FireEye: Botnet Busters

by Christopher S. Stewart

Alex Lanstein stared at the 65-inch computer monitor in the living room of his Boston apartment. Streaming data lit up the screen, the actions of a cyberlord giving orders to his botnet, a zombie army of hijacked computers controlled from an unknown location . It was early in the morning of Mar.16. The 25-year-old cybersecurity analyst had spent months preparing for the events soon to unfold. His reddish hair still matted down from sleep, Lanstein stood up and poured another cup of coffee. Suddenly, the data stream flickering on the monitor became dark, and a smile curled across Lanstein's stubbly face. Operation Rustock had begun.

Lanstein's employer, FireEye, is a Silicon Valley company that defends corporations and governments against targeted malicious software, or malware. FireEye's clients include Fortune 500 companies—Yahoo! (YHOO), EBay (EBAY), and Adobe Systems (ADBE), among them—and members of the U.S. intelligence community. The company had recently shut down some of the highest-profile spam-blasting organizations, winning recognition for imposing order on a generally disordered and unpoliced world.

Now, Lanstein and FireEye were chasing their mightiest target to date, the Web's most sprawling and advanced spam machine, called Rustock—pusher of fake pills, online pharmacies, and Russian stocks, the inspiration for its name. Over the past five years, Rustock had quietly—and illicitly—taken control of over a million computers around the world, directing them to do its bidding. On some days, Rustock generated as many as 44 billion digital come-ons, about 47.5 percent of all the junk e-mails sent, according to Symantec (SYMC), the computer security giant based in Mountain View, Calif. Although those behind Rustock had yet to be identified, profits from it were thought to be in the millions. "The bad guys," is what Lanstein had taken to calling them.

For months, FireEye plotted a counterattack, along with Microsoft (MSFT) and Pfizer (PFE)—Rustock was peddling fake Viagra, as well as sham lotteries stamped with the Microsoft logo. Working from FireEye's intelligence, U.S. Marshals stormed seven Internet data centers across the country, where Rustock had hidden its 96 command servers. Microsoft lawyers and technicians were there, too, along with forensics experts. Another team had been deployed in the Netherlands to destroy two other servers.

The sting was executed flawlessly, with everyone pouncing at once. And yet Rustock somehow fought back. From an unknown location, perhaps in Eastern Europe, the botmaster remotely sneaked back into its spam network, locked out Microsoft's technicians, and began to erase files. Clearly, those behind Rustock didn't want anyone seeing what was inside those hard drives.

After a struggle lasting about half an hour, the technicians finally wrested back control of the server. Lanstein's cell rang. T.J. Campana, senior manager for investigations for Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, told him it was over. "The bad guys lost."

Global spam levels plummeted as Rustock was taken off line. At the same time, the cybergeek community saw that something significant had happened. Who killed Rustock? And how? For two more days, Lanstein was under order from a federal court in Seattle to keep silent as a way to defend against any leaks to the enemy. Even later, when he could talk, some of the biggest questions remained unanswered, such as who was behind Rustock, and what would he, she, or they, try next?

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Call Off the Global Drug War

By Jimmy Carter

In an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders, and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz and Paul A. Volcker.

The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.

These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

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Curtis Mayfield

The Clock in the Mountain

There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan.

Digging out the entrance tunnel for the Clock.

The Clock is real. It is now being built inside a mountain in western Texas. This Clock is the first of many millennial Clocks the designers hope will be built around the world and throughout time. There is a second site for another Clock already purchased at the top of a mountain in eastern Nevada, a site surrounded by a very large grove of 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines. Appropriately, bristlecone pines are among the longest-lived organisms on the planet. The designers of the Clock in Texas expect its chimes will keep ringing twice as long as the oldest 5 millennia-old bristlecone pine. Ten thousand years is about the age of civilization, so a 10K-year Clock would measure out a future of civilization equal to its past. That assumes we are in the middle of whatever journey we are on – an implicit statement of optimism.

Engineer Chris Rand (right) with the first Geneva wheel part.

