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1.31.2007

B.A.N.A.N.A.S.

Is Jasper Johns overrated?

Beloved Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was euthanized Monday after an eight-month struggle to recover from the broken hind leg he suffered at the Preakness Stakes last year. Barbaro's owners stressed soon after his injury that they wanted him to live whether or not he could breed. How healthy does a horse have to be to sire a foal?

How to insult:

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." -- William Faulkner

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." -- Abraham Lincoln

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- Groucho Marx

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." -- Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... if you have one." -- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." Winston Churchill, in response

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." Oscar Wilde

1.29.2007

MOVING KINDA SUCKS

especially when it's minus 14 out
especially when it's snowing
especially when your furnace breaks on night #1
especially when you're not used to the train noise yet and it wakes you up 5 times

RUBBER KNIVES

The quest for a $700 bottle of wine.

Unhappy Meals: The story of how basic questions about what to eat got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and journalism.

Ryszard Kapuściński: The Open World: The author’s first trip outside Poland.

1.26.2007

JONI MITCHELL

On Jan. 28, Joni Mitchell will be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and I’m praying that no one serenades her with River.

The uninvited soundtrack to Christmas 2006 was Sarah McLachlan’s low-fat, fun-free, vanilla-latte version of Mitchell’s 1971 classic River. Between the first and 24th of December, every time I found myself wading through a snake pit mega-chain toward the last stripy scarf in the bin, Sarah McLachlan was there, too, braying the theme song of my holiday disorganization with all the laziness that typifies a one-off Christmas cash grab: “I wish I had a river so looong…” I swear she yawns during the word "long."

There is something peculiar about McLachlan, founder of the successful women’s music festival Lilith Fair, covering Mitchell. Mitchell has always shrugged off the “woman genius” mantle, despite her status as musical pioneer and adopted mommy figure for legions of female singer songwriters. She once told a reporter: “One guy came up to me and said, ‘You’re the best female singer-songwriter in the world.’ I was thinking: ‘What do you mean female? That’s like saying you’re the best Negro.’”

Point taken; it’s a backhanded compliment with a ghetto sting. But as a teenaged girl in the mid-'80s encountering Blue (the album containing River) for the first time, the fact that the songs – confessional but not solipsistic; folk but not earnest; pop but not empty – were written by a woman felt thrilling. Mitchell sang of adventure, disappointment, God, love, disaster. Not only was the music emotionally bloody and intricate, the lyrics – her busy phrasing pushing the words to spill out over the song’s structure – made it seem like she was living a gigantic life.

Pre-Google, I harassed my favourite clerk at the local second-hand record store for information, researched her in back issues of Rolling Stone, and learned that Joni Mitchell was a painter, too, and a poet. She owned all the rights to her songs. She had been smoking since she was nine. She occupied the world. That this music didn’t come from Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen (her contemporaries) or REM’s Michael Stipe and the Fall’s Mark E. Smith (mine) provided a kind of comfort I didn’t know I needed: greatness and arrogance and artistry could be female, too. That Mitchell didn’t want to be considered a feminist paving the road for female musicians only made her more intriguing (though her very existence did, and still does, seem like feminism to me); that was a way of being I hadn’t known, either.

I first heard the song River – and this is so very sad – during an episode of the yuppie angst TV drama thirtysomething when I was 16 or 17. The female singers of my generation were Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Whitney Houston: teeny boppers, vocal acrobats and hired hands, mostly singing songs written for them by other people – often men, or Carole Bayer Sager. They sang about liking boys, and wanting to dance with somebody. I was just old enough to recognize how hard this stuff sucked, and I was rabid for music more like the poetry and fiction that had my head spinning; something speaking of all the possible ways to exist. I knew, as all teenagers do, that I was leaving adolescence, and I heard the thrill and sadness of adulthood in River’s opening note, that repeated one-finger Jingle Bells piano, and then the lyrics: “It’s coming on Christmas/ They’re cutting down trees/ They’re putting up reindeer/ Singing songs of joy and peace/ I wish I had a river so long/ I would teach my feet to fly…” A song about ice-skating ! (Lou Reed didn’t have one of those!) The rumours were true, then: Joni Mitchell was Canadian, too.

By the end of the '60s, Mitchell had become a darling of the Laurel Canyon So-Cal folk scene. Though singers like Judy Collins and Buffy Saint-Marie had made hits out of Mitchell’s songs, her own stardom wore on her, and in 1970, Mitchell “quit this crazy scene” (a phrase from River), writing most of Blue in self-imposed exile while travelling through Europe. Big Yellow Taxi and Both Sides Now may be her best-known songs, but it’s the entire album Blue that is still her most resonant work. In an upcoming tribute disc, three of the 12 songs come from Blue. On Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums of all time, it’s ranked No. 30. Her long career since has been marked by departure and reinvention, most famously her collaboration with jazz idol Charles Mingus. At the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame ceremony, Margaret Atwood will read her poetry, and jazz musician Herbie Hancock and soprano Measha Brueggergosman will perform her songs. Mitchell, who hates a box, is sure to love this.

But no matter how experimental the evening gets (I fear interpretive dance), many of us watching will be hearing the clean, raw precision of Blue in our heads. The record feels like it could only exist as an album, something from before the fragmentation brought on by iPods and downloads, when you were forced to witness the whole vision, track by track. The thing Mitchell built was a house of postponed grieving: maybe for her privacy, her relationship with Graham Nash or the daughter she gave up for adoption a few years before. In the mid-'90s, when Mitchell publicly reunited with that daughter, the cryptic lyrics to Little Green made sense: “He went to California/ Hearing that everything's warmer there/ So you write him a letter and say ‘Her eyes are blue’/ He sends you a poem and she's lost to you….” It’s a perfect rumination on sorrow. Mitchell has said: “At that period of my life, I had no personal defences.… There’s hardly a dishonest
note in the vocals.”

Mitchell’s work, while not a roadmap to her life, has always been far too personal to pass as hippie banner-waving. The exception may be the anthem Woodstock, a hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but Mitchell never actually made it to the festival, choosing instead to make an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. Still, the vagabond principle of the era is all over Blue, as in the song Carey: “Carey get out your cane and I’ll put on some silver/ Oh, you’re a mean old daddy but I like you fine.” Silver, linen, African winds – there’s a vaguely Wiccan, Tiffany-lamp vibe to Mitchell, and her dedicated followers, that I’ve always tried to ignore. Yet Blue doesn’t feel like an artifact. If Mitchell were merely a boomer hero, she wouldn’t matter so much to Sufjan Stevens and Bjork, who cover her on the upcoming tribute disc. If she were merely a female hero, Prince and Elvis Costello wouldn’t cite her as a major influence; they appear on the tribute, too. The song Prince chose to cover? A Case of You, from Blue, in which Mitchell famously sings: “I can remember Canada/ Oh Canada…” and the word Canada loops up and down and closes in on itself.

That Joni Mitchell is Canadian, and female, matters almost not at all to me now; role models get less necessary, or are abandoned entirely, with age. But studies have shown that the music we meet at our most self-involved, in youth, is the music that hits us deepest. McGill professor Daniel Levitin has done research to show the music of childhood almost burns itself into our brains, which is exactly how it feels.

Maybe that’s why the ubiquitous Sarah McLachlan cover of River is so grating: the River part of my brain is well travelled, sacred territory. There’s no room for anyone else there. On the other hand, McLachlan’s cover lacks that unfathomable combination of gravitas and weightlessness that defines Mitchell’s singing, even now, with a voice smoked down to a crackling ember. Mitchell can never hit those Blue notes again, but I can always turn to them and remember who I was. When I listen to Cat Power, Lucinda Williams, Tracy Chapman, Jenny Lewis, Martha Wainwright, Will Oldham, Ben Harper – I think of Joni, who came first, reluctantly, and right on time. -- www.cbc.ca

1.25.2007

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

imports and altercations
my faculties on a shoe-string vacation
I settled down on a hurt as big as Robert Mitchum
and listen to Lucinda Williams
oh, convenient lies, rubber knives
I'm a dastardly villain, doing belly dives
I before E except after me
I'm dousing my vitals at break-neck speed
you and your little entourage
playing amazing little parlor games in the garage
like a jury of my peers triangulating
my pretty point of exasperation
yes we gather for some of that Catholic juice
and hide behind the shower curtain, i watch the virgin spruce
I'm soaking wet and feeling funny
the mirror's a mirage, no wonder I always look so crummy
my heroes are all off in the great beyond
England is old but Atlantis is gone
feathers are floating down, and I can't dodge them
the tar is oozing from my little noggin
it's ugly ancient residue
there ain't no mistaking what's been abused
feathers are floating down and I can't dodge them
the tar is oozing from my little noggin
it's ugly ancient residue
there ain't no mistaking who's been accused

MUSIC

Beck's favourite records of 2006
TV On The Radio
Return to Cookie Mountain

Miss Violetta Beauregarde
Odi Profanum Vulgus Et Arceo

spank Rock
Yoyoyoyoyo

Liars
Drum’s Not Dead

Madlib Beat Konducta
Vol. 1-2

Crystal Skulls
Outgoing Behavior

Dr. Dog
Takers and Leavers EP

Girl Talk
Night Ripper

Cornelius
Sensuous

Raconteurs
Broken Boy Soldiers

Thoughts:

> still need to see Pan's Labyrinth
> moving this weekend; it is freezing out
> 20-some odd nights until Hawaii
> two more nights at 133 Alcorn
> i vow to improve my home improvement skills and ability/motivation to recycle food waste in the green bins.

MUSIC IS LOVE: ALBUM OF THE DAY

Forgotten by rock history, and probably by most of its participants, David Crosby's 1971 "If I could only remeber my name" is a one-of-a-kind freak-folk apogee. It's a solo album in name only, since the Croz operates as a cosmic cruise director, bringing in pals like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia and Grace Slick. In hydroponic jams like "What Are Their Names," you can hear each guest wander into the studio, plug in, play a few licks, sing a few harmonies ("Peace is not an awful lot to ask" -- dig it!) and raid the fridge. Garcia steals the show, and the two killer tracks are the ones where he burns on guitar, playing in a dark "Wharf Rat" mood: "Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves)," where Garcia cuts Jorma Kaukonen in a guitar duel, and "Laughing," featuring Jerry's profoundly sad pedal steel.

