Buffy the Vampire Slayer (8 p.m., WB) has another rerun; it's the one in which Buffy and Riley try to deal with each other's secret identities. Biography (8 p.m., A&E) has a new profile of George Carlin. Will & Grace (9 p.m., NBC) reruns the episode in which Grace and Jack get their knickknacks appraised on "Antiques Roadshow." Angel (9 p.m., WB) is a rerun, too; Cordelia has one date with a guy and wakes up hugely pregnant. The new sitcom Talk to Me (9:30 p.m., ABC) stars Kyra Sedgwick as a kooky New York radio personality. Beverly D'Angelo costars as a Dr. Laura knockoff named Dr. Debra. A job-related tragedy pushes the fragile Danny's buttons on NYPD Blue (10 p.m., ABC).

Specials

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1) Lou Reed "Possum Time" from "Ecstasy" (Reprise)

It's 18 minutes long and you can play it all day long. A huge fuzztone that sounds more like a construction site than a guitar sets an implacable, unsatisfiable zigzag line in play. "It's possum time!" a slightly demented, definitely pleased man announces. "I feel like a possum in every way!" In fact he sounds like a man who won't back down, and you follow him, at a distance, on a nighttown walk. When it ends it's as if the sun is coming up -- so soon? Already? You've seen nothing that isn't ugly, but the walk has its own rewards. "The only one left standing," Reed says, sounding tired. He's grown all the way into his role as bad conscience -- his own and the nation's. He may even grow out of it, but not yet. When, in the Velvet Underground, in another era, a young man who sounded old sang with fright and nausea of "all the dead bodies piled up in mounds," who'd have thought that more than three decades later he'd still be prowling the streets looking for more of them, more bodies, more mounds, like a detective of the obvious?

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Their new albums were released on the same day this week. The parallels end there: Smith's "Gung Ho," featuring a baker's dozen of new songs and her longtime backing band, is a wild burst of adrenalin and beauty; Mitchell's overwrought "Both Sides Now" is an orchestral collection of standards (and a pair of Mitchell's own classics) that collapses under the weight of her jazz pretensions and decimated voice.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer (8 p.m., WB) reruns one of its best episodes ever, "Hush," in which bone-chillingly scary floating skeleton ghouls called "The Gentlemen" come to Sunnydale to steal everyone's voices in preparation for a ritualistic bloodbath. The second half of the show is as good as it gets, a silent movie by turns terrifying, slapstick and lyrical. If you've never watched the show before (shame on you), this episode might make you a believer. The animated p.c. fairy tale series Happily Ever After (8 p.m., HBO) has a rewrite of "Rip van Winkle" by Erica Jong (I'm not making this up), set in the '70s, in which a rock star's wife (Calista Flockhart) gets liberated from male tyranny. Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Jessye Norman have voice cameos. Angel (9 p.m., WB) repeats the one in which our hero is having dreams that he's an evil killer vampire again. The Beat (9 p.m., UPN), the latest series from Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana ("Homicide," "Oz"), premieres. Mark Ruffalo and Derek Cecil play Manhattan beat cops with messy personal lives. Sports Night (9:30 p.m., ABC) concludes its two-parter in which Dan and Casey are having professional and personal differences. Frontline (check local times, PBS) presents "The Hunt for Bin Laden," an update of a 1999 investigation into the search for the elusive terrorist leader. On NYPD Blue (10 p.m., ABC), Jill and Diane handle a rape case, and Kabuki receptionist John Irvin is finally allowed to speak.

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Danger and darkness ooze from the 29-year-old Tacoma, Wash., resident's rather brilliant second full-length CD, "Furnace Room Lullaby." The first hint of the CD's eerier contents is a disturbing cover photograph of Case lying glassy-eyed on a cement floor. With a voice that alternates between celestial sweetness and the grittiness of a truck-stop floor, Case's unorthodox, superbly original blend lands somewhere in the badlands between Patsy Cline and Patti Smith or Dolly Parton and the New York Dolls. Trouble is a Case constant. One moment she sounds as if she could steamroll right over you ("Mood to Burn Bridges"), the next she's ready to whisper confessions that you should probably never hear ("No Need to Cry").