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The Empty Room

by Jonathan Lethem

Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth floor of the tower on Columbus Avenue. The light, its taxi yellow gone matte from pendulum-years above some polluted intersection and crackled like a Ming vase’s glaze where bolts had been overtightened and then eased, sat to one side of the coffee table it was meant to replace as soon as my father found an ­appropriate top. In fact, the traffic light would follow us up the Hudson, to Darby, to the house with the empty room. There it never escaped the garage.

Another memory: my playmate Max’s parents had borrowed, from mine, a spare set of china plates. I spent a lot of time visiting with Max and, when he let us inside his room, Max’s older brother. So I was present the afternoon my father destroyed the china set. Max’s family lived in a duplex, the basement and parlor floor of a brownstone, a palace of abundance . . . Max and his brother had separate rooms, and a backyard. All this would pale beside the spaciousness of our Darby farmhouse. That was the point.

The return of the china had become a running joke between our two families, or at least for Max’s parents. They kept trying to give it back, my father kept explaining that we really had no use for the second set; he claimed that it had been a gift, not a loan. In this my father struck them as facetious, when he was actually not only sincere but losing patience.

This day my father had swung by on his way home from Penn Station to pick me up. His work was taking him to Albany more often. While they stood in the kitchen, Max’s father took him by surprise, placing the stack of scrupulously cleaned china into my father’s free hands.

“You really don’t want them?” my father confirmed, in his dry way.

“No, please,” said Max’s father.

“Well, then, we’ll just do this,” declared my father, opening his hands. The plates dropped and exploded, slivers finding every corner of the kitchen and the living room carpet beyond. There, memory halts. Max and I were reduced to pen pals when my family moved.

The New York State Department of Housing and Urban Development was my father’s employer, and we went upstate to be closer to his work. The move, though, was sold to my sister and me as a kind of bodily impulse on my family’s part, like that of salmon spawning, to reject the hectic, compromising city in favor of a place where we could live. I was old enough to fantasize about the teenagerish collections of who knows what I’d cunningly display in a bedroom of my own, and how I would exclude Charlotte and her friends, and then how, later, with great ostentation, I would allow them to enter.

The movers poured our belongings into the new home. Its hugeness, the endless closets, the fact of the barn and garage: these performed a magic trick on our stuff. My father’s accumulations dwindled as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Charlotte and I ran through the house in a fever, counting the doors, including closets, attics, cellar. We lost count at sixty. We then chose our rooms. One room was appointed a den, another a guest room. My father singled out a room downstairs, formerly the doctor’s consulting office (my parents had purchased this house from the estate of a retired country optometrist), with one door and one window, otherwise a simple rectangle outlined with plain molding, and declared it the future site of the empty room. The room was empty now. So it would stay.

“What’s it for?” asked his eleven-year-old son.

“Anything we want it to be,” my father said.

“Can we play there?” asked his eight-year-old daughter.

“As long as you take your toys out with you when you’re finished, yes.”

He explained by means of a series of exclusions. I asked whether we could go inside and close the door. “There are no rules,” he said. “But—” I began. “Except that it stay empty,” he interrupted. “Can I eat in there?” I asked, a few days later. “There’s nothing you can’t do in there,” my father said, mysteriously. “Our family eats together at the table,” said my mother. Charlotte asked if it was my father’s room. “It doesn’t belong to any of us,” he said. “It’s just a part of the house. In the same way that Arfy lives with us but doesn’t belong to us.” On moving upstate we’d gained a puppy, to prove we had a backyard. “Is it Arfy’s room?” asked Charlotte, perhaps misunderstanding. “Arfy, too, is free to use the empty room,” said my father. “If Arfy poops in there, who has to clean it up?” I asked. We all glanced at my mother.

Then came a ritual cycle of first occupations, Barbies and ­G.I. ­Joes soberly scattered and collected under my father’s gaze. My mother ignored it. One Saturday morning she slept in, and my father led us in to sit cross-legged for a breakfast picnic on the smooth, cold floorboards, our Pop-Tarts raised above our heads to keep them from Arfy’s nipping bounds.

