The video for Tightrope is out, and it’s the jam:

I’ve got extended thoughts about Monae’s use of the medium, and contrasting her with Lady Gaga, up at The Atlantic:

Along the way, she developed a striking aesthetic of her own. What Lady Gaga has done for pantslessness, Monae may well do for saddle shoes, pompadours, and the tuxedo. While it often seems that Gaga’s music is simply a vehicle for her performance art, her songs catchy but unextraordinary dance tunes elevated by the package in which they’re delivered, Monae has a voice strong enough to have considered pursuing a Broadway career. And she deploys that instrument in swoops and chants on her best songs. Where Lady Gaga’s best videos are strong, referential pastiches, Monae has created an eerie world in her videos tracing the adventures of her alter-ego, an android named Cindi Mayweather, a universe where magic and technology coexist and interact, and where music and dance are potent but risky weapons of liberation.

Check the whole thing out.

I was flipping aimlessly through Jezebel’s gallery of former teen dreams this weekend, when I came across this reminder in the final slide, of tolerance for Justin Bieber maniacs:

Every generation has their irritating, unintentionally hilarious, goofy idol to fall in love with in a completely safe and silly way, and unless you can honestly say that your crush on Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Rider Strong or Devon Sawa or Justin Timberlake in his shiny pants days was somehow more legit, let’s just give this kid, and his 11-year-old fans, a break.

And oh my goodness, Devon Sawa.  I haven’t thought about him in years!  But man, what girl my age didn’t have her dreams of a slow dance shaped by the live-action Casper movie? (Christina Ricci really was the best stand-in a generation of weird little girls could have ever had.)





The memories faded quickly, of course.  I’d forgotten Sawa long before he played Stan in Eminem’s music video for the song of the same name, long enough that I didn’t recognize him, think to make the connection.  The guy had some talent, once upon a time:

I really like the idea of Angelina Jolie as Maleficent.  And I really like the idea of a live-action movie from the perspective of the Disney villainess.  A woman who has figured out how to turn herself into a dragon absolutely must have an interesting backstory.  And for all the early Disney movies are gorgeous, they’re also incredibly myopic, focused on the fates and romances of, let’s be honest, some rather dim princesses.  The women who are after them have some scope, some sense of the value of the kingdom, some ambition far beyond a guy on a horse.  That, I’m curious about.

I really do love Neil Gaiman’s work, and since I spent my free time last weekend re-reading a big chunk of Sandman, that love is particularly fresh in my mind.  But his “nobody’s guide to the Oscars” is really a little irritating.

I ask Deette who’s inside the dress, and she tells me it’s Rachel McAdams. I want to say hello – Rachel’s said nice things about me in interviews – but she’s working right now. I’m not. No one wants to take my photo, or, Deette discovers, to interview me. I’m invisible….I walk over to the stairs. A nice young man in a suit asks me for my ticket. I show it to him. He explains that, as a resident of the first mezzanine, I am not permitted to walk downstairs and potentially bother the A-list.  I am outraged.  I am not actually outraged, but I am a bit bored, and I have friends downstairs.

All the complaining about seats, and being invisible might have been sort of charming if told with an actual sense of wonder, by someone who isn’t a Very Big Deal in the universe he mostly inhabits.  The idea that Very Big Dealism ought to translate into all dimensions may be something that’s generally true if you’re Dream of the Endless.  But Gaiman’s written enough about the laws of universes to know that you’ve got to learn them all and obey them if you want to get by, and that power in one realm doesn’t entitle you to preeminence in another.  Besides, isn’t being a graphic novels badass enough?

But I think I would be more weirded out than comforted by having this many other couples this involved in my marriage:

Much is being made of the political message and final moments of Erykah Badu’s video for “Window Seat,” (which is blurred in such a way as to be safe for all but the most conservative workplaces).  But I really do want to talk about some of the things that are happening around the edges:

It’s interesting to me that as Badu abandons her clothes, the camera includes in the frame people picking some of them up and following after her, at least for a little while.  The soft focus makes the video look like a watercolor.  I recognize that the style is a direct reference to the Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination, and that the video’s filmed literally in the same location where that tragedy took place.  But I have to admit I was a little bothered by the fact that the reactions of people around Badu were obscured.  You can see some of them turning towards her, but not their expressions.  It’s effective, in that it makes what happens to her more surprising.  It might have been less so if we could see disgust or hatred in their features.  And it might have been even more stunning if they noticed her but were generally accepting, and the person who does violence on her was identified, was clearly someone truly deviant from society as a whole.