FAT ACTORS DON'T WIN

The most moving film performance that I saw a male actor give in 2006 was Richard Griffiths as Hector, the teacher/hero of The History Boys. Yet in a year of relatively undistinguished leading-man performances, Griffiths failed to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor. Maybe Griffiths got overlooked because the academy disdains film adaptations of stage plays (though that doesn't seem to have hurt Dreamgirls, which got eight nominations). Maybe Griffiths lost the Anglophile vote to Peter O'Toole, nominated for his performance in Venus (though the academy's use of proportional voting in its nominations, a system beloved by the left because it gives smaller groups greater power, is supposed to minimize such scenarios). I suspect a different handicap. Griffiths is very fat.

My admiration for Griffiths' performance in The History Boys is not some quirky and embattled opinion. Griffiths has been widely praised for his performance in the film, and when he played the same role on stage he won a best actor Tony on Broadway and a best actor Olivier in London. All major roles in the film were played by the same actors who originated them at London's National Theater, where I saw the play in 2004, and on a subsequent world tour that finished up this past fall in New York. With the exception of Clive Merrison's manic turn as the opportunistic headmaster, every performance translated beautifully from stage to screen. Griffiths' performance acquired, if anything, a deeper resonance when seen in close-up. (On the whole I preferred the film to the stage play, for reasons extraneous to my argument here. I've related them in a "Spoiler Special" podcast with Slate film critic Dana Stevens.)

Why no academy nomination? Looking back over a complete list of previous winners in the best actor and actress categories, I can locate only one fat person. That was Charles Laughton, who won playing Henry VIII in 1933. And even Laughton wasn't all that fat compared both to Griffiths and to the mountainlike presence Laughton would become later in his career. A few other best actors and best actresses might at worst be called "somewhat beefy." I'm thinking of Emil Jannings, Marie Dressler, Victor McLaglen, Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, Rod Steiger, John Wayne, George C. Scott, Kathy Bates, Anthony Hopkins, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The categories of best supporting actor and actress are more hospitable to endomorphs, just as they're more hospitable to the handicapped and members of minority groups. (It's OK to be fat or black or the wearer of a prosthetic device, apparently, so long as you don't hog the whole picture.) Consequently you have Jane Darwell fatly playing Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Thomas Mitchell in Stagecoach, Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier, Burl Ives in The Big Country, and Margaret Rutherford in The V.I.P.s. Hattie McDaniel won a best supporting actress award for Gone With the Wind, and she was both African-American and fat! Sixty-eight years later, Jennifer Hudson, also African-American and fat, gave what is said to be a wonderful leading-role performance in Dreamgirls (haven't seen it myself) but got slotted into the ghettoized category of best supporting actress.

It is well-known that audiences don't especially like directing their gaze at people who fail to conform to their notions of normality and physical attractiveness. This is nowhere so true as at the movies. But it's a tad dismaying to learn that even the film professionals who decide on academy nominations are susceptible to this small-mindedness. Hell, even critics are susceptible to it; in his New Republic review, Stanley Kauffman opined, apropos of nothing, that Griffiths had "the most grotesquely obese figure I can remember in an actor." (Kauffman liked the performance but weirdly downplayed its significance, saying the role was "a piece of cake for Griffiths, as it would be for any competent actor.") Fat people are subjected to particular scorn and discomfort, because they are often thought (usually mistakenly) to have gotten that way through self-indulgence. This is a particularly inapt view in Griffiths' case, because his obesity came about as a result of an ill-considered radiation treatment when he was 8 years old—for being too skinny, of all things. Griffiths told Joyce Wadler of the New York Times that within 12 months of the treatment, his body weight increased by 60 percent. Of course, Griffiths' weight is entirely irrelevant in any case. Alan Bennett, who wrote the play and the movie, included in his text no reference to the size of Hector, the teacher whom Griffiths plays. (The fellow currently playing Hector on London's West End is of average size.) What matters is not the size of the actor, but the size of the performance. In that sense, Griffiths is, I believe, too large to ignore.


LUCINDA AGAIN

Lucinda Williams:
The Last Word
By Mark Guarino
“This is the last batch,” Lucinda Williams says of the songs on West, her new album.

But don’t call it a swan song. The new songs confront, rail against and ultimately find solace alongside loneliness and death, the two themes burrowed inside all of her songs in a lifework of 28 years.

This “last batch” are the songs Williams found cleaning out the closet of her personal history, in the dust hairs of wrecked relationships, ones which, when clumped into a single ball, revealed a consistency. “All my boyfriends were rock ’n’ roll guys, and some of them were younger,” she says. “That wasn’t really what I needed, obviously. I guess it’s an immaturity thing; you keep trying to find what you need and you have to knock on a lot of doors. And finally, you have to say to yourself, ‘I keep knocking on the same door and it’s not working. Maybe I should try a different door.’”

Through that untested door stood Tom Overby, director of marketing for Fontana Distribution, an independent arm of the Universal Music Group, and Williams’ fiancé since last March. They plan to marry near the end of 2006. The almost three-year relationship arrived suddenly and with particular ease. “I just knew. There’s just no question. You don’t have to analyze. I wish it happened sooner, but part of that was my growth. I had to get past a lot of old ideas and old expectations, old patterns that weren’t serving me well,” she says.

Remnants of that destructive grind — “I would just lose myself in the relationship and then I would resent it and then I would want to get out” — end up on West. Amid the subdued tension of “Rescue” she reminds herself in listed refrains all the things her lover can’t do for her, not because he doesn’t want to, but because it’s an insurmountable task. “He can’t save you/ From the plain and simple truth/The waning winters of your youth,” she sings.

“I’ve since written some happy love songs, if you can believe that,” she says with a laugh. “But I had to let these last ones out.”

“I’ve gone through a lot of growing and changes that I think are evident in this record,” Williams, 54, declares. It’s a process that can best describe how she somehow got here in the first place, from a university poet’s daughter to a vagabond folkie to a songwriter who today just doesn’t have the respect of an industry that, in the not-so-distant past, was content to throw her away; she is the rare songwriter who can claim literary grit. School kids can study these songs just as diligently as hungry, eager-to-absorb songwriters at open mic night. In the illuminated images of her lyrics, the sensuality of their presentation and the vulnerable roughage of her voice, she twists together elements of blues, country, spirituals and sometimes a dirty roadhouse backbeat into a near-mystical genre of confessional storytelling of which she is the single living definition.

“Lucinda set a standard for a lot of people,” observes independent Nashville singer-songwriter Joy Lynn White, who covered two of Williams’ songs on her 1997 album The Lucky Few. Williams returned the compliment by enlisting her to sing background harmonies on 2001’s Essence. “I can’t tell you of all the girls who are in the Americana genre of music that constantly refer to Lucinda as their mentor,” White says. “If a reviewer puts you in her genre, that’s a real lucky thing.”

“One thing I’ve always noticed about her is some of her songs are so simple but in just those few words and the way her melodies are, they’re so effective. It’s just a natural thing,” says songwriter Jim Lauderdale, who has sung harmony vocals and played guitar with Williams since the mid-1980s. “It’s very hard to write a song that seems so simple but in just those few words, it says all that it needs to. There’s not really any extraneous stuff going on.”

If West is a reaction to the turmoil on its heels, then she’s right on target. Williams earned her reputation as a prickly perfectionist by default: one who will fight until the sound in her head is also coming out of the speakers. When a producer added drums to her second album in 1980 against her will, she vowed never again; the radar was up. When critical favor and commercial success met at a crossroads that was Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, her breakthrough album in 1998, it was accompanied by magazine articles that detailed the sweat equity it took to finish it, a process that ground through a prolonged cast of musicians, producers, studios and sessions over a period of years.

Of course, the characterization can be taken another way: the defensive offense.

“I heard through the grapevine that she would chew up guitar players and spit ’em out. I was willing to go out there and give it a run,” said Doug Pettibone, the guitarist in Willliams’ current band. To survive, he learned to read body language. “If she moved her body towards you but didn’t look at you but looked at your amp like maybe there’s something wrong with [it], that’s when you knew she didn’t like it. You knew she liked it if she would turn around and be smiling like a kid in the candy store. And those were the moments you’d go after. She knows exactly what she wants.”

Lauderdale sees Williams as “very sensitive” about how she wants her songs to translate. “That must be one of the reasons why things are so powerful when she records and performs,” he says. “She’s one of the few writers and singers I know who moves me to tears and at the same time, another song later, will move me to this mystical experience. When I sing with her, I’m sort of transported somewhere.”

West was likewise recorded, then torn apart and stitched back, toyed and tinkered with, until it became what it is today: her spookiest record. These are beautifully bleak songs even with such dim lights of resolve. While known for ballads eliciting heartache, these songs buck their hind legs hard. Williams’ voice is particularly gnarled; atop the creeping grooves of “Unsuffer Me” she delivers bruising lyrics (“My joy is dead/ I long for bliss”) with no salve remaining in her voice. On “Come On,” the album’s biggest rock moment, she scalds a former lover by blaring a repeated sexual innuendo. The quieter moments find her drained. On “Learning How to Live” she sings of finding a way to go on after being abandoned even though the weariness in her voice tells us the chances are slim. “All I have left is this dime store ring/But I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” she sings.

Those vocal scars, more cragged as she gets older, are exactly what made iconoclast Chicago songwriter Robbie Fulks campaign for Williams to share a duet with him on his 1998 album. “There are a lot of singers who can hit the notes and convey conviction … but her particular value is in all the ‘wrong’ things she does, in terms of modern commercial music, anyway: singing in between and around notes, not hiding her regional accent, revealing herself to a sometimes less-than-glamorous effect, the folksy vibrato,” Fulks said in an email interview.

For recent fans who discovered Williams through Car Wheels, West can be a heavier listen, one that relies less on the story narratives of her past albums and more on personal moods. The songs are textured and less straightforward. Hal Willner, the eclectic producer known for working across the spectrum, from Marianne Faithfull to Allen Ginsberg, is credited for bringing in an ensemble of inventive players that included jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Tony Garnier, keyboardist Rob Burger, string player Jenny Sheinman and others whom Willner thought of as musicians second and experimental stylists first. The first thing he did was strip Williams’ demos of everything except her vocals and Doug Pettibone’s guitar. Then he rebuilt.

“We did have somewhat of a credo at the beginning: no steel guitar. We thought ‘Let’s do this differently.’ Lucinda’s just so much more than that,” Willner says. “I love contrasts, taking Lucinda’s voice which is just so emotional and direct and raw, and contrasting that with strings. The effect is more.”