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Friday Book Club - Cat's Cradle

by Michael H. Miller

The reputation of Cat’s Cradle among the literary cognoscenti is summed up succinctly in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s obituary in the New York Times: “Though it initially sold only about 500 copies, it is widely read today in high school English classes.” This was also my perception of the novel — something I had moved on from the same way I progressed beyond acne. Kurt Vonnegut, I thought, is serious fiction for people who do not take fiction seriously. A recent volume published by the Library of America, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973, would seem to confirm his rightful status alongside other inductees into the Library of America’s unofficial canon: Henry James, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth. So why the bias?

My older sister introduced me to Vonnegut when I was 14 and had no interest in books. She gave me a copy of Cat’s Cradle, which I read in more or less one sitting, setting it down, reluctantly, only for bathroom breaks and a longer, more unfortunate respite, Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s house. From there, Vonnegut became the first author whose work I desired to read in full. Despite some of the turgid later works—Hocus Pocus and Deadeye Dick, in particular—I succeeded. At the end of this binge, an interesting thing happened: The impulse was purged. I never read a page of Vonnegut again.

Because of the novel’s reputation as, essentially, gateway literature, I assumed I had progressed beyond his writing in favor of Delillo, Pynchon, even the likeminded Philip K. Dick, who has had the benefit of always existing on the fringe of popular taste, always in need of a great defender. (Surely, the argument for Do Androids Dream of Sleep? as the Greatest Novel Ever is rarer than similar claims about Slaughterhouse Five.) Putting aside those assumptions, I decided, for the first time since I was 14, to revisit the author that got me reading in the first place.

I immediately saw a book filled with subtle meaning that had escaped me before, even in that blunt opening line, “Call me Jonah.” If Melville’s Ishmael (probably the most famous character in literature to use the imperative as a way of introducing himself), like the Ishmael of Genesis, was saved from drowning, Vonnegut’s narrator is telling us he is quite doomed from the outset: The Book of Jonah, of course, takes place inside the belly of a whale. The narrator’s real name is not Jonah (it’s John), but from the first sentence Vonnegut has us thinking about water. He repeats the image throughout the novel so that by the time of the arrival of ice-nine, the real villain of the book, a substance that freezes any liquid at room temperature, we’ve been anticipating its appearance and expecting the worst.

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Going Straight

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

One Saturday afternoon last winter, I drove north on Route 85 through the rolling rangeland of southeastern Wyoming. I was headed to a small town north of Cheyenne to see an old friend and colleague named Michael Glatze. We worked together 12 years ago at XY, a San Francisco-based national magazine for young gay men, back when we were young gay men ourselves.

Though only a year removed from Dartmouth when he arrived at XY, Michael had seemingly read every gay book ever written. While I was busy trying to secure a boyfriend, he was busy contemplating queer theory, marching in gay rights rallies and urging young people to celebrate (not just accept) their same-sex attractions. Michael was devoted to helping gay youth, and he was particularly affected by the letters the magazine received regularly from teenagers who were rejected by their religious families. “Christian fundamentalists should burn in hell!” he told me once, slamming his fist on his desk. I had never met anyone so sure of himself.

Many young gay men looked up to him. He and his boyfriend at the time, Ben, who also worked at the magazine, made a handsome pair — but their appeal went deeper. On weekends we would go to raves together, and I would watch as gay boys gravitated toward the couple. Michael and Ben seemed unburdened (by shame, by self-doubt) and unapologetically pursued what the writer Paul Monette called the uniquely gay experience of “flagrant joy.” But unlike some of our friends who rode the flagrant joy train all the way to rehab, Michael and Ben rarely seemed out of control. There was a balance — a wisdom — to their quest for intense, authentic experience. Together they seemed to have figured out how to be young, gay and happy.

I thought about those times as I pulled my rental car into the Wyoming town where Michael now lives. A lot had happened in the decade since we last saw each other: he and Ben started a new gay magazine (Young Gay America, or Y.G.A.); they traveled the country for a documentary about gay teenagers; and Michael was fast becoming the leading voice for gay youth until the day, in July 2007, when he announced that he was no longer gay.

