NEIL YOUNG

Neil Young has surprised his fans and his record label with a new project: a protest album that includes a song titled Let's Impeach the President. "We didn't know he was making a record," Bill Bentley, a spokesperson for Young's label Reprise Records, told Reuters.

Executives at Reprise and parent company Warner Music Group will get to hear the album – entitled Living With War – on Tuesday, the Canadian music icon's longtime manager Elliot Roberts said. Young, 60, announced the new work on his website Monday.

"I just finished a new record. A power trio with trumpet and 100 voices," Young says via a ticker on the site.

The album, which Young recorded over three days earlier this month, features 10 tracks.

"I think it is a metal version of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. Metal folk protest?" he comments on the site.

The website also features some lyrics from the title track, with more lyrics to be released later.

Living With War comes less than a year after the release of Young's Prairie Wind – songs from which were also featured in the recent Jonathan Demme concert film Neil Young: Heart of Gold.

The new protest album, which includes an anti-Iraq war track, stands in contrast to the stance Young took following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. After recording the song Let's Roll as a tribute to the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, Young publicly supported the Patriot Act, the U.S. legislation that gives authorities much broader powers to combat terrorism.

OTHER

At “Saturday Night Live,” when two writers come up with the same sketch idea—Hey, we should do Dick Cheney shooting his buddy in the face!—the sketches are said to be “bumping” to get on the air: usually, only one succeeds. Now two promising TV pilots loosely inspired by the backstage goings on at “S.N.L.” are themselves bumping to get on NBC’s fall schedule.

Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing,” has written “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” starring Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford as a creative team that’s called in to rescue the network’s signature live sketch-comedy show. Tina Fey, the “S.N.L.” star, has written a show called—for now—“The Untitled Tina Fey Project,” starring Tina Fey, of all people, as the head writer at the network’s live variety show. Her pilot features Alec Baldwin as the network’s meddlesome new “V.P. of development for NBC/GE/Universal/Kmart.”

Fey’s comedy is set in New York at a fictional NBC, and Sorkin’s drama is set in Los Angeles at a slightly more fictional NBS, but both feature network heavies named Jack. Kevin Reilly, the real-life president of NBC Entertainment (which is a division of General Electric and a sister company of Universal but is not, as of this writing, affiliated with Kmart), explains, “Jack was G.E.’s pre-approved network executive name.” More seriously, he says that when both scripts arrived on his desk, last fall, “I saw the problem coming from a mile away. But these are very particular artists, who write what they care about. They’re not writers for hire who say, ‘Whattya got—a boy and his dog? I’ll write that!’ ” Reilly is at pains to note that neither show is based on actual NBC dynamics and that each is tonally distinct: “Tina is more madcap, and Aaron is exploring issues and character dynamics and has a real romance at the center.” Sorkin’s pilot begins with Wes, the executive producer of NBS’s show, reacting to a censor’s decision to kill a sketch called “Crazy Christians” by addressing the camera and urging viewers to turn off their sets:

WES
We’re eating worms for money. . . . Guys are getting killed in a war that’s got theme music and a logo. That remote in your hand is a crack pipe [that profits] this prissy, feckless, off-the-charts greed-filled whorehouse of a network you’re watching.


“That part,” Reilly acknowledges, “is based on us.”

Lorne Michaels, the longtime executive producer of “S.N.L.,” is also an executive producer of Fey’s pilot. When Sorkin asked Michaels to permit him to observe “S.N.L.” for a week, Michaels, protecting his turf, declined. “I haven’t read Sorkin’s script,” he says, “but God knows I’ve been told about it. Since we do sketches about Christians all the time, I guess he’s going for a bigger set of issues, his characteristic subject being power and its responsibilities. But is this a new insight, that networks are not to be trusted?” Michaels goes on, “The reality is that the network isn’t that powerful anymore—talent is.”

Fey’s pilot takes a swipe at talent in a scene in which Liz, the head writer, meets with Tracy, an unhinged movie star whom her new boss wants as a regular on the show. Tracy takes her for a ride in his red Hummer:

LIZ
This is a great car. What does it run on? Jet fuel?
TRACY
It runs on fame juice.
LIZ
Wonderful.


Alec Baldwin, who has hosted “S.N.L.” twelve times, says, “I’d be stunned if NBC picked up both shows. And ours has the tougher task, as a comedy, because if it’s not funny, that’s it. Whereas a drama can start off as a hard-hitting medical show about real issues, and before you count to three it’s about who’s fucking who.” Tina Fey, taking a somewhat higher road, says, “It’s just bad luck for me that in my first attempt at prime time I’m going up against the most powerful writer on television. I was joking that this would be the best pilot ever aired on Trio”—a cable channel, owned by NBC Universal, that ran failed shows. “And then Trio got cancelled.”

Sorkin, taking an even higher road, one dictated by his studio, Warner Bros. Television, a unit of Time Warner (which is also not, as of this writing, connected with Kmart), was unavailable for comment. But Kevin Reilly says that NBC might well have room for both shows, particularly if Fey’s ends up as a midseason replacement. “The only way we could screw it up,” he says, “is if the audience gets confused.”

Networks being what they are, Fey suspects that confusion is inevitable: “We’ll probably end up doing a terrible crossover, where the Matthew Perry character on the drama rapes my character on the comedy—and then the ‘Law & Order’ team solves the crime.”

THE ENVIRONMENT

The imminence of catastrophic global warming may be a subject far from the ever-drifting mind of President Bush—whose eschatological preoccupations privilege Armageddon over the Flood—but it is of growing concern to the rest of humanity. Climate change is even having its mass-entertainment moment. “Ice Age: The Meltdown”—featuring Ellie the computer-animated mammoth and the bottomless voice of Queen Latifah—has taken in more than a hundred million dollars at the box office in two weeks. On the same theme, but with distinctly less animation, “An Inconvenient Truth,” starring Al Gore (playing the role of Al Gore, itinerant lecturer), is coming to a theatre near you around Memorial Day. Log on to Fandango. Reserve some seats. Bring the family. It shouldn’t be missed. No kidding.

