This makes me laugh everytime:

Neil Young's 'Living With War' Shows He Doesn't Like It
By JON PARELES NY TIMES

Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, "Living With War" (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four weeks ago and as of Friday can be heard in its entirety free on his Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and on satellite radio networks. Mr. Young half-jokingly describes "Living With War" as his "metal folk protest" album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; "History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe," he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a sound that harks back to Young albums like "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Ragged Glory."

Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists "Don't need no more lies," longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.

In a song whose title alone has already brought him the fury of right-wing blogs, he urges, "Let's Impeach the President." It ends with Mr. Young shouting, "Flip, flop," amid contradictory sound bites of President Bush. But Mr. Young insists the album is nonpartisan.

"If you impeach Bush, you're doing a huge favor for the Republicans," he argued, speaking by telephone from California. "They can run again with some pride."

Mr. Young is a Canadian citizen. But having lived in the United States since the 1960's, he sings as if he were an American. The title song of "Living With War" quotes "The Star-Spangled Banner," and the album ends with the choir singing "America the Beautiful."

The album's release is a high-tech, globe-spanning update of a topical song tradition that's much older than recordings: the broadside, a songwriter's rapid response to events of the day. "They had these songs that everybody knew the melodies to," Mr. Young said. "They'd just write new words, and the minstrels would be traveling around spreading the word. Music spreads like wildfire when you do it that way."

On Tuesday a higher-quality version will be for sale as a download from online music stores, and a CD will be in stores next week as soon as it can be manufactured and shipped. Eventually a DVD will be released with video of the recording sessions, which took place March 29 to April 6. Many of the songs on the album were first takes, recorded immediately after Mr. Young taught them to the band. On March 31 he wrote three songs: "Let's Impeach the President" before breakfast, "Looking for a Leader" after he recorded "Let's Impeach the President" and "Roger and Out" the same evening.

Mr. Young's Web site will have a more elaborate presentation, available free. It will include a page designed like a cable-news broadcast, complete with visuals (including recording-session scenes), ticker and logo: LWW (for "Living With War") rather than CNN. "Even if it turns out that we can't sell it with the news in it, we won't sell it, we'll just stream it," he said. "We don't have to sell it. We can still get it out there. This has nothing to do with money as far as I'm concerned."

Mr. Young wants the album heard as a whole. The online streams play through from beginning to end; until the CD is ready, the downloadable copies will be available only as a bundle of the full album. "That first impression is so important," he said. "Instead of just going to 'Let's Impeach the President,' people will have to absorb the whole thing. To understand the songs, you need to understand where the whole album's coming from. It protects my right as an artist to have the work presented the way I created it."

Mr. Young has always been impatient with the time lag between writing a song and getting it to the world. When four student protesters were shot dead at Kent State University in 1970, he wrote "Ohio," recorded it with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and released it two and a half weeks later by sending acetates — preliminary pressings — to radio stations. (He will be on tour this summer as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in what's billed as the Freedom of Speech Tour.)

After 9/11 Mr. Young wrote "Let's Roll," a song about the passengers who brought down a hijacked plane in Pennsylvania, and released it free online. "Now we have the Internet," he said. "It doesn't sound as good, but it's much faster, and it gets around the world. That's huge, that's as big as we get."

The songs on "Living With War" are straightforward and single-minded, setting aside the allusive, enigmatic quality of Mr. Young's rock classics. "These are all ideas we've heard before," he said. "There's nothing new in there. I just connected the dots."

The protest song, rocked-up slightly from its folky 1960's form, has been making a comeback during the Iraq war, from arena bands like Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones and Green Day to indie-rockers like Bright Eyes and blues-rockers like Keb' Mo' and Robert Cray. Bruce Springsteen's latest album is a tribute to the protest-song mentor Pete Seeger, although it features old folk songs rather than Mr. Seeger's topical material.

"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Mr. Young said. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal wave. This is just the tip of it."

Mr. Young said that he made "Living With War" not with a plan, but on an impulse. "I don't know what actually did it," he said. "It happened really fast, faster than I think I've ever experienced. There was just a kind of a wave."

As in the 60's, protest songs risk self-righteousness and preaching only to the converted. Only the most generalized ones outlast the interest in whatever headlines inspired them. There's not a lot of mystery to the songs on "Living With War"; they make their points as forthrightly as possible. Yet in the Internet era information — not just songs but blogs, videos, photos, drawings, e-mail jottings — is in the paradoxical position of being published worldwide and perhaps archived forever, but also being impulsive and ephemeral. A song for the Internet doesn't have to be one for the ages. Like an old broadside, it just has to get around for its moment, for right now. "Living With War" — irate, passionate, tuneful, thoughtful and obstinate — is definitely worth a click.

Birth is expected this weekend.

If in Toronto, visit the Contact Photography exhibits throughout the city.

FILM
NY Times

A persuasively narrated, scrupulously tasteful re-creation of the downing of the fourth and final plane hijacked by Islamist terrorists on Sept. 11, "United 93" is the first Hollywood feature film to take on that dreadful day. It won't be the last. (Next up, ready or not: Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center.") Preceded by both the expected bluster and genuine relief that the film is as good as it is — and it is good, in a temple-pounding, sensory-overloading way that can provoke tears and a headache — it was written and directed by the British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, who has crossed the pond to make the feel-bad American movie of the year.

Mr. Greengrass cut his teeth in British television working on a current-affairs program and directing factually grounded films. His breakout film, "Bloody Sunday," released in 2002, recreates a violent clash in 1972 between peaceful Irish protesters and trigger-happy British paratroopers that left more than a dozen marchers dead. Though produced for television, it toured the international film festival circuit and led directly to his next gig, "The Bourne Supremacy," a hyperkinetic Hollywood spy thriller about an amnesiac C.I.A. operative (played by Matt Damon). With jerky hand-held camerawork and nanosecond editing rhythms, Mr. Greengrass ratcheted up the action to Mach 5 and walked away with a canny box-office hit. Thrilling and gloomy in parts, it was the perfect warm-up for this new film.

Without ceremony, credits or introductory music, "United 93" opens with a cluster of Muslim men murmuring prayers in a hotel room. The four are the hijackers later identified by the F.B.I. as Ziad Jarrah (Khalid Abdalla), Saeed al-Ghamdi (Lewis Alsamari), Ahmed al-Haznawi (Omar Berdouni) and Ahmed al-Nami (Jamie Harding). Distinguished by his glasses and heavy black brows that hover over his worried eyes like the silhouette of a flying bird, Jarrah quickly becomes the most important hijacker in Mr. Greengrass's retelling. That's partly because Jarrah will pilot the plane, a photograph of the Capitol building taped to the control yoke, but also because in this recognizably human face we find a screen for whatever emotions we want to project: indecision, fear, regret or something more oblique, unknown.

Much of what happened on the plane remains unknown. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, some 15 minutes after the second plane hit the South Tower a United Airlines flight dispatcher began transmitting alerts to his planes, including United 93, warning pilots to guard against "cockpit intrusion." The message was received by United 93 at 9:24 a.m., three minutes after it had been transmitted. Two minutes later the pilot, Capt. Jason M. Dahl (JJ Johnson), asked for confirmation. Two minutes after that, the hijackers breached the cockpit and gained control of the plane, probably murdering both pilots and a flight attendant. At 10:03 a.m., after passengers tried to break down the cockpit door, United 93 plowed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone onboard.

In its vivid details and especially its narrative pacing, the account of the United 93 hijacking in the 9/11 report reads like a nail-biter, something cooked up by Sebastian Junger. Drawing on different sources, including the report and family members, Mr. Greengrass follows the same trajectory as the report, with most of the screen time devoted to the period between takeoff and the excruciating moments before the plane crashed. The film carries the standard caution that it is "a creative work based on fact," yet Mr. Greengrass's use of nonfiction tropes, like the jagged camerawork and the rushed, overlapping shards of naturalistic dialogue, invests his storytelling with a visceral, combat-zone verisimilitude. And yet at the same time, beat for beat, the whole thing plays out very much according to the Hollywood playbook.

"United 93" not only gives us what happened inside the doomed plane: it also shows us the panic and chaos that seized those tracking air traffic that morning. Perhaps Mr. Greengrass felt it would be unbearably claustrophobic to stay inside the cabin for the 35 minutes between the moments when the hijackers seized and crashed the plane. Or perhaps because it's difficult to build and sustain narrative tension inside a single, confined set (as even Hitchcock proved), or perhaps because he just wanted to give us a larger view of that day, the filmmaker employs a narrative strategy as old as the movies themselves. He tells the story of "United 93" through cross-cutting, restlessly and with increasing rapidity moving back and forth between the plane and the F.A.A. and military personnel who are trying to understand what's happening.

The film's early, quiet scenes of these men and women preparing for another day of work — the co-pilot walking around the plane for a preflight check, air-traffic controllers exchanging technical small talk — are especially effective, since they underscore that before all these people became either heroes or, in the case of the F.A.A., heavies, they were men and women, people, not abstractions.

The problem is that it isn't the ordinariness of the passengers and the crew that most of us remember. What we remember are the accounts of their heroism and Todd Beamer's famous "Let's roll," here movingly uttered by the actor David Alan Basche almost as an aside, and their murder. And this is where writing about "United 93," as a movie, as an entertainment, becomes difficult. Mr. Greengrass has worked hard to honor the victims, as has the studio releasing the film. The whole production has arrived in a hush of solemnity; the notes given to the press even include biographies of the crew and passengers, some by family members. But because Mr. Greengrass treats everyone onboard as equals (no one is a star, on screen or off), and because he throws us into the story without telling us who they are, they never become individuated. They are the guy in the baseball cap, the weeping woman, the man bleeding to death on the floor. More than anything, they are the instruments of the narrative's inexorable momentum, helping to push the story forward with their confused whispers, desperate plans and, finally, stunningly bold action.

Working with the talented cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who has brought a gritty neo-realist touch to a number of Ken Loach's films, and a trio of crack editors (Clare Douglas, Christopher Rouse and Richard Pearson), Mr. Greengrass puts us in the middle of the fast-escalating mayhem amid a flurry of smash edits, raging voices and pooling blood. As the camera whips from one location to the next, a few faces come sharply into focus, in particular that of Ben Sliney, the operations manager who was actually running the F.A.A. command center the morning of Sept. 11. Mr. Sliney is one of nine F.A.A. and military personnel who play themselves; you only have to hear Maj. James Fox, from the Northeast Air Defense Sector, ask where the president and vice president are to understand why.

"United 93" is a sober reminder of the breakdown in leadership on the morning of Sept. 11. Unlike Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," the film doesn't get into the whereabouts of the president that day, or why Osama bin Laden ordered the attack; its focus is purposely narrow. But that narrow focus, along with the lack of fully realized characters, and the absence of any historical or political context, raises the question of why, notwithstanding the usual (if shaky) commercial imperative, this particular movie was made. To jolt us out of complacency? Remind us of those who died? Unite us, as even the film's title seems to urge? Entertain us?

To be honest, I haven't a clue. I didn't need a studio movie to remind me of the humanity of the thousands who were murdered that day or the thousands who have died in the wars waged in their name. That's one reason why the arguments about whether it's too soon for a film about the attack rings hollow and seriously off the point. Sept. 11 has shaped our political discourse and even infiltrated our popular culture, though as usual Hollywood has been awfully late to that table. Yet five years after the fact and all the books, newspaper and magazine articles, committees and scandals later, I think we need something more from our film artists than another thrill ride and an emotional pummeling. "United 93" inspires pity and terror, no doubt. But catharsis? I'm still waiting for that.

MUSIC FOR THE WEEKEND

Country Girl - Primal Scream ****
Mushaboom remix - Feist
Ibi Dreams of Pavement (live) - Broken Social Scene
Hallelujah - Bono
Henney Buggy Band - Sufjan StevensShe Doesn't Exist - Robyn Hitchcock
Into your Arms - The Lemonheads
Pretty Woman - Al Green
Severed Hand (live) - Pearl Jam (though it sounds like it is by The Who)
Cocaine Eyes - Neil Young
Angry Anymore (live) - Ani Difranco
Where or When - Peggy Lee
Quito - The Mountain Goats (Quito, Ecuador is, fittingly enough, the only national capital city that lies in the shadow of an active volcano.)
One Evening - Feist
Revolution - Nina Simone
Knockin' On Heaven's Door - Cat Power

Interested?

FILM

If you're going to the Tribeca Film Festival...

Hot Docs films reviewed

50 v. JAY-Z

form the Village Voice
One of my favorite things to write about last year was the big untold story in East Coast rap, the silent cold war between Jay-Z and 50 Cent that came to a head at Jay's "I Declare War" concert in October when he pointedly declared war on nobody but brought out a wide range of prominent 50 foes (Nas, Jadakiss) in what seemed to be a sort of massing of the armies. Jay had his team (Nas, Beanie Sigel, Kanye West), and 50 had his (Mobb Deep, M.O.P., Mase), and it looked like it would stay that way, a miles-wide chasm between East Coast rap's two most successful rappers and their warring conceptions of rap. Or that's what I thought, anyway. It became apparent pretty quickly that this was a totally simplistic and unrealistic image. Jay and 50 may not like each other, but they aren't going to let that mutual animosity get in the way of their cashflows. A few months ago, someone at MTV News asked 50 about the cold war, and 50 said that it wasn't real at all, that he'd even be working with Jay on Freeway's next album. This seemed unlikely, to say the least; Freeway's dusty, desperate, conflicted drug-rap never seemed to have much in common with the increasingly banal money-talk that 50's been doing lately ("Mansion after mansion / Next stop, the Hamptons," guh). But it turns out that it's true; the album is mostly done, and it'll be released as a joint venture between Roc-A-Fella and G-Unit, executive produced by both Jay and 50. The first hard evidence of the collaboration emerged a couple of weeks ago with DJ Whoo Kid and Freeway's G-Unit Radio 19 mixtape.

On the surface, it makes sense. 50 and Freeway both came up on mixtapes, and they released their first albums within a few months of each other. Freeway is one of those perennially on-the-rise rappers with all the right connections and unimpeachable credibility who nevertheless can't seem to make the leap to actual stardom. And 50's been making a habit of snapping up underperforming East Coast street-rappers lately; it's the reason the Mobb Deep dudes have G-Unit tattoos on their hands now. Allhiphop's news report on the album's progress makes it look like we could have a classic on our hands: guest appearances from 50, Young Buck, State Property guys, Scarface, Jay-Z, and Kanye and production from Just Blaze and Kanye, among others; all these guys should be able to match up perfectly with Free's rangy, classicist aesthetic. Free has consistently been one of the most fascinating figures in rap, a Muslim who raps about girls and drugs and violence but who always sounds guilty about it, who says he'll stop sinning and commit himself fully to his religion later in life, when he finally gets past all the temptation that constantly surrounds him. Philadelphia Freeway, his first album, didn't always address that dichotomy, and misguided pop moves like the collaboration with Nelly and the pimp-song with Snoop Dogg kept it from being great. But it's still a truly strong album, with Just Blaze's windswept soul production and Free's hungry hyena-yelp providing all the relentlessly churning tension that was often missing from the lyrics. Working with the right guys, Freeway seems like he could finally attack his own inner conflict on the new album and become the great rapper he's always had the potential to be. I'm not sure, though.

I'm not sure because G-Unit Radio 19 is a terrible mixtape, scattered and incoherent and generally unpleasant. Most of the blame can go to Whoo Kid, the most painfully inept big-name mixtape DJ working (worse than Kay Slay even). Whoo Kid can't put together a cohesive, listenable mixtape to save his life; his echoey vocal drops and gunshot-noises and intrusive skits can turn even a pretty good track into a piece of shit. He also wastes our time with interludes like this one:

Whoo Kid: Should I play a new Freeway joint?
Prince of Bahrain: Yeah, yeah.
Whoo Kid: What do y'all think of Freeway before I get into that?
Prince of Bahrain. You know Freeway Freeway, yeah, I like that dude, you know? You know what I'm saying?
Whoo Kid: He is a fellow Muslim, too, so you know, you got to respect that already.
Prince of Bahrain: Yeah, yeah...(trailing off)

Whoo Kid also pairs Freeway up with Lil Jon on the first track, and every East Coast rapper who tries that move always ends up looking desperate (see: Mobb Deep, Nas). But part of the blame lies with Freeway himself. His voice still sounds amazing, and he still wraps it around beats with a visceral, breathless dedication, but now he's rapping about his off-shore accounts and antique cars and shit, and it's even less interesting coming from him than it is from Johnny Q. Mixtape Rapper. Gritty rappers are having more and more problems translating their styles to the G-Unit milieu; Mobb Deep has the same problem all over their new album. When you come up evoking fear and hopelessness and longing and hate, it's hard to make jewelry-talk work. At this rate, M.O.P. is going to be talking about partying on yachts in Monaco before the end of the year, and nobody wants to hear that shit. Maybe Jay and 50 should get back to silently beefing.

“One more roll, and I’ll get it all back.” Gambling uses evolved pleasure centers in the brain, which makes it all the more dangerous.

“After the age of forty, every man is responsible for his own face,” Albert Camus observed. Well, at least if that man shaves.

MUSIC
On Pearl Jam (Rolling Stone)

Wartime, for everything else that's wrong with it, brings out the best in Pearl Jam: the power-chord brawn, contrary righteousness and metallic-KO songwriting sense. The band's second and third albums, 1993's bluntly titled Vs. and 1994's Vitalogy, are as good as modern rock-in-opposition gets: shotgun guitars, incendiary bass and drums, and Eddie Vedder's scalded-dog howl, all discharged in backs-to-the-wall fury and union.This album, Pearl Jam's first studio release in four years and their best in ten, is more of that top electric combat. With a difference. The Pearl Jam on Pearl Jam is not the band that famously responded to overnight platinum by going to war with the world. Vedder, guitarists Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, bassist Jeff Ament and drummer Matt Cameron are now fully at war in the world, unrepentant veterans of the campaign trail (the Vote for Change Tour) and right-wing crucifixion (the "Bushleaguer" uproar) who have made the most overtly partisan -- and hopeful -- record of their lives. For Vedder, the 2004 election was not a total loss. "Why swim the channel just to get this far?/Halfway there, why would you turn around?" he demands in the first song, "Life Wasted," in a ragged, run-on bark. And it's all forward ho from there. As immediate and despairing as breaking news from Baghdad -- "World Wide Suicide" opens with a newspaper casualty report -- Pearl Jam is also as big and brash in fuzz and backbone as Led Zeppelin's Presence.

That's not just rock-critic shorthand. However you define grunge music, Pearl Jam didn't play it. They were, from jump street, a classic rock band, building their bawl with iron-guitar bones and an arena-vocal lust that came right from Zeppelin, early-Seventies Who and mid-Eighties U2 (with distortion instead of the Edge's glass-guitar harmonics). But Pearl Jam have not been this consistently dirty and determined in the studio since they subbed for Crazy Horse on Neil Young's 1995 Mirror Ball. I own two complete tours' worth of Pearl Jam's official-bootleg concert CDs, and this record's five-song blastoff ("Life Wasted," "World Wide Suicide," "Comatose," "Severed Hand" and "Marker in the Sand") is right up there in punch and crust with my favorite nights in that live series (Seattle, 11/6/00, and New Orleans, 4/8/03, to name two). And whenever the guitars take over, which is a lot -- Gossard and McCready's slugging AC/DC-like intro to "Life Wasted"; McCready's wild wah-wah ride in "Big Wave"; the way he cracks Vedder's gloom in "Parachutes" like heat lightning -- it reminds me that Gossard and McCready deserved to be on our 2003 "Greatest Guitarists" list. Permit me to admit it here: I screwed up.

That's more confession than you'll ever hear in the Bush White House. But talk-show pit bulls will be disappointed to find that Vedder doesn't waste his breath naming names here, except for a glancing reference to "the president" in "World Wide Suicide." There is blame, but it's spread all around. "Now you got both sides/Claiming killing in God's name/But God is nowhere to be found, conveniently," Vedder sings in "Marker in the Sand," from inside Gossard and McCready's crossfire and the saturation bombing of Ament and Cameron. There is dread too -- lots of it. "Army Reserve" is a midtempo elegy for the real Army Reserve, the wives and children who serve in worry, behind the lines. (The dark harmonies crowding Vedder's low, grainy vocal feel like ghosts in waiting.) And "Unemployable" is just half a story, with a soaring-melancholy chorus. The song ends before the guy with the pink slip can find a new job. But Vedder's opening scene -- the fist with the ring that says jesus saves, flying with helpless anger into a metal locker -- is lesson enough. In multinational capitalism run riot, the bottom line doesn't care about religion or party line. We're all expendable.

And we're all accountable. The politics on Pearl Jam are not those of right or left but of engagement and responsibility. In "Life Wasted," Vedder at least partly mocks his old self, the one that wore success and the leverage that came with it like sackcloth: "Darkness comes in waves, tell me/Why invite it to stay?" But there is only determined optimism in Pearl Jam's superb finish, "Inside Job." The song starts quietly, then climbs and peaks like a combination of "Stairway to Heaven" and the Who's "The Song Is Over" -- a mirror image of Vedder's stumble through each line from night into light. "I will not lose my faith," he promises under thunderclap guitars, with such assurance that even if you don't agree with anything else on this record, you believe him.
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The Canadian dollar on Wednesday reached its highest level since November 1991 as it climbed to 88.82 cents US in morning trading on world currency markets.

