MUSIC Bob Dylan - Modern Times Tom Waits - Orphans Neko Case - Fox Confessor Beck - The Information Willie Nelson - Songbird M. Ward - Post-War Cat Power - The Greatest The Strokes - First Impressions of Earth Hot Chip - The Warning Neil Young - Living with War
BOOKS The Blind Side - Michael Lewis Black Swan Green - David Mitchell Restless - William Boyd The Attack - Yasmina Khadra The Other Side of the Bridge - Mary Lawson Long Tail - Chris Anderson Heat - Bill Buford What is the What - Dave Eggers Weather Makers - Tim Flannery Lost Painting - Jonathan Carr
FILM UNITED 93 THE DEPARTED AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH VOLVER LITTLE CHILDREN CHILDREN OF MEN LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE HALF NELSON BABEL (BORAT)
Very Fine Lines: What Makes a Cartoon New Yorker-Worthy? Draw Your Own Conclusion.
Two plumbers working on a sink with an alligator coming out of the faucet? Yes.
Two drunks brainstorming about starting the Drinking Network? No.
A guy with his hand chopped off pointing the way to the Islamic court? Ahhhhhh . . . maybe.
It's Wednesday afternoon and David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, is picking cartoons. A few minutes ago, Bob Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor, entered Remnick's office carrying three wire baskets and 81 cartoons. The baskets are labeled Yes, No and Maybe. The cartoons are the ones Mankoff chose from the nearly 1,000 he received since the previous Wednesday's meeting. Now, with the help of Managing Editor Jacob Lewis, Remnick will decide which ones the magazine will buy.
He picks a cartoon out of the pile. It's by Roz Chast, the New Yorker's queen of modern neurosis. This cartoon is a gallery of fictitious "Excuse Cards." Smiling in anticipation, Remnick starts reading.
"You know, some of these are not great," he says, sadly. "I like the concept of it," says Lewis. "I'm not sure this is working," Remnick says and the cartoon goes into the No basket.
He picks up the next cartoon. It's another Chast: a mock front page of a tabloid newspaper, the "Arctic Enquirer," with headlines about salacious doings in Santa's workshop.
Remnick laughs. "Okay, let's take that," he says. It goes into the Yes basket.
He keeps going. No. No. Yes. No. Now he picks up a cartoon that's labeled "Good Shrink, Bad Shrink." A guy's lying on a psychiatrist's couch with a shrink on each side of him. One shrink is saying, "Face your demons." The other says, "Take a pill."
Remnick cracks up. "That'll be on every refrigerator in America," he says. laughing. It goes into the Yes basket.
No. Yes. No. No. Remnick picks up a cartoon of a corporate boardroom with a bunch of guys in suits sitting around a conference table with one chair occupied by a brain in a jar. The caption reads, "But first let's all congratulate Ted on his return to work."
" Ewwww!" Remnick says, half groaning, half laughing. "Bob!" "It's great!" Mankoff says. "It's horrible!" Remnick responds, laughing. "What? A little brain in a jar?" Mankoff replies. "No animals were hurt in the making of this cartoon." Remnick laughs. But he doesn't change his mind. "Not here," he says. It's a No.
Hey, wait a minute! Did you catch that? The guy laughs at the cartoon, but he still rejects it! It's good the cartoonists aren't watching. This would drive them crazy. Well, craz ier. Constant rejection has rendered these geniuses half nuts already. In about 20 minutes, Remnick rejects 48 cartoons and buys 33 -- that's 33 out of nearly a thousand that came in this week! It's hard out here for a cartoonist.
Just ask Matthew Diffee. At 36, he's one of the New Yorker's star cartoonists, creator of the classic drawing of Che Guevara wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt, which has become a hot-selling T-shirt itself. But the man is practically punch-drunk from repeated rejection.
Every Tuesday, like most of the New Yorker's four dozen regular cartoonists, Diffee submits a batch of about 10 cartoons.
"And if you're really, really funny that week," he says, "you'll sell . . . one cartoon! That's a 90 percent rejection rate." On a bad week, the rejection rate is 100 percent. This makes for a lot of ego-battered cartoonists. It also makes for a lot of rejected cartoons, many of them very funny. Which is why Diffee recently published a book called "The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in the New Yorker."
It's a group of cartoons drawn by 31 New Yorker cartoonists and rejected by Mankoff or Remnick because they were a little too . . . well, one cartoon, by Drew Dernavich, shows a doctor handing his patient a rubber glove and saying, "Give a man an exam and he'll be healthy for a day; teach a man to examine himself and he'll be healthy for a lifetime."
"It's funny to see something drawn by somebody who's in the New Yorker, but it's way too crude to ever be in the New Yorker," Diffee says. "To me, the funniest element is that this guy actually submitted this. W hat was he thinking?"
"The Rejection Collection" is hilarious, Remnick says. "But," he adds, "I did not find myself saying, 'I wish I took these cartoons.' Maybe a few, but very few. I think a lot of these cartoons were purposely submitted knowing they wouldn't get through, and they did it for the hell of it. They know there are certain limits. There's a language limit, a grossness limit, a juvenile limit."
Remnick hates rejecting cartoons. He really does. "There's a heaviness about it," he says, sighing heavily. "Because you're conscious that a certain number of people are waiting on pins and needles to see if they've got a cartoon in that week. It's hard. We're pretty much the only place that runs cartoons consistently, and we run maybe 15 or 20 a week. It's a really tough way to make a living."
Humor Percolator Here's how Matthew Diffee makes his living: Every morning, he sits down with a cup of coffee, a black Pilot pen and some blank sheets of white paper, and he starts thinking.
"I'll think of something," he says. "I just thought of a barn. What about a barn? A barn raising? Amish people? What about Amish people? They have those beards without mustaches. What would an Amish guy who had a mustache say to a guy who didn't? Those are ideas, but they're not good ideas. So you leave the Amish and you think: corn. And you come up with some bad corn ideas. But maybe one of the bad corn ideas combines with one of the bad Amish ideas and out of the blue, something comes to you."
He's in Washington to promote "The Rejection Collection," and he's sitting in a coffee shop cranking up on caffeine and explaining how cartoons are born. Years ago, he says, he was thinking about the phrase "I was in a different place then."
"I wrote down that phrase and I thought, 'How can I make that funny?' " he says. "And months later, I was thinking about pirates: They walk the plank. They have a hook for a hand. Well, what else could they have instead of a hook? You go through the options. It has to be about the size of a hook. You can't use a broom or a canoe paddle. So it has to be a garden tool or a kitchen utensil. And I thought: A spatula is kind of funny."
Presto! He drew a pirate with a spatula for a hand and the caption, " I was in a different place then." And the New Yorker bought it.
Diffee started drawing cartoons in the late '90s, when he was living in Boston and failing to make it as an artist or a stand-up comic. His first cartoon won a contest sponsored by the New Yorker, and Mankoff encouraged him to submit more. For a year, Diffee submitted 15 cartoons a week, every week. "I sold four," he says. That's four out of about 700. The next year he did a little better. He sold eight.
Now, Diffee lives in Brooklyn and has a contract with the New Yorker, which buys about two dozen of his cartoons a year. He won't say how much his contract pays him -- and Mankoff won't reveal what the magazine pays for cartoons -- but he's getting by.
"I'm not saving money," he says, "but I'm paying my New York rent."
On Tuesday mornings, Diffee goes to Mankoff's office to drop off his latest batch and schmooze with the other cartoonists who've come to drop off their batches. A dozen or so will go to lunch at a restaurant called Pergola des Artistes and talk shop.
"If you expect a lot of one-upping each other in a Gag-o-Rama, you'd be disappointed," he says. "We have serious conversations on how to draw duck feet or whether a duck is funnier than a penguin. And there's a level of bitterness that we're not selling as much as we should."
He pauses. "Sometimes somebody will say something funny and you'll see a bunch of people do this -- " He reaches into his pocket for a pen and paper. "And somebody'll say, 'I claim it!' "
Do You Get It? Remember the "Seinfeld" episode about the New Yorker cartoon? Elaine doesn't get the cartoon, so she shows it to Jerry and George, and they don't get it either. Somehow she buttonholes the editor of the New Yorker and demands that he explain it. But he can't.
"Cartoons are like gossamer, and one doesn't dissect gossamer," he says, lamely. The episode was funny because sometimes New Yorker cartoons really are baffling. It was even funnier if you knew that the script was written by Bruce Eric Kaplan, a TV writer who also draws cartoons for the New Yorker -- cartoons that he signs BEK. Brilliant cartoons that are sometimes, if truth be told, a bit baffling.
Mankoff, who has been cartoon editor at the magazine since 1997, knows that sometimes people are befuddled by New Yorker cartoons. "We don't do focus groups. We don't find out ' Does everybody get it?' " he says. "And sometimes people don't get it. Sometimes it's because we made a mistake. Sometimes it's because the reference is very elusive."
Picking cartoons isn't as easy as it looks. "The funniest cartoon is not necessarily the best cartoon," says Mankoff. "Funnier means that you laugh harder, and everybody's gonna laugh harder at more aggressive cartoons, more obscene cartoons. It's a Freudian thing. It gives more relief. But is it a better joke? To me, better means having more truth in it, having both the humor and the pain and therefore having more meaning and more, uh, uh . . . " He searches for a word, then finds it: "poetry."
Mankoff, 62, is a cartoon philosopher and a cartoonist. He's the guy who drew the oft-reproduced classic of a businessman looking at his datebook as he talks on the phone, saying "No, Thursday's out. How about never -- is never good for you?"
He is also a cartoon entrepreneur. He's the creator of the Cartoon Bank, which sells New Yorker cartoons in every conceivable permutation. You can buy books of New Yorker cartoons about cats or golf or baseball or business or technology or teachers or shrinks. Or you can buy "The Complete Book of New Yorker Cartoons," a massive tome that includes two CDs that, taken together, contain all 68,647 cartoons that had run in the magazine before the book was published in 2004. You can also buy framed prints of every New Yorker cartoon, plus T-shirts, notecards, games, even a shower curtain, so you can look at cartoons when you're naked, wet and soapy.
"Bob is a marketing genius," says Sam Gross, who has been drawing cartoons for the magazine since 1969. "He sells those cartoons on everything but mint jelly."
"Let's look at yesterday, " Mankoff says. He swivels his chair and taps on his computer. The screen fills with the record of yesterday's sales at the Cartoon Bank. "Yesterday we did $26,000," he says, happily.
And the cartoonists get a cut of the action. "On a framed print, an artist might get, say, $60," he says. Some artists have made as much as $100,000 from a popular cartoon.
"Your cartoon that appears in the New Yorker has a life after life," he says. "We pay you for the cartoon and you get royalties. Are you going to be a millionaire? I don't think so. But you can make a decent living."
Rejection Perfection
Looking a tad cartoonish with his scraggly gray hair and his hangdog face, Mankoff flips through a huge pile of cartoons.
"No," he says, tossing one aside. "Nah," he says, rejecting another. "Not funny enough," he grumbles, flipping faster. "Definitely not . . . No way . . . Not here . . . Not now . . . Not on my watch . . . Not your day . . . No . . . No . . . For God's sake, no! . . . A thousand times no!"
This isn't real life, thank God. It's a movie, a short called "Being Bob," with Mankoff playing himself as The Rejecter, killer of cartoonist's dreams. It debuted at a New Yorker event last year and now Diffee's showing it at Politics and Prose, the Washington bookstore, where he's promoting "The Rejection Collection."
When the movie ends, he opens the floor to questions. "Does Mankoff ever laugh?" somebody asks. "I've never seen it happen," Diffee says, lying about his pal for the sake of a laugh. "He has snickered. But that was because the cartoon was bad and he'd seen it before."
He tells the story of the year he sent in 700 cartoons and sold four. "And for some reason, I kept doing it," he says. "Some people don't. They have other options, maybe." A kid comes to the microphone and asks, "Do you get frustrated a lot?" "How can you tell?" Diffee asks. That gets a laugh. "Yes, I get frustrated a lot," he admits.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "If you have a pessimistic outlook on life, you'll probably do better," he tells the kid. "If you think nine out of 10 of your ideas will be rejected, you'll work harder."
It's the power of negative thinking -- the perfect philosophy for New Yorker cartoonists and any other poor souls who are frequently clobbered by rejection.
Alternate Titles for O.J. Simpson's New Book. Stab This Book Stab Your Wife With This Book Beat Your Wife to Death With This Book Tuesdays With Stabby Are You There, God? It's Me, a Multiple Murderer To Kill a Mockingbird, Wherein the Mockingbird Is Your Ex-Wife and Her Friend, the Waiter What to Expect When You're Expecting to Stab Someone
U2
CHRISTMAS SHOPPING: THE GIFT RIGHT OUT by James Surowiecki
Christmas shopping in the U.S. has been a reliable source of anxiety and stress for well over a century. “As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is eaten, the great question of buying Christmas presents begins to take the terrifying shape it has come to assume in recent years,” the New York Tribune wrote in 1894. But recently millions of Americans, instead of trudging through malls in a desperate quest for the perfect sweater, have switched to buying gift cards. The National Retail Federation expects that Americans will buy close to twenty-five billion dollars’ worth of gift cards this season, up thirty-four per cent from last year, with two-thirds of shoppers intending to buy at least one card; gift cards now rival apparel as the most popular category of present. This is, in part, because of clever corporate marketing: stores like gift cards because they amount to an interest-free loan from customers, and because recipients usually spend more than the amount on the card—a phenomenon that retailers tenderly refer to as “uplifting” spending. But the boom in gift cards is also a rational response to the most important economic fact about Christmas gift giving: most of us just aren’t that good at it.
We all know that bad gifts inflict a cost—just think of the rigid smiles that greet an unwanted floral tie or Josh Rouse CD—but it’s surprising how big that cost can be. Since the early nineteen-nineties, Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been doing a series of studies in which college students are asked to put a value on the presents they receive. Waldfogel’s main finding is that, in general, people spend a lot more on presents than they’re worth to those who receive them, a phenomenon that he calls “the deadweight loss of Christmas.” A deadweight loss is created when you spend eighty dollars to give me a sweater that I would spend only sixty-five dollars to buy myself. Waldfogel estimates that somewhere between ten and eighteen per cent of seasonal spending becomes deadweight loss, which means that billions of dollars a year is now going to waste.
Why aren’t we better at gift giving? A lot of the time, we don’t know the people we’re shopping for all that well. Much of the deadweight loss that Waldfogel found was caused by older people, who may not be attuned to what their young relatives really want, and are therefore more likely to give gifts that recipients value less. More surprisingly, though, we’re also bad at buying for the people we’re closest to. A recent study by the marketing professors Davy Lerouge and Luk Warlop finds that familiarity can actually lead us astray. They ran a series of experiments with long-standing couples in which the partners tried to predict each other’s taste in furniture—a sort of academic version of “The Newlywed Game”—and found that, in general, people did a poor job of it. In making predictions, people tend to rely on what Lerouge and Warlop call “pre-stored beliefs and expectations,” rather than paying close attention to what their partner really liked. People did a good job of predicting their partner’s preferences, in fact, only when they shared those preferences. My idea of what you want, it turns out, has a lot to do with what I want.
Does our incompetence at gift giving matter? Many would say no. Waldfogel, after all, measured the value of presents in purely monetary terms—he explicitly told his subjects to ignore sentimental attachments. But sentiment obviously has a tremendous amount to do with how we respond to gifts. A study by the economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway shows that we value unrequested gifts more than presents we ask for, because we assume that the former show more thought. And we also go to great lengths to demonstrate that a gift is more than a dollar sign: we snip off price tags, clip the prices off book jackets, and ask for gift receipts that hide the cost of the present.
The problem is that, while we say that gift giving is about sentiment, not about money, we act as if the best expressions of sentiment came in expensive packages. Around a hundred and fifty billion dollars is spent on gifts during the holiday season every year; this year, the average American expects to spend close to a thousand dollars on presents. And, much as sentiment counts, we don’t let it stand in the way of getting what we want: according to a survey by the National Retail Federation, forty per cent of America expects to return at least one holiday gift this year, and an American Express survey found that roughly a third of respondents had “re-gifted” presents. If we’re spending all this time and money on gifts, the fact that so much of it is wasted matters.
An economist might suggest that the solution is to abandon the pretense and simply start exchanging small piles of money. The boom in gift cards is a kind of socially tolerable version of this: the cards are somehow more personal than cash, and they’re also not going to be wasted on an unwanted gift. But Waldfogel’s studies also suggest a very different solution: if most of the presents we buy are going to be less valuable in monetary terms than in sentimental ones, then there’s no reason to believe that the more expensive gift is a better gift. In fact, the more we spend at Christmas, the more we waste. We might actually be happier—and we’d certainly be wealthier—if we exchanged small, well-considered gifts rather than haunting the malls. Calculating the deadweight loss of Christmas gifts is a coldhearted project, but it leads to a paradoxically warmhearted conclusion: the fact of giving may be more important than what you give. Start with “Bah, humbug” and you somehow end up with “God bless us, every one.”
NEW IAN MCEWAN FICTION FOR THE PLANE RIDE HOME
ON CHESIL BEACH by IAN MCEWAN
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. They were sitting down to supper in a tiny room on the second floor of a Georgian inn in Dorset. In the next room, visible through the open door, was a fourposter bed, rather narrow, whose cover was pure white and stretched startlingly smooth, as though by no human hand. Edward did not mention that he had never stayed in a hotel before, whereas Florence, after many trips as a child with her father, was an old hand. Superficially, they were in fine spirits. Their wedding, at St. Mary’s, Oxford, had gone well; the service had been decorous, the reception jolly, the sendoff from school and college friends raucous and uplifting. Her parents had not condescended to his, as they had feared, and his mother had not significantly misbehaved, or completely forgotten the purpose of the occasion. The couple had driven away in a small car belonging to Florence’s mother and arrived in the early evening at their hotel on the coast in weather that was not perfect for mid-June or the circumstances but was entirely adequate: it was not raining, but nor was it quite warm enough, according to Florence, to eat outside on the terrace, as they had hoped. Edward thought that it was, but, polite to a fault, he would not think of contradicting her on such an evening.
So they were eating in their rooms before partially open French windows that gave onto a balcony and a view of a portion of the English Channel, and of Chesil Beach with its infinite shingle. Two youths in dinner jackets served them from a trolley parked outside in the corridor, and their comings and goings through what was generally known as the honeymoon suite made the waxed oak boards squeak comically against the silence. Proud and protective, Edward watched closely for any gesture or expression that might have seemed satirical. He could not have tolerated any sniggering. But these lads from a nearby village went about their business with bowed backs and closed faces, and their manner was tentative; their hands shook as they set items down on the starched linen tablecloth. They were nervous, too.
This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated with a single glazed cherry. Out in the corridor, in silver dishes on candle-heated plate warmers, waited slices of long-ago roasted beef in a thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue. The wine was from France, though no particular region was mentioned on the label, which was embellished with a solitary darting swallow. It would not have crossed Edward’s mind to order a red.
Desperate for the waiters to leave, he and Florence turned in their chairs to consider the view—of a broad mossy lawn and, beyond, a tangle of flowering shrubs and trees clinging to a steep bank, almost a cliff, that descended to a lane that led to the beach. They could see the beginnings of a footpath, dropping by muddy steps, a way lined by weeds of extravagant size, giant rhubarb and cabbages, they looked like, with swollen stalks more than six feet tall, bending under the weight of dark, thick-veined leaves. The garden vegetation rose before them, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the gray, soft light and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose distant steady motion made lapping and sucking sounds against the grating pebbles. Their plan was to change into rough shoes after supper and walk on the shingle, between the sea and the lagoon known as the Fleet, and if they had not finished the wine they would take that with them, and swig from the bottle like gentlemen of the road.
And they had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before them in the hazy future, as richly tangled as the early-summer flora of the Dorset coast, and as beautiful—where and how they would live, who their close friends would be, his job with her father’s firm, her musical career and what to do with the money her father had given her, and how they would not be like other people, at least, not inwardly. This was still the era—it would end later in that famous decade—when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure. Almost strangers, they stood, strangely together, on a fresh pinnacle of existence, gleeful that their new status promised to promote them out of their endless youth—Edward and Florence, free at last! One of their favorite topics was their childhoods, not so much the pleasures as the fog of comical misconceptions from which they had emerged, and the various parental errors and outdated practices they could now forgive.
From these heights they could see clearly, but they could not describe to each other certain contradictory feelings: they separately worried about the moment, sometime soon after dinner, when their new maturity would be tested, when they would lie down together on the fourposter bed and reveal themselves fully to each other. For more than a year, Edward had been mesmerized by the prospect that on the evening of a given date in June the most sensitive portion of himself would reside, however briefly, within a naturally formed cavity inside this cheerful, pretty, formidably intelligent woman. How this was to be achieved without absurdity, or disappointment, troubled him. His specific worry, based on one unfortunate experience, was of overexcitement, of what he had heard someone describe as “arriving too soon.” The matter was rarely out of his thoughts, but though his fear of failure was great, his eagerness—for rapture, for resolution—was far greater.
Florence’s anxieties were more serious, and there had been moments during the journey from Oxford when she’d thought she was about to draw on all her courage to speak her mind. But what troubled her was unutterable, and she could barely frame it for herself. Where he merely suffered conventional first-night nerves, she experienced a visceral dread, a helpless disgust as palpable as seasickness. For much of the time, through all the months of merry wedding preparation, she had managed to ignore this stain on her happiness, but whenever her thoughts turned toward a close embrace—she preferred no other term—her stomach tightened dryly, and she felt nausea at the back of her throat. In a modern, forward-looking handbook that was supposed to be helpful to young brides, with its cheery tones and exclamation marks and numbered illustrations, she had come across certain words and phrases that almost made her gag: “mucous membrane,” and the sinister and glistening “glans.” Other phrases offended her intelligence, particularly those concerning entrances: “Not long before he enters her . . .” Or “Now at last he enters her.” And “Happily, soon after he has entered her . . .” Was she obliged on the night to transform herself for Edward into a kind of portal or drawing room through which he might process? Almost as frequent was a word that suggested to her nothing but pain, flesh parted before a knife: “penetration.”
In optimistic moments, she tried to convince herself that she suffered from no more than a heightened form of squeamishness that was bound to pass. Certainly, the thought of Edward’s testicles, pendulous below his “engorged penis”—another horrifying term—had the potency to make her upper lip curl, and the idea of herself being touched “down there” by someone else, even someone she loved, was as repulsive as, say, a surgical procedure on her eye. But her squeamishness did not extend to babies. She liked them; she had looked after her cousin’s little boys on occasion and enjoyed herself. She thought that she would love being pregnant by Edward, and in the abstract, at least, she had no fears about childbirth. If only she could, like the mother of Jesus, arrive at that swollen state by magic.
Florence suspected that there was something profoundly wrong with her, that she had always been different, and that at last she was about to be exposed. Her problem, she thought, was greater, deeper, than straightforward physical disgust: her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh; her composure and essential happiness were about to be violated. She simply did not want to be “entered” or “penetrated.” Sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy but the price she must pay for it.
She knew that she should have spoken up long ago, as soon as he had proposed, long before the visit to the sincere and soft-spoken vicar, the dinners with their respective parents, before the wedding guests were invited, the gift list devised and lodged with a department store, and the tent and the photographer hired, and all the other irreversible arrangements. But what could she have said? What possible terms could she have used, when she could not name the matter to herself? And she loved Edward, not with the hot, moist passion she had read about but warmly, deeply, sometimes like a daughter, sometimes almost maternally. She loved cuddling him, and having his enormous arm around her shoulders, and being kissed by him, though she disliked his tongue in her mouth and had wordlessly made this clear. She thought that he was original, unlike anyone she had ever met. He always had a paperback book, usually history, in his jacket pocket in case he found himself in a queue or a waiting room. He marked what he read with a pencil stub. He was virtually the only man Florence had met who did not smoke. None of his socks matched. He had only one tie, narrow, knitted, dark blue, which he wore nearly all the time with a white shirt. She adored his curious mind, his mild country accent, the huge strength of his hands, the unpredictable swerves and drifts of his conversation, his kindness to her, and the way his soft brown eyes, resting on her when she spoke, made her feel enveloped in a friendly cloud of love. At the age of twenty-two, she had no doubt that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Edward Mayhew. How could she have dared risk losing him?
