HAPPINESS

Well, the house we've been living in for 42 months sold last night. We'll be out by February 1st. A little daunting, a little liberating. I'll definitely miss it.

"Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness." - Robertson Davies

We're all big babies. “My grandfather was born in 1888 and he didn’t have a lifestyle. He didn’t need one: he had a life.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/22/svbabies22.xml&site=6&page=0

Conrad Black’s problems, his self-destructiveness, can be traced back – to what? The loveless childhood? The academic failure?...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-525-2415315-525,00.html

Iraq has seen the collapse of the authority of the state, says Martin Amis, and the collapse of the value of human life.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2412302,00.html


ON BORAT:

As Borat Sagdiyev, a visitor from Kazakhstan, Sacha Baron Cohen is a balls-out comic revolutionary, right up there with Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Dr. Strangelove, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Cartman at exposing the ignorant, racist, misogynist, gay-bashing, Jew-hating, gun-loving, warmongering heart of America. Borat will make you laugh till it hurts, and you'll still beg for more.

Borat, subtitled Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, sneaks up on you. Or it will if you're not part of the cult spawned when HBO premiered Cohen's Da Ali G Show in 2003, and Americans first encountered the inspired British comic who hid behind a series of alter egos. His gangsta journalist Ali G tricked politicians (Newt Gingrich, Boutros Boutros-Ghali) and pundits (Gore Vidal, Andy Rooney) into embarrassing and revealing interviews. His Bruno, a gay fashion commentator with a Nazi fetish, claimed to be the voice of Austrian youth. And then there's Borat, the smiling, shamelessly offensive TV reporter from Kazakhstan who takes pride that his sister is "the number-four prostitute in all of country" where a ritual -- "the running of the Jew" -- is celebrated every year ("There you go, kids, crush that Jew egg before it hatches"). Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world, but Cohen is counting on the fact that most Americans know squat about it or him. For the record, Cohen, 35, is nothing like Borat, Bruno, Ali G or Jean Girard, the gay French Formula Un driver who kissed Will Ferrell full on the lips in Talladega Nights. Cohen is a Cambridge scholar from a middle-class and devout Jewish family. Their son, the second of three, wrote his history thesis on the role of Jews in the American civil-rights movement. Not since Little Red Riding Hood have the unsuspecting been duped so hilariously by a big, bad wolf in sheep's clothing.

Borat is such a mind-blowing comedy classic in the making (seeing it once is just not enough) that Cohen's cover will surely be blown after the movie opens. But during the time it took Cohen to put Borat's journey on film with director Larry Charles (he debuted with Bob Dylan's Masked and Anonymous, a title that would also fit snugly here), people lined up, signed releases and bought the scam: that Borat, with his pubic patch of a mustache, his unwashed gray suit, his butchered English and his blatant bigotry, really was a roving Kazakh citizen doing a documentary on American culture.

OK, not everyone bought it. The government of Kazakhstan was appalled at seeing its country depicted as a place where men treat women as slaves, screw their sisters and swill wine made from horse piss. No wonder the Kazakh scenes were shot in Romania. "Not too much rape -- and humans only," Borat helpfully tells a friend as he leaves his village for America, carrying "a vial of gypsy tears to prevent AIDS." Cohen makes primo slapstick out of all the silliness, but it's his merciless knack for Swiftian satire that gives Borat its remarkable staying power. There's something cathartic about laughs that stick in your throat.

Don't be fooled by how this demonically devious mockumentary looks (as wonderfully tacky as an $18 million budget will allow) or how it's organized (clever masked as haphazard), the film doesn't waste one of its eighty-nine minutes. The script that Cohen wrote with Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham and Dan Mazer tells us that Borat has a hidden agenda for coming to America. He's seen Baywatch and wants to take the "virgin" Pamela Anderson as his bride. When Borat catches his fat producer Azamat (Ken Davitian) jerking off to photos of Pam, he engages the hairy beast in a naked ass-to-mouth wrestling match that could set back screen nudity for decades. If you don't upchuck, the scene is uproarious and kicks off Borat's journey across America in an ice-cream truck (don't ask) to find his muse.

Will Borat get his "sexytime" with Pam and have his hoped-for "romantic explosion" on her stomach? I'll never tell. And I don't have to, because the core of this movie -- its raison d'etre -- is who and what Borat encounters along the way. No aspect of prejudice, hypocrisy, arrogance and stupidity is overlooked.

At a rodeo in Virginia, Borat is greeted with cheers when he tells the crowd, "We support your war of terror," and then hypes them up more by longing for the day that "Premier George W. Bush will drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq."

At a gun store he asks the owner for the best gun for killing Jews and is told that a 9mm or a 45 will do just fine. He settles for a live bear. Terrified at having to sleep overnight at the home of a kindly Jewish couple, Borat believes that two cockroaches crawling under the door are the Jews transformed. To make them go away, he throws money at them. And so it goes, with Borat's antics extending to a frat-boy boozefest, a Pentecostal church rally, a classy dinner party down South in which he is taught the formal art of toilet training and a confab with feminists who seem startled by the well-known fact in Kazakhstan that the brain of a woman is the size of a squirrel's. On the debit side, the attempt to snatch Anderson at a book-signing feels staged, as if the movie had suffered a brush with Hollywood. But the brush is quick and far from fatal. Cohen's total immersion in his character is a wonder to behold. If Oscar voters have any sense, they recognize his performance for what it is: a tour de force that sets off comic and cosmic explosions in your head. You won't know what outrageous fun is until you see Borat. High-five!


THE PRESTIGE
There are nifty tricks galore up the sumptuous sleeve of this offbeat and wildly entertaining thriller. But I won't spoil them. You can safely know this: Hugh Jackman as personality-plus Robert Angier and Christian Bale as cool technician Alfred Borden are turn-of-the-twentieth-century magicians out to beat the other at his own devious game. In The Illusionist, Edward Norton had to work alone. Jackman and Bale make a mind-bending team. Special props to Bale, whose award-bait tour de force will spin your head around. At the helm is Memento director Christopher Nolan, who teamed up with his brother Jonathan to add fresh twists to the novel by Christopher Priest. These Nolans are not to be trusted, but they sure make it fun to be fooled. Scarlett Johansson plays a sexy assistant, first to Robert and then Alfred. Everyone is focused on an illusion (The Transported Man) cooked up by electricity whiz Nikola Tesla (yes, that is David Bowie, and he's mesmerizing). Michael Caine steals all his scenes as Cutter, the insider who drops teasing hints about how every trick has three acts: the Pledge that draws you in, the Turn that moves you out of the ordinary and the Prestige, where you can't believe your eyes. Nolan directs the film exactly like a great trick, so you want to see it again the second it's over. I'd call that wicked clever.

Oscars Create New Truman Capote Biopic Category
October 27, 2006
LOS ANGELES—The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences announced today the introduction of a new Oscar category honoring the Truman Capote–themed feature film genre. "We are now able to honor excellence in the emerging field of Capote-inspired filmmaking," said Academy president Sid Ganis, referring to the new film Infamous, as well as such upcoming features as 20th Century Fox's Truman, Paramount's Truman Capote, Universal's Truman Capote, Jr., DreamWorks' animated Truman And The Big Black And White Ball, and Columbia's road picture Harper & Tru. Warner Bros.' Goin' Capote, scheduled for a Thanksgiving release, stars Oscar hopeful Jimmy Fallon in what many are calling his most understated role yet

Kenny Rogers Denies Cheatin' During World Series

Country vocalist Kenny Rogers repeatedly and vehemently denied rumors that he engaged in cheatin' behavior during Game 2 of the World Series Sunday night, which he maintains he watched on TV at his friend Randy's house across town despite anonymous eyewitnesses placing him at the Lincoln Park Motor Inn with an unknown red-haired woman. "C'mon, honey, you have to believe in me, here," Rogers said from the front lawn of his estate while dodging clothing and personal possessions thrown at him from the second-floor windows of his house by Wanda Miller, his wife of nine years. "I had a few beers and, you know, decided to take my time getting home, is all. Honey?" Suspicion initially settled on Rogers when a visual inspection seemed to reveal a "tacky" stain on the multiple-Grammy-award winner's hands.

Sudan Passes Campaign-Finance Reform

KHARTOUM, SUDAN—In what is being hailed as a major step toward making presidential contests more fair and equal, the Sudanese legislature approved sweeping campaign-finance reform Monday, passing a bill limiting all candidates to 500,000 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition.

"It is not fair that certain individuals vying for the presidency should hold a large advantage over others," said Sen. Nyala Uwayi (L-Atbara), co-sponsor of the Khandaq-Uwayi Campaign Finance Act. "Why should I have a better shot at becoming president just because I have twice as many AK-47 Kalishnikov assault rifles as my opponent? In a fair system, everyone should have the same chance to seize power."

In addition to restricting ammunition, the Khandaq-Uwayi Campaign Finance Act sets strict caps on private contributions from desert warlords, limiting donations to three Light Anti-Tank Weapons or one Optical Wire-Guided Anti-Aircraft Missile per warlord. Under the new law, candidates who accept more than the allotted weaponry will be subject to fines and/or beheading.

The act also prohibits incumbents from courting influential lobbyists with special favors and gifts. This provision comes in response to last month's revelation that in 1996, president Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir accepted a T-72 Main Battle Tank from the powerful southern warlord Kafia al-Nahud in exchange for an overnight stay in the presidential harem. The tank would later play a key role in al-Bashir's successful defense against attacks from presidential challenger Talawdi Waw of the Sudanese People's Liberation Party.

"This sort of campaign-finance reform was long overdue here in the Sudan," Sen. Abache Bor (K-Nasir) said. "Obviously, it's important that a candidate be well-armed, but that shouldn't be the sole determining factor in a fight for public office. A presidential contest should be about more than who has the biggest war chest."

HOUSING

The median price of a new home plunged in September by the largest amount in more than 35 years, even as the pace of sales rebounded for a second month.

This is only in the US unfortunately.



WHY WE HATE THE ST. LOUIS CARDINALS

The St. Louis Cardinals reached the World Series thanks to the worst hitter in the National League. Yadier Molina, whose .216 batting average was dead last among NL regulars, launched a tie-breaking blast to beat the Mets in Game 7 of the NLCS, joining Bucky Dent and Francisco Cabrera as the unlikeliest of October heroes. How fitting that such a lowly player should lead these Cardinals to victory. With a regular-season record of 83 and 78, St. Louis is the second-worst World Series participant in history. Now, after their 5-0 victory over Detroit in Tuesday night's Game 3, they're two wins away from becoming baseball's weakest World Champion ever.

Americans love an underdog, right? Not this time. On message boards and in the newspapers, the sentiment about the Cards' NLCS victory ranged from eye-rolling disdain to outright disgust. In one chat room I frequent, somebody posted "Tigers in 4" before Molina had finished circling the bases. "Wow, is the National League pathetic that it could produce this team as its representative," cringed blogger Scott Long at the Baseball Toaster. USA Today's World Series handicappers were equally scornful, suggesting that the Tigers' biggest challenge against the Cardinals would be "keeping a straight face."

Improbable championship runs inspire delight in other sports—think March Madness—but not in baseball. That's partly because upsets are so at odds with the game's tradition. In its first 70 or so years, before the advent of divisional play, baseball produced only two real postseason shockers: the New York Giants' sweep of the invincible Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series, and the Chicago White Sox's upending of the 1906 Chicago Cubs, whose .763 winning percentage remains the best of all-time. In nearly every other year, the series paired two pretty evenly matched teams, and since each boasted the best record in its league, none could be characterized as a huge underdog. Flukes simply weren't possible, and a championship won on the field was inherently credible.

Today, the postseason tournament consists of eight teams of varying degrees of quality. Nondescript ballclubs crash the bracket every season, and once inside they're apt to make trouble. At least one of the wild card teams has made the World Series five years running. The Cardinals are a division winner, but their presence in the World Series is still a fluke.

St. Louis' surprising run seems particularly galling now because this era of playoff randomness coincides with the height of baseball's statistical age. While random chance governs the sport from game to game, the opposite is true on a season-long level. The gradual accretion of outcomes—pitch after pitch, at-bat after at-bat, game after game—yields a deep body of evidence about which teams and players are the best. By the end of the season, we know not only who's more valuable, but by how much. And Yadier Molina isn't valuable.

Stat-centric analysis holds such sway over fans and sportswriters that when it clashes with the outcomes on the field, we tend to sneer at the outcomes. Next to the rich trove of data we've acquired throughout the season, a seven-game series seems like a ridiculously crude instrument for determining the best team. The Cardinals' October accomplishments, however stirring, don't seem as believable as those recorded by better teams over the long haul. I'm a huge Cardinals fan, and I still can't convince myself that they're the best team in baseball.

But there's another way to look at this. We could view the Cards as a bunch of guys who made themselves better than their numerical profiles—who surpassed their limitations when it mattered most. That's how we viewed George Mason last spring, when it beat a vastly superior UConn team to make the Final Four. All but the sourest fans embraced those upstarts.

The "underdog" storyline may fly in the face of baseball tradition, and it may violate every principle of sabermetrics. But ballplayers are people, not Strat-O-Matic cards. They have the capacity to make adjustments, and—even if only for a few games—raise their level of play. The results might not be reproducible, nor sustainable over the long haul. But this isn't the long haul. This is October, the month when random chance beats certainty into submission.

Besides, don't we watch sports in the hope of seeing something unexpected? The St. Louis Cardinals may not be the best team in baseball, but if they can overcome their own foibles and beat the Tigers two more times, they will be the most improbable World Champions of all time. If you can't find something to celebrate in that—well, there's always Strat-O-Matic.

THE PHYSICS OF BASEBALL'S MOST POPULAR ILLEGAL PITCHES

Detroit's Kenny Rogers may not have been playing by the rules when he pitched his team to victory in Game 2 of the World Series on Sunday. Television footage showed some goopy black stuff smeared on Rogers' palm as he started the game. (Video footage shows similar stuff on his hand during his previous postseason starts.) Questioned later, Rogers said the stuff was "a big clump of dirt" that he used to get a better grip. How might the goop have given him an edge?

It depends on the goop. To be effective, a hurler has to vary the speed and movement of his pitches. He can do this legally by changing his grip on the ball and the spin he creates when he throws it. A pitcher who's willing to break the rules can create other effects by doctoring the surface of the ball. There are three basic techniques: He can scuff the ball, moisten it, or make it sticky.

To scuff a ball, the pitcher marks one side with whatever's handy. (Some pitchers rub the ball against the ground or grate it on a sharpened belt buckle. Joe Niekro was caught with an emery board and a square of sandpaper stuck to his finger.) The pitcher then has to throw the ball in such a way that the scuffed side stays in one place as the ball travels toward the plate. That creates unusual turbulence and can force it to swerve in one direction. (If the scuffed side spins, its effect on the air gets spread out and won't do much at all.) It's possible that Rogers used the goop on his hand to scuff up or alter the surface of the ball, but engineers who study pitching say it would take a lot of schmutz to get a useful effect. Cheaters who don't scuff can throw the "spitter" instead. By lubricating the ball—with saliva, Vaseline, hair grease, or something else—the pitcher can throw a pitch that slides off his fingers without generating too much backspin. A greased-up pitch behaves kind of like a split-fingered fastball—it drops to the ground faster than a typical pitch. If Rogers had wet, slippery mud or clay on his hand, he might have been moistening up his pitches.

One Cardinals player suspected that Rogers had a sticky substance called pine tar on his hand. What advantage would sticky fingers provide? If a pitcher makes the ball sticky—or if he makes his fingers sticky—he might be able to get a tighter grip and throw the ball with more spin. A fastball with more backspin would stay up longer; a curveball with more spin would have a larger break.

Many people in baseball view doctoring with pine tar as a minor offense, at least compared with throwing scuffed balls and spitters. In 1988, the Dodgers' Jay Howell was ejected from a playoff game against the Mets for having pine tar in his glove. "I don't feel like I did anything wrong," said Howell. "If I'd scuffed, that's different." The Mets' team captain agreed: "I don't think a pitcher using pine tar is cheating … he's just trying to get a better grip. It's ridiculous."

Last year, Rogers' teammate Todd Jones defended the use of pine tar in a column for the Sporting News. "Pine tar is no big deal to players," Jones wrote. "Everybody uses pine tar. … It's almost a basic part of the game. Sandpaper and Vaseline, however, are looked at as cheating." (Jones had a neat explanation for the goop on Rogers' hand: "It could have been chocolate cake.")

Bonus Explainer: Some baseball researchers argue that a sticky ball could actually help the hitters. When a sticky ball makes contact with the top part of the bat, it's less likely to glance off as a foul ball. This allows the hitter to swing under the ball a bit and put backspin on it as he makes contact. The backspin could, in turn, make the ball travel farther off the bat.

BORAT TRICKED ME!

Banning Vegemite:

Australians living in the United States are spooked because of rumors of a ban on Vegemite. Recent media reports from Down Under have claimed that U.S. customs officials have started searching for the spread. The U.S. government denies that the Aussie delicacy will be banned. What's in Vegemite, anyway?

A lot of yeast. Vegemite is a brown, salty paste made of leftover brewers' yeast mixed with vegetables and spices. Australians and New Zealanders often spread it on toast with butter. The taste is strong and bitter, so the spread, which has a consistency similar to margarine, is used very lightly. The rumors about a possible Vegemite ban stem from the spread's high concentration of folate, a water-soluble B vitamin. Folate is a vital nutrient that, among other things, helps form red blood cells and prevents neural tube defects in fetuses. Artificial folate, also known as folic acid, is highly regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, though, and only approved for use in a few foods (such as breakfast cereals). But since Vegemite's folate is naturally occurring—brewers' yeast contains several B vitamins—it is not banned in America. (Nutritionists typically use "folate" when referring to the naturally occurring vitamin and "folic acid" for the synthetic version.)

The FDA has approved adding folic acid to select foods as a way to ensure that consumers, particularly pregnant women, get enough of the vitamin. If artificial folate were more prevalent, though, it's possible that people could ingest too much. The recommended daily allowance of folic acid from synthetic foods is 0.4 milligram per day for people older than 19. (For comparison's sake, a "single serving" of Vegemite has 0.1 milligram of folate.) The "tolerable upper limit," or the maximum amount of folic acid a person should eat in a day, is 1 milligram.

Why is the FDA wary of folate? Because little research has been done into the consequences of ingesting large quantities of the stuff. Nutritionists say that the biggest concern is that excessive folate consumption could mask a dangerous vitamin B-12 deficiency, particularly in the elderly. A 2005 study suggested that elderly people who ingested high amounts of folic acid or folate saw their mental capabilities decline more rapidly than seniors who did not take folate or folic acid supplements.

Traveling in a fried-out combie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me breakfast
And she said,

Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Cant you hear, cant you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.

Buying bread from a man in brussels
He was six foot four and full of muscles
I said, do you speak-a my language?
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich
And he said,

I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder
Cant you hear, cant you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.

Lying in a den in bombay
With a slack jaw, and not much to say
I said to the man, are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?
And he said,
Oh! do you come from a land down under?

SAFE AS HOUSES?

In the past few months, it’s been almost all bad news for the housing market. Homebuilders have had to tell Wall Street that between twenty and thirty per cent of their contracts have been cancelled. Janet Yellen, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, has said that streets full of unsold new homes now make parts of Phoenix and Las Vegas look like “ghost towns.” Selling a home takes longer than it used to, and the inventory of existing homes for sale has gone up almost forty per cent in the past year. Yet, through it all, one fact has continued to provide solace to anxious homeowners and real-estate brokers alike: housing prices have stayed remarkably stable.

The lesson we’re supposed to take from this is that a home remains as solid and safe an investment as ever. After all, we’re constantly told, you have to go back to the Great Depression to find a full year in which housing prices fell. Unfortunately, the numbers upon which these comforting conclusions depend—namely, median home prices for the country—are unreliable and misleading.

There are plenty of statistics available about the housing market, but median home prices, which are tracked by both the National Association of Realtors and the Census Bureau, are what typically make headlines. They seem to tell buyers and sellers exactly what they want to know: how much the one has to spend, how much the other stands to make. The N.A.R. says that median sale prices for existing homes have risen fifty-seven per cent since 2000, and in many markets the increase has been much bigger than that.

Although these numbers come from an association that has a vested interest in making the housing market look healthy, they do provide a roughly accurate picture of how housing prices have behaved in the past six years. But if you’re trying to figure out what kind of investment housing is—what rewards you can expect and what risks you’ll run—median prices become a lot less useful. In the first place, the data don’t adjust for improvements in quality. People have been building bigger homes—the typical new home is about twenty-five per cent bigger than it was twenty years ago—and putting money into improvements like central air-conditioning, home theatres, and pools. And the impact of quality adjustments isn’t trivial; a study of home prices between 1977 and 2003 found that adjusting for quality reduced the return to homeowners by forty per cent.

As for the much vaunted statistic about housing prices never falling for a full year since the Depression? That’s true only if you forget about inflation. When you adjust for it, you find long stretches when housing prices tumbled and then stayed low for years; nationally, real home prices were actually eight per cent lower in 1991 than they were in 1979. What makes the problem worse is that sellers have recently been offering buyers huge incentives, ranging from granite counters to free cars and, in some cases, large rebates. These are, in fact, price cuts, but they never make it into the data.

Then, there’s the problem of sample bias. When you hear that housing prices in a city have gone up, you assume that all the homes in the city have become more valuable. But the numbers reflect only the homes that were actually sold in a given month, and, if more of those homes happen to be expensive, it’ll make the market as a whole look strong even if it’s really quite weak. This is what leads to the curious phenomenon of median prices rising even as the number of sales is plummeting and the backlog of houses on the market is soaring.

Because nominal median prices compare completely different groups of homes (all those sold in August, 2005, say, and all those sold in August, 2006), they can overstate how much prices go up during booms and understate how much they go down during busts. Luckily, there are other measures we can use. For example, the government compiles one index that tracks the repeat sales of homes that have mortgages with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and another index that measures new-home sales while controlling for quality. The economist Robert Shiller, meanwhile, has created an index that controls for quality by tracking repeated sales of the same houses over more than a century. Together, these numbers give us a better picture of what happens to housing prices over time. And though they show that housing prices have risen sharply in the past decade, they also show that, over the longer haul, investing in a home is far from a sure thing; if you control for inflation and quality, Shiller found, real home prices barely budged between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-nineties. The idea that housing prices have nowhere to go but up is, in other words, a statistical illusion.

It’s an illusion, though, that has powerful effects. Clearly, it encouraged the speculative buying of the past few years. And it has also made sellers remarkably hesitant to cut prices, which has led to the huge backlog of unsold properties. Eventually, sellers are bound to realign their expectations with reality by trimming their asking prices. That will hurt people who were fooled into reckless speculation by assurances that investing in houses offered risk-free rewards. For most people, however, a decline in prices needn’t be so painful. If you’re planning to sell your home and buy another one, an over-all decline in housing prices leaves you no poorer than before. And, if you’re staying in your home, a drop in value can actually make things easier by lowering property taxes and insurance costs. Look at the bright side: at least you’ve got a roof over your head.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU PUT AN ELBOW THROUGH YOUR PAINTING

Casino mogul Steve Wynn ripped a hole through his $139 million Picasso painting while gesticulating at a cocktail party, reports the New York Post. Nora Ephron gave her own first-person account of the damage: It was "a black hole the size of a silver dollar … with two three-inch long rips coming off it in either direction." Wynn had just agreed to sell the painting; now, the deal is off. Is there any way to fix the ripped Picasso?

Yes, but it will be slow and tedious work. The torn ends of the canvas can probably be lined up, and conservators can identify matching fibers on either side of the rip by inspecting them under a microscope. In general, you can expect the wefts in the fabric—that is, the crosswise yarns of the weave—to split at the site of the impact. The lengthwise warps tend to get stretched out, but they may not break.

The rip itself can be mended in a few different ways. First, the conservator can line up the torn ends and affix them to a new piece of fabric that lines the back of the painting. She might also try to attach the torn ends to each other using a method called Rissverklebung, in which individual fibers are rewoven back into place.

To reweave the warps and wefts, you have to figure out the proper placement of each individual fiber. Bits of paint that are stuck to the fibers must be glued in place or removed until the reweaving is complete. (Conservators map out the location of each paint flake they remove so it can be replaced in precisely the right spot.) Because an accident will stretch out some fibers and fray others, you sometimes have to tie off and shorten some threads while attaching new material to lengthen others. Threads attached to the back of the canvas will reinforce the seam.

Closing the tear is only the first part of the process. An accident like Wynn's can damage the painting in other places by stretching the fabric and distorting the image. To correct for these planar distortions, the conservators try to change the lengths of individual fibers or small patches of the canvas. Applied humidity can make a fiber expand across its diameter and shrink across its length—and tighten up distended parts of the weave.

Bits of paint that have fallen off the painting must also be replaced. Wynn might have surveyed the scene of the accident and saved any stray bits of paint for the conservators in a petri dish. (Chance are he didn't strip much off the canvas—Ephron says he was wearing a golf shirt, which suggests a bare-elbow blow. An elbow covered with rough fabric would probably have done more damage.) Conservators have to touch up spots of missing paint with fresh material, color-matched to the surrounding area.

One more thing: Conservators always try to make their repairs reversible. That way, you won't cause any permanent damage to the work if you screw up, and someone can always try to improve on your work in the future.

FILM

On the afternoon of February 23, 1945, the Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, standing at the top of Mt. Suribachi, on Iwo Jima, raised his camera hastily and, without looking through the viewfinder, took the most famous picture of the Second World War. United States forces had landed on the island four days earlier. When the invading troops captured the mountain, five marines and a Navy corpsman attached an American flag to a heavy water pipe, then stuck the pipe in the ground and began to push it upright. Snapped at that instant, the photograph is an accidental masterpiece of classical construction, with the diagonal line of the pole supported by the surging, upraised arms of the men and balanced, at the base, by a marine poised at a right angle to it. None of the faces are visible, and the bodies seem bronzed, as if some sculptor with a taste for the monumental and the obvious had shaped insensible flesh into an icon of spiritual and patriotic glory. In a little more than a day, the picture, printed on the front page of just about every major newspaper in the United States, became an emblem of the war effort. There were, however, two aspects of the event that few people at home knew: that another flag had been raised earlier that day, only to be pulled down, as the story goes, when the Secretary of the Navy requested it as a souvenir; and that the battle on Iwo Jima was to go on for a month more, claiming the lives of three of the six men. (In all, almost seven thousand Americans died there.) After the fighting ended, the remaining flag-raisers—John (Doc) Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes—were called home and paraded around the country as salesmen-heroes in a fourteen-billion-dollar national War Bond tour. Obsessed with their dead friends, these three ordinary men, the central players in Clint Eastwood’s ironic epic, “Flags of Our Fathers,” faced their public role with varying degrees of pride, nausea, and guilt, and then were cast aside when they were no longer of use to the military.

John Bradley was the corpsman on Suribachi, and, after his death, in 1994, his son James, working with the writer Ron Powers, reconstructed the event and its aftermath in a book that became a best-seller in 2000. William Broyles, Jr., and Paul Haggis, adapting the book for the screen, jump back and forth between three narrative lines: a fictionalized James Bradley (Thomas McCarthy) interviewing the survivors and people connected to the event; the battle; and the bally-hoo, in all its marzipan-and-carved-ice excess. “Flags of Our Fathers” is an accomplished, stirring, but, all in all, rather strange movie. It has been framed as a search for the truth, yet there isn’t much hidden material to expose. The flag-raising may have been a repeat performance, but it wasn’t, apparently, staged for the camera. Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Hayes (Adam Beach) were embarrassed by the opportunistic congressmen and the excitable girls who fawned over them, and Eastwood returns again and again to the chagrin of being praised for having done nothing special. When the men appear before a roaring crowd in a stadium, or attend a dress-up dinner filled with swells, they are suddenly yanked back in memory to a moment of terror on the island. Their anguish comes off as genuine, yet this was one occasion when the celebrity culture, however manic and tasteless, did some practical good. The movie has a fine, sensitive temper, but it lacks an emotional payoff. As the men fade into obscurity, it turns into an elegy.

The strength of “Flags” lies in its sombre battle scenes, which were shot mostly on a coastal strip of Iceland where the black sand has the same desolate look as Iwo Jima’s mangled turf. Eastwood and the cinematographer Tom Stern drained all the color out of the shots except for thick, red stains of blood. There’s quite a lot of that. In “Saving Private Ryan,” Steven Spielberg told the story of a small unit fighting as a group in the countryside and in a ruined city, but Eastwood captures the isolation of a man standing quietly in the daylight who is suddenly torn up by mortar fire from far away. Death comes arbitrarily, without the phony “moral” distribution of rewards and punishments seen in many old war movies. A soldier just dies—or he doesn’t. Of the three survivors, Ryan Phillippe’s Bradley is the sanest and also the bravest, Adam Beach’s Hayes, a Pima Indian, the most emotional and battle-haunted. In a companion movie that will come out next year, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” Eastwood will tell the story of the struggle from the Japanese point of view. The Americans expected to survive the battle; the Japanese were commanded to die in it. In “Flags,” the mood is one of sober regret; in “Letters,” one imagines, the mood could only be of the most ferocious devotion.



My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted. And three girls I met on the Central Park carrousel were kicked out of school for smoking, and the price of silver dropped by forty thousand rupiah in Indonesia. With these seemingly trivial events from my own life, I illustrate the dramatic principle by which the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes his movies. Iñárritu, who made “Amores Perros” (2000), is one of the world’s most gifted filmmakers. But I had the same reaction to “Babel” that I had to his most recent movie, “21 Grams” (2003): he creates savagely beautiful and heartbreaking images; he gets fearless performances out of his actors; he edits with the sharpest razor in any computer in Hollywood; and he abuses his audience with a humorless fatalism and a piling up of calamities that borders on the ludicrous.

