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John Hillcoat's The Road finally arrives in theaters Wednesday, more than a year after its originally announced release date. Yet despite rumored cuts, tweaks, re-shoots, and an initial marketing campaign bizarrely committed to selling the apocalypse as a romance, the film is not the disaster many assumed it would be. Furthermore, rather than a bastardization of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, it's a scrupulous adaptation, from Joe Penhall's screenplay (A.O. Scott writes in the NY Times that, "Mr. Penhall's script follows the novel as faithfully as a hunting dog") to Hillcoat and company's haunting visuals. A great feature at Wired.com juxtaposes passages from McCarthy's book with stills from the movie, and the similarities are uncanny. In this context it's easy to read McCarthy's prose as gnomic stage directions. "When the bridge came in sight below them there was a tractor-trailer jackknifed sideways across it and wedged into the buckled iron railings," he writes, and Hillcoat's composition follows this tricky contortion to the letter.
But Hillcoat's literal fidelity prevents the film from approximating the novel's power. It's a matter of proportion. Action and dialogue constitute but a fraction of what comprises McCarthy's grim epic. Yet it seems like all of the book's dialogue and main action has been shoehorned into the film's svelte two hour running time. Scenes and exchanges are steadily beaded throughout, relegating McCarthy's repetitions, silences, and blanketed dread to moments of scenic transition. Instead of quiet, anticipatory terror, the film plays as chatty, pulse-pounding thriller. Scenes that transpire over several paragraphs in the 250-page book loom larger when dramatized to five minutes out of 113. The film doesn't belabor its flashbacks -- scenes in which Charlize Theron stars as an intractably hopeless wife and mother -- but these are blink-and-they're-gone fever-dreams in the book, not moments ripe for star-powered drama.
Certain incidents in McCarthy's book are vivid and unshakable -- the fired bullet, the horrific basement discovery, the food cellar -- but the film doesn't provide enough room for these to stand out from numerous others. I want less action, less dialogue -- a Terrence Malick version of "The Road" shorn to the essentials.
Hillcoat's one stroke of genius has nothing to do with McCarthy's book, and happens when the narrative and expectations of adaptation have ended. It's easy to miss, but during the final credits Hillcoat slips in a soundtrack of ambient noise. You hear a sprinkler, a creaking screen door, a dog barking, children playing. Banal things that no longer exist in McCarthy's post-apocalyptic universe. Forget literal fidelity -- this is the closest the film gets to McCarthy's mournful tone. And it's the first time a blank credit-scroll put a lump in my throat.
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As far too many people know all too well, ABC's Good Morning America disinvited the newly minted pop star Adam Lambert from appearing on its stage today. Lambert had been found guilty of committing lewd and lascivious acts at Sunday's American Music Awards, which also aired on ABC. His crimes against common decency—which, surprisingly, some people believe still exists—included handling the head of a male dancer in pantomime of what the standard text calls Auparishtaka, or mouth congress. That the brash tackiness of the performance should have roused our moral guardians to action and our entertainment press into a frenzy was slightly, very slightly, peculiar, given the general lewdness and lasciviousness of the context—the American Music Awards, America, etc. The scandal of course has to do with Lambert's being gay and male and, as the L.A. Times' Ann Powers shrewdly observes, a rocker (as opposed to an R&B Romeo).
His GMA gig cancelled, Lambert instead spent his morning on CBS's Early Show, which, being largely unwatchable, is largely unwatched, and thus had nothing to lose. To my mind, 7:30 am is a bit early in the day for leather pants, but Lambert was encased in a pair, chatting easily as the bottom of the screen crawled with news of troops in Afghanistan and murder in the Philippines. He explained himself as he had in other venues the day before. Question: "Now that you have had time to think about the children, your child fans, do you feel that you need to apologize to them?" The reply was an adamantly casual and eminently reasonable nope. What a relief to hear someone not apologize. At the end of the Early Show, he did a couple of numbers, inoffensive in all respects, his voice as big as his hair. Then Lambert glided outside to sign autographs for any number of nice ladies with firm perms and honest Ohioan faces. They seemed very supportive.