There was no one she could have talked to. Ruth, her sister, was too young, and her mother, perfectly wonderful in her way, was too intellectual, too brittle, an old-fashioned bluestocking. Whenever she confronted an intimate problem, she tended to adopt the public manner of the lecture hall, and use longer and longer words, and make references to books that she thought everyone should have read. Only when the matter was safely bundled up in this way might she sometimes relax into kindliness, though that was rare, and even then you had no idea what advice you were receiving. Florence had some terrific friends from school and music college who posed the opposite problem: they adored intimate talk and revelled in one another’s problems. They all knew one another, and were too eager with their phone calls and letters. She could not trust them with a secret, nor did she blame them, for she was part of the group. She would not have trusted herself. She was alone with a problem she did not know how to begin to address, and all she had in the way of help was her paperback guide. On its garish red cover were two smiling bug-eyed matchstick figures holding hands, drawn clumsily in white chalk, as though by an innocent child.
They ate the melon in less than two minutes while the lads, instead of waiting out in the corridor, stood well back, near the door, fingering their bow ties and tight collars and fiddling with their cuffs. Their blank expressions did not change as they observed Edward offer Florence, with an ironic flourish, his glazed cherry. Playfully, she sucked it from his fingers and held his gaze as she deliberately chewed, letting him see her tongue, conscious that in flirting with him like this she would be making matters worse for herself. She should not start what she could not sustain, but pleasing him in any way that she could was helpful: it made her feel less than entirely useless. If only eating a sticky cherry were all that was required.
To show that he wasn’t troubled by the presence of the waiters, though he longed for them to leave, Edward smiled as he sat back with his wine and called over his shoulder, “Any more of those things?”
“Ain’t none, sir. Sorry, sir.”
But the hand that held the wineglass trembled as he struggled to contain his sudden happiness, his exaltation. Florence appeared to glow before him, and she was lovely—beautiful, sensuous, gifted, good-natured beyond belief.
The boy who had spoken nipped forward to clear away. His colleague was just outside the room, transferring the second course, the roast, to their plates. It was not possible to wheel the trolley into the honeymoon suite for the proper silver service on account of a two-step difference in level between the room and the corridor, a consequence of poor planning when the Elizabethan farmhouse was “Georgianized” in the mid-eighteenth century.
The couple were briefly alone, though they heard the scrape of spoons on dishes, and the lads murmuring by the open door. Edward laid his hand over Florence’s and said, for the hundredth time that day, in a whisper, “I love you,” and she said it straight back, and she truly meant it.
Edward had a degree, a first in history from University College London. In three short years, he had studied wars, rebellions, famines, pestilences, the rise and collapse of empires, revolutions that consumed their children, agricultural hardship, industrial squalor, the cruelty of ruling élites—a colorful pageant of oppression, misery, and failed hopes. He understood how constrained and meagre lives could be, generation after generation. In the grand view of things, the peaceful, prosperous times that England was now experiencing were rare, and within them his and Florence’s joy was exceptional, even unique. In his final year he had made a special study of the “great man” theory of history—was it really outmoded to believe that forceful individuals could shape national destiny? Certainly his tutor thought so: in his view, History, properly capitalized, was a grand narrative, driven forward by ineluctable forces toward inevitable, necessary ends, and soon the subject would be understood as a science. But the lives that Edward had examined in detail—Caesar, Charlemagne, Frederick II, Catherine the Great, Nelson, and Napoleon (Stalin he had dropped, at his tutor’s insistence)—rather suggested the contrary. A ruthless personality, naked opportunism, and good luck, Edward had argued, could divert the fates of millions, a wayward conclusion that had earned him a B-minus, almost imperilling his first.
An incidental discovery was that even legendary success brought little happiness, only redoubled restlessness, gnawing ambition. As he was dressing for the wedding that morning (tails, top hat, a thorough drenching in cologne), he had decided that none of the figures on his list could have known his kind of satisfaction. His elation was a form of greatness in itself. Here he was, a gloriously fulfilled, or almost fulfilled, man. At the age of twenty-three, he had already outshone them all.
He was gazing at his wife now, into her intricately flecked hazel eyes, into those pure whites touched by a bloom of the faintest milky blue. The lashes were thick and dark, like a child’s, and there was something childlike, too, in the solemnity of her face at rest. It was a lovely face, with a sculpted look that in a certain light brought to mind an American Indian woman, a highborn squaw. She had a strong jaw, and her smile was broad and artless, right into the creases at the corners of her eyes. She was big-boned—certain matrons at the wedding had knowingly remarked on her generous hips. Her breasts, which Edward had touched and even kissed, though nowhere near enough, were small. Her violinist’s hands were pale and powerful, her long arms likewise; at her school sports days she had been adept at throwing the javelin.
Edward had never cared for classical music, but now he was learning its sprightly argot—legato, pizzicato, con brio. Slowly, through brute repetition, he was coming to recognize and even like certain pieces. There was one that she played with her friends which especially moved him. When she practiced her scales and arpeggios at home, she wore a hair band, an endearing touch that caused him to dream about the daughter they might have one day. Florence’s playing was sinuous and exact, and she was known for the richness of her tone. One tutor said that he had never encountered a student who made an open string sing so warmly. When she was before the music stand in the rehearsal room in London, or in her room at her parents’ house in Oxford, with Edward sprawled on the bed, watching and desiring her, she held herself gracefully, with back straight and head lifted and tilted proudly, and read the music with a commanding, almost haughty expression that stirred him. That look had such certitude, such knowledge of the path to pleasure.
When the business was music, she was always confident and fluid in her movements—rosining a bow, restringing her instrument, rearranging the room to accommodate her three friends from college, for the string quartet that was her passion. She was the undisputed leader, and always had the final word in their many musical disagreements. But in the rest of her life she was surprisingly clumsy and unsure, forever stubbing a toe or knocking things over or bumping her head. The fingers that could manage the double stopping in a Bach partita were just as clever at dripping tea all over a linen tablecloth or dropping a glass onto a stone floor. She would trip over her own feet if she thought she was being watched—she confided to Edward that she found it an ordeal to be in the street, walking toward a friend from a distance. And whenever she was anxious or too self-conscious her hand would rise repeatedly to her forehead to brush away an imaginary strand of hair, a gentle, fluttering motion that would continue long after the source of stress had vanished.
How could he fail to love someone so strangely and warmly particular, so painfully honest and self-aware, whose every thought and emotion appeared naked to view, streaming like charged particles through her changing expressions and gestures? Even without her strong-boned beauty he would have had to love her. And she loved him with such intensity, such excruciating physical reticence. Not only his passions, heightened by the lack of a proper outlet, but also his protective instincts were aroused. But was she really so vulnerable? He had peeped once into her school-report folder and seen her intelligence-test results: a hundred and fifty-two, seventeen points above his own score. This was an age when these quotients were held to measure something as tangible as height or weight. When he sat in on a rehearsal with the quartet, and she had a difference of opinion on a phrasing or tempo or dynamic with Charles, the chubby and assertive second violinist, whose face shone with late-flowering acne, Edward was intrigued by how cool Florence could be. She did not argue; she listened calmly, then announced her decision. No sign then of the little hair-brushing action. She knew her stuff, and she was determined to lead, the way the first violin should. She also seemed to be able to get her rather frightening father to do what she wanted. Many months before the wedding, he had, at her suggestion, offered Edward a job. Whether Edward really wanted it, or dared to refuse it, was another matter. And she had known, by some womanly osmosis, exactly what was needed at that celebration, from the size of the tent to the quantity of summer pudding, and just how much it was reasonable to expect her father to pay.
“Here it comes,” she whispered as she squeezed his hand, warning him off another sudden intimacy. The waiters were arriving with their plates of beef, his piled twice the height of hers. They also brought sherry trifle and Cheddar cheese and mint chocolates, which they arranged on a sideboard. After mumbling advice about the summoning bell by the fireplace—it had to be pressed hard and held down—the lads withdrew, closing the door behind them with immense care. Then came the tinkling of the trolley retreating down the corridor, then, after a silence, a whoop or a hoot that could easily have come from the hotel bar downstairs, and, at last, the newlyweds were properly alone.
A shift or a strengthening of the wind brought them the sound of wavelets breaking on the shore below, like a distant shattering of glasses. The mist was lifting to reveal dense trees and foliage curving away above the shoreline to the east. They could see a luminous gray smoothness between the boughs and leaves which might have been the silky surface of the sea itself, or the lagoon, or the sky—it was difficult to tell. The altered breeze carried through the parted French windows an enticement, a salty scent of oxygen and open space that seemed at odds with the starched table linen, the corn-flour-stiffened gravy, and the heavy polished silver they were taking in their hands. The wedding lunch had been huge and prolonged. They were not hungry. It was, in theory, open to them to abandon their plates, seize the wine bottle by the neck, and run down to the shore and kick their shoes off and exult in their liberty. There was no one in the hotel who would have wanted to stop them. They were adults at last, on holiday, free to do as they chose. In just a few years’ time, that would be the kind of thing that quite ordinary young people would do. But, for now, the times held them. Even when Edward and Florence were alone, a thousand unacknowledged rules still applied. It was precisely because they were adults that they did not do childish things like walk away from a meal that others had taken pains to prepare. It was dinnertime, after all. And being childlike was not yet honorable, or in fashion.
Still, Edward was troubled by the call of the beach, and if he had known how to propose it, or justify it, he might have suggested going out straightaway. The ceiling, low enough already, appeared now nearer to his head, and closing in. Rising from his plate, mingling with the sea breeze, was a clammy odor, like the breath of the family dog. Perhaps he was not quite as joyous as he kept telling himself he was. He felt a terrible pressure narrowing his thoughts, constraining his speech, and he was in acute physical discomfort—his trousers or underwear seemed to have shrunk.
But if a genie had appeared at the table to grant Edward’s most urgent request, he would not have asked for any beach in the world. All he wanted, all he could think of, was himself and Florence lying naked together on or in the bed next door, confronting at last that awesome experience which seemed as remote from daily life as a vision of religious ecstasy, or even death itself. The prospect—was it actually going to happen? to him?—once more sent cool fingers through his lower gut, and he caught himself in a momentary swooning motion that he concealed behind a contented sigh.
Like most young men of his time, or any time, without an easy manner, or a means of sexual expression, he indulged constantly in what one enlightened authority was now calling “self-pleasuring.” Edward had been pleased to discover the term. He was born too late in the century, in 1940, to believe that he was abusing his body, that his sight would be impaired, or that God watched with stern incredulity as he bent daily to the task. Or even that everyone knew about it from his pale and inward look. All the same, a certain ill-defined disgrace hung over his efforts, a sense of failure and waste, and, of course, loneliness. And pleasure was really an incidental benefit. The goal was release—from the urgent, thought-confining desire for what could not be immediately had. How extraordinary it was, that a self-made spoonful, leaping clear of his body, should instantly free his mind to confront afresh Nelson’s decisiveness at Aboukir Bay.
Edward’s single most important contribution to the wedding arrangements had been to refrain, for more than a week. Not since he was twelve had he been so entirely chaste with himself. He wanted to be in top form for his bride. It was not easy, especially at night in bed, or in the mornings as he woke, or in the long afternoons, or in the hours before lunch, or after supper, in the hours before bed. Now here they were at last, married and alone. Why did he not rise from his roast, cover her in kisses, and lead her toward the fourposter next door? It was not so simple. He had a fairly long history of engaging with Florence’s shyness. He had come to respect it, even revere it, mistaking it for a form of coyness, a conventional veil for a richly sexual nature—in all, part of the intricate depth of her personality, and proof of her quality. He convinced himself that he preferred her this way. He did not spell it out for himself, but her reticence suited his own ignorance and lack of confidence; a more sensual and demanding woman, a wild woman, might have terrified him.
Their courtship had been a pavane, a stately unfolding, bound by protocols never agreed upon or voiced but generally observed. Nothing was ever discussed—nor did they feel the lack of intimate talk. These were matters beyond words, beyond definition. The language and practice of therapy, the currency of feelings diligently shared, mutually analyzed, were not yet in general circulation. While one heard of wealthier people going in for psychoanalysis, it was not customary to regard oneself in everyday terms as an enigma, as an exercise in narrative history, or as a problem waiting to be solved.
Between Edward and Florence nothing happened quickly. Important advances, permissions wordlessly granted to extend what he was allowed to see or caress, were attained only gradually. The day in October when he first saw her naked breasts long preceded the day when he could touch them—December 19th. He kissed them in February, though not her nipples, which he had grazed with his lips once, in May. She allowed herself to advance across his body with even greater caution. Sudden moves or radical suggestions on his part could undo months of good work. The evening in the cinema, at a showing of “A Taste of Honey,” when he had taken her hand and plunged it between his legs set the process back weeks. She became . . . not frosty, or even cool—that was never her way—but imperceptibly remote, perhaps disappointed, or even faintly betrayed. She retreated from him somehow without letting him ever feel in doubt about her love. Then, at last, they were back on course: when they were alone one Saturday afternoon in late March, with the rain falling heavily outside the windows of the disorderly sitting room of his parents’ tiny house in the Chiltern Hills, she let her hand rest briefly on, or near, his penis. For less than fifteen seconds, in rising hope and ecstasy, he felt her through two layers of fabric. As soon as she pulled away he knew he could bear it no more. He asked her to marry him.
He could not have known what it cost her to put a hand—it was the back of her hand—in such a place. She loved him, she wanted to please him, but she had to overcome considerable distaste. It was an honest attempt—she may have been clever, but she was without guile. She kept that hand in place for as long as she could, until she felt a stirring and hardening beneath the gray flannel of his trousers. She experienced a living thing, quite separate from her Edward—and she recoiled. Then he blurted out his proposal, and in the rush of emotion, the delight and hilarity and relief, the sudden embrace, she momentarily forgot her shock. And he was so astonished by his own decisiveness, as well as mentally cramped by unresolved desire, that he could have had little idea of the contradiction she began to live with from that day on, the secret affair between disgust and joy.
They were alone then, and theoretically free to do whatever they wanted, but they went on eating the dinner they had no appetite for. Florence set down her knife and reached for Edward’s hand and squeezed. From downstairs they heard the wireless, and the chimes of Big Ben that preceded the ten-o’clock news. Along this stretch of coast, television reception was poor because of the hills just inland. The older guests would be down there in the sitting room, taking the measure of the world with their nightcaps—the hotel had a good selection of single malts—and some of the men would be filling their pipes for one last time that day. Gathering around the wireless for the main bulletin was a wartime habit they would never break. Edward and Florence heard the muffled headlines and caught the name of the Prime Minister, and then, a minute or two later, his familiar voice, raised in a speech. Harold Macmillan had been addressing a conference about the arms race and the need for a test-ban treaty. Who could disagree that it was folly to go on testing H-bombs in the atmosphere and irradiating the whole planet? But no one under thirty—certainly not Edward and Florence—believed that a British Prime Minister held much sway in global affairs. Every year the Empire shrank as another few countries took their rightful independence. Now there was almost nothing left, and the world belonged to the Americans and the Russians. Britain, England, was a minor power—saying this gave a certain blasphemous pleasure. Downstairs, of course, they took a different view. Anyone over forty would have fought, or suffered, in the war and known death on an unusual scale, and would not have been able to believe that a drift into irrelevance was the reward for all the sacrifice.
Edward and Florence would be voting for the first time in the next general election and were keen on the idea of a Labour landslide as great as the famous victory of 1945. In a year or two, the older generation who still dreamed of the Empire must surely give way to politicians like Gaitskell, Wilson, Crosland—new men with a vision of a modern country where there was equality and things actually got done. If America could have an exuberant and handsome President Kennedy, then Britain could have something similar—at least in spirit, for there was no one quite so glamorous in the Labour Party. The blimps, still fighting the last war, still nostalgic for its discipline and privations—their time was up. Edward and Florence’s shared sense that one day soon the country would be transformed for the better, that youthful energies were pushing to escape, like steam under pressure, merged with the excitement of their own adventure together. The sixties was their first decade of adult life, and it surely belonged to them. The pipe-smokers downstairs in their silver-buttoned blazers, with their double measures of Caol Ila, with their memories of campaigns in North Africa and Normandy, and their cultivated remnants of Army slang—they could have no claim on the future. Time, gentlemen, please!
The rising mist continued to unveil the nearby trees, the bare cliffs behind them, and portions of a silver sea, while the smooth evening air poured in around the table, and they continued their pretense of eating, trapped in the moment by their private anxieties. Florence was merely moving the food around her plate. Edward ate only token morsels of potato, which he carved with the edge of his fork. They listened helplessly to the second item of news, aware of how dull it was of them to be linking their attention to that of the guests downstairs. Their wedding night, and they had nothing to say. The words rose indistinctly from under their feet, but they made out “Berlin” and knew instantly that this was the story that had lately captivated everyone: an escape from the Communist east to the west of the city by way of a commandeered steamship on the Spree, the refugees cowering by the wheelhouse to dodge the bullets of the East German guards. Florence and Edward listened to that, and then, intolerably, the third item as well, the concluding session of an Islamic conference in Baghdad.
Bound to world events by their own stupidity! It could not go on. It was time to act. Edward loosened his tie and firmly set down his knife and fork in parallel on his plate.
“We could go downstairs and listen properly.”
He hoped he was being humorous, directing his sarcasm against them both, but his words emerged with surprising ferocity, and Florence blushed. She thought he was criticizing her for preferring the wireless to him, and before he could soften or lighten his remark she said hurriedly, “Or we could go and lie on the bed,” and nervously swiped an invisible hair from her forehead. To demonstrate how wrong he was, she was proposing what she knew he most wanted and she dreaded. She really would have been happier, or less unhappy, to go down to the lounge and pass the time in quiet conversation with the matrons on the floral-patterned sofas while their men leaned seriously into the news, into the gale of history. Anything but this.
Her husband was smiling and standing and ceremoniously extending his hand across the table. He, too, was a little pink about the face. His napkin clung to his waist for a moment, hanging absurdly, like a loincloth, and then wafted to the floor in slow motion. There was nothing she could do, beyond fainting, and she was hopeless at acting. She stood and took his hand, certain that her own returning smile was rigidly unconvincing. It would not have helped her to know that Edward in his dreamlike state had never seen her looking lovelier. Something about her arms, he remembered thinking later, slender and vulnerable, and soon to be looped adoringly around his neck. And her beautiful dark eyes, bright with undeniable passion, and the faint trembling in her lower lip, which even now she wetted with her tongue.
With his free hand he tried to gather up the wine bottle and the half-full glasses, but that was too difficult and distracting; the glasses bulged against each other, causing the stems to cross in his hands and the wine to spill. Instead he seized the bottle alone by the neck. Even in his exalted, jittery condition, he thought he understood her customary reticence. All the more cause for joy, then, that they were facing this momentous occasion, this dividing line of experience, together. And the thrilling fact remained that it was Florence who had suggested lying on the bed. Her changed status had set her free. Still holding her hand, he came around the table and drew near to kiss her. Believing it was vulgar to do so holding a wine bottle, he set it down again.
“You’re very beautiful,” he whispered.
She made herself remember how much she loved this man. He was kind, sensitive; he loved her and could do her no harm. She shrugged herself deeper into his embrace, close against his chest, and inhaled his familiar scent, which had a woodsy quality and was reassuring.
“I’m so happy here with you.”
“I’m so happy, too,” she said quietly.
When they kissed she immediately felt his tongue, tensed and strong, pushing past her teeth, like some bully shouldering his way into a room. Entering her. Her own tongue folded and recoiled in automatic distaste, making even more space for Edward. He knew well enough that she did not like this kind of kissing, and he had never before been so assertive. With his lips clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved around inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private, imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there, too. It was the hard tapering tip of this alien muscle, quiveringly alive, that repelled her. His left hand was pressed flat above her shoulder blades, just below her neck, levering her head against his. Her claustrophobia and breathlessness grew, even as she became more determined that she could not bear to offend him. He was under her tongue, pushing it up against the roof of her mouth, then on top, pushing down, then sliding smoothly along the sides and around, as though he thought he could tie a simple up-and-over knot. He wanted to engage her tongue in some activity of its own, coax it into a hideous mute duet, but she could only concentrate on not struggling, not gagging, not panicking. If she was sick into his mouth, was one wild thought, their marriage would be instantly over, and she would have to go home and explain herself to her parents. She understood perfectly that this business with tongues, this penetration, was a small-scale enactment, a ritual tableau vivant of what was still to come, like the prologue of an old play that tells you everything that must happen.
As she stood waiting for this particular moment to pass, her hands, for form’s sake, resting on Edward’s hips, Florence realized that she had stumbled across an empty truth, self-evident enough in retrospect, as primal and timeworn as Danegeld or droit du seigneur, and almost too elemental to define: in deciding to be married, she had agreed to exactly this. She had agreed that it was right to do this, and to have this done to her. When she and Edward and their parents had filed back to the gloomy sacristy after the ceremony to sign the register, it was this that they had put their names to, and all the rest—the supposed maturity, the confetti and cake—was a polite distraction. And if she didn’t like it she alone was responsible, for all her choices over the past year were always narrowing to this, and it was all her fault, and now she really did think that she was going to be sick.
When he heard her moan, Edward knew that his happiness was almost complete. He had the impression of delightful weightlessness, of standing several inches clear of the ground, so that he towered pleasingly over her. There was pain-pleasure in the way his heart seemed to rise to thud at the base of his throat. He was thrilled by the light touch of her hands, not so very far from his groin, and by the compliance of her lovely body enfolded in his arms, and the passionate sound of her breathing rapidly through her nostrils. It brought him to a point of unfamiliar ecstasy, cold and sharp, just below the ribs, the way her tongue gently enveloped his as he pushed against it. Perhaps he could persuade her one day soon—perhaps this evening, and she might need no persuading—to take his cock into her soft and beautiful mouth. But that was a thought he needed to scramble away from as fast as he could, for he was in real danger of arriving too soon. He could feel it already beginning, tipping him toward disgrace. Just in time, he thought of the news, of the face of the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, tall, stooping, walruslike, a war hero, an old buffer—he was everything that was not sex, and ideal for the purpose. Some cursed him for having given away the Empire, but there was no choice, really, with these winds of change blowing through Africa. No one would have taken that same message from a Labour man. And he had sacked a third of his Cabinet in the “night of the long knives.” That took some nerve. “MAC THE KNIFE” was one headline; “MACBETH!” was another. Serious-minded people complained that he was burying the nation in an avalanche of TVs, cars, supermarkets, and other junk. He let the people have what they wanted. Bread and circuses. A new nation, and now he wanted us to join Europe, and who could say for sure that he was wrong?
Steadied at last. Edward’s thoughts dissolved, and he became once more his tongue, the very tip of it, at the same moment that Florence decided that she could take no more. She felt pinioned and smothered, she was suffocating, she was nauseated. And she could hear a sound, rising steadily, not in steps like a scale but in a slow glissando, not quite a violin or a voice but somewhere in between, rising and rising unbearably, without ever leaving the audible range, a violin-voice that was just on the edge of making sense, telling her something urgent in sibilants and vowels more primitive than words. It might have been inside the room or out in the corridor, or only in her ears, like a tinnitus. She might even have been making the noise herself. She did not care—she had to get out.
She jerked her head away and pushed free of his arms. Even as he stared at her in surprise, still openmouthed, a question beginning to form in his expression, she seized his hand and led him toward the bed. It was perverse of her, insane even, when what she wanted was to run from the room, across the gardens and down the lane, onto the beach to sit alone. Even one minute alone would have helped. But her sense of duty was painfully strong and she could not resist it. She could not bear to let Edward down. And she was convinced that she was completely in the wrong. If the entire wedding ensemble of guests and close family had been somehow crammed invisibly into the room to watch, these ghosts would all have sided with Edward and his reasonable desires. They would have assumed that there was something wrong with her, and they would have been right.
She also knew that her behavior was pitiful. To survive, to escape one hideous moment, she had to raise the stakes and commit herself to the next, giving the unhelpful impression that she longed for it herself. The final act could not be endlessly deferred. The moment was approaching, just as she was foolishly moving toward it. She was trapped in a game whose rules she could not question. She could not escape the logic that had her leading, or towing, Edward across the room toward the open door of the bedroom, and the narrow fourposter bed and its smooth white cover. She had no idea what she would do when they were there, but at least that rising sound had ceased, and, in the few seconds it would take to arrive, her mouth and tongue were her own, and she could breathe and try to take possession of herself.
What are your current fixations? Well I’m really into the Kasabian album, but I’ve just got an album in New York by a guy called M. Ward, it’s called Post-War. Fookin’ hell man. I’ve never heard this guy before, and I was doing a photo shoot, as us rock stars generally do, and some guy was playing it in the background. I was like, “What’s that fookin’ music?” And he’s like, [adopts American accent] “Dude, it’s M. Ward.” One of the best albums I’ve ever heard actually.
Why do you live where you do? Why do I live in London? Because it’s the centre of the universe, young man. I think it’s everybody’s right and duty, if they’re not gonna leave the country that they live in, is to at least live in the capital because it’s the biggest fookin’ city. That’s not strictly true, because you wouldn’t go live in Washington if you were in America. I wouldn’t anyways. London’s the capital of Europe — it’s one of the great six, seven cities of the world. I came for the weekend in 1994 and I’ve never been back to Manchester.
What has been your most memorable or inspirational gig and why? Can I pick two that I’ve attended? One was in 1992 at a place called G-Mex in Manchester and it was U2, Public Enemy and Kraftwerk on the same bill. Fookin’ dig that. It was on U2’s Zoo TV tour and it was mind-blowing. I wasn’t even in a band at that point, but it was like, “When I get in a fookin’ band that’s how I’m fookin’ havin’ it.” The second gig was about three years ago when Neil Young was doing his solo acoustic tour of Greendale. It was just him, an acoustic guitar and his mouth organ at the Hammersmith Apollo in London and it was just fookin’ outrageous. He played the whole album from start to finish and you kind of sit there watching him and think, “Fookin’ hell man, I haven’t made it yet.” D’ya know what I mean? He’s the master. And then of course, true to form, you go out and buy the album and it’s absolute dog shit. [The movie] is fookin’ dreadful. I kind of like Neil Young just because he’s fookin’ punk rock, he and Dylan. Crazy old dudes man.
What have been your career highs and lows? Career high, I guess, is playing at Maine Road in Manchester because it was the grounds of the football team I’ve supported since I was a child [Manchester City FC]. It was the first stadium we played and it was amazing. It was so inconceivable that a kid from around the corner from the football ground would get to play that. And a career low? I don’t know because they’re all part of the story, so they’ve added something in a weird kind of way.
What’s the meanest thing ever said to you before, during or after a gig? During? I don’t fookin’ listen to what any of those idiots have got to say during a gig. But Lars Ulrich came to see us one night — we tune our own guitars up because we’re still capable of doing that — and he was like, [adopts perfect Ulrich accent] “F-Fuck, you know, you know you guys should really fuckin’ get one of your fuckin’ road crew to tune your guitars. The fuckin’ spaces in between the songs are too long.” And it’s just like, “Look man, I don’t know if anyone’s ever pointed this out to you before, but you’re the fookin’ drummer in Metallica. Now you fookin’ get on with that and leave the rest of it to us.”
What should everyone shut up about? George Bush, I guess. That’s kind of a lame thing to say though. I mean he’s a scary idiot, everybody knows that, don’t they? So just let him get on with it. He’s not gonna be around in two years anyway, is he? Thank the lord.
What traits do you most like and most dislike about yourself? What I most dislike about myself is the fact that I think I’m capable of achieving anything. If somebody came up to me and said, “We’re just having a bet over there and my mate reckons that you couldn’t swim the English Channel.” And I’d say, “Really? Gimme the fookin’ trunks!” Now I can’t swim, but I’d still give it a go. Plus, I also interrupt people a lot. That annoys me. I love the fact that I’ve managed to generate myself an extraordinary amount of cash. I really am very proud of that… because it allows me to interrupt people.
What advice should you have taken, but did not? Don’t fookin’ join your brother’s band. And this is my advice to people: if you’re ever gonna join a band, don’t have any family members in it. It’s wrong. The Everly Brothers and the Kinks will tell you the same fookin’ thing. It always ends in tears. Always.
What would make you kick someone out of your band and/or bed, and have you? Well, there’s been a healthy turnover of band members, as you probably know. It doesn’t take much to get you fired in Oasis. Not turning up for band meetings is an instant dismissal. And kick someone out of bed? I guess if I was hungry or not and I needed feeding. “Just get on with my fookin’ bacon sandwiches and shut up!” Although, I’ve never done that before in my entire life, you see. I guess any form of flatulence. That would be wrong.
What do you think of when you think of Canada? I think of being absolutely freezing fookin’ cold. And I also think of this fookin’ weird, weird French influence. What’s that all about? What business have they got over there? Why French? I was in a Dunkin Donuts in Canada, and the menu was in French — the whole thing, right. And I asked the woman for a coffee, and she only spoke French. Now, I’ve taken a lot of drugs in my time mate, but I’ve got to say that the single most frightening experience of my life was thinking, “I could have swore I was fookin’ in Canada when I got off that tour bus. And now I’m in… am I? No. I don’t know.” And then I said to the woman, “You can speak English, can’t you?” And I think she was getting annoyed that I was being a bit rude by that point, because she was only speaking French. I was going, “I know you can speak English. We’re in Canada. And I know you understand what I’m saying.” I may have brought up something about the war and then left.
What is your vital daily ritual? A cup of very strong tea and a Marlboro Light in the morning. Gotta have that. And at least two hours from the point of opening one’s eyes to the point of getting ready for one’s business. Gotta be two hours. I can’t be getting up and going straight to practice. That’s out of order.
What are your feelings on piracy, internet or otherwise? See, I like pirates. That’d be a good occupation, wouldn’t it? I’d like to have been a pirate, if I wasn’t a rock star. Some might say pirates are earlier day rock stars. Of course, on the sea. Fook internet piracy. How boring’s that? I just don’t think I have an opinion on that. We’ll leave that to Lars Ulrich. Make an arse of yourself. Hey, if it’s out there for free and you can find it, then good for you. To be quite honest, between me and you, can I say this off the record? I’ve got enough money. I don’t need any more. Lars Ulrich has got enough money. He don’t need anymore. Keith Richards or Paul McCartney have got more money than sense — look at the way they dress. It’s blatantly evident. We’re well paid, us successful people.
What was your most memorable day job? Being a roadie [for the Inspiral Carpets]. It’s almost up there with being a rock star. In fact, it’s less hassle than being a rock star, but you don’t get paid as much.
How do you spoil yourself? I own a lot of guitars, and if I see one I’ll just buy it. I own lots of shoes. Shoes are important. Since I don’t take drugs anymore, I have a real weakness for guitars and sunglasses.
If I wasn’t playing music I would be... I guess I’d still be a roadie. I’d be setting guitars up for playing music.
What makes you want to take it off and get it on? What does that mean? Get naked and start fooking goblins? I dunno, Viagra?
What has been your strangest celebrity encounter? Well, I’m one of the rare breed of rock’n’rollers who I actually does my own shopping. You can catch me at various supermarkets round the west end, buyin’ various household appliances and bits of food, stuff like that. So I kind of mix quite well with the general public, and I don’t mind rubbing shoulders with the mere mortals in the street. I don’t consider myself to be a celebrity. It doesn’t freak me out going to buy a pint of milk. Not like Elton John or Robbie Williams — I don’t lock myself way from society and then claim that people don’t understand me. But, have you met Lars Ulrich? Although he’s a fookin’ geezer and I do love him, he’s a strange character. A strange, strange man. I met William Shatner once, in a lift. He got in a lift we were in and we actually did resist the urge as he pushed the button to his floor, to say, you know what I’m gonna say, don’t you? I don’t need to say it. But we all burst out laughing because we all wanted to say it. You know he’s a midget, and he was kind of looking at us and said, [Adopting a Shatner accent] “Are you in some kind of band?” Well, what? What does that fookin’ mean? We’re in a band. And then he went, “You look like the Doors.” Which one of us exactly?! Who looks like fookin’ Jim Morrison? D’ya know what I mean? “I’m not being Ray Manzarek,” that’s what I said. “Fook that! And I’m certainly not being Robby fookin’ Krieger!”
Who would be your ideal dinner guest, living or dead, and what would you serve them? Right. What would I serve them? How many can I have? Right, well let’s see, my dining table seats eight, so that’s me and my girlfriend, so that’s six guests. Bono, Bill Hicks, John Lennon… I reckon it’s gonna be a shit party this, innit? Well let’s just do lunch with five, and ham sandwiches I think. And if people didn’t eat meat, just fookin’ eat the salad.
What does or did your mom wish you were doing instead? My mum? She’s fookin’ havin’ a laugh. My mum actually thought we’d amount to zero, so the fact that I’m a fookin’ major rock star makes her happy. Maybe the fact that I just bought her a new house has something to do with it.
Given the opportunity to choose, how would you like to die? I’d like to die in my sleep, take a real coward’s way out. Or overdose, preferably on heroin.
Perhaps the most verbally colourful band of the last 25 years, Oasis — primarily songwriter/guitarist/occasional singer Noel and front-man Liam Gallagher — know how to give the right sound bite at the right time without any care. But beyond their big gobs is a collection of songs that took Britain — and a good portion of the world — by storm, in a way unlike any other British band since their heroes: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. This month, Oasis celebrate their 15-year existence with Stop the Clocks, a collection of the best songs, according to the band. Heavy on selections from their two masterpieces, debut album Definitely Maybe and its follow-up (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, the compilation may throw some off with its unbalanced track listing — namely the complete write-off of their third album, the cocaine-fuelled circus Be Here Now. According to Noel, it’s just about honesty. “You can’t be sentimental about these things. It was just like, ‘If it’s that good, then why haven’t we played it for fookin’ six years?’ Subconsciously, in the back of all our minds, we’ve dismissed [Be Here Now]. Anyway, who’s gonna argue that my best work was done over the first two records, and it’s only recently come back to work over the last two records.” But it’s also about having a laugh too, something the band have done plenty of, even at their own expense over the years. “The middle two, well, not much inspiration going on there… not that anybody out there shouldn’t go out and buy them!” See NY Times magazine this week
The Magic Castle 7001 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood “It’s a members-only club where magicians perform. I was there for a party, and they offered me a membership and I accepted. It’s great because you can go anytime and see magic. What more can you want? My friend Rob, of the band Possum Dixon, performs there every week.”
The Griffith Park Railroads 440 Crystal Springs Drive, Los Angeles “There is a miniature choo-choo train that drives around the park, toward the edge near the freeway. It’s my son’s favorite place to go, so we come here a lot. It’s cool because I can ride in the train with him. And there’s a conductor with a conductor outfit.”
Tiny Naylor’s Corner of Sunset and La Brea, Hollywood “Tiny Naylor’s was a drive-in from the 1950s that was demolished in the ’80s. Waitresses wore roller skates and little skirts, and they’d roll up to your car with a tray that attached. I ate breakfast with my grandfather there all the time. It was a big hangout for punk rockers in the mid-’70s. The architecture was amazing, too, like a giant spaceship.”
The Griffith Observatory 2800 East Observatory Road, Los Angeles “An obvious landmark, but I always take my friends from out of town. On a clear day, you can see the ocean and the harbor in Long Beach and Pasadena. It’s one of the last places in L.A. that is still in intact from when I was young. Rebel Without a Cause was also filmed here.”
South Willard 8038 West Third Street, Los Angeles “South Willard is a clothing store that always has something good. I’ve gotten some weird necklaces and sweaters and T-shirts there.”
Amoeba Music 6400 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood “It’s a mecca for music — it’s overwhelming, but you can find anything. I went yesterday and picked up the TV on the Radio record. I haven’t done a proper excavation, but you can go and in 15 minutes, you leave with your hands full.”
Ocean Way Recording 6050 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood “I’ve spend a lot of time at this recording studio. I’ve made three albums (Sea Change, Mutations and The Information) and a million different projects here. Frank Sinatra and the Mamas & the Papas recorded here. It still has the old mixing board and the rooms are fairly untouched, and it just has a magic sound to it. Everything recorded here comes out with a little sheen of gold.”
Zuma Beach 30000 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu “I would take my producer Nigel [Godrich] here. It’s his favorite place in the city. It’s the English person’s ideal of what L.A. is — because of the sun and the cliffs. I think it’s the best place to go see the sunset.”
