the bushclintonkatrainafund.org) but, apparently, we get to do some of the work. Yipee!

The audience screams wildly, rises to an ovation and goes home new car-less.

The battle over the semi-colon.


Jeff Harris takes video clips at the Toronto Film Festival.

When you try your best but you don't succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

When the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can't replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
and ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

High up above or down below
when you're too in love to let it go
but if you never try you'll never know
Just what your worth

Lights will guide you home
and ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Tears streaming down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears streaming down your face and I

Tears streaming down your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Tears stream down your face and I

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

MUSIC

Equally at home with putting his unique spin on songs by AC/DC, Neil Diamond and John Denver as he is recording his own compositions, Mark Kozelek further indulges his interpretive bent on his next album, "Tiny Cities." Due Nov. 1 as the first release on Kozelek's own Caldo Verde imprint, the set features 11 new versions of material originally recorded by veteran indie rock act Modest Mouse.

Although several cuts feature Kozelek performing solo acoustic, "Tiny Cities" is attributed to Sun Kil Moon, the band he debuted in 2003 with the acclaimed Jetset album "Ghosts of the Great Highway." Emily Herron guests on vocals on "Grey Ice Water." Much in the vein of Kozelek's prior cover recordings, the material here is given completely new arrangements that bear little resemblance to the originals. The obscurity "Four Fingered Fisherman" has been transformed from a loose, extremely lo-fi exercise into a haunting, finger-picked solo guitar piece, while a string-tinged "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes" generates its rhythm from Kozelek's phrasing instead of its prior quirky, funk gait. Elsewhere, the artist injects a sense of optimism into "Neverending Math Equation" and strips the modern rock hit "Ocean Breathes Salty" down to its inherent bittersweet reflections on past and present.

"Tiny Cities" will be released on Rough Trade outside of North America, and will be available on vinyl via director Cameron Crowe's Vinyl Films label bolstered by an alternate version of "Exit Does Not Exist."

Kozelek is in the midst of a short North American tour with Low vocalist/guitarist Alan Sparhawk's new project, the Retribution Gospel Choir. The group plays Los Angeles tonight (Sept. 7). Although no Sun Kil Moon or solo dates are planned for the fall, Kozelek hopes to play select shows in the first part of 2006. His cover of Neil Diamond's "Kentucky Woman" can be found on the new EP "Songs From the Brown Hotel," a companion to RCA's upcoming soundtrack for "Elizabethtown."

The track list for "Tiny Cities":

"Exit Does Not Exist"
"Tiny Cities Made of Ashes"
"Neverending Math Equation"
"Space Travel Is Boring"
"Dramamine"
"Jesus Christ Was an Only Child"
"Four Fingered Fisherman"
"Grey Ice Water"
"Convenient Parking"
"Trucker's Atlas"
"Ocean Breathes Salty"

LYRICS

Dead Man's Will
Iron & Wine

Give this stone to my brother
Cuz we found it playing in the barnyard
Many years ago

Give this bone to my father
He'll remember hunting in the hills
When I was 10 years old

May my love reach you all
I locked in myself and buried too long
Now that I come to fall
Please say it's not too late
Now that I'm dead and gone

Give this string to my mother
It pulled the baby teeth she keeps inside the drawer
Give this ring to my lover
I was scared and stupid not to ask
For her hand long before

May my love reach you all
I locked in myself and buried too long
Now that I come to fall
Please say it's not too late
Now that I'm dead and gone



Miss Sarajevo
U2

Is there a time for keeping your distance
A time to turn your eyes away
Is there a time for keeping your head down
For getting on with your day

Is there a time for kohl and lipstick
A time for cutting hair
Is there a time for high street shopping
To find the right dress to wear

Here she comes
Heads turn around
Here she comes
To take her crown

Is there a time to run for cover
A time for kiss and tell
Is there a time for different colours
Different names you find it hard to spell

Is there a time for first communion
A time for East 17
Is there a time to turn to Mecca
Is there time to be a beauty queen

Here she comes
Beauty plays the clown
Here she comes
Surreal in her crown

Dici che il fiume
Trova la via al mare
E come il fiume
Giungerai a me
Oltre i confini
E le terre assetate
Dici che come fiume
Come fiume...
L'amore giungerà
L'amore...
E non so più pregare
E nell'amore non so più sperare
E quell'amore non so più aspettare

[Translation of the above]
It's said that a river
Finds the way to the sea
And like the river
You shall come to me
Beyond the borders
And the thirsty lands
You say that as a river
Like a river...
Love shall come
Love...
And I'm not able to pray anymore
And I cannot hope in love anymore
And I cannot wait for love anymore
[End of Translation]

Is there a time for tying ribbons
A time for Christmas trees
Is there a time for laying tables
And the night is set to freeze



Parting Gift
Fiona Apple

I opened my eyes
While you were kissing me once more than once
And you looked as sincere as a dog
Just as sincere as a dog does,
When it's the food on your lips with which it's in love

I bet you could never tell
That I knew you didn't know me that well
It is my fault you see
You never learned that much from me

Oh you silly stupid pastime of mine
You were always good for rhyme
And from the first to the last time
The sign says stop
But we went on whole hearted it ended bad
But I love what we started it says stop
But we went on whole hearted it ended bad
But I love what we started