For the record, Sunday's instance of simulated oral stimulation was, to judge by the standards of the genre, not bad. It seemed minorly less calculated than Madonna's many forays into faux fellatio, but somewhat less authentic than Karen O's frequent attempts to swallow her microphone. We can credit David Bowie and Mick Ronson with providing the unsurpassable high point of music-related pseudo-penilingus. That was a bit of rock-erotic theater—recreated in Todd Haynes' excellent Velvet Goldmine—wherein Ziggy Stardust falls, face first, on Ronson's guitar as he plays it right-handed. Lambert, by contrast, was just making love with his ego.
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Every family has its Thanksgiving traditions. This year, How I Met Your Mother officially made the slap bet the centerpiece of its annual celebration.
Shameful:
—The notion that a turkey left behind in a cab would end up in the lost and found at Port Authority. HIMYM occasionally makes keen observations about life in New York. This was not such an occasion.
—The "you're dead to me" look. The Shame Index has previously noted that HIMYM would do well to avoid special effects, but this episode yet again leaned heavily on effects for comedy. The reasons Lily had for disavowing characters like her bridesmaid—"I'm just not a fan of strapless"—and Mr. Park were funny, but the glowing eyes routine got old quick. And Mr. Park's actual death at the end of the episode was a contrived, maudlin twist.
—The attempt to recapture the magic of the original Slapsgiving episode. The Shame Index doesn't necessarily think this sequel was doomed to fail—the long shelf life of the slap bet is part of what makes it so funny—but fail it did. The transferability of slaps was a clever idea, and an apt one coming from lawyer Marshall. But the bickering over whether Robin or Ted would get to bestow the slap grew tiresome, as did the slap puns, which failed to capture the spirit of one-upsmanship of the previous Slapsgiving.
—Related: As Amos Barshad has noted on Vulture, one of the strangest aspects of the Robin-Barney arc was how unfazed Ted was by the relationship. Last night, during the argument over who would get to slap Barney, Ted announces that he's angry that Robin slept with one of his best friends. Was some repressed issue with Swarkles finally rearing its ugly but understandable and potentially dramatic head? Nope! It was merely slap-bet brinksmanship.
—Also related: Is the Shame Index alone in feeling upset on Barney's behalf vis-a-vis the slap? That the slap-bet commissioner could herself become a slapper via a transfer of slapping rights seems to the Shame Index a prima facie conflict of interest. And while a slap bet is inherently rough justice, was it not cruel and unusual of Marshall to bestow on Barney a fake pardon the moment before delivering the brutal fourth slap? The slap bet must be governed by the rule of law. The Shame Index would like his objection noted for the record.
Awesome:
—Guest star Christina Pickles. Yes, sitcom fans: Pickles, who played Judy Geller on Friends, showed up last night as Lily's grandmother. A conscious nod to the debt HIMYM owes Friends? Or just casting happenstance? The Index likes to think it's the former.
—Mickey's board games. They weren't all funny, and some were funnier than others, but the Index did enjoy Tijuana Slumlord, Dog Fight Promoter, and, especially, There's a Clown Demon Under the Bed. Donna Bowman of the AV Club spied in the background of Mickey's apartment a prototype for a game called Landmine Lunge, which is also inspired. The episode pushed the joke too far in the end, however, with the exploding gallbladder filled with lead paint and horse bile. The final bit—a fake '80s-style ad for a slap-based board game—was likewise just silly.
—Marshall's appearance via video link at the weekly Eriksen family dinner. (Does the fact that Marshall's dad is played by Bill Fagerbakke of Coach bolster the argument that HIMYM pays homage to sitcoms of yore through its casting? Was Carter Bays also a big fan of Get a Life?)
—"Well then we'll just give him some dark meat."
In other news, the Index was pleased to see Carter Bays forced to account for HIMYM's poor handling of the Barney and Robin relationship, even if his response was far from satisfactory. The Index was also happy to see that he is not alone in finding the treatment of Swarkles problematic. Time's James Poniewozik, in a response to last week's episode, put his finger on what's so odd about the abrupt breakup: Last season, HIMYM convinced us that even Barney—promiscuous, solipsistic Barney—has a real emotional life. Now the series wants us to forget about it. Ain't that a slap in the face.
Previous Shame Indices: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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This is potentially blasphemous to admit, but I have never been a huge Seinfeld fan. So I wasn’t particularly excited about the four Jewish Beatles getting back together on the season 7 finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm (which aired Sunday night). I was, however, delighted to see Larry David reunite with his estranged wife, Cheryl.
In prior seasons, Cheryl was the voice of reason, tamping down Larry’s excessive reactions to perceived slights and social misunderstandings. Since her departure, Larry has been completely unhinged, getting into shouting matches with his friends and acquaintances several times a show. In more than one episode this year—both the finale and an episode called “The Black Swan”—Larry got into knock-down, drag-out fights about tipping service people. Cheryl wouldn’t have let Larry completely self-immolate over something so stupid.
Cheryl was especially welcome in last night’s episode because she wasn’t just reacting to Larry’s out-of-control behavior. She was the straight woman to the diva-dom of the Seinfeld players. The closing shot of Cheryl’s face—when Larry stops her mid-kiss and harangues her about leaving a water mark on Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’s coffee table—is reason enough for this viewer, at least, to hope for yet another season of the show.
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Verlyn Klinkenborg, a New York Times editorial board member and author of the paper's "Rural Life" column, spends most of his time on his upstate New York farm, gazing across meadows and musing on The Splendor of the Goldenrod, The Wisdom of the Barn Mouse, and The Majesty of Henry the Pig's Feed Bag. But occasionally the philosopher-rube scrapes the mud off his boots, has Maw lay out a clean shirt, and ventures into town to meditate upon civilization. In the latest of these adventures, Klinkenborg has discovered a novelty that may yet transform modern life: the bicycle.
In an "Editorial Observer" column published this week under the remarkable title "Individualism, Identity and Bicycles in Northern California"—is it a 500-word newspaper column or a doctoral thesis?—Klinkenborg finds himself on the campus of Stanford University, contemplating "great clouds of cyclists pulsing between classes along the street called Serra Mall ... like so many slowly charged particles in a physics experiment."
This puffed-up prose is typical of Klinkenborg, who may be the windiest windbag in newspaper history. But surely poetry is called for in the case of this column: Klinkenborg is recounting an astonishing spectacle.
At Stanford, he reports, cyclists pilot bikes of assorted makes and gear configurations. Also, they display varying degrees of cycling aptitude. "Some riders are clearly adepts," Klinkenborg writes, while others ride "à la 8 years old, prey to the wobbling clutches of gravity, prone to every distorting posture a bicycle can inflict." The cyclists are clad in a variety of costumes. Some talk on cell phones as they pedal. Many carry bags. It all leaves Klinkenborg in a state of wonder-struck bafflement. "There is a deeply pleasing randomness about the campus cyclists, as though one morning university officials had assigned a bicycle to every member of the Stanford community, come as you are."
There is, indeed, a randomness "about" the campus cyclists, although it has nothing to do with university officials. The fact is, each of these riders has obtained his or her bicycle individually, often by purchasing them at a store specializing in the sale of bicycles. Similarly, the sartorial variety that Klinkenborg finds mysterious is the result of a process, undertaken by each cyclist at his or her place of residence, whereby a suit of clothes is selected and then donned, beginning with undergarments and proceeding to outerwear. Often as not, these fully clothed individuals then fill a satchel or valise with personal belongings—a corncob pipe, say, or a dog-eared copy of Making Hay. This explains the cyclists' "distended bags of every description," which Klinkenborg observes with wide-eyed bewilderment.
In truth, Klinkenborg isn't bewildered at all. But bewilderment is his shtick. Klinkenborg's columns are literary minstrel routines, starring the writer as an idiot savant—a bumpkin-seer who perceives the marvelous in the pedestrian and pivots to "epiphanies" that elude those of us who haven't spent years watching sunlight dapple the snouts of woodchucks.
You and I might stand on Serra Mall and see ... a bunch of college kids biking to class. But Klinkenborg is a fount of gnomic insights. To wit: A bicycle isn't just a bicycle. "Whoever all these cyclists are, as individuals, their individuality is burnished by the bikes they ride and by the way they ride them. It's as though the bikes are only partly transportation, as though they were really machines for differentiation." A few paragraphs later, Klinkenborg rises to his final cadence.
Truly, we are the only species so discontented with our natural gaits, so ambitious to exceed a foot-pace. It all puts me in mind of Thomas Jefferson, on the subject of walking and horses and their deleterious effect on human exercise.
"I doubt," he wrote, "whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal."
I know that faux-naiveté is Klinkenborg's mode. But does he expect readers to buy that he's perplexed by the concept of wheeled transport?
Here's a suggestion: Why doesn't Klinkenborg return from Palo Alto, Calif., to his farm at "a foot-pace"? He would save his cash-strapped employer some money on travel funds, for one thing. And he would behold many strange and wondrous sights en route, not excluding the darting of the whippoorwill against the glassy azure and the defecating of the prairie dog in the shade of the stretching oak.
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Word leaked on Thursday that Oprah Winfrey will end her long-running talk show come Sept. 9, 2011. She'll make an official announcement on-air Friday, commencing—we can only assume—20 long months of self-aggrandizing recaps and tributes. "The Oprah Winfrey Show" has been the nation's highest-rated talk show for more than 20 years, and an estimated 7 million viewers tune in on a daily basis. But the show commanded an audience nearly twice that size during its late-'90s peak. And though there's already speculation that Winfrey will start a new show on her own network, basic cable autonomy isn't the same as ubiquitous network syndication. Perhaps she's bowing out because she knows her powers are on the wane.
If we are indeed nearing the end of the Oprah era, a smaller news item from last week should have been a tipoff. Winfrey's production company, Harpo, reached a settlement with Mutual of Omaha over the rights to the phrase "aha moment." Since neither side has commented on the case, it's unclear exactly what was settled. But "settled" seems like Oprah PR-speak for "lost." Dictionary.com defines an "aha moment" as "a sudden understanding, recognition, or resolution." "Aha moment" and its sister phrase "eureka moment" have been around for years, which only demonstrates how words and phrases long and commonly used aren't necessarily safe from trademark protection.
As techdirt reports, Mutual of Omaha applied for the trademark in 2008 to support a marketing campaign dubbing the insurance company the "official sponsor of the aha moment." But Oprah, who'd used the term on her show, also claimed rights. The snag is that Harpo Productions didn't make a legal claim until this past June, a year after Mutual of Omaha had launched its campaign and long after a Florida clothier made a claim of its own. In the wake of the settlement, Mutual of Omaha still rather definitively runs the Web site AhaMoment.com, which sells insurance through a high-concept gathering of people's eureka testimonies. None, as yet, feature or credit Oprah. Her "aha moments," it seems, are numbered.
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"It'll be better next time" is a phrase that rarely brings the reassurance the speaker intends, but it's the best thing that can be said for Project Runway. The book is now closed on Season 6, which was beset by legal problems, second-rate contestants, uninspired challenges, inconsistent judging, absent judges, too many one-day contests, and the wrong venue. Let's pretend it never happened and hope that Season 7, back in New York and with Michael Kors and Nina Garcia guaranteed to be on hand for all the challenges, will induce a case of selective amnesia.
But first, the formalities: Thursday night brought the second part of the finale (and someone needs to tell the folks at Lifetime that "finale Part 1" is like "a little bit pregnant"—it is or it isn't the finale), and there was only one question left unanswered: Who would win? The collections had been out there since the Bryant Park shows back in February, and Tim Gunn had explained the meltdown shown in Lifetime's promos for the finale in a fabulous interview with the Los Angeles Times. After an avalanche of faint praise (Nina Garcia, "I thought they all put a lot of time and effort into their collections"; Heidi Klum, "It really looks finished"), Heidi named Irina Shabayeva this season's winner.
Despite Irina being the clear favorite going into Fashion Week, her victory was by no means assured. The judges praised Althea's coolness and her talent for connecting with "the street." They enjoyed Carol Hannah's impeccable draping and tailoring and her willingness to play with color (at least in comparison with the others—the whole show was like a scene from Pleasantville). What won it for Irina was that her collection was the most cohesive. Too cohesive, perhaps—every single garment was black, which doesn't photograph well. As Nina Garcia observed, "It gets very little editorial, black." Still, Irina had a story—"My collection is all about New York. ... What it takes to survive in this city as a woman. It's about comforting and shielding yourself"—and she paid attention to detail. She was the only designer who had made hats to accompany her looks, for example, and, overall, her pieces looked as if they belonged in Bryant Park rather than at a high-end fashion show in a suburban mall.
Still, there is one unresolved issue. As Tom & Lorenzo, the kings of Project Runway commentary, revealed earlier this week, the T-shirts that garnered Irina so much praise weren't exactly all her own work. The slogans were copied from "Reasons To Love New York," a December 2008 piece in New York magazine.
Oh, Gucci, maybe Season 6 isn't over yet after all.
Previous Project Runway Recaps: Week 1, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 8, Week 9, Week 10, Week 11, Week 12
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Several weeks ago in this space, I noted a curiosity of National Public Radio's musical coverage: that NPR has "a strict preference for music that few actual living African-Americans listen to." NPR's taste in black music, I wrote, can be described by the acronym DORF—it prefers black musicians who are Dead, Old, Retro, and Foreign.
I asked Slate's readers to email nominees for the DORFiest musical artists of all time and to identify other, non-NPR bastions of DORF taste. Here are some results.
The most frequently mentioned name was Bob Marley, whose recordings were also nominated in multiple DORF categories. Marley's "One Love" was the consensus winner for DORF National Anthem.
Two readers, Jesse S. and Shelly V., hailed the late Malian singer and guitarist Ali Farka Touré as the ultimate DORF icon. Jesse wrote: "He was old, now he's dead. He's from Timbuktu, and he's so retro he sounds like John Lee Hooker's grandfather." Both Jesse and Shelly noted that Touré's song "Diaraby" provides the theme music for the daily "Geo Quiz" segment on the Public Radio International broadcast The World, which airs on many NPR affiliates. Jesse also pointed to Touré's association with renowned DORF-connisseur Ry Cooder, the American guitarist behind multi-DORFiest-of-the-DORF nominees, Buena Vista Social Club.
Several other African artists received nods, including Nigerian Afrobeat hero Fela Kuti; Jùjú legend King Sunny Ade; and South African choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who, as reader Patrick S. wrote, qualify for "The DORF grand slam ... O, R, F, and two sad, racially-charged D's."
Closer to home, frequently cited DORF icons included B.B. King (who, to be fair, is neither D nor F); Ray Charles; and Nina Simone. In the case of Simone, Slate reader Maldo argued that an honorary F be appended to her D, O, R on account of her long, self-imposed exile from the United States.
One of the most intriguing ideas came from journalist Carolina Gonzalez, who proposed a parallel "FIB Theory" of NPR's taste in Latin music: "Folklorical ('pure' musics away from corrupting modern influences); Impersonators (non-Latins who earnestly take up Latin sounds); Boundary-Breaking (usually expressed as 'doesn't sound the way you expect Latin music to sound'). The Latinos as phantom theory lives!"
I received just a few suggestions about DORFy media outlets. A couple of e-mailers mentioned Paste magazine. An insightful reader, Frances J., identified the 1983 film The Big Chill as a landmark in the codification of DORF taste—a truth whose full horror no viewer of the movie's famous postprandial dance scene will fail to grasp.
But the most interesting DORF development in recent weeks is a striking de-DORFicization under way at NPR. If you visit the "Song of the Day" page on the NPR Music Web site—cited in my initial Brow Beat post for its unmitigated DORFiness—you will find the following message: "Every weekday from Nov. 9 to Nov. 20, Song of the Day is surveying the past decade, one year (and one song) at a time, with an emphasis on America's most popular music. These picks don't exactly qualify as musical discoveries, but they do have something to say about the 10 years we're about to leave behind."
Say what? America's most popular music? Sure enough, "Song of the Day" has gone full-bore poptimist and full-bore anti-DORF: The series so far has included smart considerations of 50 Cent's "In Da Club," Outkast's "So Fresh, So Clean," Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," and Rihanna's "Umbrella"—all of them actual hit records by living African-Americans. If this keeps up, DORF lovers may well have to get their fix elsewhere.
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Jody Rosen: Jonah, let's cut to the chase: John Mayer is a douchebag. Or, rather, he's a meta-douchebag—a guy who's smart enough, self-aware enough, to know that he's a douchebag, and to meditate on douchebaggery and its discontents in his music.