That is definitely the effect of a song like “Wrap My Head Around That,” nearly 10 minutes of electro-blues featuring Williams groove-talking to Pettibone’s hardnosed blues guitar riffs, countered by Frisell’s spacey accents. “Words,” a love letter to the art of writing, is presented in a garden of subtle delights: slyly shifting percussion, flecks of accordion and shimmering guitar chords.

“Everybody who played on the record really got involved in the musical creative end of it,” Williams notes. “I really haven’t gone into a studio with what I would call a quote-unquote actual producer. Everyone I’ve worked with”—Gurf Morlix, Steve Earle, Roy Bittan, Bo Ramsey, Charlie Sexton—“has been a musician-slash-producer. I always had this fear that a natural producer was going to come in and overproduce me. I was still coming from that rootsy, folksy place I started out in.” But as her most recent albums broadened her musical boundaries, she said she was finally prepared for the ambiance of West.

“I feel this album is really the one I always wanted to make,” she said. “I wasn’t quite sure how to get there at the time. Or maybe I wasn’t quite ready.”

The unusual setting led Williams to write songs at night and bring them to the band the next day, a significant blow to the anxiety she endured in past years when faced with writing songs on demand. The major revelation became the two new songs referencing Lucy Morgan, her mother who died of aneurisms three years ago in March while living in an assisted living facility in Fayetteville, Ark.

Williams’ biographers tend to dwell on Miller Williams, her Arkansan poet father who once recited his work at President Clinton’s 1997 inauguration and with whom she shares her lyrics with before recording them. Her mother, a long-time New Orleans resident, is less known. She was a living room musician raised against a repressive Methodist backdrop in rural Louisiana. After she and Williams’ father divorced when their daughter was 11 and Lucinda went to live permanently with her father and stepmother, her mother turned to a quiet life. Lucinda later discovered she was an avid reader of psychology, was enrolled in therapy her entire life and was the owner of a library of books by Jung and other leading analysts.

“My mother was an incredible, intelligent person,” Williams says. “She was in trouble. Mental illness has run through the family on my mother’s side. So some of [my songs], she wasn’t ready to deal with. ‘Bus to Baton Rouge’ [on Essence] really says a lot about all of this. I remember when I recorded that song; she didn’t want me to put it on the record.”

A memento of her mother’s death is the new song “Fancy Funeral,” a drowsy lament protesting the marketplace of grieving and the artifices pitched to the bereaved. “No amount of riches/Can bring back what you’ve lost/To satisfy your wishes/You’ll never justify the cost,” she sings.

Calling the song “a literal portrayal of what I’d gone through planning my mother’s funeral,” Williams says her immediate family’s plan for a simple cremation service in Arkansas was hijacked when her mother’s Louisiana relatives insisted she be given a traditional burial in the family plot back home.

“It really turned into a Flannery O’Connor/Eudora Welty/Carson McCullers short story,” Williams explains. “I found myself in a funeral parlor for the first time of my life shopping for caskets. It was the most surreal and disturbing experience I ever had.

“Funeral parlors should all be shut down. They just suck you in. As soon as you walk into that door you might as well forget it, you lost control over your senses. In my case, my mother just died and I was the one paying for everything and handling it all. And somehow I got talked into buying all this stuff I knew my mother didn’t want. It was a nightmare,” she says, adding a laugh. “I had to write that song.”

Lucinda Williams fans are familiar with the songwriter’s geography of grief. In past albums, and especially on Car Wheels, her songs recount, memorialize or address characters from her past who died unnecessary deaths or young deaths, or abandoned their relationships in towns spanning the map of her early wandering: Lake Charles, Lafayette, Slidell, Greenville, Pineola.

After Car Wheels made her a headliner and resulted in a Grammy win for best contemporary folk album, Williams hit a writer’s block: “It was an albatross around my neck because I was defined by that record.”

The laborious process she came to accept for writing songs was broken. Instead, in a two-week sprint, she found herself in an unprecedented writing spree, resulting in Essence, an album of songs that turned inward instead of cataloging stories from the outside.

“They were so different in that I didn’t feel I had to work on them as long. I remember consciously thinking, ‘Can I get away with this? Is this OK? Don’t I have to work long, don’t I have to labor over them, don’t I have to have more narrative songs on this record like the ones on Car Wheels?’ I was really, really worried about it.”

With lyrics hinged on simple repetition, a crucial link to the blues, Williams turned a corner. Through later albums, including West, she let herself be open to different sounds, making room for influences ranging from soul poet Jill Scott and the basement punk of Paul Westerberg to electronic duo Thievery Corporation and the fuzzed-out North Mississippi blues of Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. The space between albums slimmed, her songwriting loosened, and her self-confidence grew.

Turns out the prime motivator for this creative renewal was a single album: Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, his blues-minded but gorgeously dark album from 1997.

“I’ve watched his career for so many years, ever since I discovered him in 1965. I saw him go through the same kind of transgression from when he was doing the older stuff—Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde—all of these heavy metaphorical and heavy narrative songs. And now, all of the sudden, he comes out with Time Out of Mind, which is really open and moody and has real simple lyrics. He almost gave me permission for what he’s been able to do,” she says.

She met Dylan twice, once in 1979 when he gave her a kiss on the cheek after watching her perform at a Greenwich Village folk club, just after recording her Folkways debut. The second was 19 years later, in 1998, when he appeared opening night to thank her for opening a leg on his never-ending tour. “He had this very, almost nurturing, sweetness about him,” she recalls. “Then I never saw him again for the rest of the tour.”

Still, they are linked. Dylan and Williams both understand how to filter suffering in their songs—by revealing the real beauty within deep sorrows—so it doesn’t translate as boilerplate misery. There is a process and, unfortunately, there is a price.

1.22.2007

MISCELLANY

The latest Sedaris.


how vietnam really ended...


I dislike PeytonSmushFaceManning very much.

ON SLOAN

"One of my biggest complaints about the album is how little of Jay Ferguson we hear in the lead-- only two songs feature him up front throughout, and they're among the best tracks on the album. I've always loved his voice, a liberally honeyed tenor, and his songs have a melodic ease to them that first recalls, and then transcends, 70s AM Gold. His "Right or Wrong" is a jangling, harmony-stuffed song that touches on the album's underlying theme of self-awareness, while "Before the End of the Race" is a far less self-consciously mature take on the adultery theme of "The Other Man" from a few years back.

An overabundance of self-conscious emotional maturity was a big part of what hampered Sloan's last two efforts, and the band lets itself have more silly fun in this new format. The result is that their artistic maturity is more fully displayed, both on beautifully realized songs like closer "Another Way I Could Do It", which poignantly illuminates the never-ending adjustments required by moving to a big city, to wild leaps out of the band's usual bounds like the punky, almost Wire-ish "HFXNSHC". Even seemingly small things, like the way lead single "Who Taught You to Live Like That?" contrasts big harmonies with a pounding arrangement that makes great use of a limited chord progression signal a creative revival.

Which is all great to hear, because for all their talk of accepting a slow fade in these songs, these four musicians are too good together to go out with a whimper. As a late-career stirring of the creative juices, this album is mostly successful, though among the thirty songs there are naturally a few that don't fully take. Sloan could've just as easily kept churning out good-but-not-great albums forever. To their credit, they've chosen a more difficult, more rewarding path."

1.21.2007

FUN

The Turntables That Transform Vinyl

LONG-PLAYING records are gathering dust in the homes of many music lovers, who hope to hear their contents one day on a CD player or iPod.
Now, an updated version of another audio relic, the phonographic turntable, may provide a fairly inexpensive way to do that. Two new consumer turntables on the market at $200 or less connect directly to computers to transfer cherished vinyl to MP3 files and CDs.
The machines aren’t for audiophiles who have the skill to rig their own systems with special cables and preamplifiers. But they may offer a doable way for nontechies to thrill again to their favorite bit of analog Beethoven or Dylan.
Learning how to use these systems takes time — up to three or even four hours. The turntable has to be assembled, and the LPs cleaned carefully to remove the dust of ages — two jobs that those over 30 might remember well.
Then the recording software, which comes on a CD, takes about a half-hour to set up properly — or three times that if you skip the “frequently asked questions,” as I did, and then sheepishly return to them when you get stuck.
The software requires some attention even after you learn its ways. For example, it can’t automatically detect the end of each track between two songs or movements of a symphony. You have to mark these spots yourself in the program before burning a CD or making an MP3 file.
Still, once the learning curve is vanquished and the sounds of much-loved old recordings fill the air, you may wonder why you waited so long.
One of the new turntables is called the Ion USB or, more formally, the iTTUSB ($199 list price, about $150 on the Web through a site like Amazon.com). Made by Ion Audio, it works with both PCs and Macs. This lightweight plastic turntable plugs directly into the USB port of computers; inside, it has a preamplifier to bolster the sound, which is digitized and then sent to the computer through the USB cable.
When the Ion turntable is removed from its box, the rubber belt that drives the platter must be threaded into place, and the tone arm put together and balanced so that it produces just the right weight on the record. Be sure not to discard the Styrofoam blocks after you unpack the device: the tone arm and its counterweight are tucked within them.
The software goes on next. The Ion uses a venerable and free program called Audacity, which can do many jobs — like eliminating some scratches on the recording. Installing it is easy, though a few instructions in the Audacity manual are in high geek, particularly those that guide you through changing the settings so the internal sound card on the computer will be used for playback rather than the turntable, which has no speakers. The frequently asked questions, downloadable at the Ion site, www.ion-audio.com/ittusb_FAQ.php, are invaluable here.
One of the trickiest parts of the recording procedure is low-tech: cleaning the records. Unearth your old LP cleaning brush or buy a new one and carefully run it over the LP. And make sure that the turntable is on a level, relatively vibration-free surface.
When you press “record,” you’ll see the digitized wave forms of the music traveling across the monitor and hear the audio version through the computer speakers or headphones. (Ion suggests trying a short section of an LP as a test.) If you are ambitious, you can edit the file, deleting some of the scratches, for instance.
Once the recording is done, the album must be divided manually into tracks, by marking the beginning and end of each with the computer mouse. If you can’t tell from the wave forms where the break is — they drop off when there’s silence — you can always check by listening to the recording.
In Audacity, each track is stored as a separate file; if you are making multiple tracks, you send each on its way as a .wav file to your hard disk. The manual was too geekish on this step, but the frequently asked questions explained it clearly. Once the files are on the hard drive, they can be burned quickly to a CD. The Ion will also convert 78-r.p.m. records, as well as cassette tapes.
Another new turntable, Audio-Technica’s LP2Da ($170 to $199) works with PCs but not with Macs. And it has a sturdy dust cover, unlike the coverless Ion. The Audio-Technica’s tone arm comes assembled and can be set to raise and lower itself from the turntable automatically
The Audio-Technica model has a pre-amplifier, but no USB connection. It plugs into the computer the old-fashioned way: through an analog line input jack. That means that it won’t work with many laptops unless special hardware is bought, for laptops typically have a jack only for a microphone.
THE accompanying software, Cakewalk Pyro, is easier to use than Audacity: burning a CD, for instance, requires only one click for the entire LP, while Audacity requires that you send along each track separately. And it includes software for converting .wav files to MP3 files; by contrast, Audacity requires users to download a free plug-in in order to do this.
Ion users may soon have software that is easier to handle: in April, the company plans to replace Audacity with a program that detects tracks automatically and allows recording in MP3 format without a separate download. Buyers of the iTTUSB will be able to download the update at no charge. The company also plans to ship two models that are variations on the basic iTTUSB, both with dust covers.
Of course, there are other ways to digitize old LPs. Commercial services will transfer them, typically for $15 to $50 each, depending on the number of extra services. TEAC makes an all-in-one machine that doesn’t require a separate computer to convert LPs to CDs ($400). It does some automatic tracking, although incompletely.
To see how the new, inexpensive turntables sounded once they were set up, I invited a friend, George Basbas, a physicist, to bring over some of his treasured LPs. One was an old Columbia Masterworks album featuring the countertenor Russell Oberlin. We recorded it on the Audio-Technica turntable, burned a CD from the .wav files, then played both the CD and the LP on the stereo.
We couldn’t tell for sure which was the LP and which was the CD, although many experts probably could. “Any digitization process imposes limits on quality,” said Mark Schubin, a media technology consultant in Manhattan. “Be prepared: it won’t sound the same as you heard it through your analog system when you were playing back the record.”
But the new recording sounded good enough as we listened to Mr. Oberlin’s exquisite voice fill the room, ready to be taken along by CD or MP3 in the car or on a walk, freed after more than 50 years from its vinyl confinement.

NORAH JONES

Norah Jones, Now in Her Own Words

A LOCAL musician couldn’t ask for a more appreciative audience than the petite, black-haired woman in blue jeans who was one of about two dozen people at Marion’s Marquee Lounge on the Bowery a few Mondays ago. As the guitarist Tony Scherr led a trio through his bluesy, slightly skewed songs, she tapped her foot, giggled at his stage patter and vigorously applauded his solos. Every few tunes, she whispered, “I love this song!”

Between sets she walked over to hug band members and chat about gigs. She’s part of a circle of New York singers and songwriters who play one another’s songs and swap backup musicians. Sometimes she visits Lower East Side karaoke bars and belts out songs by Shakira or Guns N’ Roses. She’s also a member of various bands — the Sloppy Joannes, the Mazelles, the Little Willies — who show up as opening acts at no-cover-charge places like the Rodeo Bar. But she’s far better known by her own name: Norah Jones.

In a few days Ms. Jones, 27, would resume her main career: the one that has sold millions of albums and made her almost too popular for the 3,000-seat theaters she prefers to arenas. Her third solo album, “Not Too Late,” is due for release Jan. 30, and like her first two it offers the intimate sound of a handful of musicians in a small room, the sound of places like this one.
“Not Too Late” is also the first full album of her own songs, and it is darker, thornier and sometimes funnier than the albums that made her a star.

“On the first album I was saying, that’s just one part of me,” she said. “And then I was thinking, well, am I going to hide the rest of me now just because I’m afraid of something? No. I’m just going to be myself.” At Marion’s Marquee Lounge she wore no makeup and had no entourage: only her boyfriend and songwriting collaborator, Lee Alexander, with whom she traded grins through the evening. They had rushed over after a long day of rehearsals to hear the night’s opening act: Jason Crigler, a guitarist and singer-songwriter recovering from a 2004 brain aneurysm. Ms. Jones had headlined a benefit concert for his medical expenses, and she watched his set with sisterly concern and increasing relief. Between sets she pointed out the other musicians in the room, offering praise and updates on their albums in progress. While she’s by far the best-known musician from this circuit, she’s still immersed in it. Here she was just another working musician among peers, the exact opposite of a diva. She has little interest in high-profile celebrity, and the tabloids generally ignore her. “I think I just never interested people that way in the beginning,” she said. “I don’t think I’m that boring, but I think, to an outsider ‘O.K., she’s in a stable relationship, she’s not a drug addict. She wears clothes, she wears underwear.’ ”

She shrugged. “There’s no facade,” she said. “I wish there was sometimes.”
Back onstage Mr. Scherr eased into an unhurried vamp, and Ms. Jones almost purred with pleasure. “I love slow music,” she declared.

Of course she does. She has thrived as a ballad singer, alternately celebrated for her finesse and dismissed as bland. Many listeners, she admits, consider her albums “background music.” On “Not Too Late” the instruments are still mostly unplugged, and the tempos stay moderate; its first single, “Thinking About You,” is a soul-flavored love song Ms. Jones had hesitated to record because it was “too pop.”

Yet her newer songs don’t always provide the comforts of her first two albums. The change is clear in the album’s first song, “Wish I Could.” It’s a gentle guitar waltz, and as it begins, the singer frets about how she can’t bear to go into an old favorite place “without you” — the kind of situation listeners might expect in a Norah Jones song. But then a girlfriend pulls her in, grieving that her man, a soldier, has been killed in the war. The song deepens from plaintiveness to irrevocable sorrow.

Ms. Jones wrote it, she said, while thinking about a soldier she dated soon after she arrived in New York City in 1999. She recently tried to find information on him, with no results. “I’m worried about him,” she said.

“Wish I Could” is followed by “Sinkin’ Soon,” a banjo-plinking, New Orleans-tinged shuffle with touches of Tom Waits and Kurt Weill. As Ms. Jones tinkles piano tremolos and allows herself a sultry rasp, it warns, “We drifted from the shore/With a captain who’s too proud to say/That he dropped the oar.” Later in the album comes “My Dear Country,” a song she wrote after the 2004 election: “Who knows, maybe the plans will change/Who knows, maybe he’s not deranged,” she sings.

“I’m not a very dark person,” Ms. Jones said. “The darkness on this album comes more from just being aware of what’s going on around us.”

Much of “Not Too Late” was recorded in the home studio at the loft Ms. Jones shares with Mr. Alexander. They met when she was looking for a bass player for a brunch gig singing jazz at the Washington Square Hotel, where she was also a waitress. Adam Levy, who’s still the guitarist in her band, gave her a list, “and I lucked out because I think the list was alphabetical,” Mr. Alexander said. He had just gotten a cellphone; Ms. Jones’s call was the first to come through.
The studio’s big windows survey the Lower East Side; there are guitars in neat racks overhead and two elegant antique pianos — a baby grand and an upright — among the keyboards. The doorway into the studio is flanked by vintage concert posters for members of Ms. Jones’s musical pantheon: Duke Ellington, Hank Williams, Ray Charles and Patsy Cline.
Jazz, country and soul were all folded into Ms. Jones’s 2002 debut album, “Come Away With Me.” In a pop universe full of whiz-bang electronic bombast and frantic vocal acrobatics, she arrived like an emissary from some subtler dimension. She sang modestly, with discreet jazz syncopations, accompanied by a few hand-played instruments.

“It’s not that things are left out very carefully,” she said. “It’s just that we never thought about putting them in.” The songs, most of them written by her band members, were filled with wistful longing and, tucked behind it, the serene assurance that she’d never have to shout for attention. Or so it seemed. Actually, in three years singing on the New York club circuit, Ms. Jones had tried showier styles and decided she couldn’t pull them off. “I sang in some bad blues band for a while, and I heard a recording of myself,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘God, I’m oversinging, and I don’t sound like Aretha Franklin, so I shouldn’t try.’ And I think I scaled back a little bit more than maybe I meant to.”

MS. JONES has a musical pedigree; her father is the sitar master Ravi Shankar. Norah’s mother, Sue Jones, and Mr. Shankar broke up soon after Norah was born, and Norah was raised in Texas, in touch with Mr. Shankar but not close to him. “I didn’t really grow up with much of a relationship with him,” she said. “Now that we’re in a good place, I think: ‘Wow, he’s 86. I should ask him all these questions about music.’ I was just interested in having a dad for a long time, and I was almost annoyed that he was a famous musician. And now I’m like: ‘Oh, my God, John Coltrane came to him for a lesson. Forget George Harrison. I want to know about his afternoon with John Coltrane.’ ”

Drawn to jazz, she majored in piano at the pioneering jazz studies department of the University of North Texas before dropping out and heading to New York City. “I used to be a jazz snob, believe it or not,” she said. “I sort of turned my nose up at anything more commercial.”
She soaked up music theory and developed a limpid touch on piano, though not the sheer velocity of musicians she admires. “I’m not lazy, but I’ve never been a lock-myself-in-the-practice-room kind of girl,” she said. “I don’t have chops. I can’t play fast.”
In New York she found herself at the intersection of two social and musical scenes: jazz musicians, who were fond of musical complexities and structural experiments, and singer-songwriters, aiming for concision and elegance. She regained respect for the basic three-chord songs of country, soul and folk.

“I’m admitting it: I don’t make jazz really anymore, but I’m very heavily influenced by it,” she said. “I had to reprogram myself. That’s why I started writing more on guitar in the beginning, because I only knew three chords, and it was easier, it just made my life simpler. And on the piano it took me a long time to realize I could play a triad” — an unembellished major or minor chord — “and it doesn’t have to sound really simple. I finally learned how to do it.”
Her reticence became her gift. Although “Come Away With Me” wasn’t what Top 20 radio stations defined as pop, it caught on almost by word of mouth and kept selling, eventually reaching 10 million copies in the United States alone, ratified by an armload of Grammy awards. Her slightly more upbeat 2004 sequel, “Feels Like Home,” has sold four million copies in the United States, and last year Ms. Jones released an album with her casual, countryish side project, the Little Willies (named after another hero, Willie Nelson). Popularity brought a backlash: from jazz aficionados grumbling that Ms. Jones’s pop didn’t belong on the hallowed Blue Note label, from rock and pop listeners who found her music too tame, and from people who grew tired of hearing her albums everywhere as, yes, background music.

