--City Journal
--Crain's NY Business
--Daily News
--The Forward
--Gotham Gazette
--Page Six
--New Yorker
--New York Observer
--New York Magazine
--New York Newsday
--New York Press
--New York Sun
--New York Times
--Wall Street Journal
--The Villager
--Village Voice
--Al Ahram
--The Atlantic
--Boston Globe
--Chronicle Higher Ed
--Chicago Tribune
--Columbia J. Review
--Commentary
--Dissent
--The Economist
--Financial Times
--The Guardian
--Jerusalem Post
--Kurdistan Observer
--LA Times
--London Review
--Me Three
--Mother Jones
--Le Monde Diplomatique
--N+1 Magazine
--National Review
--The Nation
--New Criterion
--New Humanist
--The New Republic
--NY Review of Books
--NYT Book Review
--Paris Review
--Reason
--San Fran Chronicle
--The Telegraph
--Three Penny Review
--Times Lit Supplement
--The Times of India
--Vanity Fair
--Washington Monthly
--Washington Post
--Weekly Standard
--Anne Applebaum
--Martin Amis
--James Bowman
--David Brooks
--E.J. Dionne
--Michael Dirda
--Maureen Dowd
--Thomas Friedman
--Robert George
--Malcolm Gladwell
--Christopher Hitchens
--David Horowitz
--William Shawcross
--Mark Steyn
--Andrew Sullivan
--Jonathan Yardley
--Leon Wieseltier
--James Wolcott
--Arts & Letters Daily
--Alibris
--Apple.com Trailers
--Armavirumque
--Back-In-Print
--Bibliomania
--Chud
--Curbed
--Drudge Report
--Sci Tech Daily
--Gawker
--Gothamist
--IMDB
--InstaPundit
--Media Bistro
--Michael Totten
--Nerve
--New Yorkish
--The Onion
--Plagiarist
--Plastic
--Popfactor
--Savage Love
--Slate
--The Smoking Gun
--Spike Magazine
--Wonkette
--Whatevs
--WSJ Opinion Journal
BOOKS:

-- The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}

-- Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}

-- The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}

-- The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}

-- Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven {A sorely forgotten modern classic. Leven has since swapped the galley for the camera, directing such keepers as Don Juan Demarco and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Satan has relapsed.}

-- Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}

-- Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}

-- Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}

-- Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}

-- The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, by E.W. {Nasty, brutish and short, in short form.}

-- The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}

-- Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March, [Library of Congress Hardcover Edition] {Look: it's his world, we all just live in it.}

-- The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}

-- Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}

-- Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}

-- The War Against Cliché and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}

-- Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}

-- The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}

-- The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliché. And get a dictionary.}

--The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}

-- The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood {The bling to Dale Peck's blah.}

-- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}

-- Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}

-- Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}

-- Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}

-- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}

-- The Persian Mirror: The Elusive Face of Iran, by Elaine Sciolino {For those with short odds on the next war of choice.}

-- Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}

-- The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children’s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}

-- The Chicago Manual of Style, by the University of Chicago Press Staff {and the ghost of Allan Bloom.}

-- The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}

-- Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}

-- Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}

-- My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}

ALBUMS:

-- You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}

-- Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}

-- Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}

-- Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}

-- Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}

-- Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}

-- Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}

-- These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}

-- SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}

-- The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}

-- It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}

-- Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, by the Unicorns {Morbid, tinny, wildly innovative and beautiful.}

-- Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn’t usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}

-- Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}

-- The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it’s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}

-- The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}

-- The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}

-- No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}

-- The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}

FILMS & TV:

-- Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}

-- Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}

-- Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}

-- The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}

-- Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}

-- Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}

-- Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}

-- The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}

-- Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modelled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}

-- Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}

-- Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}

-- The Office - The Complete Collection (First And Second Series Plus Special) {Creator, writer, director and star Rick Gervais used to manage Suede and now this. That's enough laurels for one lifetime. He can die now.}

-- Arrested Development - Season One {To think that Teen Wolf Too was just a glimpse of Jason Bateman's potential.}

1/16/05 - 2/22/05
12/3/04 - 1/15/05
9/1/04 - 12/2/04
7/14/04 - 8/31/04
6/23/04 - 7/13/04
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ENDNOTES, REVIEWS & NOTICES
EU Flag  
Czechs and Balances:
One Year After the EU Moved East
by Orli Sharaby
[link]

Last year the weeks leading up to May 1 were intense, what with European Union accession on the horizon. Companies were rushing to meet new protocol, government was rushing to find new suits for the photo-opts, and citizens were rushing to figure out whether or not they supported the move. Now, a full year after E-day, I decided to pin these Czechs down and force them to form an opinion once and for all. That’s when being an English teacher comes in handy. Sure, you can talk to your Czech friends, but in an English lesson you’re the boss, and you’ve got an hour and a half of your students’ undivided attention. I resolved to keep my questions simple and vague so as to get the most uncensored views. Unfortunately, given ten minutes or ten hours, the answer never seems to satisfy.

Me: “How do you feel about the EU?”
Jana*: “Well, there are any problems with agriculture and a limits they put on us.”
Jan: “The politicians don’t really give us many informations.”
Pavel: “They were worried much Czech people will move to the West, but any people who wanted to do this made it before the EU.”

Basically, what I gathered from the answers to my first question is that Czech people don’t feel much when it comes to the European Union. A recent poll says that 25% of Czechs consider themselves to be Eurooptimists, 54.5% consider themselves to be Eurorealists, and 20.5% see themselves as Euroskeptics. To put that into perspective, 100% of my students called themselves Eurorealists, but as you can see from their responses they’re more like Euroneutralists. Clearly, though, we had more than this four-line dialogue. And you’ll have to trust me when I say that none of them argued with the other; they just went back and forth presenting pro-EU, anti-EU, and who-cares-EU arguments without getting passionate about anything, and, of course, without passing any broad judgment.

Me: “What about the constitution referendum?”
Pavel: “How?”
Jana: “The constitution. My boyfriend has a book about this big [holds thumb and index finger to imitate thickness of book] that talk about constitution. But it’s in legal Czech. I try to read it, couldn’t understand at all.”
Jan: “I don’t know anything about it.”
Me: “Are you going to vote?”
Pavel: “Yes.”
Jan: “Yes. But I don’t know how I’ll vote.”
Jana: “Yes. I think I’ll probably vote no. Or maybe yes.”

As far as voter apathy goes, my students were incredibly ahead of the general population; that same poll claims only 20% of voters plan on casting ballots. But it seems that those conscientious citizens will be grossly uninformed about the actual issues involved. The referendum here in the Czech Republic doesn’t have a date set yet, but will likely happen sometime in 2006. Even though that’s miles away, with the current political crisis having been dragging its feet for a good three months and with no end in sight, everyone’s kind of got their minds on other things, and will continue to for a while. Ask around: you too will find that no one really knows what’s up.

I did extract one intuitive statement from a student, “Honza”, when I posed a question about Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria’s probable accession: “You know, lots of people have tried to do the same thing – Alexander the Big, Hitler. They all failed.” Hmm...

*Names have been changed to ensure privacy.

Prague Fashion Week  
Shiny, Happy Praguers Clapping Hands
by Orli Sharaby

If any of you Americans have ever been to Prague, you may have been impressed by the extraordinarily beautiful women. You may even have been (if you’re a guy) drooling so much or (if you’re a girl) being jealous so much, that you didn’t notice what was covering up their amazing bodies. It could’ve been nude stockings; maybe it was a pleather skirt; perhaps her t-shirt boasted a tacky and misspelled English slogan – but whatever that girl was wearing, chances are it wasn’t pretty.

Knowing what I do about the Czech fashion sense, it’s a wonder I spent the precious hours I did at Prague Fashion Week, April 11-18. But I’ll go to anything for a good laugh, especially if it’s free. And if you want me to be really truthful, I do have to say that there were a few respectable collections on display – among them Sisi Wasabi, Karaka Design, and Rodriguez Figueroa. Of course, none of them was Czech. The audience, however, was, and I think I was one of the 5 best-dressed spectators (which isn’t saying much) at the event. I mean, how can you expect Czech designers to create something beautiful when they’re surrounded by people who dress in head-to-toe pink and have skunk-inspired highlights in their hair?

It’s been just over two years since I moved to the Czech Republic, and all this time I’ve been trying to decode the popular fashion ethos. Quite often, but quite randomly, throughout the three days of catwalk presentations at Fashion Week, the audience would suddenly burst into applause for an outfit that was sashaying down the runway – usually they were pieces I found repulsive; sometimes they were just alright, and other times I actually liked what I was seeing. None of it made sense. It wasn’t until the very last collection that it occurred to me what was happening, and then instantly I understood the last two years of my life: the Czechs were applauding each and every, but only, the shiny objects.

The Schiavo-esque Death of the Novel
by Nic Duquette
[link]

The novel has been declared a dead form ever since it ceased to be, well, novel. But today the director of the NEA moans that consumption of literature is on the wane among youth, as well as seven other major American art forms; only jazz has seen an uptick. (Clearly, the iPod has tapped into the hunger left unsatisfied by those coast-to-coast all-jazz stations. Clear Channel's diet of vanilla big band can't satisfy the lust for that avant garde free jazz stuff.)

The study (PDF link here) is inherently flawed. The nine major art categories to be consumed are jazz, classical, opera, musicals, non-musical theater, ballet, "other dance," museum or gallery art, craft fairs, plays/poetry/novels/short stories, and parks/historic buildings/neighborhoods. "Other dance" refers to "modern, folk and tap." So: according to the NEA, you experience art when you buy Shrinky Dinks at a flea market or jog through Christo-free Central Park, but not when you read a graphic novel or blast Abbey Road. It would be one thing if the survey were hopelessly classical-elitist. But instead they seem to have included only dying art forms they could whinge about to the media. Tap dancing? Quick, Congress, save our cultural heritage!

Without accepting the premise that our artistic literacy has changed over all, there is some sort of global warming going on in literature. The glaciers are melting, the sea is rising, it's getting hot in here so take off all your dust jackets. There was a time when mass market magazines like Cosmopolitan published short stories by the great masters of the age. While I admire the dedicated work of Conde Nast's fornicologists, and I'm glad they have room to publish papers like "Fifteen Hot New Ways to Ride His Rod," hasn't something been lost?

Rather than blame lack of education, or class, or whatever, I instead suspect that the culprit is our perception of time. Short stories now seem very, very long. The TV news introduced an era of quick stories with flashy visuals. Complex personalities and matters of state became charicatures bashing each other with foam boxing mitts between commercial breaks. Where characterization became rich, it has flattened out. But where no characterization existed, some has had to be invented. Look at the articles today in the New York Times and Sports Illustrated on the Orioles' sweep of the Yankees. The focus is entirely on New York's apoplexicrat, who didn't pay $200 million in salary to see his team lose. (Watch for an exiled Baathist soccer coach to turn up as the Bronx first base coach with a Taser.) The article is concerned not with the baseball game -- the fluffy diversion sports sections exist to report upon -- but on the meta-drama between Steinbrenner and his glum employees. SI.com doesn't even report the score until the third paragraph. Why is this? If I read sports reporting, I want to hear about Derek Jeter's hits and his fielding, not his thoughts on grand strategy. ("This slump seems to be an explainable psychological artifact which will be eradicated by reversion to the mean," piped Jorge Posada.) ESPN.com at least has a box score, but ESPN the channel is a wasteland of talking heads and poker.

I have no alternative hypothesis to combat the NEA's self-hating elitism. But I'm not ready to blame the government, or the schools, or working-class schlubs or crass unlettered bourgeois. Rather, some sort of cultural shift is going on, akin to the change in the novel after the invention of movable type. Illuminated manuscripts were pretty, but we came out ahead in the end. Perhaps something similar is happening here.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell  
Yawn: Malcolm Gladwell's Just-Okay Bestseller
by Michael Weiss

George Orwell, no stranger to the astute snap judgment, once said that the best books are the ones that tell you things you know already. In that sense, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink is very good book indeed, right up until it forgets that it’s told us what we knew already and decides to keep on telling us. Namely, that the enlightened hunch -- manifest in a perceptual method Gladwell calls ‘thin-slicing’ -- can trump the labored, data-glutted rationale. Clichéd catchphrases abound to account for how familiar this stuff is to us. “Too Much Information” leads to “Analysis Paralysis.” Gladwell's novelty is in demonstrating how these things can result in the quotidian miscalculation (a lousy date, a lousier marriage) or the major prime time screw-up (an art museum’s phony Bronze Age statuette, a truckload of misdiagnosed cardiac patients).

But outside the Old Curiosities Shop industry of non-fiction publishing, such observations about human intuition don’t seem all that, well, counterintuitive. Nor do Gladwell's findings represent a cultural breakthrough by any means. The wonders of untutored species sense have been sufficiently gauged and authenticated by common sense. And a tipping point has surely been reached when every show on television now deals with lawyers, FBI agents, criminal psychics and ER residents who weekly defeat cant and expectation with shoot-from-the-hip savvy.

Only by briefly limning the recent advances in cognitive science does Gladwell ever really freshen up this idea of Gut-IQ. The rest of the time he's just pulling fun or tiresome vignettes -- some of which would be better suited to the medium of chain e-mail -- off the shelf. (The best of these has a grizzled Vietnam veteran performing a low-budget takedown of the Pentagon war game machine: the legend of John Henry updated for the regime change era.)

Still, for someone whose thesis concerns the perils of intellectual overkill, Gladwell succumbs to the temptation too often himself. The overlarding suffers worst when it suffers from pedantry. Here he is, in a slow chapter on marketing, elaborating a food-taster’s scale for measuring the slipperiness of mayonnaise: “And on the 15-point slipperiness scale, where 0 is not slippery at all and 15 is very slippery... Whitney’s vanilla yogurt is a 7.5, and Miracle Whip is a 13. If you taste something that’s not quite as slippery as Miracle Whip but more slippery than Whitney’s vanilla yogurt, then, you might give it a 10.” Yes, you might. Thanks, Malcolm.

Though even when the panorama seems flush, a good many of the stories in Blink are engaging enough to be read for their own sake, like brisk New Yorker essays anthologized around a sluggish theme.

Pope Photo  
The Face of Catholicism
by Orli Sharaby

Leave your kimonos and manga at home today; the once popular cliché “East Meets West” is so 1990s; in 2005, it’s all about “Eastern Europe meets South America, wherein religion meets pop culture and nudity.” Finally, things are getting interesting! And so if one were to suddenly find oneself in Warsaw on the day of Pope John Paul II’s funeral, this person never having had a cult-like obsession with anything but maybe Dr. Pepper and The Simpsons, one would be absolutely amazed. On Friday 8th April, the city of Warsaw became a massive public shrine, with big screen TVs broadcasting “the best of the Pope” and funeral candles that seemed to have gathered of their own free will into hundred-member huddles on street corners, not to mention the hordes of God-fearing Poles who took to the streets (in utter silence), making normal pedestrian traffic impossible.

But once you think you’ve seen it all, you come face-to-face with that new 2005 catchphrase. A two story high poster depicting thousands of Brazilian soldiers, some clothed in white and others naked, assembled to form an image of John Paul II’s face in profile. His “lips” upturned in a Mona Lisa-esque smile. In the foreground, thousands of mourners’ candles; in the background, the ominous Stalin-era Palace of Culture and Science. This has got to be some kind of joke. But it just might be for real. Actually, the photo, taken by Polish artist Piotr Uklanski, went on display weeks before the Pope’s death, on the site where the city plans to erect its first modern art museum. The spokeswoman of the Culture Ministry claimed at the time that the photo shows that “contemporary art does not have to be controversial and provocative.” Well, she obviously didn’t do her research on Mr. Uklanski, or maybe she was just so caught up in the religious euphoria of seeing the Pope’s face so big that she forgot to remember. The artist in question, after all, is responsible for an exhibition consisting of 100 photographs of popular actors stone-cold-faced and in Nazi uniform. He’s also set a man (a well-protected one) on fire as a performance piece, so he could document the audience’s reaction. And published, in an ad in Artforum, a photo he took of a woman’s bare ass, and revealed her identity (that’s Alison Gingeras, curator at the Pompidou, in case you were curious).

So with that track record behind him, crossing the Atlantic and landing himself in a country radically different from his native Poland, save for their devotion to Catholicism, and assembling 3500 soldiers, half of them in their party suits, in the shape of a smirking John Paul? Yes, that sounds a bit “controversial and provocative.” But the true glory of this 9.2x8 meter image, a glory Uklanski could never have imagined, came when it found itself at the epicenter of a city-wide shrine that enthusiastically gave a whole new meaning to the term religious iconography.

Funeral  
The Dirge Urge: The Arcade Fire's Funeral
by Nic Duquette

The Arcade Fire's Funeral is one of those sonically dense indie albums that steals tricks from so many pervious artists at once that reviews of it have tended to phrase their adulation in oenophilic terms ("a fruity splash of Pink Floyd; a flutter of Ian Curtis") that say more about the reviewer's ability to parse influences than the album's objective goodness/badness. Which isn't to say reviewers haven't bitten this hook. The Onion waffled, but AMG gave it four and a half stars, and Pitchfork named it #1 album of 2004. It's also gotten a big thumbs-up from my little brother, who has the best musical taste of anyone I know. Still, I'm skeptical.

This album is really, really good, but I balk at the fulsome praise it's been getting from so many corners at once. Funeral was made while half the band was losing family members, and the songs tend to have mournful melodies buried under mountains of strings. Yet there's also a flippancy that undermines the album's emotional core. Consider this sentence from the liner notes:

When family members kept dying, [the Arcade Fire] realized that they should call their record, "Funeral", noting the irony of their first full length recording bearing a name with such closure.

With that, the band considers the Eggersian paradox of profiting from grief without lifting a finger to escape from it, and at times even embracing it with what seems to be deliberate tactlessness. The album art looks like some kind of Gothic wallpaper, and the liner notes are designed as a funeral program mockup. A song about suicide is subtitled Laika, presumably after the dog the Soviets sent to a slow death in orbit. Another song, "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)," is rendered as a country tune, sung in a Texas accent, and includes the lyric "Time keeps creepin' through the neighborhood, killing old folks, wakin' up babies." The song "Crown of Love" splices a 6/8 time signature to a dance-beat coda, but it's not clear whether the song is supposed to be toungue-in-cheek or not.

For all that the album is a fun listen, only the final track, "In the Backseat," has the haunting quality necessary for a mournful song to stick in the mind for days after a single listen. To the band's credit, they know how to end an album well, and the sorrow of "In the Backseat" is beautifully expressed. So what was going on with the previous tracks, where the hearts on the sleeves seemed to be made out of felt and held with a pin?

My suspicion is that this otherwise excellent album wasn't recorded with the singularity of purpose it aspires to. I recommend to it for the music, which is good. But its emotivism is more like the superficial showboating of the Polyphonic Spree than the straight-on wistfulness of the Flaming Lips or the jokey morbidity of The Unicorns.

The Final Solution  
A Tiny Receptacle for a Thrilling Tale: Michael Chabon Reins Himself In and, Finally, Delivers What He's Promised
by Nic Duquette

When I was an undergrad, the school-funded left/liberal/progressive tabloid ran a page two editorial offering cheerful, banal tips on relieving end-of-semester examination stress. The editor gave it the unfortunate title, "The Finals Solution." That the article was largely an endorsement of Austrian beverage Red Bull didn't help. Of course, the editor, a cookie-cutter ultraaggrieved liberal, was aghast at what he'd done. Only mutual Bush-hatred kept the team together.

Like the poor undergraduate's editorial, Michael Chabon's new The Final Solution sandwiches an epic tragedy between two whimsies, although in this case the author fully knew what he was doing. Chabon has made his reputation with the excellent (but uneven) Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which examined Holocaust-fleeing New York Jews who create a Superman-like comic book hero to enact their fantasies and dreams. He also inspired and guest-edited the McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, a well-intentioned retro experiment in genre fiction. In the foreword, he lamented the ascendance of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story," the grade-B Joyce knock-offs one quickly flips past in every single New Yorker, sighing at the probable timber count. The collection of intentionally genre tales wanted to be Bill Watterson and came off Warhol, but the intentions were good. And it clarified the thesis of Chabon's manifesto.

The Final Solution finds a voice for Chabon's genre-as-literature approach to writing books, and it works. Its style is joyfully breezy in a distinctly Victorian way. The main character is straight out of Doyle, while various inhabitants of the local vicarage/inn are wholly Dickens. Overlaid over this is the joy in seeing a book that IS new and modern, but picks from the best of what made this era of Victorian novels great and adds generously. The main character, an old, retired detective of advanced age who is never named, is clearly Sherlock Holmes, and the title reflects a double meaning in this sense. It's a play off "The Final Problem," the story in which Doyle attempted to kill off his character at a waterfall; it also suggests, as is obvious from Holmes' bouts of dementia, that this will be his last case.

But there's also an undercurrent of despair. The title also references the Holocaust, and the mystery concerns the pet parrot of a nine-year-old German Jew who is a refugee in England, a parrot which recites mysterious strings of numerals. And the descriptions of Sherlock Holmes encountering moments of mental frailty, even speaking during a case as if his friend Watson were by his side (and not, implicitly, long dead), are tinged with sadness.

I'm not giving out much plot detail because there is not much book to describe. With illustrations and a pretty stout typeface, this novella still struggles to fill one hundred thirty pages; at seventeen dollars, it's not the best deal going in hardcover. But it's undeniably Chabon's best work to date, a minor gem that suggests very big things to come. How big? Really big. Tom Hanks movie adaptation big. Superhero big.

Closer  
Larry & Anna & Dan & Alice: Closer, But No Cigar
by Michael Weiss


"Did you swallow his cum?"
"Yes."
"How did it taste? How did it taste?!"
"It tastes like you, but sweeter!"
"That’s the spirit. Thank you. Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die."

If Mike Nichols and Patrick Marber are to be understood, all couples may not eventually have an exchange like the foregoing, but it’s perfectly plausible that at least one will. This is bad news. People talk. Amy Sohn writes a column in New York magazine, example begets phenomenon... Next thing you know, men are the new masochists, women are the new sadists, and everyone is subsisting without therapy. This may be the most unsettling notion in a film that purports to be jam-packed with them. There’s plenty of strange love going around, yet the only doctor in the house is a dermatologist -- and he’s the one asking about the cum.

Closer is adapted from Marber’s play about a tidy constellation of star-crossed lovers -- two guys and two girls to be exact -- who get around to sleeping with each other in every hetero permutation of their number. The film opens on Dan (Jude Law) walking toward Alice (Natalie Portman) on a crowded London street. A ballad-overlain, slow motion sequence frames their ambulatory courtship as if to declare this a major moment in the history of kismet. Which of course it is -- for Dan and Alice. A biscuit more languorous of pace and we might have reasonably expected to see a handshake by the end credits. Fortunately, plot intervenes. Alice, a direction-befuddled American “waif” (her word and best you mark it), steps off the sidewalk and gives an oncoming taxi the pleasure of running into her first. Our dehypnotized hero rushes to her side, is greeting by a semi-conscious “Hello, stranger,” and with the snap of a jump cut (get used to this), we’re back in hypnotic business. Thus a quietly budding relationship erupts in bloody and contused climax (get used to this, too).

It’s unclear whether staging Dan and Alice’s formal introduction in a hospital waiting room was an act of foreshadowing, labored idiosyncrasy, or just a way of giving the two a shared ain't-we-sweet? anecdote for talking the rest of the cast into bed. A few immediate hints, however, told me right away just what Dan was up against in the shape of Alice. With her dyed orange locks and retro-funky jacket (blue suede, yak hair trim: Paul Weller’s duds in Antarctica), I got the awkward sense I’d been down this swooning rabbit hole before. Wasn’t Alice the adorable nightmare that gave Jim Carrey such agita in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Beautiful, charming, and like everything mixed together in her probable medicine cabinet, highly contraindicated. The thinking man’s crush of the season is the advertised damaged good, so let it never be said that we couldn’t see this coming. Alice unselfconsciously rifles through Dan’s suitcase looking for cigarettes while he’s out getting coffee. She gleefully marvels at the corners cut off his fish sandwich, which sandwich is wrapped in foil, beneath which foil would not be where any sensible person would keep his cigarettes. Alice, in other words, is a snoop. And she is the worst kind of snoop: the one who thinks she’s being endearing and cutely bold when she’s scarily detonating personal boundaries with strangers. Hello, indeed.

But hold it right there. This was the moment for our good samaritan, returning to witness Alice’s unlawful bag-creep, to polish off his magnanimity with a paid ER bill, a few cautious words about the sinistral nature of British traffic, then high-tail it the hell back to work, tout court. We are not without sympathy for the Earl Grey routine of Dan’s existence. He writes obituaries. His current girlfriend is a linguist. OK, that says it all to me, too. But he really needed to trust his better judgment on this one. Looking like Jude Law practically guarantees future curbside damsels, many even prostrating themselves into varied and interesting positions of distress for Dan’s benefit. And did I mention that Alice is a stripper?

I haven’t read Marber’s play, but I’d imagine the pole-dancing conceit was just as yawned-over then for what it was, is and always will be: the worst first-shelf tenderizer a clumsy writer can reach for when faced with a tough piece of sirloin. “Look how fragile. How confused. Save her.” Yeah, yeah. That and a Mastercard still won’t get you sex in the champagne room. You’ll have to wait til quittin' time to take the strippers home in Closer’s mimetic universe. Many were the moments (clear heels! clear heels!) that left me wondering when the subject of Anna’s graduate degree was going to come up.

A lot of ink has been spilled over Queen Amygdala’s unwillingness to show skin in her flicks, and much of it (the ink) over how cumbrous this makes tackling the role of a g-string nymphet. In the most unforgettable scene in the film, in a strip club, deft camerawork and the ponderous eclipse of Clive Owen’s damnably big head are all that not only keep Natalie Portman’s reputation in tact, but Sharon Stone’s as well. To her credit, I was never quite sure whether Alice’s body or words writhed and slivered with greater forensic suasiveness. This scene -- like its counterparts in real life strip clubs, or, you know, so I’ve been told -- is a game of one-sided role-playing, with Larry (Owen) as the wounded and pathetic pounder on the transactional fourth wall. Injury and pathos are necessary preconditions for his summoning of alpha strengths, as we later learn, but for now all Larry wants are answers. Anna (Julia Roberts) has left him for Dan who has ditched Alice for Anna. To Larry, Alice is revenge itself. Try telling her this: “I’m not going to be your revenge fuck,” she says. Sorry, what was that about an MBA in two years? The game is too well underway, but Alice can’t leave coital determinism well enough alone. “Lying,” she tells her neurasthenic, cash-hemorrhaging client in a rare bearing of soul instead of crotch, “is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off -- but it’s better if you do.”

Well, with wisdom like that it’s hard to argue for reconciliation, monogamy or even less voulu modes of deception and betrayal (the lipstick-stained shirt collar comes to mind.) “Look closer,” you may recall, was the magic eye-like enticement for seeing American Beauty, a sclerotic satire whose vast reserves of cliché and falsity were actually quite detectable from miles away. (A vigorous “nailing” of modern suburbia eludes us still.) Now imagine the inherent danger in writing specifically, exclusively about desire. What abraded, brambly warrens of cliché and falsity would you want to avoid? The big one seems self-evident: wardrobe malfunction. You must never dress up your theme as something higher or nobler than it is. In the telescoped coming attractions and going repulsions of celluloid, any attempt at this quickly degenerates into sentimentality or unwitting farce. It’s an indicator of promise, then, that a film about desire should be motivated more by human distance than proximity. Closer is an ironic title for a movie that aims to drive a wedge between every pair it involves, and though most of the film’s turmoil is cleverly cooked up out of sight, during tumescent off-camera periods of absence and longing, we’re meant to believe that the characters’ emotional alphabet ranges beyond an elementary “a” to “c” -- affection to contempt. There’s a weepy meltdown or two, some all-purpose chatter about abiding loyalty and virtue, but make no mistake: potions that are drunk of siren (and satyr) tears are done so because intoxication is a fix for these people. Listen again to their dialogue:

“I slept with someone in New York -- a whore.”
“Why did you tell me?”
“Because I couldn’t lie to you.”
“It’s fine.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Why are you?”
“Because I’m selfish and I think I’ll be happier with her.”

“I treat you like a whore?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why would that be?”

It’s as if David Mamet and Woody Allen had a self-parody contest. Who talks like this? And by the way, the one who gets treated like a whore is the one who finds it okay that her partner recently slept with a bona fide practitioner; Anna's not exactly been Suzy Homemaker while Larry's been away, as the “why would that be?” cuttingly and too coolly demonstrates. These words, however, peal with froideur and moral nullity. The actors look silly or uncomfortable speaking them. Larry wants to know where and how Anna and Dan did it in his apartment. Anna, after insufficiently little needling, tells him. In detail. Is this “edgy” scriptwriting or the standard lingo of a faddish new paradox in cinema: the unfolding of the psychosexual mellow-drama? People capable of such detachment, such cultivated menace under the exigencies of adultery and break-up, are not likely to be too bummed about adultery and break-up to begin with. “It’s fine.” There’s your replacement hiding under the bed. Actually, more like relaxing. Lock the door on your way out, please. It’s not you, it’s me. Whatever.

If Larry and Anna and Dan and Alice were portrayed as happy voluptuaries, that’d be one thing. But they’re not. They’re portrayed as understandably flawed, regular people who don’t deserve what happens to them. All presumed entitlements to self-pity, manifest in frequent convulsions of how-could-you narcissism, are completely rubbished by the ridiculous fugue states of communal fucking to which these characters inevitably recur. When Dan’s with Anna he intuits, and then acts shocked by, the fact that she’s recently slept with Larry again. More convincing would have been Dan’s shock that Anna hadn’t recently slept with Larry again (“Are you feeling all right, honey?”). That’s just the kind of gal Anna is. She’s supposed to be conflicted and tortured, yet unlike most people who legitimately fall under that category, she never lies -- putatively out of respect for her homme du jour, an admirable insistence that he know the truth about his up-to-the-minute competition. This is conflict and torture, all right: the kind that gets resolved by ordering a Diet Coke with a double bacon cheeseburger.

In a way, I’m glad it's Mike Nichols who initiates the countdown sequence of our mutual assured erotic destruction. His resume reads like a commissioned Freudian study on stimulation and its discontents, and his findings never shy from indictment. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: the 50’s. The Graduate: mom. Carnal Knowledge: give me a break. The Birdcage: Republicans. Angels in America: AIDS and Republicans. Closer finally comes clean and tries to pin the blame where it belongs, squarely on ourselves. This might have worked, too, had the elected representatives of a wide pathology been more representative and less narrowly pathological.

Sideways  
In Vino Gravitas: Alexander Payne's Knock-Out New Film Sideways
by Michael Weiss

I promised myself I wasn't going to do this, but...

An oblique way to view the 2004 election is through the lens of American cinema, and more specifically, through its depiction of the Red State/Blue State divide. For the most part, Hollywood has also been guilty of swinging from representative extremes. If one considers the way it chooses to present any place external to the megapolitan culture-domes of New York and Los Angeles, another polarity soon becomes apparent. Sometimes the marquees are lit up with unstinting hagiographies of self-sacrificing small town heroes, the misadventures of era-hopping, twanging retards, or the sweaty courtroom travails of enlightened Grishamite litigators. Other times, it's curtain-to-curtain lynch mobs, Gospel-mouthing Dixie housewives, or truckfuls of slack-jawed Klansmen who think Jim Crow was a liberal plot of Reconstruction.

Now consider how damned refreshing it was when Alexander Payne picked up a camera in the mid '90s. Here, finally, was someone who was establishing a reputation for not condescending to what Philip Larkin once condescendingly called the 'vast deserts of bigotry' that define American life between the coasts. Under Payne's smart storyboarding, there were complexities and intellectual refinements springing up all around fly-over country, so much so that one might actually consider landing there someday. Psychic torment in Omaha unrelated to the closing of a Wal-Mart? The hell, you say.

Not that the virtue of originality alone is enough to redeem art, but thankfully Payne made sure his films were also some of the acutest satires to be stamped on celluloid in decades.

And that's saying even more than it's saying given that his debut film, Citizen Ruth, was a comedy about one woman's funny embroilment in the abortion debate. If you can imagine Dead Man Walking: The Musical, you can see what kind of out-of-the-gate risks Payne was willing to take on as an unknown filmmaker. A rather well tapped cell within the honeycomb of 'American values,' which we're again hearing so much about, fetus flushing as a subject didn't seem doable without encountering serious problems. A dreaded but unspoken infamnia, as it became in the Godfather II; a yawning, party-stopping plot device, as it was used in the bad Manhattan-set Alfie remake -- sure. Yet for two hours, in Nebraska, abortion is tricky business indeed. At the very least, one expected cookie cutter homilies and ethical fault lines to be drawn the second the opening credits began to roll. How pleasant the discovery, then, that in Payne's Midwestern world pro-life and pro-choice extremists act with equal ugliness as agents of opposing politics but identical priorities, more worried about how their activism struts and preens than about the born or unborn humanity they endeavor to protect. And Laura Dern's strung-out, opportunistic Ruth isn't exactly portrayed as a cervical Joan of Arc... In fact, I can't remember a single unflawed or morally reliable character in the whole black comedic shebang, which, by any chromatic standard of comedy, ought to have had its audience reaching for a warm blanket of consensual reassurance. But nope. We were more capable than that, and Alexander Payne knew it. Citizen Ruth might have more credibly borne the tagline that was used by a later auteurist, albeit overrated, 'issue' film: No one gets away clean.

Or, while we're at it, unexamined. This set a CV precedent. Payne's follow-ups were two very brilliant movies, Election and About Schmidt, and they were just as immune to cant and sentimentality even though the budgets and frames of reference expanded widely. If you had to isolate Payne's major talent, you might say he's got a way with insinuating seamlessly the unexpected or unpredictable, as though ironic novelty were just another clichÈ in movies. In Election, it was the idiot jock -- nature and John Hughes' answer to the talking sphincter muscle -- that turned out to be the most affable and well-meaning character. (When you think about it, they do exist, don't they?) Then there was Matthew Broderick's mediocre schlub teacher... Neither we nor him could have predicted what latent but entitled strains of amorality he would have activated by a manipulative and freakishly annoying overachiever, the kind of female high school student Wes Anderson would make Jason Schwartzmann date instead of bury in a shallow grave. And, if for no other reason to rejoice over it (despite there being plenty), About Schmidt did two seemingly impossible things. It de-Jackified Jack, and it made seeing Kathy Bates naked a laughing matter.

So if from such heights of collar-loosening awkwardness and winning idiosyncrasy, a buddy road trip comedy seems like a tumble into the mundane, you should probably run right out and see Sideways, pronto. It's Payne's latest, and I think best, film to date.

Keeping with his sub theme of muted surprise-springing, Sideways is the first Payne film not set in Omaha. It's set in California. It's also the first film ever to take the ultimate red state revenge by toying with blue state stereotypes, yet not snidely or maliciously sending them up. This is almost Golden Rule filmmaking and the temptations for sadism Payne averts are practically evangelical in magnitude. You think I'm kidding? Within the first five minutes, the parodic arsenal has already been hauled out for what any heartland director could use for a cheap, bobo-busting good time: from the morning coffeehouse pop-in (complete with a spinach croissant order), to the New York Times crossword puzzle, the Xanax-medicated clinical depression, and -- perhaps the most lambent blue flag of all, not to mention a running conceit of Sideways -- the arch connoisseurship of wine. "Soupcon," "flutter of nutty cheese," "transcendent." As pertains to hooch talk, these are Yankee fightin' words, building toward some violent and nasty climax that, mercifully, never does come. (I can't have been the only one in the theatre to feel a mere wedge of brie away from a Kerry mandate.)

The wonderful Paul Giamatti plays Miles, a recently divorced sadsack intellectual and borderline vine-drunk with a novel that'll maybe get published soon. Miles is also the best man at his best friend Jack's (Thomas Hayden Church) upcoming wedding, and Sideways is the chronologue of the two's last hurrah bachelors' spree, which of course doesn't turn out the way they'd expect. But this being a Payne comedy, it doesn't always turn out the way you'd expect, either. And you've seen the trailer and know the playbook for this type of film inside-out and everything.

Miles and Jack hit the North California highway together in search of great wine and good golf, and, since Jack is a washed-up actor and the Oscar to Miles' (less fastidious) Felix, an easy pre-marital lay or twelve. Enter Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen, Stephanie and Maya, both very bright and sexy and mavens for fine varietals, particularly when put to the service of casual courtship.

The danger inherent in a movie set around the consumption of a pretentious drug of choice is that the drug will become a pretentious metaphor for human characteristics. And here again, Payne delivers in making the only scene to get within cork-popping distance of realizing this danger the best scene in the whole film. It involves the self-hating and amorously reluctant Miles, de-escalating from a disastrous double date he didn't want to go on in the first place, was too distracted and morose to have enjoyed, and nearly terminated halfway through with a drunken phone call to his nice ex-wife.

Once Jack and Stephanie go off to fuck (sorry, it's not 'make love' to listen to their noises), Miles is left alone with Maya, someone he's superficially known as a waitress for a few years but would not have dared to ask out without Jack's ego-blind prodding. They're lounging on beaten-up patio furniture and it's clear to all that Maya wants Miles and will let him have her if only he can make the first move. He gets the conversation right, but the tone of it and the attendant body language unbearably wrong. He's giving a languid and detailed explanation, at Maya's prompting, of his one true love: pinot. It's a fragile grape, see, and its full potential is not easily brought to bear; pinot only flourishes under the most exact and clement agricultural conditions and... well, it's not hard to see what Miles is really driving at here. Giamatti even looks, as Wodehouse would say and as would be apropos in a film about wine, like a man poured into his clothes who forgot to say when. Yet despite his best efforts to not let Maya get physically intimate with him, she does just that anyway. He misses his mark, failing to respond after she covers his hand with her own: the international sign for "kiss me, you fool" and a gesture registered on Giamatti's face with as much soulfulness as should be legal without a tenor saxophone in his mouth. (By the way, Maya's speech about why she loves rose, which ends, "...and I guess because it just tastes so fucking good," is the hottest thing a woman has done on screen since Scarlett Johannson sang "Brass in Pocket" in a pink iridescent wig.)

Without giving too much else away, you'll be happy to know that Miles does not come away with an all-better-now, happy egg exterior from his revitalizing affair with Maya, which gets off the ground after the stated bumps and fits. Nor does the free-wheeling and frat-scrupled Jack come away unscathed or irreparably mangled from his romp with not only Stephanie, but a chunky restaurant waitress who's a fan of his long-gone soap opera stardom, as well as, erm, other things...

For all its corkscrew comic staging, Sideways ultimately does what Alexander Payne knows how to do pretty effortlessly by now: break your heart without bleeding the thing dry, and tease and challenge the brow without the beating that thing into submission. His work, like a fine you-know-what, improves remarkably with age.

Modest Mouse, Good Music For People Who Like Bad Music  
Good Music for People Who Like Bad Music: the new Modest Mouse album is better than their old stuff, but it still sucks.
by Nic Duquette

I've only heard one other Modest Mouse album, The Moon & Antarctica, the one those who like the band still consider their best. I got it to round out my seven CDs when I joined the BMG music club, which you'd think would suggest mainstream appeal as well as indie success if it got on that list, right? I was a little uncomfortable with the cover art -- cerulean hands shaking in the sky over a grey moonscape surrounded by lavender? Are these people fucking colorblind? But I put the CD in and listened to it doggedly, waiting for the purchase to pay off. I finally gave up. Yeah, it was different from everything else, but the discovery was as joyless and draining as crunching through a linear algebra problem. I thought the problem was me. Then I saw Modest Mouse touring in support of the Flaming Lips. I'm still unsure whether Issac Brock was toxically drunk, but I sure wished I was. They were terrible. When your singing is worse than Wayne Coyne's, you have a problem.

So I was suprised to hear Modest Mouse with a great single on Boston radio. "Float On" was as deliberately different as anything else they'd done, but with a thumping drumbeat and U2 guitar line that also allowed it to be a catchy tune. Wow, I thought. Maybe these guys don't suck after all. Maybe they just needed time to find themselves.

Nope. I haven't been led on so badly by a good single since I bought Smash Mouth's Fush Yu Mang on the theory that the whole album would be full of cheaply-produced fun like Walkin' on the Sun. (It wasn't. I gave the CD away.)

Good News for People Who Like Bad News is good for eight minutes. After a brief horn bit, it starts with The World At Large, which is as good as Float On. Float On is up next. Then it goes into forty minutes of the same old crap -- layered vocals that try to sound ominous, poorly place guitar harmonics, songs that are more clever than they are good and more unpleasant than they are clever. To Brock's credit, the songs show more economy than on Moon, the track order is more varied, and his voice has grown by leagues. But it doesn't matter with songwriting like this. Example: there's one track that's fifty-eight seconds of some voice mumbling about digging your grave. It's titled "Dig Your Grave." That's great, Issac. Cute.

And the cover art sucks again, too. This time it's olive and hot pink.

I bought it on sale for $12, so I guess I'll keep it for the first two tracks. But I wish I'd just bought the single on iTunes.

Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE  
Taken for Lost, Gone and Unknown for a Long, Long Time: SMiLE and the resurrection of Brian Wilson

Let's get the hatchet work out of the way right now: As the New York Times pointed out, not in a review but in an editorial (!), the voices on Brian Wilson's new record aren't those of the classic Beach Boys. Of the original Wilson brothers, two are dead and one has aged four decades. Mike Love is in oldies-circuit purgatory. The new lyrics on Good Vibrations are a little annoying. And sometimes the digital recording lacks warmth. Okay? You're right on all these points, Times. (Unfortunately, the opportunity to view the Times' niggling concerns is not a free link.)

But this release is about the composition, not the recording. The recording is gorgeous. The composition is even better. Smile is a towering masterpiece, as unique, moving, grand, fun and towering as Rhapsody In Blue or Copland's Rodeo. It deserves to be in the classical canon with those pieces as well as on those innumerable Rolling Stone "five thousand greatest albums of all time" lists that pop up every six months.

Several negative reviews have compared this album to the counterfactual Beach Boys album that was never finished. But not only did the composer have a psychological collapse, but the other Beach Boys didn't even care for the material, Good Vibrations notwithstanding. The old Heroes and Villains sounded like a cartoon funeral dirge. This new one is an epic six-gun shootin' laugh-out-loud miniopera. It's gorgeous.

Any exposition on the virtues of this album would require several listens and as many paragraphs. I don't have the time for that now; I have a day job. If you don't want to take my confidence on faith, there's a low-quality streaming version of the album here. Whether you rush to the site or to Best Buy, though, trust me; this is a rare album you ought to listen to as soon as possible. --Nic Duquette

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel  
Magic for Grown-Ups: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel
by Nic Duquette

Susanna Clarke's debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, is the rare book that manages to elevate its allusions to metafiction without teasing Delillian self-reference. But just as it's a story of two magicians bringing the long-lost art of magic back to England, it's also a novel that wheels hundreds of geriatric genres back into the sunlight in an unexpectedly exciting and readable new form.

I won't even try to summarize the plot of Strange and Norrel, which at eight hundred pages still overflows its banks into dozens of footnotes before filtering back down into some immense underground resevoir of the author's imagination. Since the plot concerns the unexpected return of magic to an unprepared world, the novel has been called Harry Potter for adults, and Bloomsbury, Rowling's publisher as well as Clarke's, has certainly been hyping that blurb as much as it can -- the company has such high expectations that it started a US division solely to publish the book, and its first print run is rumored to be 250,000. Not bad for a first novel.

Clarke claims to have begun her novel in 1992, well before Pottermania, but it seems unlikely she was completely uninfluenced by Rowling's success. Still, the comparisons between the books are superficial. Clarke does not play to adolescent fantasies of suddenly discovering one has secret powers, and her writing shows much mroe craft than Rowling's. The book doesn't steal from Rowling much, at least not as much as it does from Dickens' charicatures, Jane Austen's comedies of manners, Tolkien's exhaustive fantastical backstory, C.S. Lewis's religious allegory, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as reinterpreted by Neil Gaiman, dark and druggy reality-bending (Lovecraft?), historical fiction, war narrative, and dozens of other, distinctly British subgenres which seemed to have disappeared meaningfully from the landscape with the passing of their authors. They all can be felt in the undercurrents of Clarke's book. Indeed, Lord Byron even appears as a minor character.

This novel probably isn't quite the masterpiece it's being hyped as. No character escapes caricature, but Clarke's elastic language manages to keep the same motifs fresh and exciting for almost 800 pages. In the tradition of the old novels it emulates, the beginning of Strange and Norrel is dull and the acceleration is not fast. But I'm finding fault simply for the sake of providing a balanced review. This novel ranges wide over every scrap of writing that's ever been read and forgotten about and borrows a little here, a little there, creating its own rules as it goes and never quite showing its hand. I won't be sure whether it's a good novel or a great novel until I reread it. But unlike most novels of this length, I plan to someday.

The Less Deceived: John Kerry and the Postwar Tragedy of Vietnam
by Michael Weiss

The suspension of Joseph Ellis from the faculty of Mount Holyoke College occurred during the summer before my final year as a Dartmouth undergraduate. I remember a roundtable discussion in my senior History seminar. The professor, who also happened at that time to be the elegant feminist chair of the History Department, remarked that it was especially silly of such a bright and circumspect scholar as Ellis to fabricate war stories about Vietnam. Was this done, my prof asked, to give Ellis a patina of macho authority or a heroic first-person credibility in the evaluation of his subject? And if so, why? Ellis surely knew by 2001 -- and had secure enough a railing on the tenure track to be able to say by then -- that the real heroes of his generation were those who had actively avoided military service from 1962 to 1972. True, the draft made such avoidance an even more heroic feat, but conscription only works as an excuse for actuating disgraceful foreign policy if you believe the phrase "conscientious objector" to be a hollow euphemism for "draft-dodger." And then there were those who went willingly into the breech, as the current Democratic candidate for president did and as he and his base of contemporaries, many of whom sat out the war themselves, never tire of reminding us.

The clarifying and semi-apologetic cliché of Sixties peace activism ran that one was "anti-war, not anti-soldier." This is a delicate moral dichotomy to navigate, as no war can be fought without soldiers and not even the most conformist, duty-bound soldier is immune to having thoughts of his own about the war he's fighting. To claim otherwise is to elevate the rational separation of command and duty to a mind-numbing, near totalitarian level, not to mention spit on the graves of men like Wilfred Owen and Ron Ridenhour and turn a deaf ear to women like Jessica Lynch. (Michael Moore will tell you these are the only people worth listening to on matters of bellicosity.)

So it followed for careful critics of the Vietnam War that American troops had been deceived-bullied and coerced into doing the bidding of an imperialist government looking to conquer Southeast Asia. The domino theory as a check on Soviet expansionism was, in updated parlance, "sold" to them as sound policymaking, just as WMD and the imminent threat of Saddam Hussein is now said to have been sold to our troops in Iraq as their chief reasons for being there.

In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, John Kerry claimed membership to this corps of deceived Vietnam veterans, a clearly "bipartisan" organization since quite a few ex-soldiers who continued to believe the cause of fighting Communism in Indochina was a just one were nevertheless inclined to admit that, given the option to do it all over again, they would not. They were now, to borrow a phrase from a haunting Philip Larkin poem about another form of victimization, the "less deceived."

What troubles me about John Kerry and the current trumpeting of his Vietnam record is that, judging by his theatrics at the Democratic Convention and the comments he's made elsewhere on the stump, he'd gladly leap at the chance to fight this deceptive war all over again. It's his role in the one we're waging now he's not so sure about.

I don't know anyone who would claim John McCain is one to shy from brandishing his military credentials. To be sure, his tenure in Vietnam served as the ethical backdrop and much pointed-to elephant in the room of his presidential bid in 2000, a year when "character" was in desperate need of return to the White House. Yet McCain's reflections as a Navy pilot and POW never failed to register without a thank-God-that-hell-is-over-with sobriety of tone, the absence of which would be excusable for someone under the psychic strain of justifying a hell as gruesome as the one he went through. McCain never repudiated the war that kept him locked up for half a decade in a third world martial jail. Whatever you think of his politics and however curious you may be of the unspoken moral contradictions he continues battle, one thing about the Arizona senator is clear: his stoicism is non-negotiable. Yet such is not the case for McCain's across-the-aisle colleague, who came home to become the most eloquent anti-war veteran and then forgot his eloquence.

One month ago we were given to hear the following: "John Kerry, reporting for duty."

A big smile and a winsome delivery and I can't have been the only one left wondering, what does he mean, "Reporting for duty"? I thought he had reported already and come, at great agony and medal-shirking pathos, to regret it. And are not the hard lessons learned from that experience the foundations of Kerry's smarter-than-Bush policies for postwar Iraq? Whence the revisionist call to arms for an ended battle? This is either the guilty conscience escaping from an ex-protestor, or the mumblings of a time-lapsed delusional afflicted with post-traumatic stress syndrome. In any event, we have gone from the less deceived back to the deceived, and all in the convenient span of a national election cycle. History, as Joseph Ellis should have known better, often repeats itself in the worst possible way.

Consider how much credit has been paid by the sanguinary and suddenly retro-hawkish left to Kerry's willingness to sign up for service. Typically this credit has been paid in contrast to George W. Bush's reluctance to even leave the state of Texas in the sixties, much less don a National Guard uniform when doing so might have really meant something. Bill Clinton's unmistakably face-saving act of self-effacement at this year's convention gave us a new catchphrase in a season already glutted with them. "Send me!" cried John Kerry, repeatedly. Ah, but that all depends on what the definition of "me" is...

Kerry has boasted of having been convinced to enlist in 1966 by no less of a figure than William Bundy, a personal friend of the family and Lyndon Johnson's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs (also brother to McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor under both Kennedy and Johnson). The younger, still-living JFK was evidently wonderstruck by all things redolent of Hiannisport at that time, and most likely he felt an expectation to live up to the legacy of his slain icon and monogrammatic twin. Though it's no compliment to even a naïve 22 year-old that all it took to transplant him from New Haven to the Mekong Delta was a single dorm room bull session with one of the least wise, but most escalationist, "wise men." And this was before Kerry gave a class oration at his Yale commencement in which he spoke critically of the war he was about to join:

"What was an excess of isolationism [in American foreign policy] has become an excess of interventionism... We have not really lost the desire to serve. We question the very roots of what we are serving."

Wait a minute. That sounds unambiguously like someone who sees the folly of shouldering a rocket launcher against the forces of Ho Chi Minh. The "roots" to which Kerry alluded, however, were not to be questioned for very long; he shipped out shortly after delivering this speech. (Indeed, if one wished to uncover the genesis of his now-infamous "flip-flop" on the issues, this oration and the act that followed it would be a good place to start looking.)

It'd be nice if Kerry preferred to brag that he's grown up a lot since those days of anxiety of political influence, or at least spoke more unequivocally about what kind of influence Vietnam had on him. If being harangued into fatigues by a mediocre ideologue is proudly still a suasive high-water mark, then should anyone with higher standards than those of the Anybody But Bush camp be demanding a Kerry-picked group of advisors to extricate us from the present "quagmire" in Iraq? And should the sitting president be gleefully assailed for saving his own ass when, as Kerry also indicated in his Senate testimony, many young souls still stuck in the jungle were desperate to do likewise?

This brings us to the larger point about the debate over Vietnam in this election: namely, why it's being had at all. Apart from the periodic recrudescence of an event said to have been the existential "death of American innocence," what does this historic war have to do with present one - and I don't just mean in Iraq but around the world, being prosecuted against the agents of theocratic fascism? The V-word is as non sequitur in the current discourse as the words Hohenzollern or Hapsburg or kaiser would have been in the one of 1939. Ask yourself: should a plebiscite of World War I veterans have been necessary to determine US involvement in World War II? If so, would we have appreciated its results, knowing what we now know about Hitler's ambitions, and knowing then the enervating impact the Great War had had on its participants?

If epaulets were the sine qua non of foreign policymaking, we would not have to worry about the exploitation of the Vietnam War by a candidate for the presidency of the United States. There would be no Vietnam War to discuss, just as sure as there would be no United States.

Perhaps that other popular catchphrase of the year has nailed the sentiment precisely. It's time to move on.

Bright Young Things.  
Sniffing the Exhalation of Their Own Herd: Bright Young Things
by Michael Weiss

Stephen Fry's made an accomplished career for himself as the favored footman of the English Society of the Funny W. Wilde, Wodehouse and now Waugh. The televised and cinematized class comedy has never had it so good than under Fry's witty guidance, and so it's a real pleasure that he chose for his directorial debut Evelyn Waugh's novel secondo, Vile Bodies. (The film's title, Bright Young Things, borrows the book's working title.)

Fry knows his source material thoroughly and, in a way, Waugh's book is the perfect fizzing quinine cocktail for the man who brought Jeeves and Oscar to life to throw back. It's as if everything Fry admires about the literary ethos of Wodehouse and Wilde -- the injunction to do some serious living by living as unseriously as one can -- has been carefully stitched into the hairshirts of notoriety that both writers were forced to bear in their careers. Wodehouse learned how war could effectively wipe the smile off someone's face when he danced to the music of Nazi time; and of course Wilde became the sexual martyr of two centuries when the release of his personal repression extracted the venom of repressiveness in a society that had recently celebrated him.

So too goes the party-stopping gravity in Waugh, who differs, however, from his contemporary and from his predecessor in one very crucial respect. Waugh discovered the killjoy from the moment he put pen to paper. His fiction was never without a moral tonic or saving grace to punctuate all the silliness and espieglerie, as Fry's superficially frothy but deeply solemn film illustrates in ways Waugh's book could not have done. One is reminded of just how unhappily this comic tale ends. The events which bring the gramophone to a screeching halt include the lunatic's death of Agatha Runcible, who was easily the heart and soul -- or, given the universal penchant for substance abuse, nostril and liver -- of the BYTs. In the book, Agatha's demise is mentioned en passant as part of a larger epilogic pastiche, but Fry, perhaps recalling his portrayal of Wilde's saturnine beginning-of-the-end stint as a hard laborer, has Agatha languish longer in the sanatorium before kicking the bucket. Played to the hilt by the wonderful newcomer Fenella Woolgar, Agatha's early pathos as a clueless madcap is given color and depth of humanity in these scenes without making her seem simpering in that Angel-of-Death-cometh way a lesser director might have indulged. And speaking of angels, there's good old Melrose Ape, a shrill banshee of American evangelism who heads up a touring group called the "Angels of the Glad New Day," downy young girls all dressed in white and all straight out of Lewis Carroll's wet dream.

Played by a hilariously marmish Stockard Channing, Mrs. Ape exists to bring a puritanical dudgeon to a hard boozing, coke snorting society party. Not realizing that her cute little entourage would turn out to be more minatory than darling, the hostess of this soiree cuts things short after hearing her guests decried as a bunch of Godless barbarians ("Bright young people is what they call you -- well! One out of three ain't bad, I guess!"). This is a sentiment Waugh, with his creeping Catholicism, can only have shared about his own characters, and herein lies his genius at not burdening his light stuff with moralization. He ventriloquizes rather than sermonizes his judgments through the vessel of this thundering beast of a woman -- an ape, all right. Though her gospel may be Waugh's, the bigger joke comes at the expense of a more loathsome species than the proselytizing zealot: the visiting foreigner with nasty things to say about one's countrymen. Waugh made the glorification of English tradition the counterpoise to his satire of that tradition, if not his whole raison d'ecrire. (And is there anything more traditionally English than trashing Americans?) Fry cleverly inserts a throwaway line in the same vein: the Canadian publishing tycoon Lord Monomark implores a "Mrs. Simpson" to return at once to the States. (It's another credit to the filmmaker that he does not underestimate his audience's grasp of pre-Camilla royal scandal, or try to "update" his movie with modern references.)

In contrast to the other Funny W's who also dabbled in the transatlantic special relationship, Waugh sensed early on that the flute-clinking frivolity that was the Anglo-American Jazz Age, with its shared syncopation and fondness of generational argot, came at too high a cultural price. This was a man who named his first book Decline and Fall, which might have convinced even the least teleologically-minded reader of its author's take on the fin de siecle and what that wheedling infant, the centenary nine, was about to do to God, King and Country. In case the point was missed there, it was surely hammered home in the sequel, where half the bon vivants were disgraced or killed off domestically, and the other half were sent overseas to die on the battlefield. (See also one of his best written books, Put Out More Flags.)

Published in 1930, Vile Bodies was set in a future nearer than Waugh himself knew was imminent. It ominously prefigured the onset of another world war and even more ominously spoke of it in tones redolent of the what-does-it-all-mean intellectual histories now being written about what was then unironically and myopically called the "Great War." Added to the notion of Fergusonian overstretch, of which World War I may have well been the culmination, are more metaphysical adjectives to give shape to the event that produced the machine gun, the tank and the chemical weapon, not to mention the gemini twins of nationalism and internationalism. "Hygenic." "Unifying." "Ethically maturing." Orwell, in his classic essay, "My Country, Right or Left," remembered admonitions by WWI veterans as a schoolboy: War was a "good thing," it "made you tough," "kept you fit." And as if not to let the charnal stench of a globe on fire appear the mere extension of epochal waste that preceded it, we're now told that millions marched into death in 1914 because kaisers and prime ministers needed some way of curing the incipient anomie and slackness of will depleting their empires. Neurosis as a casus belli -- was the twentieth the century of Freud or what?

Waugh was at once luridly attracted to and repulsed by this spiritual clearing-house rationalization for war, the Sword of Honor trilogy being his most obvious evocation of such. It defined his sadomasochistic relationship with modernism, and it surely -- and not unrelatedly -- stoked his fascination with fascism. The kitsch of that ideology could summarily be described as "Everything old is young again." But not quite the same, Waugh might have added, and did do: Bright Young Things is a wistful irony.

The "bodies" in question here might have started out as members of a self-indulgent metropolitan set, but they most likely wound up as something even more vile than that: corpses. Fry taps into this dead serious undercurrent of the text, which is not quite "under" enough to be labeled subtext and which at moments hazards into the realm of sentimentality. By film's end we see a tearful Miles Malpractice, once the gay belle of the ball, lamenting his criminalized homosexuality and fleeing England as a wanted man (not in the way he might have enjoyed, either.) Fry intelligently refuses to let his Edwardian wastrels get away with getting away with it all. Blithe, narcissistic and reckless, but in possession of absolutely no idea how the world will only let them down in the end; this encapsulates our heroes in the fugitive and bubbly Acts I and II of the film, which yield occasionally to foreshadowing of the morose and world-historical Act III. The characters remain developmentally arrested, the movie grows up.

In one memorable scene, a rustic cab driver lectures the protagonist Adam Symes (or Fenwick-Symes as he's actually called and would actually be called in a more "proper" era) on the excesses of the youth generation. What this country could really use is another war, says the gruff prole. Nothing like the "sound of guns and the smell of gas" to clean up the mess of decadence sweeping the land. "It all sounds so disgusting, dunn'it?" "Yes, the sound of gas and smell of gundpower does sound disgusting," replies Adam. In another context this would be a pitch-perfect Wildean riposte. If only this were Half Moon Street. If only Adam were being withering instead of just unaware of the real question -- a question he, and the zeitgeist for which he is spokesman, must perilously answer at a later date.

Together We're Heavy  
Overweight: Polyphonic Spree's Together We're Heavy
by Nic Duquette

I liked the first Polyphonic Spree album, but more for the possibilities it suggested than its inherent merits. I love baroque sunshine-with-sadness pop like Pet Sounds or The Soft Bulletin. I have a bootleg of Smile. So when I hear twenty-odd Texans are running around in choral robes singing happy anthems, I get excited. Since the first album was essentially a demo that made good, Together We're Heavy is the first chance we have to see what the Spree can do with a real studio and a real record contract. Promisingly, their sound is robust, thoughtful and not as busy as last time, and the songs aren't as repetitive, which shows that they're at least thinking about their weaknesses. Unfortunately, the songwriting's ambition exceeds its accomplishment. If repetition could make their first album wearing, it also could let the lyrics' uncynical joy rise above the simplistic writing. The hooks in these songs are strong, but with six of the ten tracks running over five minutes long and frequently with gradiose sectional changes, it's hard to get absorbed. Brian Wilson had similar limitations, but "Good Vibrations," candidate for greatest song of the pop era the PS are ripping off left and right, barely exceeds two minutes in length. Compare to the ten-minute "When The Fool Becomes A King," which features operatic intensity exceeded only by embarrassing self-reference that becomses self-parody. (How creatively bankrupt do you have to be to reuse the chorus from your UK-hit debut single in a ten-minute epic?) Don't get me wrong: if they don't fall apart under the burden of their big band payroll, the Polyphonic Spree have a great album coming down the pipe sooner or later. This one is not it.

A Ghost Is Born  
Good Egg: Wilco's A Ghost Is Born
by Nic Duquette

I'm not surprised that Wilco's new album has been damned with faint praise from hip reviewing establishments; the ending is just terrible, as the penultimate track, "Less Than You Think" is a three minute song that is unlucky enough to be saddled with twelve minutes of noise. (Jeff Tweedy supposedly was trying to simulate the migranes that turned him to drugs, but it sounds more like an amplification of the high-pitched whine industrial fluorescent lights used to make years ago, with some other stuff dubbed in and mixed to the bottom.) Then the last track, "The Late Greats," is two and a half minutes of forgettable melody and painfully bad lyrics. No wonder Pitchfork hipsters have triggered their inevitable cool-backlash. (It's amazing Radiohead have staved it off for so long.) It's unfortunate that Tweedy decided to end this album so badly, because the first forty-five minutes are as strong as anything Wilco has ever recorded. This is what you get when you drive out a flamboyant keyboardist while experimenting with noise rock; something that's minimalist as it is anarchic, as warm as it is mechanical. Like if the Velvet Underground really had cut an album in a "closet." Spiders (Kidsmoke)is the core of the album, ten minutes of bizarre noise jamming, piano hook and understated synth that's surprisingly seductive, no matter how many critics think it's indulgent or dull. The other tracks are organic but tight, atonal but inviting. This album synthesizes so many elements of what's come before that it all sounds fresh; instead of wedding influences together into a chimerical fantasy, like YHF (you could almost hear the critics salivating to compare that one to the two least likely albums in the classic rock canon they could think of), A Ghost Is Born sums the entirety of rock music history seamlessly and humbly. Furthermore, Tweedy's new mastery of his voice is unexpected and lovely. This album is not perfect or cohesive, and the choice the listener will have to make between concluding the album with fifteen minutes of suffering or the power button mean this one will never be on anybody's top tier. But the good parts are as good as anything Wilco's ever done; maybe even better.

Camera Obscura: Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11
by Michael Weiss

One of the funniest and most affecting skits on Michael Moore's short-lived NBC series TV Nation featured black actor Yaphet Kotto trying to hail a cab in Manhattan. The only other fare he was competing against was a white ex-convict done up in a Simpsons-worthy caricature of what a don't-fuck-with-me jailbird should look like. Taxis invariably flitted by the Emmy award-winning Homicide star only to stop half a block down to pick up the ex-con. If this weren't enough -- and it never is with Michael Moore -- the farcical ante was then upped by lowering, as it were, the racist bar all the way to the ground. Yaphet was given accessories to make him appear less "menacing": first a bouquet of flowers, then a box of chocolates, finally a swaddled baby. Still, the poor guy just couldn't get a cab.

This was about as well-executed as a Michael Moore documentary fragment got or probably will ever get again. Humorous, uncomfortable to watch and educational not in the least.

Was there ever a greater sociological cliché about New York City propagated through local news channels and awful stand-up comedy routines that needed less proving than the one about bigoted taxi drivers? And to have this hammered home to a national television audience by a "rebel and his mic," as the tag-line for Moore's first film once read... Well, if this was rebellion, what must playing it safe have looked like?

Still, given what Moore has been up to lately, it's nice to reminisce about a time when he actually had a point about something relevant and could present it with the barest scrap of intellectual and moral authenticity.

This is a slight exaggeration. Moore has always found a real challenge really unattractive. He prefers cooking up paradoxically unimpressive films of what might be termed, in this post-Chomskyan epoch, manufactured dissent. And there's nothing chic about this particular strain of "radicalism" which, for all its one-liners and burlesque animation sequences, still sells itself as policy review.

There's no second guessing in a Michael Moore documentary despite the fact that a political documentary is, by convention if not by definition, an exercise in second- and third- and fourth guessing. Moore has repeatedly claimed his films are more like audio-visual Op-Ed pieces than documentaries. The trouble with this apologia is that, as Geoffrey O'Brien points out in his Fahrenheit critique in the New York Review, as an op-ed writer, Moore falls flat on his face; his points are occluded by hamfisted prose and a hyperactive pace that could the content of any high school poetry contest a run for its money. He's much more effective as a cinematic bricolageur, which is why you'll never hear him say the White House tried to impede the publication of Dude, Where's My Country?

Much of this has to do with attention span and with passive reception of information. Moore's ideal audience is already in a state of high dudgeon; it's impatient to take down a guy like George W. Bush, but it's even more impatient to have its motivation for doing so descried by the loudest, shrillest voice it can find. This is not to grace a "visceral" or emotive response to global affairs with the benefit of mindfulness--it's just to rile the gut even further and stoke the limbic system more intensely. Why else would so many film critics trash the homework and data representative portions of this film but extol its power to leave an audience feeling "shaken." This is Fahrenheit, all right. But it's higher than the film's allusive degree of 451, and the temperature has been rising a long while before the projectors rattle into action.

Yet the contradiction in Moore's seemingly populist style is that he sees himself speaking truth not to power, but to blinkered servility. Otherwise the condescending kindergarten tone of voice would have to go, and the odd (in both senses of that word) thesis would demand complication by antithesis or cross-examination.

Moore revels in assuming even his most loyal audience is energetic but stupid -- too much of the latter to edify itself unless dragged marmishly to the blackboard and have its nose rubbed in the lesson plan. (Remember: We're the culture with the ear-to-ear grin on our face denoting nothing between those two ears. See David Brooks' NYT piece on Moore.) Either that, or -- you'll pardon the sardonic benefit-of-the-doubt technique in which our man specializes -- Moore is more energetic but not quite as stupid himself, and it's in the spirit of egalitarianism that he anticipates our need for a semi-literate Cliffs Notes to current events.

He is a veritable genius, however, in his ability to synchronicize the volume of his chorus with a relevant public angst. What will he think of next? The answer is whatever we think of first. Each successive instance of a Moore J'accuse has taken on more than a hint of the crowd-pleasing element. Each film grows exponentially crowd-fellating, in fact. Why else maintain, as he was right to do, that his Oscar acceptance speech two years ago was received more approvingly in the Shrine Auditorium than the media persisted in claiming? He has more of the mob on his side than the mob or the media would like to believe.

So when the Big One who done good from Flint arrives as the man of the hour in Hollywood, the rest of the script pretty much writes itself. To paraphrase Moore's entire political philosophy without oversimplifying it: Wealth, power and prestige always bear an inverse relationship to truth, justice and the UN Security Council way. Stereotypes of conservatism are objective; your worst suspicions of authority are irrefutable facts by virtue of having remained your worst suspicions for long enough, well past the Stupid White Men statute of credible repudiation.

Yet the most "convincing" sections of Fahrenheit 9/11 are excellent examples of the Blake line: "A truth that's told with bad intent, / Beats all the lies you can invent." For a film that rests so much of its case on interpolation, it's a genuine, un-Moore-like irony that interpolation is exactly what damns this film as a bloated self-satire. (If he opted instead for the mockumentary genre, Moore would find a more hygienic and rewarding role as a kind of bastard child of Oliver Stone and Fellini. Give Moore a soundstage and he can wait for Godot, Guffman, Ralph Nader, Wesley Clarke, whomever to his heart's content and the quarrel between the truth and him will end there.)

Proof of presidential misconduct is splashed across the screen in this movie in eureka-shots of excised passages of declassified records that have been treated liberally with black magic marker -- always a sign of someone up to no good. And yet what is Fahrenheit itself but a 40's newsreel-velocity pastiche of excised passages and blackened-out records of recent American history?

We're shown Donald Rumsfeld happily shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983 (or rather re-shown it, as this grainy piece of gotcha evidence had been circulated on the Internet for over a year now.) Bad, morally nullifying stuff, to watch the current Defense Secretary make archival nice with public enemy number one. But never mind that as special envoy to Iraq during the Reagan administration Rumsfeld was obligated to negotiate with Saddam lest he commit a hostile act of state against a American ally. It should nauseate (not to mention implicate) us all now to even have to refer to Saddam as an ally in the past tense or to watch this sleazy piece of Washington deal-making with a genocidal bastard. But does Moore care to go to the videotape of Kofi Annan doing the same thing and to a greater extent, under the veil of multilateralism, just a few years ago, after the first Gulf War and after Saddam had become a transcontinental byword for psychopathic brutality? Of course not. The suggestion is that diplomatic competence on Rumsfeld's part in 1983 de-legitimizes his war-making capacity in 2003. Never mind that incompetence back then might well have inaugurated an even earlier "drumbeat" to war with Iraq. Would Michael Moore have preferred a confrontation with Saddam when Iraq was embroiled in its own "quagmire" against Khomeinist Iran? Saddam didn't lack weapons of mass destruction at that point on the timeline, nor was he afraid to use them within and without his own borders. Should the U.S. have invaded rather than coddled Baghdad twenty years ago to spare the humanitarian crises that any student of Baathism could have predicted would occur? And how might a preemptive war of choice have inflamed Arab opinion of a military-industrial superpower that was not then the only nation on earth worthy of such a title? Important questions, but not important enough for Michael Moore. Five seconds of incrimination beats a few minutes of investigation.

You also wouldn't know from what's presented in the course of this 122 minute sideshow that the current Defense Secretary, whatever his shortcomings, has at least partially reduced the moral deficit incurred by American realpolitik by his direct involvement in the overthrow, capture and imprisonment of his former hand-palpating dictator buddy. (Edging your way to the head of the statecraft learning curve is at best an example of inconsistency and at worst one of hypocrisy to Moore). Or that as a member of the Ford cabinet with the same job as he holds now, Rumsfeld and a White House chief of staff by the name of Dick Cheney spent their days plotting to subvert the architect of client-state foreign policy and the man arguably most responsible for America's geopolitical blunders in the Middle East: Henry Kissinger. Or did the Carlysle Group call all the shots in Saudi-US comity before George Bush, Sr. was even head of the Central Intelligence Agency? Once again, tricky stuff -- too tricky for Moore to wade through. The logical threads to his arguments never do find more definitive punctuation than pseudo-provocative, cowardly ellipsis.

And what exactly was proved by exhibiting the worst elements of our armed forces reveling in the destruction of Iraqi homes and the murder of innocent civilians? Would Moore have it that this level of sadism is systemic in the US military and that -- to update his post-production material by a few months -- the insane torturers of Abu Ghraib occupy majority status on the frontlines as well? If so, it would have been brave of him to come right out and say this. Instead, a malignant tissue is magnified a thousand fold to represent a wasting, pathologic organism. But then the mood switches and this visual is juxtaposed to an image of the same patient, now healthy and robust. We get a Flint, Michigan mother sharing her pain in a languorous uninterrupted scene, after learning that her enlisted son has been killed in a black hawk helicopter crash in Iraq. Certainly, Moore doesn't think this cut-down boy was ever blasting the Bloodhound Gang while civilian rooftops burned, or turning giddy at the prospect of pillage and destruction. This can't be the same guy who's there to "comfort" the grieving mother and help her redirect her suffering into righteous rage at the Bush administration, can it? Anti-war is not anti-troops, after all. At least Moore accords his audience this single opportunity to decide something for itself: which is the more exploitive of his depiction of American soldiers?

Moore knows that Fahrenheit is full of distortions, lies and frenzied, look-here-but-not-here sleights of cinematic hand. He admitted as much by plying the trade of non-fiction and then boasting about his zero tolerance policy towards criticism or hostile questioning. A slightly more sinister shade of this syndrome of guilt-paranoia was offered up earlier in the blockbuster season by Mel Gibson. Thanks to Mike and Mel, we now know the telltale signs of auteuristic bad faith: the entering into defense mode from the storyboarding phase; the unwillingness to carry the debate out of the cineplex and into the public forum; and the kind ofattention to select detail that would make Richard Hofstadter roll over in his grave.

It occurred to me halfway through watching Fahrenheit 9/11 that what distinguishes this movie from The Passion of the Christ is Moore's total lack of devotion to his particular gospel. Imagine what that smug grin of his must have undergone in the hours upon hours spent editing his precious masterpiece. What footage might have caused those fleshy jowls to avalanche in a rictus of opposed self-judgement? Or are we to believe there never was anything on the celluloid that Moore deemed unprintable for reasons of lending credence to counterpoint? Believe that, and wait a year or two... Michael Moore will tell you another one.

Dress Your Family in Denim and Courduroy  
Comical Chic: Dress Your Family in Courduroy and Denim
by Nic Duquette

His most recent offering is more uneven than previous collections, although its highlights show the polish of an experienced craftsman. His humor is less dependent on homosexuality-based jokes with fluorescent sell-by dates and instead plays on human cruelties as heartbreaking as they are funny. His wit is colossal. His fame has led to self-consciousness that is by turns annoying and artful. I could be talking about the Eminem record that came out a few years ago, but it's David Sedaris who's cleaning out his closet now. Sometimes the anguish is too much for Sedaris to deliver, particularly in the first half of the book; but it's relatively light, breezy anguish -- think Eggers without structural games -- and it sets the stage for some of Sedaris's finest essays yet, from his highly uncomfortable time working at a maid service to his plans to remodel Anne Frank's hideout into the perfect apartment -- before sputtering to a close. Unfortunately, the darker tone worries me about Sedaris's career plans; the book is classified as ESSAYS, with no HUMOR cross-listing. Furthermore, the new biography inside the dust jacket begins "David Sedaris is a playwright..." and relegates his humor work to the bottom of the paragraph. Playwright my ass. Let's all hope Sedaris is not becoming ashamed of humor.