Puerto Escondido 10321 Hawthorne Boulevard, Inglewood “I tell people to go here on Sundays. It’s a Mexican restaurant in East L.A., and they have a mariachi band and dancing and really good seafood. It’s relaxed, but kind of a party, too. We shot a scene in my video for ‘Girl’ here. It’s a pretty authentic place.”
City of Monterey Park “I was really obsessed with this neighborhood 10 years ago. I’d go every weekend. It’s mostly Chinese. In the ’90s, there was an influx of 750,000 or more Chinese who left Hong Kong to come here. They built massive shopping malls and movieplexes. The street signs and supermarkets are all in Chinese. When you go to the movies, the concession stands have mung bean Popsicles and dried shrimps instead of M&M’s.”
Clearman’s Steak ’n Stein Inn 9545 east Whittier Boulevard, Pico Rivera “It’s a steakhouse that looks like a giant mountain lodge with fake snow on it year-round. The waitresses all wear Swiss halter-top dresses. The bar is probably 30 years old and it’s just, like, frozen in time. I took Stephen Malkmus there for a big dinner recently.”
When, earlier this month, the new International Criminal Court in The Hague charged its first defendant, a former Congolese warlord called Thomas Lubanga, with abducting children and turning them into killers, an important point was made. It will no longer be acceptable, the court was warning, to involve children in wars, either as deliberate targets or as recruits for the guerrilla militias and government forces waging civil war across parts of Africa and Asia.
Among these children, in the 1980s and 1990s, were the Lost Boys of Sudan. And after 3,800 of these "lost boys"—the phrase taken from Peter Pan's orphans and widely disliked today by most African refugees—started arriving in the United States in 2000, plucked out of refugee camps in Ethiopia, they brought with them stories of what, precisely, it had been like to be a child caught up in an African civil war. (Very few of those to arrive were girls, for it was the boys, tending cattle in the fields, who were able to escape when militias torched their villages.) In these memoirs, written most often with the help of journalists and mentors, these boys, by now young men, told of hunger and fear, of walking for weeks or months across hostile land, being preyed on by crocodiles, drinking their own urine, or being hauled away to be trained as boy soldiers. The stories bear repeated telling: They are what the savagery of modern civil war is all about.
Some of these memoirs have gone further. They have sketched in what it was like to arrive, as guests of U.S. generosity, in Chicago, Dallas, or San Francisco and never to have encountered before a fridge, a cube of ice, an elevator, a television set, a traffic light, or a hamburger. Dave Eggers, in What Is the What, has carried that story another step forward to take in the lassitude that has overcome many of those who originally welcomed the young Sudanese so warmly, and who have since been worn down by the neediness of young people who have lost so much. (The proceeds from the book are to go toward providing financial help for Sudanese refugees and to rebuilding southern Sudan.)
Written as a series of alternating sections or flashbacks, What Is the What—bad title, terrible cover—calls itself a novel but was created closely out of the story told to Eggers by Valentino Achak Deng, who reached Atlanta, after 14 years in refugee camps, in 2001. Achak survived the government helicopter gunship obliteration of his village in southern Sudan and a frightening and painful trudge to safety in Ethiopia. His personal experiences, as he says in a preface, are in essence no different from those depicted: Every event in the book could, and indeed did, take place, but not all to him, nor in the order presented. As such, the narrative reads very much like reporting, which accounts perhaps for its power—but also poses a number of interesting questions. Would the punch have been greater or smaller had Eggers stuck to nonfiction? What would have been lost in terms of detail or emotion had he kept to the literal truth? My feeling is that in a book like this, told in the first person by Achak, using his own name, it actually makes extraordinarily little difference. The liveliness and drive of the story are what count, and the accuracy of what he describes has been widely corroborated by others. Achak's personal testimony, whether in reality or in fiction—the tale of his walk; his constant hunger; his sense of helplessness when a boy is pulled out of line in front of him by a lion and eaten in the tall grass; his horror as he watches starving boys, many of them totally naked, tearing the flesh of a dead elephant into strips to carry away and eat; the blood trickling down their faces—is what brings the story alive. Calling it fiction becomes no more than a device, a way to build an engrossing story while remaining scrupulously honest.
Less familiar than the story of the long walk perhaps—and therefore sometimes more interesting—is Achak and Eggers' account of life in the Ethiopian refugee camp and its militarization by the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. Here, the Lost Boys were seduced or coerced into becoming boy soldiers, or used as "aid bait" to secure U.N. food rations for the militia camped not far away. Achak himself remained adamantly pacifist, refusing to follow friends when they went to train, but the brutality of the adult soldiers toward the children he witnessed is chilling. "Any boy who had shirked or misbehaved would be caned," he observes, "and for many of these boys, skeletal as they were, canings could prove debilitating, even fatal. … Boys tried to escape and were shot. Boys lost their rifles and were shot. … We lost four of the Eleven that way. … Boys make very poor soldiers. That is the problem." Though there were many children among nearby Rwanda's genocidaires, brainwashed by adult militias, this is a side to the story that is seldom recorded in any detail. Nor have other Lost Boys written at such length about everyday camp life, with its rumors and sudden upheavals, its hardship and intense friendships, or how these thousands of children turned first into adolescents and then into adults in a setting remote from anything they had even known. When Achak and his friends first set eyes on a white man, an aid official from the United Nations, they see him as "erased," his whiteness a deformity like a missing limb.
In the United States, too, Eggers carries the story on. Here again it is a troubling tale. After their initial delight in being safe and well-fed, not all the Lost Boys prospered. As P.W. Singer noted in 2004 in his excellent study Children at War, many have coped poorly, particularly when English is their third, or even fourth, language. Few have found that the meager wages they earn from meatpacking or hotel cleaning allow them to study for the education each one craves. "We wanted it all immediately," says Achak, "homes, families, college, the ability to send money home, advanced degrees, and finally some influence." After five years in the United States, Achak is still working on the front desk of a health club, as far from the college degree he dreamed about as when he first arrived. He has also been mugged by thieves, who steal most of his possessions, while the young Sudanese girl he loves has been murdered. "Our peripheral vision is poor in the U.S.," he notes; "we do not see trouble coming."
It is not, of course, all bleak. The Lost Boys who made it to the United States not only survived—bearing witness yet again to man's incredible resilience—but most have preserved some sense of hope in a better future. When Achak talks over the phone—mobile phones are an essential part of every refugee's life—to other young Sudanese scattered across every state in the United States, there is a real feeling that, despite the delays and the setbacks, despite the lack of schooling or money, the possibilities are all still there. Achak's story, like that of countless numbers of refugees successfully resettled in the United States—1.8 million arrived between 1982 and 2002—is a necessary counterpoint to the other studies of former child soldiers, stuck in refugee camps across Africa, who cannot go home, either because they have no home to go to or because as killers they are no longer welcome, and who hover around the margins of life, druggy, uneducated, and traumatized.
The Lost Boys were the lucky ones; the others never made it. Eggers' vivid and haunting story stays long in the mind as an account of what civil war does to children; and whether it is fact or fiction, in this particular case at least, is of no importance at all. - Slate.com
songs of the day: don't look back in anger - oasis s healing - hot chip
AND IN THE END The Beatles, a pop combo from England, have a new album. Or they don’t, depending on how you see it. They had a not-new album called “1” a few years ago, which became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Lesson: even though every man, woman, and parakeet already owns many Beatles albums, they will buy these songs again, even if there is not a lick of newness involved. With “Love” (Capitol), there is a lick. The producer Sir George Martin, working with his son, Giles, has revisited the original Beatles recordings to provide a soundtrack for the Cirque du Soleil act “Love.” The Martins have created an eighty-minute Beatles mix tape using the well-known recordings, demo versions, and bits that were buried the first time around. (One significant benefit of “Love” is that the Martins worked from original multitrack tapes, and the songs get their best digital sound to date.) In several instances, they have blended elements of two or three Beatles songs to make a new composition.
It is impossible to ruin this music—one would have to submerge “Come Together” under an ocean of tubas to subdue its cryptic badassery. But an ineptly sequenced mix tape can lessen the greatness of great songs, and “Love” manages to do this several times. The segues from “I Am the Walrus” into “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” into “Help!” may be supported by acrobatic stagecraft, but without bodysuits and backflips, these transitions are infelicitous. “Love” is not entirely redundant; the subtle tweaking of familiar songs is consistently smart and can sometimes be thrilling. So why not have less of what we all know and more reinvention? Bedroom mashup producers like Danger Mouse and Go Home Productions have been rearranging Beatles records for the past five years, and, when the Martins allow themselves to be equally irreverent, “Love” justifies its existence. In one track, the drum pattern from “Tomorrow Never Knows” (Ringo’s finest moment) is threaded into George Harrison’s “Within You Without You” to create a radically remixed song, emphasizing the strings and voice while blending in reversed tapes. It is gorgeous and odd, kind of like something the Beatles would do.
Thirty-six years ago this month, President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. The act—the product of a bipartisan effort extraordinary even for a day when bipartisanship was unexceptional—had been hammered out by a group of senators that included Democrats Edmund Muskie, Birch Bayh, and Thomas Eagleton, and Republicans Bob Dole, Howard Baker, and Robert Packwood. The bill passed the Senate unanimously, prompting Senator Eugene McCarthy to tell Muskie, “Ed, you finally found an issue better than motherhood.” At the signing ceremony, Nixon called the Clean Air Act a “historic piece of legislation,” but he stressed that it was only a first step. “I think that 1970 will be known as the year of the beginning,” he said.
Nostalgia for the Nixon Administration is an increasingly acceptable emotion these days, and it was hard not to feel it last week, when oral arguments were heard in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency. The suit, which has been described as “one of the most important environmental cases ever,” is the first on global warming to reach the United States Supreme Court. The plaintiffs—a group that includes, in addition to Massachusetts, eleven states, three cities, and thirteen environmental groups—hope to compel the Bush Administration to impose limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. If they are successful, the operation of every power plant and factory as well as the design of every new car in the country could potentially be affected. At the center of the suit is the Clean Air Act, and the question of just how ambitious its authors intended it to be.
The Bush Administration’s position, in keeping with its general stance toward regulation but in contrast to its general stance toward executive power, is that its hands are tied. The E.P.A., it argues, lacks the authority to limit greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, because when the act was drafted global warming wasn’t yet recognized as a problem. The “relevant provisions of the law,” it states in its brief to the Supreme Court, are “best construed not to authorize regulation . . . for the purpose of addressing global climate change.” Furthermore, the Administration asserts, even if the Clean Air Act did grant the E.P.A. the power to treat CO2 as a pollutant, the agency shouldn’t—and wouldn’t—exercise it.
Just about anyone familiar with the Clean Air Act can see the White House’s narrow reading of the law for what it is: a deliberate misreading. The act was expressly constructed to allow the E.P.A. to regulate substances known to be dangerous and also substances that might in the future be revealed to be so. Danger was defined as broadly as possible; among the many possible hazards listed in the statute are “effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, and climate.” In a friend-of-the-court brief for the plaintiffs, four former E.P.A. administrators—including Russell Train, who headed the agency under Nixon, and William Reilly, who led it under George Bush senior—point out that Congress clearly directed the E.P.A. to “regulate air pollution based on new and changing scientific information.” The four go on to note that the E.P.A. has, many times in the past, used its authority to control pollutants whose dangers could not have been foreseen in 1970; for example, in the early nineteen-nineties, faced with data on ozone depletion, the agency issued a timetable for phasing out chlorofluorocarbons.
But just because the Bush Administration is willfully misconstruing the Clean Air Act doesn’t mean that it will lose. Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency comes to the Supreme Court via the D.C. Circuit Court, whose three-judge panel issued three disparate opinions on the case. One of the judges ruled for the states. The second ruled for the E.P.A., on the ground that the agency could decline to regulate greenhouse gases if it chose. The third sided with the second, but gave different reasons: the plaintiffs, he asserted, lacked the standing to sue, since they were suffering no particularized harm (beyond the danger to humanity at large). During last week’s oral arguments, the plaintiffs’ standing was the focus of fully half the questions. James Milkey, the Massachusetts assistant attorney general who argued the case on behalf of the states, was midway through an explanation of how coastal regions would be especially hard hit by global warming when Justice Antonin Scalia interrupted him.
