Continuing its quest for total rerun domination, Law & Order (8 p.m., TNT) begins airing syndicated reruns on Tuesdays on TNT, in addition to round-the-clock on A&E. The TNT run kicks off with the one where Julia Roberts drops by to play footsie with Ben Bratt. The new sitcom Kristin (8:30 p.m., NBC) stars Broadway baby Kristin Chenoweth as a sunny gal from Oklahoma who goes to New York to be an actress, but ends up working as a personal assistant to a womanizing real-estate developer (Jon Tenney). On a rerun of NYPD Blue (10 p.m., ABC), Diane and Danny have some awkward moments, Denby gives Diane a false lead and Andy gets the word on Theo's condition. It seemed a little odd that Rick Schroder's Danny Sorenson didn't appear in the "Blue" season finale (he went missing after going on a bender and having a stripper turn up dead in his apartment). But now it all makes sense: Schroder announced over the weekend that he was following in the footsteps of David Caruso, Amy Brenneman, Jimmy Smits, Sharon Lawrence, Gail O'Grady, Nicholas Turturro, James McDaniel and Kim Delaney and leaving the show. At this point, Dennis Franz has got to be wondering, "Was it something I said?" Frontline (10 p.m., PBS, check local listings) presents "Blackout," a report on the energy crisis in California, coming soon to a deregulated state near you.

Specials

There's no "Buffy" tonight, but you can still see Sarah Michelle Gellar on the WB in I Know What You Did Last Summer (8 p.m., WB). Those with short attention spans can skip ahead to the next film in the series, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (9 p.m., USA). Court TV's Safety Challenge 2001 (10 p.m., Court TV) quizzes viewers on crime survival strategies, using dramatizations and interviews with experts. ABC News correspondent Jack Ford hosts.

Sports

Baseball: Braves at Expos (7 p.m., TBS)

Talk

Rosie O'Donnell (syndicated) David Duchovny, 'N Sync David Letterman (CBS) David Duchovny, Trisha Yearwood Jay Leno (NBC) Hugh Jackman, Blues Traveler Politically Incorrect (ABC) Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Donal Logue Conan O'Brien (NBC) Dave Chappelle, Weezer Craig Kilborn (CBS) Josh Hartnett, Buddy Guy

All times Eastern unless noted.

Joyce Millman is Salon's TV critic. To read more by Joyce Millman, visit her column archive.

Industry sources say Columbia Records, the music arm of the giant Sony Corp., is using one of its bestselling acts to send a message to the highly paid brigade of promoters: Enough is enough.

Most listeners don't know that virtually all the pop and rock songs they hear on the radio have been paid for -- indirectly -- by the major record companies. The record labels pay millions of dollars a year to the independent radio promoters, universally referred to as "indies," who in turn pass on a lot of that money to radio stations, which accordingly play what the promoters ask them to.

But the record companies are bridling under ever-increasing costs. In a move that could reverse that trend, Columbia informed indie promoters two weeks ago that the label would sharply curtail its indie payments on behalf of the new single from the multiplatinum-selling girl group Destiny's Child, "Bootylicious." The label said it would pay $1,000 to indies whose radio stations in only the top 50 markets added the song to their weekly playlists. But the label said it will not pay any indies for adds in smaller-market stations. This may seem like a minor distinction, but it represents the first time in years a major label has attempted to cut costs in this way. Columbia runs the risk of alienating the powerful indies in the hundreds of smaller radio markets across the country. Traditionally, indies have been paid whenever one of their claimed stations added a song in any of the nation's hundreds of individual radio markets. And in a major market, $1,000 per song per station represents just the base fee; depending on the circumstance -- like how desperate the label is for airplay -- the fees can ultimately run as high as $5,000 per song.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source at Columbia downplayed the move, suggesting it's not uncommon for a label to hold back payments on an act as popular as Destiny's Child, since the song's going to get played anyway. "It's not that big a deal. It's not a line drawn in the sand," this source said.

Others disagree. "I've never heard of that," says one veteran Top 40 indie promoter, referring to the top 50 market cutoff. "When I found out I said, 'Holy shit.'"

According to this indie, when a label has a sure thing on its hands it will often only pay for adds that come just the first week the single is released. But all market sizes are covered. "It's a courtesy, an unwritten rule," the indie explains. The rationale for paying indies for songs that stations will play anyway, like "Bootylicious," is that the indies will work harder getting less well-known acts the airplay they need -- or won't try to keep them off the air.

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The indies, who maintain long-term relationships with radio programmers and financial alliances with station managers, don't exactly control what gets played on commercial radio. But they do take credit for -- and get paid for -- what gets played.

That influence, real or imagined, has kept record companies at bay. But the companies are now increasingly upset about the escalating costs -- while there are no definitive figures, it's likely labels will dole out more than $100 million, perhaps even as much as $200 million, this year to indies.

But the companies are also afraid of the indies. They're reluctant to confront them for fear that they could retaliate by sabotaging future hits. And without crucial radio airplay, labels cannot reach the mass audience they need to sell their CDs.

That's why Columbia's directive to cut off payment for any station outside the top 50 markets may represent this war's Fort Sumter. Sources suggest it's the first time in years that a major label has tried to dictate terms to the powerful indies. "It's groundbreaking," says another promoter, who concedes the money-drenched system is teetering out of control. He cheers Columbia's move with Destiny's Child, despite the fact it cost him some money.

"I'll bet you a lot of indies are pissed off, but I got no problem with it. We need a correction and I think this could be the beginning."

Another agrees: "I applaud the Destiny's Child move. Columbia's a market leader with a ton of hits right now. They have the power to send a message and test the waters. To say let's see if it's about the music or the money; let's call a spade a spade. Long term, it could save the industry."

The indie promoter was once just a lobbyist whom the labels hired to help shepherd new songs onto the radio. But those days are long gone. Instead, indies today simply align themselves with certain radio stations, and pay them annual "promotional budgets" of $100,000 or more. The stations can use the money any way they wish; but once the payment is made, the indies claim those stations as their own -- and bill the record companies for each song the station adds to its playlist. Indies say they're merely paying for access, a chance to talk to station programmers about playing new songs. But in reality, many radio station program directors hear from their indies just once a week -- on Tuesday afternoon to find out what singles are being added. The indie then calls those adds into the labels -- station A is adding song B -- which triggers the indie's payment from the labels. "Indies don't work records anymore, they make deals," admits one who's been in the business for decades. "It's like being a salesperson for PlayStation 2 last Christmas. You just take orders."

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Columbia's move, however modest, to cap indie earnings comes at a time when there is growing concern among the labels about both the power indies wield and the fees they charge.

Of course, the labels, always searching for a competitive edge, pay the fees willingly, and have only themselves to blame for runaway costs. "Indies are only in business through the benevolence and stupidity of record companies," says one indie who's benefited for years.

Indeed, one need look no further than recent moves by the radio conglomerate Clear Channel, which owns nearly 1,200 U.S. radio stations and controls a hefty 60 percent of the rock-radio market.

Clear Channel has been aggressively looking for ways to make money off its unprecedentedly large radio holdings. There had been talk it would hand its entire roster of music stations over to just one indie firm, Tri State Promotions & Marketing, giving the firm unmatched power to leverage hundreds of Clear Channel stations and generate even more revenue from the record companies.

That appears now not to be the case. Sources speculate recent press attention, both from Salon and the Los Angeles Times, may have dampened company enthusiasm for the deal. Another hurdle may be the different cultures within the broadcasting business; there is for example the tightly knit world of urban and R&B radio, which a pop-promotion firm like Tri State would have a hard time penetrating.

Sources also say two other indie powerhouses, Jeff McClusky and Bill McGathy, might now be allowed to keep some of their current Clear Channel stations.

For instance, a source says McGathy recently bid a breathtaking $3.25 million for the right to represent en masse Clear Channel's 100-plus rock stations. (While the offer probably included some form of upfront lump payment, it still represents a hefty premium over the current industry average of about $100,000 per station.)

"It was a fair market bid," says the source.

Clear Channel countered with a counteroffer that totaled $8 million.

Such moves are viewed with enormous concern by the labels, which are ultimately the source of that money. It's now doubtful McGathy will win Clear Channel's entire rock roster, but rather just a small portion. But all around, prices continue to escalate. Just two years ago, one indie says, he was able to secure an exclusive relationship with a pop-music station in a top 100 market for $50,000 a year. That same indie recently lost a small pop-music station outside the top 100 markets when a competitor offered nearly $200,000 annually. He says the only way that indie can turn a profit on the station is if he doubles the rate he charges labels for playlist adds.

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Will Columbia's "Bootylicious" gambit work?