“I have a real big fear of being overexposed,” she said. “On the first record I was everywhere and it was like the worst time in my life.”
She was grateful for success, she quickly noted. “I’m appreciative of everything. But it was the most unhappy time for me.”

“I’m very much not like my records in person,” she added. “They expect me to be very girly, very romantic, very melancholy, and I’m not any of those things. So it’s funny. I don’t know where this side of me came from, this ballad-loving, quiet, simplistic, all that stuff. That’s very much from me, and I’m not sure where I got that or why I held onto it so tightly.”
She knows her albums can be lullabies. “People always tell me how: ‘Oh, my god, my son listens to your album every night to go to sleep. He went to summer camp last summer, and he couldn’t sleep, so I had to give him his Norah Jones album.’ I’m like: ‘Oh, that’s so sweet. Thank you.’ I put people to sleep. Putting people to sleep, one child at a time.” She laughed.

“It’s funny, with every album, I’m like: ‘Oh, this is way different from my last album. This is so much not as mellow.’ And then I’ll listen to it and I’m like, ‘Wow, this song’s slow.’ ”
Ms. Jones wrote only a few songs on each of her first two albums. (Her Grammy-winning hit, “Don’t Know Why,” was by Jesse Harris, who’s part of her studio band.) As she was gearing up for her third album, she said, “I was kind of depressed that I hadn’t been creative in that way.” So despite the complications of life on the road, she decided: “I’ve got to figure out how to just do this. This is my life now.”

After the tour, Mr. Alexander left her alone for a month while he produced an album for Amos Lee. “I was staying up late by myself in the studio playing, which is something I never do when he’s home,” she said. “We had been together for five years, and it was the first time we’d spent that kind of time apart, where I was the one alone and not busy.”

What came out, along with political reflections, were songs about loneliness and breakups. “It’s my journal, not my diary,” she said. “We realized we’re in a good relationship. We don’t want to cause turmoil just for a good song, so we’ll just have to get it from other people. I did have some good friends who were going through a pretty rough breakup at the time. And I definitely looked towards that for a lot of these songs. I finally started looking outside myself for ideas.”

A sense of mortality flickers through the album’s apolitical songs. In “The Sun Doesn’t Like You,” she sketches a love song in a stark prison landscape, complete with dogs and razor wire; “Someday we all have to die,” she reflects. Amid eerie, Minimalistic plinking and an aura of guitar feedback, “Not My Friend” starts as a plaint and turns far more sinister: “When I back away,” she sings, “I’m gonna keep the handle of your gun in sight.” Even “Little Room,” a droll, countryish bounce about a tiny apartment from her early days in New York City, notes that with the bars on the windows, “If there were a fire we’d burn up for sure.”

The music on “Not Too Late” stays poised; its edge is turned inward. “I know that to some people it might sound the same: ‘Oh, it’s quiet, therefore it’s the same,’ ” Ms. Jones said. “But I don’t mind being misunderstood anymore, that’s the thing. I realize that it doesn’t matter if people don’t understand me or what something means to me. If it doesn’t translate then that’s O.K., I don’t care anymore.

“If people enjoy the music, great. And if they don’t like it, and they think it’s boring, fine. They don’t get it. But it doesn’t matter anymore if I’m completely understood. Because you’re not going to be. And you’re never going to please everybody, so you shouldn’t try.”
A few nights later Ms. Jones had a formal performance: a Webster Hall show for television cameras and an audience of friends, the news media and music-business contacts. At the sound check she was a working musician again, making last-minute adjustments to details: deciding, for instance, that one song needed the quiet rustle of a shaker instead of brushes on a snare drum. She started the concert not with a ballad, but with the sardonic barrelhouse strut of “Sinkin’ Soon.” After the applause she smiled knowingly. “I promise we’ll play some quiet slow songs,” she said. “Eventually.”
SUCH A GOOD MOVIE

CHILDREN OF MEN

As it’s January now, with pre-Oscar buzz in full swing, so I’ll take this opportunity to make a prediction: Children of Men will not win any Academy Awards. Here’s another prediction: Oscars or no, this movie will eventually be recognized as a masterpiece. The best film of the year and one of the finest of the decade, Children of Men faces an unfortunate demise at the box-office. Critics have tried to get the word out, but considering the lousy marketing campaign and tepid opening-weekend returns, odds are that Universal Studios will chalk up Children of Men as a big-budget disappointment. The film opens with a typical morning for Theo Faron (Clive Owen): a cup of coffee, a shot of whiskey, and a terrorist bombing. Theo lives in London of 2027, where squalid camps house illegal immigrants, toxic pollution clouds the air, the government sanctions suicide pills (named “Quietus,” a nod to Hamlet), and no child has been born in two decades. When 18-year-old “Baby Diego” (the youngest person in the world) dies, all of London grieves, mourning the slow death of the entire human race. “He was a wanker,” says Theo. “Yes,” counters his hippie friend Jasper (Michael Caine), “but he was the world’s youngest wanker.” Within a hundred years, mankind will be extinct. Like nearly everyone else on Earth, Theo has lost all hope. More than a cynic, the man is a misanthrope, seemingly without the possibility of redemption. That is, until Julian (Julianne Moore), his ex-lover, comes back into his life. Julian leads the Fishes, a revolutionary group blamed for terrorist bombings (the Fishes claim Britain’s authoritarian government is responsible, but to its credit, the film never clarifies the matter). Julian asks Theo to protect a poor refugee girl, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey). The girl, as it turns out, is pregnant; her baby represents the last beacon of hope for the human race—and for Theo.

Director Alfonso Cuarón has already produced both a near-masterpiece (2001’s acute Y tu mamá también) and a fine studio picture (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the only Potter film that retains the novels’ sense of wonder and darkness), but even these successes fail to prepare one for Children of Men. The film rapidly grows in scale, becoming a road movie, an action flick, and finally, a war picture. In two particularly note-worthy sequences, an ingeniously staged ambush and a climactic battle, the director—astonishingly—uses a single take. We’ve seen this trick before, most famously in the opening of Welles’ Touch of Evil and the nightclub sequence in Scorsese’s Goodfellas. But the extended takes in Children of Men accomplish something very different. Rather than heightening artifice, these shots bring us directly to the battlefield, dodging bullets and stepping over bodies. Critics claim that Cuarón never gives us enough information about this world and its various warring factions, but repeat viewings confirmed my initial suspicions; this film is so visually (and aurally) dense that it requires a second, and in my case, even a third look. But repeat viewings aren’t necessary to convince the viewer that this future could exist—it’s the world we’re making for ourselves every day (the movie is replete with allusions to Guantanamo, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the Falklands, homeland security, terror alerts, and much more). Cuarón explores massively ambitious themes not through dialogue, nor even through narrative, but through a series of metaphorically rich visual motifs that encompass political, biblical, and mythic dimensions. With this remarkably sophisticated storytelling, the big picture evolves out of accumulated texture and detail. All this ambition would falter were it not for Clive Owen, whose careful performance provides the human spine that a film of this scope so sorely needs (a spine that Steven Spielberg’s recent, painfully uneven work in this genre lacks). Cuarón has a deep, tender belief in people, and the warmth and humor of Children of Men come from the tiny moments we share with these characters. Cuarón is more interested in Jasper’s strawberry-flavored joints, Julian’s ping-pong balls, and Theo’s feet than he is in the global, political, and scientific implications of infertility. Children of Men isn’t really an action movie, a sci-fi picture, or a political allegory, but a humanist epic. Its hero never picks up a gun, never kills a villain, and his moment of change—from despair to hopefulness—doesn’t come amid explosions or pyrotechnics, but with the birth of a child: just as he’s about to perform the impromptu delivery that will give hope to the human race, he sanitizes his hands with the scotch he’d once used to shut out the world.

THIS ONE'S OPTIMISTIC; THIS ONE'S GONE TO MARKET

You Are What You Expect

Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Put so starkly, the question has a fatuous ring. Unless you are in the grip of a bipolar disorder, you are probably optimistic about some things and pessimistic about others. Optimism tends to reign when people are imagining how their own plans will turn out. Research shows that we systematically exaggerate our chances of success, believing ourselves to be more competent and more in control than we actually are. Some 80 percent of drivers, for example, think they are better at the wheel than the typical motorist and thus less likely to have an accident. We live in a Lake Woebegon of the mind, it seems, where all the children are above average. Such “optimism bias,” as psychologists have labeled it, is hardly confined to our personal lives. In fact, as Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and Jonathan Renshon argue in the current issue of Foreign Policy, it may help explain why hawkishness so often prevails at the national level. Wasn’t the Iraq war expected by proponents to be “fairly easy” (John McCain) or “a cakewalk” (Kenneth Adelman)?

But when it comes to the still bigger picture — the fate of civilization, of the planet, of the cosmos — pessimism has historically been the rule. A sense that things are heading downhill is common to nearly every culture, as Arthur Herman observes in “The Idea of Decline in Western History.” The golden age always lies in the past, never in the future. It’s not hard to find a psychological explanation for this big-picture gloominess. As we age, we become aware of our powers diminishing; we dwell on the happy episodes from our past and forget the wretched ones; moving toward the grave, we are consumed by nostalgia and foreboding. What could be more natural than to project this mixture of attitudes onto history at large?

The very idea of progress, a novelty of the Enlightenment that has been in fashion only fitfully since, can grow wearisome. “Progress might have been all right once,” Ogden Nash said, “but it has gone on too long.”

You might think scientists would be the optimistic exception here. Science, after all, furnishes the model for progress, based as it is on the gradual and irreversible growth of knowledge. At the end of last year, Edge.org, an influential scientific salon, posed the questions “What are you optimistic about? Why?” to a wide range of thinkers. Some 160 responses have now been posted at the Web site. As you might expect, there is a certain amount of agenda-battling, and more than a whiff of optimism bias. A mathematician is optimistic that we will finally get mathematics education right; a psychiatrist is optimistic that we will find more effective drugs to block pessimism (although he is pessimistic that we will use them wisely). But when the scientific thinkers look beyond their own specializations to the big picture, they continue to find cause for cheer — foreseeing an end to war, for example, or the simultaneous solution of our global-warming and energy problems. The most general grounds for optimism offered by these thinkers, though, is that big-picture pessimism so often proves to be unfounded. The perennial belief that our best days are behind us is, it seems, perennially wrong.