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While Phish's Trey Anastasio, appearing at the Tibet House benefit for the second time, may have elicited the most fervent fan reaction, he was hardly the musical highlight of a night that moved smoothly from the quietly transcendent -- and there is no other word for the otherworldly chanting of the monks from Drepung Gomang Buddhist Monastic University -- to the deeply sensual sounds of Brazilian singer Virginia Rodrigues, who looked, moved and sounded like a French Quarter priestess.

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When I was in high school in the suburbs, in the early-'80s, Patti Smith was
no kind of icon. Musically, she didn't jibe with buzz-saw punk, ominously danceable
new wave or pasteurized FM radio rock; she evaded the jury-rigged
radar of adolescent rebellion. Teen rebels, of course, generally want an
existing "countercultural" pack to join, complete with wardrobe and hairdo
guidelines. Even if Patti Smith had not recently stopped making records (and
even if we'd known to listen to the ones she had made), she was too much of
a misfit for the misfits to embrace.

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None of the above is true. If Ronald Reagan's biographer, Edmund Morris, can fictionalize his relationship with the Gipper, why can't I do the same with David Byrne? I am in the middle of writing a history of Byrne's old band, the Talking Heads, for Morrow. I recently met him for lunch in New York City at the Ear Inn, a bar lodged inside a two-story brick building called "The James Brown House." Not that James Brown. This structure was built by another James Brown in 1817. I believe this is the oldest functioning bar in New York.

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Composer Philip Glass, the vice president of Tibet House, hosted and
performed at the event, inviting Tibetan performance group Chaksam-Pa
onstage for a colorful ritual dance before Cibo Matto took over just before
8 p.m. Set to release a long-awaited follow-up to the band's 1996 debut
"Viva La Woman!" Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda got the show off on the right
foot. Backed by Sean Lennon on bass and beat-boxer Duma Love, the band
offered the evening's most electrifying moment with the hyperactive funk of
"Sugar Water." But Love's mouth magic was the only percussion needed for a
soft cover of Henry Mancini's "Moon River."

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Oh, Vega has one. Many members are men. You know the kind of guy I
mean -- suckers for aloof, wounded women. Think back to Vega's first, self-titled record. Not only did she proclaim Marlene Dietrich as a chilly heroine, but in "The Queen and the Soldier," a young soldier is executed on the order of the frigid queen who is "strangling in the solitude she preferred." Back in the spring of '85, when "Suzanne Vega" was released, a thousand young men (myself included) dreamed of her as an unobtainable ice maiden.

Vega released just four more records over the next 15 years. While her hit was the beaten-neighborhood-kid number "Luka," her best CD so far is 1990's "Days of Open Hand." Discreetly electric, its elegance makes it a classic somewhere between Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends" and Leonard Cohen's "New Skin for the Old Ceremony."

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But for the past two weeks, I've been paging through "Patti
Smith Complete," and have reevaluated Smith and her work. Since the
mid-'70s, what woman has matched Smith in both poetic madness and
foolishness? As for men, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits have matched Smith, but she stands behind no one. I still believe "Radio Ethiopia" was a terrible
mistake, but its lyrics are an extraordinary read. "Deep in the heart of your
brain is a lever/Deep in the heart of your brain is a switch/Deep in the heart
of your flesh you are clever/Oh you met your match in a bitch ..."

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No other collection of songs has ever expressed the poignant agonies and sheer rage of girlhood like this. In these songs is the sharp, self-pitying nihilism of girls sitting in their bedrooms and slitting their wrists, the dull ache of having sex with someone who couldn't care less about you, and then the joy -- the liberating, screaming joy -- of an experience like walking into a punk club for the first time and finding it full of girls exactly like you. Both the film and the music perfectly capture the highly pitched passion and symbiotic bonds between teenage best friends and the searing pain that comes from their dissolution.

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