Any attempt by labels to rein in indies is bound to conjure up a strong sense of déjà vu for record-industry veterans. In 1981, upset about the influence amassed by a group of powerful indies known as "The Network," Warner Bros. and Columbia (before CBS sold the label to Sony) launched a boycott. Like today, powerful indies then were getting $3,000 or $4,000 an add, even though they rarely talked to station programmers. According to Fredric Dannen's 1990 music industry exposé, "Hit Men," the boycott quickly collapsed after the labels' marquee artists -- Loverboy (a platinum act at the time) and the Who among them -- revolted after having trouble getting their songs on the radio. Four years later, labels were still worried about the suffocating costs of indies. At the time, CBS was spending $12 million a year on indie promotion. Today, some majors spend that much every few months. In 1985 music industry trade group the Recording Industry Association of America considered launching an investigation into indies. If the RIAA found any illegal activity, the labels would have a reason to cut their ties, and save millions. The investigation was shelved, but labels got the out they needed the next year when NBC journalist Brian Ross, helped along by label sources, aired a sensational report connecting heavyweight indies with organized crime. Soon a federal grand jury, under the supervision of then-U.S. Attorney General Rudy Giuliani, began investigating indie promotion. Then-Sen. Albert Gore Jr. opened hearings on "the new payola." Soon, major labels announced they were no longer using indies. Over time, the practice reemerged. When it did, humbled indies were getting just $700 an add for a major-market station, not $3,000. And that's where the base rate stayed, well into the '90s. Recently, those indie fees have skyrocketed. One record label's head of promotion estimates it cost $1 million today "just to see if you have a hit at pop radio."

And there's no way around the system. "Everything on the radio is bought today," says Greg Mull, a former major-market programmer. (Mull was once named Billboard magazine's rock program director of the year.) "If you don't put money on the table, then the record is not going to get going. Prior to five years ago, that absolutely was not true."

So how is "Bootylicious" doing at radio? Two weeks after being shipped to radio, 113 pop stations had added the song, according to R&R magazine, making it among the most popular new songs at radio. By comparison, two weeks into the girl group's previous radio hit, "Survivor," for which all indies got paid, 150 stations were playing it.

This may seem like a smaller number, but there are interesting facts under the figures. Indies suggest that much of the discrepancy can be explained by the expected reaction of a hardcore part of the indie world -- by means of two dozen well-known "put" pop stations nationwide that may never play the song.

They're called "put" stations because they're controlled by influential indies who can "put" whatever they want on the playlists. Those indies may be upset by Columbia's move and may have retaliated by keeping "Bootylicious" off the air where they can. But most of the "put" stations are outside the top 50 markets.

With more than 100 stations already on-board for "Bootylicious," and Destiny's Child's new album still entrenched in the top five on Billboard's album chart, "so far, so good if you're Columbia," says one indie promoter. "They're looking pretty smart, or pretty ballsy."

Eric Boehlert is a senior writer at Salon.

This is partly made clear by the presence of hobbits, those sensible if small-minded late-Victorian villagers, and partly by the "applicability" (the word Tolkien preferred to "allegory") of the War of the Ring to various events of the modern age, from the battle against Nazism to the Cold War and the atomic bomb to the Industrial Revolution and the backlash against it. (As I have already suggested, I find this latter parallel the most convincing of the three.) But Tolkien's modernity lies most clearly in his anti-modernism. To borrow a concept, perhaps outrageously, from German philosopher T.W. Adorno -- who might be considered a kindred spirit from a vastly different tradition -- Tolkien issued his own Great Refusal to the myth of Enlightenment, preferring the enlightenment of myth.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In a lengthy and inadvertently hilarious screed published in the wake of the Channel 4/Waterstone's poll (whose result she called a "bad dream"), Germaine Greer defines the central characteristic of Tolkienian literature as "flight from reality." This is true enough if you understand the ideological content of her terms, so that "flight" means "thoroughgoing rejection" and "reality" means "the accepted liberal narrative of material and political progress." Although educated in terms that modernist critics and authors had to respect, Tolkien attracted a readership of millions with a disreputable genre and the message that almost everything valued by the modernists was empty and evil. Dear oh dear indeed.

T.A. Shippey is actually brave enough to compare this quintessentially anti-modern writer to the avatar of literary modernism himself, James Joyce. If Shippey is not quite as solid a literary critic as he is a philologist -- his claim that "the dominant literary mode of the 20th century has been the fantastic" is daring, if overstated -- here he strikes a telling blow. First there are the coincidences: Joyce and Tolkien were close contemporaries from neighboring nations, had similar class and religious backgrounds and are best known for one work, highly original, immensely influential and encyclopedic in scale ("Ulysses" and "The Lord of the Rings," respectively). Moreover, both labored long and hard over a successor work, written in still more inscrutable language, which proved impenetrable to all but their most devoted fans ("Finnegans Wake" and "The Silmarillion").

There are deeper correspondences, and here Shippey could have gone further and included Vladimir Nabokov as well. All three, you might say, have strong qualities of boyishness; they are precocious and erudite, lost in their own worlds. All are obsessively interested in language and indeed in linguistics. (Joyce, as my father could have told you in considerable detail, was something of an amateur philologist.) Each, in Shippey's phrase, "engaged in deep negotiation with the ancient genres of epic and romance" (see "Ulysses" and "Lolita"). Each was fascinated by puzzles, games and systems of taxonomy, and employed them as matters of both form and content. Yet the differences, says Shippey, are more instructive than the similarities:

Tolkien's approach to the ideas or the devices accepted as modernist is radically different because they are on principle not literary. He used "mythical method" not because it was an interesting method but because he believed that the myths were true. He showed his characters wandering in the wilderness and entirely mistaken in their guesses not because he wanted to shatter the "realist illusion" of fiction, but because he thought all our views of reality were illusions ... He experimented with language not to see what interesting effects could be produced but because he thought all forms of human language were already an experiment. One might almost say that he took the ideals of modernism seriously instead of playing around with them. All right, but one might also say that with the 20th century in the rearview mirror and the boundaries of high and low culture virtually dissolved, Tolkien's outsider status isn't what it used to be. For all its idiosyncrasy, "The Lord of the Rings" looks more and more as if it might belong to two distinct but interconnected literary traditions. One of these reflects the growing literary respectability of science fiction and fantasy, and would include Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany and various others. (Tolkien has a legion of imitators and emulators, but that is a separate phenomenon.)

The second category is really the leading offshoot of modernism itself, and might be dubbed Great Weird Boy Books, meaning weighty tomes that mix realism and fantasy along with various forms of language and discourse, much of it technical or abstruse, while aspiring to a mythic dimension. Such a list would include "Ulysses" and "Lolita," to be sure, but also "Gravity's Rainbow," "Catch-22" and "Slaughterhouse Five." You could add books by William Gaddis, Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace; you could reach outside the overeducated pale-male demographic for Ralph Ellison or A.S. Byatt or Delany or Margaret Atwood.

If we've gotten anything useful from postmodern literary theory (which is a debatable proposition), it's the idea that a book always reveals and conceals things that neither the writer nor the reader can control. Tolkien may have intended "The Lord of the Rings" as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," as he once wrote, but relatively few readers since the 1950s have received it that way. As Shippey makes clear, Tolkien's world is one of virtuous pre-Christian monotheism rather than paganism, and his "eucatastrophe" (Tolkien-C.S. Lewis parlance for a great moment of deliverance), when the One Ring is destroyed and Sauron's works are unmade, carries faint but distinct pre-echoes of Christian salvation and resurrection. But to those who saw Tolkien as a liberatory spirit of the counterculture, a lover of trees and hater of machines, the Christian dimension was simply irrelevant.

Tolkien was indeed a lover of trees and hater of machines; he was also an unregenerate Tory, even a monarchist, who distrusted modern notions of democracy and equality and resented the increasing dominance of the left in intellectual life. Those who embraced Tolkien from the '60s onward had of course not seen his letters of the 1940s, in which he praises Francisco Franco, suggests that it may not matter whether Adolf Hitler or the forces of "Americo-cosmopolitanism" emerge victorious from World War II and even remarks, "There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the 'Germanic' ideal."

Although Tolkien's defenders have done their utmost to rationalize and contextualize it, there is a troubling fixation on racial and ancestral purity in "The Lord of the Rings." Aragorn (usually described as "Aragorn son of Arathorn"), the returned king who assumes his rightful throne by epic's end, is descended from the Númenorean line of Elendil, which confers fair skin, great height and beauty, exceedingly long life, valor in battle and healing powers. The further away from this ideal ancestry Tolkien's humans get, the darker, cruder and less reliable they become.

In fairness, Tolkien never suggests that racial purity makes a decisive difference between good and evil; the Woses are noble savages who value freedom, while the sinister Lord of the Nazgûl is a great king of Númenorean descent who was twisted to the will of Sauron. (Further philology: Tolkien's English word for the Nazgûl, the Ringwraiths, was aptly chosen, since "wraith" is related to "writhe" and "wreath," and carries the meaning of a bent and twisted spirit.) Even the dark-complexioned Southrons and Easterlings who fight for Sauron's armies are seen as valiant but deluded, and those who surrender to Aragorn's forces are shown mercy. But there is no mercy for the Orcs, a subhuman race bred by Morgoth and/or Sauron (although not created by them) that is morally irredeemable and deserves only death. They are dark-skinned and slant-eyed, and although they possess reason, speech, social organization and, as Shippey mentions, a sort of moral sensibility, they are inherently evil. In short, they are by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about, far away to the east and south. In a letter to a potential film producer, Tolkien explains them as "degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." As a representation of the Other, to use contemporary critical terms, they could hardly be more revealing.

And yet, and yet. If Tolkien's racial typing is dismaying, it is also the product of his background and era, like most of our inescapable prejudices. At the level of conscious intention, he was not a racist or an anti-Semite. In his letters, he decries the racial situation in his birthplace of South Africa, and he knew and liked several Jewish academics; when someone wrote to ask whether his last name was of Jewish origin, he replied that he "should consider it an honor if it were."