I took off my glasses
While you were yelling at me once more than once
So as not to see you see me react
Should've put 'em, should've put 'em on again
So I could see you see me sincerely yelling back

I bet your fortress face
Belied your fort of lace
It is by the grace of me
You never learned what I could see

Oh you silly stupid pastime of mine
You were always good for rhyme
And from the first to all the last time
All the sign says stop
But we went on whole hearted it ended bad
But I love what we started it says stop
But we went on whole hearted it ended bad
But I love what we started



Review of Iron and Wine/Calexico's new EP:

In the all-American rush for bigger and better, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that many things are better in small doses: spinach, mortgage payments, in-laws. Who really wanted to see Lethal Weapon 4 or the most recent Star Wars films? It just would have been better to cut the fat and trim things down. Keep things to a minimum, and they tend to be better. In many ways, Sam Beam is both proving and testing this rule.

First, it should be acknowledged that Beam is on his game this year. Sure, Iron & Wine hasn’t released a full-length, but he’s still managed to put out the two best releases of his career, the Woman King EP in February and now In the Reins, a collaborative EP with Calexico: 13 tracks all told and among them the best that he has ever written and put to tape. At the same time, these EPs mark the shift of Iron & Wine’s style from a Beam-centered singer-songwriter project to a full-fledged band with things like drums, electric guitars, and now even horns.

While Woman King remains the better of the two EPs, In the Reins is nonetheless quite remarkable in its continued push toward a broader musical palette for Beam and the way that it results in a finished project that’s so clearly a melding of two styles. It’s tempting to initially overlook Calexico’s role here, given the lack of any real vocal contribution from Joey Burns, but in many ways it serves as an important move for them, too, forcing them to focus in and work with a new style of singing. It’s never quite as awesome as it could be, but it still features a few of the better songs either group has recorded.

Calexico come out strong on “He Lays in the Reins,” playing more of a bold Mexican folk style than the spaghetti western music of their earlier records. Unfortunately, Beam still seems somewhat uncertain with his voice, staying quiet when he should be belting out his lines, which necessitates a marked instrumental shift for the verses. This is made all the more obvious when mariachi singer Salvador Duran takes vocal duties in the second verse, belting out his lines over the full bridge. Even with that, Duran’s full tenor has to be laid lower in the mix to match Beam, which is a bit of a shame. The track still comes out well, Beam’s standard mix of gorgeous imagery and wistfulness saving a lackluster delivery.

Lyrically, “Prison on Route 41” finds the clearest middle ground between the southern delta folk of Beam and the Arizona desert of Calexico. Beam tells the story of his incarcerated family and the salvation found in love, and while the music doesn’t move much (aside from a lively banjo), the track suits Beam well. On “History of Lovers” both groups click; Calexico goes full-on with the slide guitar and horn section, and Beam finally cuts loose, letting himself belt out his lyrics of challenged love, betrayal, and violence, the whole thing coming to a wonderfully raucous finale.

“Red Dust” lets Calexico groove on a fun little blues riff, but it’s hard to pay it much mind when “16, Maybe Less” is just around the bend. The latter track is one of those perfect love songs, and it basically renders everything around it superfluous. Beam's back in his comfortable whispering mode, but they mix him in high enough to make up for it. Sarah Beam makes a background vocal appearance in the first verse, a tale of teenage love, but then he takes it alone for probably the most melancholy, beautiful verse of his career. “I met my wife at a party when I drank too much / My son is married and tells me we don’t talk enough / Call it predictable, yesterday my dream was of you,” he sings, before heading back into the chorus. Calexico manage the sort of unobtrusively full-fledged instrumental that so much of Beam’s earlier music would have benefited from. The light drum brushes, subtle bass line and gorgeous slide guitar match the song perfectly. It’s a track that completely justifies this sort of collaboration.

Wisely, Beam and Burns follow it up with “Burn that Broken Bed,” probably the weakest song of the bunch, leaving “Dead Man’s Will” to seal the deal. It’s a natural closer, opening with a group sing-along using only Beam’s light guitar as accompaniment. “Give this stone to my brother / ’cause we found it layin’ in the barnyard / many years ago,” they sing, a subtle marimba entering underneath. As the song builds, Beam works masterfully with the idea of an already dead man's regret: “May my love reach you all / I lost it in myself and buried it too long / Now that I come to fall / Please say it’s not too late / Now that I’m dead and gone.” The effect of the group singing and that creepy marimba is the kind of sadness that Beam has always strived for in his music.

It’ll be interesting to see how much more Calexico and Iron & Wine plan on working together. They’re certainly off to a good start here, and the joint tour they are embarking on will give them a chance to road test and tweak their partnership. They’ve also got a lot of ground left to cover. The decision to keep Burns off the mic is perhaps the most vexing aspect of the collaboration. Over the last few Calexico records, Burns has become more confident as a singer and songwriter, making his absence here all the stranger. His confident country twang would make a beautiful counterpoint to Beam’s quite drawl. I’d also love to hear what Beam could do with some of the “Minas de Cobre” flair that made Calexico so great in the first place.