You know, for all that he can be sexist, un-evenhanded, someone who doesn’t remotely adhere to traditional journalistic principles, but Perez Hilton deserves credit for having consistently strong taste in music and working hard to promote the artists he likes.  I think his upcoming radio countdown show could actually be quite good.

One of the few areas of popular culture I was actually fully caught up with when I was a kid was Casey Kasem’s Top 40 countdown.  I used to tape songs off the radio on weekends–the program was the first place I heard “Ms. Jackson,” “Unbreak My Heart,” No Doubt, a lot of the other music that’s lingered with me throughout the years, along with oddities like Madonna’s dance remix of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina”:

Listening to it week after week was a fascinating look at evolving American tastes, a weird juxtaposition, a chance to keep up with the things that other people liked but that I was having trouble finding on my own.  For a nerd, countdowns were a public service, a kind of informational bulletin I devoured and was grateful for.

I haven’t listened to a countdown program regularly in years; I wised up enough to find music on my own.  But I do regularly check out artists Perez recommends.  Under all that goofy hair dye, terrible clothes, and idiotic photoshop scribbling, the guy’s got taste.  Perhaps at some point that’ll be enough, and the posing can fall away.  And if the show takes off, I might be tempted to tune in.

Jezebel says the era of breast implants in Hollywood might be over.  SEK, blogging over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, notes that a casting call for the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie saying women with implants need not apply, is sexist in its own way: the standard it’s imposing might not be encouraging women to have surgery, but it’s still a criticism of a choice women have every right to make.  My concern is that this is just another trend, rather than a step towards an embrace of genuine body diversity in Hollywood.  


In that casting call, “real breasts” is just the last item in a list that starts with “Must be 5′7-5′8, Size four or six – no bigger or smaller. Age 18 to 25. Must have a lean dancer body.”  In other words, they still want women who are very conventionally skinny and lithe.  And the move away from implants isn’t necessarily a move away from a preference larger busts at all, just for the particular strain and rigidity of implanted breasts.  


We live in a time when individual actresses like Gabby Sidibe can break through the expectations Hollywood has for women’s bodies, without changing general preferences and expectations at all: the veil closes behind them until a very particular project and a very particular director needs someone else who looks different from a conventional Hollywood movie star.  The truth is that rigid standards of appearance aren’t just a matter of sexism and problematic body image.  They make for boring-looking movies, films that look off because they don’t look like the real world in its infinite variation.  The same thing is true of movies with weirdly monochromatic casts, too.  Even if studios aren’t particularly worried about the body image standards they project, or the characteristics of the population of actors they employ, they ought to worry about whether their movies have some reality to them.

Heh:

It’s a good thing I find our culture collapsing in on itself pretty much completely hilarious, or it would be a really, really terrible time to be a critic.

A lot of you asked me to participate in the 10 Books meme in last Friday’s special requests thread.  I hope you guys won’t be annoyed by this answer, which is a bit of a dodge.  I just finished up a piece for The Atlantic arguing that influence isn’t just about the books that affected one’s reading or thinking.  It starts like this:

When I was 20 years old, I marched off to get arrested in a pair of gray slacks and a gray sweater that didn’t match and didn’t suit me. I certainly believed in the reasons and 14 of my friends and I were going to walk into the Yale Admissions Office, sit down, refuse to leave, and proceed to sing folk songs as loudly as possible. Reforming the university’s financial aid system seemed like a broadly good idea. But when it came to getting an arrest record for the cause, my decision can be laid at the door of Jean Merrill, a then-82-year-old children’s book author who’d never met me in her entire life.

As the “ten books” meme has swept the Internet, prompting writers to declare the importance of everything from Peter Singer’s Writings on an Ethical Life to J.M. DeMatteis’ Kraven’s Last Hunt entry in the Spider-Man line in the development of their thinking, I’ve found my thoughts turning frequently to Merrill’s The Pushcart War. It’s not that her satiric portrait of urban machine politics and corporate titans—complete with progressive, pretty celebrities, poker-playing politicians, and truck company owners, plus a children’s crusade inspired by a jailed peddler—is the best piece of children’s literature ever written. But the memory of a fictional flower-seller and the influence of his arrest was one of the things that helped me say yes when my friends needed one more person to make the sit-in successful.The Pushcart War was one of the books that pushed me, a terminal bookworm, out into the world, that made me not just think, but act.

 I hope y’all like it; this was something I’d been working on even since before the request, and that I care about a lot.  I realize it’s a dodge.  But it’ll get at least some of my influential books out there for you.

So, I was watching All the President’s Men again over the weekend as background while I was doing a little writing, and had the great pleasure of noticing on screen who but Ned Beatty, so delightful as Det. Stanley Bolander in a minor role as the Miami State’s Attorney.  I really do love Bolander as a character.  The combination of bitterness and hope is irresistible:

And I suppose the happiness I take in noticing things like this is evidence of a terminal preference I have for supporting actors over leading men and women.  All the President’s Men is a marvelous movie for those  people who fill in the critically important details of a movie, who determine whether there’s oxygen in the world on screen, or just a few people moving in isolation across it.  Jack Warden, Hal Holbrook, Jason Robards alone make a feast.  And everyone else making up the movie’s Washington is really very fine too.

I ended up going to Beach House’s show at the Black Cat on Friday night somewhat unexpectedly, and it turned out to be quite the pleasure.  I hadn’t listened to the band very much before, but even though the exceedingly mellow sound means the group can’t build a conventional emotional swell in a set, the show had the feel of a backyard party, with big, pinata-like tinsel-decked objects rotating over the stage, and the crowd bopping quietly along.  I particularly like “Take Care,” I think:

One thing I’ll say about Beach House though, and this is a problem much more for the show as a live act than as a creator of albums, is the songs tend to meander off at the end.  In an album, they could blend into each other, but there’s a tentativeness about it when they’re performing live.  It’s as if they run out of things to say or do within the structure of a pop song.  And given that that’s the medium in which they’re working, that might be something for them to figure out.

The trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World looks completely charming and exciting.  It’s a great cast up and down, and even for the few seconds he’s in it, the trailer became another entry in the case Chris Evans is making for me liking him:

But the trailer shook loose something that’s been percolating in my mind for a while.  What would the recent history of movies look like if Patrick Fugit had become the indie darling Michael Cera is, and was taking some of the roles he’s taking now.  It may just be because Fugit’s six years older than Cera, but where Cera is a blank, Fugit’s always struck me as open, and vulnerable: there’s something behind those wide eyes.  I never understood why Juno was so nuts about Paulie in Juno, but I absolutely understood why Mary might be terrified and tantalized by Patrick’s attention in Saved!  I don’t think Cera’s ever had a performance that equals Fugit’s in Almost Famous.  Superbad is fine, it certainly captures a certain adolescent anxiety, but so does Almost Famous without the intense reliance on vulgarity (which is only a sin when it’s a crutch), and with a deep engagement with the transformative power of art.  I wish Fugit worked more, and got the recognition he deserves.  But in Hollywood even more so than in life, things are rarely fair.

Guys, I’m taking the rest of the day off from the day job, and from here.  I hope you won’t mind.  Consider this a requests thread.  I promise, for once, to honor 100 percent of them.

Tom Bissell’s piece about his addiction to video games is a worthwhile read in and of itself, but it’s also a very good meditation on how different kinds of art work on people’s brains.  On literature, he notes:

Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and take shelter in another. When the minds of the reader and writer perfectly and inimitably connect, objects, events and emotions become doubly vivid – more real, somehow, than real things. I have spent most of my life seeking out these connections and attempting to create my own. Today, however, the pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar. Today the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games.

And this on the power of video games’ immersive worlds:

Vice City’s sequel, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, was several magnitudes larger – so large, in fact, I never finished the game. San Andreas gave gamers not one city to explore but three, all of them set in the hip-hop demimonde of California in the early 1990s (though one of the cities is a Vegas clone). It also added dozens of diversions, the most needless of which was the ability of your controlled character, a young man named CJ, to get fat from eating health-restoring pizza and burgers – fat that could be burned off only by hauling CJ’s porky ass down to the gym to ride a stationary bike and lift weights. This resulted in a lot of soul-scouring questions as to why a) it even mattered to me that CJ was fat and why b) CJ was getting more physical exercise than I was. Because I could not answer either question satisfactorily, I stopped playing.

And this on artistic taste in general:

Many children who want to believe their tastes are adult will bravely try coffee, find it to be undeniably awful, but recognise something that could one day, conceivably, be enjoyed. Once our tastes as adults are fully developed, it is easy to forget the effort that went into them. Adult taste can be demanding work – so hard, in fact, that some of us, when we become adults, selectively take up a few childish things, as though in defeated acknowledgment that adult taste, with its many bewilderments, is frequently more trouble than it is worth. Few games have more to tell us about this adult retreat into childishness than the Grand Theft Auto series.