SCALIA: I thought that standing requires imminent harm. If you haven’t been harmed already, you have to show the harm is imminent. Is this harm imminent? MILKEY: It is, Your Honor. We have shown that [rises in] sea levels are already occurring from the current amounts of greenhouse gases in the air, and that means it is only going to get worse as the— SCALIA: When? I mean, when is the predicted cataclysm?
Meanwhile, from the plaintiffs’ perspective, even a victory could be vexed. Should the court decide that the states have standing and that the E.P.A. has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, responsibility for writing those regulations would still fall to the agency. Given who’s in charge of the E.P.A. these days, it’s hard to see how this would represent a solution. (Imagine entrusting campus alcohol policy to the guys at Delta Tau Chi.)
The Bush Administration’s indifference to global warming might seem at this point like just one of many failures—of will, of imagination, of leadership. In future decades, it will come to seem more significant: at a moment when there was still a chance to avert the worst effects of climate change, the United States couldn’t be bothered to.
The plaintiffs in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency have brought the suit out of desperation. What is really needed, as they would be the first to acknowledge, is immediate action on a scale commensurate with what’s at stake: not an invocation of the Clean Air Act but a new law of comparable vision that would lay out clear—and aggressive—targets for greenhouse-gas reductions. The Democrats should use their newly won congressional majorities to pass such legislation, and President Bush, following Nixon’s example, should sign it. That, at least, would be a beginning.
THE OFFICE
Office life in two worlds. by TAD FRIEND Issue of 2006-12-11 Posted 2006-12-04
If Samuel Beckett were still around, his plays might begin on the late shift. “An office. An unattended PC glows under strong fluorescent light. Front left, a copying machine. Front right, a document shredder. Back, in near-darkness, a lounge with a disorderly refrigerator. A head peeps over a cubicle wall.”
Yet Beckett might consider an office too familiar, too encoded with generic misery. Just as a commercial about a fretful housewife readies us for a miracle spray, so a commercial set in an office—such as one for FedEx, Sprint Nextel, and countless others—prepares us for jocular scenes of oppression. The ads follow the blueprint established by the “Dilbert” comic strip and by Mike Judge’s 1999 film “Office Space” (where the boss kept dropping by to follow up on “those T.P.S. reports”). At the office, we have come to understand, the boss is always a blustery martinet; abbreviations are a B.F.D.; your co-workers eat your food, talk your ear off, and stab you in the back; and work has no inherent value.
The richest treatment of these themes—and other, more searching considerations—occurred on “The Office,” a BBC Two sitcom whose impact vastly exceeded the length of its run: a mere twelve episodes in 2001-02 and a two-part coda, “The Office Christmas Special,” the following year. Shot as a mock documentary, it examined the daily nonevents at a branch of Wernham Hogg, a fictional paper-supply company in Slough, the city west of London celebrated by John Betjeman: “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! / It isn’t fit for humans now.” The show, which aired here on BBC America and is available as a DVD set, was indebted for its format and some of its improvisatory byplay to such Christopher Guest films as “Best in Show,” but while Guest’s characters are defined by excessive optimism, the paper pushers created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant were glum and self-loathing. They gauged their standing in the world by their jobs, as many of us do, and their jobs involved monotonous labor at a failing company in a collapsing industry. Like “The Office,” standout workplace sitcoms—including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “M*A*S*H,” “Taxi,” and “The Larry Sanders Show”—take place at pokey or besieged outfits. Their characters’ struggles to have their lives matter make the show “relatable,” as the networks put it. Failure is repeatedly relatable, whereas triumph goes down best in a single serving, such as one of those movies about unlikely bobsled heroes or plucky pint-size hockey players. A Goldman Sachs sitcom would have to be set in the mailroom, because watching envy and truckling is a lot funnier than watching the distribution of Christmas bonuses.
The workers at Wernham Hogg wear muted blues and grays and seem to be drowning in queasy fluorescence; they never see the sun. The show’s format compounded the gloom, because our emotions weren’t being cued with pop-song hooks or jolted by a laugh track; yet, by placing the cameras right up in the action and interspersing one-on-one interviews, the show allowed us to discover the characters for ourselves. The documentary verisimilitude also allowed scenes to peter out with a blank look or a sigh rather than build up to the American joke-joke-joke crescendo, known as the “blow,” a structure that usually involves someone bellowing at a freshly slammed door, “Does this mean we’re not getting married?”
The show’s lodestar was Ricky Gervais as the regional manager, David Brent. With his dated Vandyke, darting eyes, and shit-eating grin; with his wish to be more of a friend and entertainer than a boss, a wish torpedoed by the coercive feebleness of his patter and his horrifying dance moves; and with his unerring gift for joining conversations and killing them with one unpardonable remark, David was a new figure in sitcoms: the unbearable lead. In the first episode, in a scene that extended for an excruciating two and a half minutes, he sought to impress the new temp by having him sit in as he played a practical joke on the receptionist, Dawn (Lucy Davis). After calling her into his office, he pretended to fire her for stealing. When she began to sob, he winced and shifted and finally murmured, “Good girl, that was a joke we were doing.” With her head still in her hands, she called him a “wanker” and a “sad little man.” “Am I?” he said, attempting nonchalance. “Didn’t know that.” But he does. And our slow discovery of how this self-knowledge eats at David made us, grudgingly, begin to think of him as tragic.
While Gervais and Merchant’s decision to end the show well before it jumped the scone was admirable, NBC’s decision to air an American version, beginning in the spring of 2005, seemed deplorable. The show’s cult of admirers was outraged; the New York Observer wrote that, to much of Hollywood, “this smells like another colossal failure in the works.” It was as if the network had announced that it was going to take a British institution like “Pop Idol” and remake it with a jingoistic title like “American Idol.” (Since then, Québécois, French, and German networks have rolled out local versions of “The Office”; the template is becoming as globally ubiquitous as “Baywatch.”) The doubters had reason for concern, though: while classic sitcoms such as “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son” were based on British models, more recent efforts to adapt “Absolutely Fabulous,” “Coupling,” and “The Kumars at No. 42” had all gone amiss.
Initially, NBC was too respectful. The goings on at the Scranton branch of the Dunder-Mifflin paper company duplicated those at Wernham Hogg scene for scene, which didn’t play to the new writers’ interests or the new cast’s strengths. But in the fall of 2005 the writers, led by Greg Daniels, the co-creator of “King of the Hill,” declared independence, and soon enough the show became a hit, first as a downloaded phenomenon on iTunes and then in the Nielsen ratings. It also became the best sitcom on the air. The creative turning point was last fall’s Halloween episode, in which Dunder-Mifflin’s corporate office in New York tells Michael Scott (the American version of David Brent, played by Steve Carell) to fire an employee by the end of the day. As he loudly struggles to think of a way out, or a way to get someone else to do it, Carell lets us see his character rummaging around in his brain for ideas, rocking forward as if to tip one closer to his mouth. The episode becomes completely goofy when Michael, in costume with a papier-mâché head on his shoulder, persuades his dweeby but Machiavellian lieutenant, Dwight (a brilliantly humorless Rainn Wilson), that the second head is whispering advice about whom to fire.
The winning silliness was new, as was that episode’s final scene. We see Michael, after going through with the firing, sitting glumly in his condo. Then the doorbell rings and he brightens, spilling candy in his eagerness to befriend a group of trick-or-treaters. Sappy, perhaps, but also an assertion that work needn’t define us.
The British “Office” was a pitiless meditation on rules and class. (The American “Office” doesn’t care about class; the writers handle very gently the fact that Michael’s favorite New York restaurants are a Sbarro’s and a Red Lobster.) David Brent was always afraid that he was being sneered at—and he was. It wasn’t so much that David’s bosses spoke in the tones of the BBC, while he spoke Estuary English and prided himself on knowing all the pop-culture trivia familiar to readers of the Sun; it was his attempts to disguise his background by larding his conversation with Latin tags like “ipso facto,” always misused, and with management-speak about, say, “team individuality.” And there was his public behavior, as when a woman at a club accused him of wanting just to shag her. His wounded rejoinder: “Yeah, and from behind, ’cause your breath stinks of onions, and I didn’t tell you that, did I?” As he smirked at her—touché!—she slapped him, and everyone froze. The appalled silence was “The Office” ’s recurrent landing point.
Most of David’s employees didn’t know what to do with their embarrassment, but Tim (Martin Freeman), a salesman, usually bailed out of the collective mortification with a deadpan look at the camera. Making faces is the way the weak take their revenge. (Tim also regularly needled David’s provincial assistant, perpetuating a British tradition of repressive jeering that extends back to Mr. Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” who observed, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”)
Many of Tim’s poker-faced glances and slightly pop-eyed takes were directed toward Dawn; he wooed her the way a dog woos its master. Their long-simmering mutual crush was the show’s sole gesture toward the optimistic American “arc,” in which characters go on a journey together and are rewarded. But the crush didn’t boil over, because Dawn was engaged to someone else. Tim and Dawn were afraid to break the rules-—and their colleagues, equally afraid, made sure that they didn’t.
David declared at one point that he’d like “to live, you know, on and on and on, you know—know what it’s like to live forever.” Yet the show’s blank interstitial shots of the photocopier chunking out documents and of people staring at their computer screens, just as before, became increasingly dreadful. “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” as Estragon observes in “Waiting for Godot.” In the final episode, when David’s bravado crumbled and he pleaded with his bosses in a low voice to rescind their decision to fire him (“Don’t . . . make me redundant,” he said, barely able to get the words out. “Just say that it’s not definite now”), his appeal to keep things as they were, given how bad even he knew they were, was wrenching.
The challenge that faced the American “Office” was to honor the spirit of the original while tweaking the workplace dynamics so that audiences would want to watch more than twelve episodes. The British scabrousness and barely suppressed violence is gone, and the Scranton office—brighter and noisier, with more posters, parties, and pep—is Slough on Zoloft. Scranton has its thwarted lovebirds, too, Jim and Pam (the boyishly appealing John Krasinski and a depressed but radiant Jenna Fischer), who are better-looking and more assertive than Tim and Dawn. But two more office romances have been woven into the mix, and where Ricky Gervais’s David was nearly asexual, Steve Carell’s Michael Scott is weirdly and delightfully pansexual. Ryan, the go-getter junior salesman (B. J. Novak, one of several writers on the show who also play characters), tries never to be alone with his boss. It’s not just that Michael slaps him on the rear and calls him on his cell phone to coo but that Michael once proclaimed, when everyone was playing Who Would You Do?, “Well, I would definitely have sex with Ryan!,” adding, a moment late, “ ’cause he’s going to own his own business.” Which makes it perfectly understandable.
Referring to such differences, Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment, has remarked that “Americans need a little bit more hope than the British.” In fact, conditions in Scranton are fairly hopeless: when it appeared, earlier this season, as if the branch might close, many of the employees were delighted. Toby, the doleful human-resources nebbish (Paul Lieberstein), told the camera, “For a minute there, I saw myself selling my house, moving to Costa Rica, learning how to surf. But, Costa Rica will still be there . . . when I’m sixty-five.”
What distinguishes Dunder-Mifflin from Wernham Hogg is not hope but consolation. In the British “Office,” we never learned most people’s names; the American version lovingly anatomizes everyone and takes advantage of the long-take documentary format to reveal the full complexity of everyone’s feelings (we glean, for instance, that Toby has an unspoken crush on Pam, and therefore resents Jim). Lost is the condemnatory power of the anonymous British chorus; gained are both a standard American melting pot and a commedia-dell’arte stock company, featuring Kelly the Yakker, Meredith the Lush, Kevin the Letch, and Creed the Cantankerous Freak, who is just a possession or two away from being a hobo. When Dwight is hovering uselessly in Michael’s office as Michael tries to deal with the sudden death of his predecessor, who was decapitated in a car accident, Creed (Creed Bratton) suddenly dips in his random oar.
CREED: You know, a human can go on living for several hours after being decapitated. DWIGHT: You’re thinking of a chicken. CREED: What’d I say?
