NOVEMBER 27, 2006

It's snowing in Vancouver -- a lot. It's also supposed to hit 17 degrees in Toronto on Wednesday. Sadly it will be Vancouverites who will be laughing in February when the crocuses are out and we're in the middle of a deep freeze. No power or potable water in West Van though. Winter camping.

Random thoughts for the day:

1. Craigslist is amazing. We have had our basement cluttered with inherited pieces of (ugly) furniture for three years now -- furniture we'd never use, and furniture too bulky and onerous to move easily. So I threw descriptions and pictures up on Craigslist and 15 (!) minutes later a guy emailed and offered to come by and get it all and pay us $200. Brilliant.

2. I've really enjoyed reading Bill Simmons' Now I can Die in Peace. Funny read.

3. I like this Tom Waits interview:

Pitchfork: Have you ever thought about living anywhere besides California?
Tom Waits: I've been around. Chicago, New Orleans, New York, L.A., Portland [Oregon]. California has the public image, the land of milk and honey. It has one of those images that's completely and utterly removed from what it really is. Like all great fantasies. Where are you calling from?

Pitchfork: Brooklyn.
Tom Waits: Everybody's from Brooklyn! We lived in New York for a while. About 14 different places in two years.

Pitchfork: Do you ever miss it?
Tom Waits: I don't know. Sometimes when I go back I go, oh man, I remember this. The energy of it. It's like a big dragon. But I'm a hothead. I wasn't well-suited for the temperament of that town. I need something that's a little more-- not as volatile. I get in arguments with shop owners. And slowly, all the little businesses in our neighborhood, the lights started going out and I had to go further and further from home to get supplies. I'm better off here in the sticks where I can't hurt myself.

Pitchfork: You have a fine reputation for haunting California's salvage yards and pawn shops. What attracts you to certain objects?

Tom Waits: I'm interested in things when I don't know what they are. Like "Hey, Ray, what the hell is this?" Oh, that's lipstick from the 1700s, that's dog food from the turn of the century, that's a hat from World War II. I'm interested in the minutiae of things. Oddities.

Pitchfork: Do you collect anything?
Tom Waits: Like little ceramic dogs? I collect instruments. It's ongoing.

Pitchfork: There's a blues singer in Clarksdale, Mississippi named Super Chikan who makes the most beautiful-looking guitars out of oil cans and other bits of hardware that he paints and strings. He has a guitar made out of a toilet seat that he calls the Shit-tar. Do you ever make your own instruments?
Tom Waits: I have friends who are builders who make instruments. "Alternative sound sources" is the technical way of saying it, which could really be anything-- maybe something you found along the side of the road. I think hardware stores can be fascinating if you go in there with a mallet! I look for things that are left of center, something you've only seen your whole life, but never heard. Hit it! With a stick! I have a guitar made out of a 2x4 that I bought in Cleveland. You know, in Iraq, you can't have a guitar in the window of a music store because it's too sexy. You know, the curves. So I could go over there with these 2x4 guitars and really take the country by storm.

Pitchfork: Do you have a favorite instrument?
Tom Waits: I have a Chamberlain I bought from some surfers in Westwood many years ago. It's an early analog synthesizer, it operates on tape loops. It has 60 voices-- everything from galloping horses to owls to rain to every instrument in the orchestra. Including the human voice [Waits sings a scale in "synthesizer voice"]. Eleven-second samples! I like primitive things. I've used that a lot over the years on different recordings.
I have a Stroh violin. Stroh is the guy who created the violin with the horn attached to the bridge. This was around when orchestras played primarily in pits. In old theaters, the string players would complain that they couldn't be heard in the balcony. So this guy created the Stroh violin, which was a way of amplifying sound before electricity. It sounds almost like the violin is coming out of the horn of a 78 record player. He made Stroh basses, Stroh cellos. He even has a one-string Stroh violin. Those are interesting. I used one on a record called Alice.

Pitchfork: Do you have a favorite sound?
Tom Waits: Bacon. In a frying pan. If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.

Pitchfork: There is a long human history of seeking impure sounds. In his book Deep Blues, Robert Palmer talks about the influence of West African music on early American blues, and how so many African musicians aggressively eschewed clean sounds-- by attaching pieces of tin to their drums, humming into flutes, things like that. Do you have a natural affinity for sloppier tones?
Tom Waits: I think it lets you incorporate your own voice into the voice of the instrument. By nature, I think we're all curious and looking for mutations all the time. It's not peculiar to me. I guess it's a question of taste. How do you like your eggs?

Pitchfork: You sing Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski on this record. To what extent has literature influenced your music?
Tom Waits: I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page and that's a whole other thing. I'm going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page. But I'm still a word guy. I'm drawn to people who use a certain vernacular and communicate with words. Words are music, really. I mean, people ask me, "Do you write music or do you write words?" But you don't really, it's all one thing at its best. Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning. But to begin with, most people who make songs just start out with [Waits makes noises].

Pitchfork: Sure, and the Beats were very musical writers.
Tom Waits: And the Beats were performing their work in clubs, shouting their work. That's another element of it.

Pitchfork: What sorts of movie roles are you attracted to?
Tom Waits: I do some acting. And there's a difference between "I do some acting" and "I'm an actor." People don't really trust people to do two things well. If they're going to spend money, they want to get the guy who's the best at what he does. Otherwise, it's like getting one of those business cards that says about eight things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure. With acting, I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue, if that. The trouble is that it's really difficult to do a small part in a film, because you have to get up to speed-- there are fewer scenes to show the full dimensions of your character, but you still need to accomplish the same thing that someone else has an hour and a half to do. In terms of making them anatomically correct. And you have to make sure that you're working with people who you really trust and admire and feel safe with. That's not always the case, and if you want to stay working, you have to take chances a lot of time.

Pitchfork: It seems like that's the same case with making records. How different do you think your music would be if you hadn't married Kathleen Brennan?
Tom Waits: It's so hard to say. Everything would be different. She's a remarkable collaborator and we have a real rapport, and that's really what anybody who is working with anybody else is looking for. It clicks.

Pitchfork: I'm interested in the way songwriting works in your home. Less the artistic process, more the physical one-- do you and Kathleen write in the same room, do you snack, do you bicker?
Tom Waits: Sometimes we go in the car, just take the tape recorder and go on a long trip. Sometimes we just sit around the piano-- if we have a deadline, it tightens up the perimeters of the whole thing. We work independently and we work together. If both of you know the same stuff, one of you is unnecessary. Hopefully we're coming at it from different angles. But I don't really know how it works. It's one of those things where you can't really take it apart.

Pitchfork: What was it like touring with your son on drums?
Tom Waits: He's been playing drums since he was eight. He's a big strong guy, taller than me. He's a giant of a man. He has a lot of interest in music, he does beat-boxing and listens to music and it stays with him. He was playing with old-timers-- he's only 21. With families and music, you're usually looking for something that can make you unique. And it can be hard to find that. But he was excellent, it was terrific playing together, as you'd imagine it would be. You learn as much from your kids as they learn from you.

Pitchfork: The new record is such an interesting compendium of your work, giving equal weight to all sides of your sound. How did you decide to organize the songs into brawlers, bawlers, and bastards?
Tom Waits: It was just a big pile of songs. It's like having a whole lot of footage for a film. It needs to be arranged in a meaningful way so it will be a balanced listening experience. You have this big box with all these things in it and it doesn't really have any meaning until it's sequenced. It took some doing. There's a thematic divide, and also pacing and all that. There are different sources to all these songs and they were written at different times. Making them work together is the trick.

Pitchfork: Was there a song where it wasn't immediately evident to you which disc it would fit best on?
Tom Waits: Yeah. But, you know, ballads went on one-- we wanted to call it "Shut Up and Eat your Ballads". The blues and gospel stuff seemed to go together. And the more uncategorizable stuff wound up on Bastards. That's the stuff that's spoken word. After a while it made sense. "Form three lines. You're in the wrong line, buddy."

Pitchfork: You cover Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene", which is one of my favorite songs. It's also, I think, one of your strongest vocal performances. Do you listen to a lot of early American folk and blues?
Tom Waits: Oh yeah, sure. Over the years, yeah I have, and I still do, sure. Most of the things you absorb you will ultimately secrete. You know that. You take something in and that's just what happens, whether it's Jack T. Gardener or Bo Carter or Memphis Minnie or Barbecue Bob. It's all out there and available for you to enjoy, absorb, and be nourished by. Which is a pretty great thing-- somebody did something a hundred years ago and it lasted three minutes and now they're gone and everyone who worked on it is gone, but it's not gone. It's still just as fresh as it was the day it was recorded. I always find that interesting. We don't really know of what we do, how it's going to still be around. But I try to keep that in mind when I record. I've recorded stuff I know I'll never sing again, and I've recorded stuff that I know I will keep singing, in order to try and solve the riddle. But I think it's good to listen to as much as you can, of the old and the new.

Pitchfork: Are there any new artists or people performing right now that you're excited about?
Tom Waits: Missy Elliott. I'm crazy about her. She did some video where she's on the beach doing the jerk in a wife beater. She's out of her mind. She's so natural. It's like she's always been around. Chamillionaire. I listen to a lot of stuff that my kids listen to. You know, Jay-Z, the Beastie Boys, all that. Most of the stuff that dominates the household is not stuff I'd necessarily listen to, but now I put on what the kids put on. My wife, when I met her, she had a remarkable record collection. And they were all still in their sleeves! I couldn't believe it. She took care of her records. Rachmaninov, Beefheart. For me, most of my records were out of their sleeves and in a drawer somewhere. I married a record collection.

Pitchfork: What moment in your career are you most proud of?
Tom Waits: Most of the time I just want to make another record. This stuff is always the best stuff, the fresh material. It's always what's up ahead. I don't really have one of those "Oh, that was my big moment" things.