Furthermore, like "The Lord of the Rings" itself, Tolkien's political and social views were so peculiar that he can genuinely be claimed by renegades and revolutionaries almost as easily as by Jesuits and aristocrats. In 1943 he wrote to his son Christopher, "My political beliefs lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) -- or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy ... Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers."

It was the entire terrain in between anarchy and monarchy -- the so-called rational forms of government, from socialism to liberal democracy to fascism -- that he disliked. (The Shire had virtually no government or police force before the arrival of Saruman.) He loved England but not Great Britain and still less its empire; he had little preference between the American and Soviet behemoths, but once said he suspected the Russians were "not quite so dismal." He was a hardcore Luddite who would no doubt have been horrified by the Internet; he gave up driving in 1939 after seeing what cars and road building had done to his beloved English countryside, and even in later years when he had become rich he never owned a television set or a washing machine.

"The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets," he wrote to Christopher in another wartime letter. "It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, USSR, the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be."

This I think is the Tolkien who survives, the cantankerous, politically unclassifiable, anti-globalization Tolkien who is clearly our contemporary -- jibes against feminism included. In trying to return a lost sense of myth and mystery to his little corner of the world, he also sought to make the globe as a whole less small, dull and flat. He lived in a provincial suburb for virtually his entire adult life -- he was a Christian after all, and accepted that this is a fallen world -- but fought against the spreading ideology of suburbanism more fiercely than any black-clad rioter smashing a Starbucks window. "There is only one bright spot," he added in the "Anarchy and Monarchy" letter, "and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations ... But it won't do any good, if it is not universal."

Although the subject of sex in Tolkien deserves its own article -- he is writhing in his grave, a tormented wraith, as I write this -- it is one of the key contradictory elements in his work and requires a brief visit. Despite what some critics have suggested, I see no homosexual element in "The Lord of the Rings"; rather, it is a "homosocial" realm of intimate, affectionate relationships among men, of a kind that has virtually vanished from modern life. From his school days in Birmingham onward, Tolkien spent his intellectual life in just such a realm, sharing his innermost thoughts and visions with Lewis and other friends around firesides and in Oxford pubs. Frodo and his courageous servant Sam -- who indeed saves the entire quest from disaster -- undoubtedly love each other, and their love is both physical and emotional, in fact platonic in the truest sense. Tolkien intended to reflect the complex cross-class relationships between man and officer, servant and master, that he had encountered as a World War I lieutenant.

That doesn't mean, on the other hand, that "The Lord of the Rings" is ever fully comfortable with heterosexuality. Its female characters are little more than idealized figures of inspiration or decoration; Eowyn, the warrior-princess of Rohan, is the only real exception. (Was her original a female graduate student who braved the pipe smoke and postprandial glasses of port?) Her courtship by Faramir of Gondor is stylized and awkward but at least has the flavor of real emotion. If you still believe that the book has no more explicit depiction of heterosexual activity than that, however, I suggest you take another look at the disturbing encounter between Sam and Shelob, the huge and evil female spider, at the end of Book Four.

But I am mainly here to praise Tolkien, not to bury him, and one bizarrely sexualized scene between hobbit and arachnid does not spoil my enjoyment of "The Lord of the Rings." It is a book too long for some of its purposes and too short for others; its highfalutin language gets more archaic as it goes along, and it never quite lives up to the menace and tension of the journey from the Shire to Rivendell in Book One (a judgment with which Tolkien apparently agreed). I don't believe for a moment that it is the best book of the 20th century, or even that such comparisons are meaningful. But it is a distinctive, even definitive, modern work of rebellion against modernity and, in the words of Tolkien's publisher and friend, Rayner Unwin, "a very great book in its own curious way." It is not merely the scale of mythic invention or the grand storytelling that distinguishes it but also its tragic vision, the profound melancholy mentioned by Lewis. Few if any heroic quests have ever had such a sense of human frailty and weakness; although Frodo brings the Ring all the way to the Cracks of Doom where Sauron forged it, in the end he is overcome by temptation and claims it for his own. He is redeemed only by chance, or by divine grace, which in Tolkien's world comes to the same thing. He has shown mercy to the treacherous and miserable Gollum, who becomes the accidental agent of Frodo's and the world's salvation. But Frodo, the book's ostensible hero, fails in his quest and is left, like the knight who guards the Holy Grail, with a grievous wound that can never heal (an Arthurian parallel Shippey has not noticed).

Even the victory wrought by the Ring's destruction is a sad affair, in many respects closer to defeat. Much of the magic and mystery drains out of Middle-earth after Sauron's fall, leaving behind an ordinary, only slightly prehistoric realm dominated by human beings. Tolkien's most beloved characters -- Gandalf, the High-Elves Elrond and Galadriel and the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, both of them indelibly marked by the Ring -- depart over the western seas to a paradisiacal nowhere that none of us on this shore will ever see.

Tolkien liked to present himself to friends and readers as a contented fireside hobbit, fond of tobacco, simple food and late mornings in bed, and there can be no doubt, reading his letters, that he was immensely gratified by the outpouring of love and enthusiasm his work engendered. (And immensely irritated by some of it; when a woman wanted to name her Siamese cats after his characters, he replied that they were "the fauna of Mordor.") But in reality he was a strange and complicated man who wrote a strange and sad book, whose complex of meanings we will likely never determine.

I think the best answer to the dear-oh-dear, flight-from-reality crowd is to point out that Tolkien's Middle-earth is not an imaginary world but an imaginary history of our own world. For all its fantastic and immortal creatures it is after all a vale of tears, and "The Lord of the Rings" is not a triumphalist fantasy but a lamentation and farewell for all that is past or passing. Tolkien should of course have the last word on this. Less than a third of the way through his epic he sounds a melancholic note that reverberates throughout his story and prefigures its ending. It is perhaps the loveliest piece of prose in all his work, and it reminds us that he understood myth not only in terms of philology or sacred truth but also as writing of tremendous clarity and affective power.

Frodo and his companions depart by boat from Lórien, the enchanted forest of Galadriel -- a sort of earthly paradise, which Shippey thinks Tolkien may have borrowed from the medieval poem "Pearl" -- near the end of Book Two. But it seems to be Lórien that is slipping away from them,

like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world.

Even as they gazed, the Silverlode passed out into the currents of the Great River, and their boats turned and began to speed southward. Soon the white form of the Lady was small and distant. She shone like a window of glass upon a far hill in the westering sun, or as a remote lake seen from a mountain: a crystal fallen in the lap of the land. Then it seemed to Frodo that she lifted her arms in a final farewell, and far but piercing-clear on the following wind came the sound of her voice singing. But now she sang in the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the Sea, and he did not understand the words: fair was the music, but it did not comfort him.

Andrew O'Hehir is a Salon contributing writer.

"Why do I get the sinking suspicion that you hand your children over to a kid kennel every morning in order to drive the latest BMW and want not to feel guilty about it?"

It's pretty funny if you know me. It's really sad, whether you know me or not. Most mommies are familiar with the oft-invoked "Mommy Wars," a battle that has working and stay-at-home mothers going mano a mano for moral primacy. And most of us know that it is largely overblown. It is true that many of us are ambivalent about mothers going to work, but studies have indicated that a majority of men and women either approve of the practice or feel that a mother's choice -- either to stay at home or to enter the workforce -- should be respected.

This fact does not prevent the periodic release of poisonous diatribes against working mothers. It's just that they don't tend to come from other mothers -- at home or at work. They come from musty quarters where "choice" is rather narrowly defined. Richard Lowry gives us his take in the May 28 cover story of the National Review. Among other things, he says this about working mothers:

"They are a historical aberration; they represent a minority preference among women; and they run exactly counter to the standard of motherhood that should be encouraged by society. No wonder elite culture treats them as hothouse flowers, who must hear nary a discouraging word. But the fact is that working moms are at the very center of a variety of cultural ills. Maybe a little stigma is exactly what they deserve."

Ouch.

Child-rearing manuals advise the parents of stubborn toddlers that there comes a time when it is no longer effective to simply say "No," or to expect action as the result of a stern "Because I said so." Instead, it becomes necessary to offer distractions or, better yet, to suggest that a child make a choice. The parent conjures for the toddler a heady whiff of independence but tailors the "choices" to ensure that the outcome is "safe" or "appropriate." One creates the illusion of options while making sure that the child makes the choice that is desired by the parent.

This is a strategy that is well known to mothers, but not just because they are encouraged to employ it with their children. It is familiar because, as women, we are frequently treated as toddlers, enticed but ultimately manipulated by others as we make "choices." Implicit in the realm of reproductive choice is independence; but certain in the scenario of terminating a pregnancy is scorn or shame or criminality. And when women have children, they are once again offered a variety of choices -- some of them dignified as "rights" -- and once again, they find that there is really only one appropriate option, one way to do the right thing.

This is a free country. Debate is a good thing. We can feel strongly about missile shields and panty shields and Tom and Nicole. But we have supposedly been cured of any tendency to dominate or discriminate on the basis of misguided assumptions. It is not appropriate to look upon other humans with proprietary designs, except, of course, if they are children. (Here we do not discriminate, dispensing disrespect freely with no regard to race, creed or color.) And there was, of course, that mostly informal, though widely acknowledged, liberation of women.

So why, when a woman chooses both to work and to mother, does she incite the sort of rage reserved for wayward clerics and defilers of sacred things? Why is a report about the potential negative impact of child care on children offered as proof that working mothers are selfish and unkind? Where is this pack of boogeywomen, racing to egotistical satisfaction in fancy cars, braking long enough to dump their children with strangers and then speeding past saintly stay-at-home moms, forcing them to eat their haughty dust? The stigma that Lowry wishes to attach to working mothers will have to be just a little stigma, since stigma must be stretched these days to cover all sorts of new options that are wrong or bad or immoral, despite their being chosen by seemingly rational folks. In fact, many of these options have become bona fide alternatives supported by technology and the law, not to mention great swaths of the population.

Single people, for instance, are choosing to become single parents. Some of them are older women, some of them are lesbians, one of them is Rosie O'Donnell. There are enough of them to give a turbocharge to census statistics in this category. (New census data shows that the number of single-parent families grew five times faster in the '90s than the number of married couples with children.)

Likewise, many couples are choosing to not get married but to have families nonetheless. Some are gay, some are being creative with reproductive technology, some are adopting. (More impressive census data here: The number of married couples nearly doubled in the past decade to 5.5 million.)

As these choices have proliferated, so have the flak, confusion and heartbreak of those who belong to generations or cultures who find these choices unacceptable. To the extent that these choices can be made more difficult, or that better choices can be made more attractive, there is work underway: Bullying laws that include harassment on the basis of sexual orientation are having a tough time in local legislatures; incentives are on offer in some states to promote marriage with cash prizes.

But it would be hard -- some would say impossible -- to bar women from work. As Lowry points out in the National Review: "Returning to a regime that discourages women's work as a matter of law is, of course, out of the question." All that is left is shaming and haranguing and the frequent manipulation of statistics. Says Lowry, "At the very least young women shouldn't be constantly told that they should want what they don't."

This overpowering female urge to be at home with children is yet another myth, however, that has been exploded by science and statistics. In her book "Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection," anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who has studied maternal behavior for three decades, insists that in humans -- more than any other species -- mother love is a sometime thing, a compulsion dependent on circumstances, not just hormones.

"Mothers have worked for as long as our species has existed, and they have depended on others to help them rear their children," says the professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California at Davis. "I have come to understand just how flexible parental emotions in humans can be."

Certainly the statistics on the number of women in the workforce would seem to indicate a range of female desires and goals that go beyond giving birth and nurturing offspring. In slightly more than one decade, ending in the late '80s, the number of employed mothers with small children doubled. By the end of the '90s, more than 60 percent of working women had children younger than 3 years old.

"Working women are the norm, but we live in a society that imagines what is normal is not normal." says Lisa Benenson, who, as editor in chief of Working Mother magazine, receives a passel of venomous diatribes about working mothers every month. "Even if it is a minority of people who believe that women who go to work are wrong, evil and harming their children, that is the broad image that is conveyed; it is the image we see and read about in the media." The beleaguered and ineffectual working mom on TV -- "a crazed harridan who can't get anything right," says Benenson -- is not a reflection of reality. "But what we see is what we come to believe," she says. (Mitigating presences, she says, are Sela Ward from "Once and Again" and Amy Brenneman from "Judging Amy.")

Spared from the most venomous criticism are single mothers who work out of financial necessity. Even though their quality of mothering is frequently questioned, their lack of choice in the matter makes them objects of pity rather than targets of scorn. Yet, says Benenson, "most mothers work because they have to." She points to statistics that show 75 percent of working mothers earning annual salaries of $25,000 or less. "Tell me those women aren't working because they have to," she says.

But if they are not in the workforce because of financial necessity, they still have a right to be there, says Benenson. "Why must we make a choice for them?" she says. "Because for some reason, raising children is something we have to be right about."

Yet the data collected on the effects of working mothers on their children seems to indicate that kids benefit, for the most part, from having a mom who works. A 1999 analysis of data collected in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) found few negative effects of maternal employment. The ones that were found -- a slight difference in the level of compliance in 3- and 4-year-olds -- disappeared by the time the children were 5 to 6 years old. Children of mothers who worked long hours were found to have slightly lower test scores, but the differences in their scores and those of children with mothers at home also faded over time.

(The quality of child care was not part of the NLSY study, but when it has been considered, a predictable correlation between the quality of care and the outcomes for children has been reported.)

In a 1999 study by University of Michigan psychologist Lois Hoffman, who has been tracking the impact of maternal employment since the early '60s, researchers listed effects of mothers at work on their children's well-being that included higher academic outcomes for children, better social adjustment for children and a higher sense of competence and effectiveness in daughters. The study also found working mothers "are more affectionate with their children than those who don't have full-time jobs." Working mothers were also less depressed and had higher morale than stay-at-home moms. "They feel a sense of empowerment," Hoffman says.

In fact, one of the few negative effects of maternal employment found in research to date is not due directly to employment but guilt about employment. Mothers who feel guilty about enjoying their jobs were seen in studies to sometimes overcompensate by overindulging their children, a factor that affects children's peer relationships and academic performance.

So to the extent that Lowry and others jealously guard access to the choice of work like some hand-built tree fort (No girls allowed!), there is no evidence that they are improving things for their favorite victims, "the children." In fact, it would seem, they could be making things worse.

Perhaps then, it is time once again for the guilt-plagued working to return to the parenting manual, this time to the section on bathroom humor. It is important, mothers and fathers are told, to ignore the immature and nonsensical mantras of children who are verbally experimenting with naughty words. Remember: If you neither laugh nor panic, the potty humor will fade as the potty mouth recognizes the inappropriate and silly nature of his or her words.

Jennifer Foote Sweeney is the editor of Life.

Unfortunately for the Bushes, their fellow citizens have a right to know that the first family will be held to the same rules imposed on the rest of us. The necessity for a single standard is greater still when those rules were imposed by the president himself.

Yet conservative commentators, in a sudden display of tender concern for victims of tabloid journalism, are urging reporters to stop picking on the Bush twins. They point out that almost all American kids start drinking before they reach legal age, that underage guzzling is usually a private problem for families to resolve, and that neither of the girls has harmed anyone else.

The pleas for mercy sound perfectly reasonable, even though several of the same pundits couldn't resist attacking Chelsea Clinton in the most cruel and boorish way. But except for a few lonely civil libertarians, almost nobody made those permissive arguments when George W. Bush (and a bipartisan majority of the Texas Legislature) enacted the "three strikes" penalties that could lead to Jenna Bush's imprisonment if she is arrested with alcohol once more.

In the situational ethics that now define conservatism, cracking down on kids who drink was a great national imperative, until that policy meant political trouble for a Republican in the White House.

No doubt the public humiliation of Jenna and Barbara Bush has been inevitable since 1997, when their father approved a set of Draconian revisions to the Texas laws governing consumption of alcohol by minors. Like most teenagers, they eventually were bound to run afoul of those statutes, which he had trumpeted as symbols of his own rectitude and his determination to crush youthful vice and criminality. Due to their high visibility, they were likely to be caught, too.

In fact, as reported in the Houston Chronicle, Jenna Bush's first alcohol offense occurred within six months after the then-governor signed the harsh new standards into law. (Were it not for a loophole that excludes her first offense because she was only 16 at the time, she would now be facing up to six months in jail as well as a $2,000 fine.) By the time he approved that bill, Bush had already fashioned a political career out of his propensity for cracking down, for "tough love" and for treating juvenile offenders with "zero tolerance." Those were the principal themes of his first campaign for governor, when much more was said about his opponent's history of substance abuse than about his own excessive drunkenness. During that 1994 race, he went so far as to cite his daughters as evidence of his fitness to punish other kids. "I've raised two children that respect discipline," he said proudly (and somewhat optimistically).

Within weeks after he signed the laws that now haunt his family, Bush triumphantly addressed a Midwestern GOP conference. "One of my main responsibilities as governor -- and I believe one of the responsibilities as Republicans -- is to set the tone for change," he remarked. "Whether that change involves schools, or the juvenile justice system, or whether that change involves solving the No. 1 problem facing America -- the culture of our time -- a culture that says if it feels good, do it, and if you have a problem, blame somebody else."

When he embarked on his campaign for the presidency, Bush continued to emphasize the nation's supposed moral decline while proclaiming a "new era of personal responsibility." As the long-concealed facts about his own past finally emerged, however, it became difficult not to wonder whether he assumed that his preachments are for ordinary citizens only, not members of the Bush clan. With his insistent avoidance of honest discussion about his own indulgences and indiscretions, including his drunk-driving arrest, he made that contradiction all too obvious.

Lying behind Bush's personal double standard are issues not only of abusive authority but of class and race. The imagery he exploited in his crusade against juvenile offenders always focused on black, Latino and white working-class youth, not the sons and daughters of the fancy Dallas and Houston suburbs. That nasty habit hasn't changed with his elevation to the White House. The latest penalty to be imposed on young people arrested for possession of marijuana -- permanent ineligibility for federal student loans -- is heavily class-biased. Young scholars with backgrounds similar to that of Bush girls, each of whom is the beneficiary of a half-million-dollar trust fund, don't need federal loans.