Such reflections may or may not ease our tendency toward global pessimism. But what about our contrary tendency to be optimistic — indeed, excessively so — in our local outlook? Is that something we should, in the interests of cold reason, try to disabuse ourselves of? Optimism bias no doubt causes a good deal of mischief, leading us to underestimate the time and trouble of the projects we undertake. But the mere fact that it is so widespread in our species suggests it might have some adaptive value. Perhaps if we calculated our odds in a more cleareyed way, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.

A couple of decades ago, the psychologist Shelley Taylor proposed that “positive illusions” like excessive optimism were critical to mental health. People who saw their abilities and chances realistically, she noted, tended to be in a state of depression. (Other psychologists, taking a closer look at the data, countered that depressives actually show more optimism bias than nondepressives: given the way things turn out for them, they are not pessimistic enough.) And there is new evidence that optimism may in some ways be self-fulfilling. In a recently published study, researchers in the Netherlands found that optimistic people — those who assented to statements like “I often feel that life is full of promises” — tend to live longer than pessimists. Perhaps, it has been speculated, optimism confers a survival advantage by helping people cope with adversity.

But pessimism still appears to have its advantages. Another recently published paper observes that over the last three decades, the people of Denmark have consistently scored higher on life-satisfaction than any other Western nation. Why? Because, say the authors, the Danes are perennial pessimists, always reporting low expectations for the year to come. They then find themselves pleasantly surprised when things turn out rather better than expected.
Americans, too, are lowering their expectations, at least in one respect. According to the Census Bureau’s 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, most college freshmen in 1970 said their primary goal was to develop a meaningful life philosophy. In 2005, by contrast, most freshmen said their primary goal was to be comfortably rich — a more modest one, it would seem, given the relative frequency of wealth and wisdom.

As for the minority still seeking a philosophy of life, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus came up with a formula nearly a century ago that remains the perfect blend of optimism and pessimism: Things are hopeless but not serious.

MOVIES

The Painted Veil
2006Director: John Curran
Cast: Edward Norton, Naomi Watts

there’s a scene in The Painted Veil in which you can watch a man think something over and change his mind. As Dr. Walter Fane, bacteriologist attached to England’s Colonial Office in 1920s Shanghai, actor Edward Norton delivers his most economical, resonant performance to date. As Fane and his wife Kitty (Naomi Watts) argue over her affair with Vice-Consul Charlie Townsend (Liev Schreiber), Kitty persuades him to consider that it’s unreasonable to blame her entirely when he’s insisted on seeing her as other than she is. In an unhurried beat, Norton’s wounded, rational, earnest doctor considers that. Suddenly unsure, he cocks his head, gazes downward, looks up again, then quietly agrees she’s right. The acting is wonderfully deft, and forecasts much of what happens between these mismatched two when they travel far inland to the city of Mei-tan-fu during a cholera epidemic and a wave of anti-Western anger.

Based on W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel of the same name, The Painted Veil has been an ensemble effort from start to finish. In the saga’s bare bones version, screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) and producer Sara Collecton (Showtime’s “Dexter”) acquired rights and began adapting Maugham’s book eleven years ago. In 1999 they recruited Norton, already a student of China, who worked on the script and eventually played Fane. He brought on Watts. In early 2005, she landed director John Curran (We Don’t Live Here Anymore), an ex-pat New Yorker who started making movies in Australia in 1990. Curran anchored the on-screen story’s anti-Western political unrest, left vague in the novel, to British troops’ actual massacre of Chinese demonstrators in Shanghai in May 1925.

Shot on location in Shanghai, in southern Guangxi Province’s green hills along the Li River, and on Beijing sound stages, The Painted Veil is the first Western film co-produced with the Chinese Film Bureau, with a largely Chinese crew. The film radically alters the story’s structure, quickly defining this as much cultural encounter as personal drama. Instead of opening with Kitty’s “startled cry” within her shuttered bedroom—outside, Walter has just turned the locked door’s knob while her lover’s inside with her—the film strands Walter and Kitty in a long shot at a rainy crossroads en route to Mei-tan-fu, helpless without porters, exchanging uncomprehending stares with local workers digging in the muddy hillside.

The film adds anti-British gangs who chase Kitty (and teach Walter that he cares to protect her), and expands the figure of Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) who must juggle warlords, Englishmen, local superstition, and cholera. Gone is the novel’s protracted ending—another melodramatic encounter with an even more caddish Charlie, an ocean voyage in which China becomes “unreal,” Kitty’s mother’s death, and Kitty’s departure for the Bahamas with her father, where she imagines having a daughter she’ll raise to be independent. The film cuts all this away, assuming today’s audience can immediately envision these characters whole and viable in this setting. It provides Kitty with a five-year-old son in the London epilogue, relieves her of the novel’s highly compromising friendship with Charlie’s wife, and makes China a living presence instead of a backdrop by turns ornamental and “decadent, dirty, and unspeakable.”
Edward Norton has said the producing ensemble sought to “liberate” Walter and Kitty’s story from the novel’s limitations. In the film’s newly opened space, Walter and Kitty arguably grow into love before he dies; in the novel, Kitty emphatically never comes to love him—and arguably couldn’t.

What core remains of Maugham’s novel? First, a string of gem-bright exchanges whose dialogue the screenplay lifts almost verbatim from Maugham’s pages. What spoken words pass between Kitty and Walter, Kitty and Charlie, Kitty and Waddington the Customs officer, and Kitty and the French convent’s Mother Superior play as convincingly or better on-screen as on the page. Second, the seemingly blasé Waddington (Toby Jones) and the patrician Mother Superior (several double takes reveal that it’s Diana Rigg of Avengers fame) are characters whose alliance is provocative rather than merely eccentric—and inspired casting. Finally, the filmmakers preserve Maugham’s final judgment of Charlie Townsend as “unimportant” in Kitty’s eyes. If anything, the film strengthens this assessment by having Kitty use it as a cooler, reassuring word to her son as the story closes instead of the hot epithet she throws at Charlie. All along Kitty has pleaded that, compared with such misery surrounding them, her sins are surely minor though the pain she has caused Walter is not. By the film’s end, she’s earned that position. The Painted Veil also succeeds because its makers overcome several obvious temptations to excess that might doom a hastier project. The film refrains from making Kitty into Eleanor Roosevelt. Her transformation is right-sized—she humbles herself, tries to help the nuns and the orphans because she feels bored and useless, and she gets some unexpected joy for her efforts. Metaphorically, we could say the film never confuses her tinny piano ditties for the orphans with the score’s languid, lavish solos by pianist Lang Lang. This allows Walter and Kitty a brief romantic kindling that’s plausible instead of sentimental. The filmmakers wisely refrain from a voice-over narration by Kitty drawn from Maugham’s rendering of her inner thoughts. What the novel’s Kitty tells herself or imagines she would like to tell others is sometimes clueless, shallow, unbecoming, and frankly racist. Finally, Curran and company refrain from the epic effect. The Painted Veil does not try to be, say, Lawrence of Arabia. This means when a wife asks her husband to think about something, he can pay attention, and we can pay attention to him. People will watch this more muted film a long time.

1.19.2007

SONGS OF THE DAY

Everybody's gotta learn sometime - Beck
Did I say? - Teenage Fanclub
Knockin' on heaven's door - Bob Dylan
Hey Joe - Jimi Hendrix
Steady as she goes - Raconteurs
Dashboard - Modest Mouse

STYLUS' FAVOURITE BOB DYLAN HARMONICA SOLOS

Got to be an important person to be in here honey
Got to have done some evil deeds
Got to have your own harem when you come in the door
Got to play your harp ‘til your lips bleed


We should all be grateful that the early pairing of Dylan’s nasal, serrated voice with a harmonica was mandated by the folksinger idiom. Dylan’s abrasiveness obscures the pragmatic beauty of his best melodies, but the more fortunate tunes he rescues, harmonica swooping down like a superhero’s alter-ego. Prodded into action by the above lyric from “Sweetheart Like You” and the distant memory of a single note solo held in space for a limpid eternity, I leafed through the Dylan catalogue through a long night, spooked on the live Bootleg tracks by ambient audience noise and the sound of the corner of Dylan’s guitar bumping into the mic stand.

On many tracks, Dylan’s harp is little more than an interlude, a respite from the lyrical barrage. But on the songs below, the harmonica sings with a gasping sweetness that sets Dylan’s gruffness in sharp relief. For a brief minute, and usually less, Dylan actually sings to us.

10. “Baby Please Don’t Go” (No Direction Home outtakes)
Huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf, Dylan casts the harmonica as the hellhound on his trail, ending with a long-drawn wail that becomes a leitmotif in Dylan’s solos. Like his singing, Dylan’s playing is more excitable and eager than it is musically deft, but the sheer energy of it all wouldn’t be matched ‘til the rock-star swaggering of Dylan’s 1974 tour with The Band.

09. “On the Road Again” (Bringing It All Back Home)
Each verse compounds sardonic exasperation with snotty, adolescent mystification (“I ask for something to eat, I’m hungry as a hog / So I get brown rice, seaweed, and a dirty hide dog”), until Dylan can say nothing except with his harmonica, which blows a snide, chuckling refrain. Dylan later fathered a long line of pissy diatribes (see “Idiot Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone”) but none deploy his sneering harmonica to such effect.

08. “I Shall Be Free” (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)
Before the Newport brouhaha, Dylan didn’t so much take an axe to his carefully constructed folksinger persona as poke it, prod it, and rearrange it until he resembled a Picasso vision of folk, eyes sliding around his head and a smile no one knew what to do with. The harmonica on “I Shall Be Free” mines the same seam: fundamentally it’s a straightforward accompaniment to a simple folksong, only its grown legs and a smile, showing up in odd places, getting odd looks, and putting people off their conversations. And when Dylan goes “Ooohoohooh” in mid-solo, the smile winds up on your face too.

07. “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” (The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3).
Dylan gilds his riff on anti-communism with a juicy nugget of pure, blissful paranoid certainty, an eminently whistleable little theme that mixes equal parts heartland naiveté and all-American patriotism. It’s one of the best examples of harmonica-as-character in a Dylan narrative: Dylan’s fearful but undaunted sleuth merges with the harmonica as Dylan spits out codas between jaunty blasts of the coda (“It was the mailman… he punched me out…”).

06. “Just Like a Woman” (Blonde on Blonde)
Blonde on Blonde was a new kind of album, and Dylan stepped up his harp playing to match, allowing the melody to condense around a single solo, rather than treating the instrument as a means of catching his breath between verses. The introduction is languid and bittersweet, modeling Dylan’s most soulful tune like a skinny French woman on a plank. But it’s in the closing bars that Dylan lets himself really show off, unleashing a solo both plaintive and sublime, recapitulating not just the song’s melody, but its air of breezy, bright heartbreak.

05. “Blowin’ in the Wind” (No Direction Home bootlegs)
The most explicit version of the inherent comparison between Dylan’s reedy, thin voice and the harmonica, this live take sees Dylan lend his harp verses more generously than he ever did Baez or anyone else. He gives us the melody ostinato, defiantly sweet, sweetly defiant, and rendered with greater clarity and sensitivity than his blunt, splintered-wood phrasing will permit.

04. “To Ramona” (“Halloween” 1964 Bootleg Vol. 6)
“Ramona” is a relatively minor song: funereal, even plodding. Which only makes the contrast with the glorious, perfect solo lying in wait two-thirds of the way through all the more unwonted and astonishing. Dylan tips his hand slightly with a strident four bar introduction, but then sets to work on the words with the attention to detail of a man who had just written “Gates of Eden.” Then he picks up the melody, makes torrid, flagrant love to it for a verse, and packs the song away like a workman closing a toolbox.

03. “Tangled Up in Blue” (Blood on the Tracks)
Nary a puff at the harmonica until the last 40 seconds of one of his greatest songs, when Dylan pours all the bitterness and homeless longing of his divorce into a wordless, hauntingly joyful dirge, beautiful enough to draw tears, but over before its barely begun. The solo abandons the melody entirely, reaching outwards further and further, ending too soon to offer anything but a hint of a vision of a future beyond the omnipresent ending.

02. “Mr. Tambourine Man” (“Royal Albert Hall” 1966 Bootleg Vol. 4)
Dylan never cut loose more than this, the prospect of setting his cutthroat band on the resentful English seeping through the joints of his acoustic set. Beating at the limits of the song, wandering dangerously close to a sort of Steve Vai approach to the harp, manufacturing rhythm and throwing everything within reach at the wall, the song features, if not necessarily the best harp solo, two of the most extraordinary, virtuoso Dylan moments on record.

01. “Every Grain of Sand” (Shot of Love)
Dylan’s Christian-era sermonizing is, barring the more apocalyptic fire-and-brimstone material, mostly a drag. “Every Grain of Sand” is no exception. It has a pretty, if trite, lyrical conceit, but its harp solo redeems this all-but damned song—stultified, doctrinal, sleepily lacking any of the fire found elsewhere on the evangelical Dylan. Liquid, iridescent, Dylan upstages himself so badly that it’s a serious drag when he begins singing again. But like a benevolent god, Dylan lets us have a second bite at the cherry before letting the song exhaust its maudlin journey.

1.17.2007

ICE ICE BABY

A Louisiana woman displaced by Hurricane Katrina gave birth Tuesday to a son whose frozen embryo was rescued from a flooded New Orleans hospital during the 2005 storm. How long do frozen embryos last?

For decades, if you store them the right way. Embryos can remain on ice pretty much indefinitely; one baby was born after being frozen for 13 years. To get that kind of shelf-life, an embryo must be carefully sealed inside a tank filled with liquid nitrogen and monitored to keep it at least 31 degrees Farenheit below zero.

The tanks are usually free-standing and do not have to be refrigerated because the liquid nitrogen inside keeps the contents frozen at about minus 320 degrees. Once all of the nitrogen has turned to gas and seeped out of the tank, the temperature drops dramatically within 24 hours. To keep the embryo nice and cold, the liquid nitrogen must be checked and refreshed at least weekly. (Some tanks refuel automatically.) A sealed, undamaged tank can stay at a suitable temperature for a couple of months before being restocked with fresh nitrogen.

Freezing an embryo (embryo cryopreservation) takes a few hours and involves bathing an embryo (usually three or five days after fertilization) in a cryoprotectant solution like sucrose or propylene glycol. The solution draws moisture out of the embryo to prevent ice crystals from forming inside and destroying it. The embryo and solution are then transferred to a thin vial or straw, which is placed in a computerized freezer and taken from room temperature to around minus 18 degrees.

Next, a lab technician begins to "seed the freezing process," which involves touching a cold object to the straws or vials so that the first ice crystals form in the surrounding solution, and not inside the cell. (There are newer methods of freezing embryos that bypass the seeding phase.) Then the temperature of the embryo is gradually reduced by about half a degree per minute until it reaches somewhere between minus 31 to minus 130 degrees. It's then safe to plunge the vial containing the embryo into the liquid nitrogen solution for storage.

Once the mother's uterus is ready to have the embryo implanted, thawing it takes around an hour. The technician soaks the embryo in liquids that gradually wash away the cryoprotectant solution. Once the embryo is thawed to room temperature, it needs to be placed in an incubator to keep it at 98.6 degrees so it can live until implantation. It can last a day or more in this state.

MUSIC



She says wake up, it's no use pretending
I'll keep stealing, breathing her
Birds are leaving over autumn's ending
One of us will die inside these arms
Eyes wide open
Naked as we came
One will spread our
Ashes round the yard

She says if I leave before you darling
Don't you waste me in the ground
I lay smiling like our sleeping children
One of us will die inside these arms
Eyes wide open
Naked as we came
One will spread our
Ashes round the yard

FAMILY

From 83 COTTINGHAM

Finleys, 2006

1.15.2007

THE DEAL HAS GONE DOWN

In the still of the night, in the world's ancient light
Where wisdom grows up in strife
My bewildered brain, toils in vain
Through the darkness on the pathways of life
Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air
Tomorrow keeps turning around
We live and we die, we know not why
But I'll be with you when the deal goes down

We eat and we drink, we feel and we think
Far down the street we stray
I laugh and I cry and I'm haunted by
Things I never meant nor wished to say
The midnight rain follows the train
We all wear the same thorny crown
Soul to soul, our shadows roll
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

Well, the moon gives light and it shines by night
When I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O'r the road we're bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

Well, I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they're not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

1.12.2007

FOOTBALL PREDICTIONS

Indianapolis at Baltimore -- Billick get closer to the Super Bowl. 27-24
Philadelphia at New Orleans -- Classy till the end, Philly loses
Seattle at Chicago --Grossman plays the whole game. Bears win 30-10
New England at San Diego -- Win or Lose, Todd Sauerbrun is going to party his ass off in San Diego. Pats Lose: 35-21

BUSHWHACKED

GEORGE BUSH has always been a gambler but this is his most audacious bet yet. Most Americans now believe that America has lost the war in Iraq. Only last month the Baker-Hamilton group, a bipartisan group of wise men (and one wise woman) told Congress that the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating”. It recommended a managed withdrawal, dangling the prospect of the bulk of America's combat troops pulling out in early 2008. This week Mr Bush rejected that advice. He intends to defy world opinion, American opinion, congressional opinion, much military opinion and even the advice of many members of his own Republican Party by reinforcing rather than reducing America's effort in Iraq. Some will call this reckless. Some will say the president is in denial. We don't admire Mr Bush, but on this we think he is right.

It's not just about “surge”
Mr Bush is investing much hope in a plan, known as “the surge”, to secure the mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhoods of Baghdad by injecting “more than 20,000” additional American troops on top of the 130,000 or so already in the country. His hope is that by creating an island of calm in the capital, the Americans will be able to arrest the slide into civil war and give Iraq's politicians the breathing room they need in order to settle their differences in an atmosphere of reduced violence. It is not just a military plan, says Mr Bush: it includes a dose of new economic help focused on job creation and another political push designed to help Sunnis, Shias and Kurds agree on how to share oil revenues and governmental power under the new constitution they voted for in October 2005.

It is by no means certain that the surge will succeed. The Americans have tried before to impose order on Baghdad, only for violence to flare again as soon as the troops move on (see article). Those who say this is too little, too late, may be proved right. Sectarian hatreds have deepened since that referendum of 2005, as the wildly differing reactions of Shias and Sunnis to the hanging of Saddam Hussein demonstrated. Even with Iraqi helpers, American soldiers may not be welcomed in Baghdad's neighbourhoods now that Iraqis have turned for protection to their local militias. According to one survey last September, 61% of Iraqis approve of attacking coalition forces. It may be that by barging into Baghdad's neighbourhoods, and staying there this time, the Americans will merely stoke resistance and take (and inflict) more casualties.

In short, the surge may fail. But the surge is not the most significant part of Mr Bush's speech of January 10th. If this particular plan fails, a new one will be formulated. Far more significant is the strategic message that in spite of the Baker-Hamilton report, and notwithstanding the growing pressure from public opinion and a Democrat-controlled Congress, this president will not in his remaining two years concede defeat and abandon Iraq to its fate. And this, whether it is motivated by obstinacy, denial or a sober calculation of the strategic stakes in Iraq, is a good thing.

How so? Advocates of quitting say that after losing more than 3,000 soldiers and spending more than $300 billion America has already failed and should therefore depart. But only half of this proposition is correct. It is true that America has failed. It has failed to deliver Iraq smoothly from dictatorship to democracy. Even if the situation were eventually to improve, the country that suffered so much under Saddam will remain scarred for generations by the mistakes America made after the invasion of 2003, and the loss of life they caused.

It does not, however, follow that America should go now. For as even the Baker-Hamilton report said, a premature departure would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and further deterioration. Without the Americans to protect the elected government and keep outside powers at bay, the prospect is for full-scale civil war and the violent intervention of Iraq's neighbours. From afar it may look as if Iraq could not fall any lower. But it easily could.

One objection to the argument that conditions would get even worse if America left is that conditions have got worse anyway. Certainly, the United States should not keep an army in Iraq just to glower at Iran and protect Iraq's perpetually squabbling politicians. Those Iraqis who welcomed the invasion—and most did—expected the Americans to depart swiftly. The longer they stay, the more they are resented and the greater the motivation of Iraqis to attack them. The point is to use America's necessarily temporary presence to create the conditions in which it becomes safer for it to depart.

Easy to say. America has built an Iraqi army, but its loyalties are divided. It has organised elections, but the politicians refuse to make the necessary compromises across sectarian lines. The Baker-Hamilton group reckoned that announcing an early departure would concentrate Iraqi political minds. But this risked turning the Americans in Iraq into lame ducks, devoid of influence as they packed to leave. The merit of surging is that this should strengthen America's still considerable influence and help it to force the Shias and Kurds to share their power (and oil) with the Sunni minority. The compliance of Iraq's leaders is crucial. If they still refuse to share power, civil war will continue and it will be time for America to give up.