The loonie was up 0.46 of a cent from Tuesday's close. Traders said the dollar was driven higher by stronger metals prices, a weaker U.S. dollar and a Bank of Canada statement yesterday that most currency traders interpreted as being hawkish about the need for future interest rate hikes.
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In the late autumn of 1888 Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh spent a little over two months living and working together. It is a wonder they lasted so long. They made a very odd pairing, even for artists. Gauguin was 40 and Van Gogh 35 when they shared the Yellow House, a small, spartan dwelling on an unassuming square in Arles, a city which had once been the capital of the western Roman empire but had since fallen on hard times. Gauguin had a small avant-garde reputation and a considerably larger opinion of himself; Van Gogh was unknown and felt himself to be unworthy, an apprentice in everything. The two men had been brought together by Van Gogh's elder brother Theo, who was Gauguin's dealer in Paris and Vincent's sole source of money. The idea that they should live together had many advantages: Gauguin could keep an eye on the unstable Vincent on his brother's behalf, the two impecunious artists could share expenses, and together they would form a 'Studio of the South', a quasi-monastic artistic community. The Yellow House, enthused Vincent, would be 'an artists' house, but not affected, on the contrary, nothing affected'.

This was all very well, except that their personalities were contrasting rather than complementary. The story of their relationship and the tragic disintegration of their high hopes is the subject of Martin Gayford's wonderfully perceptive book.

The Yellow House, full of irregular angles, cluttered with paintings and right on the street was barely big enough for the oversized personalities of its inhabitants. The two painters existed in a fug of tobacco smoke, alcohol and paint, cooped up when the weather was bad, living, eating and working together in a room only 15 feet wide and 24 feet long. Apart from outings to the local brothels - what they termed 'hygienic excursions' - and occasional visits from friends the pair were rarely apart. There was always going to be trouble. Gauguin felt it too: 'Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling inwardly, some sort of struggle was preparing.'

Neither man was an easy housemate but Van Gogh was particularly difficult. He would work frenetically, talk interminably and drink excessively: 'If the storm within gets too loud,' he noted, 'I take a glass too much to stun myself.' Gauguin himself often felt stunned by this intense existence, his nerves 'strained to the point of stifling all human warmth'. For a short while their hope that they might feed off one another artistically seemed to be coming to fruition. They painted everything that was at hand - scenes in Arles, the house, the furnishings, the square outside, each other. While Van Gogh admired almost everything Gauguin produced, the older man was more sparing with his praise, commenting tartly that Van Gogh did indeed 'have an eye for blobs of impasto'.

Martin Gayford deftly charts how the differences in temperament quickly became divisive, and his narrative shifts subtly from art history to psychological thriller. While Gauguin was stuck in the South his paintings were beginning to sell in Paris and his name to attract critical attention. He found himself feeling far from the action, marooned with a man whose mental unravelling was becoming more pronounced by the day. Gauguin's increasing fretfulness transmitted itself to Van Gogh and only heightened the other man's anxieties.

In December alone Van Gogh had painted 25 pictures, he was exhausted, often drunk, becoming increasingly unhinged and fearful that Gauguin was going to abandon him, as indeed he was. Years earlier, back in Holland, Van Gogh had asked: 'Is being alone really living?' He had come to the conclusion that it wasn't and the prospect terrified him.

The crisis came on December 23 when, of course, Van Gogh sliced off part of his left ear. He wrapped the grisly morsel in newspaper and delivered it to a whore called Rachel in a nearby brothel; on opening this unexpected gift the poor girl fainted, as well she might.

Martin Gayford's account of the whole episode is particularly poignant, and he lays out a convincing explanation of the complex reasons why the painter turned on himself: manic depression with an admixture of religious mania and personal guilt over leaving the reformed prostitute he had lived with back in Holland. It was more than enough to overcome his already fragile mental resources. Gauguin himself left Arles on Christmas Day and the two painters never saw each other again.

It is a sad, sad story but, as this revealing and touching book reminds one, the path to this tragedy was documented in a series of paintings that have become among the best known in Western art.

NEIL YOUNG

Click here to watch a funny/articulate interview with Neil.

BOSTON EXCERPTS
 
 
 
  

MISCELLANY

Phillip Roth is one of my favourite authors. He has written a new book.

The movie nobody wants to see.

Bruce Springsteen and writer's block. But Pitchfork likes his new record a lot: On paper, The Seeger Sessions seems like a terrible idea: traditional American folksongs paid hyper-reverent homage by one of rock n'roll's most earnest performers, an attempt to transform campfire songs into sermons and anoint sweet, old, cord-cutting Pete Seeger high priest of Americana. Instead, this collection-- consisting of songs Seeger has sung, but none he's written-- is a boisterous, spirit-raising throwdown, conjured by a 12-man band (guitar, harmonica, tuba, violin, B3 organ, upright bass, banjo, piano, drums, accordion, trombone, saxophone, trumpet, and more) and a pack of grinning backup singers. Perhaps ironically, Bruce Springsteen-- one of America's most-adored songsmiths-- is soaring high on a record full of tracks other people wrote.

TAKING ON BUSH
The Economist

Sniff the air in Washington, DC, this spring and you notice the smell of decay. The Republicans have been America's dominant party, winning seven of the past ten presidential elections and controlling both houses of Congress since 1994 (except for a brief interlude in 2001-02 when one of their senators defected). And their institutional power has been as nothing compared with their ideological clout. Wherever you look—from welfare reform to foreign policy—the conservative half of America has made all the running.

Yet this machine is stalling. The White House is doing its best to engage in some emergency repairs. The past few weeks have seen the appointment of a powerful new chief of staff, Josh Bolten, and a new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Rob Portman. Karl Rove, George Bush's chief political adviser, is also giving up his policymaking role to concentrate on preparing for this November's elections. But the party's problems go too deep for personnel changes to solve.

Mr Bush is the most unpopular Republican president since Richard Nixon: a recent Washington Post-ABC poll showed that 47% of voters “strongly” disapprove of his performance. Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader who did more than anybody else to build the conservative machine in Congress, is retiring in disgrace, the better to focus on his numerous legal problems. More Republicans may well be implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal in the coming months.

The ideological shine has gone, too. The party of streamlined government has been gorging on legislative pork. A party that once prided itself on businesslike pragmatism has become synonymous with ideologically skewed ineptitude of the sort epitomised by Donald Rumsfeld (see article). “What is the difference between the Titanic and the Republican Party?” goes one joke in conservative circles. “At least the Titanic wasn't trying to hit the iceberg.”

This presents an opportunity for America's other big party. The Democrats hope to win this year's congressional elections in November and, on the back of those, to capture the White House in 2008. They need a net gain of 15 seats to take over the House and six seats to take over the Senate.

With two-thirds of Americans convinced that their country is heading in the wrong direction, this might appear to be easy. It isn't. First, various technical factors—from the power of incumbency to gerrymandering—will help the Republicans in November. More important, if the Republicans reek of decay, the Democrats ooze dysfunctionality: divided, beholden to interest-groups and without a coherent policy on anything that matters to America and the world (see article).

It is never easy for America's out-of-government party. There is no leader of the opposition, and the cleverer presidential candidates may want to keep their powder dry till 2008. But it is not impossible to produce coherent ideas. In 1990 “New Democrats” began to gather round Al Gore and Bill Clinton; in 1994 Newt Gingrich rallied Republicans around his “Contract with America”. Nowadays “the alternative to Bush” is a muddle of vacuous populism and meaningless slogans (who is not for “real security”, whatever that is?). Worst of all, the Democrats are marching backwards.

Take the party's economic policies. Mr Clinton stood for free trade and (after some retraining) a balanced budget. In 1993, 102 House Democrats, less than half the total, voted for the North American Free-Trade Agreement. Last year, only 15 Democrats defied the unions to vote for a smaller trade bill, the Central American Free-Trade Agreement. In the usually wiser Senate, only 11 out of 44 Democrats supported the bill, and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton were not among them. As for the budget, the Democrats' main criticism of Mr Bush's splurge is that he has not spent enough.

This, sadly, is symptomatic. Some Democrats are trying to unpick Mr Clinton's welfare reforms. Despite the party's rhetoric about protecting the poor, it has blocked most serious attempts to improve the schools poor children are condemned to attend. As for national security, the party seems to be veering ever further to the Michael Mooreish left. Two years ago, Mr Kerry savaged Mr Bush over Iraq, but talked relatively responsibly about a gradual withdrawal. Now the call from many of the party's leaders is to bring the troops home now—and hang the consequences for the region.

Familiar vested interests are sometimes at work. The Democrats' relationship with the teachers' unions is just as crony-ridden as (and even more damaging to America's long-term interests than) the White House's ties to Big Oil. But there is also something new eating away at the Democratic brain: fury at Mr Bush. And though Bush-bashing may be understandable, it also looks increasingly counterproductive. The risk for the Democrats is that, although Mr Bush will retire to Crawford in 2009, he will have defined them as an anti-Bush party—isolationist because he was interventionist, anti-business because he was pro-business. Mr Rove would love that.

Incompetence v incoherence: the battle intensifiesMention this to party activists and you will get the same complaint that Mr Clinton mercifully ignored in the early 1990s: you are just trying to turn their party into “Republican lite”. In fact, there are plenty of areas where liberal America needs to stand up bravely for its beliefs: against the death penalty, in defence of civil liberties, sounding a warning on global warming. American voters respect principles and convictions; what they do not like is pandering to special interests and waffle.

The real danger facing the Democrats is that they become a permanent minority party—a coalition that enjoys support from the super-rich, a few minorities and the working poor, but is out of touch with the suburban middle class, not to mention America's broader interests. Such a party might sneak a victory this year, thanks to Mr Rumsfeld et al, but then get hammered by, say, John McCain in 2008.

Two years ago, this newspaper narrowly favoured Mr Kerry's incoherence over Mr Bush's incompetence (see article). Since then, Republican incompetence has exceeded even our worst fears. How depressing to report that Democratic incoherence has soared too. America deserves better.

I went to Boston this weekend. Pictures to follow soon:

COINCIDENCES

Mark Twain was born on the day of the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1835, and died on the day of its next appearance in 1910. He himself predicted this in 1909, when he said: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it."

Lincoln and J.F. Kennedy

Life

Both presidents had 7 letters in their last name.
Both were over 6' feet tall.
Both men studied law.
Both seemed to have lazy eye muscles, which would sometimes cause one to deviate.
Both suffered from genetic diseases. It is suspected that Lincoln had Marfan's disease, and Kennedy suffered from Addison's disease.
Both served in the military. Lincoln was a scout captain in the Black Hawk War, and Kennedy served as a navy lieutenant in World War II.
Both were boat captains. Lincoln was a skipper for the Talisman, a Mississippi River boat, and Kennedy was skipper of the PT 109.
Both had no fear of their mortality and disdained bodyguards.
Both often stated how easy it would be to shoot the president. Lincoln supposedly said, "If somebody wants to take my life, there is nothing I can do to prevent it." Kennedy supposedly said "If somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it." Note that both these quotes are each 16 words long.