Pitchfork: I'm sure you know Scarlett Johannson is recording an album of your songs?
Tom Waits: Well no, I read about it in the paper.

Pitchfork: No one consulted you beforehand?
Tom Waits: No, no. But, you know, more power to her.

Pitchfork: Are you excited to hear it?
Tom Waits: I don't know if I'm excited to hear it, but I'm curious. People make songs so that somebody else will hear them and want to do them. I guess it's an indication that the songs aren't so ultra-personal that they can't possibly be interpreted by anyone else. I've seen her in movies. I don't know what she's going to do with the tunes. When you get a hold of somebody else's song, you make it your own. That's all you can do. And that usually requires a certain amount of tailoring. Cut the sleeves off, lay some buttons. Everybody does something different to a song, that's the tradition.

Pitchfork: In your artist's statement for the new record, you say that your voice is really your instrument, which certainly seems true to anyone who has ever heard your records. Some of my favorite singers are the ones who sound a little out of control. Are you ever surprised or offended by what your voice can or cannot do?
Tom Waits: If you're still pushing the envelope and wanting to find out what this baby can do, or if you're still trying to imitate things-- most people start out by imitating. Slowly you develop your own voice. I like vocal word stuff. But I don't always write with an instrument, I usually write a capella. It's more like drawing in the air with your fingers. It's closest to the choreography of a bee. You're freer. You have no frets to constrict you, there are no frets on your voice, and that's a good feeling. So for composing melody, it's something you can do anywhere.

Pitchfork: Did you always know you wanted your voice to sound a certain way?
Tom Waits: I talked to Robert Siegel, the newscaster on NPR, and he said that most announcers and people in radio, they want their voices to sound older. Because a lot of the news you're delivering is very serious and very heavy, and you don't want to sound like a little kid talking about how thirty-three people were killed in a roadside bomb. You have to compose your voice and your whole demeanor so that it's situated to give weight, dignity, and gravity to all the things you're saying. You want the same thing for your voice when you're a singer. You want your voice and how you're approaching it to suit the material.

Pitchfork: There is a rich and wonderful American history of tough, scrappy songwriters-- everyone from Ramblin' Jack Elliott to Bob Dylan-- compulsively mythologizing themselves, inventing backstories, changing their names, developing personas to work alongside songs. Is there a Tom Waits mythology?
Tom Waits: I'm sure there is. The fact is most of the things that people know about me are made up. My own life is backstage. So what you "know" about me only what I allowed you to know about me. So it's like a ventriloquist act. And it's also a way of safely keeping your personal life out of your business. Which is healthy and essential. I'm not one of those people the tabloids chase around. You have to put off that smell-- it's like blood in the water for a shark. And they know it, and they know that you've also agreed. And I'm not one of those. I make stuff up. There's nothing that you can say that will mean the same thing once it's been repeated. We're all making leaner versions of stories. Before there was recording, everything was subject to the folk process. And we were all part of composing in the evolution and the migration of songs. We all reached out, and they all passed through our hands at some point. You dropped a verse or changed the gender or cleaned up a verse for your kids or added something more appropriate for your community. Anything that says "Traditional," it's "Hey, I wrote that, I'm part of that." Just like when a joke reaches you-- how did it reach you? If you could go back and retrace it, that would be fascinating.

Pitchfork: So the second you write something down, it's fiction.
Tom Waits: There is no such thing as nonfiction. There is no such thing as truth. People who really know what happened aren't talking. And the people who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up. It's the same with your own stories, the ones that circulate around with your family and your friends. We're all part of the same hypocrisy.

Pitchfork: Do you keep a notebook?
Tom Waits: Oh yeah, everybody does! Life is too confusing. Monkey wrenches, pocket knives, dog food, instant coffee, lipstick. You gotta get it organized somehow.

Pitchfork: Thanks so much for talking with me.
Tom Waits: Oh! OK. Alright. I'll leave you with a few little things out of my book here. In Los Angeles, it's illegal for a man to beat his wife unless he's on the courthouse steps. In Tulsa, it's against the law to open a soda bottle without the supervision of a licensed engineer. In Texas, the Encyclopedia Britannica is banned because it contains the formula for making home brew. In Claradon, Texas, it's illegal to dust any public building with a feather duster. In Washington, it's illegal to paint polka dots on the American flag. There are only two things you can throw out the window of a moving car, legally. Do you know what they are?

Pitchfork: Um…
Tom Waits: Water. And feathers. Everything else you can get in trouble for.

PHOTOS





BUTTERBALL HELP-LINE HELP-LINE.
mcsweeneys.net

Q: A caller just said she forgot to baste every 10 minutes. I advised her to serve the turkey anyway. Was I correct?
A: Not at all. The turkey is merely the vehicle for the basting. In a recent poll, nine out of 10 people would rather sit down at the table and suck on the end of a baster full of buttery juices than gnaw at some dry old wing. Bad call.

Q: I just overheard my co-worker advising a home cook to truss the bird. I arrived late at the "Talk Turkey" seminar last week and missed the trussing segment. Can you advise?
A: Trussing, while not the chef's best friend, is that pleasant acquaintance you see about once a year and always have a compliment for. Trussing is legal in every state. Trussing comes from the word "truss," which means to truss, or tie string or put pins in a turkey to help it stay in a pretty poultrylike shape that is pleasing to the eye. Cooks must remove pins and string before consuming. If a caller wants to know if she should truss, you should tell her you only go around this crazy world once. Trust truss.

Q: Cinnamon or nutmeg?
A: Cinnamon is a nice spice people are comfortable consuming throughout the year, sprinkled either on toast or in a delicious coffee beverage. Nutmeg is a nasty, gritty substance that wants nothing to do with us in the spring or summer but demands our favor come November, only to disappear to the back of the shelf for another year. Why do we continue to accommodate this so-called seasoning? Nutmeg is a stupid jerk.

Q: I just hung up with a caller with the words "gobble gobble" instead of "goodbye"—was this appropriate?
A: No. Make sure you note that in your report to your supervisor on Monday.

Q: The vending machine on the second floor is broken and we're starved. Should we call maintenance?
A: Maintenance is home eating a proper dinner with family and friends. Go to the office kitchen and look in the cupboard behind the fridge. There will be a half-eaten box of Triscuits there, because every office kitchen in existence contains a half-eaten box of Triscuits in the cupboard behind the fridge. Triscuit dust is an acceptable snack when poured into a small paper cup and drunk in the manner of water. Do not use a straw.

Q: My boyfriend didn't care if I worked the holiday. Is our relationship in trouble?
A: Perhaps your boyfriend wanted to watch football unencumbered and without you fussing around with gravy boats and miniature marshmallows. If your boyfriend is a fresh-faced soap star who wants to move up to Broadway, look for him tap dancing his heart out in front of Macy's around 10:35 a.m.

Q: I've been answering calls from perplexed home cooks all day and I still don't know why we bother, really.
A: Everyone talks about the bickering relatives and the burnt yams, but few talk about taking a weekday to eat and nap and gossip with a sibling about another sibling. No one owns it. No focus group studies it. Just you and a mostly empty bowl of stuffing and no clean utensils, so use your fingers already.

OFFENDED

According to a source close to Pierce Brosnan, the former James Bond actor felt affronted by the performance of Daniel Craig in the latest Bond film, Casino Royale. "Pierce just felt that he should have carried his gun in such a way that people knew it was James Bond they were dealing with, and not some 'first-year Bobby who doesn't know the first difference between an Aston Martin that transforms into a snowmobile and one that turns into a submarine,'" said the source, who added that Brosnan said the Bond girl bedded by Craig may have appeared attracted to him, but he could tell she was faking it. "Pierce felt the performance was amateur and that in general the film lacked a certain je ne sais quoi." Former Bond actor Roger Moore reportedly agreed with Brosnan's assessment and added that, while he was glad to see someone other than Timothy Dalton in the role, no actor has brought the pithy elegance befitting 007 since 1979's Moonraker.

CNN Renews This Week At War For Next Eight SeasonsNovember 22, 2006

ATLANTA — CNN officials announced that they will be carrying the popular news show This Week At War through the 2014 season. "We're confident that we'll have at least eight full seasons worth of material for this property," said CNN President Jonathan Klein during the dedication of the new 11-story TWAW news headquarters in Kuwait City. "And believe me, we're going to be going in some surprising new directions. A premise like this can go on for a generation." In addition to TWAW's extended renewal, CNN is retooling existing news shows to give them a more martial focus, most notably The Situation And War Room, and Lou Dobbs Tonight In The Middle Of A Pitched Street Battle Between Sunni And Shiite Extremists.

Alfonso Soriano: 'I Am Excited To Play For $136 Million'November 23, 2006

CHICAGO—Alfonso Soriano called a press conference Monday to announce that, starting in the 2007 season, he would officially be making $136 million. "I turned down several offers of amounts of money that, in my opinion, were far lower than $136 million," said Soriano, who was smiling from ear to ear as he delivered the news of his signing. "I expect to be making $136 million for a long time." Although Soriano has gained a reputation as a selfish, me-first player, he went on to assure his critics that this new contract is "not about the money."

SACHA BARON COHEN

Two Escalades stop in the middle of Sixty-Fifth Street on the West Side of Manhattan. Out of the front SUV, a tall, awkward mustachioed man in an ill-fitting blue-gray suit emerges. In the past month, through a series of press stunts, interviews, news events and blanket advertising, this man has turned himself into a household name in America: Borat.

It is Halloween, the night of a thousand living Borats roaming our city streets in costumed adulation of the spurious Kazakh journalist, but this Borat is the real thing. A throng of movie publicists, photographers, collaborators and assistants close in around him as he heads toward the escalators that lead up to the Walter Reade Theater, where an advance screening of his American cinematic debut is about to start. He pauses at the foot of the escalator, turns to me and extends a hand. "Hi," he says, in a deep, genteel British accent that I've never heard emerge from this mustachioed visage, despite having watched every minute of available footage he has recorded. "I'm Sacha."

And with this one word -- "Sacha" -- he informs me that I am being let behind the Kazakh curtain, into the mind of the man behind the buffoon, into the very private world of England's most popular enigma, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Since reaching star status in Britain in 1998 with his other alter ego, the wangsta jester Ali G, Baron Cohen has never done an interview in his home country as himself and has never done an interview this extensive anywhere. Even when promoting his supporting role in the Will Ferrell Nascar parody, Talladega Nights, the Sacha Baron Cohen he presented to the press was still a character: typical of either a pretentious British thespian or a really stupid bystander who didn't understand any of their questions. A shorter, shaven-headed man chases after Borat. "Your hair," he mouths, as he reaches him and adjusts the tangle of black curls on his head. This man is Jason Alper, who has designed all of Baron Cohen's costumes and will later tonight accidentally steal his shoes.

After pausing for paparazzi in his usual pose -- shit-eating grin, elbows pressed against his sides and two thumbs up -- Borat heads into the theater and introduces Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

"At first, Kazakh censors wouldn't let me release this movie because of anti-Semitism," he tells the assemblage. "But then they decided that there was just enough."

What follows is one of the greatest comedies of the last decade and perhaps even a whole new genre of film. It features just four actual actors (and a male porn star found to portray Borat's teenage son, Huey Lewis); the rest of the cast consists of real people Borat encounters while traveling across the country in pursuit of Pamela Anderson -- each one an unwitting actor propelling forward his Don Quixote-like quest (Anderson was in on the joke). If you've been anywhere near a television or newspaper in the last month, you know the story. Chances are you've already seen it. Maybe even twice.

After the screening, Borat returns to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel to shower and transform back into Sacha Baron Cohen: mild-mannered Londoner, fiance of actress Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers), reluctant sometime resident of Los Angeles. I wait outside the restaurant Asiate for him to appear. I'd met Baron Cohen once before, three years ago, when he was recording his first series of Da Ali G Show for HBO, interviewing a panel of leading scientists as pseudo hip-hop youth talk-show host Ali G. ("Let's talk about when technology goes horribly wrong: Could there be another Nintendo 64?") At the time, our interview resulted in answers like this one: "When me came out me mum's poom poom bush, me immediately started crying in a junglistic riddim. Me first word was 'ho.' "

This interview promises to be different....

Today, without the funny mustache, Baron Cohen responds to the statements from the Kazakh government seriously for the first time.
"I've been in a bizarre situation, where a country has declared me as it's number-one enemy," he says, forcing a wry grin. "It's inherently a comic situation." He stops, then backpedals a little. "I mean, it's always risky when you don't go down the normal route." Pause. Maybe he's taking himself too seriously now. "I wish I would have been there at the briefing that Bush got about who I am, who Borat is. It would have had to be great."

When Baron Cohen first heard that the Kazakh government was thinking of suing him and placing a full-page ad promoting the country in The New York Times, he was editing his movie in Los Angeles. His reaction: "I was surprised, because I always had faith in the audience that they would realize that this was a fictitious country and the mere purpose of it was to allow people to bring out their own prejudices. And the reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist -- who believe that there's a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old."

In actuality, it turns out that Borat is a far more damning critique of America than it is of Kazakhstan. The jokes that Baron Cohen mentions above -- and all the rest about beating gypsies, throwing Jews down wells, exporting pubic hair and making monkey porn -- are clearly parody. But the America that Borat discovers on his cross-country trek here -- rife with homophobia, xenophobia, racism, classism and anti-Semitism -- is all too real.

"I think part of the movie shows the absurdity of holding any form of racial prejudice, whether it's hatred of African-Americans or of Jews," Baron Cohen says.

A waiter places a complimentary appetizer in front of Baron Cohen.

"What is this?" he asks.

"Ceviche," the waiter answers.

"No, what's in it?"

"Coconut, fish, yuzu, pomegranate."

Baron Cohen continues to grill the waiter: "What kind of fish?"

It soon becomes clear that he is not merely curious or vegetarian or allergic to peanuts. He keeps kosher and is making sure that there is no shellfish, pork or other forbidden food or food combination in the dish. A devout Jew, Baron Cohen also keeps the Sabbath when he can, which means that he doesn't work from Friday evening to Saturday evening.

Unsure of the waiter's trustworthiness, Baron Cohen pokes at the appetizer as he points out that his parents "love" the Jewish humor. And his maternal grandmother, who's ninety-one and lives in Haifa, Israel, went to a midnight screening, then called her grandson at 4 a.m. to compliment him and dissect the scenes in detail.

"Borat essentially works as a tool," Baron Cohen says. "By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' [a song performed at a country & western bar during Da Ali G Show] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.
"I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic."

Baron Cohen doesn't make this grand statement with confidence. He makes it shyly, as if he's speaking out of turn. It's interesting to watch Baron Cohen get bashful, because it is the exact opposite of the characters he portrays. These sincere boors aren't afraid to bring a bag of their own excrement to the table at an antebellum dinner party or ask David Beckham if he can feed on his wife Victoria "Posh Spice" Beckham's breasts.

There is a certain sadism to Baron Cohen, who seems most comfortable when making others uncomfortable. To some degree, Borat and Ali G are safe refuges for him, masks he can hide behind. If everything that comes out of your mouth is parody, then you never have to be accountable for what you say -- because you didn't really mean it anyway. You only said it to lead your interview subjects to the thin line between patience and intolerance in order for their true personality to reveal itself.

In contrast, Baron Cohen himself has no defenses or alibis. One wonders if he could withstand the awkward situations to which he constantly exposes his alter egos.

"I think I'd find it hard to," he admits. "I think you can hide behind the characters and do things that you yourself find difficult."

There are two things Baron Cohen doesn't like talking about: his background and his creative process -- how he creates his characters, how he procures interviews with highly inaccessible figures like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump, and how he gets them to take seriously his preposterous questions. ...

>> This is an excerpt from the new issue of "Rolling Stone," on newsstands until November 30th.

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MUSIC

When Tom Waits claims he doesn't know why he called this three-CD set Orphans, he's being cagey. Orphans obviously began as an outtakes collection -- unreleased work tapes plus old soundtrack, tribute and benefit tracks. Only then, Waits, painfully aware that odds-and-sods projects were lame, decided to fill in some blanks with new songs, couldn't resist rerecording others and ended up with a definitive album. Each disc has its own subtitle: Brawlers for rock, Bawlers for ballads and Bastards for weirdness. Although the promo advertises "56 Songs. 30 New Recordings," only fourteen can be readily found on other albums.
Brawlers is Waits blues a la Mule Variations, only broader. His drummer son Casey's basic thump on "Low Down" reminds the ear that Waits generally bellows over pretty intricate beats. He was on the dreamy New Orleans lilt of "Sea of Love" back in 1988, and though Tito Puente might not think so, "Fish in the Jailhouse" is indeed a mambo. Of course, there's also the first of two Ramones covers, and, fitting nowhere but so good they'd fit anywhere, the mandolin-tinged "Bottom of the World" and the unrhymed, seven-minute "Road to Peace," a portrayal of a Palestinian terrorist that blinks even less than Springsteen's.

Bawlers is Waits' bread and butter -- professional sentimentalists love the way he mauls slow ones, and six of the soundtrack tunes are here, from Big Bad Love, Pollock and Shrek 2. Waits can get grotesquely goopy when he makes nice, but the new "Tell It to Me" and the recycled "The Fall of Troy" are genre classics right up there with Waits' bumptious claims on "Young at Heart" and "Goodnight Irene." Bastards is messier musically, but its six spoken-word pieces are long overdue for anyone who's guffawed at the shaggy-dog monologues Waits rolls out at shows. In "The Pontiac," a dad reminisces about his cars, the mad entomology lecture "Army Ants" isn't far behind, and "First Kiss" explains something we've always wondered. Waits reached that romantic milestone with a trailer crone who made up her own language, wore rubber boots and could fix anything with string. Just like our Tom.

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The Real Marriage Penalty
By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
“Some of usare becoming the men we wanted to marry,” Gloria Steinem proclaimed 25 years ago. She meant, of course, that women in large numbers were seizing the places in higher education and the professions that had formerly been closed to them, becoming the doctors, lawyers and executives that they once hoped only to wed. Over the past generation, the liberal notion of egalitarian marriage — in which wives are in every sense their husbands’ peers — has gone from pie-in-the-sky ideal to unremarkable reality. But this apparently progressive shift has been shadowed by another development: America’s growing gap between rich and poor. Even as husbands and wives have moved closer together on measures of education and income, the divide between well-educated, well-paid couples and their less-privileged counterparts has widened, raising an awkward possibility: are we achieving more egalitarian marriages at the cost of a more egalitarian society?

Once, it was commonplace for doctors to marry nurses and executives to marry secretaries. Now the wedding pages are stocked with matched sets, men and women who share a tax bracket and even an alma mater. People, like other members of the animal kingdom, have always been prone to “assortative mating,” or choosing to have babies with a reassuringly similar partner. But observers like Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico and author of “The Mating Mind,” suggest that the innovations of modern society — from greater geographic mobility to specialized work environments to Internet dating — have made this matching process much more efficient. “Assortative mating is driven by our personal preferences, but also by whom we meet, and these days we have many more opportunities to meet others like ourselves,” he says. (As with most contemporary sociological phenomena, “Seinfeld” was there first: a 1996 episode featured the comedian finding “the female Jerry.”)

In particular, Americans are increasingly pairing off by education level, according to the sociologists Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare. In an article published last year in the journal Demography, they reported that the odds of a high-school graduate marrying someone with a college degree declined by 43 percent between 1940 and the late 1970s. In our current decade, the researchers wrote, the percentage of couples who are “educationally homogamous” — that is, share the same level of schooling — reached its highest point in 40 years. Assortative mating by income also seems to be on the rise. In a 2004 study of couples wed in the 1970s through the early 1990s, the researchers Megan Sweeney and Maria Cancian found an increasingly strong association between women’s wages before marriage and the occupational status and future earnings prospects of the men they married.

Why is this happening? For one thing, more couples are meeting in college and other educational settings, where prospective mates come prescreened by admissions committees as discerning as any yenta. Husbands and wives who begin their relationships during their school years are more likely to have comparable education (and, presumably, income) levels. Secondly, men and women have become more alike in what they want from a marriage partner. This convergence is both cultural — co-ed gyms and bars have replaced single-sex sewing circles and Elks clubs — and economic. Just as women have long sought to marry a good breadwinner, men, too, now find earning potential sexy. “There are fewer Cinderella marriages these days,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History.” “Men are less interested in rescuing a woman from poverty. They want to find someone who will pull her weight.” For this reason, the “marriage penalty” once paid by highly educated women has all but disappeared: among women born after 1960, a college graduate is more likely to marry than her less-educated counterpart. And finally, there’s what Schwartz calls the growing “social and economic distance” between the well educated and the less so, a gulf even ardent romantics may find difficult to bridge.

This last theory holds that disparities in wealth influence whom we marry, but there’s reason to think that our mating patterns could be producing economic inequality as well as reflecting it. A model constructed by the economists Raquel Fernández and Richard Rogerson, published in 2001 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, led them to conclude that “increased marital sorting” — high earners marrying high earners and low earners marrying low earners — “will significantly increase income inequality.” A 2003 analysis by Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, found that a rising correlation of husband-and-wife earnings accounted for 13 percent of the considerable growth in economic inequality between 1979 and 1996.

Burtless himself does not think that assortative mating is necessarily becoming more prevalent. In fact, he says he believes that “the tendency of like to marry like has remained roughly unchanged over time. What have changed are the labor-market opportunities and behavior of women.” In this conception, men have always married women of their own social class, but such stratification was obscured by the fact that the female halves of these couples often did not work or pursue advanced degrees. Now that women who are in a position to do so are attending college and graduate school and joining the professions, the economic consequences of Americans’ assortative mating habits are becoming clearer.

If assortative mating does contribute to our growing gap between rich and poor, does that matter? Few people would question any individual’s romantic preferences. And yet as the current clash over gay marriage demonstrates, private choices about whom we marry — or don’t marry, or can’t marry — can have loud public reverberations. Not long ago, the marriages of whites and blacks, and the lifting of laws that once prohibited such unions, revealed a nation beginning to open its mind on matters of race; likewise, rates of marriage across lines of education and income provide an index of social mobility. If there are fewer such marriages, then there are “fewer sources of intimate ties” between groups, Schwartz says, making marriage one more brick in the wall that separates America’s haves and have-nots.

Of course, men and women don’t choose each other on the basis of education and income alone. Putting love aside, as men’s and women’s roles continue to shift, other standards for selecting a partner may come to the fore. Indeed, the sociologist Julie Press recently offered what she called “a gynocentric theory of assortative mating,” moving the focus from what men now desire in a marriage partner to the evolving preferences of women. What would-be wives may be seeking now, she proposed in The Journal of Marriage and Family, is “cute butts and housework” — that is, a man with an appealing physique and a willingness to wash dishes. Could this be a feminist slogan for our time?

Buyer Be Aware
By ROB WALKER
Obsessive Consumption

In 2000, Kate Bingaman-Burt graduated from college and took a full-time job as a designer and art director for a gifts company in Omaha. She worked on ads and packaging and products but didn’t feel great about any of it. Mostly it was stuff that “people didn’t really need,” she says, and ultimately it made her wonder about why people buy what they buy. Eventually she quit, went to art school to pursue a master’s degree — and started wondering about the things she bought. This led to a project she called Obsessive Consumption, which involved documenting pretty much all of her purchases; soon she started collecting those images on a Web site. And this turned out to be the first iteration of something that continues to this day: “I basically built a brand out of Obsessive Consumption,” she says, “and ran with it.”

Since then the project — or brand — has taken two forms. She exhibits her work in shows with titles like “Love Your Money” and “Available Credit,” and she also sells things in an online shop: drawings; stuffed dollar signs sewn from “vintage and recycled materials”; and pillows with sewn-on designs inspired by credit-card logos. For $4, you can buy a zine of her pen-and-ink-drawings of purchases she made in May 2006: “Exciting stuff here kids. . . . Kate buys a lime on May 5, her second pair of sunglasses for the summer on May 1 and falls victim to purchasing trendy skinny jeans that do nothing for her figure on May 20.”

Although she no longer documents every product she buys, her own purchase patterns still occupy a prominent place in her work, through (for instance) an ongoing series of hand-drawn recreations of her credit-card bills — which are for sale through her Web site. Her first credit-card-statement drawing, as she recalls, was purchased by Jim Coudal, the founder of Coudal Partners, a design and advertising agency in Chicago. Coudal remembers seeing the drawings online and contacting Bingaman-Burt about acquiring the portrait (as it were) of her October 2004 Chase statement. At the time, she hadn’t figured out how to price them, and ended up charging him the minimum balance due, which happened to be $140.

“The credit-card statement is this thing that everyone in America understands, and it’s completely produced by machine,” Coudal observes. “No human touches it, except for the human at the other end, who has the card — and who affects the content of that statement by the purchases they make.” Coudal appreciated the idea of animating this soulless document through hand drawing (the Chase logo suddenly looked so attractive), but what he really liked was that it connected with the artist’s actual purchases. “It brought an anonymous part of everyone’s life and made you look at it in a completely different way,” he says.

Bingaman-Burt, who also teaches graphic design at Mississippi State University, does not see her work so much as a negative reaction to consumer culture as an attempt to cope with it on its own terms.

“Obsessive Consumption is repulsed and grossly fascinated by the branding of consumer culture,” her site explains. “It wants to eat the entire bag of candy and enjoy the sickness that it feels an hour later. It doesn’t want to be an outside critical observer. It wants to be an active participant.” Indeed, the June statements of her various cards showed a cumulative total balance of more than $23,000. She says that it has been reduced to something like $15,000, as she has recovered from grad-school-era debts — but she also acknowledges that there’s “a lot of guilt and emotion” involved in recreating evidence of money spent and interest racked up.

But of course that’s part of the point. And Bingaman-Burt knows perfectly well that nobody needs any of the Obsessive Consumption objects any more than the gifts and cards she designed and helped market in the early 2000s. Her hope, she says, is to engage an audience on a more conceptual level, inviting them to think about consumption and obsession and their after-effects (and to think of them more frequently than during the holiday retail frenzy that begins this coming “black Friday”). The objects she creates and sells are, in a way, simply “souvenirs” of that thought process. As a brand, Obsessive Consumption is about facing the stark realities of obsessive consumption. As Bingaman-Burt puts it: “The products are aware of their lack of necessity.”

DJ SHADOW

SESAME STREET













I FEEL LIKE GOING HOME
Yo La Tengo
I am not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass
Matador : 2006

TUESDAY

Conrad Black expects his trial will be “spectacular” and he’ll walk away a free man. He may be right on the first count...

Hating Paris Hilton is fun: we like a good sneer at the undeserving and decadent rich. She’s our communal dartboard; skewering her gives us a chance to affirm who we are...

In the 15th century, an emerging middle class had the portrait as a means of public exposure. Today, it’s YouTube. Some things never change...

MOVIES
A Wild and Uncrazy Guy

Will Ferrell used to apologize for being normal. He knew that comedians were traditionally angst-ridden, misunderstood misfits who survived unhappy childhoods by masking their pain and anger with humor. Comedy was an outlet and a remedy for their rage or melancholy or fear. From Richard Pryor to Woody Allen to Jim Carrey, they all had their demons. “I have no interesting demons,” Ferrell told me on a sunny early-autumn day in Hollywood. He was folded into a low leather chair in his sparsely furnished office at Gary Sanchez Productions. He and his writing partner, Adam McKay, who directed the movie “Talladega Nights,” a Nascar sendup that stars Ferrell and is the most successful comedy of the year, had just moved their operations into this two-story bungalow. A housewarming gift from Ferrell’s agents — a specially commissioned photograph of a group of professional baseball players with their middle fingers extended — was leaning in its frame against an empty bookshelf. Ferrell was, as he often is, wearing loose khaki shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers. He is 6-foot-3 and rangy, with a broad torso, but he is economical in his movements. There’s a stillness about him that is surprising.

“I was never the class clown,” Ferrell said, listing the reasons that he is an unlikely comedian. “I was popular in high school and in college. I was good at sports. I’ve always been a ‘but look, the glass is half-full’ kind of guy. I used to worry that I wasn’t crazy enough to succeed in comedy. Or troubled enough. In the beginning, people were surprised that a seemingly mild-mannered person could bring a script or a character to life.” He paused, suddenly looking a little giddy. “But I’m not above throwing a chair out a window just to see what happens,” he said. “I may not have demons, but I am kind of immune to inhibitions.”

