New Sade, people.  It’s typically gorgeous and limpid, even without the metaphor of being washed clean, which is central to the song.  Sade is someone I like, even though I would say I have trouble listening to her sometime.  I think it’s a combination of pacing, vocal style, and lyrics.  I tend to feel a bit like I’m sinking under the song, and the lyrics come along just often enough to pull me back enough into the narrative and images.  That said, periodically I find myself with “Lovers Rock” on repeat for days at a time.  I think it reminds me of being by myself on the beach I’ve been going to my entire life:

Although I do greatly like Josh Brolin and Frank Langella, I have some trouble believing that Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is going to be a good movie.  Even if it’s an Evil Traders movie, it feels a year or so off: the fact of joblessness, and of a permanent dislocation of career plans for a large swath of young people have swamped the causes and original villains.  I do, however, love seeing Michael Douglas relaxed and aged into a rogue’s role.  I mean, this is kind of delightful:

But like, for example, The Good Guy, this wretched-looking romantic comedy, the question of whether bankers and traders can be good people feels weirdly irrelevant today.  I mean, really, who cares?

Well, looks like Sam Worthington might get to be Dracula, in addition to Perseus, a Hero to the Native Peoples of Pandora, and a robot who thinks he’s a dude.  Aside from the fact that this seems like a terrible casting choice (come on, is this the face of Vlad the Impaler, people:

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy the excellently-named yotambientengosuperpoderes.


I didn’t think so.) every time studios make one of these awful-looking vampire movies, they take a step away from doing a serious and gorgeous adaptation of The Historian, the best, and most grown-up, vampire novel to come out and become available for adaptation in years.  There’s theoretically a Historian movie in production (Sony owns the film rights), but with no public cast information available, I feel the need to treat it with as much credulity as the recurring rumors, mostly died down now, that someone is doing a movie version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  It’s really too bad.  The Historian places vampirism in an entirely different context than the wan abstinence and immortal youth narratives so predominant today, but it’s still a pretty sexy book.  The difference is that the sexual tension is between adults rather than teenagers, and those adults are serious academics.  A movie treatment of the novel could tap both the vampire craze and folks like me who like nerdy professorial movies (see Possession), and movies about relationships between actual adults.  Which is probably why it’ll never get made.

So, you know how I completely love Solange’s “Sandcastle Disco”?  V.V. Brown’s “Crying Blood” is like that, but so much more so:

I adore everything about this girl: the pouf of bangs, the old-school houndstooth-print dress with the saddle shoes, the fact that she moves like a rock star rather than like a pop singer, the fierce happiness of this heartbreak song.  ”I’m crying blood / I’m crying tears from my eyes like I can’t deny / And I am falling like a comet from a broken sky” is both sad and incredibly tough.  It’s nice to be reminded of how much you can jam into a two-and-a-half-minute song.