So for many Americans, the Bush booze bust represents a question of elementary fairness as well as an opportunity for a few laughs. It isn't that the president's daughters deserve to be mocked or humiliated. They don't. It is simply that they must be accorded the same tough treatment mandated by him toward other young people, whose chances and privileges are otherwise far smaller than theirs. The only insurance of such equal justice (or injustice) is appropriate media coverage of their illegal conduct and its consequences.

In short, on Father's Day they will have only one man to blame for their present predicament.

And speaking of Daddy Dubya, perhaps his daughters' distress will encourage him to reconsider his punitive attitude toward those who make the same mistakes he once did. Had he been subjected to such a strict and unforgiving code, after all, this paragon of sobriety would be in no position to inflict his hypocrisies on the rest of us today.

Joe Conason writes about political issues for Salon News and other publications. For more columns by Conason, visit his column archive.

We are the Internet, over here at Salon, at least part of it, and it was hard not to wonder exactly what Fleischer meant by his dark warning. Actually, I knew exactly what he was trying to say: The Internet is a shadowy place where reputable people don't go, where rumor and innuendo and bile simmer in the darkness until they bubble up into unsavory news stories, stories that reputable people, sadly, then have to answer questions about. What I didn't know is whether that's what Fleischer actually believes, whether he's missed the fact that for most people, the Internet is not some fringe obsession, but the place to check stock quotes, sports scores and news headlines, buy books and CDs and Gap T-shirts (plus meet new friends; more on that later) -- as well as the fact that the Internet had absolutely nothing to do with Jenna Bush making news.

The Associated Press broke the stories of Bush's alcohol citations, and that makes sense. Her troubles are a matter of public record. She's an adult, she broke the law more than once and she's the president's daughter. Her father has advocated and signed into law tough penalties for underage drinkers. Her alcohol-related mishaps are a legitimate news story, not Internet gossip.

But it was hard not to miss an odd convergence. The same week as Bush's troubles made headlines, a news story did come bubbling up from the dark reaches of the Internet: the strange tale of gay conservative Andrew Sullivan, and the supposed "hypocrisy" of his lecturing on gay politics and morality while, apparently, he looks for kinky sex on the Internet. His critics, who include gay journalists Michelangelo Signorile, David Ehrenstein and Michael Musto, have in various ways made public the details of Sullivan's Internet exploits, including his screen handle as well as the online personal "profile" the HIV-positive journalist used as he sought out opportunities for having unprotected sex with men who are also infected with the AIDS virus. Discovered on the Internet, published in print, the Sullivan story then became mainstream news.

The convergence of the Bush and Sullivan stories, as well as the public reaction to them, raises the toughest and most fascinating questions in journalism today: Why are we so obsessed with the private lives of public figures? What kind of privacy, if any, are they entitled to? And what's "private"? Is hypocrisy a good enough reason to reveal someone's secrets -- and who decides what constitutes hypocrisy? Both have now become "Internet stories" because they've taken on a life of their own on Web sites, chat rooms and message boards. Amazingly, in Salon's letters pages and elsewhere, Jenna Bush has gotten considerable sympathy for suffering media overkill, while Sullivan's humiliating sexual exposure has been widely applauded.

The reaction is, of course, ass-backwards: The Bush story is news, while Sullivan's is not.

In fact, the reaction to the Sullivan story has been scarier to me than the story itself. That Sullivan has made enemies is well known. He and Signorile have clashed before over the ethics of "outing" gay public figures who have stayed in the closet, with Signorile opting for exposing their hypocrisy and Sullivan defending their right to privacy. That Signorile would decide, along similar lines, that the public also needed to know about Sullivan's private sexual practices, in light of his moralistic public statements, doesn't shock me. I don't agree, but I'm not surprised. I am surprised, and a little sickened, by the reaction to the story. Letters on Jim Romenesko's Media News have overwhelmingly favored Signorile. Sullivan's foes offer two lines of defense for outing him sexually. One is that he's preached a fairly (but not unrelentingly) conservative line on sex and AIDS and gay identity. His New York Times magazine article about good news on the AIDS-fighting front, "When Plagues End," is blamed for creating the illusion that the disease has been conquered, supposedly leading to public and private neglect of the issue. So supposedly, the news that Sullivan himself is practicing unsafe sex (though he and his partners are HIV-positive, they could be exposing one another to new, more virulent strains of the virus) is of public interest, especially in this age of rising HIV-infection rates.

But if public health is the real reason for outing Sullivan's private sexual behavior, then the names of everyone we know, gay and straight, who practices unsafe sex should be revealed, posted in the town square, in newspaper classifieds and, of course, on the Internet. Of course, the real reason Sullivan's critics support his outing is payback, pure and simple, despite their high-minded public-health protestations. And that's appalling. More than a few people have written about Sullivan's criticisms of President Clinton's private transgressions when they defend savaging the gay conservative, as though his anti-Clinton writings make his private life fair game.

It seems as if there's a brand-new, very simple standard for when the private behavior of a public figure is news: when he or she writes something that makes enemies. And that's indefensible.

Sadly, Clinton's impeachment, rather than sobering the country about the costs of sexual witch hunts, actually made them more likely -- in the short term anyway. Left-wing Web sites were atwitter with rumors of an alleged affair between Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and a state official last month. Enemies of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have luxuriated in the public scold's very public humiliation over his affair with Judith Nathan. Some people who've defended the Jenna Bush story as news do so solely because right-wing attack dogs would have had a field day with similar news about Chelsea Clinton. That reasoning is logically and morally corrupt, but it's amazingly prevalent.

One yearns for absolute standards: that the private life of a public figure is either always news or it's never news. But that's impossible. The stench of hypocrisy will always draw the media's attention, and it should. I've found myself thinking a lot about Salon's much-criticized decision to run the story of Henry Hyde's extramarital affair as Hyde, a harsh Clinton critic, was set to head the House impeachment committee. I was torn at the time, and still am, a little. But the almost exact correspondence between what Clinton was being impeached for -- and it was adultery after all, not lying about it -- and Hyde's own hidden past made it, in the end, a solid, defensible story. Sullivan, by contrast, has taken complex and contradictory stands on gay sexual politics, and, at any rate, isn't standing in official judgment over anyone.

I'm torn, too, about the extent of the Jenna Bush coverage and at what point it becomes overkill. I've actually gone farther than many people and suggested her drinking may have something to tell us about her father, the president. Issues of character and judgment have always been the real questions about Bush, a relative political lightweight who got elected thanks to his promise to "change the tone" and "restore honor and dignity" to the Clinton-befouled White House. He got a pass on his own drinking, and even used his daughters as an excuse for not coming clean about his DUI. Jenna's drinking is evidence that such a course was not only bad politically but perhaps bad personally, in that professionals always advise parents with alcohol problems to tell the truth about their drinking. On the other hand, I was once 19, and I cringe at the extent to which Jenna Bush has lost her privacy.

But then, we're all on the verge of losing our privacy if Andrew Sullivan's critics have their way. Maybe the scariest thing about their defense of outing Sullivan is the extent to which they insist he has no rights to privacy, especially when he's been so foolish as to post personal information on the Internet. In that sense, they sound a little like Fleischer, as though the Internet is a dark and scary realm where you can't complain about meeting dragons if you're dumb enough to go there.

Of course, some of these same left-leaning zealots no doubt oppose corporate invasions of Internet privacy, and support the movement to limit attempts to capture and disseminate the information we reveal about ourselves on the Internet daily. That said, Sullivan and others probably have to accept that there is no privacy and anonymity on the Internet anymore -- though Sullivan has paid a heavy price for not understanding, in time to protect himself, the extent to which the rules have changed.

What's most striking is the lack of sadness on this last point. Privacy seems a little like oxygen to me, necessary for human life, and evidence of its ever-shrinking dimensions is a little like the hole in the ozone layer, ominous and depressing. Payback feels good at the time, but in the end it really is a bitch. For all of us.

Joan Walsh is the editor of Salon News.

Nicks is one of Fleetwood Mac's three singer-songwriters -- keyboardist Christine McVie and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham are the others. But onstage (and Fleetwood Mac is touring incessantly), Nicks is front and center, tiny and snub-nosed and as fresh-faced as a cheerleader, twirling in her ballerina skirts and gauzy batwing blouses and lacy shawls and Bride of Frankenstein platform boots. She's the photogenic one, and the media gloms onto her, which isn't fair, really, because Fleetwood Mac is much more than Stevie Nicks' backup group.

Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, the band's namesakes, are one of the most supple, crackling rhythm sections in rock 'n' roll; they've anchored Fleetwood Mac through years of personnel changes, and now they've made their big, unimaginably big, score. The latest incarnation of Fleetwood Mac has a luscious sound merging the smoky blues favored by Christine McVie with the American pop-folkie confessionalism of Buckingham and Nicks, two kids from affluent San Francisco suburbs who played in a local band together, ran away to Los Angeles, became lovers and recorded one unsuccessful album as a duo. The album nonetheless caught the ear of Mick Fleetwood, and they joined the band in 1974.