“Babel” is set in Morocco, Tokyo, Southern California, and northern Mexico, and is made up of three stories held together only by the arbitrary will of the director and his collaborator, the screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. A Japanese hunter in Morocco, whose wife has committed suicide in Tokyo—devastating their teen-age daughter, who is deaf—leaves his rifle with a Moroccan guide, who sells it to a neighbor, a goatherd in the mountains. This man turns the gun over to his sons—young boys stupid enough to take a potshot at a tourist bus. Sleeping against a window, Cate Blanchett gets plugged through the neck, causing her almost to bleed to death until she is saved by the fervent ministrations of her husband, Brad Pitt, who, among other things, calls their home in San Diego and tells their housekeeper, Adriana Barraza, that she has to stay with their children. She obeys the instruction by carting the kids off with her to Mexico to attend her son’s wedding, only to lose them in the desert on the way home. There are other mishaps and humiliations in this highbrow shaggy-dog-story-cum-travelogue that I will not trouble you with. No one is evil—the movie is not melodrama—and much of the physical action is decisively staged and shockingly powerful. “Babel” is an infuriatingly well-made disaster.

Arriaga and Iñárritu’s theme is the pathos of ignorance. All over the world, terrible things happen, and we cannot know or feel them. We do not speak one another’s language or share one another’s customs, but an eagle-eyed artist, as he spans the globe, can link us together. As a mood, this globalized empathy is a noble enterprise. As a method of constructing a movie, it’s very hard to pull off. The three stories share a common element in the relationship of parents to children, but they are so idiosyncratic that they don’t comment on one another; they just lie side by side in the same film. I don’t think moviegoers are being overly categorical if they expect a sense of order sterner than trivial contingency. King Lear dies not because Goneril dropped a goblet two months earlier in her bedroom antechamber but because she, her sisters, the other characters, and the disintegrating natural world are part of an intricately worked pattern of will and action and event.

Arriaga and Iñárritu are trying to create potent fictions by harping on pain and misunderstanding. But why? Serendipity is every bit as likely as calamity. Happy chains of the miraculous exist in movie history—they are called screwball comedies, which is not a genre these filmmakers are likely to take up soon. Arriaga and Iñárritu, confusing sheer dread with dramatic tension, make us suffer, but in that case we had better learn something new, and I’m not sure there’s much to be learned from watching Cate Blanchett scream as she’s sewn up by a Moroccan village doctor except for the bourgeois lesson that wealthy Westerners should think twice before leaving the friendly confines of a comfortable hotel. It remains to be said that Brad Pitt gives a good performance as the distraught husband; the trials of the girl in Tokyo (Rinko Kikuchi), desperate for the embrace of a man, are carried off with the utmost boldness, delicacy, and understanding; and the entire movie looks magnificent—the neon nightscapes in Japan and the brownish mountain wastes of Morocco, too. Iñárritu has enough talent to shake up conventional moviemaking. But he still hasn’t figured out how to use it.

MUSIC VIDEO MADNESS


Peter Tosh and Mick


Beck


Jason Collett & Feist: Hangover Days


Joseph Arthur live

What's the difference from a Saturday night
Where the light spreads dark around the drunk hearts
In their headless hallways where bodies are
put on the market place
To happiness endlessly taking pills
With the young going down
I see nothing or nowhere
I know what I've found
Must be in paradise

Next year we will live in the country
With our money, by day the sky builds
Doing our laundry and renting us some random machines
Getting our religion and sex on the TV
Assumptions made simply to get away
Everyone old is already with me
On tiny decks enjoying midsummer weather and friendly company
And in their picture frames there you and I will be
Knowing what we've found

Enough to get away
Knowing what we've found
Enough to get away
Knowing what we've found
Enough to get away
Knowing what we've found
Enough to get away

Bright drops of blood so my thoughts are
I turn to lie down but sleep stays far
I'm just an echo of the song going through my head
The light behides the ghost
But I'm the one that's dead
And I think of who you be
When you're here with me
Maybe it's a spiritual disease
Sliding through shoots of oblivion into infinity
Back into our maker's hands
No more rain or controversy
Knowing what we've found

Enough to get away
Knowing what we've found


Beck


Flaming Lips

ENOUGH TO GET AWAY

If we are aggrieved by the rigors of the rat race, the answer is not the clumsy guidance of a paternal state. The answer is simply to stop being a rat.

The relationship between the index finger and the fourth finger might tell a tale or two...

SPORTS GUY ON LAST NIGHT'S GAME

7:03 -- After a one-out walk to Edmonds, Willie leaves Perez in the game to pitch to Rolen ... and thank God, because that led to Endy Chavez making the greatest catch of all-time! Holy crap! He just snow-coned a homer over the left field wall, then threw out Rolen to end the inning. That was like the Gary Matthews Jr. catch, only in a game that actually mattered. I can't speak.

7:04 -- Still in shock.

7:05 -- Just watched it for the sixth time on TiVo. Gets better every time. And kudos to Buck for nailing the call from start to finish, right down to the "Have you ever seen better?" as they went to commercial. You could have hit Chavez 10,000 straight fungos and not given him a more perfect ball to scale the wall on. One more inch and it's a homer. Wow. Can't get over that one.

7:08 -- Great replays of the catch by Fox. I'm giddy. That was a "two curtain call" catch. No, really, They gave him two curtain calls. Another thing I love about great baseball catches -- when they show the guy rehashing the catch with teammates in the dugout with the happy smile on his face, looking like a guy who just came home from hooking up with a hot chick and can't stop smiling as he tells his roommates the details. I love baseball.

Endy...

Just because:


CONVERGENCE HERE

Titles Still Available for Taut, Fast-Paced Legal Thrillers.
Approach the Bench
Motion to Strike
Travesty of Justice
Case Dismissed
Binding Arbitration
Continuance Granted
The Process Server
Can You Read That Back for Me, Please?

TV Really Might Cause Autism
Findings from a new Cornell study.

Last month, it was speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.

Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.

The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate. "We are not saying we have found the cause of autism, we're saying we have found a critical piece of evidence," Cornell researcher Michael Waldman told me. Because autism rates are increasing broadly across the country and across income and ethnic groups, it seems logical that the trigger is something to which children are broadly exposed. Vaccines were a leading suspect, but numerous studies have failed to show any definitive link between autism and vaccines, while the autism rise has continued since worrisome compounds in vaccines were banned. What if the malefactor is not a chemical? Studies suggest that American children now watch about four hours of television daily. Before 1980—the first kids-oriented channel, Nickelodeon, dates to 1979—the figure is believed to have been much lower.

The Cornell study is by Waldman, a professor in the school's Johnson Graduate School of Management, Sean Nicholson, an associate professor in the school's department of policy analysis, and research assistant Nodir Adilov. "Several years ago I began wondering if it was a coincidence that the rise in autism rates and the explosion of television viewing began about the same time," Waldman said. "I asked around and found that medical researchers were not working on this, so accepted that I should research it myself." The Cornell study looks at county-by-county growth in cable television access and autism rates in California and Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1989. The researchers find an overall rise in both cable-TV access and autism, but autism diagnoses rose more rapidly in counties where a high percentage of households received cable than in counties with a low percentage of cable-TV homes. Waldman and Nicholson employ statistical controls to factor out the possibility that the two patterns were simply unrelated events happening simultaneously. (For instance, petroleum use also rose during the period but is unrelated to autism.) Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth in cable television."

But the fact that rising household access to cable television seems to associate with rising autism does not reveal anything about how viewing hours might link to the disorder. The Cornell team searched for some independent measure of increased television viewing. In recent years, leading behavioral economists such as Caroline Hoxby and Steven Leavitt have used weather or geography to test assumptions about behavior. Bureau of Labor Statistics studies have found that when it rains or snows, television viewing by young children rises. So Waldman studied precipitation records for California, Oregon, and Washington state, which, because of climate and geography, experience big swings in precipitation levels both year-by-year and county-by-county. He found what appears to be a dramatic relationship between television viewing and autism onset. In counties or years when rain and snow were unusually high, and hence it is assumed children spent a lot of time watching television, autism rates shot up; in places or years of low precipitation, autism rates were low. Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "just under 40 percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching." Thus the study has two separate findings: that having cable television in the home increased autism rates in California and Pennsylvania somewhat, and that more hours of actually watching television increased autism in California, Oregon, and Washington by a lot.

Research has shown that autistic children exhibit abnormal activity in the visual-processing areas of their brains, and these areas are actively developing in the first three years of life. Whether excessive viewing of brightly colored two-dimensional screen images can cause visual-processing abnormalities is unknown. The Cornell study makes no attempt to propose how television might trigger autism; it only seeks to demonstrate a relationship. But Waldman notes that large amounts of money are being spent to search for a cause of autism that is genetic or toxin-based and believes researchers should now turn to scrutinizing a television link.

There are many possible objections to the Cornell study. One is that time indoors, not television, may be the autism trigger. Generally, indoor air quality is much lower than outdoor air quality: Recently the Environmental Protection Agency warned, "Risks to health may be greater due to exposure to air pollution indoors than outdoors." Perhaps if rain and snow cause young children to spend more time indoors, added exposure to indoor air pollution harms them. It may be that families with children at risk for autism disorders are for some reason more likely to move to areas that get lots of rain and snow or to move to areas with high cable-television usage. Some other factor may explain what only appears to be a television-autism relationship.

Everyone complains about television in a general way. But if it turns out television has specific harmful medical effects—in addition to these new findings about autism, some studies have linked television viewing by children younger than 3 to the onset of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—parents may urgently need to know to keep toddlers away from the TV. Television networks and manufacturers of televisions may need to reassess how their products are marketed to the young. Legal liability may come into play. And we live in a society in which bright images on screens are becoming ever more ubiquitous: television, video games, DVD video players, computers, cell phones. If screen images cause harm to brain development in the young, the proliferation of these TV-like devices may bode ill for the future. The aggressive marketing of Teletubbies, Baby Einstein videos, and similar products intended to encourage television watching by toddlers may turn out to have been a nightmarish mistake.

If television viewing by toddlers is a factor in autism, the parents of afflicted children should not reproach themselves, as there was no warning of this risk. Now there is: The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends against any TV for children under the age of 2. Waldman thinks that until more is known about what triggers autism, families with children under the age of 3 should get them away from the television and keep them away.

