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?