Death

Both presidents were shot in the head, on a Friday.
Both were seated beside their wives when shot. Neither Mrs. Lincoln nor Mrs. Kennedy was injured. Both wives held the bullet-torn heads of their husbands.
In each case, the man was injured but not fatally. Major Henry Rathbone was slashed by a knife, and Governor John Connolly was shot.
Lincoln sat in Box 7 at Ford's Theatre. Kennedy rode in car 7 in the Dallas motorcade.
Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre. Kennedy was shot in a Ford product, a Lincoln limousine.
Mrs. Kennedy insisted that her husband's funeral mirror Lincoln's as closely as possible.

The Assassins
Both assassins used three names: John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. (It should be noted that Lee Harvey Oswald was known as just Lee Oswald prior to the assassination.)
There are 15 letters in each assassin's name.
Both assassins struck when in their mid-twenties. Booth was born in 1838, and Oswald was born in 1939.
Each assassin lacked a strong father figure in his life. Booth's father died when he was 13 years old, and Oswald's father died before he was born.
Each assassin had two brothers whose careers he coveted. Booth's two brothers were more successful actors and Oswald envied his brothers' military lives.
Both assassins were privates in the military. Booth was a private in the Virginia Militia, and Oswald was a private in the Marine Corps.
Both assassins were born in the south.
Both assassins were known sympathizers to enemies of the United States. Booth supported the Confederacy and Oswald was a Marxist.
Both assassins often used aliases. Booth frequently used "J. Wilkes" and Oswald used the name "Alek J. Hidell."
Booth shot Lincoln at a theatre and was cornered in a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and was cornered in a theatre.
Each assassin was detained by an officer named Baker. Lt. Luther B. Baker was leader of the cavalry patrol which trapped Booth at Garrett's Barn. Officer Marion L. Baker, a Dallas motorcycle patrolman, briefly detained Oswald on the second floor of the School Book Depository until he learned that he worked there.
Both assassins were killed with a single shot from a Colt revolver.
Both assassins were shot in a blaze of light-Booth after the barn was set afire, and Oswald in the form of television cameras.

Family and Friends
Both presidents were named after their grandfathers.
Both were born second children.
Both married while in their thirties. Lincoln married at 33 and Kennedy married at 36.
Both married dark-haired, twenty-four-year-old women.
Both wives died around the age of 64. Mary Todd Lincoln died in 1882 at age 63 years and 215 days, and Jackie Kennedy died in 1994 at age 64 years 295 days.
Both wives were known for their high fashion in clothes.
Both wives renovated the White House after many years of neglect.
Each couple had four children, two of whom died before becoming a teen.
Each couple lost a son while in the White House. Willie Lincoln died at age 12 in 1862, and Kennedy's son Patrick died two days after his birth in 1963.

Politics
Both presidents were elected to the House of Representatives in '46.
Both were runners-up for the party's nomination for vice-president in '56.
Both were elected to the presidency in '60.

Vice-Presidents
Southern Democrats named Johnson succeeded both Lincoln and Kennedy (Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Andrew Johnson was born in 1808, and Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908.
There are six letters in each Johnson's first name.
Both Johnsons served in the military. Andrew was a brigadier general in the Civil War and Lyndon was a commander in the U.S. Navy during WW2.
Both Johnsons were former southern senators.
Both Johnsons had urethral stones, the only presidents to have them.
Both Johnsons chose not to run for reelection in '68.

NEIL YOUNG

Neil Young has surprised his fans and his record label with a new project: a protest album that includes a song titled Let's Impeach the President. "We didn't know he was making a record," Bill Bentley, a spokesperson for Young's label Reprise Records, told Reuters.

Executives at Reprise and parent company Warner Music Group will get to hear the album – entitled Living With War – on Tuesday, the Canadian music icon's longtime manager Elliot Roberts said. Young, 60, announced the new work on his website Monday.

"I just finished a new record. A power trio with trumpet and 100 voices," Young says via a ticker on the site.

The album, which Young recorded over three days earlier this month, features 10 tracks.

"I think it is a metal version of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. Metal folk protest?" he comments on the site.

The website also features some lyrics from the title track, with more lyrics to be released later.

Living With War comes less than a year after the release of Young's Prairie Wind – songs from which were also featured in the recent Jonathan Demme concert film Neil Young: Heart of Gold.

The new protest album, which includes an anti-Iraq war track, stands in contrast to the stance Young took following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. After recording the song Let's Roll as a tribute to the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, Young publicly supported the Patriot Act, the U.S. legislation that gives authorities much broader powers to combat terrorism.

OTHER

At “Saturday Night Live,” when two writers come up with the same sketch idea—Hey, we should do Dick Cheney shooting his buddy in the face!—the sketches are said to be “bumping” to get on the air: usually, only one succeeds. Now two promising TV pilots loosely inspired by the backstage goings on at “S.N.L.” are themselves bumping to get on NBC’s fall schedule.

Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing,” has written “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” starring Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford as a creative team that’s called in to rescue the network’s signature live sketch-comedy show. Tina Fey, the “S.N.L.” star, has written a show called—for now—“The Untitled Tina Fey Project,” starring Tina Fey, of all people, as the head writer at the network’s live variety show. Her pilot features Alec Baldwin as the network’s meddlesome new “V.P. of development for NBC/GE/Universal/Kmart.”

Fey’s comedy is set in New York at a fictional NBC, and Sorkin’s drama is set in Los Angeles at a slightly more fictional NBS, but both feature network heavies named Jack. Kevin Reilly, the real-life president of NBC Entertainment (which is a division of General Electric and a sister company of Universal but is not, as of this writing, affiliated with Kmart), explains, “Jack was G.E.’s pre-approved network executive name.” More seriously, he says that when both scripts arrived on his desk, last fall, “I saw the problem coming from a mile away. But these are very particular artists, who write what they care about. They’re not writers for hire who say, ‘Whattya got—a boy and his dog? I’ll write that!’ ” Reilly is at pains to note that neither show is based on actual NBC dynamics and that each is tonally distinct: “Tina is more madcap, and Aaron is exploring issues and character dynamics and has a real romance at the center.” Sorkin’s pilot begins with Wes, the executive producer of NBS’s show, reacting to a censor’s decision to kill a sketch called “Crazy Christians” by addressing the camera and urging viewers to turn off their sets:

WES
We’re eating worms for money. . . . Guys are getting killed in a war that’s got theme music and a logo. That remote in your hand is a crack pipe [that profits] this prissy, feckless, off-the-charts greed-filled whorehouse of a network you’re watching.


“That part,” Reilly acknowledges, “is based on us.”

Lorne Michaels, the longtime executive producer of “S.N.L.,” is also an executive producer of Fey’s pilot. When Sorkin asked Michaels to permit him to observe “S.N.L.” for a week, Michaels, protecting his turf, declined. “I haven’t read Sorkin’s script,” he says, “but God knows I’ve been told about it. Since we do sketches about Christians all the time, I guess he’s going for a bigger set of issues, his characteristic subject being power and its responsibilities. But is this a new insight, that networks are not to be trusted?” Michaels goes on, “The reality is that the network isn’t that powerful anymore—talent is.”

Fey’s pilot takes a swipe at talent in a scene in which Liz, the head writer, meets with Tracy, an unhinged movie star whom her new boss wants as a regular on the show. Tracy takes her for a ride in his red Hummer:

LIZ
This is a great car. What does it run on? Jet fuel?
TRACY
It runs on fame juice.
LIZ
Wonderful.


Alec Baldwin, who has hosted “S.N.L.” twelve times, says, “I’d be stunned if NBC picked up both shows. And ours has the tougher task, as a comedy, because if it’s not funny, that’s it. Whereas a drama can start off as a hard-hitting medical show about real issues, and before you count to three it’s about who’s fucking who.” Tina Fey, taking a somewhat higher road, says, “It’s just bad luck for me that in my first attempt at prime time I’m going up against the most powerful writer on television. I was joking that this would be the best pilot ever aired on Trio”—a cable channel, owned by NBC Universal, that ran failed shows. “And then Trio got cancelled.”

Sorkin, taking an even higher road, one dictated by his studio, Warner Bros. Television, a unit of Time Warner (which is also not, as of this writing, connected with Kmart), was unavailable for comment. But Kevin Reilly says that NBC might well have room for both shows, particularly if Fey’s ends up as a midseason replacement. “The only way we could screw it up,” he says, “is if the audience gets confused.”

Networks being what they are, Fey suspects that confusion is inevitable: “We’ll probably end up doing a terrible crossover, where the Matthew Perry character on the drama rapes my character on the comedy—and then the ‘Law & Order’ team solves the crime.”

THE ENVIRONMENT

The imminence of catastrophic global warming may be a subject far from the ever-drifting mind of President Bush—whose eschatological preoccupations privilege Armageddon over the Flood—but it is of growing concern to the rest of humanity. Climate change is even having its mass-entertainment moment. “Ice Age: The Meltdown”—featuring Ellie the computer-animated mammoth and the bottomless voice of Queen Latifah—has taken in more than a hundred million dollars at the box office in two weeks. On the same theme, but with distinctly less animation, “An Inconvenient Truth,” starring Al Gore (playing the role of Al Gore, itinerant lecturer), is coming to a theatre near you around Memorial Day. Log on to Fandango. Reserve some seats. Bring the family. It shouldn’t be missed. No kidding.

“An Inconvenient Truth” is not likely to displace the boffo numbers of “Ice Age” in Variety’s weekly grosses. It is, to be perfectly honest (and there is no way of getting around this), a documentary film about a possibly retired politician giving a slide show about the dangers of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels. It has a few lapses of mise en scène. Sometimes we see Gore gravely talking on his cell phone—or gravely staring out an airplane window, or gravely tapping away on his laptop in a lonely hotel room—for a little longer than is absolutely necessary. And yet, as a means of education, “An Inconvenient Truth” is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. “An Inconvenient Truth” is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important.

The catch, of course, is that the audience-of-one that most urgently needs to see the film and take it to heart—namely, the man who beat Gore in the courts six years ago—does not much believe in science or, for that matter, in any information that disturbs his prejudices, his fantasies, or his sleep. Inconvenient truths are precisely what this White House is structured to avoid and deny.

In the 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush mocked Gore as “ozone man” and claimed, “This guy is so far out in the environmental extreme we’ll be up to our necks in owls and outta work for every American.” In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush cracked that Gore “likes electric cars. He just doesn’t like making electricity.” The younger Bush, a classic schoolyard bully with a contempt for intellect, demanded that Gore “explain what he meant by some of the things” in his 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance”—and then unashamedly admitted that he had never read it. A book that the President did eventually read and endorse is a pulp science-fiction novel: “State of Fear,” by Michael Crichton. Bush was so excited by the story, which pictures global warming as a hoax perpetrated by power-mad environmentalists, that he invited the author to the Oval Office. In “Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush,” Fred Barnes, the Fox News commentator, reveals that the President and Crichton “talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.” The visit, Barnes adds, “was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more.”