Researchers might also turn new attention to study of the Amish. Autism is rare in Amish society, and the standing assumption has been that this is because most Amish refuse to vaccinate children. The Amish also do not watch television.

BOB DYLAN
My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.
People carry roses,
Make promises by the hours,
My love she laughs like the flowers,
Valentines can't buy her.

In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.

The cloak and dagger dangles,
Madams light the candles.
In ceremonies of the horsemen,
Even the pawn must hold a grudge.
Statues made of match sticks,
Crumble into one another,
My love winks, she does not bother,
She knows too much to argue or to judge.

The bridge at midnight trembles,
The country doctor rambles,
Bankers' nieces seek perfection,
Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.
The wind howls like a hammer,
The night blows cold and rainy,
My love she's like some raven
At my window with a broken wing.

THE 40-MILLION-DOLLAR ELBOW

You might have seen “Le Rêve,” Picasso’s 1932 portrait of his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, in your college art-history textbook. The painting is owned by Steve Wynn, the casino magnate and collector of masterpieces. He acquired it in a private sale in 2001 from an anonymous collector, who had bought it at auction in 1997 for $48.4 million. Recently, Wynn decided that he’d like to sell it, along with several other museum-quality paintings he owns. A friend of his, the hedge-fund mogul and avid collector Steven Cohen, had coveted “Le Rêve” for years, so he and Wynn and their intermediaries worked out a deal. Cohen agreed to pay a hundred and thirty-nine million dollars for it, the highest known price ever paid for a work of art.

A few weeks ago, on a Thursday, a representative of Cohen’s came from California to inspect the painting. She removed it from the wall, took it out of its frame, and confirmed that it was in excellent shape. On Friday, she wrote her condition report, and so, according to their contract, the deal was done. All that was left was the actual exchange of money and art.

That weekend, Wynn had some friends visiting from New York—David and Mary Boies, Nora Ephron and Nick Pileggi, Louise Grunwald, and Barbara Walters. They were staying, as they often do, at his hotel and casino, the Wynn Las Vegas. As they had dinner together on Friday night, Wynn told them about the sale. “The girls said, ‘We’ve got to see it tomorrow,’ ” Wynn recalled last week. “So I said, ‘I’ll be working tomorrow. Just come on up to the office.’ ” (He had recently moved “Le Rêve” there from the hotel lobby.)

The guests came at five-thirty, and Wynn ushered them in. On the wall to his left and right were several paintings, including a Matisse, a Renoir, and “Le Rêve.” The other three walls were glass, looking out onto an enclosed garden. He began to tell the story of the Picasso’s provenance. As he talked, he had his back to the picture. He was wearing jeans and a golf shirt. Wynn suffers from an eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which affects his peripheral vision and therefore, occasionally, his interaction with proximate objects, and, without realizing it, he backed up a step or two as he talked. “So then I made a gesture with my right hand,” Wynn said, “and my right elbow hit the picture. It punctured the picture.” There was a distinct ripping sound. Wynn turned around and saw, on Marie-Thérèse Walter’s left forearm, in the lower-right quadrant of the painting, “a slight puncture, a two-inch tear. We all just stopped. I said, ‘I can’t believe I just did that. Oh, shit. Oh, man.’ ”

Wynn turned around again. He put his pinkie in the hole and observed that a flap of canvas had been pushed back. He told his guests, “Well, I’m glad I did it and not you.” He said that he’d have to call Cohen and William Acquavella, his dealer in New York, to tell them that the deal was off. Then he resumed talking about his paintings, almost, but not quite, as though he hadn’t just delivered what one of the guests would later call, in an impromptu stab at actuarial math, a “forty-million-dollar elbow.”

A few hours later, they all met up for dinner, and Wynn was in a cheerful mood. “My feeling was, It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it.” Mary Boies ordered a six-litre bottle of Bordeaux, and when it was empty she had everyone sign the label, to commemorate the calamitous afternoon. Wynn signed it “Mary, it’s all about scale—Steve.” Everyone had agreed to take what one participant called a “vow of silence.” (The vow lasted a week, until someone leaked the rudiments of the story to the Post.)

The next day, Wynn finally reached his dealer, and told him, “Bill, I think I’m going to ruin your day.” The first word out of Acquavella’s mouth was “Nooo!” Later that week, Wynn’s wife, Elaine, took the painting to New York in Wynn’s jet, where she and “Le Rêve” were met by an armored truck. Cohen met them at Acquavella’s gallery, on East Seventy-ninth Street, and he agreed that the deal was off until the full extent of the damage could be ascertained. The contract, at any rate, was void.

The painting wound up in the hands of an art restorer, who has told Wynn that when he’s done with it, in six or eight weeks, you won’t be able to tell that Wynn’s elbow had passed through Marie-Thérèse Walter’s left forearm.

Last Friday, when Wynn’s alarm went off, at 7 A.M., his wife turned to him in bed and said, “I consider this whole thing to be a sign of fate. Please don’t sell the picture.” Later that morning, Wynn called Cohen and told him he wanted to keep the painting, after all.

MOVIES

I saw an sneak preview of Flags of our Fathers on Sunday. It lingers with you, but wasn't a fantastic movie. The battle sequences were especially good, but the present day scenes read a little like the bad part of The Notebook.

MARIE ANTOINETTE
New Yorker

In May of this year, word came through of an unruly mob in France. “Did you hear what happened?” a friend asked me. “Marie Antoinette got heckled. Absolutely slaughtered.” This was news? The last time I checked, she got heckled from the neck up more than two hundred years ago. After a while, the confusion lifted. We were talking about the Cannes Film Festival, where Sofia Coppola’s film about the life of the late Queen, starring Kirsten Dunst, had been met with a trumpet blast of boos. Needless to say, my desire to watch the movie was doubled at a stroke. Anything that rattles the ashtrays of French film critics has got to be seen.

The first intimation that “Marie Antoinette” will not cleave to the habits of other period dramas comes in the opening credits, which roll to the sound of “Natural’s Not in It,” by the Gang of Four. That title more or less covers the world of the movie, in which regular human conduct—everything from choosing whom you marry to getting dressed in the morning—is torn from your control and codified to death. We start with the teen-aged Austrian princess arriving at the French border, in 1770, as the prospective bride of Louis, the Dauphin of France (Jason Schwartzman). She enters a tented pavilion, pitched in autumnal woods; it might as well be made from candy canes and gingerbread. It even has a resident witch, the Comtesse de Noailles (Judy Davis), whose place at the head of the welcoming party is compromised by the fact that, after years at the French court, she is about as welcoming as a frozen hedgehog. Marie, schooled in warmth, greets the Comtesse with something called a hug. Worse still, she goes on to console her Austrian entourage, from whom she must now take her leave, with a group hug. To the Comtesse and her posse, all this seems not so much shocking as incomprehensible. You might as well ask them to hip-hop.

The scene sets a pattern for the rest of the film. Our heroine finds the existence of the rich and royal, in pre-Revolutionary France, to be starched beyond all tolerance; over time, she exerts a softening, not to say trivializing, influence, and that, in turn, is one of the factors that hasten the Revolution’s rush. Certainly the trivia on show here would be more than enough to enrage the malnourished masses. We get wigs that look like desserts, cookies that look like jewels, and shoes—designed for the film by Manolo Blahnik—that appear to have been stitched together at night by the world’s most sophisticated elves. There is one pair of fur-lined slippers into which even Freud would blush to insert his toes.

If Marie Antoinette throws herself into footwear, so to speak, that may be because, elsewhere in life, she lacks the satisfaction of a snug fit. Her sole duty is to provide the Dauphin with a male heir, a task made more urgent when he ascends the throne, his rambunctious old goat of a father (Rip Torn) having died from smallpox. (This being a glamour-conscious picture, there is no sign of anything as gross as actual pox—I mean, eeewww.) The Dauphin, however, is a tidy dullard whose only pleasure is the study of locks and keys; again, the symbolism is hardly tucked away in a drawer. One night in Paris, the Queen, as she now is, attends a masked ball, her features utterly disguised by a thin strip of transparent black gauze. There, at last, she meets someone with the right-sized key: Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan), a leering Swede, and, if this film is to be believed, father to the sovereign bloodline of France.

But is this film to be believed? Manolo Blahnik, with his precise grip on fantasy, seems to be the only person to have recognized the project for the confection that it is. Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine’s “inner experience.” Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie. The one, transfixing virtue of “Marie Antoinette” is its unembarrassed devotion to the superficial. There is no morality at play here, no agony other than boredom, and, until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense. The fun dies out of the film—in fact, the film itself expires—when Coppola suddenly starts dragging in discussions of the American Revolution and, at the close, a baying crowd with a hatred of chandeliers. I can see what the director was after here: the kind of irruptive shock that cuts short the jamboree in “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” But horrified realism is not her style, and her lunges at historical gravity seem insulting and uncourageous; she should have kept her nerve and stuck to the fripperies—to the noisy, brightly decorated void in which her characters spin.

The question has to be: what does Coppola know? Was “Lost in Translation” really, as it first appeared, a wistful commentary on the plight of Americans abroad, who shut themselves in their hotel rooms and fell lightly in love because it was sweeter, and less scary, than venturing outside? Or was it, as a later viewing suggested, in hock to that same trepidation, creating an insular chic out of xenophobia? A similar uncertainty pervades “Marie Antoinette,” borne along on a wave of anachronistic rock. Is the movie somehow contending that the Queen was, with her gang of cronies and her witless overspends, the Paris Hilton of the late eighteenth century? If so, then the catcallers of Cannes were even more misguided than they knew, since any decent French Marxist would be happy to deconstruct the film as a trashing of the idle rich.

