Are Morrissey's songs impossibly grand or impossibly small? Even the man himself doesn't seem to know for sure. On the second of five sold-out nights at Harlem's storied Apollo, Moz played tug-of-war with his own self-importance. And as befits his best material, even winning was a kind of losing.

For the first few songs, in a variation on an old Smiths tradition, Manchester's finest dangled a sprig of gladiolas from the zipper of his pants. A decade ago, waves of fragile, erotically confused teens would likely have stormed the stage for a nibble. But tonight, Apollo security kept them at bay--though in truth, most of the audience seemed a few years beyond such an impulsive phase. Likewise, after pleading a case of the "Harlem mumps," whatever those might be, he warned, "Don't stand too close, unless you want to catch what I have." In different times, that would have been a come-on.

Morrissey once smoldered deliciously--"Jack the Ripper" opens with "Oh, you look so tired, mouth slack and wide...your face is as mean as your life has been." Depression and desire commingled easily. The same could be said of his stage presence, a kind of controlled flamboyance that allured by repelling. With age, though, his gestures have grown more blunt. The grandiloquent jerking of the microphone cord, the genteel appraisals of his manicured hand, the collapse on bended knee after a mildly stiff rendition of "Hairdresser on Fire"--it's all taken a turn toward Vegas revue.

The new songs from You Are the Quarry, Mozzer's first relevant solo album in a decade, are more muscular than his Smiths material, but they sometimes sacrifice intimacy for pomp. "The First of the Gang to Die" and "Irish Blood, English Heart"--which opened and closed his set, respectively--were majestic, as were "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores" and a cover of the melancholy "No One Can Hold a Candle to You," by Raymonde, a nebulously Smiths-connected Manchester band. But "All the Lazy Dykes" fizzled, and "I Like You" and "I'm Not Sorry" replaced winking elisions with literal pleas. Older songs fared slightly better. "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" was more elegiac than ever, but the glam ballad "I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday" limped along, showing its age.

He closed with a single-song encore: "Hand in Glove," the first Smiths single and still one of the best. But really, the man made his clearest statement when the house lights were raised and the Apollo's speakers blasted Ol' Blue Eyes' "My Way." The rules of engagement were, as always, never in question. Backstage, the ol' tease was probably having a good laugh, if he hadn't already left the building.