Over the past decade, Ferrell, who is 39, has pioneered a comedic sensibility that is in sync with a prevailing spirit of cheerful mediocrity in America. In all his various incarnations — from the characters he spoofed on “Saturday Night Live,” on which he starred from 1995 to 2002, to the roles he has played in movies like “Old School” (which made $87 million in worldwide box office in 2003), “Anchorman” ($90 million in 2004) and “Talladega Nights” ($162 million so far) — he has perfected a version of the likable, suburban-born-and-bred, not-too-smart guy who likes to hang out with his friends, doesn’t particularly want to grow up (even if he’s married) and is happily oblivious to his own ridiculousness. Ferrell grew up in Irvine, Calif., a middle-class Republican community, and he was in a fraternity at U.S.C. Between the two experiences, he knows his characters and he knows his audience. “I have a love of suburban, lame white people,” Ferrell told me earlier. “I think I know what makes them funny.”

In recent years, comedies have become one of the few cinematic genres that are consistently successful at the box office. In 2003, “Elf,” which starred Ferrell as a Santa’s helper who journeys from the North Pole to Manhattan in search of his father, earned $26.3 million in its second week of release (compared with $16.4 million for the highly anticipated “The Matrix Revolutions”), and the industry took notice. “Elf” went on to make $220 million, and suddenly the studios were looking to invest in low-budget comedies. The success of these comedies and the box-office clout of their stars have allowed Ferrell to branch out. On Friday, “Stranger Than Fiction,” in which Ferrell plays a more restrained version of his usual white-guy persona, opened nationwide. “I was afraid that Will would be crazy because he is a comedian,” Marc Forster, the director of “Stranger Than Fiction,” told me. “But he is so normal that it is surprising.”

Although Ferrell has made a slight departure with “Stranger Than Fiction,” his main interest remains comedies that are rooted in group improvisation. “There are really only two ways to get into comedy: stand-up or improvisational comedy,” explains Judd Apatow, who directed “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and who, like seemingly everyone in Hollywood’s comedy universe, is friends with Ferrell and McKay. “Jim Carrey, Steve Martin, Woody Allen — those guys came out of stand-up, and they have a finely honed, particular personality to their comedy. Will comes out of improv, which means he enjoys playing different characters and collaboration and camaraderie. It also means being funny in the moment. That’s part of the improv tradition: comedy as it’s happening now, without a lot of takes, when it’s still fun. Since 9/11, there’s an anxiety out there in the world, and Will offers another way of seeing. He’s like you, but funnier and without worries.”

At the beginning of his career, Ferrell tried his hand at stand-up but found it too solitary an existence. “I would open my act by singing the theme music from ‘Star Trek,’ ” he recalled, as he sang the music from “Star Trek.” McKay, who was also wearing shorts and is also tall, came into the room. “It’s kind of high notes, and I did it straight,” Ferrell went on. “And then my big funny button on it was ‘I’m able to sing that because I have no testicles.’ ”

McKay laughed. “I didn’t bomb too many times,” Ferrell said, “but I preferred the safety in numbers of theater. As a kid, I played more like a girl than a boy. Traditionally, little girls play in groups and boys play king of the hill. For some reason, I liked to share. I was never the kid who had to be reminded to pass the ball.”

Ferrell and McKay met on “Saturday Night Live,” where McKay was a writer. Initially, McKay said, he underestimated Ferrell. “I thought Will was there to be the straight man in the sketches,” he remembered. “But at the first read-through for our first show, he blew everyone away. We all started writing for him because he could do absolutely everything.” McKay paused. “And everyone was always saying how nice he was. But Will’s really not that nice. He likes to cause trouble. You know, when Will was at U.S.C., he tried to convince his frat that they should turn gay. He told them it would promote brotherhood and that they could save money on beer because there would be no women around to drink it.”

Ferrell laughed. “Half the guys really thought I was serious,” he said, sounding a little jubilant. “They found no humor in the idea whatsoever.”

McKay and Ferrell began writing together at “S.N.L.,” and when McKay left the show and moved to Los Angeles, Ferrell followed. Their writing method still draws on the free-form creativity of their “S.N.L.” past. “Will types and I lie down on the couch,” McKay explained. Ferrell added: “We improvise the themes. That will slowly digress into, Did you read that thing in the paper? We’ve had days where we’re, like, O.K. — last interruption — this is the last time I’ll talk about the Lakers, but what are they doing? We really do an expert job of not being too hard on ourselves if we have a day that we totally blow because we just have to talk about other stuff. Usually, the next day we’ll hit the ground running.”

This is the dream of American men: wear shorts, make millions, goof around with your friends, be hilarious. What’s more, you get to be part of a clique of like-minded comic actors, writers and directors who trade ideas, appraise one another’s work and appear in one another’s films. One of Ferrell and McKay’s first collaborations was “Anchorman,” a movie set in San Diego in the ’70s that revolves around a local TV news anchor and his professional cohort. In one scene, the anchor, Ron Burgundy, and his network-news team are challenged to a rumble by rival newsmen played by, among others, Vince Vaughn, Luke Wilson and Ben Stiller, three of the reigning stars of comedy. So goes the current comedy community, which is close-knit and supportive: Ferrell showed up in a surprise cameo with Owen Wilson and Vaughn in “The Wedding Crashers”; Apatow helped out as a producer on “Anchorman.” “The hardest part about doing this job is you get no sympathy from your wife when you say how hard your day was,” Apatow says. “They know that a writing session is pizza and YouTube and hanging out with your friends. The conventional wisdom is that men want to be funny to get girls, and that’s true. But guys also want to be funny to make their friends laugh. Comedians, especially, enjoy each other’s company. Or at least, this generation does.”

Ferrell and McKay certainly do amuse themselves. When they signed a two-year deal in June with Paramount Vantage to produce relatively low-budget comedies, they announced to Variety that their new venture — Gary Sanchez Productions — was named after an ex-N.F.L. kicker from Paraguay. They said that Sanchez, whom they claimed they met on a cruise, would finance their company. “With Mr. Sanchez’s support and vision, we look forward to a long and productive partnership,” Ferrell informed Variety. “Viva Paraguay!” Ferrell and McKay posed with “Sanchez” for several full-page ads, one of which ran with the following statement from him: “Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are my friends. Do not harm them. Or I will put you in an abandoned refrigerator full of cobras.”

“The quote may have been too much,” McKay said. The reporter from Variety, who wasn’t sure whether Sanchez existed, was apparently not amused. “I told you — Will Ferrell is not nice,” McKay laughed. “He is much more dangerous than he looks. The man is completely fearless.”


In the 2000 presidential election, Ferrell voted for Al Gore. This would not have been especially noteworthy if at the time he hadn’t been impersonating George W. Bush every week on “Saturday Night Live.” His depiction of Bush as an inarticulate, slightly addled frat boy who spoke about “strategery” and about his wish to emerge “victoriant” played no small part in defining the public persona of the real Bush. In one particularly memorable sketch, actors playing Gore and Jeb Bush debated the country’s future while Ferrell, as Bush, the soon-to-be president, stood in the corner of the room playing with a ball of string like a contented cat.

Not long after that sketch, “S.N.L.” ran a prime-time election special, and Bush and Gore themselves visited the studio. “It was that strange sensation when art and life collide,” Lorne Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night Live,” told me on the phone from his office at NBC. “There were the two candidates making fun of themselves to the actors who were playing them. Will, especially, captured something essential about Bush, and because Will is so likable, I believe, he tilted the election toward Bush. Often, it’s the messenger that makes the material.”

Although Ferrell portrayed Bush as bumbling and not too bright, the impersonation was strangely affectionate, and Bush reportedly loved it. He asked Ferrell to make an appearance with him at the White House Press Corps dinner in 2000, which Ferrell declined. Bush later made a similar request for a charity event held by Barbara Bush. When Ferrell said no a second time, Bush phoned Jeff Zucker, then the head of NBC, and asked him to persuade Ferrell to perform. “He said, ‘You gotta get your guy to do my mom’s charity,’ ” Ferrell recalled, using his Bush accent, over dinner at Kelly and Ping’s, a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. “The idea was that Dana Carvey would imitate the dad and I would be the son. And then the two real people would come up behind us, and we’d go, ‘Oops, sorry!’ That was the whole thing. So George the son called Zucker and I was ... busy. In both cases, I especially did not want to do the inevitable photo op afterwards where we are all holding hands. That would have been a gesture of support.” Ferrell paused. “I’ve actually had people say to me, ‘Thanks a lot for Bush,’ as if I helped him win the election. Luckily, no one has said that in a while. But I can’t help the fact that people in America seem to not mind stupidity.”

Ferrell’s Bush, vapid and likable, was a typical creation. With nearly all the characters he has played — Ron Burgundy (a vapid, likable news anchor), Frank the Tank (the vapid, likable would-be frat guy in “Old School”) — Ferrell shows little interest in searching out a dark side. His niceness and his affection for the lameness of these men redeems their many failings and always makes them somehow attractive. Which is not to say there isn’t a subversive element at times. In “Talladega Nights,” which he wrote with McKay, Ferrell plays a Nascar driver named Ricky Bobby, a version of his Bush character, and he uses the character’s likability to soften what would otherwise be pointed satire. In the film, Ricky Bobby is challenged by Jean Girard, a gay French Formula One driver played by Sacha Baron Cohen. Girard reads “The Stranger,” by Albert Camus, and drinks espresso while he drives, and when he trounces Ricky Bobby on the track, Ricky Bobby begins to unravel. At the end of the movie, a rejuvenated Ricky Bobby wins the big race, and he and Girard have a long kiss to celebrate. “The kiss goes on and on,” Ferrell said, as his stir-fry chicken and vegetables arrived. “Adam and I just thought it was funny.” Ferrell took a bite. “It still makes me laugh that at press junkets for the movie, the reporters all say, ‘Let’s talk about that on-screen kiss!’ I play along and say we rehearsed for three months. But really I feel like saying, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ” He smiled. “I do go in and out of Bush sometimes when I’m playing Ricky Bobby,” he continued. “I love the idea of Bush having the big kiss with the French guy.”

In light of the fact that “Talladega Nights” has been a huge hit in many of the states whose voters helped elect Bush and opposed gay marriage, it’s not hard to wonder if Ferrell’s likability might have some effect on the political landscape. Surely it is not a coincidence, Ferrell speculated, that Bush himself read “The Stranger” over the summer. “Bush must be taking his signals from cinema,” Ferrell told me a month after “Talladega” came out. “But don’t you think he’s getting on Air Force One and saying to the press corps that travels with him, ‘Well, I gotta get back to my Kah-moo’? And then he’s nodding off to sleep. ‘This is good stuff,’ he’ll say, and meanwhile the book is dogeared at the same Page 23.”

Not that Ferrell seriously sees himself as having a real impact. He shrugs off praise and criticism alike. “Will does not have an ounce of alpha,” Lorne Michaels says. “He’s so normal that you can forget how talented he is. It’s rare for a comedian to be so well adjusted. His height helps. In a Ben Stiller world, he’s unusually tall and big. As a result, Will doesn’t have that need to dominate.”

Ferrell grew up as a typical suburban kid. His father, Lee, played keyboards for the Righteous Brothers, and his mother, Kay, was a graduate student in English (she now teaches at a community college). When Ferrell was 8, his parent divorced. He recalls cheering up his younger brother: “I was the kid who said, ‘Look at it this way: we’ll have two Christmases now.’ ”

The divorce may be the only cloud in Ferrell’s past. He is close to both of his parents. “Will was always funny,” his father told me. “But he was never one of those kids who are always ‘on.’ It was not like every Thursday night was show night. But in high school, if they wanted to sell T-shirts for whatever fund-raising drive they had, they’d ask Will to make the announcement. He’d get on the school’s P.A., make everyone laugh and they’d sell everything.”

After years of witnessing the instability of his father’s career, Ferrell initially shied away from show business. At U.S.C., he studied to be a sports broadcaster. After graduation, he moved back home with his mother for three years. (“I had no ego about that,” he says now. “It’s kind of sad.”) He took an internship at a local cable access news show in Orange County, and one day he cracked a joke on the air, and it prompted a life-changing epiphany. “I realized I didn’t want to be Jim Lampley,” he says. “I wanted to be Chevy Chase.”

Ferrell had many disastrous day jobs (playing an elf at a shopping mall, failing miserably as a bank teller, losing the keys to the cars he was paid to valet park), while at night he studied acting and performed his stand-up routine. He met his future wife, Viveca, in the summer of 1991 at a theater class at the South Coast Repertory Conservatory. “She was in the good group and I was in the worse group,” he said, as he finished his meal at Kelly and Ping’s. “But the good group just needed guys, and I was tall.” Viveca, who is Swedish, did not pursue acting; she became a fine-arts auctioneer. They are now about to have a second son, and they live in the Hollywood Hills with three dogs.

In 1991, Ferrell began taking classes at the Groundlings, an improv company that is Los Angeles’s answer to Chicago’s Second City. He quickly graduated from taking classes to joining the main company. Like Second City in Chicago, the Groundlings, where future “S.N.L.” stars like Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz and Maya Rudolph all studied and performed, is a pipeline to “S.N.L.” From the start, Ferrell’s persona was the large but otherwise remarkably average-seeming guy who could go really crazy. “I remember seeing Will at an alternative comedy club in L.A.,” Apatow says. “He was wearing a full-body unitard with a hood, and he was imitating a bad magic act in the style of Cirque du Soleil. I was always trying to find out the root of his humor, the great mystery of Will. But after much investigation, I have learned that there is no great story that explains why Will is so funny. Will Ferrell may be the greatest explanation for genes: he was just born funny.”

“Saturday Night Live” called in 1995 and asked Ferrell to audition. He was very nervous. “It was harder, and a bigger break,” he told me, “to get on ‘S.N.L.’ than it was to get into movies.” Ferrell was competing with about 36 people, only 8 of whom were hired. He chose three bits for his audition: Senator Ted Kennedy doing stand-up (“God, this is dated, I thought”); the Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray at a play reading; and an angry parent yelling at his kids to get off the shed.

He passed the first audition and was asked to meet with Lorne Michaels at his office. “I had this idea that I would bring an attaché case full of fake money to his office,” Ferrell recalled. “I’d say, ‘We can talk all day long, but what really talks is money.’ And then I was going to leave.” But when Ferrell walked in with the briefcase, he found it too awkward to take out the cash. So he sat with the briefcase at his side. At his next meeting with Michaels, Ferrell brought the money and the briefcase again. “He told me I was hired and to put the briefcase down,” Ferrell said. “I ended up giving around $10,000 to his assistant in fake money.”

In his first show, Ferrell performed a sketch as the “get off the shed” guy — the first in a long series of Ferrell’s even-tempered men who violently erupt and yet somehow remain affable. “It was goofy and light,” Michaels recalled. “Will was part of the new breed of comedians who grew up watching ‘S.N.L.’ For them, comedy is a legitimate career choice. When I got into it 40 years ago, this was a disreputable profession. It was uncharted, and your parents did not approve. Comedy was an act of rebellion. Now that anger has pretty much evaporated. Parents are proud if their kid is funny. And that creates a different kind of comedy.”

Michaels was quick to point out how versatile Ferrell was on “S.N.L.” — playing everything from a male cheerleader to the “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek to Janet Reno, the U.S. attorney general at the time. In his first season on

“S.N.L.,” Ferrell got bad reviews in the press. “I put one review up on my door,” Ferrell told me as he finished his ice cream. “I remember calling my mom and saying, ‘Well, I’m the only cast member that was mentioned by name in this review, but they called me most obnoxious newcomer.’ ” Ferrell laughed. “I thought: They noticed me! I’m off to a flying start.”

It was a cool September night in Los Angeles, and Ferrell was tucked into a corner of Orso, an Italian restaurant. He was wearing a pair of loose khaki slacks and yet another T-shirt. (“I hang my T-shirts,” he said earlier, “I like to give them equal wear.”) Ferrell had been busy: he’d finished the shooting for a film, “Blades of Glory,” in which he plays a sex-addicted figure skater competing in the Olympics. The day after the shoot was finished, Ferrell flew to Canada for the premiere of his new film, “Stranger Than Fiction,” at the Toronto Film Festival. In “Stranger Than Fiction,” Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an I.R.S. auditor who wakes up one day to hear a woman, played by Emma Thompson, narrating his life story. When she mentions his imminent death, Crick embarks on a quest to find her and save himself.

While “Stranger Than Fiction” is humorous in parts, it also delves into larger existential questions about art and life, comedy and tragedy. “I was crying during the entire movie,” Ferrell said when he returned from the movie’s premiere in Toronto. “It was almost like when you’re crying so hard that you can’t catch your breath. It was like we won the game 48 to nothing, and no one thought we were going to win.”

Ferrell rarely talks about his films this way, but “Stranger Than Fiction” is a departure for him. There’s nothing goofy about his character: he’s orderly and trapped. “It was so freeing to not run around and act like a crazy person,” Ferrell said. “It was so nice to be conversational and talk like a normal human being. I felt like my job on ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ was to play really good defense. Don’t throw the ball out of bounds. If you’re open, take the shot, but otherwise don’t get too fancy.”

At the premiere, he was asked whether “Stranger Than Fiction” was an indication that he was going to stop making his trademark comedies. (“No.”) He was also asked a question that he is asked repeatedly about his film career: What’s with all the nudity? Though Ferrell does not appear in his underwear in “Stranger Than Fiction,” in “Talladega Nights,” for instance, he runs around a racetrack in his underwear twice. “The journalists would ask me, ‘Is it in your contract that you have to be naked or in your underwear for every movie?’ ” Ferrell said, looking frustrated — which is as close as he gets to looking angry. “Sometimes I say that Unicef gets a percentage of the box office if I’m naked.”

Ferrell has been taking his clothes off since “Saturday Night Live.” In one sketch on the show, he rolled up a pair of star-spangled short shorts until they fit him like a thong. While filming a nude running scene in “Old School,” he refused to wear a robe between takes. Even in “Bewitched,” perhaps the most conventional comedy Ferrell has done, his character appears naked.

None of the nude scenes would be funny, of course, if Ferrell were in tiptop shape. “Skinny is not funny,” Ferrell said. “When I take my clothes off, it’s not to show off. It wouldn’t be funny if I was ripped.” He paused. “But now I’m going to pull back on all the nudity. I don’t want to be predictable. The last thing I want to do is think of myself in the third person. Like, this is a Will Ferrell part. Or that’s a Will Ferrell joke. I think that means you won’t see me in my underwear again for at least two years.”

Ferrell’s use of nudity can be a revealing aspect of his comedic perspective. It is always extreme: he isn’t ever just standing around in his underwear; he’s running or twisting or sitting with his feet up on a desk. It’s funny in large part because he adds an element of discomfort. “I like to find the funny thing and then, because you’re already here, go one step beyond it to there,” Ferrell said. “The best way I can describe it is, when I was at ‘S.N.L.’ and a sketch was bombing, human nature would be flop sweat and get off the stage. But I would actually slow down and take more time because I had this perverse thing of, ‘O.K., you don’t like it, I’m going to make you sit through it even longer.’ ” Ferrell looked pleased. “There’s a satisfaction in pushing something as far as it will go and seeing if you can convince an audience. I have ideas like that all the time, things that just strike me as funny. Adam and I talk about me doing an album of terrible songs that we’ve written and singing them really earnestly.” He paused, then smiled. “I could do a tour. Maybe sing a song or two in my underwear.” It was hard to tell if he was joking.