“An Inconvenient Truth” is not likely to displace the boffo numbers of “Ice Age” in Variety’s weekly grosses. It is, to be perfectly honest (and there is no way of getting around this), a documentary film about a possibly retired politician giving a slide show about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. It has a few lapses of mise en scène. Sometimes we see Gore gravely talking on his cell phone—or gravely staring out an airplane window, or gravely tapping away on his laptop in a lonely hotel room—for a little longer than is absolutely necessary. And yet, as a means of education, “An Inconvenient Truth” is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. “An Inconvenient Truth” is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.

The catch, of course, is that the audience-of-one that most urgently needs to see the film and take it to heart—namely, the man who beat Gore in the courts six years ago—does not much believe in science or, for that matter, in any information that disturbs his prejudices, his fantasies, or his sleep. Inconvenient truths are precisely what this White House is structured to avoid and deny.

In the 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush mocked Gore as “ozone man” and claimed, “This guy is so far out in the environmental extreme we’ll be up to our necks in owls and outta work for every American.” In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush cracked that Gore “likes electric cars. He just doesn’t like making electricity.” The younger Bush, a classic schoolyard bully with a contempt for intellect, demanded that Gore “explain what he meant by some of the things” in his 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance”—and then unashamedly admitted that he had never read it. A book that the President did eventually read and endorse is a pulp science-fiction novel: “State of Fear,” by Michael Crichton. Bush was so excited by the story, which pictures global warming as a hoax perpetrated by power-mad environmentalists, that he invited the author to the Oval Office. In “Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush,” Fred Barnes, the Fox News commentator, reveals that the President and Crichton “talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.” The visit, Barnes adds, “was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more.”

As President, Bush has made fantasy a guide to policy. He has scorned the Kyoto agreement on global warming (a pact that Gore helped broker as Vice-President); he has neutered the Environmental Protection Agency; he has failed to act decisively on America’s fuel-efficiency standards even as the European Union, Japan, and China have tightened theirs. He has filled his Administration with people like Philip A. Cooney, who, in 2001, left the American Petroleum Institute, the umbrella lobby for the oil industry, to become chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he repeatedly edited government documents so as to question the link between fuel emissions and climate change. In 2005, when Cooney left the White House (this time for a job with ExxonMobil), Dana Perino, a White House spokesperson, told the Times, “Phil Cooney did a great job.” A heckuva job, one might say.

Last week, Gore dropped by a Broadway screening room to introduce a preview of “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dressed in casual but non-earth-tone clothes, he gave a brief, friendly greeting. If you are inclined to think that the unjustly awarded election of 2000 led to one of the worst Presidencies of this or any other era, it is not easy to look at Al Gore. He is the living reminder of all that might not have happened in the past six years (and of what might still happen in the coming two). Contrary to Ralph Nader’s credo that there was no real difference between the major parties, it is close to inconceivable that the country and the world would not be in far better shape had Gore been allowed to assume the office that a plurality of voters wished him to have. One can imagine him as an intelligent and decent President, capable of making serious decisions and explaining them in the language of a confident adult. Imagining that alternative history is hard to bear, which is why Gore always has the courtesy, in his many speeches, and at the start of “An Inconvenient Truth,” to deflect that discomfort with a joke: “Hello, I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next President of the United States.”

Those inclined to be irritated by Gore all over again will not be entirely disappointed by “An Inconvenient Truth.” It can be argued that at times the film becomes “Death of a Salesman,” with Gore as global warming’s Willy Loman, wheeling his bag down one more airport walkway. There are some awkward jokes, a silly cartoon, a few self-regarding sequences, and, now and then, echoes of the cringe-making moments in his old campaign speeches when personal tragedy was put to questionable use. (To illustrate the need to change one’s mind when hard reality intrudes, he recalls helping his father farm tobacco as a youth and then his sister’s death from lung cancer.) But in the context of the larger political moment, the current darkness, Gore can be forgiven his miscues and vanities. It is past time to recognize that, over a long career, his policy judgment and his moral judgment alike have been admirable and acute. Gore has been right about global warming since holding the first congressional hearing on the topic, twenty-six years ago. He was right about the role of the Internet, right about the need to reform welfare and cut the federal deficit, right about confronting Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo. Since September 11th, he has been right about constitutional abuse, right about warrantless domestic spying, and right about the calamity of sanctioned torture. And in the case of Iraq, both before the invasion and after, he was right—courageously right—to distrust as fatally flawed the political and moral good faith, operational competence, and strategic wisdom of the Bush Administration.

In the 2000 campaign, Gore was cautious, self-censoring, and in the thrall of his political consultants. He was even cautious about his passion, the environment. That caution, some of his critics think, may have cost him Florida, where he was reluctant to speak out on the construction of an ecologically disastrous airport in the middle of the Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. But since the election––especially since emerging from an understandable period of reticence and rebalancing—Gore has played a noble role in public life. It’s hardly to Gore’s discredit that many conservative commentators have watched his emotionally charged speeches and pronounced him unhinged. (“It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again,” the columnist and former psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer wrote after one such oration.)

It may be that Gore really has lost his taste for electoral politics, and that, no matter what turn the polls and events take, an Al-versus-Hillary psychodrama in 2008 is not going to happen. There is no substitute for Presidential power, but Gore is now playing a unique role in public life. He is a symbol of what might have been, who insists that we focus on what likely will be an uninhabitable planet if we fail to pay attention to the folly we are committing, and take the steps necessary to end it.