Still, In the Reins is a clear success. For those of us who’ve always enjoyed Beam but had to worry about falling asleep listening to his music, these last two EPs have shown him as more than a very quiet one-trick pony. Likewise, it’s good to hear from Calexico after an extended absence since 2004’s excellent Convict Pool EP, and the way in which they concentrate so intently on backing up Beam inspires a lot of respect. Hopefully, In the Reins is only the first release in a collaboration that brings together regions of folk music usually separated by, uh, Texas.
http://www.cokemachineglow.com/reviews/ironcalexico_reins2005.html

SPORTS

September and October really are great months for sports. Baseball playoffs, NFL Sundays, US Open tennis, NHL/NBA beginnings, etc. Sports writing in the newspapers rarely captures any of that feeling. Here is an exception.

My Very Open Diary: Ogling Short Skirts On Ashe’s Blue Courts
By: Jonathan Ames
Date: 9/12/2005

Aug. 29, 2005, 3:30 p.m.

I sit on the No. 7 train, heading to the U.S. Open, and I admire the shapely calves of the woman sitting next to me. She’s talking to two colleagues who stand in front of her, and they’re all going to the Open. One of her colleagues is a fey young man who bears an uncanny resemblance—especially considering our destination—to Pete Sampras. The other colleague, a middle-aged woman, appears to be the boss, and she’s gossiping about someone in their office: “She’s gone on four dates with this guy who is categorically handsome, but he hasn’t made a move. He’s not aggressive enough.”

“Four dates?” says the woman next to me.

“That’s a lot of dates,” says Pete Sampras.

“She’s the third woman I know who said she’s dating someone who’s not aggressive,” says the boss.

I wonder what’s going on with these passive men, some of whom are categorically handsome, and then I tune the trio out. I tell myself that I should be thinking about tennis—after all, I’m on assignment. For some reason, my mind then flashes back to this town tennis tournament I won the summer before eighth grade. I was supposed to get a trophy, but it wasn’t ready when I won. The guy in charge of the tournament and the trophies was this fellow who had a withered leg from polio. He was in his late 40’s, and the town paid him a small fee to be in charge of all things tennis. He loved the sport and was constantly playing, heroically dragging that leg all over the court.

I had two baseball trophies, two soccer trophies and one fake, unearned trophy, which featured an athlete in a bathing suit, and I desperately wanted to replace the false trophy with my tennis trophy. Five trophies would really show the world what an athlete I was. How the world would know this I’m not sure, since no one ever came into my room other than my mother.

So I started calling the man with the bad leg every two weeks, asking him if my trophy had arrived yet. After about four months of phone calls, he yelled: “It’s just a trophy! Stop calling me!” Then one day, about six months after I won the tournament, he put the trophy in our mailbox. I positioned it on my bureau where I could stare at it narcissistically for hours, but it was a bit tainted now since I had tormented the tennis guy to get it. I was the town champ, but I still felt like a loser—my life story.

4 p.m.

I’m outside the press office at the tennis center, waiting for my credentials, and I spot Virginia Wade, the former British champion. She’s tanned, handsome and dignified, with gray hair feathered down the middle. Then I spot the beautiful Maria Sharapova coming from the practice courts. She’s in a halter top and sweatpants, and though she is thin and tall, I can see that beneath the sweat pants she has powerful buttocks, which must aid her serve. Sharapova then disappears into the players’ entrance to the stadium, and I admire, on my right, a policeman with a German shepherd. The dog is panting from the heat and lying down on the job. I see that on the back of the policeman’s shirt it says “Canine Unit.” Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to be a policeman, and I’m also madly in love with dogs, so I write in my little notebook that being a part of the Canine Unit would be the best of both worlds for me, and then I remember how, years ago, a transsexual prostitute in the meatpacking district whispered to me like a siren as I walked by, “It’s the best of both worlds,” and then a girl in the press office comes outside and tells me that my credentials are ready.

7:30 p.m.

I’m sitting in the journalists’ section of Arthur Ashe Stadium. The humidity is as thick as a phonebook. It’s like being in a bathroom with the windows closed after taking an epically long, hot shower. I’m wearing a linen blazer that feels as comfortable as a suture. To my right, in the V.I.P. section about 30 yards away, Mayor Bloomberg and former Mayor Dinkins, both in suit and tie, seem impervious to the heat.

Maria Sharapova is playing a Greek woman named Daniilidou. Sharapova is in a light-blue dress with yellow trim and no sleeves. The dress flaps up when she exerts herself, and you see bright yellow undergarments, which aren’t really panties but the kind of thing that a superheroine might wear—a cross between panties and tights.

When she serves, I note that her armpits are quite white, as opposed to her tanned outer arms, and I find this very sexy. I’ve always had a thing for women’s armpits. It’s not an all-consuming thing, like a foot fetish, but just a general admiration for the female armpit.

Sitting near Mayor Bloomberg, I observe Andy Rooney hunched over in a posture that would seem to indicate rapt attention, but on closer inspection, I can see that his spine has been crushed by age and time, though it doesn’t mean he’s not paying attention. David Boies, Al Gore’s lawyer, sits a few rows behind Rooney, and my mind drifts back to the 2000 election, but it doesn’t like to drift back there for too long.

From the upper reaches of the stadium, a man cries out, “I love you, Maria!” She wins in straight sets.

9:30 p.m.

Andre Agassi is playing superbly and is easily defeating his opponent, a guy named Razvan Sabau. Women call out, “I love you, Andre!”

Agassi seems to waddle a little, and I imagine that his body, after running thousands of miles on tennis courts all over the world, is a bit worn down, but he still hits the ball with great authority. I wonder what keeps Agassi going. This is his 20th year playing the U.S. Open—isn’t he bored with it? Then I think how being competitive never goes away. It’s instinctual, like lust: No matter how much you’ve made love, you’re still more or less interested in sex. I, for example, never play competitive sports any more, but I do play Internet backgammon against anonymous strangers, and I find myself wanting to win. But why? Who cares? It must be Darwinian. To prove you’re the best is part of our programming, because if you’re the best, then you get to have a mate and you get to pass on your genes. Why we want to pass on our genes, I don’t know, but seemingly we do. So this desire to pass on one’s genes fools one into striving, even at Internet backgammon or professional tennis. Something like that. Well, we’ve all been hearing about Intelligent Design, and I’ve just now given an example of Ignorant Darwinism.

10:45 p.m.

I’m in the interview room with many journalists. Agassi, who has won his match quickly and efficiently, comes in. He has white threads hanging from his chin, which he seems unaware of. He must have dried his face with a towel that was falling apart.

He fields a number of dull questions with patience and generosity. I then work up the courage to ask, “Do you ever feel bad defeating your opponents? You handily beat that guy tonight and it was his first U.S. Open.”

Agassi looks me right in the eye and says firmly, “No. You don’t cheat anybody out of their experience. It all makes you who you are down the road. You’ve got to learn from it. I’ve been on the other side.”

I love his answer. It’s the thinking of a champion, but it’s also quasi-spiritual, acknowledging the other player’s destiny. Then I think how, when I was 14, I let my best friend beat me at tennis. I had been defeating him for years and so, this one time, I finally let him win—and when we were done, he lorded his victory over me. He carried on for several minutes, and then I weakened and said, “You only won because I let you.” This resulted in a terrible fight, and we never played tennis again.

Sept. 2, 2005, 4 p.m.

Serena Williams is playing an Italian woman named Francesca Schiavone. Serena has very appealing, well-defined armpits and her superheroine panties are burgundy. When she walks, her rear seems to have a life of its own, and a very nice life at that.

It’s a bright, beautiful day, and above us the Fuji blimp makes a loud, droning sound like an enormous, noisy refrigerator in the sky, and men call out, “I love you, Serena!” I’m sitting with a bunch of salty old journalists. Bud Collins, the legendary, jovial tennis maven, is directly in front of me, and I say to him, “Excuse me, Mr. Collins, but I was wondering—do you know when fans started shouting out ‘I love you’ to the players?”

“I first heard it a century ago,” says Mr. Collins, “in Boston. Someone shouted ‘I love you, Cooz!’ to Bob Cousy. I’m not sure when it started in tennis. They get some sort of self-fulfillment proclaiming it.”

Then Mr. Collins says, to a man to our left, “Would you please sit down, sir?” and I see that it’s Richard Williams, Serena’s father. He turns and smiles at Mr. Collins, who was, of course, joking, and says, “If I sit down, I won’t be able to get up.”

Serena is playing inconsistently but winning. She’s too much for Schiavone. During tough points, her father, with a slight lisp, encourages: “Come on, Serena!”

An old Italian journalist next to me says to an even older American journalist, “You know what ‘Schiavone’ means?”

“No,” says the weather-beaten old American. These guys are a fraternity of tennis press, and they enjoy teasing each other.

“‘Big slave,’” says the Italian. Bud Collins turns around and says, “It means ‘big slave’?” “Yes,” says the well-spoken Italian. “I have to talk to you, Bud, about these things, not this old alligator”—referring to the weathered American journo—“who can’t understand nuance. He’s not civilized.” “Go, big slave,” says the old American.

5:10 p.m.

I’m in the corridor of the stadium. Serena has won. Two journalists are speaking with Richard Williams. I approach and they peel away, and I say to him, in journalist mode, “You hear so much about the American Dream, but I think you’re an authentic dreamer. You envisioned your two daughters as champions, and it came true.”

“I wanted them to be No. 1 and No. 2 in the world, but I was a fool then,” he responds.

“What would be your goal now?” I ask, surprised by what he has said.

“Unity of the family,” he says, a bit forlornly, and then we part, and I don’t know the full story, but I think he must be broken-hearted that his marriage has failed.

6 p.m.

I’m in the interview room, and Serena Williams is fielding questions. She’s eloquent and charming. I ask her, “Amidst all the calls of ‘Come on, Serena!’, are you able to make out your father’s voice?”

“I can kind of differentiate my dad’s voice,” she says. “I definitely listen for it innately.”

“Does it help you when you hear him?”

“I think it does,” she says sweetly. “I think it does.” I’m tempted to ask her about her father’s statement about family unity, but it doesn’t seem necessary.

9:50 p.m.

The air temperature is pleasant. It’s the kind of night that makes you forget about global warming for half an hour, and Roger Federer, the No. 1 man, is playing a wily Frenchman named Santoro. Federer walks about the court with great self-possession, seemingly unflappable. His eyes are set a bit too closely together; otherwise, he’d be matinee-idol handsome.

In the V.I.P. section, Nicole Kidman, ethereal with her yellow-blond hair and luminous skin, leans back in her chair, calmly elegant, like a 21st-century Grace Kelly. She sits with the director Steven Shainberg, who has cast her as Diane Arbus in his latest film. I watch her watch Federer. It all feels vaguely Roman—he’s a gladiator and she’s an empress—except no one’s Iife is at stake, only money, and lots of it. I wonder if she finds Federer appealing. I imagine myself talking to her, how I would fumble for words, like a fool.

11 p.m.

I lie on a bench near the enormous World’s Fair globe, which is just outside the tennis center. Fountains go about their business of shooting water in the air. I look up into the black night sky. I’m a bit lonely, and I think about my failings as a person. Then I give it a rest and just look into the sky and, for a moment, I feel at peace on a beautiful summer night.


I like how Agassi is back to wearing tennis whites.



OTHER:

Is Bin Laden Winning?
Lost at Tora Bora

Another Anniversary
By RAYCHUL GOLDENBERG-BIVENS as told to SARA IVRY
NY Times

We were going to be married during the weekend of Sept. 15, 2001. It was going to be a small, family thing, with a few friends, and there was a state park where we wanted to have it. Our dog was going to be in the wedding. We're not the most traditional people.

We were living in North Carolina and had been engaged for almost a year. Jeff is in the Coast Guard and was going to be transferred to Florida in October. Sept. 11 was his last day on the job before his leave kicked in; we had planned time off for the wedding and the move. He left for an overnight trip to Virginia on the 10th, transporting a boat for the Coast Guard.

I was working as a vocational counselor, and on the morning of the 11th, I was taking applications at a high school. Someone came in around 9 a.m. and said a plane had hit one of the towers. It sounded like a freak accident. I finished at the school, and by the time I got back to my office, I found out about the second plane. We watched a small television that was brought out from somebody's office. It had terrible reception. I remember people putting tinfoil ears on it, trying to get a better picture. Then we heard about the plane that hit the Pentagon and the one that went down in Pennsylvania.

I was antsy, concerned, but I didn't have a way to reach Jeff. He called me around 11:15, on the road back from Virginia, and said that the Coast Guard had recalled everybody's leave. He had to report for duty on the morning of the 12th.

I was taken aback. I didn't know how he could be affected; maybe he would end up in the line of fire. As we talked, he put the pieces together: we didn't know when flights would start again, when he would be home again or for how long. It would be devastating if something happened to him. There was a sense of urgency. Jeff's a really even guy, but his speech was halting when the conversation started going this way, and he asked if I wanted to marry that night.

I had conflicted feelings. Who does this on this kind of day? But we also talked about how right it felt, to do something loving on a day they meant to be so obliterating.

We decided to go through with it. Jeff called the magistrate's office to make sure it was open. I had been trying to call my sister in New York and wasn't able to get through; one of my parents reached me and told me she was O.K. I don't want people to think we ignored what was happening. Everyone was in a daze. My mom tells me that I called her in the early afternoon to say we were going to be married. I don't remember calling.

I got off work at 4 p.m., went home and started to get ready. Jeff got home after I did. We rushed to get changed; he wore a shirt and tie, and I wore a dress, a cranberry-colored dress.

On the way to the courthouse, we stopped at a pharmacy so I could buy pantyhose; I felt I needed them for some ridiculous reason, and I wriggled into them in the car. It was a whirlwind. In reality, the magistrate's office was open 24 hours a day. It doesn't make any sense now why we felt so rushed, but it seemed to at the time.

Jeff and I had called coworkers to get two witnesses. We met Jeff's in the parking lot, but my friend didn't show up. We found a guy mopping floors, but he couldn't speak English. And then a police officer agreed to do it. The magistrate said something like, This is the last thing I thought I'd be doing today. He didn't say it in a negative way, but he wasn't overly jovial either.

It was a very short ceremony. My ring wasn't ready. Jeff had his. I was hoping we would read our vows at the magistrate's, but it was like, boom, over.

Afterward, we went to Bistro by the Sea, where we had planned to go with our families after the wedding. There were televisions with the news on. I remember feeling somber. We didn't tell anybody; there weren't that many people there. We read our vows during dinner - I had three drafts, and I read parts off of different sheets of paper. We had cake, something chocolate, and we tried to tune out the television. When we got home, we stood in front of the computer and took pictures with the little camera on the computer. They came out really dark.

We had done something for ourselves. We weren't sure how people were going to react to the news. I sent out a big group e-mail message the next day and specifically said that we had done this not to be disrespectful, but to do a good thing on an incomprehensibly bad day. And I remember from the e-mail messages I got back from people that this resonated with them.

We live in Virginia now; Jeff is stationed in Portsmouth. We've had three anniversaries, and he has been home for only one. We're not sure he'll be home this year. But every year, we end up feeling that even if Jeff had been available on, say, the 13th, we still would have married on the 11th. I admit it's a little bit sad not to have pictures, not to have had a cake, not to have had loved ones there. But what are pictures compared with people's lives? Or what everybody else had to go through? Nothing. Those things are insignificant.

MISCELLANEOUS

George Bush: Inept Again
from The New Yorker

One of the creepier vanities of most political leaders is the private yearning to be tested on a historical scale. Bill Clinton used to confide that, no matter what else he did as President, without a major war to fight he could never join the ranks of Lincoln and F.D.R. During the Presidential debates in 2000, George W. Bush informed his opponent, Al Gore, that natural catastrophes are “a time to test your mettle.” Bush had seen his father falter after a hurricane in South Florida. But now he has done far worse. Over five days last week, from the onset of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast on Monday morning to his belated visit to the region on Friday, Bush’s mettle was tested—and he failed in almost every respect.

Obviously, a hurricane is beyond human blame, and the political miscalculations that have come to light—the negligent planning, the delayed rescue and aid efforts, the thoroughly confused and uninspired political leadership—cannot all be laid at the feet of President Bush. But you could sense, watching him being interviewed by Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America”—defensive, confused, overwhelmed—that he knew that he had delivered a series of feeble, vague, almost flippant speeches in the early days of the crisis, and that the only way to prevent further political damage was to inoculate himself with the inevitable call for non-partisanship: “I hope people don’t play politics during this period of time.”

And yet, to a frightening degree, Bush’s faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the crisis. Suntanned and relaxed after a vacation so long that it would have shamed a French playboy, Bush reacted with fogged delinquency, as if he had been so lulled by his summer sojourn that he was not quite ready to acknowledge reality, let alone attempt to master it. His first view of the floods came, pitifully, theatrically, from the window of a low-flying Air Force One, and all the President could muster was, according to his press secretary, “It’s devastating. It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.” The moment demanded clarity of mind and rigorous governance, and yet he could not summon them. The performance skills Bush eventually mustered after September 11th—in his bullhorn speech at Ground Zero, in his first speech to Congress—eluded him. The whole conceit of his Presidency, that he was an instinctive chief executive backed by “grownups” like Dick Cheney and tactical wizards like Karl Rove, now seemed as water-logged as Biloxi and New Orleans. The mismanagement of the Katrina floods echoed the White House mismanagement—the cavalier posture, the wretched decisions, the self-delusions—in postwar Iraq.

Just as serious, the President’s priorities, his indifference to questions of infrastructure and the environment, magnified an already complicated disaster. In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the Army Corps of Engineers’ funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23 million less than the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million, delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees. Former Republican congressman Michael Parker was forced out as the head of the Corps by Bush in 2002 when he dared to protest the lack of proper funding.

Similarly, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which is supposed to improve drainage and pumping systems in the New Orleans area, recently asked for $62.5 million; the White House proposed $10.5 million. Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a pro-Bush Democrat, said, “All of us said, ‘Look, build it or you’re going to have all of Jefferson Parish under water.’ And they didn’t, and now all of Jefferson Parish is under water.”

The President’s incuriosity, his prideful insistence on being an underbriefed “gut player,” is not looking so charming right now, either, if it ever did. In the ABC interview, he said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” Even the most cursory review shows that there have been comprehensive and chilling warnings of a potential calamity on the Gulf Coast for years. The most telling, but hardly the only, example was a five-part series in 2002 by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a newspaper that heroically kept publishing on the Internet last week. After evaluating the city’s structural deficiencies, the Times-Picayune reporters concluded that a catastrophe was “a matter of when, not if.” The same paper said last year, “For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won’t be finished for at least another decade.” A Category 4 or 5 hurricane would be a catastrophe: “Soon the geographical ‘bowl’ of the Crescent City would fill up with the waters of the lake, leaving those unable to evacuate with little option but to cluster on rooftops—terrain they would have to share with hungry rats, fire ants, nutria, snakes, and perhaps alligators. The water itself would become a festering stew of sewage, gasoline, refinery chemicals, and debris.” And that describes much of the Gulf Coast today.


“The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “March of the Penguins,” “Red Eye.”from The New Yorker

One way or another, sex is always in the head. It’s clear from the opening gag of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” that Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell), the gentle fellow who finds himself in so unhappy a state in early middle age, is not impotent. Anything but. Yet Andy is definitely a head case. His story goes something like this: he got frightened when he was still green (we see an encounter with an eager teen-age girl who sports scary steel braces on her teeth), and thinking about his fear made him more frightened; years later, his anxieties have snowballed so heavily that he’s permanently flummoxed. He won’t even go near a woman.

One of the nice things about this lewd and funny hit comedy is that it springs its wildest, most scabrous jokes from a recognizable male dilemma. Gentility, not to mention sophistication and indirection, has departed from our raucous culture forever, but, if we are going to have our comedies dirty, they might as well be human, too. The Dickensian moniker Stitzer, with its suggestions of “stiff,” “zipper,” and “stitched,” tells us what Steve Carell and Judd Apatow, who wrote the movie together, want us to think of their hero: he’s aroused but all locked up. Carell makes him a pleasant-looking guy with a too bright smile that flashes nervously, a man who has more testosterone than he knows what to do with; his overexercised chest bristles with thick, dark hair—it’s a jungle cry in itself. But Andy’s inhibitions go so deep that he can’t say what he thinks about anything, much less about sex; he clings to blandness as a kind of safety. The movie treats this modern Caspar Milquetoast tenderly: there’s really not much wrong with him except that he’s missing the only heaven that God, in his wisdom, granted us on this earth.

In the past thirty years or so, ever since “Saturday Night Live” went on the air, performers from late-night television have attempted to charge up the movies, not always with happy results. Some of the comics and comedy writers who jumped from one medium to the other have landed on their heads, turning out work that was gag-centered, fitful, and skittish (in both senses). Except for a few inspired sequences, last year’s “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” which involved some of the same TV-based talents as “Virgin,” was a klutzy mess. But Judd Apatow, who produced “Ron Burgundy,” directed this time, and he has developed a rhythm that sustains a long movie. Much of the comedy is as coarse and obvious as a burlesque show and almost as foul-mouthed as “The Aristocrats,” but, within the broad license that Apatow allows himself, he works with considerable delicacy, psychological insight, and a surprising sense of detail. “Virgin” may be a one-joke movie, but a variety of comic styles get packed into the joke. Steve Carell (from “The Daily Show”) is now about halfway between a TV comic doing traits and gags and a good actor who happens to be funny. Like all comics, he trusts laughs, and he makes Andy a mass of tics, twitches, and pratfalls. Here and there, however, a man’s pained temperament steps out from behind the professional comic’s armature—a touch of wounded dignity, of yearning for peace and quiet as well as for love. The only thing a forty-year-old virgin needs more than sex is to be left alone—that’s why he’s still a virgin. Carell understands that agonizing ambivalence.

Apatow surrounds Carell with a large, exuberant cast, beginning with the actors who play Andy’s fellow-workers at a large San Fernando Valley electronics store—the gentle-giant bearded comedy writer Seth Rogen, the speedball rapper and actor Romany Malco, and the unpredictable Paul Rudd, who has a crazy streak lurking behind his good looks and friendly smile. Andy’s friends want to help him find a girl; they are full of stupid schemes, the point being, of course, that they are even more screwed up in their relations with women than he is, and delusional as well. The group scenes with Carell and these noisy clowns were mainly improvised (the best takes were edited together), and they’re full of odd corners and curlicues—for instance, a quasi-obscene phrase passed back and forth among them and elaborated into a kind of bizarre verbal monument that they all stare at in wonder. Each of these madcaps also gets a number of extravagant solo arias—Malco, in particular, lets loose a couple of sex rants so preposterous that he seems to have distilled them from the boasts of a dozen losers topping one another on street corners. Apatow appears to be a generous director and a great fan of comic talent. Elizabeth Banks and Leslie Mann have good bits as predatory women who terrify the hero, and Jane Lynch, as the tough boss at the electronics store who suddenly softens and takes a shine to Andy, breaks into a tender Guatemalan love song—an unexpected gift, and exquisitely sung, too.

“The 40-Year-Old-Virgin” is a hit, I would warrant, because it’s truly dirty and truly romantic at the same time, a combination that’s very hard to pull off. The romantic part comes alive every time Catherine Keener is on the screen. Keener has a big smile and a husky laugh, and she’s warmer, more welcoming than usual. She plays Andy’s new friend, who’s a real woman—that is, she’s loving, and she’s trouble, too. The movie leaves us with the grateful realization that, for a man, love and trouble are worth having more than anything, and it ends with a triumphant double coda that brings the jokes down to earth with a touch of sexual realism and then sends them off again with a flight of lyrical fantasy.

Are we imitating them, or are they imitating us? The hugely successful French documentary “March of the Penguins” yields itself so readily to anthropomorphic readings that it’s hard to say where bird ends and man begins. With a reassuring smack!, the penguins emerge, one after another, from the ocean and hit the ice. It’s the first stage of what the movie presents as the routine, annual sublime—the trek across seventy miles of Antarctic wasteland to the thick-iced mating ground. As they shuffle across the terrain with bowed shoulders, the penguins look, from the rear, like shtetl Jews heading off to shul. Flopping to their bellies for greater speed, they could be kids taking a wave on a surfboard. When male and female find a partner, they stand with heads bowed before each other in what appears to be silent adoration. If we are moved, are we experiencing what they are feeling or what we are feeling? After some demurely photographed funny stuff, a baby is conceived. The egg is then transferred from mother to father, and, as the dad huddles for warmth with the other dads, balancing his package on his toes, the mom makes the long journey back to the water to eat, returning when she is ready to feed her hungry chick. Such scrupulous and selfless devotion to children would not seem out of place in lacrosse-mom precincts like Glen Cove or Montclair. Yet here’s the miracle: the extreme coldness and clarity of the air, and the translucent blues and searing whites of the landscape, lend the ritual, however mundane, familial, and instinct-driven, an aspect of eternal splendor. And, given the extreme difficulties that the filmmakers (led by Luc Jacquet) must have endured, the entire moviemaking enterprise has an aura of heroism, too. A perfect family movie, a perfect date movie, and one of the most eye-ravishing documentaries ever made.



In 1967, the Italian director Elio Petri made a film called “We Still Kill the Old Way.” Well, the veteran American director Wes Craven still kills the old way, too. His dandy little thriller “Red Eye,” which is exactly eighty-five minutes long, has been made with classical technique and bravura skill, and it’s leaving moviegoers in a rare state of satisfaction. (The absence of people whizzing through the air on green wings or deliquescing into corpses and coming back to life again has been much appreciated.) When the beautiful young hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) gets picked up at the Dallas airport by a handsome fellow (Cillian Murphy) who jokes about his name—Jackson Rippner, as in Jack the Ripper—we’re alerted to danger by his overfriendly manner, and by the joke itself, which would seem to be unnecessary if he weren’t trying to reassure Lisa of his harmlessness. But the screenwriter, Carl Ellsworth, doesn’t tell us too much. He knows that for the audience the pleasure of this kind of filmmaking lies in taking the bait and then being slowly but inexorably reeled in. Cillian Murphy, who has angelic looks that can turn sinister, is one of the most elegantly seductive monsters in recent movies, and Rachel McAdams has large, doll-like features that mask a surprising amount of calculation and rage. As Murphy sits down next to her on an airplane, the movie turns into a complicated duel that depends on precise observation of physical detail and moment-by-moment continuity so closely calibrated that it’s impossible to find a wasted shot or an exaggerated emotion. Craven, who made “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and the “Scream” series, has a slightly off-center wit. As Murphy and McAdams are engaged in a death struggle in the airplane’s toilet, a huffy stewardess disapproves of what she takes to be an inappropriate use of a public facility. The joke is almost worthy of Hitchcock.

"Willy" by Joni Mitchell (essay by jennifer o'reilly)
from mcsweeneys.net

The first line of this song is "Willy is my child, he is my father." The song goes on to reveal that Willy, besides serving as simultaneous progeny and ancestry, is also a reluctant lover who can't quite commit because of past wounds. "Willy" is a love song, but the jury is still out on whether Joni is incestuous and—let's just say it—a little icky, or whether she has expressed the most profound and beautiful sentiment about love ever made. I shopped it around to my friends to see if I was in the sicko camp for thinking that it was the latter.

The first time I tried this, I was in free-thinking Washington Square Park playing my guitar with my best folk-singer-in-the-making girlfriend. I had just come strong off "Case of You," which she'd never heard and was wild about, so I thought I'd give "Willy" a good ol' whirl. I started the mournful opening chords and my friend was riveted. "Willy is my child, he is my father," I sang cautiously.

"Ew!" Her face screwed in disgust. "That's gross. That is a really gross song."

I tried it out on a couple more people, but eventually I had to stop. The result was clear. Nobody saw the line "Willy is my child, he is my father" the same way I did. People couldn't separate their sexual lives with their lovers from the other various roles they played. But the song seemed to be strikingly apropos for the relationship I had with my own partner. I remember the day it was raining and I was crying because I couldn't find my socks and how he had to comfort me even though I was acting like a stupid spoiled child. I think about how I once cautioned him not to eat the candy he had purloined from the doctors' office because it would spoil the penne arrabiata I was making for dinner. He is my child, he is my father. Strange but true.

There comes a time when you have to separate yourself from everything you know and say what's honest. Every time I hear Joni Mitchell, I know I'm hearing something that's stripped bare, that's passed every bullshit test in the book, something that very possibly took a massive amount of emotional bloodletting to get down on paper. My heart breaks and swells every time I hear this song. I once knew a musician named Blue (remarkably by coincidence) who told me that the first time he heard a Joni Mitchell album he sat down and wept afterward. Joni can do that to you, but only if you admit the things that scare you the most.

At the end of the song, Joni gives us this jewel: "I feel like I'm just being born / A shiny light breaking in a storm / There are so many reason why I love him." I'm newly married and I have to admit, I don't always feel like a "shiny light breaking in a storm," but I understand what she means. There's something about new love that stirs the soul and something about old love that allows your lover to fill every need that you have. It's a miraculous statement about the human condition that we can do this for each other.

In the court of public opinion, the general consensus seems to be that I'm in league with the sickos. But in my own private court of opinion, I have a feeling that Joni knew what she was talking about all along.

Willy is my child, he is my father
I would be his lady all my life
He says he'd love to live with me
But for an ancient injury
That has not healed
He said I feel once again
Like I gave my heart too soon
He stood looking thru the lace
At the face on the conquered moon
And counting all the cars up the hill
And the stars on my window sill
There are still more reasons why I love him

Willy is my joy, he is my sorrow
Now he wants to run away and hide
He says our love cannot be real
He cannot hear the chapels pealing silver bells
But you know it's hard to tell
When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it?s real
But you're bound to lose
If you let the blues get you scared to feel
And I feel like I'm just being born
Like a shiny light breaking in a storm
There are so many reasons why I love him





I just learned that Mushaboom by Feist is about playing house. It's about dreaming of what's next, what may be, and about taking chances. Mushaboom, Nova Scotia was the inspiration:

Helping the kids out of their coats
But wait the babies haven't been born
Unpacking the bags and setting up
And planting lilacs and buttercups

But in the meantime I've got it hard
Second floor living without a yard
It may be years until the day
My dreams will match up with my pay

Old dirt road Knee deep snow
Watching the fire as we grow old

I got a man to stick it out
And make a home from a rented house
And we'll collect the moments one by one
I guess that's how the future's done

How many acres how much light
Tucked in the woods and out of sight
Talk to the neighbours and tip my cap
On a little road barely on the map

Old dirt road Knee deep snow
Watching the fire as we grow old
Old dirt road Rambling rose
Watching the fire as we grow well I'm sold