I think I have a growing affection for Nicole Scherzinger. I feel very conflicted about this. I find the Pussycat Dolls insufferably irritating and tacky. I wish she would do something better with her career. It’s rare that I feel any sort of need to defend my affections for participants in our mass culture, or that I feel any real sour distaste for those I don’t like, but Scherzinger’s always been an exception because I felt like so much of what she was doing was such a waste. But then, perhaps she’s on the way to improvement. First, I thought she was completely, completely adorable on Dancing With the Stars, both in her level of commitment and execution:

And she’s really not a bad Maureen in the live production of Rent:

More could have been done with the choreography here, but that inner-thigh-reach-and-slide is nicely executed, and she sounds good. I hope folks keep her working. I don’t really know how one makes the step up from manufactured-band mediocrity to the real thing, but maybe they could get her a job on Glee, or something?

But I’m not going to lie. Daydream Nation looks awfully pretentious:

I think it’s got a couple of triggers for me. The moving stick figure reminds me a little bit too strongly of the unrealized musical notation figures from Idlewild. The soft-focus and music and angst remind me a lot of The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, though I’m guessing that no one undergoes gender reassignment surgery in this movie. And the hot-for-teacher plot bothers me. Movies like this generally default into extremely cliche psychology about why people like that get together, and in this case, it looks like she has a messy, immature breakup with him anyway and ends up with someone much more age-appropriate, which is of course supposed to be the response that proves she’s matured and just isn’t some hard-to-control little harlot.  And is still really, really predictable. I understand that relationships like this are useful shorthand: he’s the teacher, she’s the student, he’s the boss, she’s the ambitious underling, she’s the tough, sour career girl, he’s the player who finds himself attracted. But that shorthand can also function as a straightjacket. Why does the student-teacher relationship have to be a volatile benchmark on the road to maturity for one and ruin for the other?

So, earlier in the summer, my boss handed me a copy of Justin Cronin’s The Passage. I was racing through A Song of Ice and Fire, and it’s a rather heavy book to schlep around in my purse in the August heat, so I put it off until I got on the plane to Anchorage. And then I read the whole thing in a single day. Obviously, spoilers to come.

It’s not a perfect book. In fact, it’s substantially far from a perfect book. There’s an extent to which it’s a hard science-fiction novel: the process by which scientists working for the military identify and then replicate a virus, experimenting on death-row inmates with it, is explicable, if advanced. But it’s also a book that relies, at least in what we know so far, on magic. That isn’t always a combination that works. Magic throws doubt on the validity, capabilities, and limitations of hard science, and it’s difficult to make the transition from scientific thinking to magical thinking. I do hope that Cronin manages to reconcile magic and science in the subsequent books in the series.

But if the writing and character development are as strong as they were in the first novel, I’m willing to live with the contradiction, even if he doesn’t achieve a conceptual reconciliation. My worry is that with the conclusion of the beautifully developed father-daughter relationship that acts as the frame device for the first novel, Cronin won’t be able to keep it up. The Passage was much better as a road book, and as a collection of A Canticle for Leibowitz-like fragments, than as a portrait of a post-apocalyptic society. The setup and conception of the society was just fine, but the book got crowded and a bit baggy in the middle, and got much better once the cast slimmed back down and started moving again. If Cronin can build a relationship between Peter and Amy that equals the relationship between Amy and Wolgast (though it will, by necessity, be different), then I think the sequels will work.

The book’s at its best when it’s about the mysteriousness of love. Amy’s most often the object of that love, but she’s not a void onto which men like Wolgast and Peter project what they want to see. She’s a complete person, one who sees the sadness in A Christmas Carol, who experiences her greatest empathy in relationship to people who can’t communicate with others: a rape victim, polar bears in a zoo, people turned into shells. She is not theirs to decode, or make legible, rather they have to venture into her strangeness and accept it. I like that. It feels true.

First, thanks so much to Katie, BabylonSista, Kay and Dylan for keeping house while I was gone. I was mostly, seriously off the grid while I was in Alaska, but when I checked in, it was clear they were kicking ass in my absence. It’s such a treat to read them, much less to read them here.

So, I am not the biggest fan of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” mostly because I think the lyrics are weirdly goofy and condescending. And I think most of the video is, as New York says, eerily like an advertisement. But I think there’s one thing in particular about this that works. The sex scene, or really, the lead-up to the sex scene, since that’s all we get, has a nice awkwardness to it. New York notes the realistic-but-not-video-worthy white cotton panties. But the struggle with the jeans buttons, and the way they move around the room, captures the gawkiness of desire well. Points for that, Katy.