Redefining success
After everything that has gone so wrong, it would be foolish to argue that Mr Bush's plan is certain of success. Even if it does succeed, this would not be “victory” in any normal sense. Iraq is likely to be violent and unstable for years to come. Contrary to what Mr Bush said this week, the dream of turning it into a democratic model for other Arabs has died.

It is a characteristic of democracies to aim high and lose patience quickly when success is elusive. The people of the United States thought they were ridding the world of a dictator who was building an atomic bomb. They hoped to be greeted as liberators, not invaders. More than the cost in soldiers' lives and squandered dollars, it is the feeling that they are doing no good that has turned them against this war. Instead of a high-minded victory, they have witnessed a debacle.

And yet there is much that America can still try to do to mitigate the dimensions of the debacle. At one end of the spectrum of bad consequences is a failed state, fought over by neighbours, breeding terrorism in the oil-rich centre of the Middle East. Another possibility is partition, of the sort that resulted in massive death and displacement during the independence struggles of India and Israel. Yet another is an Iraq in thrall to a nuclear-arming Iran that is increasingly hostile to Western friends and interests in the Middle East.

For its own sake, as well as for the sake of Iraqis, the United States should reflect hard before accepting any of those possible futures. For the present, Iraq still has an elected government that claims to want what America wants: security for all of Iraq's people and a power-sharing agreement that prevents the place from spinning apart or falling under the control of any neighbour. The job of holding it together remains daunting, but the Americans in Iraq have many resources, from the power of the gun to the power of the purse. The one they are running shortest of is support back home. For all his flaws, the lonely Mr Bush is right to resume the charge.
ECONOMIST.com

ESSENTIAL SONGS OF JAMES BROWN

"Please, Please, Please" (1956)
James Brown was blowing the mike out from the first note of his first single. As raw as a begging suitor's scraped knees, this descendant of the Orioles' "Baby Please Don't Go" set the pattern for JB's early records: wailing, sweating and growling over slow-rolling rhythm & blues. He's howled it at almost every show for fifty years.

"Think" (1960)
A cover of a 1957 hit by the "5" Royales that cranked up the tempo, mangled the lyrics, shoved Nat Kendrick's relentless drumming right up front, threw in a lacerating sax solo by bandleader J.C. Davis and effectively announced that the old order could pack it in, because R&B had a new boss.

"Lost Someone (Live at the Apollo version)" (recorded 1962, released 1963)
Live at the Apollo was recorded in Harlem during the Cuban missile crisis, at the James Brown revue's twenty-fourth show of the week. It made him a star, and its core is this astonishing eleven-minute meltdown: a sliver of a ballad that Brown turns into an epic of sexual despair.

"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" (1965)
And, all of a sudden, there was funk: 126 seconds of clipped, spare, unfiltered blammo; a nine-piece horn section whose only job is to smack you in the face every few seconds; and a brand-new beat. It was rammed onto tape in under an hour en route to yet another show.

"Cold Sweat" (1967)
Barely even a song ­ just insanely syncopated rhythms ricocheting all over the place, some curlicues and slashes from tenor saxophonist Maceo Parker, a monolithic drum break by Clyde Stubblefield and James Brown singing so hard his voice turns into a percussion instrument. Half the R&B bands in America spent the next four years trying to catch up to this two-part single.

"Say It Loud ­ I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968)
In 1968, the hyperproductive Brown released seven albums and fourteen singles, but the biggest cultural impact came from this stomping civil-rights anthem. (Those kids chanting the chorus? Mostly white and Asian.)

"Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing" (recorded 1970, released 1972)
He'd cut an earlier, odder version of "Talkin' Loud" in 1970 with an acid-rock band, but this swaggering jam was the hit ­ you can hear Brown yelling to engineer Ron Lenhoff to keep recording while he rewrites the song mid-take. This lineup, featuring teenage bass wizard Bootsy Collins, lasted only a year, producing a string of hits including "Sex Machine" and "Super Bad."

"Doing It to Death" (1973)
Officially released as "Doing It to Death," by Fred Wesley and the JB's, this Number One R&B hit is universally remembered as "Gonna Have a Funky Good Time," by James Brown, who still opens his shows with it. Trombonist and bandleader Wesley gets the first solo, followed by returning prodigal saxophonist Maceo Parker.

"The Payback" (recorded 1973, released 1974)
Brown's son Teddy was killed in a 1973 car accident; a grieving JB, with the IRS breathing down his neck, rebounded with his darkest, angriest single, a hoarse threat of revenge that sold a million copies and played off his new nickname, "the Godfather of Soul." Jimmy Nolen's sinister guitar riff has powered everything from En Vogue's "My Lovin' " to Massive Attack's "Protection."

24

Bombers Strike, and America Is in Turmoil. It’s Just Another Day for Jack Bauer.
It’s morning again on “24,” and Day 6 is looking bleak. Among other things, teams of suicide bombers are blowing up buses and subway cars all across the United States.

Every new season of this Fox thriller is another twist of a kaleidoscope: the same pieces — terrorists; counterterrorists (and, almost inevitably, a mole); an innocent suburban family; and the president, his aides and his family — are tumbled together to form new patterns around the central figure of the special agent Jack Bauer.

And that makes the four-hour, two-part premiere on Sunday and Monday both comfortingly familiar and strangely gripping. Jack (Kiefer Sutherland), who last season was headed for a Chinese prison, is set free — at a very high cost — so he can once again come to his country’s rescue. Only this time, Jack is not asked to avert a looming terrorist attack; major cities are already under attack. The best he can do is try to prevent the disaster from getting even worse.

Even in its sixth season, “24” remains remarkably compelling. The ratings have steadily increased since the series began in 2001. The first four episodes suggest that this season could be one of the best thus far. The countdown clock — each episode takes place over one hour of a 24-hour period that ends at the conclusion of the season — is just a gimmick. And it’s not just that the action zigzags between at least three separate but interconnected story lines or that the characters are richly imagined. (Actually, many are cartoonish.)

“24” prolongs suspense with detours and surprise twists, and not just in the plot. The series also thrives on ideological red herrings — it leans Tom Clancy right, then suddenly will feint left and then back again.

Torture, presented with gusto and almost no moral compunction, is an increasingly popular way of gathering intelligence on “24.” If anything, the new season seems even more intent on hammering home the message that torture is necessary in the war against terror, and that despite what some experts claim, torture works.

At one point, Jack plunges a knife into a suspect’s shoulder, then relents, convinced that the man will not talk. A more ruthless associate disagrees and plunges the knife into the captive’s knee, ripping upward until the man screams out the location of his leader.

But “24” also jukes to the far side of political correctness and even left-wing paranoia. In two different seasons, the villains seeking to harm the United States are not Middle Eastern terrorists but conspirators directed by wealthy, privileged white Americans: in the second season, oil business tycoons tried to set off a Middle East war, and last year, Russian rebels turned out to be working in cahoots with a cabal of far-right government officials. By those standards, the current crop of Muslim terrorists intent on nuclear Armageddon could yet turn out to be a front for French-Canadian separatists.

Then again, the meddlesome naïveté of civil rights purists is also a leitmotif on “24.” In Season 4, a lawyer for Amnesty Global is dispatched by a terrorist mastermind to free a suspect before he can be interrogated, and the government lets the terrorist walk away. (Jack quit the Counter Terrorist Unit so he could break the suspect’s fingers as a private citizen and leave his bosses plausible deniability.)

This season, the president’s sister, Sandra (Regina King), is a lawyer for an Islamic American solidarity group so passionately intent on protecting her client’s constitutional rights that she shreds the personnel files to prevent the F.B.I. from seizing them — on principle.

Family ties have a way of knotting up on “24.” Jack’s daughter is not around this season, but his estranged father, Phillip Bauer (James Cromwell), makes his first appearance later in the series. Morris (Carlo Rota), the ex-husband of Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub), is back at C.T.U. as an analyst, while the boss of the unit, Bill Buchanan (James Morrison), turns out to be married to the national security adviser, Karen Hayes (Jayne Atkinson), whose name sounds like that of Karen Hughes, a former counselor to President Bush who is now the under secretary of state for public diplomacy.

The televisions at C.T.U. headquarters and the White House are tuned to Fox News. When a rival cable network is shown, the report is brief and labeled CNB.

For obvious reasons, the series is a favorite of the Bush administration and many Republicans. Last season, Senator John McCain made a cameo appearance (despite his objections to torture), and in June the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, held a panel discussion titled, “ ‘24’ and America’s Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter?” The guests included Ms. Rajskub, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security.

That kind of partisan favor is not surprising. Officials in the Clinton administration rubbed elbows with the cast of “The West Wing”; his former press secretary Dee Dee Myers worked as a consultant to the series.

Oval Office deliberation is one of the more colorful elements of “24,” more compelling than even the high-tech satellite snooping and interoffice sniping at C.T.U. headquarters.

It’s like a video game version of a John F. Kennedy School of Government model of presidential decision-making: presidents on “24” are confronted with split-second choices and horrifying moral dilemmas, like choosing to sacrifice the life of a visiting head of state to save American lives. The Cuban missile crisis lasted 13 days; on “24,” the life-or-death consequences of a decision become clear within three commercial breaks.

Last season proved a high point in White House intrigue and indecision. President Charles Logan (Greg Itzin) was irresistible as a caviling, craven commander in chief who manipulates his pill-addled first lady, Martha (Jean Smart).

The newly elected president, Wayne Palmer (D. B. Woodside), the brother of the assassinated president, David Palmer, is more resolute, but he too wavers between hawkish aides who want to put Muslim Americans in detention camps and those who fret about violating the Constitution. The debate can stiffen into a 10th-grade civics lesson.

When the F.B.I. director points out that in wartime, other presidents had suspended many protections, President Palmer snaps, “And Roosevelt interned over 200,000 Japanese-Americans in what most historians consider a shameful mistake.” The wording makes it sound as if the scriptwriters couldn’t agree on whether it was truly shameful, and threw in “most historians” as a palliative.

One thing never changes: the president and his aides keep making the critical blunder of not trusting Jack’s instincts.

This time, however, even Jack is hobbled by self-doubt. He returns to the field altered by his ordeal in China and uncertain whether he can handle the task. On his way to track down a terrorist, Jack suddenly stops, his shoulders slumped, his voice shaken. “I don’t know how to do this anymore,” he says.

His not very sympathetic companion gruffly replies, “You’ll remember.”