I haven’t played video games since college, when I got overly invested in the Sims for a while and felt somewhat disturbed by the pull, by my own investment.  Obviously I stopped far before Bissell did.  And uh, didn’t end up intertwining video game and hard drugs habits.  But this is far and away the best piece I’ve ever read articulating the pull I felt and the uneasiness I felt about it, and about how art’s interaction with our brains and our moral reasoning is a part of how we should judge its power and accomplishment.

As is so often the case, Hero Complex has a great, nuanced take on the challenges Chris Evans will face in playing Captain America, and not just playing him, but portraying him in a period piece, which means something rather particular in comics:

I remember talking to Gabriel Macht, who portrayed the title role in “The Spirit,” rooted in another 1940s-era creation, and he moaned about the vintage dialogue and retro sensibility of a square-jawed hero who was plucked from the era of serials and dropped into a CG age. “You say it as honest as you can,” he said with a tight smile. Well, we all know how that turned out.

“Captain America” is being directed by Joe Johnston, and when I spoke to him a few weeks ago, he said one of the big challenges of the project was finding an actor who could present two physiques on screen — the “98-pound weakling” look of Steve Rogers and then the ripped-muscle frame of his heroic alter ego after receiving a dose of the ultimate performance-enhancing drug. Evans will be tested by that body-shaping, but also by the need to win the hearts and minds of 21st century movie-goers with an FDR-era champion; that will be especially interesting to watch as the movie ventures overseas, where the name of the film might smack of jingoism.

I must say, The Spirit was really one of the most transcendently awful movies I’ve ever seen in my entirely life.  It was astonishingly bad.  There was too much of everything: too much of Samuel L. Jackson in high camp mode (something it’s hard to imagine saying), too many women to keep straight (Jamie King’s character was most intriguing and least used), too much harsh lighting contrast.  I suppose there’s an extent to which it was an interesting experiment in making a visual graphic novel, but I don’t think it was a success.  That aside, the extent to which it was really a period piece was exceedingly limited.  


Which doesn’t mean superhero period pieces are a bad idea at all.  They don’t need to be directly related to our history, though they can provide alternate metaphors for how we understand it, and the historical revisionism of Watchmen is wonderful, both in the comic itself and the details of the movie adaptation.  There could be a pretty badass movie in the combination of Mad Men‘s aesthetics and Wonder Woman’s adaptation to mainstream society as an adventurer beyond her closed society of Amazons.  Joe Johnston’s weird directing history would suggest he’s not going to proceed along those lines.  He did do a nice period piece in October Sky, so if he can restrain some of the impulses he had in Jumanji, etc., he might have the right touch.

Guys, Drake is SO BORING.  Can someone please explain to me what is appealing about a guy who makes dishwater songs like this and louses up tracks with Eminem on them and makes really dopily sexist music videos?  I mean, really people:

Because I do not understand. I am at a loss.

I will lead up the fundraising campaign to make this a real thing.  I am not even kidding.

This would blow the intermittently-funny Walk Hard out of the water.  America deserves a truly uproarious parody rockstar biopic.  And salvation through Hawaiian shirts.  And Weird Al sure deserves the validation.

So, in my rapture over 84 Charing Cross Road earlier in the week, I somehow missed entirely that it’s a true story.  Helene Hanff and Frank Dole actually wrote all of those letters.  I’m stunned, and deeply gratified, again, by how rich human experience actually is.

I will never, never understand why memoirists fabricate experiences to pass off as their own, or publishers continue to send out fictionalized memoirs as if they’re as good as the real thing.  The truth has such unmistakeable power to it.  Remember this opening scene from the first episode of The Wire (no spoilers, but very great enticement for anyone who hasn’t seen it)?

Careful readers of Homicide, David Simon’s reported book about the Baltimore Police Department, will note that this conversation is something that actually happened.  As fiction, it’s testament to the power of a writer’s imagination.  As fact it’s an astonishing testament to the power of human experience to be literate, surprising, and clearly and cleverly illustrative beyond the power of anyone to make up.  I’d rather be constantly in shock to the beauty and pathos of the world as it is than seek constant substitutes for it.

What in the Lord’s name is Frances McDormand going to be doing in Transformers 3?  I love Frances McDormand!  Is this all a sick plot by Michael Bay to lure nerds like me who swore never again back in? Because it will succeed, no matter how disgusted I am with myself over it.  Damn you, Frances!  You’re capable of so much better!  Like this: