MUSIC
On Pearl Jam (Rolling Stone)

Wartime, for everything else that's wrong with it, brings out the best in Pearl Jam: the power-chord brawn, contrary righteousness and metallic-KO songwriting sense. The band's second and third albums, 1993's bluntly titled Vs. and 1994's Vitalogy, are as good as modern rock-in-opposition gets: shotgun guitars, incendiary bass and drums, and Eddie Vedder's scalded-dog howl, all discharged in backs-to-the-wall fury and union.This album, Pearl Jam's first studio release in four years and their best in ten, is more of that top electric combat. With a difference. The Pearl Jam on Pearl Jam is not the band that famously responded to overnight platinum by going to war with the world. Vedder, guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron are now fully at war in the world, unrepentant veterans of the campaign trail (the Vote for Change Tour) and right-wing crucifixion (the "Bushleaguer" uproar) who have made the most overtly partisan -- and hopeful -- record of their lives. For Vedder, the 2004 election was not a total loss. "Why swim the channel just to get this far?/Halfway there, why would you turn around?" he demands in the first song, "Life Wasted," in a ragged, run-on bark. And it's all forward ho from there. As immediate and despairing as breaking news from Baghdad -- "World Wide Suicide" opens with a newspaper casualty report -- Pearl Jam is also as big and brash in fuzz and backbone as Led Zeppelin's Presence.

That's not just rock-critic shorthand. However you define grunge music, Pearl Jam didn't play it. They were, from jump street, a classic rock band, building their bawl with iron-guitar bones and an arena-vocal lust that came right from Zeppelin, early-Seventies Who and mid-Eighties U2 (with distortion instead of the Edge's glass-guitar harmonics). But Pearl Jam have not been this consistently dirty and determined in the studio since they subbed for Crazy Horse on Neil Young's 1995 Mirror Ball. I own two complete tours' worth of Pearl Jam's official-bootleg concert CDs, and this record's five-song blastoff ("Life Wasted," "World Wide Suicide," "Comatose," "Severed Hand" and "Marker in the Sand") is right up there in punch and crust with my favorite nights in that live series (Seattle, 11/6/00, and New Orleans, 4/8/03, to name two). And whenever the guitars take over, which is a lot -- Gossard and McCready's slugging AC/DC-like intro to "Life Wasted"; McCready's wild wah-wah ride in "Big Wave"; the way he cracks Vedder's gloom in "Parachutes" like heat lightning -- it reminds me that Gossard and McCready deserved to be on our 2003 "Greatest Guitarists" list. Permit me to admit it here: I screwed up.

That's more confession than you'll ever hear in the Bush White House. But talk-show pit bulls will be disappointed to find that Vedder doesn't waste his breath naming names here, except for a glancing reference to "the president" in "World Wide Suicide." There is blame, but it's spread all around. "Now you got both sides/Claiming killing in God's name/But God is nowhere to be found, conveniently," Vedder sings in "Marker in the Sand," from inside Gossard and McCready's crossfire and the saturation bombing of Ament and Cameron. There is dread too -- lots of it. "Army Reserve" is a midtempo elegy for the real Army Reserve, the wives and children who serve in worry, behind the lines. (The dark harmonies crowding Vedder's low, grainy vocal feel like ghosts in waiting.) And "Unemployable" is just half a story, with a soaring-melancholy chorus. The song ends before the guy with the pink slip can find a new job. But Vedder's opening scene -- the fist with the ring that says jesus saves, flying with helpless anger into a metal locker -- is lesson enough. In multinational capitalism run riot, the bottom line doesn't care about religion or party line. We're all expendable.

And we're all accountable. The politics on Pearl Jam are not those of right or left but of engagement and responsibility. In "Life Wasted," Vedder at least partly mocks his old self, the one that wore success and the leverage that came with it like sackcloth: "Darkness comes in waves, tell me/Why invite it to stay?" But there is only determined optimism in Pearl Jam's superb finish, "Inside Job." The song starts quietly, then climbs and peaks like a combination of "Stairway to Heaven" and the Who's "The Song Is Over" -- a mirror image of Vedder's stumble through each line from night into light. "I will not lose my faith," he promises under thunderclap guitars, with such assurance that even if you don't agree with anything else on this record, you believe him.
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The Canadian dollar on Wednesday reached its highest level since November 1991 as it climbed to 88.82 cents US in morning trading on world currency markets.

The loonie was up 0.46 of a cent from Tuesday's close. Traders said the dollar was driven higher by stronger metals prices, a weaker U.S. dollar and a Bank of Canada statement yesterday that most currency traders interpreted as being hawkish about the need for future interest rate hikes.
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In the late autumn of 1888 Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh spent a little over two months living and working together. It is a wonder they lasted so long. They made a very odd pairing, even for artists. Gauguin was 40 and Van Gogh 35 when they shared the Yellow House, a small, spartan dwelling on an unassuming square in Arles, a city which had once been the capital of the western Roman empire but had since fallen on hard times. Gauguin had a small avant-garde reputation and a considerably larger opinion of himself; Van Gogh was unknown and felt himself to be unworthy, an apprentice in everything. The two men had been brought together by Van Gogh's elder brother Theo, who was Gauguin's dealer in Paris and Vincent's sole source of money. The idea that they should live together had many advantages: Gauguin could keep an eye on the unstable Vincent on his brother's behalf, the two impecunious artists could share expenses, and together they would form a 'Studio of the South', a quasi-monastic artistic community. The Yellow House, enthused Vincent, would be 'an artists' house, but not affected, on the contrary, nothing affected'.

This was all very well, except that their personalities were contrasting rather than complementary. The story of their relationship and the tragic disintegration of their high hopes is the subject of Martin Gayford's wonderfully perceptive book.

The Yellow House, full of irregular angles, cluttered with paintings and right on the street was barely big enough for the oversized personalities of its inhabitants. The two painters existed in a fug of tobacco smoke, alcohol and paint, cooped up when the weather was bad, living, eating and working together in a room only 15 feet wide and 24 feet long. Apart from outings to the local brothels - what they termed 'hygienic excursions' - and occasional visits from friends the pair were rarely apart. There was always going to be trouble. Gauguin felt it too: 'Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly, some sort of struggle was preparing.'

Neither man was an easy housemate but Van Gogh was particularly difficult. He would work frenetically, talk interminably and drink excessively: 'If the storm within gets too loud,' he noted, 'I take a glass too much to stun myself.' Gauguin himself often felt stunned by this intense existence, his nerves 'strained to the point of stifling all human warmth'. For a short while their hope that they might feed off one another artistically seemed to be coming to fruition. They painted everything that was at hand - scenes in Arles, the house, the furnishings, the square outside, each other. While Van Gogh admired almost everything Gauguin produced, the older man was more sparing with his praise, commenting tartly that Van Gogh did indeed 'have an eye for blobs of impasto'.

Martin Gayford deftly charts how the differences in temperament quickly became divisive, and his narrative shifts subtly from art history to psychological thriller. While Gauguin was stuck in the South his paintings were beginning to sell in Paris and his name to attract critical attention. He found himself feeling far from the action, marooned with a man whose mental unravelling was becoming more pronounced by the day. Gauguin's increasing fretfulness transmitted itself to Van Gogh and only heightened the other man's anxieties.

In December alone Van Gogh had painted 25 pictures, he was exhausted, often drunk, becoming increasingly unhinged and fearful that Gauguin was going to abandon him, as indeed he was. Years earlier, back in Holland, Van Gogh had asked: 'Is being alone really living?' He had come to the conclusion that it wasn't and the prospect terrified him.

The crisis came on December 23 when, of course, Van Gogh sliced off part of his left ear. He wrapped the grisly morsel in newspaper and delivered it to a whore called Rachel in a nearby brothel; on opening this unexpected gift the poor girl fainted, as well she might.

Martin Gayford's account of the whole episode is particularly poignant, and he lays out a convincing explanation of the complex reasons why the painter turned on himself: manic depression with an admixture of religious mania and personal guilt over leaving the reformed prostitute he had lived with back in Holland. It was more than enough to overcome his already fragile mental resources. Gauguin himself left Arles on Christmas Day and the two painters never saw each other again.

It is a sad, sad story but, as this revealing and touching book reminds one, the path to this tragedy was documented in a series of paintings that have become among the best known in Western art.