It wouldn’t be the same without him. In the final episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Mary Richards explained the hidden mechanism of our workplace sitcoms, telling her co-workers, “I thought about something last night. What is a family? And I think I know. A family is people who make you feel less alone and really loved. Thank you for being my family.” Somewhat more self-importantly, Michael Scott tells the camera, “A lot of these people, this is the only family they have. So as far as I’m concerned”—he pulls out a “World’s Best Boss” mug that he bought for himself—“this says ‘World’s Best Dad.’ ”
This office taps home the point that work is fundamentally alien to the workplace. The reason that bosses become blustery martinets is that any sensible employee at a place like Dunder-Mifflin would rather play video games or gossip than tutor clients in the manifold varieties of copy paper. Yet Michael is the worst offender; he hates paperwork and is constantly distracting his employees while supposedly motivating them—the man is a karaoke machine of samplings from leadership manuals, and his emotional declarations sound like “The 48 Laws of Power.” “Would I rather be feared or loved?” he wonders aloud. “Um, easy: both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.” There is something Trump-like about Michael—the inert quiff of hair, the bombastic maxims, the bluff, mechanical determination.
Where David Brent wields language like a blunderbuss, brandishing it before the gates of the establishment, Michael wraps himself in it like a Sean John jacket, longing, hopelessly, to be black. “Wassup!” he cries, to his “dawgs” and “be-yotches” when they’re “in the house.” Last week, in an episode guest-written by Gervais and Merchant, he put on a do-rag and pretended to be Prison Mike, giving his employees the 411 on why office life is, in fact, preferable to time in the hole. There are also, in a somewhat more Caucasian mode, his impressions of Moe Howard, of the Three Stooges, and Adolf Hitler, of the Third Reich. Steve Carell does wonderful work with his voice, going from strangled and squeaky when he’s wounded to orotund when he’s feeling statesmanlike, an effect routinely shattered by his penchant for cackling and blurting out “Fo’ shizzle!” or “What’s the dealio?” All the conversational lint that tumbles around the airwaves gets trapped on the blank mesh of his brain.
Michael is less concerned with class than David, but he’s classier. When layoffs loomed at Wernham Hogg, David leapt to take a promotion, even though it meant that his Slough office would close (in the end, he failed the physical). By contrast, when Michael is told that the Scranton branch will be shuttered, he and Dwight drive to New York to appeal for his workers’ jobs. Scranton winds up absorbing the somewhat more professional Stamford branch, not because of Michael’s ultimately irrelevant road trip but because Stamford’s manager leveraged the situation and got a better job at Staples. Jim tells the camera, “Say what you will about Michael Scott, but he would never do that.”
Aside from such occasional clangers—fundamental-decency alert!—the show has a near-perfect grasp of tone. When Pam accepts her “Dundie” award from Michael at the annual ceremony at Chili’s, she has been drinking and flirting with Jim and wants to show off for him, so she launches into a mock acceptance speech. “Finally,” she concludes, “I want to thank God”—and her pause as she glances at the award in her hand and the engagement ring she has worn for more than three years is strangely affecting—“because God gave me this Dundie, and because I feel God in this Chili’s tonight.” In such scenes, the show manages to send up the forced camaraderie that Michael demands while celebrating its haphazard but genuine epiphanies.
The American show is much more willing to bend reality in the service of a joke. Jim, who sits next to Dwight and is able to tolerate his pettiness only by thinking of ingenious ways to punk him, goes so far as to send him faxes that purport to be time-travelling warnings from “future Dwight”—and Dwight heeds them. But the new “Office” does fix the original’s nagging realism problem: it was difficult to believe that David Brent would have lasted in his job for eight years. The writers take care to demonstrate that Michael Scott’s intense, blundering amiability can close a sale, particularly when the client is drunk. Most of the time, Michael’s boss, Jan Levinson (a splendid Melora Hardin as a steely professional occasionally beset by self-doubt), can’t understand why she hasn’t fired him. But Jan also warms to Michael’s sympathetic side, particularly when she’s drunk. She even makes out with him, twice, to her everlasting chagrin.
Michael is too dim to understand that Jan is way out of his league; he sees himself as a sort of man-about-town who’s not afraid to cry. In this vein, he regularly convenes breach-healing colloquia about diversity and tolerance, which always backfire. This fall, he tried to demonstrate that there’s nothing scary about gays by publicly embracing Oscar (Oscar Nuñez), an accountant who he had been told, privately, was gay. (Michael explained to us that he wished he’d known about Oscar’s sexuality, because then he wouldn’t have kept calling him “faggy.” “You don’t call retarded people retards,” he pointed out, with characteristic logic. “It’s bad taste. You call your friends retards when they’re acting retarded. And I consider Oscar a friend.”) Oscar rejected the embrace with a shove, declaring, “I don’t want to touch you—ever consider that? You’re ignorant. And insulting. And small.” Michael’s pained glance at the camera demonstrates Steve Carell’s particular strength as a comic actor: he doesn’t just deliver jokes and P.C. doubletalk—he swaddles them in bubble wrap and adds a gift card. When they don’t go over, he’s crestfallen. Here he ended up crying on Oscar’s shoulder: “Sorry I called you faggy.” Michael wants nothing more than to keep his humiliations to himself. But there are so many.
The biggest humiliation, though he hasn’t yet begun to acknowledge it, is the growing evidence that his office is not exactly a family. Michael’s employees, of course, recognize family metaphors as a corporate falsehood, and they behave accordingly: his wingman, Dwight, recently maneuvered to replace him, having earlier told us that his defining quality as a worker was loyalty—“but if there were somewhere else that valued that loyalty more highly, I’m going wherever they value loyalty the most.”
Similarly, Andy, a new guy from Stamford (Ed Helms, in a scene-stealing turn as a smarmy frat-boy type), tells us he’ll have the second-in-command job within six weeks, through “name repetition” and “personality mirroring.” Michael falls for the manipulation, of course, and his credulousness made us feel the sort of sadness we feel when a computer outplays Garry Kasparov. Even Jim has no problem with getting ahead and is now Michael’s No. 2. Class isn’t destiny here; destiny is achieved by selling and, in both senses of the word, hustling.
Gervais and Merchant’s handling of the Tim-and-Dawn plot was a master class in the pleasures of delayed gratification. At the very end of the show’s coda, “The Office Christmas Special,” Dawn tearily stepped into Tim’s arms. The related issue that the American “Office” must now resolve seems, at first, merely technical: how to perpetuate Jim and Pam’s mating dance as the show continues indefinitely. Their flirtation is more articulated, playful, and intimate than Tim and Dawn’s longing; it’s screwball rather than chivalric. They essentially serve as the office’s cruise directors, engineering a karate bout between Michael and Dwight and conducting an office Olympics with medals made from yogurt lids (they give Michael a gold lid for closing on his condo).
Inspired writing can multiply obstacles for a long time: Sam and Diane teased viewers for five years on “Cheers,” and Niles and Daphne eyed each other for seven years on “Frasier” before running off together. But when the will-they-or-won’t-they plot winds down, it often takes the show with it, as it did on “Moonlighting.” Precisely because Jim and Pam’s relationship has been so poignant—it’s the show’s chief ornament—they are fast running out of reasons to stay apart. At the end of last season, Jim approached Pam in the parking lot one night and said, “I’m in love with you.” A few minutes later in the darkened office, a likelier setting, they kissed. Then she said she was still going to marry Roy, her lunk of a fiancé. Yes, it made no sense. This season, even as Pam called off the wedding, Jim left for the Stamford office so that he could forget her; now the merger has brought him back, along with his Stamford colleague and new girlfriend, Karen (a spunky Rashida Jones). Their relationship feels much more mature than Jim and Pam’s skylarking, and so is clearly doomed.
How this matter plays out will define the show’s view of office life. Is this “Office” a romance, a place to find your soul’s counterpoint? Or is it a comedy of consolation, a place where dreams of love and Costa Rica gradually slip away? Michael, at least, would argue for the romance. Last season, he urged Jim to “never, ever, ever give up” his pursuit of Pam. It helped, somehow, that Michael uttered this Churchillian sentiment while wearing plastic handcuffs and shivering in the makeshift brig of a booze-cruise boat on Scranton’s Lake Wallenpaupack. The frigid weather and the correctional setting were straight out of the British original; the unlooked-for kindness was a local contribution. The BBC and NBC are two offices separated by a common language.
now that we've allegedly traded the Age of the Album for the Age of the Playlist, there are quite a few compilation series like this one, wherein your favorite acts root through their record collections and offer a home-listening mixtape. The concept tends to be most enlightening when it comes to acts that make electronic music, and not just because they're presumed to be better music scholars. The truth is that we tend to talk about electronic acts in relation to other electronic acts-- the ones on the same labels, the ones that use the same tools and techniques, the same synths and software. With the right mix, musicians like these can try to place themselves within a much larger tradition of songwriting, and spell out what it is they'd be interested in whether they were writing for digital keyboards or chamber quartets.
This installment of the LateNightTales series pairs up with Jean-Benoît Dunckel's solo project as the total fall publicity for Air. It's also one of the best of this type of mix I've heard in a while. For one thing, Air have taken the "Late Night" part of the title very seriously, making for an incredibly functional, utilitarian mix. Only a very few tracks here have anything approaching a conventional drum kit, and a good portion of the set consists of moody film-score work and orchestral pieces: These songs are matched up on their slow movement and their spare, deliberate sound. The result is uniformly pensive and weighty, painted in deep, dark colors-- a mix for the deadest hours of night.
And since Air have always been pop songwriters more than any kind of "electronic" act, they manage to offer a terrific picture of the music that informs their own recordings. The most colorful track here is Minnie Ripperton's still-gorgeous "Lovin' You", a track whose twinkling 70s keys are an obvious antecedent to Air's Moon Safari. (They also sound so pure and natural that it's hard to remember why that album had to give them the occasional ironic wink.) There are also plenty of examples of the kind of very-grave, very-French baritone drama that clearly informs the group's later albums. The way Japan's "Ghosts" suspends David Sylvian's voice over an abyss, with only the odd keyboard accent to keep it company; the way Scott Walker and Lee Hazlewood rumble their way through deep reverb over plush arrangements-- what else would you expect Air to be listening to?
The band's choices here turn out to be consistently interesting, too, and should prove worthwhile even to someone who already digs through this kind of stuff on her own. Sofia Coppola might have beat them to anthologizing the Cure's "All Cats Are Grey", and a Cat Power chestnut in the middle kind of breaks the spell, but the majority of the picks are damned clever. Jeff Alexander's "Come Wander With Me" seems like it should be some vintage English or Greenwich-Village folk, until you look it up and find out it was composed for an episode of The Twilight Zone. There's some of the sedate, flanged-out psychedelic music people forget Black Sabbath tended to make. The folky second half skips from a Robert Wyatt lullaby to Elliott Smith to the Troggs' whispery "Cousin Jane"-- something like the Stones' "I Am Waiting" if it never got around to the rock part. There's a string piece from the Chinese composer Tan Dun, a bit of Nino Rota, a suddenly sunny break from Sébastien Tellier, and-- for the closer-- the Cleveland Orchestra playing Ravel.
Which means this disc is surprising, satisfying, and most of all very, very functional. The trouble with most home-listening mixes, here in the Age of the Playlist, is that you could quite easily throw together a bunch of songs you liked on your own. Air are smart enough to specialize-- to do a mix for an exact mood, an exact time of night, the kind of deep and deliberate music that sounds right when everything else seems too loud, too much. You could try to piece something similar together from your mp3 collection, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be half as good-- and besides, you'd have already heard it all.
20 years ago, Neil Young's wife Pegi co-founded the Bridge School, a non-profit organization dedicated to assisting individuals suffering from physical disabilities and speech impediments in achieving their maximum potential.
Each year since the Bridge School's inception, Neil has organized annual Bridge School benefit concerts, calling in acts like himself, Billy Idol, Bright Eyes, Emmylou Harris, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Ryan Adams, Smashing Pumpkins, Tegan and Sara, Thom Yorke, Metallica, Tom Waits, Wilco, Willie Nelson, and more to help raise money for the foundation. Looks like he found that heart of gold, eh? (Ba dum dum.)
Now, the Bridge School has released a hefty iTunes benefit compilation of recordings from those concerts. The collection features 80 tracks, including several culled from 1997's Reprise release The Bridge School Concerts, Volume 1 (Live).
You can purchase the album as a whole or as individual tracks but either way, proceeds go directly to the Bridge School.
Highlights include Thom Yorke covering Young's "After the Gold Rush" and playing Radiohead's "Street Spirit" solo, the Wilco live rarity "Bob Dylan's 49th Beard", Smashing Pumpkins' "To Sheila", Tom Waits' "Innocent When You Dream", Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" and "Vicoius", and more.
