MUSIC

I'm impressed with the new Thom Yorke album. Download these:

Harrowdown Hill

Atoms for Peace

Black Swan

The Clock

Analyse

Cymbal Rush

PHIL COLLINS

The other day, at a recording session for the cast album of “Tarzan,” Disney’s new Broadway musical, Phil Collins, the drummer and singer who wrote the show’s songs, walked across the floor of a recording studio in midtown. The studio was capacious. At the far end, as at a dance in a high-school gymnasium, were a band and some singers. Collins was wearing a dark T-shirt, pale-green linen pants, and black canvas sneakers. His head is small and round, like a globe, and closely shaved, so that the dark patterns of hair suggest land and the bald parts suggest water. He was adding percussion parts to the tracks—a small task, but one that he preferred to see to himself.

Collins came to rest by a microphone and a music stand. He put on a pair of headphones, like a pilot. From a table, he picked up a cylinder about the size of a spice bottle and held it in his left hand, with his elbow bent. The cylinder was filled with pellets. Over a speaker an engineer said, “Everybody ready to run? Here it comes . . . Rolling.”

With the fervor of citizens just released from colonial rule, the actors sang, “Two worlds, one family,” while Collins moved the shaker back and forth in front of the microphone. In the control room, one man said to another, “The back was better on that one, but the front was better on the one before it.”

Meanwhile, Collins stepped to the middle of the studio and embraced a man in a dark shirt and jeans. He put his arm around him while a third man took a photograph of them. They parted. Briefly, Collins walked in circles. He picked up a tambourine. He lifted one knee, apparently to study a detail on his pants leg. Finally, he sat on a stool and rocked back and forth several times.

Over the speaker a man in the control room said, “End of measure fifty-seven, we cut to seventy-eight. No vamp.” On these takes, Collins played the tambourine. When they were finished, he walked into the control room. A young man approached. Collins lowered his head and listened to him intently. “Minestrone soup,” the man said. “We found a place that makes it.”

To eat his soup, Collins sat in a small room, with Tom Schumacher, the producer of Disney Theatrical Productions. Collins was talking about a big band that he organized a few years ago to play at the Montreux Jazz Festival. “I live in Switzerland, right down the road from the festival, and they gave me one night to do anything I wanted,” he said. “Drummers love big bands, because you get to set up pieces of music that are three or four measures down the line. Ba-ta-ba-ta-ba-ta-BAM.” To prepare for the evening, he spent hours watching a video of how to play drums with brushes. “I never had to use them before,” he said.

When someone asked Collins if he minded all the waiting around involved in a musical, he said that he was accustomed to it from having played in a band. Also, he said that his experience with the theatre began in childhood. When he was fourteen, he played the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!” in London’s West End. “By that time, I had already played drums for nine years,” he said. “My headmaster told me that I couldn’t do the whole run. My parents took me out of school and put me in drama school, and that was the end of my education. Anyway, I did the role for several months, until my voice broke. I left, then went back and, at sixteen, played Oliver. Mostly what I was doing was looking at my watch and waiting to grow up. I would have had a dance band, but there weren’t many around.”

“There was the Beatles,” Schumacher said. “They could have used a better drummer,” he added, helpfully.

Collins compressed his lips slightly. Then he nodded and said, “I’ll tell him.”
from The New Yorker

FILMS

“X-Men: The Last Stand” and “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber.”
by DAVID DENBY
Issue of 2006-06-05
Posted 2006-05-29


Once you’ve seen, in the third “X-Men” movie, Hugh Jackman hurling through the air and smashing into a tree, or Halle Berry spinning like a top as she ascends to nowhere, you don’t need to see it again. But Brett Ratner, taking over as the director of the franchise from Bryan Singer, who directed the first two movies in the series, has no fear of repetition. Anything but. Ratner, the auteur of the frenzied “Rush Hour” movies, is a crude synthesizer of comedy and action tropes, and in “X-Men: The Last Stand” he disdains the liquid beauty and the poetic fantasy of Singer’s work, and trashes his actors by repeatedly slamming them around or leaving them stranded. Famke Janssen, as Jean, the class-5 mutant who has unparalleled powers, receives an enormous buildup: the megalomaniacal Magneto (Sir Ian McKellen), who thinks that mutants should simply annihilate humans, releases Jean’s strengths as a destroyer, and she has a few man-devouring scenes that suggest what a liberated mutant woman can do. At the climax of the movie, however, Ratner leaves Janssen standing stock still—her red hair backlit in a halo—and looking puzzled. I’ve never seen an actress so obviously lost—and just when she should be taking control. Anna Paquin also stands around looking blank, and the stunning Rebecca Romijn, as Mystique, in body-fitting blue scales—the most openly erotic image in recent mainstream cinema—is quickly killed off.

Ratner revels in Sir Ian’s balcony-shaking theatrical voice (as was said of Orson Welles, McKellen seems to carry his own echo chamber around with him), but as a director he is no lover of women. He doesn’t seem to love much of anything in this movie, except for spasmodic violence. In this installment, written by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn, a chemical cure for mutancy has been found; the President of the United States (Josef Sommer) supports it, but almost none of the mutants want to be “cured.” There’s the usual earnest plea that ethnic minorities be left alone to cultivate their otherness rather than be forcibly merged into the bland mediocrity of humankind, but the liberal social argument, such as it is, is soon abandoned. A dispute breaks out (it’s been simmering all through the series) between Magneto and the peaceable Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and, in an execrably staged scene, the movie ends in a three-way war (humans and two kinds of mutants) on Alcatraz. People are blown away, cars are flung up in the air and set on fire, and so on. But you can’t see much of it, because Ratner, covering a multitude of clumsy sins, stages it in semi-darkness.

What a comedown, after the weirdly beautiful things Singer and his technicians did in the first two movies. For Singer, the essence of digital magic was transformation: one person’s flesh can turn into another’s, or melt and pour into a flashing metal stream. Among other things, the first two movies were a celebration of the human body brought to perfection and then pushed by super-earthly flights of imagination into mythical achievement. But Ratner’s movie is one thudding climax after another, and it left me exhausted, the way the second and third movies in the “Matrix” series did. Computer-generated imagery, an enormous breakthrough in film technology (analogous to the development of color cinematography), has existed in its mature form for little more than a decade, and already it’s threatening to become a nuisance and a bore. Where is it written that C.G.I. has to be used to enhance violence in comic-book plots? Singer and Peter Jackson have used it as artists, but they are selling violence, too. Maybe it’s time for the aesthetes—an American Cocteau or two—to create a whole new digital world.



Many of us, of course, have spent hours at the movies relishing violence and explosions as entertainment. In the documentary “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber,” we see explosions in which real people die, and the sequence comes as a kick in the gut. In 2005, Robert Baer, the C.I.A. case officer whose adventures and misadventures served as the basis for George Clooney’s role in “Syriana,” went around the Middle East with a camera crew, interviewing Lebanese and Israeli intelligence officers and politicians, and the families of suicide bombers and their victims. In between the interviews, Baer and his collaborators, the producer-directors Kevin Toolis and David Batty, drawing on news-agency footage, lay out the historical development of suicide as a weapon—first as a weapon of war, then of terror. The movie is a pageant of fanaticism, sacrifice, and death, and the most striking passage comes near the end. Some of the Lebanese and West Bank bombers were trailed by cameramen, and the footage they recorded—say, of a car bomber taking out an Israeli military patrol—was later used by terrorist organizations as a recruiting and propaganda tool. Baer shows some of those films again and again, and by the end of the sequence I wasn’t sure what enraged me more—the moviemaking terrorists, the blithe idiocy of routine commercial entertainment, or my own complacency in putting up with so much of it.

Baer, who narrates, begins by saying that he is obsessed with the terrorist bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut, in April, 1983, which killed sixty-three people and wiped out most of the C.I.A. station there. How did suicide become so potent a force? He goes through the stages: Ayatollah Khomeini, in the early nineteen-eighties, sanctified very young soldiers’ dying in the defense of Iran, which encouraged a thirteen-year-old boy to strap explosives to his body and blow up an Iraqi tank; Hezbollah used terror against Israelis occupying southern Lebanon in the eighties and nineties; and so on. The filmmakers place each development in its political context, and they trace the increasingly sinister use of religion to justify self-slaughter and murder. Baer can’t say who bombed the Embassy, but he strongly suggests that Iran was behind it, and that Iran has been waging a secret war against American interests for more than a quarter of a century.