At 4 p.m. on a Saturday in late October, 10 hours after arriving from England, where he had attended the well-received premiere of “Stranger Than Fiction,” Ferrell was in a tiny dressing room on the eighth floor at 30 Rockefeller Center, where “Saturday Night Live” is filmed. His father, Lee, was sitting on a dilapidated sunken couch, and his nearly constant traveling companions, his assistant, Jessica Elbaum, and his publicist, Matthew Labov, were sitting in tall director’s chairs. Ferrell, who was wearing the pants half of a track suit and a long-sleeved T-shirt, looked a little tired. He was there to support John C. Reilly, his co-star in “Talladega Nights.” Reilly was the host of “S.N.L.” that evening, and Ferrell, a close friend, had volunteered to make a cameo appearance. The idea was that Ferrell would interrupt Reilly’s opening monologue — but in character, playing James Lipton, the host of “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” Ferrell’s Lipton, insufferably obsequious, a blowhard extraordinaire, was one of the impersonations that he made famous during his tenure at “S.N.L..”

Ferrell looped a long muffler that he bought at a London soccer game around his neck. He walked down the hall to the stage and took a seat in the audience in the second row on the aisle. Reilly, who was wearing a brown suit, came onstage to applause from a small audience that had gathered for a rehearsal.

“When I was asked to host ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I said yes, of course,” Reilly began. “But I told them, a lot of people know my face, but they don’t know my name.” At that moment, Ferrell rose to his feet and said, in his most pompous baritone: “That is a patent falsehood! You, sir, are a delight!” Reilly then invited Ferrell’s Lipton onstage, and Ferrell proceeded to take out a large stack of blue note cards. Listing all of Reilly’s film credits, Lipton-style — only getting them entirely wrong — Ferrell said, “You were brilliant as Roxie Hart in ‘Chicago.’ ” “No,” Reilly countered. “That character was played by Renée Zellweger.” Ferrell persisted and demanded to hear some of Roxie’s big number from “Chicago.” Reilly relented, and the “S.N.L.” house band played the song “Nowadays,” as he and Ferrell both began to sing. Ferrell sang in character as Lipton — a little too much vibrato, a little too grandiose.

After the sketch, Reilly and Ferrell took a moment to revise some of the stage direction, and then Ferrell went to change into a gray suit and be made up to resemble Lipton for the dress rehearsal. Later, seconds before the 8 p.m. start time for the dress rehearsal, Ferrell was taken to his chair in the second row. When he stood up in character as Lipton, there was a moment of surprise in the audience that quickly gave way to recognition, followed by cries of “It’s Will Ferrell!” After the applause died down, Ferrell went onstage and did the bit.

Afterward, Ferrell wasn’t completely pleased with the performance. He said he felt the sketch was a little flat, a bit tame. He conferred with Reilly and studied his script. For the actual on-air show at 11:30 p.m., Ferrell added some physical comedy. When he mentioned Roxie Hart and “Chicago,” Ferrell asked to speak to Roxie. At that moment, he put his fingers to Reilly’s lips. “Can I talk to Roxie?” he begged. “Is she in there?” Ferrell tried to pry Reilly’s teeth apart, pulling his mouth open. It was invasive, unexpected and very funny.

“Baby steps,” Ferrell said later, when he returned to the dressing room. “You can always make something better, but it’s always baby steps, little by little.” He sat down in a director’s chair. He looked weary. But there was little time to rest. He and McKay were about to start writing their next script, “Step-Brothers,” which will star Ferrell and Reilly. By February, Ferrell plans to have grown his curly hair into an Afro so he’ll be ready to play a ’70s basketball star in a movie about the American Basketball Association. “When I left ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I was off work for three months,” Ferrell said. “That was the longest I haven’t worked in years.” He paused. “I do feel, at heart, that I’m a lazy person who found this thing that I love. Comedy makes me industrious. Without it, I’m just another guy.”

There's one whopper of a reason why Casino Royale is the hippest, highest-octane Bond film in ages, and his name is Daniel Craig. This rugged, jug-eared Brit, whose irregular features improbably radiate a megawatt star charisma, gets the last laugh on the Internet buzz killers who've been ragging on him at craignotbond.com for being blond and blue-eyed and too short (five-eleven) for Bond duty. Not only is Craig, 38, the best Bond since Sean Connery, he's the first of the Bonds (great Scot Connery, one-shot George Lazenby, charmer Roger Moore, stuff-shirt Timothy Dalton and smoothie Pierce Brosnan) to lose the condescension and take the role seriously.

HERTZBERG:

Interviewing President Bush aboard Air Force One a few days before his second inauguration, a Washington Post reporter noted that American forces in Iraq had neither been welcomed as liberators nor found any of the promised weapons of mass destruction. “The postwar process hasn’t gone as well as some had hoped,” the reporter ventured. “Why hasn’t anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?” The President’s reply—as iconically Bushian as “Bring ’em on”—came to mind last Tuesday night as the big blue waves started rolling in. “Well,” he said back then, “we had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 election.”

Actually, it was more like an impunity moment. “Let me put it to you this way,” Bush had said the day after John Kerry’s concession. “I earned capital in the campaign—political capital—and now I intend to spend it.” And spend it he did. Whatever he had left over after he blew a wad trying to turn Social Security into a bonanza for the financial-services industry was squandered on an unending skein of assurances that the war in Iraq was going fine. By last week, the coffers were empty, and not even the hurried-up sentencing of Saddam Hussein to be hanged by the neck until dead could refill them. The accountability moment had arrived at last.

Americans have had enough, and their disgust with the Administration and its congressional enablers turned out to be so powerful that even the battered, rusty, sound-bit, TV-spotted, Die-bolded old seismograph of an American midterm election was able to register it. Thanks to the computer-aided gerrymandering that is the only truly modern feature of our electoral machinery, the number of seats that changed hands was not particularly high by historical standards. Voters—actual people—are a truer measure of the swing’s magnitude. In 2000, the last time this year’s thirty-three Senate seats were up for grabs, the popular-vote totals in those races, like the popular-vote totals for President, were essentially a tie. Democrats got forty-eight per cent of the vote, Republicans slightly more than forty-seven per cent. This time, in those same thirty-three states, Democrats got fifty-five per cent of the vote, Republicans not quite forty-three per cent. In raw numbers, the national Democratic plurality in the 2000 senatorial races was the same as Al Gore’s: around half a million. This time, despite the inevitably smaller off-year turnout and the fact that there were Senate races in only two-thirds of the states, it was more than seven million.

This election was a crushing rebuke to Bush and his party. The rest is interpretation. Nearly everyone agreed that public anger about the Iraq catastrophe was paramount. To the surprise of much of the political class, exit polls suggested that corruption was almost as formidable a factor, especially among Independents and disaffected Republicans. On the right, some commentators complained that the G.O.P.’s problem was that it hadn’t been conservative enough: too much spending, too much nation-building, too much foot-dragging on abortion and the like. Others took comfort in the hypothesis that, because a number of Tuesday’s new faces are Democrats of a (relatively) conservative stripe, the election was actually a victory for the ideology, if not the party, of George W. Bush. In a blog post titled “All’s Well on the Conservative Front,” Lawrence Kudlow, of National Review, pointed to the “conservative Blue Dog Dems who won a whole bunch of seats” as proof that “Republicans may have lost—but the conservative ascendancy is still alive and well.”

Maybe. Or maybe those Blue Dogs won’t hunt. In truth, the great majority of Capitol Hill’s new Democrats will be what used to be called liberals, and in every case Tuesday’s Republican losers were more conservative than the Democrats who beat them. Moreover, the fate of ballot initiatives around the country suggests that, on balance, the conservative tide may be ebbing. In six states, mostly out West, proposals to raise the minimum wage won easily. Yes, seven ballot measures banning same-sex marriage passed, albeit by smaller margins than has been the pattern; but one, in Arizona, was defeated—the first time that has happened anywhere. Missourians voted to support embryonic-stem-cell research. Californians and Oregonians rejected proposals to require parental notification for young women seeking abortions, and the voters of South Dakota overturned a law, passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor eight months ago, that forbade abortion, including in cases of rape or incest, except when absolutely necessary to save the mother’s life. Rick Santorum, the Senate’s most energetic social conservative, went down to overwhelming defeat—man on dog won’t hunt, either, apparently.

A more persuasive analysis than the all’s-well theory holds that Tuesday’s debacle reveals the limitations of the “mobilize the base” strategy, which Karl Rove devised on behalf of his boss, and which has required the Republican Party to entrust itself entirely to a hard core of taxophobes, Christianists, and dittoheads. Rove’s strategy, this analysis suggests, seemed to work only in 2000 (when Bush came in second at the ballot box) and in 2002 and 2004 (when its weaknesses were masked by fear of terrorism). Traditionally, America’s two big political parties have been loose coalitions, one center-left and one center-right. Rove transformed the Republicans into something resembling a European-style parliamentary party of the right, politically disciplined and ideologically uniform. This year, in response, many on the center-right acted like Europeans, too: they voted not the man (or woman) but the party (Democratic). That sealed the fate of Rhode Island’s popular senator Lincoln Chafee, among other remnants of moderate Republicanism. For the center part of the center-right, there was nowhere to go except to the center part of the center-left.

The day after the election, at a press conference in the East Room of the White House, the curtain rose on Act III of “Oedipus Bush.” On one level, the current President Bush was all crisp decisiveness as he announced the replacement of his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, with Robert Gates, a former C.I.A. director and the president of Texas A. & M. University. Below the surface, but only a little below, something altogether more unsettling was going on. Rumsfeld was one of the first President Bush’s least favorite people; Gates is one of his most trusted confidants. He is also an active member of the Iraq Study Group, which is headed by another of the father’s intimates, James Baker. The group’s report, expected in the New Year, will offer the outlines of a different course in Iraq—an offer the President may be unable to refuse. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld yields to Gates; in the Oval Office, adolescent rebellion gives way to sullen acquiescence.

Bush said some of the right things at his press conference, but he chose his words carelessly. He congratulated the “Democrat leaders” and promised bipartisanship—a goal he is unlikely to advance by referring to his hoped-for new partners by a name calculated solely to annoy them. Impressions are inherently subjective, of course; but he looked like a man who at that moment would much prefer to be commissioner of baseball, the job he longed for in 1993, before falling back on running for governor of Texas. It has been obvious for some time that, as President of the United States, George W. Bush is in very far over his head. He does not know how to use power wisely. He will now have a Democratic Congress to restrain him, and, perhaps, to protect him—and us—from his unfettered impulses. This may not be the Thanksgiving he was looking forward to, but the rest of us have reason to be grateful.

MUSIC

Oddly, there are two articles out there about REM vs. U2. Interesting reads:
1
2

A lot of good music lately... My favourite songs right now:

>woke up new - mountain goats
>when the deal goes down - bob dylan
>summersong - decemberists
>strange apparition - beck
>new partner - mark kozelek
>hangover days - jason collett
>enough to get away - joseph arthur
>bottom of the world - tom waits (dylan and waits are so appropriate for this time of year)


Vancouver today

A fake Charlie Kaufmann movie that's excellent.

NEWS

Two unsuspecting fraternity boys want to make lawsuit against “Borat” over their drunken appearance in the hit movie.
The legal action filed Thursday on their behalf claims they were duped into appearing in the spoof documentary “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” in which they made racist and sexist comments on camera.

The young men “engaged in behaviour that they otherwise would not have engaged in,” the lawsuit says.
“Borat” follows the adventures of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's Kazakh journalist character in a blend of fiction and improvised comic encounters as he travels across the United States and mocks Americans. The plaintiffs were not named in the lawsuit “to protect themselves from any additional and unnecessary embarrassment.” They were identified in the movie as fraternity members from a South Carolina university, and appeared drunk as they made insulting comments about women and minorities to Cohen's character.

The lawsuit claims that in October 2005, a production crew took the students to a bar to drink and “loosen up” before participating in what they were told would be a documentary to be shown outside of the United States.

“They were induced to agree to participate and were told the name of the fraternity and the name of their school wouldn't be used,” said the plaintiffs' attorney, Olivier Taillieu. “They were put into an RV and were made to believe they were picking up Borat the hitchhiker.”

After a bout of heavy drinking, the plaintiffs signed a release form they were told “had something to do with reliability issues with being in the RV,” Taillieu said.

The film “made plaintiffs the object of ridicule, humiliation, mental anguish and emotional and physical distress, loss of reputation, goodwill and standing in the community,” the lawsuit said.

It names 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp., and three production companies as defendants. Studio spokesman Gregg Brilliant said the lawsuit “has no merit.”
The plaintiffs were seeking an injunction to stop the studio from displaying their image and likeness, along with unspecified monetary damages.
“Borat” debuted as the top movie last weekend with $26.5-million (U.S.).


EVEN BETTER...


LOW LOW LOW

For Neil Young, 1970 proved to be a particularly busy year. In addition to touring the world as a solo acoustic act and with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as recording two pivotal albums (After the Gold Rush and Deja Vu), he managed to squeeze in a few gigs with Crazy Horse. Six of the best takes from two torrid shows at the Fillmore East on March 6th and 7th are available on this CD, which is the first-ever archival release from Young's bulging vault. Epic jams on "Down by the River" (twelve minutes long) and "Cowgirl in the Sand" (sixteen minutes) are highlights of the disc, which also contains "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," "Winterlong" and "Wonderin.' “The guitar interplay between Young and original Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten is breathtakingly sharp; Young has played with countless other guitarists since Whitten died in 1972, but nobody has come close to matching his ragged-glory style.


For years, fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse have been waiting for an official chance to hear Crazy Horse live with original leader Danny Whitten, the insanely talented guitarist who died of a heroin overdose in late 1972, inspiring Tonight's the Night. Tuned-in fans have been awaiting this very set for at least a dozen years, as it was originally to be tacked onto the end of a Decade-style triple CD of outtakes. Thankfully, this well-recorded live set from the infamous Fillmore East was well worth the wait. Here are scorching, extended takes of "Down by the River," "Winterlong," and "Cowgirl in the Sand," each propelled by guitar interplay so delightful you have to keep rewinding to hear it again. In fact, bits of it seem to prefigure the ways that Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine would feed off each other in the band Television, only with less of a sweet edge. But the world doesn't need any more arguments that Young was a proto-punk; what the world does need is at least a dozen more releases from Neil's archives! And hopefully, with this awesome live album, the floodgates have truly been opened and there are many more to come, in the vein of Dylan's Bootleg series. This disc is worth it alone for the version of "Wondering," a tune not officially recorded until many years later in Neil's weird '80s rockabilly phase.

See Half Nelson.

Read my brother's blog. He is travelling through Africa.

See excellent paintings here.



WILDER SHORES OF LOVE
CY TWOMBLY

 
 
  

THE ECONOMICS OF GLOBAL WARMING

Throughout the midterm campaign season, at least one major issue was conspicuously absent from debate. Except in California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reinvigorated his bid for reëlection by vowing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, climate change was barely mentioned. This can’t be wholly blamed on the politicians: according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, Americans still rank global warming as a low policy priority—far behind Iraq, the economy, and health care—with less than half of respondents designating it a “very important” issue.

Given the news out of Baghdad, it’s only natural that people would choose to focus on catastrophes unfolding in real time, but the longer that global warming is ignored the more intractable it becomes—a point made forcefully last week in a report issued by the British government. Unless the nations of the world come together to control emissions, the report said, we face the risk of “major disruptions to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.”

The report’s author, Sir Nicholas Stern, the head of Britain’s Government Economic Service, is hardly a scaremonger. He combines a strong academic background—Cambridge, Oxford, and the London School of Economics—with practical experience. After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, he spent six years at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. From 2000 through 2003, he was the World Bank’s Chief Economist. Last year, Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked him to examine the economic consequences of climate change and make recommendations for what governments should do about it. The report Stern delivered, at six hundred pages, sets a new benchmark for policy discussion.

The Bush Administration and its ideological and corporate allies have downplayed the scientific evidence for global warming while complaining that taking on climate change in a major way would place too great a burden on the economy. Stern, who came to the subject fresh, dismisses these views. He says, “Climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response.”

At the launch presentation of his report, Stern pointed out that global warming is a textbook case of an “externality,” in which the prices people pay for gasoline, electric power, and other energy products don’t reflect their true costs, among them the impact of greenhouse gases. “Our emissions affect the lives of others,” he explained. “When people do not pay for the consequences of their actions, we have market failure. This is the greatest market failure the world has seen.”

There are a number of ways to deal with market failures, including taxes, regulation, and compulsory voucher schemes that force corporations and other organizations to pay for the negative side effects of their activities, such as environmental pollution. Bringing carbon emissions under control is such a mammoth task, Stern says, that all these remedies will be needed. By 2050, for example, at least sixty per cent of global power capacity will have to come from non-carbon sources, such as wind farms, solar cells, and nuclear reactors; at the moment, the proportion is less than twenty-five per cent. “Mitigation—taking strong action to reduce emissions—must be viewed as an investment,” the report says. “If these investments are made wisely, the costs will be manageable, and there will be a wide range of opportunities for growth and development along the way.”

The figures that Stern and his team of researchers provide should be regarded as best guesses rather than precise forecasts, but they are instructive nonetheless. Stabilizing greenhouse-gas emissions at somewhat above current levels by 2050 would cost about one per cent of the annual global gross domestic product, or about half a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money, but it’s cheap compared with the costs we will eventually face if we do nothing—between five per cent and twenty per cent of annual world G.D.P., or as much as nine trillion dollars a year. (The G.D.P. of the United States last year was twelve and a half trillion dollars.)

These estimates are based on adding up things like a crash in the Australian tourism industry, resulting from the devastation of the Great Barrier Reef; higher property-insurance premiums in Florida, because of coastal surges; lower crop yields for Italian farmers, caused by water shortages in the Mediterranean region; and a precipitous decline in the already poverty-stricken economy of Bangladesh, owing to the fact that parts of the country may be under water.

Some cold countries, such as Russia and Sweden, may benefit economically as their climate warms up, but the overall impact is sharply negative, especially when monetary values are assigned to consequences like forced migrations, the destruction of the rain forests, and the spread of vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue fever. (Previous studies understated the economic impact of global warming because they didn’t account for such collateral effects.) In general, poor countries, especially those in tropical areas, will be affected most by global warming, and their economic sufferings will likely trigger instability. In West Africa, for example, seventeen countries share many of the same threatened water sources, and, the report says, “the region faces a serious risk of water-related conflict.”

Prime Minister Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have pledged to cut Britain’s carbon emissions by sixty per cent over the next four decades, an agenda the opposition Conservative Party also endorses. But, as Blair pointed out last week, if Britain were to cease all its emissions overnight, the beneficial impact would be wiped out by just two years of growth in China’s emissions. Blair and Brown also know that the problem can’t be seriously tackled without the participation of the United States, which leads the world in greenhouse-gas emissions. It is a measure of their estrangement from the Bush Administration—on this topic, at least—that they have hired none other than Al Gore to advise them on environmental policy. In addition, they have dispatched Stern to Beijing, New Delhi, and Washington to make the case for prompt international action. He might want to save burning some jet fuel and skip the American leg of the trip. Samuel Thernstrom, a former senior official at Bush’s White House Council on Environmental Quality, told a British reporter, “What I see so far today does not give me any reason to believe that Mr. Stern can be a spokesman who can change minds.” He added, “I don’t see a whole lot new here.”
- New Yorker

In lighter news,