As President, Bush has made fantasy a guide to policy. He has scorned the Kyoto agreement on global warming (a pact that Gore helped broker as Vice-President); he has neutered the Environmental Protection Agency; he has failed to act decisively on America’s fuel-efficiency standards even as the European Union, Japan, and China have tightened theirs. He has filled his Administration with people like Philip A. Cooney, who, in 2001, left the American Petroleum Institute, the umbrella lobby for the oil industry, to become chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he repeatedly edited government documents so as to question the link between fuel emissions and climate change. In 2005, when Cooney left the White House (this time for a job with ExxonMobil), Dana Perino, a White House spokesperson, told the Times, “Phil Cooney did a great job.” A heckuva job, one might say.

Last week, Gore dropped by a Broadway screening room to introduce a preview of “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dressed in casual but non-earth-tone clothes, he gave a brief, friendly greeting. If you are inclined to think that the unjustly awarded election of 2000 led to one of the worst Presidencies of this or any other era, it is not easy to look at Al Gore. He is the living reminder of all that might not have happened in the past six years (and of what might still happen in the coming two). Contrary to Ralph Nader’s credo that there was no real difference between the major parties, it is close to inconceivable that the country and the world would not be in far better shape had Gore been allowed to assume the office that a plurality of voters wished him to have. One can imagine him as an intelligent and decent President, capable of making serious decisions and explaining them in the language of a confident adult. Imagining that alternative history is hard to bear, which is why Gore always has the courtesy, in his many speeches, and at the start of “An Inconvenient Truth,” to deflect that discomfort with a joke: “Hello, I’m Al Gore and I used to be the next President of the United States.”

Those inclined to be irritated by Gore all over again will not be entirely disappointed by “An Inconvenient Truth.” It can be argued that at times the film becomes “Death of a Salesman,” with Gore as global warming’s Willy Loman, wheeling his bag down one more airport walkway. There are some awkward jokes, a silly cartoon, a few self-regarding sequences, and, now and then, echoes of the cringe-making moments in his old campaign speeches when personal tragedy was put to questionable use. (To illustrate the need to change one’s mind when hard reality intrudes, he recalls helping his father farm tobacco as a youth and then his sister’s death from lung cancer.) But in the context of the larger political moment, the current darkness, Gore can be forgiven his miscues and vanities. It is past time to recognize that, over a long career, his policy judgment and his moral judgment alike have been admirable and acute. Gore has been right about global warming since holding the first congressional hearing on the topic, twenty-six years ago. He was right about the role of the Internet, right about the need to reform welfare and cut the federal deficit, right about confronting Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo. Since September 11th, he has been right about constitutional abuse, right about warrantless domestic spying, and right about the calamity of sanctioned torture. And in the case of Iraq, both before the invasion and after, he was right—courageously right—to distrust as fatally flawed the political and moral good faith, operational competence, and strategic wisdom of the Bush Administration.

In the 2000 campaign, Gore was cautious, self-censoring, and in the thrall of his political consultants. He was even cautious about his passion, the environment. That caution, some of his critics think, may have cost him Florida, where he was reluctant to speak out on the construction of an ecologically disastrous airport in the middle of the Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. But since the election––especially since emerging from an understandable period of reticence and rebalancing—Gore has played a noble role in public life. It’s hardly to Gore’s discredit that many conservative commentators have watched his emotionally charged speeches and pronounced him unhinged. (“It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again,” the columnist and former psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer wrote after one such oration.)

It may be that Gore really has lost his taste for electoral politics, and that, no matter what turn the polls and events take, an Al-versus-Hillary psychodrama in 2008 is not going to happen. There is no substitute for Presidential power, but Gore is now playing a unique role in public life. He is a symbol of what might have been, who insists that we focus on what likely will be an uninhabitable planet if we fail to pay attention to the folly we are committing, and take the steps necessary to end it.

PORTRAIT OF A BEDROOM IN THE QUEEN'S GHETTO CIRCA APRIL 2006
 
 
 
  

HEALTHCARE IN THE UNITED STATES

CONSUMPTION
Issue of 2006-04-17
Posted 2006-04-10


Perhaps you have been wondering who or what is to blame for the high cost of medical care in this land of ours—and, more broadly, for the ungainly, unjust mess that is the American health-care system. If so, wonder no more. Your government has fingered the culprit: it’s “the vast majority of Americans.”

The perp having been collared, the trial held, and the verdict rendered, only the sentencing phase remains. Providentially, our leaders have come up with a punishment that fits the crime. We, the guilty, are to be condemned—or invited, but in any case for the rest of our natural lives, without possibility of parole—to turn over our bodily well-being to “consumer-directed Health Savings Accounts” in conjunction with “high-deductible health policies.”

This judgment was handed down last Monday, in the form of an article on the Op-Ed page of the Times. The piece was no Dowdy jestfest or Friedmanesque memo-to-the-mullahs, and not only because of the dreariness of its style and the banality of its content. Its author, Allan B. Hubbard, identified as “assistant to the president for economic policy and director of the National Economic Council,” has lately emerged as the White House point man on health policy, and, in subsequent days, his Op-Ed proved to have been the overture to a veritable symphony of spin conducted by President Bush himself, including an Air Force One ride to Bridgeport, Connecticut, for a stagy “Panel on Health Savings Accounts.”

Hubbard’s article, headlined “The Health of a Nation,” begins with a frank-sounding acknowledgment that “in the past five years”—that is, since the present Administration took office—“private health insurance premiums have risen 73 percent,” with the result that “some businesses” have dropped coverage altogether. “What is driving this unsustainable run-up in health insurance costs,” Hubbard asks, “and how can we make things better?” Then comes what bloggers call the money quote:

Health care is expensive because the vast majority of Americans consume it as if it were free. Health insurance policies with low deductibles insulate people from the cost of the medical care they use—so much so that they often do not even ask for prices.


Can this really be the Administration’s view of the health-care crisis? That its root cause is that Americans are (a) malingerers and (b) freeloaders who perversely refuse to go comparison shopping when illness strikes? That we’re overinsured? Hard as it is to believe that this is what they say, it’s even harder to believe that this is what they believe.

Health care is indeed expensive, but not because people are too quick to call the doctor when they experience a scary symptom or merely an annoying one, and not because some of them may bridle at entrusting their health to the lowest bidder. Throughout the Western world, health care is expensive, first of all, because it is expensive, and is bound to get more so as populations age and medical technology advances. Indeed, it should get more expensive, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of national income, because what it aims to provide—healing, the relief of suffering, the staving off of death—is of such inestimable value.

American health care is the most expensive on earth, but this, too, has little to do with overindulgence in seeking medical attention. (Overindulgence in cheeseburgers is another matter.) It has a lot to do with the waste built into what Paul Krugman calls our crazy-quilt health-care system, which has a lot to do with the fact that so much of that system is private rather than public, which in turn has a lot to do with two other factors. One is historical: during the Second World War, industry (with prodding from organized labor) got around wage controls by offering workers health benefits in place of cash, thus saddling the United States with “employer-based” private health insurance—a system now in slow-motion collapse under the competitive pressures of globalization. The other is institutional: even though there has long been popular support here for universal, government-run health care, as there is in Europe and Canada, America’s fragmented political system—riddled with weak points where well-organized, well-financed minorities can thwart the unfocussed will of a majority—has been able to deliver only for seniors and, less generously, for the poor.

Medicare—a mixed system, under which the insurance function is socialized while the care itself remains in private hands—dedicates two per cent of its resources to administration. By contrast, the private health-insurance industry spends a fortune—more than ten per cent of its income—on administrative dreadnoughts devoted largely to vetoing treatments, sloughing off sick or potentially sick clients, and scheming to stick someone else with the bill. In the United States, we spend fifteen per cent of our gross domestic product on health care, close to six thousand dollars per person. The French and the Canadians spend ten per cent of G.D.P., about three thousand dollars per head. Yet their “health outcomes,” measured by indices like longevity, are better than ours. If they spent the kind of money we do, they’d live forever.

Hubbard—who, by the way, is a finalist to be Bush’s next Secretary of the Treasury—is an initiate of the cult of the market, which he evidently regards as the fundamental model for all human relations. For him, sick people who require care are “consumers.” That word and its derivatives appear ten times in the eight hundred and fifty words of his Times piece. (“Patient” appears once. “Sick,” “ill,” and “under the weather” do not appear at all.) Accordingly, the solution that he and Bush are pushing—so-called health savings accounts—puts the onus on “consumers” to fend for themselves in the medical “marketplace.” It’s probably unnecessary to add that this solution would solve nothing. It would be yet another gift to people in the higher tax brackets, would undermine traditional insurance by pulling young and healthy people out of risk pools, and, with a fine evenhandedness, would discourage people from going to the doctor for real and imaginary illnesses alike. This is a worthy follow-up to the Administration’s prescription-drug program for seniors, another excrescence of market cultism. The elderly had hoped for a straightforward benefit that would have allowed them to acquire, at some affordable price, the medicines their doctors prescribed. What they got was a parody of “choice,” sadistic in its complexity, which forces them or their children or caretakers to game out which of dozens of private “plans” might give them access both to the medicines they need now and the ones they might unpredictably need in the future. The solicitude their government might have bestowed on them was reserved instead for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The Administration’s message to the old and sick is the same as its message to the country after the September 11th attacks: Go shopping. Well, caveat emptor. (New Yorker)

Baby Boomers Stay Active, and So Do Their Doctors

A Debt to Castro

VIDEO MADNESS

1986 World Series Game Six Re-enacted in RBI Baseball


Hybrids





Ten decisions shape your life
You'll beware of five about
Seven ways to go through school
Either your noticed or left out
Seven ways to get ahead
Seven reasons to drop out
And I said I can see me in your eyes
You said I can see you in my path
That’s not just friendship that’s romance too
You like music we can dance to
There is a time when we all fail
Some people take it pretty well
Some take it all out on themselves
Some they just take it out on friends
Oh everybody plays the game
And if you don't you're called insane
Don't don't don't don't its not safe no more
I got to see you one more time
Since you were born in 1984
Sit me down Shut me up I'll calm down And I get along with you
Everybody was well dressed
And everybody was a mess
Six things without failure you must do
So that your woman loves just you
Oh all the girls played mental games
And all the guys were dressed the same
Why not try it all
If you only remember it once
Sit me down Shut me up I'll calm down And I get along with you

DEAR CHICAGO

Spent the weekend in Chicago, Illinois:
 
 
 
  

 
 
 
  

More Chicago photographs (April 7-9):

 
 
 
  

Staying here..

Good article on oysters in the New Yorker this week.

The new Zero 7 record is good for sipping lattes to on the weekend -- if that's your thing.

A video from the Flaming Lips show... so good live.

 

The Flaming Lips, Toronto, April 4 2006

Two scientists were racing
For the good of all mankind
Both of them side by side
So Determined
Locked in heated battle
For the cure that is their prize
But it's so dangerous
But they're determined

Theirs is to win
If it kills them
They're just humans
With wives and children

Upwards to the vanguard
Where the pressure is too high
Under the microscope
Hope against hope

Forging for the future
But to sarcrifice their lives
Both of them side by side
So determined

Theirs is to win
If it kills them
They're just humans
With wives and children

Theirs is to win
It will kill them
They're just humans
With wives and children 

Going to Chicago this weekend...

MUSIC

Zero 7 [ft. José González]: "Futures"Zero 7 might be a compound lighter than Air, but their earnestness-- contrasted to the (French band)'s high-tech Bacharach riffs-- should at least partially absolve their MOR excursions. The sun-kissed wooziness of their new album, The Garden, is a guileless species of retro. The first single, "Futures", approximates, in one friend's words, the sound of James Taylor and CSNY tripping together. A breezy midsummer languor drenches everything: the watertight drum groove, Henry's backup vocals, the pancaked synths, and picnic strumming. And yes, it's the toothless, melismatic cod-soul that you and your colleagues can enjoy an al fresco latte to, but it never claimed otherwise.

Ron Sexsmith - All in good Time

The Flaming Lips comment on "The Sound of Failure":
We have a friend whose father was dying of cancer - I say "was" because it (the cancer and his death) dragged on agonizingly for over a year - and they (our friends) were becoming, understandably, weary of being forced to be upbeat... And I remember hearing a comment once about how annoying it was, to them, to have to hear this gratingly jubilant fake enthusiasm (usually hokey hyped-up pop groups like Black Eyed Peas, Destiny's Child, Ashlee Simpson, Hillary Duff, etc.) blasting out of the "Muzak" systems virtually everywhere they went. To them this cheerleader-type assault was really only effective if you didn't actually have any real psychic stress... And they felt that it was, surprisingly, helpful to them to try to understand their fears and their sadness - as opposed to pretending that it's "all good." And, you see, this is true insight... finally we know it's okay to have a troubled mind, it's okay to fail... And so this song (which was written in the car on the way up to New York from Oklahoma while I drove and Steven played battery powered keyboard and computer) is about a young girl whose best friend has died, and everywhere she goes (like the friends I mentioned earlier) she must endure the empty optimism of the inexperienced. She wants to know, since it has arrived, what is despair, what is hope, what is failure... And what is in the darkness??

The line in the song, "so go tell Britney and go tell Gwen" is obviously a reference back to my friends and their Muzak incident... meaning, "Yeah, go tell Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani that their energy and their Prom Queen smiles only go to prove that they don't empathize with my sadness." I believe, in the song, that Britney and Gwen could be thought of as this grieving girl's less mature friends... and that she's not trying to go against them, she just doesn't want to pretend that she understands what she doesn't really understand - what death is... what despair is... what existential fear is... She doesn't know, but she's starting to find out...

EXPLAINED
Slate

Do big hailstones ever kill people?
At least 27 people died as tornadoes and hailstorms struck the Midwest and the South on Sunday. So far it seems like the strong winds—and not the "softball-sized" balls of falling ice—have done most of the damage. A tree fell on one person, another died when his mobile home rolled over, and a baby was blown down the street. Do giant hailstones ever kill anyone?

Yes, but it's very rare. Hailstorms have caused only a handful of deaths in the United States over the last 100 years or so; most of those killed were children. We have reports of one child dying from a hailstone strike in 1893 and another in 1928. A Texas farmer perished on account of hail in 1930, and babies had their skulls broken by balls of ice in 1979 and 1981. Adults do get hit, but they're less likely to perish from their injuries. "I got hit so hard I thought I was going to pass out," one Fort Worth, Texas, victim of "softball-sized" hail told the Associated Press in 1995. "I started running and got hit in the head. Blood was everywhere," said another.Hailstone deaths in other countries are somewhat more common. A few years ago, the Chinese government reported that at least seven people in Zhengzhou died in a storm of "egg-sized" hail. Dozens more ended up in the hospital. In Bangladesh, a giant storm of "grapefruit-sized" hail killed almost a hundred people in 1986. Some of the stones weighed more than 2 pounds.

Americans may be less likely to get killed by hail because we spend so much time indoors. (Weather patterns in North America may also make hailstorms less severe.) Animals that don't have this luxury tend to die in greater numbers. Individual hailstorms have killed dozens of horses and hundreds of chickens at a time in the United States. An 1888 storm in India is said to have wiped out more than 1,600 animals.

Three factors contribute to making a hailstorm especially dangerous: the size of the stones, the frequency with which they fall, and the wind speed. The killer hailstorm in Zhengzhou didn't have very big stones, but fierce winds pushed them earthward at very high speeds. More frequent hail increases your likelihood of getting hit in the head or another vulnerable spot. (Size and frequency trade off as a general rule: The bigger the hailstones, the fewer of them there are.) Hailstones do come in different shapes, but there's little evidence that a spiky ball of ice does any more damage than a round sphere. Stones can also come in elongated forms, in cross-shapes, or with rings around the middle.

How big is a softball-sized hailstone? About 4.5 inches in diameter. Climatologists don't like using balls and fruits to describe hailstones, since not everyone knows exactly how big a softball or grapefruit is supposed to be. (They prefer to use coins—dime-sized, nickel-sized, quarter-sized, and half-dollar-sized—as a point of reference.) Government weather services do have some guidelines: Grapefruit-sized hail is 4 inches in diameter, baseball-sized hail is 2.75 inches, golf-ball-sized hail is 1.75 inches, ping-pong-ball-sized hail is 1.5 inches, and pea-sized hail is less than half an inch in diameter.

MUZAK

THE SOUNDTRACK OF YOUR LIFE: Muzak in the realm of retail theatre.
by DAVID OWEN, The New Yorker

If you blindfolded Dana McKelvey and led her into a retail store, a restaurant, a doctor’s office, or a bank, she could tell fairly quickly whether the music playing in the background was Muzak. You may think that you would be able to tell, too, but unless your job is creating Muzak programs, as McKelvey’s is, you probably wouldn’t. The syrupy orchestral “elevator music” that most people associate with the company scarcely exists anymore. Muzak sells about a hundred prepackaged programs and several hundred customized ones, and only one—“Environmental”—truly fits the stereotype. It consists of “contemporary instrumental versions of popular songs,” and it is no longer terribly popular anywhere, except in Japan. (“The Japanese think they love it, but they actually don’t,” a former Muzak executive told me. “They’ll get over it soon.”) All of Muzak’s other programs are drawn from the company’s huge digital inventory, called the Well, which contains more than 1.5 million commercially recorded songs, representing dozens of genres and subgenres—acid jazz, heavy metal, shag, neo-soul, contemporary Italian—and is growing at the rate of twenty thousand songs a month. (Some record labels now upload new releases directly to the company, which, like a radio station, pays licensing fees for the songs it uses.) The Well includes seven hundred and seventy-five tracks recorded by the Beatles, a hundred and thirty by Kanye West, three hundred and twenty-four by Led Zeppelin, eighty-four by Gwen Stefani, a hundred and ninety-one by 50 Cent, and nine hundred and eighty-three by Miles Davis. It also includes many covers—among them, versions of the Rolling Stones’ song “Paint It Black” by U2, Ottmar Liebert, and a late-sixties French rock band with a female vocalist (who sang it in French) and approximately five hundred versions of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday,” which, according to Guinness World Records, is the most frequently covered song in the world.

“There are so many songs out there that if I listened to just one I’d never know whether it was Muzak or not,” McKelvey, who is twenty-six years old, and has the kind of soft, persuasive voice that would sound good on late-night radio, told me. “But I could tell if I listened to the flow of a few. The key is consistency. How did those songs connect? What story did they tell? Why is this song after that song, and why is that one after that one? When we make a program, we pay a lot of attention to the way songs segue. It’s not like songs on the radio, or songs on a CD. Take Armani Exchange. Shoppers there are looking for clothes that are hip and chic and cool. They’re twenty-five to thirty-five years old, and they want something to wear to a party or a club, and as they shop they want to feel like they’re already there. So you make the store sound like the coolest bar in town. You think about that when you pick the songs, and you pay special attention to the sequencing, and then you cross-fade and beat-match and never break the momentum, because you want the program to sound like a d.j.’s mix.” She went on, “For Ann Taylor, you do something completely different. The Ann Taylor woman is conservative, not edgy, and she really couldn’t care less about segues. She wants everything bright and positive and optimistic and uplifting, so you avoid offensive themes and lyrics, and you think about Sting and Celine Dion, and you leave a tiny space between the songs or gradually fade out and fade in.”

Muzak’s corporate headquarters are in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Naturally, there’s an awesome sound system, which extends into the parking lot but not (for deeply felt symbolic reasons) into the elevator. McKelvey works in a section of the building called the Circle, a curved arrangement of cubicle-size offices, which are the only Muzak work spaces that have doors. She has spent many hours behind hers, listening to hundreds of songs and thinking about how best to employ music to further the marketing ambitions of the hundred or so clients she manages at once. At the time I visited, she was working on a proposal for a prospective customer, a French-owned chocolatier in New York City. “They want the program to include music from everyplace in the world where cocoa grows,” McKelvey told me. “It’s a challenge, to say the least, but it’s fun.” Shortly before we talked, she had been listening to lounge and rhythmic music from Brazil and West Africa, and to a number of less exotic songs, including familiar jazz tunes that she felt conveyed a mood of chocolate-appropriate romance.

McKelvey, a creative manager at Muzak, is one of twenty-two “audio architects”—the company’s term for its program designers. All but two are in their twenties or thirties, and all have serious, eclectic, long-term relationships with music. (Eight of the architects work in the Circle, ten work in the Muzak office in Seattle, two work in New York, and two work from home, in Connecticut and in California.) McKelvey was born in 1980 in Charleston, South Carolina. Her parents weren’t musicians, but her mother liked to sing and her father worked as a d.j.; he now owns a night club in Charleston called Casablanca. McKelvey began playing the piano when she was two, could read notes on the treble clef before she could read words, and took up the violin when she was seven. Two years later, she joined the Charleston Youth Symphony, as a violinist, and performed through high school. At home, when she wasn’t practicing classical pieces, she listened mainly to eighties pop—Michael Jackson, DeBarge, the Jets—and to the music her parents loved, which was Motown and funk. “I never had a TV in my room,” she told me. “I always had a 45-player. My dad had an amazing record collection, and he still does, and it’s all first runs, not reissues. Whenever I’m in Charleston, I try to sneak records from him.” She says her current taste in music is too diverse to characterize.

People at Muzak sometimes speak of a song’s “topology,” the cultural and temporal associations that it carries with it, like a hidden refrain. When McKelvey works on a program for a client whose customers represent a range of ages—such as Old Navy, whose market extends from infants to adults—she has to accommodate more than one sensibility without offending any. The task is simplified somewhat by the fact that musical eras and genres are not always moored firmly in time. Elvis Presley (who is represented in the Well by fourteen hundred and five tracks) sounds dated to many people today, but teen-agers can listen to Beatles songs from just a few years later without necessarily thinking of them as oldies.

Spanning musical generations can pose technical challenges. If a track that was recorded last year is played immediately after one from the forties, fifties, or sixties, the difference in texture can be jarring. (Anyone who has downloaded music onto an iPod or other digital music player is familiar with the difficulty of maintaining consistency from song to song.) One of the techniques used at Muzak is dynamic range compression, which consists of turning down the loudest parts of a signal and then turning up the entire signal; it’s the reason that television commercials often seem louder than the programs they interrupt even though the commercials and the programs are technically limited to the same sound level. In addition, audio architects frequently use tracks as bridges between music from different eras—say, placing a Verve remix of a jazz standard between an Ella Fitzgerald classic and a recent release by Macy Gray. Tracks in the Well are catalogued not only by artist and title but also by producer, label, and date. Recordings from particular studios in particular eras often share a characteristic sound—like wines from particular vineyards and vintages—and some juxtapositions work better than others.

Covers can be useful when you have a range of ages, McKelvey told me. “You can play Vanessa Carlton and Counting Crows doing ‘Big Yellow Taxi,’ and it’s relevant to young people today because the message is still meaningful and they know who Vanessa Carlton and Counting Crows are, but it’s also relevant to their parents, who think, Wait a minute, I know this song—isn’t that what’s-her-name? They may not think of Joni Mitchell right away, but the song affects them because they listened to it when they were younger.”

McKelvey studied marketing at Winthrop University, near Charlotte, North Carolina, and went to work at Muzak not long after she graduated. She told me, “The first time I explained to my mom what I do for a living, she said, ‘They pay people to do that?’ Most people walk into a store and hear music, but they never think that somebody actually put thought into what they’re hearing. A song they like is playing, and they’re nodding along with it, or maybe they’re kind of dancing to it and maybe they don’t want anyone to see that they’re dancing. They don’t realize that the song was put there for a purpose, and that there’s a reason why they’re doing what they’re doing. But there is.”



The company that became Muzak was founded by George Owen Squier, a career Army officer, who was born in Dryden, Michigan, in 1865. Squier earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, in 1893, and he later devised a way to transmit battlefield radio messages clandestinely by using living trees as antennae. In the early nineteen-hundreds, he invented a system of “multiplex telephony and telegraphy by means of electric waves guided by wires”—transmitting multiple radio signals along the outside of electrical, telegraph, and telephone lines. Squier realized that his invention could be used to deliver music, news, and other programming directly to homes and businesses. In 1922 (after helping to establish a predecessor to the Air Force, and running the Army’s Signal Corps during the First World War), he sold a license to the North American Company, a public-utility conglomerate, which formed a new subsidiary, Wired Radio, to develop the idea. One of the first test markets was Staten Island. Wired Radio customers there were given a boxy receiver, which looked a little like a gramophone, and the programming fee was added to their monthly electric bill. In 1934, Wired Radio—following the example of Eastman’s brilliant coinage, Kodak—changed its name to Muzak. Squier died the same year, of pneumonia.

As the quality and quantity of wireless radio broadcasts increased, eliminating the residential market for wired radio, Squier’s company concentrated on selling background music to hotels, restaurants, and other businesses, many of them at first in New York City. (Muzak is probably called elevator music because soothing melodies were used in early skyscrapers to make people feel less nervous about stepping into a contrivance that looked like a death trap.) In the forties, Muzak introduced a trademarked concept, called Stimulus Progression, which held that most workers would be more productive if they were exposed to music of gradually increasing intensity, in fifteenminute cycles. The process was said to be subliminal: Muzak affected you the way hypnosis did, whether you wanted it to or not. Only sanitized instrumental arrangements were used, because the absence of lyrics made the music less likely to intrude upon conscious thought. It was sometimes said that if the songs in a Stimulus Progression program were played in reverse order a listener would helplessly fall asleep.

Stimulus Progression acquired a vast supporting apparatus of baffling in-house research studies and impenetrable charts and diagrams. It was pseudoscience, but it remained alive at the company until the late nineties, partly because it was a useful marketing tool and partly because it seemed so plausible: most people really were happier and more productive when there was something humming along in the background. Recorded music was “piped” into insurance offices, ocean liners, hotel lobbies, and department stores, and Muzak built a network of franchisees to spread its business further. Today, the company estimates that its daily audience is roughly a hundred million people, in more than a dozen countries, and that it supplies sixty per cent of the commercial background music in the United States. (Modern Muzak is delivered to customers by satellite, over broadband, and on high-capacity disks.)

Until the late nineteenth century, people usually had little access to music unless they made the music themselves, and even in the nineteen-twenties, when Wired Radio began, most people’s lives were still tuneless much of the time. Muzak’s early listeners didn’t have clock radios, car CD players, MTV, home entertainment centers, in-flight hip-hop programs, satellite radio, or iPods, and when their telephone rang it didn’t play the theme to “The Godfather.” Muzak, for many people, was the first manifestation of a phenomenon that is now so familiar we scarcely notice it: the shifting, and frequently inescapable, soundtrack of everyday life.



In 1968, Yesco, a small company in Seattle, began competing with Muzak by offering businesses a product that came to be called foreground music: a program of popular songs that hadn’t been transformed into symphonic mush. Foreground music violated all the central principles of Stimulus Progression.

Until the fifties, “Music by Muzak” and popular music had a great deal in common, and a number of the company’s songs were recorded by the same big bands that played the hits on the radio. By the time Yesco came along, though, Muzak and popular music had diverged, and generational differences in taste were unbridgeable. When I was in high school, my father brought home a Muzak-like record called “The Beatles Songbook, Vol. 4,” by the Hollyridge Strings. He meant the purchase as a gesture of conciliation, but from my point of view the album might as well have been called “Why We Are in Vietnam” (or, more to the point, “Why I Am Not Going to Clean Up My Room”). As popular music acquired its increasingly rich topology of cultural, political, and sexual associations, Muzak’s bowdlerized hits seemed more and more like an affront. People began to use the company’s name as a generic term for anything bland, soulless, and uninspired—so much so that today many don’t realize that the word has a non-pejorative application.

Muzak was slow to adapt. It didn’t introduce an original-artist program until 1984, and that program, called TONES, was actually produced by Yesco. In 1986, Marshall Field V, the Chicago department-store heir, bought the company, and the following year he took over Yesco and merged the two. Truly modernized Muzak didn’t arise for more than a decade, when the company, which by then had another new owner, underwent a transformation that employees still refer to gravely as “the rebranding.”

This big change was initially conceived by Alvin Collis, an unlikely agent of corporate revolution, who later became the company’s senior vice-president of strategy and brand. He is fifty-three, tall, and extremely thin, and he wears a nearly unvarying uniform: nice black T-shirt, unfaded jeans, high-top sneakers, coollooking wristwatch, designer glasses. Not long ago, we met in the courtyard of the Trump Tower, where he had just had a meeting with the marketing executives of a luxury clothier, which was considering hiring Muzak to create musical programs for its stores.

Collis, who recently left Muzak to become an independent consultant, is from Victoria, British Columbia. After graduating from high school, in 1970, he bummed around Canada and Europe for a couple of years, and eventually moved to Seattle without a green card. He thought of himself primarily as a post-punk musician, a performance artist, and a storyteller. In the eighties, he worked as a freelance sound engineer, and did jobs sporadically for Yesco, and then for Muzak after the two companies merged. Once, he and a group of other engineers were adding a musical soundtrack to a movie (a project unrelated to Muzak). They were working on a love scene, which they knew was supposed to make moviegoers cry. The first time the engineers watched the scene, though, they all laughed. “We were giggling like crazy, and I was thinking, This is going to be a problem, right?” Collis told me. The men spent the next three hours trying to find the right background song for the scene. “Finally, as one song was playing, I turned around and saw that all the guys in the studio were crying. These were all crusty old guys, and by that time we had watched that scene probably twenty-five or thirty times. Suddenly, I understood that the emotional content of a movie is driven largely by your ears. Your eyes can tell you what’s going on in a scene, but it’s hard to feel things through your eyes. Even if a movie has a really good director and a really good script and really good actors, if you watch just the raw footage, with no music, you think, Oh, no, it’s going to tank.”

Several years later, Collis was doing an engineering job for Muzak. He told me, “I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they’ve hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ It was retail theatre. And I realized then that Muzak’s business wasn’t really about selling music. It was about selling emotion—about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than being just an intellectual proposition.”

In 1997, the company adopted Collis’s concept—the main element of which he called audio architecture—essentially in its entirety. Muzak went through an exhilarating period of self-examination and redefinition, and moved its headquarters from Seattle to Fort Mill—mainly for economic reasons, but also to sever itself from its stodgy past. In a relatively short time, it transformed itself from a company that sold boring background music into one that was engaged in a far more interesting activity, which it called audio branding.



A business’s background music is like an aural pheromone. It attracts some customers and repels others, and it gives pedestrians walking past the front door an immediate clue about whether they belong inside. A chain like J. C. Penney, whose huge customer base includes all ages and income levels, needs a program that will make everyone feel welcome, so its soundtrack contains familiar and relatively unassertive popular songs like “Kind and Generous,” by Natalie Merchant. The Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando, which appeals to a more narrowly focussed audience, plays “Girls, Girls, Girls,” by Mötley Crüe, and cranks up the volume. (Imagine how teen-agers would perceive the jeans and t-shirts at Abercrombie & Fitch—not a Muzak client—if those stores played country-and-Western hits.) Audio architects have to keep all this in mind as they build their programs. They also have to be aware of certain broad truths about background music: bass solos are difficult to hear, extended electric-guitar solos annoy male sports-bar customers, drum solos annoy almost everyone, and Bob Dylan’s harmonica can make it hard for office workers to concentrate. Audio architects also have to screen lyrics carefully. They removed the INXS hit “Devil Inside” from many of the company’s playlists after a devout Christian complained, and they are ever vigilant for the word “funk,” which almost everyone mistakes for something else.

People often ask Muzak executives whether they worry about competition from the satellite-radio providers XM and Sirius, which carry a broad range of commercial-free music programs, divided among many genres. Bruce McKagan, who is Muzak’s vice-president for music and voice, told me, “Satellite radio is great, but they don’t do what we do. At Muzak, we take a brand and find music that is specific to what it’s trying to accomplish in the marketplace. That’s different from simply grabbing a channel and playing it.” XM and Sirius both sell packages to businesses, but neither company offers the degree of customization that Muzak does. Nor can a business legally use a consumer broadcast of any kind as background music, unless it pays a licensing fee. (The same rules apply to digital music. The ninety-nine cents you pay to download a song from iTunes doesn’t give you the right to play that song to customers over the sound system in a restaurant.) Muzak’s main competitor is actually another commercial background-music company, called D.M.X.

Last March, at a trade show in Las Vegas, Muzak demonstrated audio branding on a large scale. The company’s simple rectangular booth had a decorative theme for each of the show’s three days: a red rose, a Martini, and an eight ball from a pool table. Dana McKelvey had designed a soundtrack for each day that was meant to evoke the theme musically. While the songs played—Etta James and Diana Krall for the rose, Frank Sinatra and dZihan & Kamien for the Martini, Blondie and Wilson Pickett for the eight ball—audio architects interviewed visitors, and used their answers to come up with a “personal audio imaging profile” for each one; later, back in Fort Mill, the audio architects used those profiles to create personalized CDs.

I went through the same imaging process during my visit to Fort Mill. Steven Pilker, a twenty-five-year-old audio architect—he had worked in a record store while in school at U.N.C. Charlotte and, when he graduated, was offered a job by a Muzak executive who had been a regular customer—asked me seven or eight questions, none of which had anything to do with music. (“When you’re not working, what do you like to do?” “If you could choose an actor / actress to star in your biographical movie, who would it be and why?”) A couple of weeks later, he sent me a six-song program, which contained nothing connected to what I think of as my main musical phenotype (“classic rock”); in fact, five of the six tracks were by artists I’d never heard of. Yet I liked all six very much, and later bought CDs by two of them (Sufjan Stevens and Jamie Lidell). Pilker’s selections aren’t definitive, of course; another audio architect surely could have had another take on my “brand.” But I was struck that Pilker, after spending very little time with me, had created an appealing musical program that was based on his sense of who I was, rather than on any direct examination of the music I actually listened to if left on my own.

Some Muzak customers have specific musical requirements for their programs; Moe’s Southwest Grill, for example, wants only songs by Roy Orbison, Jimi Hendrix, and other artists who are dead. Most Muzak customers, though, are “imaged” in much the way that I was, except that in their case the investigation is of their corporate self. Dave Keller, who is the creative director of the company’s music department, told me recently, “Audio architecture involves looking at a client’s brand, and then matching music to the attributes of that brand. In its simplest form, you use keywords to define a personality for the brand. You might say that it’s bright, or energetic, or fun, or classic, or something like that. And then you find music with a subtext that reinforces that personality. This all really comes from Alvin Collis’s vision.” Collis himself said, “If you ask a client, ‘What kind of music do you like?’ the answer doesn’t get you anywhere, because musical taste is very subjective and very personal. You want the client to be thinking, Is this the right emotion for my brand?”

When the fit is right, the effect can be memorable. At a cocktail party in Manhattan recently, I met a man who told me that he had loved the music playing in a particular restaurant, and had asked his waitress where it had come from. “I said, ‘This is the best radio station I ever heard—what is it?’ And she said, ‘It’s not a radio station; it’s Muzak.’ ”



In the late nineties, when the Muzak rebranding was under way, Collis and another executive set a private goal of securing the Gap as a Muzak customer. Such an association was unthinkable initially: Muzak was the lamest kid in the class, and the Gap was one of the most astute and brand-aware marketers in the world. But Collis felt that Muzak would have a chance if it could first establish a successful record with smaller specialty retailers. It eventually succeeded, and today the four Gap brands play customized Muzak programs in all their stores. (In ascending order of volume and boisterous musical energy, those brands are Forth & Towne, Banana Republic, the Gap, and Old Navy.)

After Collis and I had talked for a while, we walked across Fifth Avenue to the Gap store at the corner of Fifty-fourth Street. The first thing he noticed was that the music we were hearing wasn’t Muzak, it was the audio track of an in-house video advertising program, which was playing on a bank of plasma-screen monitors suspended from the store’s high ceiling. In a few minutes, the Muzak program resumed—with “Soul Meets Body,” by Death Cab for Cutie—and Collis and I moved deeper into the store, where we studied the speakers. Muzak prefers to use sound equipment manufactured by two companies, Bose and Klipsch, and it designs systems depending on the customer and the musical genre. Collis said, “If you are a company that sells candles, you want an experience that’s moody, low light, and very organic, and so you want a sound system that kind of envelops you. If you walked in, you wouldn’t see a speaker, whereas when you come into an environment that’s more youth-oriented, like this one, the speakers are right there, and they aim the music at you, so that you feel it and get a real sense of where it’s coming from. And at Old Navy the music would be even more in your face.”

Muzak’s audio architects do something analogous within programs, too: some customers want to establish different moods at different times of the day; some want current hits to repeat frequently, as they do on Top Forty radio stations; some want programs that are closely geared to the seasons. At some retailers, one of the biggest changes occurs at closing time, when the music becomes louder, more intense, and presumably more likely to include lyrics that could be mistaken for profanity. That’s an after-hours program, designed by Muzak’s audio architects for employees who restock the shelves.



When Muzak undertook its corporate makeover, executives had to decide whether to change the company’s name, which by then had acquired a surplus of what marketing types call negative equity. In the end, despite reservations, they elected to keep it and rehabilitate it—perhaps the ultimate audio-imaging challenge.

Background music is a tough business under any circumstances. Muzak—which is privately owned, although its bonds trade publicly—has lost money for a number of years. The company has tried many times to broaden its business, with mixed results. After September 11th, it made a major effort to sell closed-circuit-television security systems, but that enterprise proved almost immediately to be a dead end. (Collis told me, “With audio branding, you’re selling emotion, love, caring, feelings. With CCTV, you’re selling fear. Not a good combination.”) Other ventures have turned out better. Muzak has a large and profitable “on hold” business, which creates music-and-voice programming for commercial telephone systems. The voice division also creates in-store promotional announcements, which can be patched seamlessly into the company’s backgroundmusic programs. All in all, Muzak creates about thirty thousand voice spots a month. It also provides the drive-through ordering systems used by many fast-food restaurants.

The company’s most interesting effort to redefine its brand may be one that isn’t meant to be profitable. It’s the Muzak Heart & Soul Foundation, which contributes money to musiceducation programs around the country and conducts an annual summer camp called Noise!, whose purpose is to introduce musically inclined teen-agers to the less visible parts of the music business. LaFouji Alexander, a thirty-year-old audio architect, thinks Heart & Soul is “the cornerstone of the company.” (When I asked him to explain his last job, as a Muzak “music specialist,” he said, “Maybe a Chinese restaurant wants only a certain kind of traditional Chinese music, and if that means I have to order it from Tibet . . . ”) Most teen-agers, he said, have a distorted view of the commercial music world. “Shows like ‘American Idol’ give them the wrong idea,” he said. “Music isn’t just stars; there’s this whole huge industry behind them.” Campers at Noise! visit recording studios, meet professional musicians and industry executives, make business contacts that may be useful after college, and—not incidentally—develop favorable associations with the name Muzak. Alexander said, “I tell my boss all the time that if we directed more outreach toward the kids, doing more of the things that Heart & Soul does, we wouldn’t have a problem convincing America who we are.”

During Muzak’s early decades, office workers and others sometimes complained that public background music was an invasion of privacy. Some people feel that way today, although the first thing many of us do when we find ourselves alone with our thoughts is to reach for the handiest means of drowning them out—by putting on a pair of headphones, say, or by sliding a disk into the car’s CD player. Audio architecture is a compelling concept because the human response to musical accompaniment is powerful and involuntary. “Our biggest competitor,” a member of Muzak’s marketing department told me, “is silence.”

MUSIC

Pitchfork on The Flaming Lips:
There's a moment in last year's documentary, The Fearless Freaks, where Wayne Coyne is playing a song he was writing during the time of the Clouds Taste Metallic sessions. With only his strumming to accompany him, Wayne sings, "Cats killing dogs, pigs eating rats..." The song is "Psychiatric Explorations of the Fetus With Needles", and on its way to actualization, it will acquire a weird intro and a stranger instrumental bridge, and will be puffed up large and colorful enough to suit the rest of that big, glowing album. But even as Coyne plays it alone on guitar, you can hear something special.

Listening to At War With the Mystics-- the Flaming Lips' first new album in almost four years, and the product of many months in the studio-- it's difficult to imagine a similarly inspiring glimpse into one of these songs' construction. Much of the record sounds like chords and melodies were written later, as an afterthought to flesh out production experiments. The goofy noises, glitches, and wafts of Wilsonian harmony in "Haven't Got a Clue", for example, seem to be more central to the track's focus than the melody (of which there is almost none) or the lyrics ("Every time you state your case/ The more I want to punch your face"). But the sounds are certainly interesting.

At War With the Mystics has already been discussed as the band's Return to Rock or Return to the Weird, but I don't really hear those things. Some of this talk arose because among the first of these tracks to emerge was "The W.A.N.D.", a good song built on a gnarly guitar riff-- a combo we haven't heard from these guys for some time. It doesn't approach the force of, say, "Slow Nerve Action", but this is the best guitar rock they've produced since Clouds Taste Metallic Still, it's not indicative of the record as a whole.

Instead, At War With the Mystics is a grab bag of musical styles, without ever seeming like a retread of any particular album or sound they've explored during the course of their 20-year career. Though the themes are cut from the same cloth as the last few records-- meditations on fear, death, love, one's place in the universe, and so on-- musically, the band is up for experimenting. The production is distant, queasy, fuzzier, and less direct than any of their recent outings; the vocals are often manipulated and toyed with-- Coyne goes from singing in a register so low you can hardly recognize him (the single "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song") to one so high that he sounds like Beck doing Prince ("Free Radicals"). Musical mastermind Steven Drozd even sings his first lead, on "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung", one of the record's better songs, a peculiar amalgamation of several strands of krautrock and Pink Floyd's "One of These Days".

While the band has always played around with a variety of sounds, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of songwriting, most of Mystics doesn't measure up. It's telling that their best melody since The Soft Bulletin was written by Cat Stevens, and when the Lips make more traditional song compositions their focus, the results here are rarely engaging. At War With the Mystics leaves me wondering whether making good records is really the point for the Flaming Lips at this juncture. With this album, I'm struck by the possibility that the Flaming Lips are an idea and a project as much of a band, and records are just one of the organization's many concerns. This doesn't seem like any great tragedy, and I've no question that many tens of thousands more people will get into them this year for the first time and find their lives enriched by what the Flaming Lips have to offer. But for the first time in more than 15 years they've made an album that is difficult to consider great, regardless of how it's approached.