GLOBAL WARMING
New Yorker

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.


on blood diamond

MUSIC

Air
LateNightTales
Rating: 7.8

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.

cold.