I basically cosign the idea that artists these days might be better off just releasing mixtapes and singles, and making guest appearances on other artists’ songs rather than trying to make albums.  Although I bet my reasons for agreeing with that strategic plan are different than the ones the author original laid out, namely that Drake and Nicki Minaj have done absolutely fine without releasing albums.  As I’ve said, both here and in other venues, I’m not much of an album person.  I like some of them, but there are very, very few that I listen to repeatedly and all the way through.  Blood on the Tracks, for sure.  Stankonia, absolutely.  Both of Cee-Lo’s solo albums.  But most of the time, I tend to prefer singles.  If I find a new one that I like, I can listen to it for a couple of days straight.  I realize that’s somewhat unusual.  But I also think that most albums don’t remotely rise to the level of Blood on the Tracks.  Even Stankonia has filler, most notably the skits that have become an unfortunate, and wasteful, feature of most hip-hop albums and that show little signs of seriously abating.

And we live in an era when the economic model favors singles.  If you don’t have to pay for studio time to record twelve tracks that people will buy because they really like three of them, why make the investment in the studio time?  Why not concentrate on releasing the couple of tracks that are great, shooting killer videos for them, and selling the hell out of them?  Without the pressure to accumulate enough tracks to fill up an album, artists can release material whenever they’ve got good songs, without waiting for it to accumulate or releasing uneven records that taint their legacies.  If artists have an album’s worth of good material, nothing prevents them from releasing it, and from making it an unusual event in the music world.  Maybe I’m just myopic, or young, or something.  But if the age of the album is over, I wouldn’t be devastated.

So, the trailer for the upcoming David Duchovy-Demi Moore movie, The Joneses, about a fake family who works together as a broad-spectrum lifestyle marketing team, looks both extremely strange, and I think potentially kind of brilliant:

Obviously, “keeping up with the Joneses” is a total cliche.  But in the midst of a consumption hangover when the cliche was literalized through credit, turning the cliche into something real and specific seems extremely smart to me.  Especially since the setup allows the movie to play with both consumer practices and ideas about the extent to which families are constructions, and the extent to which they’re ruled simply by biology.  ”You’ve seen one Mr. Jones, you’ve seen ‘em all,” Moore purrs at one point in the trailer, and I think that’s what’s intriguing about this movie.  We think dubbing someone “the Joneses” means we know them, but of course we don’t.  We certainly never assume that it’s not remotely real.

And I like the casting choices, too.  David Duchovny, in the aftermath of his own personal fall from grace, seems to have relished playing roles that epitomize the rot behind sunny appearances.  Demi Moore has been so smoothed and bronzed that she’s a product in and of herself. I’ll be curious to see whether or not she can externalize something from underneath that buffed surface.  Amber Heard, who plays their fake daughter, has amassed a nice little resume for herself, and worked with Duchovny in Californication, so they may have some preexisting ease.  And having Gary Cole in the frame is always a plus too.

Given that Watchmen has been in print in trade book form since 1987, and Love and Rockets collections since 1985, not to mention the work done by folks like Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, and many, many others, it is of course wildly overdue that the Los Angeles Times Festival Books has only just now created a graphic novels category in its prizes.  I’m strongly in favor of keeping a separate category for graphic novels, since fictional prose is fundamentally different from a fusion of words and images.  The brain just processes the information differently.  We do work filling in visual details with our own imaginations when we read novels that’s not part of the engagement when we read graphic novels (at least, it works that way for me).  But there’s just absolutely no denying that graphic novels fit under the broad rubric of literature, and should be considered seriously by critics, readers, and prize committees alike.

So, I will freely admit to being one of those people who vigorously resists certain cultural phenomena (frequently for no particularly good reason), ultimately gives into them, and finds myself much happier for it.  In this category I’d include Lady Gaga, Star Trek, and the musicalization of Hairspray.  I wouldn’t say I have a perfect track record: Lil Wayne still leaves me completely cold, for example, and folks, I tried.  But I think I may have reached the brink on one recent phenomenon: the mashups of classic literature and monster movies, epitomized by the runaway success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is reportedly headed to movie adaptation.  And this is why:

I mean, look, I will always feel protective about Elizabeth Bennet.  I know a lot of women who are.  And I do worry that The Children will read things like this instead of the originals, which would be a Tragedy.  But at the same time, I appreciate that these mashups are enhancing, rather than diminishing, the badass nature of the literary and historical figures they’re taking on.  And they’re really doing it in a delightfully goofy way.

One thing I learned at a tour of Lincoln’s Cottage (which, if I may say so, is a must-see for any DC-bound visitors) is that Lincoln was nuts, or antsy, or whatever enough to ride out to join the troops when the city was under Confederate attack, making him the only U.S. president to come under fire in a war he was leading as Commander in Chief.  If he was tough enough to do that, he was tough enough to stake vampires.