There are dead spots: the helpless Patti Smith impersonation in "A Place Called Home," the dead-fish handshake Thom Yorke of Radiohead gives Harvey in their duet on "This Mess We're In." But with "Kamikaze" and "This Is Love," one number pounds on top of the other, thin sounds building until a wall you can't climb is staring you in the face. The plain fact that Harvey never uses all she has, never tells the secret, makes what she is willing to say a tease, a dare, a threat. But all of that seems far away on the first number, "Big Exit," which could have come off the Band's second album if she'd been around to play on it. Along with the hammering beat she gets on her guitar, the verses scratch at the memory, until finally the Band's basement-tapes, tall-tale "Yazoo Street Scandal" comes out of hiding. But the chorus is all Harvey, and Harvey in the air, circling the globe like Superman. "Baby, baby, ain't it true/I'm immortal/When I'm with you," she wails, not a crack or a tear in her tone, and, yes, she sounds like she has been here for a thousand years.

2) "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" returns to San Francisco 22 years after Kevin McCarthy is run down in the street screaming, "They're here! They're here!": Natalie Jeremijenko, "One Tree," at "Picturing the Genetic Revolution -- Paradise Now" (Exit Art, 548 Broadway, New York, through Oct. 28)

The installation ("Mixed Mediums Courtesy Postmasters"): eight putatively identical shrublike saplings in green containers. From explanatory material: "Cloning has made it possible to Xerox copy organic life and fundamentally confound traditional understanding of individualism and authenticity ... 'One Tree' is actually one hundred tree clones of a single tree micropropagated in culture. These clones were originally exhibited together as plantlets at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, in 1999. This was the only time they were seen together. In the Spring of 2001, the clones will be planted in public sites throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including Golden Gate Park, 220 private properties, San Francisco school district sites, Bay Area Rapid Transit stations, Yerba Buena Performing Arts Center, and Union Square. A selection of international sites are also being negotiated."

3) "Croupier"/"Sing-a-Long Sound of Music" (Waverly Theater, New York, Sept. 30)

Where the warning label on the marquee reads "PG," not "R."

4) David Margolick, "Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights" (Running Press)

With lyrics by Lewis Allen (aka Abel Meerpol, adoptive father of the sons of convicted atomic bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after the latters' execution), the anti-lynching song was both a hit and a scandal in 1939, when Holiday recorded it: "Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." Margolick somehow fails to mention this early version, regarding a lynch frenzy in Vicksburg, Miss.: "From gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers: till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees on every roadside; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest." -- Abraham Lincoln, "On the Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions," 1838

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics