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.