That’s the news that Baer threads through “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber.” But the real center of interest, for me, at least, lies in the families of the young men who died. The act by which these kids have fulfilled themselves has ended any possibility that we might attain further knowledge of their temperaments or their souls. What of those who are left behind? An Iranian mother in a black head scarf, referring to her fifteen-year-old son—a photograph shows a slender boy with dark eyes and the faint beginnings of a mustache—who died in battle, says, simply, “He became a martyr for God.” In a city near Tehran, a male relative of a bomber, pointing to a photograph, says, “There’s the martyr Hossein.” Both speak as if the boys had attained a purely official identity, as if they were not their own dead children. “It was a good path for him to take. So why would we stop him?” the mother asks Baer, and there are more remarks, from brothers, sisters, and friends, in praise of the suicide’s duty and rectitude. Other families of young dead warriors may grieve, but these people do not. Did Baer choose them for their ideological purity, or were they the only ones who would talk to him?

The families must be under enormous pressure from Hezbollah, Hamas, and other such organizations to say only the approved things. Still, knowing this, one looks for a fuller response. Did at least one of the bombers’ brothers or sisters harbor such angry thoughts as “My brother was seduced into giving up his life by a cynical and vulgar fantasy of virgins in Paradise”? Or perhaps, in a more analytic vein, did one of them think, “Young men in this society feel they have no future, so why shouldn’t they give up their lives”? Those words, which would suggest a social, rather than a religious, context for the act, are never spoken, or even hinted at. Any kind of psychological explanation is ignored, too. The families utterly reject the word “suicide.” The appropriate word is “martyr,” a bomber’s sister firmly tells Baer. Suicide, it seems, implies the possibility of unhappiness or compulsion, an emotional need that has not been met, whereas martyrdom, as the families present it, is always rationally chosen, and a gift to everyone. The religious language rules out any reason for doing something other than the single reason that is given (American fundamentalists talk the same way).

Hearing this, Baer doesn’t push very hard. He’s in a precarious situation; he enjoys, we imagine, no more than a limited welcome. But his failure to get anything more out of the families frustrates his viewers, and probably frustrates him, too. Near the end of the journey, chronicling Sunni car bombers in Iraq, he talks sorrowfully of Muslims killing Muslims, and he concludes that suicide bombing has lost any coherent political meaning and has taken on an irresistible life of its own as a glamorous cult. And the word he finishes with, to describe the intentions and results of this cult, is “chaos.” But the movie suggests that some kinds of chaos, however much induced by professional terrorists, don’t come about without the consent and support of deeply religious people.

SONG OF THE DAY

BEANBAG - YO LA TENGO
I don't really know how you smash a beanbag chair (they're kinda smashed to begin with), but according to these lyrics, it's possible. This is the kind of breezy, trombone-enriched pop track Yo La Tengo excels at creating. Piano on the eighth notes, slightly fuzzy bass, simple drumming, a bucket of "la-la"'s spilled all over the chorus, and a sorta stormy bridge that threatens all the sunshine but never totally obscures it. Ira Kaplan's gentle vocal makes lines like, "I've spent my life trying to understand/ Just how my life got to where I am" go down easy. And that trombone melody is seriously great. After listening to them murder all those classics for WFMU, it's nice to hear them back at their own material, sounding carefree and full of life.

The Simpsons is more than a funny cartoon - it reveals truths about human nature that rival the observations of great philosophers from Plato to Kant... while Homer sets his house on fire.

The Male Biological Clock. Procreate by 40 or you'll start shooting blanks.

RYAN ADAMS

Been listening to a lot of Ryan Adams lately:

"Ryan Adams (born November 5, 1974) is an alt-country and rock and roll singer/songwriter from Jacksonville, North Carolina. Adams dropped out of high school at 16 to work in a shoe shop and make music. He formed a band named Whiskeytown in 1994; they disbanded in 1999. Adams went on to put out his first solo record, Heartbreaker, in 2000. Ryan Adams is a highly prolific artist, releasing seven albums as a solo artist between January 2000 and December 2005. He has also produced an album by Jesse Malin, contributed to Beth Orton, the Wallflowers and Counting Crows albums, dated Winona Ryder, Alanis Morisette, Beth Orton, Leona Naess, Carrie Hamilton, and Parker Posey, performed specials with Elton John (who refers to him as "Oh Fabulous One"), & Willie Nelson. Additionally, at least ten other session recordings can be found floating around the internet.

Trivia:
The Old 97's song "Crash on the Barrelhead" is supposed to be about Adams being drunk at their Austin City Limits perfomance.
Adams shares a birthday with both Gram Parsons, one of his major musical influences, and his near-namesake Bryan Adams.
The song "To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high)" appeared in the comedy Old School.
The song "Dance All Night" is played over the ending credits of the romantic comedy Must Love Dogs, starring John Cusack and Diane Lane.

Ryan has a reputation for his unstable temperament. Notable incidents include:
Ejecting a fan who jokingly requested the song "Summer of 69" (written and performed by Bryan Adams) at a Nashville concert on October 14, 2002. According to an interview with Pitchfork, Adams explains that he was upset with the disrespect of a fan's Bryan Adams-related screams during a three-part harmony between Adams, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
Leaving a drunken message on Jim Derogatis' answering machine in response to the critic's review of his concert. This has subsequently been leaked onto the Internet. Although initially viewed as a rather irresponsible act, the message has now become something of a touchstone for those irked by the current state of musical criticism. Derogatis felt the impact of the confrontation through a backlash against his work and heavy criticism of his methodology and style.

Songs to look for:
New York, New York
Answering Bell
Nuclear
So Alive
When the Stars go Blue
This Is It
Wonderwall
Dance All Night
Come Pick me up


COME PICK ME UP


OH MY SWEET CAROLINA


WHEN THE STARS GO BLUE (written by Ryan Adams, sung by Corrs/Bono)

WINE
Slate.com

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris, the legendary tasting in which a pair of unheralded California wines bested some of France's most celebrated reds and whites. It was, you might say, the collective slurp heard round the world. France losing to the United States at wine? Unthinkable. In a century filled with indignities for France, the Judgment of Paris was another cruel blow. For the most part, though, the French refused to take the result seriously, dismissing it as either an aberration or, worse, the product of Anglo-American chicanery (the tasting was organized by a Brit, Steven Spurrier, who was accused of serving French wines that were either too young or from inferior vintages). The central lesson of the tasting—that competition was now at hand and that French wines would no longer necessarily enjoy a presumption of superiority—was lost on the French. Thirty years later, some of them are paying dearly for their complacency.

The story of the Great Vinous Smackdown is retold in the recently published Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine, written by George M. Taber, the Time magazine correspondent who covered the event. The tasting featured nine French wine experts, among them Odette Kahn, editor of the influential Revue du Vin de France; and Christian Vannequé, sommelier of the three-star Parisian restaurant La Tour d'Argent. The French wines were no less reputable and included the 1970 Haut-Brion, the 1970 Mouton Rothschild, and the 1973 Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles. But when the scores were tallied that afternoon at Paris' InterContinental Hotel, it was the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay from Napa that finished first among the whites, and the 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon, also from Napa, that was tops among the reds. According to Taber, one unnamed, aggrieved Bordeaux chateau owner later told Spurrier, "You've spat in our soup."

Taber's book has inspired a number of commemorative tastings in the lead-up to the anniversary. But the most eagerly awaited Judgment of Paris re-creation is the one being held today—an event organized primarily by Spurrier that is taking place simultaneously in London and Napa. Once more, an impressive panel has been assembled, although this one is not exclusively French; the judges include Vannequé; two British masters of wine, Jancis Robinson and Michael Broadbent; and the journalist Michel Bettane, often called France's Robert Parker. With a few exceptions, the wines are equally stellar. However, unlike the original Judgment of Paris, which became controversial only after the fact, the sequel has been plagued with problems from the outset.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story detailing the difficulties Spurrier has encountered. According to the Journal, the leading Bordeaux châteaux were reluctant to submit any recent vintages for a comparative tasting and ultimately persuaded Spurrier not to put the younger French wines up against their California counterparts (the concern is that the French wines, being slower to mature, would be at a disadvantage). Thus, the only competitive, fully blind portion of today's tasting will be the first flight, featuring the same 10 red wines that were part of the 1976 event. The younger wines (from 2000 to 2004) will be segregated geographically and tasted semiblind—the participants won't know which wine is which, but they will know that Flight 3 consists only of white Burgundies, Flight 4 California cabernets, and so forth.

This arrangement has caused much outrage in the wine blogosphere, where the French are being accused of—what else?—cowardice. But when I spoke with Spurrier this week, he insisted the French didn't have to twist his arm regarding the format. He agreed that it would be unfair to pit young Bordeauxs against equally youthful California cabernets in a blind tasting, because the wines do age differently. In 1976, when California wines still had something to prove, he explained, a head-to-head match-up was necessary. But California established its worthiness 30 years ago.

Still, I think it's a pity they went with a watered-down format. True, we don't need a competitive tasting to tell us that California makes great wines. But a second Judgment of Paris, done well, might have been even more interesting and revealing than the original. A blind tasting that included the three other major grape varieties in which the United States now produces noteworthy wines—merlot, syrah, and pinot noir—could have answered, or raised, all sorts of intriguing questions. Probably the most remarkable aspect of the 1976 tasting, for instance, was how often the California chardonnays were mistaken for white Burgundies. Today, would California chardonnays—which have generally become oakier and more alcoholic over the years—prove equally deceptive? And what about California pinot noir? It's generally considered an entirely different breed than its Burgundian cousin, but who knows what a blind tasting would have turned up.

This new Judgment of Paris comes at a time when a large segment of the French wine industry is mired in crisis—a crisis that might have been mitigated had the French not ignored the message of the first Judgment of Paris. France is currently sitting on an ocean of unsold wine, a glut that has led to a collapse in prices at the cheaper end of the spectrum. According to the New York Times, some 100 million liters of Appellation d'Origine Controlee wine was distilled into ethanol last year. That's enough to fill 133 million bottles. Across France, hundreds of winemakers, and possibly thousands, are on the verge of bankruptcy; it has been suggested by some trade organizations that in the Languedoc, the hardest-hit region, 30 to 50 percent of wineries may ultimately be forced out of business. There have been a number of protests tied to the crisis, and several suicides, as well.

The proximate cause of all this unhappiness is that sales of French wines have been plummeting at home and overseas, especially at the lower price points. Domestic consumption has dropped by more than 40 percent over the last four decades. And France has been hemorrhaging market share abroad, particularly in the two fastest-growing markets, the United States and Britain. The French share of the American market for imported wines fell from 26 percent in 1994 to 14 percent in 2004. Inept marketing is one big reason for the decline, and this ineptitude can be put down to complacency and chauvinism.

The French have been blindsided by the emergence of aggressive competition from Italy, Spain, Australia, South America, and other regions. This isn't true of the very finest French producers; thanks in part to the Judgment of Paris, they recognized early on that the New World was capable of making excellent wine, and they worked to improve their own offerings (which they have done—the good French wines have never been better). By and large, though, after 1976, the French continued to assume that their wines were the only ones worth drinking. They had little interest in foreign wines (even now, French wine shops offer astonishingly few imports), and they put little effort into salesmanship because they figured that French wines, simply by virtue of being French, would sell themselves. Interviewed several years ago, one Burgundian winemaker, Patrick Hudelot, put it well: "In France, there is a belief that you don't need to market your wine, that France's reputation is enough. And that way we are being left behind."

So they are. Thirty years after the Judgment of Paris, shrewdly marketed brands like Australia's Yellow Tail are winning over budget-minded drinkers around the world while a bloated, inefficient French wine industry grapples with millions of liters of unwanted wine and a growing army of destitute vintners. The French can't say they weren't warned.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Warning of Calamities and Hoping for a Change in 'An Inconvenient Truth' By A. O. SCOTT

CANNES, France, May 23 — "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's new documentary about the dangers of climate change, is a film that should never have been made. It is, after all, the job of political leaders and policymakers to protect against possible future calamities, to respond to the findings of science and to persuade the public that action must be taken to protect the common interest.

But when this does not happen — and it is hardly a partisan statement to observe that, in the case of global warming, it hasn't — others must take up the responsibility: filmmakers, activists, scientists, even retired politicians. That "An Inconvenient Truth" should not have to exist is a reason to be grateful that it does.

Appearances to the contrary, Mr. Guggenheim's movie is not really about Al Gore. It consists mainly of a multimedia presentation on climate change that Mr. Gore has given many times over the last few years, interspersed with interviews and Mr. Gore's voice-over reflections on his life in and out of politics. His presence is, in some ways, a distraction, since it guarantees that "An Inconvenient Truth" will become fodder for the cynical, ideologically facile sniping that often passes for political discourse these days. But really, the idea that worrying about the effect of carbon-dioxide emissions on the world's climate makes you some kind of liberal kook is as tired as the image of Mr. Gore as a stiff, humorless speaker, someone to make fun of rather than take seriously.

In any case, Mr. Gore has long since proven to be a deft self-satirist. (He recently told a moderator at a Cannes Film Festival news conference to address him as "your Adequacy.") He makes a few jokes to leaven the grim gist of "An Inconvenient Truth," and some of them are funny, in the style of a college lecturer's attempts to keep the attention of his captive audience. Indeed, his onstage manner — pacing back and forth, fiddling with gadgets, gesturing for emphasis — is more a professor's than a politician's. If he were not the man who, in his own formulation "used to be the next president of the United States of America," he might have settled down to tenure and a Volvo (or maybe a Prius) in some leafy academic grove.

But as I said, the movie is not about him. He is, rather, the surprisingly engaging vehicle for some very disturbing information. His explanations of complex environmental phenomena — the jet stream has always been a particularly tough one for me to grasp — are clear, and while some of the visual aids are a little corny, most of the images are stark, illuminating and powerful.

I can't think of another movie in which the display of a graph elicited gasps of horror, but when the red lines showing the increasing rates of carbon-dioxide emissions and the corresponding rise in temperatures come on screen, the effect is jolting and chilling. Photographs of receding ice fields and glaciers — consequences of climate change that have already taken place — are as disturbing as speculative maps of submerged coastlines. The news of increased hurricane activity and warming oceans is all the more alarming for being delivered in Mr. Gore's matter-of-fact, scholarly tone.

He speaks of the need to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions as a "moral imperative," and most people who see this movie will do so out of a sense of duty, which seems to me entirely appropriate. Luckily, it happens to be a well-made documentary, edited crisply enough to keep it from feeling like 90 minutes of C-Span and shaped to give Mr. Gore's argument a real sense of drama. As unsettling as it can be, it is also intellectually exhilarating, and, like any good piece of pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study. This is not everything you need to know about global warming: that's the point. But it is a good place to start, and to continue, a process of education that could hardly be more urgent. "An Inconvenient Truth" is a necessary film.

'Marie Antoinette': Best or Worst of Times? Under the Spell of Royal Rituals

CANNES, France, May 24 — Though no one called for the filmmaker's head, "Marie Antoinette," Sofia Coppola's sympathetic account of the life and hard-partying times of the ill-fated queen, filled the theater with lusty boos and smatterings of applause after its first press screening on Wednesday. History remembers the queen for her wastrel ways, indifference to human suffering ("Let them eat cake") and death by guillotine, but Ms. Coppola's period film, which is playing in competition, conceives of her as something of a poor little rich girl, a kind of Paris Hilton of the House of Bourbon.

Kirsten Dunst stars as the Austrian princess who was just 14 when she arrived in the French court at Versailles in 1770, as part of an alliance between her mother, the powerful Maria Theresa of Austria, and the French king, the grandfather of her betrothed, the future Louis XVI (the unlikely Jason Schwartzman, in a bit of gag casting).

Her youth and apparent ignorance locked the future queen in a welter of self-indulgence from which she had no reason to escape, or so Ms. Coppola vainly tries to suggest. From the moment Marie Antoinette arrives in France, after being literally stripped bare of her Austrian possessions, she is trussed up in silks and satins, feathers and furs, and restrained by the rituals of court life, as much prisoner as princess.

This is Ms. Coppola's one idea, and it isn't enough. Although early scenes of Marie Antoinette submitting to protocol — if she wants a glass of water, one servant announces her request and another fulfills it — do make her point, it soon becomes clear that the director is herself bewitched by these rituals, which she repeats again and again. The princess lived in a bubble, and it's from inside that bubble Ms. Coppola tells her story. Thus, despite some lines about the American Revolution, which is helping drain the king's coffers and starve his people, Ms. Coppola ignores what's best about Marie Antoinette's story.

She doesn't seem to realize that what made this spoiled, rotten woman worthy of attention weren't her garden parties and fur-lined shoes, but the role she played in a bloody historical convulsion. Ms. Coppola has an embarrassment of cinematic riches to play with, including the real Versailles, where Marie Antoinette lived most of her short adult life. With the help of the cinematographer Lance Acord and the production designer KK Barrett, both of whom worked on Ms. Coppola's last film, "Lost in Translation," and the costume designer Milena Canonero, who worked on "Barry Lyndon," she creates an opulent proto-Euro Disney cum rave where royals are really just 24-hour party people, full of fun and lots of cake. Soon after arriving at court Marie Antoinette asks a lady-in-waiting (Judy Davis in full twitch), "Isn't all this kind of ridiculous?" "This, madam," the woman answers haughtily, "is Versailles." But truly, madam, this is Hollywood.

Holding a Mirror Up to Hollywood
CANNES, France, May 24 — The first sounds you hear in "Marie Antoinette" are the abrasive guitar chords of the great British post-punk band Gang of Four. The effect may be jarring; this is not the kind of thing you normally associate with the 18th century. But the song turns out to be bracingly apt.

The first lines invoke "the problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure," one of the chief problems the title character will face. And the name of the song is "Natural Is Not in It," a fitting motto for a film that conjures a world of pure and extravagant artifice.

The applause after the press screening Wednesday morning — there was some! — was mingled with boos, perhaps from die-hard republicans (in the French rather than the American sense) offended by Sofia Coppola's insufficiently critical view of the ancien régime in its terminal decadence. In the movie, the hungry peasants and restless city dwellers who ultimately brought down the French monarchy are mainly a distant rumor, as the action takes place entirely within the hermetic world of the Bourbon court, with its intricate codes of behavior, its curious blend of idle hedonism and solemn purpose, its pervasive gossip and its obsession with fashion and appearance.

A bygone world, of course, as exotic and strange as the hoop skirts and bird-studded hairpieces that exalt Kristen Dunst's appealing American-girl features. Perhaps, but the music is not the only aspect of the movie that pushes it slyly toward the present. My earlier description of the courts of Louis XV and XVI could just as easily apply to 21st-century Hollywood, a parallel that, in "Marie Antoinette," is both transparent and subtle.

When Marie reads a radical pamphlet attacking the obscene, self-absorbed luxury of her life in Versailles — "Let them eat cake" and all that — she evokes nothing so much as a young movie star rolling her eyes at the latest scurrility in some trashy celebrity gossip blog.

The clothes, the parties, the flatterers, the entourage, the sham marriages and passionate adulteries: it's American celebrity culture but with better manners and (slightly) more ridiculous clothes. Affairs of state are conducted almost as it they were movie deals. (Are we over budget on that American War of Independence project? Better beef up the marketing campaign.)

But though it depicts a confectionary reality in which appearance matters above all, "Marie Antoinette" is far from superficial, and though it is often very funny, it is much more than a fancy-dress pastiche. Seen from the inside, Marie's gilded cage is a realm of beauty and delight, but also of loneliness and alienation.

It almost goes without saying that Ms. Coppola, daughter of Francis, is herself a child of Hollywood (as is Jason Schwartzman, her cousin). This is not to suggest that the film is veiled autobiography, but rather to speculate about why a movie about a long-dead historical figure should feel so personal, so genuine, so knowing.

The mixed response on the part of the critics may reflect a certain ambivalence, less about the movie itself than about our own implication in the rarefied society it imagines. To say it's a lot like Hollywood is to say that it's a lot like Cannes. Does that make us courtiers or Jacobins? Should we crown Ms. Coppola with laurels or hustle her into a tumbrel bound for the guillotine? I for one am happy to lose my head over "Marie Antoinette."

 

My sister's hand will be pictured with an article on sushi in next week's Macleans. 

MISCELLANEOUS

How timeouts are ruining the NBA.

Buy the worst house in the best neighborhood – like you’ll be happy to come home to your dump amid mansions? But happiness is hard to predict...

The 7/7 attacks in London: whom to blame? Osama in his cave? Hapless intelligence officials? The war in Iraq? Could it be that there was no discernible reason whatever?...

Where do animated characters come from?

MUSIC



Radiohead's Thom Yorke is releasing a solo record. I expect it will be quite obtuse, or challenging, or hard-to-listen-to... As expected, here's a track-by-track first glimpse at The Eraser from Pitchfork:

1. "the eraser": The title track opens with a muffled, repeated piano chord. After a few bars and a chord change, programmed beats settle in, and Thom interrupts, "Please excuse me but I got to ask," scraping the upper register. Soon, a gaggle of disembodied, moaning Thoms joins in for the chorus, which seemingly takes a cue from Morrissey: "The more you try to erase me/ The more that I appear".

2. "analyse": Vocal and rolling piano lines launch this meditation on futility. "The fences that you cannot climb/ The sentences that do not rhyme," Thom laments, sad and clever all at once. And later: "It gets you down/ You're just playing a part," one of many presumed jabs at self-identity. The chord progression somewhat recalls an accelerated "Knives Out", with a hesitant snare plodding along in the background, before Godrich drops in the first of The Eraser's many cinematic synth flourishes.

3. "the clock": A cyclical guitar line lends this track an almost motorik vibe, albeit one evoking a leisurely Sunday drive. Click-clack beats add to the pace before the inevitable opening line: "Time is running out/ For us." By the end, Thom is humming a simple, bluesy melody over the steady but relentless rhythm.

4. "black swan": Opens with an almost hip-hop beat, before a blues-inspired riff more than a little reminiscent of "I Might Be Wrong" drops in and sets the structure. "This is fucked up, fucked up," Yorke declares. Later, more identity crises are averted: "I don't care what the future holds/ 'Cause I'm right here and I'm today/ With your fingers you can touch me."

5. "skip divided": Samples of Thom drawing breaths help form the percussive foundation of this dark stalker-ly declaration. Yorke's at his most conversational here, almost pub-drunk, revealing, "When you walk in a room I follow you 'round/ Like a dog/ I'm a dog, I'm a dog, I'm a dog/ I'm a lapdog/ I'm your lapdog." Creepy.

6. "atoms for peace": Thom returns, all homesick alien, beseeching you: "No more going to the dark side with your flying saucer eyes/ No more falling down a wormhole that I have to pull you out," and striving for some higher octaves during the chorus: "I wanna geeet ouuut/ And make it woooork." Celestial tones underscore a warm, bumbling bassline-- a relatively minimal arrangement compared to the rest of The Eraser. "So many lies/ So feel the love come off of them/ And take me in your arms," he sings. Thom's own "You're Beautiful"?

7. "and it rained all night": And it's back to the Dark Side for The Eraser's chilliest number, a tune awash in eerie synth and driven by a Joy Division-esque bassline. Thom assumes the role of the poet-observer, surrealistically detailing visions of post-downpour New York, clipped vocal samples later piggybacking the bassline. It culminates in a strained, desperate: "I can see you/ But I can never reach you."

8. "harrowdown hill": Don't get thrown off by the practically post-punk opening bass riff; more haunted synth and programmed beats soon drift in and turn things nocturnal once again. "I'm coming home to make it all right/ So dry your eyes," sings Thom-- one of the most conventional, pop-esque vocal melodies on the record. "I can't take the pressure/ No one cares if you live or die/ They just want me gone/ They want me gone." The moment is suspended to make way for some riffing, which closes out the song.

9. "cymbal rush": We're greeted here by what sounds like the Pac-Man death sound effect kicked down an octave; then more funereal, ambient synth, along with pitter-patter programmed percussion not unlike that on "Kid A". "Try to build a wall that is high enough," sings Thom. "It's all boiling over." Finally, the climax: percussion picks up, guitar enters over melancholic piano chords, and more disembodied Thoms float about, moaning-- until all drops out for one final blip-bloop parade, which sputters out to an abrupt finish.

Regarding The Eraser, Yorke also wrote "inevitably it is more beats & electronics. but its [sic] songs," and that pretty much sums it up. The record is song-oriented to a perhaps surprising degree-- no instrumentals, all tracks pretty much in the four-minute range, mostly standard time signatures-- and emphasizes the trademark textural richness of Radiohead and Godrich. The Eraser lands in stores July 11 in the U.S. (lucky Brits get it a day earlier) via XL Recordings, but for now, those of you who enjoy being puzzled, hop on over to www.theeraser.net for more (totally cryptic) album details.

PJ Harvey has a tour DVD.


Norman Rockwell
Shuffleton's Barbershop
1950
The Saturday Evening Post, April 29, 1950 (cover)
Oil on canvas
46 1/4 x 43 in.
The Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

 

SYL and Michael Stipe at Cannes

SYL is in a very non-CBC-like new movie called Shortbus:  

On Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make you Love Me":
from Stylus:

A couple of years ago I read a New York Times feature on the Neptunes written by Sasha Frere-Jones, in which impresario Pharrell Williams revealed what had been inspiring him lately. Of course, it’s old news that those in the hip-hop scene love the tasteful adult contemporary sounds of acts like Phil Collins and Coldplay, so maybe I shouldn't have been too surprised to read Pharrell describe Bonnie Raitt's minor hit "I Can't Make You Love Me," from 1991’s The Luck of the Draw, as "the illest song ever." And yet I had practically forgotten about the tune, which I've had a soft spot for since first hearing it on the radio in eighth grade; despite all its "adult" signifiers, the it offered a sentiment simple enough to make me nod and say, man, that shit's true. (Never mind the fact that the main reason girls didn't love me then was that I barely knew how to approach them.)

Fourteen years later, the straightforwardness of "I Can't Make You Love Me" is still compelling. The song depicts a relationship coming to an end, and Raitt has finally accepted the inevitability of the break-up without resorting to the self-delusions of, for instance, Hoagy Carmichael's "I Get Along Without You Very Well” (in which each "of course I do" comes off as protesting too much). Here, Raitt sees the situation for what it is – unrequited love – and says so directly: "I can't make you love me if you don't / I can't make your heart feel something that it don't." (Songwriters Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin supposedly stole the refrain from the real-life courtroom epiphany of a redneck who'd been arrested for shooting up his presumably diffident girlfriend's car.) But we also sense that it's been a struggle for her to reach that level of clearheaded maturity, which makes it all the more heartbreaking.

To be honest, I haven’t actually heard all that many other Bonnie Raitt songs, but I think it’s fair to say that, despite being her second-biggest hit, “I Can’t Make You Love Me” isn’t what most people consider typical Raitt. It trades the carousing bottleneck blues-guitar sound she made her name on, and which characterizes blue-collar barn-burners like “Something to Talk About,” for the sort of plaintive synth-piano common to drippy ballads of the day and some florid grand-piano fills courtesy of Bruce Hornsby (another hip-hop hero, incidentally). It’s easy, therefore, to be dismissive of the song – its Lite FM veneer allows it to dissolve into the background. But despite Hornsby’s usual showboating style, this arrangement feels appropriately trim and efficient.

After all, the focus here is on the words, which do move beyond the single-minded sentiment embodied in the title. For all of Raitt’s seemingly healthy acceptance, there’s an element of desperation in her desire to make the relationship last one more night, squeezing whatever she can out of it. There are shades of bitterness and resentment, too; first, when she repeatedly forbids her partner to patronize her (as if she knows full well he will), and then in the chorus, when she sings, “I will lay down my heart / And I’ll feel the power / But you won’t.” The offhanded final line has the ring of “I’m just sayin’,” but as any connoisseur of the passive-aggressive knows, that’s merely an excuse to make a dig at him.

The thing about the song that I really marvel at, though, is Raitt’s voice. Again, I’m betraying my ignorance of the woman’s career, but I’ve never gotten the impression that she’s been vaunted specifically for her pipes, since that whiskey-soaked rasp is often taken for granted as part of her lowdown, blues-mama style. But Luck of the Draw came on the heels of her most commercial record to date, Nick of Time, and potentially afforded her the opportunity to stretch. (As it turned out, Luck of the Draw became her best-selling album; in the slim field of musicians whose eleventh album is their most popular, Raitt is joined by Aerosmith and, depending on what you count as a proper release, the Flaming Lips. There are two vocal moments that especially impress me. In the second verse, she suddenly surges to announce, “And I will give up this fight!” which sounds triumphant but also starkly exposes the depths of her pain. And then, during the final rendition of the chorus, she lingers on the word “don’t” until her voice becomes small and quiet. In both cases, she is beautifully clear and controlled, with a pronounced feeling of weary resignation. As far as I’m concerned, if Pharrell truly loves this song, then it can only be for the best; the man’s obviously got great taste.

Celebrity sightings in NYC

 
Last night, Cottingham (JHarris) 

GAME THEORY (BASKETBALL)
When it comes to athletic prowess, don’t believe your eyes.

by MALCOLM GLADWELL

The first player picked in the 1996 National Basketball Association draft was a slender, six-foot guard from Georgetown University named Allen Iverson. Iverson was thrilling. He was lightning quick, and could stop and start on a dime. He would charge toward the basket, twist and turn and writhe through the arms and legs of much taller and heavier men, and somehow find a way to score. In his first season with the Philadelphia 76ers, Iverson was voted the N.B.A.’s Rookie of the Year. In every year since 2000, he has been named to the N.B.A.’s All-Star team. In the 2000-01 season, he finished first in the league in scoring and steals, led his team to the second-best record in the league, and was named, by the country’s sportswriters and broadcasters, basketball’s Most Valuable Player. He is currently in the midst of a four-year, seventy-seven-million-dollar contract. Almost everyone who knows basketball and who watches Iverson play thinks that he’s one of the best players in the game.

But how do we know that we’re watching a great player? That’s an easier question to answer when it comes to, say, golf or tennis, where players compete against one another, under similar circumstances, week after week. Nobody would dispute that Roger Federer is the world’s best tennis player. Baseball is a little more complicated, since it’s a team sport. Still, because the game consists of a sequence of discrete, ritualized encounters between pitcher and hitter, it lends itself to statistical rankings and analysis. Most tasks that professionals perform, though, are surprisingly hard to evaluate. Suppose that we wanted to measure something in the real world, like the relative skill of New York City’s heart surgeons. One obvious way would be to compare the mortality rates of the patients on whom they operate—except that substandard care isn’t necessarily fatal, so a more accurate measure might be how quickly patients get better or how few complications they have after surgery. But recovery time is a function as well of how a patient is treated in the intensive-care unit, which reflects the capabilities not just of the doctor but of the nurses in the I.C.U. So now we have to adjust for nurse quality in our assessment of surgeon quality. We’d also better adjust for how sick the patients were in the first place, and since well-regarded surgeons often treat the most difficult cases, the best surgeons might well have the poorest patient recovery rates. In order to measure something you thought was fairly straightforward, you really have to take into account a series of things that aren’t so straightforward.

Basketball presents many of the same kinds of problems. The fact that Allen Iverson has been one of the league’s most prolific scorers over the past decade, for instance, could mean that he is a brilliant player. It could mean that he’s selfish and takes shots rather than passing the ball to his teammates. It could mean that he plays for a team that races up and down the court and plays so quickly that he has the opportunity to take many more shots than he would on a team that plays more deliberately. Or he might be the equivalent of an average surgeon with a first-rate I.C.U.: maybe his success reflects the fact that everyone else on his team excels at getting rebounds and forcing the other team to turn over the ball. Nor does the number of points that Iverson scores tell us anything about his tendency to do other things that contribute to winning and losing games; it doesn’t tell us how often he makes a mistake and loses the ball to the other team, or commits a foul, or blocks a shot, or rebounds the ball. Figuring whether one basketball player is better than another is a challenge similar to figuring out whether one heart surgeon is better than another: you have to find a way to interpret someone’s individual statistics in the context of the team that they’re on and the task that they are performing.

In “The Wages of Wins” (Stanford; $29.95), the economists David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, and Stacey L. Brook set out to solve the Iverson problem. Weighing the relative value of fouls, rebounds, shots taken, turnovers, and the like, they’ve created an algorithm that, they argue, comes closer than any previous statistical measure to capturing the true value of a basketball player. The algorithm yields what they call a Win Score, because it expresses a player’s worth as the number of wins that his contributions bring to his team. According to their analysis, Iverson’s finest season was in 2004-05, when he was worth ten wins, which made him the thirty-sixth-best player in the league. In the season in which he won the Most Valuable Player award, he was the ninety-first-best player in the league. In his worst season (2003-04), he was the two-hundred-and-twenty-seventh-best player in the league. On average, for his career, he has ranked a hundred and sixteenth. In some years, Iverson has not even been the best player on his own team. Looking at the findings that Berri, Schmidt, and Brook present is enough to make one wonder what exactly basketball experts—coaches, managers, sportswriters—know about basketball.



Basketball experts clearly appreciate basketball. They understand the gestalt of the game, in the way that someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about and watching, say, modern dance develops an understanding of that art form. They’re able to teach and coach and motivate; to make judgments and predictions about a player’s character and resolve and stage of development. But the argument of “The Wages of Wins” is that this kind of expertise has real limitations when it comes to making precise evaluations of individual performance, whether you’re interested in the consistency of football quarterbacks or in testing claims that N.B.A. stars “turn it on” during playoffs. The baseball legend Ty Cobb, the authors point out, had a lifetime batting average of .366, almost thirty points higher than the former San Diego Padres outfielder Tony Gwynn, who had a lifetime batting average of .338:

So Cobb hit safely 37 percent of the time while Gwynn hit safely on 34 percent of his at bats. If all you did was watch these players, could you say who was a better hitter? Can one really tell the difference between 37 percent and 34 percent just staring at the players play? To see the problem with the non-numbers approach to player evaluation, consider that out of every 100 at bats, Cobb got three more hits than Gwynn. That’s it, three hits.


Michael Lewis made a similar argument in his 2003 best-seller, “Moneyball,” about how the so-called sabermetricians have changed the evaluation of talent in baseball. Baseball is sufficiently transparent, though, that the size of the discrepancies between intuitive and statistically aided judgment tends to be relatively modest. If you mistakenly thought that Gwynn was better than Cobb, you were still backing a terrific hitter. But “The Wages of Wins” suggests that when you move into more complex situations, like basketball, the limitations of “seeing” become enormous. Jermaine O’Neal, a center for the Indiana Pacers, finished third in the Most Valuable Player voting in 2004. His Win Score that year put him forty-fourth in the league. In 2004-05, the forward Antoine Walker made as much money as the point guard Jason Kidd, even though Walker produced 0.6 wins for Atlanta and Boston and Kidd produced nearly twenty wins for New Jersey. The Win Score algorithm suggests that Ray Allen has had nearly as good a career as Kobe Bryant, whom many consider the top player in the game, and that the journeyman forward Jerome Williams was actually among the strongest players of his generation.

Most egregious is the story of a young guard for the Chicago Bulls named Ben Gordon. Last season, Gordon finished second in the Rookie of the Year voting and was named the league’s top “sixth man”—that is, the best non-starter—because he averaged an impressive 15.1 points per game in limited playing time. But Gordon rebounds less than he should, turns over the ball frequently, and makes such a low percentage of his shots that, of the N.B.A.’s top thirty-three scorers—that is, players who score at least one point for every two minutes on the floor—Gordon’s Win Score ranked him dead last.

The problem for basketball experts is that, in a situation with many variables, it’s difficult to know how much weight to assign to each variable. Buying a house is agonizing because we look at the size, the location, the back yard, the proximity to local schools, the price, and so on, and we’re unsure which of those things matters most. Assessing heart-attack risk is a notoriously difficult task for similar reasons. A doctor can analyze a dozen different factors. But how much weight should be given to a patient’s cholesterol level relative to his blood pressure? In the face of such complexity, people construct their own arbitrary algorithms—they assume that every factor is of equal importance, or randomly elevate one or two factors for the sake of simplifying matters—and we make mistakes because those arbitrary algorithms are, well, arbitrary.

Berri, Schmidt, and Brook argue that the arbitrary algorithms of basketball experts elevate the number of points a player scores above all other considerations. In one clever piece of research, they analyze the relationship between the statistics of rookies and the number of votes they receive in the All-Rookie Team balloting. If a rookie increases his scoring by ten per cent—regardless of how efficiently he scores those points—the number of votes he’ll get will increase by twenty-three per cent. If he increases his rebounds by ten per cent, the number of votes he’ll get will increase by six per cent. Every other factor, like turnovers, steals, assists, blocked shots, and personal fouls—factors that can have a significant influence on the outcome of a game—seemed to bear no statistical relationship to judgments of merit at all. It’s not even the case that high scorers help their team by drawing more fans. As the authors point out, that’s only true on the road. At home, attendance is primarily a function of games won. Basketball’s decision-makers, it seems, are simply irrational.

It’s hard not to wonder, after reading “The Wages of Wins,” about the other instances in which we defer to the evaluations of experts. Boards of directors vote to pay C.E.O.s tens of millions of dollars, ostensibly because they believe—on the basis of what they have learned over the years by watching other C.E.O.s—that they are worth it. But so what? We see Allen Iverson, over and over again, charge toward the basket, twisting and turning and writhing through a thicket of arms and legs of much taller and heavier men—and all we learn is to appreciate twisting and turning and writhing. We become dance critics, blind to Iverson’s dismal shooting percentage and his excessive turnovers, blind to the reality that the Philadelphia 76ers would be better off without him. “One can play basketball,” the authors conclude. “One can watch basketball. One can both play and watch basketball for a thousand years. If you do not systematically track what the players do, and then uncover the statistical relationship between these actions and wins, you will never know why teams win and why they lose.”

MUSIC VIDEOS I LIKE (FOR THE LONG WEEKEND)


Feist


Beck


Michael Stipe and Coldplay


Beck - Lost Cause


R.E.M. - live - reunited with Bill Berry (on bass)


U2


R.E.M.


Neil Young


Pearl Jam


Neil Young


R.E.M.


The Strokes


Iron & Wine


The Flaming Lips


Broken Social Scene


Beck


Michael Stipe's beautiful day


R.E.M. and U2

MISCELLANEOUS


Red clay time.

It’s been featured on TV and in art books. That painting of a black sailor standing before a clipper ship, circa 1776. But now a small problem...



British men are healthier than American men. Why?

Despite being richer, people are not happier than in earlier times. Only government can solve the problem, with a more caring attitude. And more therapists...

The most exciting baseball pitcher to arrive in the Big Leagues in years.

A 'Da Vinci Code' That Takes Longer to Watch Than Read By A. O. SCOTT, NY Times
CANNES, France, May 17 —

It seems you can't open a movie these days without provoking some kind of culture war skirmish, at least in the conflict-hungry media. Recent history — "The Passion of the Christ," "The Chronicles of Narnia" — suggests that such controversy, especially if religion is involved, can be very good business. "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence, arrives trailing more than its share of theological and historical disputation.

The arguments about the movie and the book that inspired it have not been going on for millennia — it only feels that way — but part of Columbia Pictures' ingenious marketing strategy has been to encourage months of debate and speculation while not allowing anyone to see the picture until the very last minute. Thus we have had a flood of think pieces on everything from Jesus and Mary Magdalene's prenuptial agreement to the secret recipes of Opus Dei, and vexed, urgent questions have been raised: Is Christianity a conspiracy? Is "The Da Vinci Code" a dangerous, anti-Christian hoax? What's up with Tom Hanks's hair?

Luckily I lack the learning to address the first two questions. As for the third, well, it's long, and so is the movie. "The Da Vinci Code," which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, is one of the few screen versions of a book that may take longer to watch than to read. (Curiously enough Mr. Howard accomplished a similar feat with "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a few years back.)

To their credit the director and his screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (who collaborated with Mr. Howard on "Cinderella Man" and "A Beautiful Mind"), have streamlined Mr. Brown's story and refrained from trying to capture his, um, prose style. "Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino with long white hair." Such language — note the exquisite "almost" and the fastidious tucking of the "which" after the preposition — can live only on the page.

To be fair, though, Mr. Goldsman conjures up some pretty ripe dialogue all on his own. "Your God does not forgive murderers," Audrey Tautou hisses to Paul Bettany (who play a less than enormous, short-haired albino). "He burns them!"

Theology aside, this remark can serve as a reminder that "The Da Vinci Code" is above all a murder mystery. And as such, once it gets going, Mr. Howard's movie has its pleasures. He and Mr. Goldsman have deftly rearranged some elements of the plot (I'm going to be careful here not to spoil anything), unkinking a few over-elaborate twists and introducing others that keep the action moving along.

Hans Zimmer's appropriately overwrought score, pop-romantic with some liturgical decoration, glides us through scenes that might otherwise be talky and inert. The movie does, however, take a while to accelerate, popping the clutch and leaving rubber on the road as it tries to establish who is who, what they're doing and why.

Briefly stated: An old man (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is killed after hours in the Louvre, shot in the stomach, almost inconceivably, by a hooded assailant. Meanwhile Robert Langdon (Mr. Hanks), a professor of religious symbology at Harvard, is delivering a lecture and signing books for fans. He is summoned to the crime scene by Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French policemen who seems very grouchy, perhaps because his department has cut back on its shaving cream budget.

Soon Langdon is joined by Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer and also — Bezu Fache! — the murder victim's granddaughter. Grandpa, it seems, knew some very important secrets, which if they were ever revealed might shake the foundations of Western Christianity, in particular the Roman Catholic Church, one of whose bishops, the portly Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) is at this very moment flying on an airplane. Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.

A chase, as Bezu's American colleagues might put it, ensues. It skids through the nighttime streets of Paris and eventually to London the next morning, with side trips to a Roman castle and a chateau in the French countryside. Along the way the film pauses to admire various knickknacks and art works, and to flash back, in desaturated color, to traumatic events in the childhoods of various characters (Langdon falls down a well; Sophie's parents are killed in a car accident; Silas stabs his abusive father).

There are also glances further back into history, to Constantine's conversion, to the suppression of the Knights Templar and to that time in London when people walked around wearing powdered wigs.

Through it all Mr. Hanks and Ms. Tautou stand around looking puzzled, leaving their reservoirs of charm scrupulously untapped. Mr. Hanks twists his mouth in what appears to be an expression of professorial skepticism and otherwise coasts on his easy, subdued geniality. Ms. Tautou, determined to ensure that her name will never again come up in an Internet search for the word "gamine," affects a look of worried fatigue.

In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it's just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

But thank the deity of your choice for Ian McKellen, who shows up just in time to give "The Da Vinci Code" a jolt of mischievous life. He plays a wealthy and eccentric British scholar named Leigh Teabing. (I will give Mr. Brown this much: he's good at names. If I ever have twins or French poodles, I'm calling them Bezu and Teabing for sure.)

Hobbling around on two canes, growling at his manservant, Remy (Jean-Yves Berteloot), Teabing is twinkly and avuncular one moment, barking mad the next. Sir Ian, rattling on about Italian paintings and medieval statues, seems to be having the time of his life, and his high spirits serve as something of a rebuke to the filmmakers, who should be having and providing a lot more fun.

Teabing, who strolls out of English detective fiction by way of a Tintin comic, is a marvelously absurd creature, and Sir Ian, in the best tradition of British actors slumming and hamming through American movies, gives a performance in which high conviction is indistinguishable from high camp. A little more of this — a more acute sense of its own ridiculousness — would have given "The Da Vinci Code" some of the lightness of an old-fashioned, jet-setting Euro-thriller.

But of course movies of that ilk rarely deal with issues like the divinity of Jesus or the search for the Holy Grail. In the cinema such matters are best left to Monty Python. In any case Mr. Howard and Mr. Goldsman handle the supposedly provocative material in Mr. Brown's book with kid gloves, settling on an utterly safe set of conclusions about faith and its history, presented with the usual dull sententiousness. So I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.

Speaking of movies, I wonder if Florida was placed in this picture strategically:



Check this out to see architecture that only exists in British Columbia. Hit refresh.

And if It's a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?
Chances are you don't have any friends named Nevaeh. Chances are today's toddlers will. In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.

The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls' names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.

Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional. Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward. The name has hit a cultural nerve with its religious overtones, creative twist and fashionable final "ah" sound. It has risen most quickly among blacks but is also popular with evangelical Christians, who have helped propel other religious names like Grace (ranked 14th) up the charts, experts say. By contrast, the name Heaven is ranked 245th.

"Of the last couple of generations, Nevaeh is certainly the most remarkable phenomenon in baby names," said Cleveland Kent Evans, president of the American Name Society and a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska.

The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. "Heaven spelled backwards," he said. Among the many inspired by Mr. Sandoval's appearance was Jade San Luis, who named his first daughter Nevaeh two years later. "It felt original," said Mr. San Luis, 26, of Cerritos, Calif. "Now, not anymore." Today Mr. Sandoval is introduced to and photographed with baby Nevaehs all the time. His own Nevaeh, now 6, skateboards and, when introduced, pipes up that her name is Heaven spelled backward. Does she understand the meaning of heaven? Mr. Sandoval replied, "She knows that is where her grandmother is."

So true:
from fittedsweats.blogspot.com

You and Me Against The World
I often wonder how my life would be different if I weren't exposed to the music of Helen Reddy and Anne "Little Snowbird" Murray at such a young age. I think the pangs of massive depression I experience on occasion would all but disappear. I got a Helen Reddy Greatest Hits CD in the mail recently -- it is released today, as it has been about every 3-5 years for the last 30.

Pretty much every song depicts some kind of struggle that as a 5 year-old, I didn't know quite what to do with. All I know is it made me sad. And that it was on the stereos of any of my mom's friends who were divorced and whom occasionally came over and chainsmoked and drank coffee at our kitchen table for 1 to 16 hours at a time. Maybe people who were more savvy, say, anyone over about 15, knew what women's lib was, and could sort of contextualize Reddy's lyrics in the "cultural mosaic" of the 1970s. (I would never use this term, by the way) All I knew about women's lib in the 1970s was the show Maude. And that everyone on it was pissed off. The only other things I really remember about the 70s is that sharks were really popular. And that everything in the 1970s except the sky was burnt orange. Pants, sofas, cars, coffee cups. Unless of course it was plaid. And not a happy plaid. It was a plaid resembling what might be at the bottom of Lindsay Lohan's toilet after a night of heavy boozing. A-frame houses were really popular. So was beer. So was divorce, which my parents never did, but anytime the songs below came on, I pretty much felt it was coming. Here's a brief look at the Reddy repetoire:


"I am Woman" -- all I knew about this song was that women--and the only one I knew at the time was my mom--were being fucked with, and had to rise up "in numbers too big to ignore." Thanks a lot, world.

"You and Me Against the World" -- Speaking of the world, me and mom have no fucking allies anywhere. We're just a couple of fire hydrants that the world, and, most likely the entire universe likes to relieve themselves upon.

"Leave Me Alone" -- some guy from Tennessee raped a woman, now she is nuts.

"Ain't no Way to Treat a Lady" --detecting a theme yet? Again, a woman is being treated poorly. A relationship is ending.

Then the Anne Murray songs came on. Try listening to "You Needed Me" once without wanting to drink a whole bottle of bar rail brandy and doing a swandive off an overpass into rush hour traffic. Then hoping that the EMTs could save you so that you could pour a bottle of arsenic into each of your eyeballs and then wrestle a a grizzly bear with rabies. Helen Reddy is fucking DEVO compared to Anne Murray.

And it is not just women singers. Try Gordon Lightfoot, or Paul Williams (he was the 4'6" guy on Hollywood Squares and Muppet shows) or Leo Sayer. Leo Sayer is fucking satan. Who were the A&R people at record labels in the 1970s? And what type of meds were they on? The worst is Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. (even though "too good to be true" is alright) Frankie Valli is the kid who gets beaten every day in gym class. And it is not because he is different or cool. It is because he is annoying as shit. And people who bitch about music and lyrics today should really go and spend a little time with these classics. I would sooner fill my kid's sippy cup with crunk juice than play one second of Anne Murray to him. It is pornography in my household. He will not know it exists. Then, if he wants to rebel in later life, his wild and dangerous act will be to purchase a split-level ranch home and get some burnt orange berber carpetting and blast Helen Reddy or Anne Murray. I will of course begin smoking crack. Which I intend to do, either way, at age 65.
END

Just finished this excellent, excellent book.

Avoiding a Da Vinci backlash.

SCAN THIS BOOK.

MUSIC

Beirut - Gulag Orkestar

MP3 --> Postcards From Italy

BOOKS

What are two of the best books written by Americans in the last 25 years?

Underworld ReviewMeridican Review

Dylan Coyle, who is 24, studies music at San Francisco State University. He has been a vegan for five years and is a careful consumer. Last year, somebody asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he said he wanted a pair of Blackspot shoes. This was a considered choice: the shoes are made from "vegetarian materials," including organic hemp and recycled tires. They are manufactured in a "safe, comfortable union factory" in Portugal and sold by the creators of Adbusters, a magazine best known for its withering critique of the advertising business and of mindless materialism. Instead of a logo — or as its logo — the Blackspot is decorated with a rough circle meant to suggest the obliteration of branding; the shoe Coyle wanted is called the Unswoosher, in an unsubtle reference to the most famous shoe logo of all, Nike's swoosh.

The makers of the Blackspot explain their mission as being "to establish a worldwide consumer cooperative and to reassert consumer sovereignty over capitalism." The first Blackspot shoe, a low-top sneaker, was released in August 2004 and has sold more than 13,700 pairs; the bootlike Unswoosher appeared in March 2005 and is selling at a faster pace (6,000 so far) than the original sneaker, according to the company. This is a pretty good showing, considering the underlying challenge: that those most sympathetic to the mission might also be those most hostile to the idea of a brand as an antidote to the ills of consumer culture. In a sense, the Blackspot is designed for those most cynical about consumerism.

Consumer cynicism is a topic of great interest to Amanda Helm, an instructor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. In connection with her research, she has conducted in-depth interviews with about two dozen consumers on the subject and has looked specifically at fans of Adbusters. Some of her preliminary findings were summarized in a 2004 article in the journal Advances in Consumer Research.

One thing she has encountered is a desire among cynical consumers not simply to avoid companies and brands they dislike but also to punish them. At the far end of the cynical-consumer continuum, this might mean defacing advertisements, but for most it plays out differently. For example, shopping at Target because you can't stand Wal-Mart — Wal-Mart came up a lot, Helm says — thus denying dollars to the disfavored company. The marketplace itself is not the enemy in this situation; it's a tool for expressing discontent. Thus one of Helm's most interesting findings: that the cynical consumers who are her main focus "demonstrated very strong brand loyalty to the few companies they could trust."

Coyle, the San Francisco student, is an interesting example. That Christmas-list request came from Outlaw Consulting, a trend-research firm. Outlaw first found Coyle several years ago, when one of its representatives approached him in a mall outside a Hot Topic. "You and your girlfriend look like hip people," Coyle recalls being told, before getting a little cash in exchange for their opinions about some brand. Thus Coyle became a member of Outlaw's "trendsetter panel," which entailed answering questions about brands and products from time to time in exchange for small sums.

When the Christmas-list request came, he thought it would be interesting to inject the Blackspot into the corporate bloodstream. (He did get a pair, but for his birthday, and not from Outlaw.) Partly because of Coyle's wish, Outlaw included the Blackspot in a list of things that appealed to its "trendsetter panel," and this was followed by a story in Forbes suggesting that the Blackspot is one of the "hottest urban brands." According to a newsletter from Adbusters, that (somewhat critical) Forbes article "netted us another new retailer . . .and many, many Web sales." Coyle's wish was honest, but the situation was more or less what he'd hoped for. Challenging consumerism by participating in it might sound like an uphill battle, but Coyle says he thinks it can work; he is, in other words, quite optimistic.

Rain in Toronto lately. Reminds me of Vancouver...in November.

Women like men who like kids, and they can spot this in men with uncanny accuracy. Yet another evolved trait of the choosy sex...

You’d never have been stupid enough to fall for the Nigerian email scam, would you? Okay, but how about the next scam? How sure are you?...

FREAKONOMICS

A Star Is Made
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.

What might account for this anomaly? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above.

Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in "none of the above." He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. "With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20," Ericsson recalls. "He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers."

This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

"I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, "is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require "talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.

And it would probably pay to rethink a great deal of medical training. Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school. Surgeons, however, are an exception. That's because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific goal-setting.

The same is not true for, say, a mammographer. When a doctor reads a mammogram, she doesn't know for certain if there is breast cancer or not. She will be able to know only weeks later, from a biopsy, or years later, when no cancer develops. Without meaningful feedback, a doctor's ability actually deteriorates over time. Ericsson suggests a new mode of training. "Imagine a situation where a doctor could diagnose mammograms from old cases and immediately get feedback of the correct diagnosis for each case," he says. "Working in such a learning environment, a doctor might see more different cancers in one day than in a couple of years of normal practice."

If nothing else, the insights of Ericsson and his Expert Performance compatriots can explain the riddle of why so many elite soccer players are born early in the year. Since youth sports are organized by age bracket, teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, the cutoff date is Dec. 31. So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to have been born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick? He may be mistaking maturity for ability, but he is making his selection nonetheless. And once chosen, those January-born players are the ones who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice and the feedback — to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem — that will turn them into elites.

This may be bad news if you are a rabid soccer mom or dad whose child was born in the wrong month. But keep practicing: a child conceived on this Sunday in early May would probably be born by next February, giving you a considerably better chance of watching the 2030 World Cup from the family section.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." More information on the research behind this column is at www.freakonomics.com.

SENTENCED
Posted 2006-05-08

Against the background of the chronic miasma of fear, tension, suffering, and sporadic but horrifying violence that envelops the world on account of Islamist fundamentalist terrorism and the reaction to it, the fate of Zacarias Moussaoui, the self-proclaimed, wanted-to-be, wasn’t-there twentieth hijacker of September 11, 2001, is of relatively small moment. Nevertheless, a debt of gratitude is owed to the nine men and three women of the jury in Alexandria, Virginia, that, last Wednesday, declined to direct that Moussaoui be put to death. The calm seriousness with which these anonymous citizens approached their task has reassured many of us that our federal criminal-court system, even in the face of the extraordinary pressures generated by the exigencies (and the politics) of the “war on terror,” remains capable of rendering justice in which sternness is guided by wisdom. And the jurors’ civic courage has probably made all of us a little—only a little, but still—safer.

Moussaoui’s case was a murky one. Of his criminal intentions there was never any doubt. He had toured the familiar stops on the Al Qaeda road: alienation and anomie in Europe, in his case France; fundamentalist indoctrination at the Finsbury Park mosque, in London; instruction at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan; flight training in Oklahoma and Minnesota; wire transfers of cash from abroad. But he was unstable and unreliable, and his connections to the specifics of the 9/11 plot were tenuous or nonexistent. On the day of the attacks, he was in jail awaiting deportation, having been arrested nearly a month earlier after a suspicious flight instructor tipped off the Minneapolis office of the F.B.I. His story kept changing in the course of nearly four and a half years of court proceedings, and he tried more than once to plead guilty to the conspiracy charges against him. Finally, in April of 2005, the presiding judge, Leonie Brinkema (who by all accounts conducted the case in an exemplary manner), accepted his pleas. What kept the trial going for another year was the government’s fixation on pursuing the death penalty.

One need feel no sympathy for Moussaoui to suspect that this fixation had more to do with domestic politics and conservative ideology than with justice per se. The familiar arguments against the death penalty apply to cases like his, some with special force. Whether or not the prospect of lethal injection deters ordinary murder—a questionable proposition at best—it is perverse to imagine that it can deter the sort of murder of which faith-based ritual suicide is an integral part. And any execution, whatever the crime it is intended to punish, degrades the society that decrees it and demoralizes the particular government employees who are assigned to carry it out. A criminal may deserve to die, may deserve even to die in terror and agony; but no civil servant deserves to be made to participate in the premeditated killing of a person who, however wicked, is on the day of execution a helpless and frightened human being.

The trial and punishment of any international terrorist occurs in a global political context that darkens another of the stains on capital punishment: the company it keeps. In 2005, according to Amnesty International, ninety-four per cent of all known executions took place in four countries. One, China, is a Communist Party dictatorship. Two others, Iran and Saudi Arabia, are Islamist autocracies. The fourth is the United States. In the democracies of Europe, American capital punishment is a source of puzzlement and disgust. But, even among Europeans who understand that its prevalence here is a function less of bloodthirstiness than of states’ rights, the execution of a European national (Moussaoui is a French citizen of Moroccan descent) in a federal death chamber for a crime in which he had no direct role would have wreaked new and unnecessary damage on popular and perhaps governmental support for America’s anti-terrorist efforts. Moral equivalences, however false, would have been drawn, and European coöperation, which is indispensable, would have been ever so slightly undermined. The Alexandria jurors, whatever their intention, chose not to inflict that wound on their country.

After the sentence was pronounced, MSNBC trotted out a bullet-headed talk-radio host to sneer at “the sissification of America.” But if it was mercy he was deploring his indignation was misplaced. “Life imprisonment without possibility of parole” hardly begins to describe the bleakness that awaits Moussaoui. He will be taken to the federal Supermax prison, in Florence, Colorado. He will be locked in a featureless, soundproof concrete box, seven feet by twelve. There he will remain—in solitary confinement, with scarcely a glimpse of sky and none of greenery, and no contact with other living things besides guards and insects—until he dies. The cruelty of this is terrible indeed, and any satisfaction it brings must be mixed with pity and even with shame.

The Moussaoui case could have been settled long ago, with the same result and the same horrific sentence, had it not been for the government’s singleminded pursuit of death. That pursuit is an apt metaphor for the wrongheadedness of what the Administration still calls, despite occasional spasms of discomfort with the term, the war on terror. The campaign against Al Qaeda in particular and Islamist terrorism in general plainly has aspects of war-fighting, but it has equally important aspects of crime-fighting and arguably more important aspects of political and ideological struggle. For the Administration, the trope of war has proved useful both for mobilizing the government and for intimidating domestic opposition, winning elections, and aggrandizing executive power. But it has also abetted the rush to the strategic disaster of Iraq and the moral disasters of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and torture. Finally, it has conferred on criminal terrorists a status they desperately want but do not deserve. Bin Laden wished for war—war between Islam and the infidels—and war is what we gave him; Moussaoui wished for martyrdom, and our government would have granted that wish, too, if not for the jury in Virginia.

“The thought that U.S. jurors are capable of such muddled thinking is horrifying,” the usually more sensible Daily News editorialized the day of the sentencing. “Any role in 9/11, any foreknowledge of the attacks, any aid and comfort given Al Qaeda is grounds for death. As too many forget, and as some on this jury obviously forgot, this is war.” Is it? Moussaoui certainly thinks so. From the following morning’s report in the Times: When Robert A. Spencer, the chief prosecutor, objected that it was inappropriate for Mr. Moussaoui to make a political speech, Judge Brinkema agreed. Mr. Moussaoui continued, nonetheless, saying, “You have branded me a terrorist or criminal.” In fact, he said, he was a soldier in the Islamic cause. In the courtroom, there was no war and there was no soldier. There was a criminal and a terrorist, and there was law and justice. — Hendrik Hertzberg

On MIIII