“Homosexuality came easy to me, because I was already weak,” he wrote in the opening line of an article for the far-right Web site, WorldNetDaily.com. He went on to renounce his work at XY and Y.G.A. “Homosexuality, delivered to young minds, is by its very nature pornographic,” he claimed. In a second WorldNetDaily article a week later, he said that he was “repulsed to think about homosexuality” and that he was “going to do what I can to fight it.”

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Standin' On a Corner

by Dan Frosch

WINSLOW, Ariz.— Repeat the lyric, “Well, I’m a standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” and watch the glint of recognition in peoples’ eyes.

So it should come as no surprise that the line from “Take It Easy,” the 1972 seminal hit by The Eagles, has become the lifeblood of tiny Winslow’s tourism trade.

On the corner of Second Street and Kinsley Avenue, on Route 66, sits Standin’ on the Corner Park, an homage to the open-highway ballad that now draws hundreds of visitors every day and has revived this dusty railroad town between Flagstaff and the New Mexico border.

The park’s main attraction is a life-size bronze statue of a floppy-haired man with a guitar, the song’s protagonist. (Locals point out that the statue, by the sculptor Ron Adamson, is neither Jackson Browne, who wrote the song with Glenn Frey, nor Mr. Frey, the Eagles member who sang it.)

A cherry-red, vintage flatbed Ford truck is parked nearby. And on a brick wall behind the statue and truck is a large mural, by John Pugh, featuring a grinning blonde in a pickup, who clearly — as the song says — is “slowin’ down to take a look” at the itinerant, all-American musician who has caught her eye.

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100 Million Android Fans Can't Be Wrong

by Beth Kowitt

The inside story of how Google conquered the smartphone world.

When Google (GOOG) acquired a tiny wireless startup called Android in 2005, few at the search giant had particularly high hopes for the deal -- if they even knew about it. At that point Google had purchased just a handful of companies, mostly software makers it had quietly folded into its operations. (Big, high-profile deals like YouTube and DoubleClick came later.) Besides, not many people knew exactly what Android did: The upstart was in stealth mode, and co-founder Andy Rubin, best known for creating the Sidekick mobile device, said little about its product or mission. Executive chairman Eric Schmidt would later joke that he scarcely noticed when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin bought the company.

Today, of course, Android is impossible to ignore. It is the mobile operating system -- the brains of a cellphone -- that powers more than 100 million gadgets. (That number will be out of date by the time you read this: Every day another 400,000 Android devices are activated.) Apple's (AAPL) iPhone gets credit for showing consumers just how cool and powerful a mobile device could be, but Google democratized smartphones by making Android available free to any handset maker that wanted to use the platform. At last count, Android software was on more than 300 different phones and tablets around the world. The only smartphones that use the iPhone operating system? iPhones. "If you just plot the graph looking at how quickly we grew," says Rubin, now senior vice president of mobile at Google, "it's almost vertical."

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The Big Business of Synthetic Highs

by Ben Paynter

It's a Friday afternoon in April, and Wesley Upchurch, the 24-year-old owner of Pandora Potpourri, has arrived at his factory to fill some last-minute orders for the weekend. The factory is a cramped, unmarked garage bay adjoining an auto body shop in Columbia, Mo. What Upchurch and his one full-time employee, 21-year-old Jay Harness, are making is debatable, at least in their eyes. The finished product looks like crushed grass, comes in three-gram (.11ounce) packets, and sells for about $13 wholesale. Its key ingredient is a synthetic cannabinoid that mimics tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana. Upchurch, however, insists his product is incense. "There are rogue players in this industry that make the business look bad for everyone," Upchurch says. "We don't want people smoking this."

From the outside the place looks abandoned. The only sign of life is a lone security camera. Inside, two flags hang above a makeshift assembly line. One shows a coiled snake and reads "Don't Tread On Me." The other has a peace symbol. The work space consists of a long, foldout table containing a pile of lustrous, green vegetation, a pocket-calculator-size electronic scale, a stack of reflective, hot-pink Mylar foil packets, and a heat sealer. Each packet has the brand name, Bombay Breeze, and is decorated with a psychedelic logo featuring a cartoon elephant meditating among abstract-looking coils of smoke and stars.

Upchurch supervises as Harness weighs out portions of the crushed foliage, dumps it into a packet, and slides the top through the heating machine to create an airtight, tamper-proof seal. He finishes about a dozen in 10 minutes, topping off what they will need for their deliveries: two shipments of more than 1,000 packets each. Upchurch points to a disclaimer near the bottom right-hand corner of each package that reads, in all caps: "NOT FOR CONSUMPTION." Says Upchurch: "That's to discourage abuse."

His protests and disclaimers to the contrary, Pandora is getting smoked—it's being packed into bongs and reviewed on sites such as YouTube (GOOG)—for its ability to alter the mind. Like many others, Upchurch is repackaging experimental medical chemicals for mainstream store shelves, most often with some clever double-entendre in the branding. He says he sells about 41,000 packets a month, delivering directly to 50 stores around the country and shipping the rest to five other wholesalers, some of whom use Pandora's products to create their own brands. Upchurch says he ships mostly in bulk orders for larger discounts. He projects his company will earn $2.5 million in revenue with $500,000 in profits this year, depending on what federal and state laws pass. "I think my business model is based less on charts than it is on guts, or something," he says.

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Pencil Dice

The simple addition of dice markings to a six sided pencil makes all the difference. Pencil dice is an essential addition to any brief case, pen cup or pencil case. A little something to help you pass the time, entertain the children or even make decisions.

Sold in pairs
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Feist

[ed.  On a Feist groove today.  Wonderful songs, fabulous voice.]

The Secret History of Iraq’s Invisible War

by Noah Schactman

In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. military developed a technology so secret that soldiers would refuse to acknowledge its existence, and reporters mentioning the gear were promptly escorted out of the country. That equipment – a radio-frequency jammer – was upgraded several times, and eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb. But the dark veil surrounding the jammers remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion.

Recently, however, I received an unusual offer from ITT, the defense contractor which made the vast majority of those 50,000 jammers. Company executives were ready to discuss the jammer – its evolution, and its capabilities. They were finally able to retell the largely-hidden battles for the electromagnetic spectrum that raged, invisibly, as the insurgencies carried on. They were prepared to bring me into the R&D facility where company technicians were developing what could amount to the ultimate weapon of this electromagnetic war: a tool that offers the promise of not only jamming bombs, but finding them, interrupting GPS signals, eavesdropping on enemy communications, and disrupting drones, too. The first of the these machines begins field-testing next month.

On a fist-clenchingly cold winter morning, I took a train across the Hudson River to the secret jammer lab.

Tucked behind a Target and an Olive Garden knock-off, the flat, anonymous office building gives no hint of what’s inside. Nor do the blank, fluorescent-lit halls. But open a door off of one of those halls, and people start screaming.

“Screens off!” barks a man with a fullback’s build. “Turn off the test equipment!” On the ceiling, a yellow alarm light flashes and spins — the sign that someone without a security clearance is in a classified facility.

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The Humpty-Dumpty Problem

by Robert L. Dorit

The publication in 1637 of René Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences changed the practice of science forever. In it, he poured the foundations of modern science by putting forth two powerful and interrelated theses. The first embraced reductionism as a way of knowing: Descartes committed himself to “divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution,” and to “conduct my thoughts in such order that, beginning with those objects that are simplest and most readily understood, I might ascend little by little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex.” Later in the same work, he deployed one of the most durable metaphors of Western intellectual thought: He argued that the body was best thought of as a machine.

By coupling those two ideas—that complex machines could be understood by taking them apart, and that living beings are essentially machines—Descartes set the stage for the age of science. He argued persuasively that living systems emerge as the physical consequences of material forces. For example, also in his Discourse, he explained the workings of the heart:

I wish it to be considered that the motion which I have now explained follows as necessarily from the very arrangement of the parts, which may be observed in the heart by the eye alone, and from the heat which may be felt with the fingers, and from the nature of the blood as learned from experience, as does the motion of a clock from the power, the situation, and shape of its counterweights and wheels.

The living world was thus the legitimate province of the sciences and its inner workings could be probed and understood through logic, observation and experiment.

The task of this new science would henceforth consist in disassembling the seemingly complicated machinery of life into its simplest components, which could then be cataloged, prodded, manipulated and described. According to Descartes’ model, any real understanding of the body could only come from taking it apart, just as one takes apart a machine to discover its inner workings. If we wish to understand how a clock tells time, according to this model, our job is to disassemble it. Understanding a clock means understanding its springs and gears. And the same is true of living “machines.”

This notion of the body as a machine would clear away centuries of intellectual detritus: By arguing that the body was the sum of its interacting parts, and, more importantly, by suggesting that the study of those parts would reveal the workings of the body, Descartes shifted centuries of scientific and philosophical discussion about imponderable life forces and inexplicable animist vapors. (Lest we go overboard in praising Descartes, he clearly panicked at the last moment. He exempted human beings from the ground rules he set for other living organisms. In so doing, he sowed 400 years of confusion and discord with his notion that the mind and the body were separate phenomena, governed by separate rules.)

Implicit in both the strategy of reductionism and the metaphor of the machine, however, is a hidden assumption. That assumption is that an accurate understanding of the parts will reveal the workings of the machine in their entirety. To state it differently, we do not need to be overly concerned with how we take the machine apart, because the parts themselves will dictate the reassembly. But is this assumption true?

Anyone who has tried to repair a piece of lab equipment, a washing machine or even an old-school carburetor knows the dangers of taking something apart without paying careful attention to the process. Making a couple of sketches or taking a few photographs during disassembly certainly makes life easier later on, when the goal is reconstruction. A little thought and a few disastrous reassemblies make it easy to dismiss the idea that the parts harbor the information needed to reassemble the whole. Yet the truth is complicated. I suspect that the reductionist strategy, in its purest form, does work when the number of component parts is comparatively small and their relations are limited and predictable. If a given gear can only mesh with a small number of other components, and a given spring fits only on a single stem, the parts do encode the whole. This is why a good clock maker could probably put a clock back together—even one she has never seen before—if all of the parts were laid out in front of her.

But living systems are not really clocklike in their assembly, and organisms are not really machines. Despite Descartes’ contention that we could not distinguish a well-made automaton of an ape from an actual ape (“were there such machines exactly resembling organs and outward form an ape or any other irrational animal, we could have no means of knowing that they were in any respect of a different nature from these animals”), the relations of parts to wholes in living systems is entirely different from that in machines—and most unclocklike.

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Peaches

[ed.  Wow.  I didn't realize until reading the Feist article (following this post) that she and Peaches were once roommates.  Talk about different career paths.]

Caution advised on the next video, you will never view the Andy Griffith Show (Mayberry, RFD) with the same perspective again.  I won't even get into the Muppets version.

Feist 1234

by Jon Pareles

On the way to the video shoot for a song named “1 2 3 4,” Leslie Feist called her father on her cellphone, urging him to drop by the studio. “I’m going to dance like in ‘Fame,’ ” bubbled Feist, a petite 31-year-old brunette who uses her last name for her solo recording career. “I’m going to be carried around on the shoulders of 50 people, like Madonna in ‘Material Girl,’ only minus the pearls and the back muscles.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. “1 2 3 4,” which appears on her new album, “The Reminder” (Cherry Tree/Interscope), is an easy-swinging tune, almost like a nursery rhyme, that grows into a mass chorus. Tucked into it are lyrics that celebrate the intensity of teenage bonds and feelings: “Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then.” The video clip, to be completed in just two days of rehearsals and one of shooting, would be a big live production number: an uninterrupted, uneditable one-camera take.

Four dozen dancers in color-coordinated thrift-store clothes surrounded Feist, raising her overhead and, at one point, flipping her. The camera swooped around, amid and above them, revealing geometric patterns like a Busby Berkeley sequence. Feist had traded her usual T-shirt and jeans for a flashy blue-sequined pantsuit and pointy golden high heels, which pinched her feet. “It’s not the most pleasant sensation,” she said after dancing in them through take after take. “But it’s for the razzle-dazzle.”

What’s a nice indie-rocker doing in a scene like this? Courting a potential mainstream audience while offering something as substantial as it is catchy.

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