In Fleetwood Mac, Christine and Stevie are like the Dashwood sisters in Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," although not in the way you'd assume. McVie is an accomplished, respected musician. Her singing is self-possessed and serene. But she's the one writing vulnerable lyrics like "You can take me to paradise/But then again you can be cold as ice/I'm over my head/And it sure feels nice," and "Oh Daddy ... I'm so weak but you're so strong." Nicks has the flighty, passionate image of a girly-girl pirouetting in a fairyland of crystal visions ("Dreams") and snow-covered hills ("Landslide"); onstage, she pulls her velvet cloak around her and becomes "Rhiannon," the sensuous witch who "rings like a bell through the night" and "rules her life like a bird in flight." But her love songs are tough and clear-eyed and almost always about the ends of affairs. She does the leaving, and the getting even. She does not beg. McVie and Nicks are a beguiling contrast, and between them stands the intriguing, intense Buckingham, half tempestuous rock stud, half needy little boy. This is a band. But as great a band as Fleetwood Mac is, it's the romantic entanglements of its members -- during the recording of "Rumours," Nicks and Buckingham were breaking up, and so were the McVies -- that got them on the cover of Rolling Stone, all in one big bed together. And you have to admit, the Nicks-Buckingham oil-and-water coupling, chronicled in the songs they wrote to and about (but, oddly, never with) each other, is in itself worth the price of admission.

Their split is captured in the greatest he said/she said single of all time, "Go Your Own Way"/"Silver Springs," released in 1976. "Tell me why/Everything turned around/Packing up/Shacking up is all you wanna do," Buckingham writes, rather ungallantly, in the fevered "Go Your Own Way." In "Silver Springs" (which was left off "Rumours"), Nicks hits him with a spine-tingling curse: "I'll follow you down till the sound of my voice will haunt you/You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you." (Twenty years later, Stevie will sing that song in Fleetwood Mac's MTV reunion special, her calm, level gaze fixed unwaveringly on Lindsey. Chain, keep us together.)

Yes, it's 1977, and Stevie Nicks (born Stephanie Lynn Nicks, in Phoenix) is the most popular, most visible, woman in rock. And she's a joke. Rock critics (East Coast, male) call her an airhead, a fluffball. "Stevie is a California girl prone to writing songs about witches, mysticism and all the other shit one would conjure up sauteeing in a Jacuzzi ... But although Big Mac's sound has been consistently bland, you can't blame Stevie -- she's tried to provide some comic relief," goes one review from Creem. But punk is coming and it's gunning for mega-ultra-supergroups like Fleetwood Mac. A new generation of women rockers will rise and they will play unpretty, untwirly music. Nicks' reign will soon be over. In the future, she and Fleetwood Mac will be a footnote, a footprint frozen in the tar pits of the bloated corporate rock age.

And coffee will never cost $3.50 a cup, LPs are here to stay and California will never, ever run out of electricity. It's 2001 and it's OK to admit it now: Stevie Nicks is cool. Actually, she's more than cool -- she's hot. Girl group du jour Destiny's Child samples the chattering, buzzing rhythm track from Nicks' post-Mac hit "Edge of Seventeen" on "Bootylicious," a song from their chart-topping CD "Survivor"; Nicks appears in the video. Courtney Love is a fan; so is Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan. (Love and Corgan covered Nicks' "Gold Dust Woman" and "Landslide," respectively.) Disciple Sheryl Crow produces, plays guitar and sings on five of the 13 songs on "Trouble in Shangri-La," Nicks' first album in seven years. Other members of Lilith nation -- Sarah McLachlan, Macy Gray, Dixie Chick Natalie Maines -- sing on "Trouble in Shangri-La," too. Even Nicks' '70s glam princess look ("For me to be without it would be like Gypsy Rose Lee without her boa," she once told an interviewer) is back in style, resurrected in recent collections from fashion designers Isaac Mizrahi, Jill Stuart and Oscar de la Renta, among others.

On the cover of "Trouble in Shangri-La," Nicks is wearing something fluttery and flappy; her feet, in those platform boots, seem to barely touch the ground. Photographed from behind, she looks like she's about to fly off a castle balcony over the moonlit ocean. What's the matter -- all your life you've never seen a woman taken by the wind? Back in Fleetwood Mac's day, they called Stevie a witch and snickered at her and feared her whirly-girly, hit-making, mystical female powers. But wouldn't you know it, witches are cool now, too: Willow and Tara from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the sisters on "Charmed," Tabitha on the soap "Passions." Stevie Nicks was, of course, ahead of her time.

You can see why empowered females like McLachlan and Crow are lining up to pay their respect. There has always been a warm sisterliness about Nicks' music. OK, sometimes you don't know what the heck she's talking about, but she has never penned an unkind word about another woman. Nicks is a girl's girl. She always has a posse of female friends around her; female fans used to perm their hair and wear flowing shmattes in her honor. She was unselfconscious enough to write a love song called "Sara," and let people wonder.

When "Sara" came out on Fleetwood Mac's dense 1979 "Tusk" album, there was a theory going around that the song was about Bob Dylan's ex-wife, sung from Dylan's perspective. And though that theory has been debunked by Nicks herself, it remains a tantalizing possibility. Isn't it obvious that Nicks is a Dylan-head, always has been? Listen to her phrasing, her verbose, opaque, myth- and legend-referencing lyrics. Of course, nobody knows what Dylan's talking about sometimes, either, but nobody ever called him an airhead. But I digress. The women in Nicks' songs are free birds and gypsies, in tune with the moon and the sea, independent, unafraid to be alone, uncaged. In the manly world of rock 'n' roll, Nicks articulated a yearning female spirituality. She put her womanliness right out there, undiluted. She was Lilith Fair before there was Lilith Fair.

Today, at 53, Stevie Nicks is still twirling. Her voice is deeper and slightly more nasal -- a byproduct, maybe, of the gigantic hole in her nose that resulted from her long coke habit (well documented on a particularly juicy episode of VH1's "Behind the Music"). But the new maturity in Nicks' timbre gives her "Trouble in Shangri-La" duets with Crow, Maines and Gray a more fascinating texture. All of those women have a bit of Nicks in them -- Crow has her husky-throated introspection, Maines her sugary toughness, Gray her slinky eccentricity. So when they take turns singing with Nicks, it's as if you're hearing her past and present selves meeting up to ponder what was, what is and what might have been.

Indeed, one song on "Trouble in Shangri-La," "Planets of the Universe," was written in 1976 while Nicks was breaking up with Buckingham. You can hear echoes of "Silver Springs" in the chorus' fierce prediction: "You will never love again/The way you loved me." She's still worrying that knot, and so apparently is Buckingham, who plays guitar on the track "I Miss You." Either that, or he's a really good sport.

"Trouble in Shangri-La" is Nicks' best work since her 1981 solo debut, "Bella Donna." The record is full of purpose and spark, and Nicks has found a symbiotic producer in Crow, who gives her tracks an elegantly crisp, country-folk/Beatles-pop sound -- she's like Buckingham, without the baggage. Although Nicks didn't write all of it, "Trouble in Shangri-La" is pure Stevie, with songs called "Sorcerer" and "Candlebright" and lots of womanly wisdom about not regretting the past and embracing age and being true to your dreams. Nicks is a middle-aged girl getting her second wind. She has never apologized for being Stevie Nicks, for doing those interpretive dances, for wearing those boots, for never learning to read or write music.

She has outlasted the bad reviews ("A menace solo, equally unhealthy as role model and sex object," wrote Robert Christgau in the '80s edition of "Christgau's Record Guide"). She has outlasted the cocaine addiction, and the addiction to the tranquilizer Klonopin, prescribed by a doctor to help her kick the cocaine addiction. She has outlasted the Epstein-Barr syndrome (caused by degenerating breast implants, she believes) that left her exhausted, bloated and creatively blocked. She has outlasted the depression and the self-doubt: "Will you write this for me/He said, No, you write your songs yourself," she sings on the new "That Made Me Stronger," about a pep talk she got from her old pal Tom Petty. But Stevie Nicks won't outlast "Rhiannon," "Landslide," "Dreams" and "Silver Springs." Those songs -- those melodies, that foggy, headstrong voice -- play on and on, woven into pop music's genetic code. You'll never get away from the sound of the woman who wrote them.

Joyce Millman is Salon's TV critic. To read more by Joyce Millman, visit her column archive.

Desperate, he turned to his classmate, Savvas Paritsis, who agreed to help by cutting the film with Apple's Final Cut Pro. The program had only been out for a year, but it already had a reputation for being far more stable than Premiere and other PC-based systems. And unlike Avid, the gold standard of editing suites in cost and capability, Final Cut was cheap. Free, pirated versions could be found relatively easily online, while with student discounts, the program could be bought for about $250. That's one-seventh the price of Avid's low-end XPress DV and about 300 times cheaper than a standard Hollywood workstation like Media Composer, which retails for about $80,000 and combines hardware and software in a single unit. "I believe that Final Cut is going to rival Avid in a serious way in the next 10 years," says Wachter. "It has everything that's needed to slay the giant: cheapness, affordability and power."

Apple vs. Avid: The battle lines for the future of digital film editing have been drawn. Hollywood, a town not known for its geek quotient, now finds itself in the throes of a passionate technology debate, a discussion about interface design, processing speed, price points and upgrade flexibility. For now, Apple seems to have the low-end momentum while Avid, which pioneered nonlinear, cut-and-paste editing more than a decade ago, maintains a loyal following among high-end commercial and feature film editors, who say that it does a better job than Final Cut with raw film and with file storage.

But it's not just market share that matters. With its laptop-ready software, low prices and fervent following, Final Cut Pro has reignited the dream of filmmaking for the masses. First, digital video and inexpensive cameras made it possible to shoot a professional feature for a fraction of what Hollywood considers standard operating procedure. Then the Internet made distribution easier than ever, and now, many Final Cut fans are saying that Apple has upended the film's final high-cost component: editing.

"One person can take a show from idea to shoot, to cutting, to color-correcting, all the way through production," says Evan Shechtman, president of Outpost Digital, a post-production house that beta-tested Final Cut and now uses it to edit several projects, including "The Life," a 32-episode series for ESPN. "You don't have to be a super-editing scientist to complete a feature."

"Cheap editing is key for young filmmakers," says Wachter. "Broken Ocean" will be completed within weeks and "if it weren't for Savvas' [Apple] G4 and Final Cut, there is no way I could have pulled off a movie set in the North Atlantic, but shot on the Hudson," he says. "Final Cut is the last component needed to fully democratize film."When Steve Jobs touted Apple's media software in January at San Francisco's Macworld conference, he displayed hokey home movies and quaint family photographs. But despite the down-home feel, Apple has been eyeing the professional market for years. The Cupertino, Calif., company acquired the Final Cut software and development team from Macromedia in 1998. Final Cut Pro 1.0 hit shelves in 1999 to some fanfare and minor upgrades heightened interest. From the start, Apple wooed film schools and editors, including Schectman at Outpost, and the company sees the 2.0 version as the culmination of its efforts. Released in March, the upgrade is "the cornerstone of our professional application endeavor," says Tom McDonald, a Final Cut product manager.

Version 2.0 won honors at May's National Association of Broadcasters conference and Final Cut interest is steadily rising in Hollywood and New York -- wherever production is done, says Ben Kozuch, founder and president of Future Media Concepts, a chain of editing institutes that trains editors. "The enrollment in Final Cut classes is busy and growing," he says. FMC has expanded the curriculum and added more classes to account for what Kozuch estimates is a steady 20 percent rise in demand. "Only a few months ago, you had to have Avid on your résumé. Now, you still should have Avid on the résumé, but more and more places are using Final Cut and you may be able to find work if that's all you know."

"This is a new phenomenon with Final Cut Pro," he adds. "It's only happened in the past six months."

Consider WGBH. The Boston public television station was one of the first to buy into Avid's pitch, and most of the editors and producers are still happy with the product. But as a noncommercial station, "we're cost-conscious and we're always looking for anything that's going to be cheaper for us," says David McCarn, chief technologist. So, a few months ago, WGBH bought several copies of Final Cut Pro 2.0. After using it to edit a handful of short films, ads and an episode of the American Experience documentary series "Zoot Suit Riots," producers report that the program is perfect for certain kinds of shows. Anything shot on digital video (as opposed to film), newsy segments that need to be edited quickly or in the field and projects with minimal budgets all fit under the Final Cut umbrella.

WGBH has also benefited indirectly from Final Cut. More and more young filmmakers who use the product have started knocking on the station's door, some with success. Former WGBH intern Jon Sahula persuaded the station to screen two short films edited with Final Cut Pro. "It's an economical way to welcome more storytellers into WGBH," says Lucy Sholley, the station's director of media relations. Final Cut, she says, has "helped us bring new talent along."

Some filmmakers say that Final Cut lets them quickly create what they want on a reasonable budget. "Whenever people try to do an independent project, any kind of independent project, they have to quit and work on other things that will make them enough money to survive," says Mark Foster, a director of commercials who just finished using Final Cut to edit "69 Minutes of Fame," a documentary on a punk band. "So if you need to use an Avid, it's going to take longer and cost you an arm and a leg, just to rent one. But with Final Cut, you can do it cheaper and faster on your own computer."

Apple has taken advantage of faster processing speeds and married that power to its own reputation as a friend to creativity, says Harry Marks, a veteran digital artist and editor who has consulted for ABC, NBC, Paramount and other major Hollywood players. As a result, the company has opened up the industry, and Avid may have reason to fear the competition. "Anyone can get Final Cut," he says. "It's accessible and stable. Avid's probably a little afraid because they've made [editing] such a black art. But the truth is that Final Cut Pro is incredibly powerful."

But Apple hardly deserves all the credit for crafting Final Cut Pro's appeal. The market for film and video, streaming online, in corporate training and through the expansion of cable, continues to grow. Editing opportunities abound, as do the pool and diversity of film editors. Plus, some say, Avid primed the market for its new competitor by earning a reputation for being exactly what young filmmakers don't want: static, hardware-centric and expensive. When Avid started, the blackbox formula made sense. Knowing that Hollywood's old guard would resist anything new out of fears of unreliability, Avid focused on stability and comprehensiveness more than flexibility, says Jeremy O'Neal at the Bay Area Video Coalition, a nonprofit post-production training facility in San Francisco. With souped-up Apple and IBM units, proprietary cards and a color-coded keyboard, the company created a closed solution that could be managed easily and did everything editors wanted.

The system's speed and strength put it a step above Tektronix Lightworks and other nonlinear systems that came out around the same time. Gradually, the industry started spending millions on Avid's two main systems, Composer and Symphony, making Avid the de facto standard. This is still true today. Ninety-six percent of the shows on television are cut with an Avid, and there are more than 75,000 certified Avid editors, according to company figures.

But at some point over the past few years, Avid users started to feel frustrated with the company's constrictions. "They've pissed a lot of people off," says Jon Ettinger, executive producer at FilmCore, a San Francisco post-production firm focusing on high-end commercials. "They announce upgrades to their system, then don't make it compatible with older versions, so what you just bought often becomes quickly obsolete. Then you have to go back and buy everything through Avid. It's quite a racket. They've know that they're the only game in town, so they take advantage of it."

To be fair, Avid does work with some other products, QuickTime, for example, and its file capacity is far greater than what most standard Apple computers can offer. Filmmakers wanting advanced special effects still require an expensive Avid workstation and many say that Avid is more reliable than the cheaper options. And regardless of Avid's steep price and inflexibility, FilmCore and other post-production companies aren't planning to abandon it. It still beats Final Cut "in terms of processing speed and other features," Ettinger says.

Yet, Avid is no longer the fastest option in every category. Final Cut is "far more adaptable," says Wachter. It lets editors easily drop in images from QuickTime, Adobe PhotoShop and other software, and third-party developers have already started expanding the product's reach. At the very least, it's an appealing alternative. Those who either can't afford an Avid or dislike Avid's "island" status, as one editor described it, now have another option.

Computer historians might find some irony in the fact that Apple is, in this battle, being praised for being open, for beating a company that's regularly denounced for creating closed "turnkey" systems, those that lock proprietary hardware and software together. After all, didn't Steve Jobs insist that proprietary systems work best, even as his computers lost market share to IBM clones?

Despite Final Cut's success, Avid argues that its products represent a better value. Though the company wouldn't comment specifically on Final Cut Pro, Charlie Russell, a product marketing manager, pointed out that Avid remains the top choice for the vast majority of film and television projects. The company has also had to achieve "the democratization of Avid video," he says, releasing a low-end version of its product that works with digital video and competes with Final Cut. It retails for $700 more than Final Cut, but the company maintains that sales are brisk.

Which raises the question: With the film industry continuing to expand and diversify, is there room for both Avid and Apple? Perhaps. Many editors say the jury is still out on Final Cut. The next few versions will determine whether Apple beats Avid or simply joins its market. In the meantime, though, Final Cut's rise seems poised to divide the industry. On one side are the veterans who swear by Avid. Doug Wellman, for example, the former director of "The Facts of Life" and a professor at the USC School of Cinema, which uses only Avid, argues that Avid is and will be "what the pros use."

But there's also a growing, wily contingent of filmmakers, editors and educators who are determined to topple what some call "the Avid monopoly." They're convinced that Avid won't survive the oncoming onslaught.

"None of us are using Avid unless we can get it for free," says Wachter. "As we age and move into the industry, we are going to take Final Cut Pro with us and slay the giant. Avid is dead. It's a dinosaur."

Damien Cave is a staff writer for Salon Technology.

Ordinarily, 30-year-old William Gaunt, of Duquesne, Pa., drives a van for Access Paratransit, a service that provides transportation for elderly and disabled citizens. This time he was hoping to pick up a prostitute. The prostitute he solicited was actually an undercover police officer. After Gaunt requested the undercover officer's services, a second officer came over and stuck his head in the van's window. He ordered Gaunt to turn off the car, but Gaunt hit the gas instead.

The second officer, Aaron Beatty, had his arm in the van and his foot in front of the tire when Gaunt drove away. His shoulder was injured and his foot was bruised, but he sustained no broken bones, according to Allegheny General Hospital.

Gaunt, a professional driver, hit three parked cars while fleeing the scene. He and an unidentified passenger then jumped out of the van and ran. Police caught Gaunt and brought him to Allegheny County Jail. He's charged with aggravated assault, fleeing and eluding, resisting arrest, solicitation and prostitution.

"He'll never drive for Access again," said Eileen Caputo, a coordinator at Access Paratransit.

Officer Beatty is recovering at home. The number of "flatfoot" jokes made so far has not yet been released.

Chris Colin is the associate People editor at Salon.

Now, the scandal that won't die has a new life. On Monday the General Accounting Office, on its own initiative, reopened an investigation into alleged vandalism against the White House and presidential offices by exiting Clinton staffers, a story propagated by anonymous sources in the Bush administration and aided by Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer.

More than two weeks ago, the GAO concluded there was no evidence of such vandalism. But Fleischer had been hinting darkly that he had the goods, and over the weekend a Washington Post story laid them out: According to Bush staffers, there had been instances of obscene graffiti, cut phone lines, broken computer keyboards and a presidential seal ripped off a wall.

While Bernard Ungar, the GAO's director of physical infrastructure, told Salon that the probe is "probably going to take a good bit of time," forces on both sides of the political aisle are already preparing to spin away any finding that proves that ultimately they were the ones in the wrong.

The Clinton administration finds itself in precisely the same position it was in back in early February, when Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., first asked the GAO to investigate the vandalism rumors. "From the beginning we've asked the White House for some substantiation for this alleged vandalism," says former Clinton press secretary Jake Siewert. "That's all we asked for in the first place."

The GAO investigation could pose greater problems for the current administration, particularly Fleischer. It was Fleischer, after all, who put the story in play by announcing that the White House was "cataloging" the vandalism. Then, after the GAO reported that the alleged damage couldn't be investigated precisely because that "cataloging" had never happened, Fleischer came in for extensive criticism for fanning the rumors.

Democrats stepped up their attacks last week. Led by Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., they jumped on the story as a chance to criticize the new administration for violating its own promises to "change the tone" in Washington. On Friday Weiner led a delegation to the White House and asked the administration to formally apologize to the previous administration.

That seemed a push too far, and Fleischer sprang into attack on Saturday, giving an exclusive to the Washington Post's Mike Allen (who had earlier reported some of the most outrageous rumors), in which he said that the White House had compiled a list of damage "based on the recollections of officials and career government employees" that included "obscene graffiti in six offices, a 20-inch-wide presidential seal ripped off a wall, 10 sliced telephone lines and 100 inoperable computer keyboards."

"We tried to be gracious, but the last administration would not take graciousness," Fleischer told the Post. "By getting the information out, we hope to put an end to this."

Not likely. Soon Clinton staffers, including Siewert, were raging about the new allegations, pointing out that there should have been an official paper trail documenting them. "I worked there," Siewert said. "If you needed something, or if something was broken, you had to fill out a form. There was a record of it."

The White House, meanwhile, allowed Salon to borrow and scan the photographs (one accompanies this story) it was showing reporters of the mess left by Clinton staffers. But the photographs -- which seem to capture sloppy stacks of garbage and old Christmas lights left by staffers for janitors -- don't do anything to bolster allegations of widespread destruction. White House press spokesman Jimmy Orr says the photos are only meant to show the "disarray" offices were left in, not any actual vandalism that occurred. Still, by midday Monday a strange détente was apparent between the warring factions, both of which seemed willing to watch the whole episode fall into an unresolved partisan purgatory. Barr, on CNN and through his press secretary, said he was content to "learn" from the episode and make sure that the accounting difficulties that kept the GAO from investigating the matter be fully identified so that a similar situation wouldn't happen again. Weiner, who was adamant about getting a formal apology on Friday, told Salon, "I'll take anything at this point."

GAO's Ungar, however, had different ideas. Reading the Post's exclusive, he realized that the list Fleischer had drawn up for the newspaper could be used for the agency's abandoned investigation, which, he told Barr in an April 27 letter, had ended because the White House had not turned over any official record of the alleged damage. Monday morning, Ungar called the White House to request a copy of the list.

"We figured that Mr. Barr would have wanted us to do this," Ungar said. "And if he didn't for some reason, then we figured Mr. Weiner would probably want us to do this." Weiner, like Barr, is a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Suddenly, the vandal scandal is back in the hands of the nonpartisan GAO. And while both sides have something to fear, nobody seems as vulnerable as Fleischer.

Barr sent a letter stating that he is grateful that the White House now "has indicated a willingness to document and investigate vandalism to White House property" that is, he wrote, "unacceptable to me and unacceptable to most law-abiding Americans." Then, even though the GAO had already contacted the White House for its list, Barr wrote that he "respectfully requests the GAO work with the White House Office of Administration to fully document" the alleged vandalism.

Weiner, for his part, issued a statement saying that "if evidence exists showing that deliberate harm was done to the White House office buildings, then it should be made immediately available" to the GAO, though "questions will certainly be raised about why it was not disclosed sooner and in accordance with the law." The White House, Weiner said, might very well have been in violation of a law that requires the full participation of government employees in GAO investigations.

So while the scandal lives on, anybody expecting a definitive resolution to the scandal might be disappointed. Ungar says he knows about Fleischer's list of damage only from what he read in the Post. "We're not even sure what information is available," Ungar says. He points out that in the Old Executive Office Building, where the majority of the damage is alleged to have occurred, there are more than 200 offices.

"I don't know what kind of repair records there are, if there will even be specific room numbers," he says. He says investigators will need to interview staffers to find out what is being alleged, and try to match the assertions with final repair records.

"Once we find out what was damaged, we'll need to try and decide whether it was intentional," he says. Ungar wouldn't rule out vandalism, but he also wouldn't rule out the possibility that instances of phone lines being cut were the result of renovations done to the space by cleanup crews. "It might have been the cleanup. That certainly is possible that some of it was not intentional. I just don't know."

Either way, Ungar allows, "the whole thing is somewhat bizarre."

Siewert still blames the press for making too much of the story, and singles out the Post. "They've twice put the charges on the front page," he says. "The Post provided cover for a lot of less scrupulous press to go forward on this story."

But Fleischer's role continues to be prominent. In trying to carefully control the story's development -- from the beginning, when he gave reporters the confirmation they needed to pursue it, through last weekend, when he seemed to try to finally quash it -- he has become the person most associated with it.

While the GAO may ultimately be able to finger groups of Clinton staffers gleefully scissoring phone lines or inserting naughty photos in the Oval Office copy machine, the alleged incidents are a far cry from the extremes originally reported. It is difficult not to conclude, based on the list Fleischer has already released, that the early reports were hyped beyond measure.

And should the GAO be unable to conclude that the latest stories -- of vandalism now five months old and undocumented when it supposedly occurred -- are true, the role Fleischer played in advancing them could end up raising more questions about his character than about the Clinton administration's.

Kerry Lauerman is Salon's Washington bureau chief.

The Hotline reports on Marjorie Williams in the July issue of Vanity Fair discussing the ongoing spat between Al Gore and Bill Clinton.

"After Al Gore presided over the certification of George W. Bush's victory, he went back to the White House to a party on the South Lawn that gathered staffers from President Clinton's eight years in office. When he arrived, Gore 'got a rousing ovation.' But it was 'hard not to notice' that the Clinton tribute 'did not include' much mention of the outgoing vice president. One former White House aide: 'You had to work at not having Gore included in that. ... They obviously did.' Clinton and Gore were 'barely on speaking' terms then. As of mid-May, the two had not spoken since the day of Bush's inauguration," the Hotline reports, quoting from Williams' article.

Folks at Lucianne.com were riveted by the news.

"I haven't been this transfixed since the tragic split of Ellen Degeneres and Anne Heche," writes one poster.

"As one enlightened poster yesterday stated and I paraphrase, 'If Al Gore can hate Clinton, Why can't we?' asks another. "Brilliant!! How can any among the PC crowd presume to tell us how to think or who to hate when their poster boy felt the same way we do about Clinton?"

Others took the opportunity for some more rumor mongering. Or was it a bad joke? It's getting harder to tell ...

"I thought there was some mention of Clinton hitting on Tipper that got to Gore. Anyone else hear/read that?"

Developing hard ...

Anger management II

With the Bush tax plan set to become law, and summer rebate checks of $300 for every tax-paying American in the mail, many of you must be wondering what in the world you're going to do with all the extra money. Well, Tony Adams has an idea for you.

Adams has launched a new site called taxrebatepledge.org.

"The concept is simple," he explains. "The only thing we are asking people to do is pledge that when they receive their tax rebate check they will donate that money to an existing organization that is fighting against George W. Bush and his agenda. Organizations like the Sierra Club, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, etc.

"We provide a list of organizations (and we will add to it) but we make no recommendations. When the tax rebates start going out, we will send an email to people reminding them of their promise to fund the fight against Bush and his agenda. There is a running total of the amount pledged that is displayed on every page. Hopefully, if enough people pledge, we can get the total up high and get some real momentum to this project and the orgs fighting Bush will really benefit. Just to clairfy, we are NOT asking anyone to send us money and we will not profit from any money donated. We are only asking for a promise to fund the fight with the tax rebate!"

The tally so far?

"$1,300 PLEDGED TO DATE BY 4 CONCERNED AMERICANS!"

Folks at the Free Republic were calling for more radical action.

"Save America. Nuke Washington D.C." writes one poster.

Anthony York is an associate editor for Salon News.

All articles must be reprinted with the following words 'Originally Published on Salon.com. Reprinted with permission. Copyright Salon Media Group 2001.'