On the other hand, I spent long periods of “Marie Antoinette” under the growing illusion that it was actually made by Paris Hilton. The exploits of Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), the old King’s mistress, are unpeeled with a schoolgirl’s sneer. “That is so Du Barry,” one of Marie’s pals says. Snuff is snorted like coke. There are hilarious attempts at landscape, but the fountains and parterres of Versailles are grabbed by the camera and pasted into the action, as if the whole thing were being shot on a cell phone and sent to friends. The young Queen builds a faux-pastoral paradise in the grounds, where she and her little daughter sport like shepherdesses, but, rather than raise an eyebrow at this make-believe, the director treats it as just another white-linen moment, like an outtake from “The Virgin Suicides,” and, for good measure, tosses in a few shots of nodding flowers and ickle bouncy lambs. That is so Coppola. It is hard to hate the film, whose silly fizz makes it simpler and less creepy than her earlier projects. If it does drop larger hints, they have less to do with the vanished culture of Versailles than with the fretful stasis of our own. The movie’s approach to the world beyond, to everything that one doesn’t know or wouldn’t care to buy, is like the look on Kirsten Dunst’s face: a beautiful blankness, forever on the brink of drifting, with a smile, into sleep.

MUSIC

What I am listening to:

Beck - The Information
Joseph Arthur - Nuclear Daydream
Sloan - Never Hear the End of It
Jason Collett - Idols of Exile
Bob Dylan - Modern Times
Tom Waits - Bawlers and Brawlers
Decemberists - Crane wife

What I am not listening to, and won't ever listen to:
the new Lemonheads, the Killers

FUTURE

The desktop is dead. We will soon live in the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data we’ll ever use...

Google Pedometer

BOOKS I HAVE BOUGHT AND HOPE TO READ SOON

Curious Incident of the Lesion on the Hip
By DAVID KAMP

Mark Haddon’s book titles seem to belong to “Wallace & Gromit” film shorts. His first novel, published three years ago, was called “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” The new one is called “A Spot of Bother.” Neither book has anything to do with a plasticine man-dog duo propelled by stop-motion animation. But, like Nick Park, the mastermind behind “Wallace & Gromit,” Haddon trades in a cheerful, quirky, life-goes-on drabness that’s particularly English. And totally brilliant.

“A Spot of Bother” concerns a retiree named George Hall. He’s a decent, sympathetic figure who used to hold a managerial post at a company that manufactured playground equipment. “In a modest way,” Haddon writes, “he had increased the happiness of a small part of the human population.” George now spends his days pottering about his home in provincial Peterborough, an hour north of London, doing acutely provincial English middle-class things — drinking his coffee from a “stripy” mug, waiting as the toast “pinged up,” building a studio in his garden, where he plans to resume his long-dormant hobby of drawing. He’s a bit of a fogy, preferring solitude to company and not wholly comfortable with the fact that his grown son is homosexual. (“It was the thought of men purchasing furniture together which disturbed him.”) But George is a nice fogy. “Things changed,” Haddon reasons on his protagonist’s behalf. “Mobile phones. Thai restaurants. You had to remain elastic or you turned into an angry fossil railing at litter.”

At the outset of the book, George discovers a lesion on his hip. His doctor diagnoses it as eczema. George, disbelieving, is convinced he has fatal cancer. Meanwhile, there are other rumblings of trouble. George learns that his wife, Jean, is carrying on an affair with one of his former work colleagues. George and Jean’s daughter, a high-strung, hot-tempered divorcée and single mom named Katie, has announced that she’s going to marry her boyfriend, Ray, who is kindhearted and prosperous but too discomfitingly working-class for Mum and Dad’s tastes. And the gay son, Jamie, is going through a rough patch with his boyfriend, Tony. These circumstances conspire to make George depressed — first just a little, and then, as time goes on, a lot.

This standard-issue suburban-melodrama stuff is a far cry from “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” which won raves for its bravura concept — its narrator is an autistic teenager whose unorthodox thought processes subvert the norms of conventional storytelling. “A Spot of Bother” isn’t nearly as audacious, and in other hands and other media, its plot elements wouldn’t amount to much, maybe a weepy nighttime soap or a lesser Steve Martin comedy.

But Haddon is too gifted and too ambitious to write a hacky second novel. In fact, he’s so wondrously articulate, so rigorous in thinking through his characters’ mind-sets, that “A Spot of Bother” serves as a fine example of why novels exist. Really, does any other art form do nuance so well, or the telling detail (“the pig-shaped notepad on the phone table”) or the internal monologue? A dust-up with her fiancé prompts Katie to consider her checkered romantic past: “They took up so much space. That was the problem with men. It wasn’t just the leg sprawl and the clumping down stairs. It was the constant demand for attention.” A church funeral provides George with the occasion to ponder the role of Christianity in his life, or its lack thereof: “He looked round at the stained-glass lambs and the scale model of the crucified Christ and thought how ridiculous it all was, this desert religion transported wholesale to the English shires. Bank managers and P.E. teachers listening to stories about zithers and smiting and barley bread as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

Beyond the zingers and tragicomic domestic set pieces, Haddon is especially heroic in capturing the tortured dynamics of nuclear-family life: the roles children never grow out of, even after they’ve become adults; the close-quarters intimacy that simultaneously binds and enervates (Jamie sums up his father as “the alphabeticizer of books and winder-up of clocks”); the ever-shifting alliances; the short-lived feuds; the commiserative phone calls about how loco everyone else in the family is. In one swift passage, Katie pinballs from treating Jamie as her dearest confidant to punching him upside the head for being indiscreet to good-naturedly gossiping with him about “Mum’s fancy man.”

“A Spot of Bother” does share one major trait with “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” In both, about halfway through, Haddon douses his story with accelerant and sets it aflame; abruptly, what has been a rather gently paced book becomes an urgent read, and pages start turning in double-time. It wouldn’t be sporting of me to reveal how, precisely, this happens, but in neither book does the author force matters with sudden ice storms or deluges of frogs or any other kind of dubious ex machina. Haddon is an unmagic realist, a guy who finds enough pathos and humor in the everyday to fashion stories that transport, entertain and keep you reading past your bedtime.

In an uncharacteristic meta-moment in which he seems to be winking at the reader, Haddon writes, “The human mind was not designed for sunbathing and light novels.” He’s talking about George’s aversion to vacations, but he also seems to be poking fun at himself, or wondering if the sort of breezy books he writes have any lasting value.

Well, when they have the kind of heart and intelligence that “A Spot of Bother” does, they certainly do. In a modest way, Mark Haddon will increase the happiness of a small part of the human population.

FREAKONOMICS: Selling Soap
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT

The Petri-Dish Screen Saver
Leon Bender is a 68-year-old urologist in Los Angeles. Last year, during a South Seas cruise with his wife, Bender noticed something interesting: passengers who went ashore weren’t allowed to reboard the ship until they had some Purell squirted on their hands. The crew even dispensed Purell to passengers lined up at the buffet tables. Was it possible, Bender wondered, that a cruise ship was more diligent about killing germs than his own hospital?

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Bender has been practicing for 37 years, is in fact an excellent hospital. But even excellent hospitals often pass along bacterial infections, thereby sickening or even killing the very people they aim to heal. In its 2000 report “To Err Is Human,” the Institute of Medicine estimated that anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year because of hospital errors — more deaths than from either motor-vehicle crashes or breast cancer — and that one of the leading errors was the spread of bacterial infections.

While it is now well established that germs cause illness, this wasn’t always known to be true. In 1847, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was working in a Viennese maternity hospital with two separate clinics. In one clinic, babies were delivered by physicians; in the other, by midwives. The mortality rate in the doctors’ clinic was nearly triple the rate in the midwives’ clinic. Why the huge discrepancy? The doctors, it turned out, often came to deliveries straight from the autopsy ward, promptly infecting mother and child with whatever germs their most recent cadaver happened to carry. Once Semmelweis had these doctors wash their hands with an antiseptic solution, the mortality rate plummeted.

But Semmelweis’s mandate, as crucial and obvious as it now seems, has proved devilishly hard to enforce. A multitude of medical studies have shown that hospital personnel wash or disinfect their hands in fewer than half the instances they should. And doctors are the worst offenders, more lax than either nurses or aides.

All of this was on Bender’s mind when he got home from his cruise. As a former chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai, he felt inspired to help improve his colleagues’ behavior. Just as important, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations would soon be inspecting Cedars-Sinai, and it simply wouldn’t do for a world-class hospital to get failing marks because its doctors didn’t always wash their hands.

It may seem a mystery why doctors, of all people, practice poor hand hygiene. But as Bender huddled with the hospital’s leadership, they identified a number of reasons. For starters, doctors are very busy. And a sink isn’t always handy — often it is situated far out of a doctor’s work flow or is barricaded by equipment. Many hospitals, including Cedars-Sinai, had already introduced alcohol-based disinfectants like Purell as an alternative to regular hand-washing. But even with Purell dispensers mounted on a wall, the Cedars-Sinai doctors didn’t always use them.

There also seem to be psychological reasons for noncompliance. The first is what might be called a perception deficit. In one Australian medical study, doctors self-reported their hand-washing rate at 73 percent, whereas when these same doctors were observed, their actual rate was a paltry 9 percent. The second psychological reason, according to one Cedars-Sinai doctor, is arrogance. “The ego can kick in after you have been in practice a while,” explains Paul Silka, an emergency-department physician who is also the hospital’s chief of staff. “You say: ‘Hey, I couldn’t be carrying the bad bugs. It’s the other hospital personnel.”’ Furthermore, most of the doctors at Cedars-Sinai are free agents who work for themselves, not for the hospital, and many of them saw the looming Joint Commission review as a nuisance. Their incentives, in other words, were not quite aligned with the hospital’s.

So the hospital needed to devise some kind of incentive scheme that would increase compliance without alienating its doctors. In the beginning, the administrators gently cajoled the doctors with e-mail, faxes and posters. But none of that seemed to work. (The hospital had enlisted a crew of nurses to surreptitiously report on the staff’s hand-washing.) “Then we started a campaign that really took the word to the physicians where they live, which is on the wards,” Silka recalls. “And, most importantly, in the physicians’ parking lot, which in L.A. is a big deal.”

For the next six weeks, Silka and roughly a dozen other senior personnel manned the parking-lot entrance, handing out bottles of Purell to the arriving doctors. They started a Hand Hygiene Safety Posse that roamed the wards and let it be known that this posse preferred using carrots to sticks: rather than searching for doctors who weren’t compliant, they’d try to “catch” a doctor who was washing up, giving him a $10 Starbucks card as reward. You might think that the highest earners in a hospital wouldn’t much care about a $10 incentive — “but none of them turned down the card,” Silka says.

When the nurse spies reported back the latest data, it was clear that the hospital’s efforts were working — but not nearly enough. Compliance had risen to about 80 percent from 65 percent, but the Joint Commission required 90 percent compliance.

These results were delivered to the hospital’s leadership by Rekha Murthy, the hospital’s epidemiologist, during a meeting of the Chief of Staff Advisory Committee. The committee’s roughly 20 members, mostly top doctors, were openly discouraged by Murthy’s report. Then, after they finished their lunch, Murthy handed each of them an agar plate — a sterile petri dish loaded with a spongy layer of agar. “I would love to culture your hand,” she told them.

They pressed their palms into the plates, and Murthy sent them to the lab to be cultured and photographed. The resulting images, Silka says, “were disgusting and striking, with gobs of colonies of bacteria.”

The administration then decided to harness the power of such a disgusting image. One photograph was made into a screen saver that haunted every computer in Cedars-Sinai. Whatever reasons the doctors may have had for not complying in the past, they vanished in the face of such vivid evidence. “With people who have been in practice 25 or 30 or 40 years, it’s hard to change their behavior,” Leon Bender says. “But when you present them with good data, they change their behavior very rapidly.” Some forms of data, of course, are more compelling than others, and in this case an image was worth 1,000 statistical tables. Hand-hygiene compliance shot up to nearly 100 percent and, according to the hospital, it has pretty much remained there ever since.

Cedars-Sinai’s clever application of incentives is certainly encouraging to anyone who opposes the wanton proliferation of bacterial infections. But it also highlights how much effort can be required to solve a simple problem — and, in this case, the problem is but one of many. Craig Feied, a physician and technologist in Washington who is designing a federally financed “hospital of the future,” says that hand hygiene, while important, will never be sufficient to stop the spread of bacteria. That’s why he is working with a technology company that infuses hospital equipment with silver ion particles, which serve as an antimicrobial shield. Microbes can thrive on just about any surface in a hospital room, Feied notes, citing an old National Institutes of Health campaign to promote hand-washing in pediatric wards. The campaign used a stuffed teddy bear, called T. Bear, as a promotional giveaway. Kids and doctors alike apparently loved T. Bear — but they weren’t the only ones. When, after a week, a few dozen T. Bears were pulled from the wards to be cultured, every one of them was found to have acquired a host of new friends: Staphylococcus aureus, E. coli, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella.. . .

THE DEPARTED

The small-time hoods in “Mean Streets,” Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough movie, from 1973, were not habitual users of the Queen’s English. Some of the conversations between Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, improvised on the spot, would begin with one man saying a word or two, then the other grabbing at the words, turning them inside out, flinging them back, and so on, until a full-scale brawl was under way in which the emotions were flawlessly clear but the sentences little more than fragments. The habit of building a tempest out of nothing became a Scorsese trademark, widely imitated by other directors, including Dito Montiel, who made the new independent movie “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” in which almost every scene turns into a clamorously inarticulate fight. Scorsese, meanwhile, has moved on to a different mode of discourse. “The Departed” is not one of his greatest films; it doesn’t use the camera to reveal the psychological and aesthetic dimensions of an entire world, as “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” and “Goodfellas” did. But it’s a viciously merry, violent, high-wattage entertainment, and speech is the most brazenly flamboyant element in it. “The Departed” is a remake of the Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs,” directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, and it has the speed and volatility of Hong Kong movies. But Scorsese and the screenwriter, William Monahan, have added weight to the cops-and-robbers plot by setting it in the Irish neighborhood of South Boston and by digging deep into urban tribal lore—the memories of loyalty and betrayal going back for decades, the nasty old jokes, the bullying insults and invective. The men commit obscene acts, and speak in cynical taunts, and the extreme violence and virtuoso cursing seem to feed off each other. It’s still not the Queen’s English, but every speech is complete in its profane eloquence.

Jack Nicholson’s Southie crime lord, Frank Costello, sets the tone. Frank, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the notorious Boston thug James (Whitey) Bulger, is not isolated in high-walled solemnity, like the Italian grandees in “The Godfather.” Instead, he’s walking the street where people can see him; or he’s mapping out strategy from a grotty little bar. Nicholson wears a satanic goatee and mustache, and his eyebrows flip up and down like semaphore flags; he gives the ultimate mad-Jack performance, a free-ranging and spontaneous impression, complete with Irish ditties, of a man who relishes each filthy deal and bone-crushing blow. “Non serviam,” he growls at a neighborhood kid, an altar boy, quoting James Joyce—by which he means that every man must refuse obedience to institutions like the Church (obedience to institutions like the Mob is another matter). The boy in question grows into Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), an ace detective in the Massachusetts State Police, and he belongs to Frank, tipping him off by cell phone when the police want to make a move on him. Colin’s opposite number—almost his twin—is Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), who’s also a Statie, but a straight one. After a number of excruciating initiations, Billy, working undercover, penetrates Frank’s inner circle. This is a double-mole story, in which the moles wind up hunting each other—the kind of interlocking narrative machinery that John le Carré used to construct in his spy novels. The deceptions of le Carré’s spooks, however, depended on the spacious geography of international espionage. In the cloistered neighborhood and Police Headquarters of this film, each mole is constantly in danger of giving himself away to the people he sees every day.

The story is highly improbable, although Scorsese and Monahan keep the complicated goings on clear and taut, and the entire movie is acted with spirit and conviction. DiCaprio, his mouth pinched in tension, his voice gravelly and low, holds his own against Damon, who has a charming and plausible line of patter as the calculating Colin. Scorsese also gets terrific work from Mark Wahlberg, as a combustible but honest Special Investigations Unit cop, and Vera Farmiga, as a police psychiatrist who is drawn to neurotic and violent men. All the characters are unusually intelligent, and the fast, scurrilous talk binds the tightly edited short sequences together. Scorsese, however, is trying to do with words what he used to accomplish with the camera, and he doesn’t produce the kind of emotional involvement that once made his movies so exhausting and also so satisfying. At the end, he seems eager to dispose of his characters in order to fill out a pattern: one after another gets shot at point-blank range (there’s hardly an actor who retains the back of his head), and shock gives way to disbelief and even laughter. “The Departed” is murderous fun, but it’s too shallow to be the kind of movie that haunts your sleep.

TV: SIX DEGREES

ABC’s “Six Degrees” is executive-produced by one of “Lost” ’s creators, J. J. Abrams, and it shines with his trademark gloss. Handsomely shot on Manhattan locations, the show is laced with wit and blessed with fine actors, particularly Hope Davis as Laura, a playful woman who’s trying to get past her war-correspondent husband’s death in Iraq (she begins by tossing out his old clothes); and the majestically surly Campbell Scott as Steven, a once noted photographer who, after years of boozing, rediscovers his gift when he photographs a stranger—Laura—sobbing on a stoop.

Yet the coincidences that bring the show’s six wayfarers together to form their own little island on the big island are vexingly hokey. “No one is a stranger—for long,” Carlos, the public defender (Jay Hernandez), intones in a voice-over at the close of the pilot. He has just run into Mae (a dewy Erika Christensen) on the subway as she is about to leave town—after seeking her everywhere since winning her release on a charge of indecent exposure. She had clambered onto a moving street sweeper near Washington Square and thrown off her top in sheer jubilation at being young and bodacious in the greatest city on earth. First of all, that’s exactly what the good folks in Jericho, Kansas, suspect is going on here. Second, it would never happen—no sanitation driver would waste time re-wetting Fifth Avenue when the show’s production team had already slicked it down.

When Laura makes the acquaintance of Whitney (Bridget Moynahan) at the pedicurist, it’s because Whitney, a fellow-Wasp, notices her Sonic Youth T-shirt and wonders if it’s from a vintage store:

LAURA: I was at the show.
WHITNEY: At Roseland?
LAURA: Yeah. Fall of ’95. It was the night before—
WHITNEY: Thanksgiving. I was there.
LAURA: Really?


Are you sure that was us and not one of the show’s writers? Whitney, a high-powered P.R. woman, also prepares one of those “as if!” meals for her boyfriend on the roof of their building, complete with a wet bar, candles, tulips, champagne, and linen napery. There seems to be only one thing missing—hold on, I’ll think of it . . . Oh, yes: food.

In the second episode, after delivering a schmaltzy voice-over about how “anything is possible” here, Damien (Dorian Missick), a limo driver with a gambling problem (sigh), picks up a lucky penny that Laura lost on the street, and his fortunes turn. Apparently, there are eight million stories out there in this crazy, big-hearted town—but it’s all one story, really, the one about trusting in your dream. Please. Just play “New York, New York” and have done with it.

The deeper problem is that we always know more than the characters: we know that Laura’s new au pair, Claire, is really Mae, and that she’s on the run; that Whitney’s boyfriend is a roué; that Carlos’s client, accused of shooting a man, is innocent and that the actual shooter is his new friend, Damien. We’re meant to be ensorcelled by the show’s glittering web of serendipity, but we’re just impatient: C’mon, people, get up to speed! One reason “Lost” sustains interest is that the characters know more than we do, so it’s as if we’re working alongside them to solve the island’s mysteries. This makes us feel a part of their small tribe—as well as of the much larger one out there in the dark. It’s a simple formula: “Lost” is more.

MUSIC

BECK
The Information
Beck has trafficked in strangeness and opacity for so long that he's now able to surprise just by saying what he means. Two tracks into The Information, listeners will hit a song called "Think I'm In Love" that's about exactly what its title suggests, as Beck sings from the position of someone who thinks he's in love, but is forced to admit, "it makes me kind of nervous to say so." That vulnerability resurfaces on "Movie Theme," in which a lush, Eno-like soundscape gives way to lines like "carry my heart like a soldier with a hand grenade." That sentiment is so sincere that it's sure to shock fans used to much more opacity. Even the mournful 2002 album Sea Change rarely cut this close to the bone.

The Information is at least partly about how love makes us uneasy, but Beck has rarely sounded this comfortable being Beck. Where last year's Guero sounded like a not-quite-right reprise of all his old moves, The Information makes for a much more satisfying return to past Beck sounds, and one that points the way to the future. Previously responsible for Beck's lush, quiet albums Sea Change and Mutations, Nigel Godrich here mixes that approach with the cut-and-paste sounds usually found on Beck's Dust Brothers-produced albums. Flutes and harmonies mix with antique computer voices. Organic rhythms turn mechanical and back again. Non-sequitur coffee-shop raps give way to gorgeous croons.

There's nothing here that Beck hasn't done before, but it sounds unexpected once again, which is a fitting development for an artist who made his name repurposing old material in unexpected ways. Here, he's done a Beck on himself, and built a stronger, funkier, more moving Beck in the process.



THE DECEMBERISTS
The Crane Wife
Rating: 8.4/10

For a few years now, the Decemberists' stagey, hyperliterate folk-rock has played well at indie labels Hush and Kill Rock Stars. The quintet has occupied a small community-theater space with gleefulness and confidence, but now it's accepted a scholarship to Capitol Records, which means a larger stage and a bigger audience. Can the band still project, or will its voices be lost in a cavernous auditorium, rejoined only by crickets and barely stifled coughs of boredom? Will nine-minute mariner epics play in Peoria?

Given the band's graduation from minor to major leagues, The Crane Wife may prove to be the most crucial record the Decemberists will release in their lifetime. Fortunately, their fourth album further magnifies and refines their strengths. Winsomely balancing frivolity and gravity, the Decemberists assemble an oddball menagerie of the usual rogues and rascals, soldiers and criminals, lovers and baby butchers-- but they've got a lot more tricks up their sleeves than previous albums had hinted. The Crane Wife employs an impressive variety of styles and sounds to tell Meloy's imaginative stories: There's the band's usual folk-rock, honed to an incisively sharp point, but they also deploy a smuggler's blues ("The Perfect Crime"), a creepy lullaby ("Shankill Butchers"), a Led Zep stomp ("When the War Came"), and, perhaps most divisively, a multipart prog track ("The Island") that stretches well past the 10-minute mark. No epic chantey this time, though.

Meloy's inventive songwriting is the binding force, emphasizing character but remaining ever in thrall to stories, savoring the way they always play out to the same conclusions. Along with the homosexual undertones that have informed Decemberists songs from every album, he jettisons most of the archetypes that inspired Picaresque and cuts his characters loose in their own tales. They still do what they're fated to do-- the thieves thieve and run amok, the lovers love and die tragically, the soldiers soldier on and pine for peaceful homes-- but they seem to do it more out of free will than authorial design. Meloy focuses mainly on matters of war ("But O did you see all the dead of Manassas/ All the bellies and the bones and the bile?") and love ("No, I lingered here with the blankets barren/ And my own belly big with child"). On the duet "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)", Meloy plays the part of an errant, possibly dead Civil War soldier while singer-songwriter Laura Veirs cameos as his "sweetheart left behind." It's Cold Mountain writ poignantly small, its sweet, wordless chorus perfectly life-size. Lumbering menacingly, the martial march of "When the War Came" smells of gunpowder and singed hair, although it sounds like it's anchored in Neverland despite trying to comment on real-world events.

Meloy's taletelling will always define the Decemberists, but The Crane Wife puts as much weight on the music as on the lyrics, and here the band gels into a tight, intuitive unit. The musicians give each song a particular spark and character, not just reinforcing the lyrics but actively telling a story. They create a breezy eddy of guitar strums and piano chords to enhance a windborne melody and an undercurrent of peril on "Summersong", and the tragedy of "O Valencia"-- any good song about star-crossed lovers must end in death-- is countered by the pep of the music, especially Chris Funk's ascending and descending guitar, which seems to take a particular glee in the inevitable denouement. The band isn't just able-bodied, but ambitious to boot. It makes the brainy prog of that monster second track, a distillation of the musical reach of their 2003 EP The Tain, sound like a natural extension of their base sound. They troll confidently from the rumbling overture and heated exposition of "Come and See" to the final rueful notes of "You'll Not Feel the Drowning". The song is chockablock with progisms-- organ runs, dampered cymbals, laser synths-- but manages to shake off the genre quote marks as the band jam with convincing menace.

Their range allows them to be precociously diverse, but everything fits naturally. The Crane Wife sounds like their most shapely album to date, resembling a spirited story arc in its set-up, rising action, climax, and resolution. In this structure the three title segments, despite essentially bookending the tracklist, form the album's thematic centerpiece, the music and story meshing gracefully and tenderly to retell a Japanese fable. "The Crane Wife 3" opens the album with a ruminative flourish as John Moen's drums push the sensuous thrust of the music and Meloy's delivery of the lines "each feather it fell from skin" colors the resignation of "I will hang my head hang my head low." It opens the album en medias res, setting up the subsequent story-songs as the narrator's rueful reminiscences.

"The Crane Wife 1 and 2" comprise a medley towards the album's end, starting slow and soft but gradually reaching crescendo in an unfurling finale, with Meloy breaking the word "heart" into multiple syllables over an unraveling drum beat. Restrained yet resonant, the song's (and album's) climax is a remarkable moment. As it segues into the rousing coda of "Sons & Daughters", the Decemberists sound like a band that knows exactly where they're going and won't be satisfied until you come along for the trip.

MORE ON BECK

Given Beck’s link to Scientology, you’d be excused for wrinkling your brow when you found out his next record was insinuatingly titled “The Information.” For a group that goes out of its way to keep light from shedding on any of the elementary tenets of their curious ‘religion,’ it seemed apropos for Beck, at least on record the group’s most playfully odd celebrity to issue such a shady WTF. Long an artist entangled and tripped up by so many contexts and genre signifiers as to be long since free of any, it was difficult to imagine Beck giving us such an open-handed glimpse--free of metaphor, flippant ramshackle beat poesie, or hip-check wordplay--into his spirituality, especially one already so fiercely topical. More than that, the notion of Beck subsiding into the giddy L. Ron Hubbard promotion of celebs like Tom Cruise and John Travolta was, well, nauseating. I mean, this is our Beck, more than ten years ours and Tom Cruise is just a nutty fucker. For better or worse then, The Information is both exactly what you feared it might be and also a document of some of Beck’s best groove-based material since Midnite Vultures.

With Nigel Godrich in the booth for the third time, Beck spent over three years crafting the songs for The Information. As such, it’s not surprising that its musical bedding is decidedly uneven. Gone, almost completely, is the love-nausea of Sea Change. In its stead, Beck goes back to the mangled, junkyard pop of his youth, mixing broken-porch funk and beat-patterned shout-alongs into an album far more groove-oriented than even the underrated Guero. These songs, almost across the board, are bound to their bottom, as Beck uses his ear for antique nouveau to create the sort of astonishingly simple but hypnotic rhythms that he’s been patterning since Mellow Gold. “Elevator Music” and “No Complaints” fume with smokehouse funk, crashing, churning bits of Odelay-themed bass-pop. “Nausea” is perfectly titled: a woozy, jungle-tangle of clanging cow-bells and stiff bass amidst monkey-voices and a cloying multi-tracked chorus, while “Think I’m In Love” finds Beck shyly reacquainting himself with love over a thicket of pianos, strings, and a paperbag writer’s bass. “New Round”’s frail beauty is a shot in the arm for Beck here; acoustic guitars flicker with trampled heart tones and a subtle drum pattern-knowingly nudged to the back—as he hums fractured couplets about chain-link winds and blackboard nights.

More than with either Mutations or Sea Change, you can hear Godrich’s rich instrumental layering beneath the rhythms. A perfect headphone album, strings, shards of voice and singing, simmering static, harmonica, synths, and bell-toned electronics seem to almost collapse into their places. Sometimes, these deep interludes and bridges distract from a song’s central melody however (as on the otherwise fantastic Headhunters-jive of “Cell Phone’s Dead”) and threaten its composition, but typically they serve instead as interesting flourishes.

Still, at fifteen tracks and over an hour, perhaps Beck needed a stiff editor more than the comfort of a familiar producer. Even given his notoriety for pastiche, each of his best albums formed a remarkably cohesive whole; he tried on different styles between records, but within each one, the tracks held together quite well. Much of The Information lives out its three-year birth in song-sketches and productions that simply don’t settle well with the rest of the album. The Beggars Banquet-era gilded piano stomp of “Strange Apparition” would have made a great b-side but feels force-fed to its neighbors, and “Soldier Jane” fails to progress beyond its staid drum pattern. With “Dark Star,” Beck amazon tracks the Headhunters again, but compounded by harmonica breakdowns and what sounds like a leftover string section from Sea Change, it’s garbled and confused. “1000BPM”’ is likewise cluttered and tuneless, a second-cousin to the jarring studio-mongering of “Sweet Sunshine” or “High 5 (Rock the Catskills).”

Aside these musical missteps though, Beck’s queer mystical refrains ultimately seem far more puzzling. And this is where you’ll have to decide just how much WTF you’ll swallow from your pop stars. One can’t help but feel Scientology’s extraterrestrial pull beneath lines like “When the information comes/we’ll know whom we’re made from” (the title track) or “ Looking for the ladder in the stratosphere/so I can be happy/let my bones melt away” (“Movie Theme”). Old Xenu himself, maybe even his entire Galactic Confederacy, is shadowed in the lines; certainly, in any case, there’s plenty of what Scientologists might refer to as ‘space opera’ to be heard. Closer “Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton,” in fact, is a squatter’s symphony of such allusions. After a shredded tape reel with snippets of both “Elevator Music” and “Cellphone’s Dead” and a toxic expanse of sound passages and reinventions, comes a spoken word outro between Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers (?!!?) supposedly about how the best album ever made might sound: “it has to tell you how to live/it is an instruction guide/subtle, it doesn’t push/it nudges, it entices, or it seduces/it has to encompass the whole world/everything that has been, is and will be/and could take it into space/and that’s why you need a spaceship/cause that’s ultimately what space travel was all about.” But maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe, with The Information, Beck’s just talking about spaceships. You know, like the rest of us. . .


We are moving from Alcorn Avenue, so I fear the URL of this blog will be changing. Stay tuned.