And so we turn to "Who Says," the first single from Mayer's fourth album, Battle Studies. It's lovely little folk-pop soft-shoe, very catchy and, at just 2 minutes 56 seconds long, compact. It's the confession of a dope-smoking roué: "Who says I can't get stoned?/ Call up a girl that I used to know/ Fake love for an hour or so/ Who says I can't get stoned?"
What I love about this song is the way it both epitomizes and subverts its genre. In musical terms, it's the supreme example of the John Mayer/Dave Matthews/Jack Johnson/Jason Mraz frat-dude romantic balladeering style—what Elvis Costello once called the "Fuck me, I'm sensitive" school of seduction. It's all there: the sing-songy limpidness of the melody, the gently brushed acoustic guitar chords, the slightly husky man-child vocals. By the time Mayer hits the first chorus, you can hear the sound of white girls falling out of their clothes on campuses across the country. But in "Who Says," Mayer pulls back the curtain—moves "Fuck me, I'm sensitive" from subtext to text, and cops to being a cad. "I don't remember you looking any better," Mayer coos, "But then again, I don't remember you."
That's a very funny line. Which makes sense: Mayer's a funny guy. (Do some Googling: check out Mayer horsing around with Kanye West in the recording studio, and modeling Borat's onesie swimsuit.) Sadly, Mayer almost never brings his sense of humor into the recording studio. So we're left with a bunch of solemn songs about "love" and "politics" and lots of virtuoso guitar noodling. Take a gander at the Battle Studies cover photo, with Mayer bundled up against the cold, gazing grimly into the middle distance. This is the death-haunted look of a man doomed to shoulder the "serious pop" legacy of Sting and Mark Knopfler. What a pity—when he sings about smoking grass and shagging groupies, he's good!
Jonah Weiner: I'll grant that this is the first time I've seen Mayer inject his sense of humor—on delightful display over the years at his blog, in his Esquire column, on his Twitter feed, and, indeed, in his Borat onesie—into his music. I haven't listened closely to anything but his singles, and even then, not always that closely, but he's always seemed much smarter, funnier and cheekier than his music lets on. This song brings the two personalities together in a way that, as you say, has a subversive effect.
Let's make that borderline subversive, though. If you want to see the "Fuck Me, I'm Sensitive" school of balladeers torpedoed, you should dial up Cock Lorge's "Cock in the Pussy," which would be vile if it didn't function as a giant wink/sneer at songs like "Your Body Is a Wonderland." It's affectingly hushed, gently strummed, deeply felt—it just so happens that the refrain goes, "My cock's in your pussy, my cock's in your pussy, baby." (There's also a killer synthesized steel-drum solo.)
Mayer pulls back a curtain here, but I don't love what's on the other side of it any more than I love Asher Roth's "I Love College" or LMFAO's "Shots"—which is to say, just 'cause someone's more up front about his douchebaggery doesn't mean he's any less douchely.
Also, you can't judge a song by its video, but the clip for "Who Says" irritates me precisely because it offsets scenes of Blue Ribbon-munching, 1Oak (or wherever) dancing, high-heels-in-the-swimming-pool debauchery with shots of bleary-eyed, just-a-guy-and-his-guitar, early-morning reckoning. Puh-leeze. In a way, the video doubles down on the douche, pulling the curtain back to reveal another curtain. Am I being too crotchety?
J.R.: Gosh, Jonah, I never took you for a playa hater.
First of all, there's a world of difference between "Who Says" and "Shots." Mayer's being wry, here. There's wit in his song, not to mention some self-deprecation, even if that self-deprecation is a hustle—a pickup line masquerading as modesty.
As for the cheesy video: I kind of like it. Look, the guy is flossing. "Who Says" is Mayer's version of every hip-hop video ever made—the model chicks, the booze flowing, the nightclub, the swimming pool. Because he's John Mayer and not T.I., it's a slightly more "tasteful," down-market vision. (Fewer rims.) The moody, bleary-eyed stuff is merely a genre convention, no more or less intrinsically lame than the morning-after tableaux in a thousand R & B videos: brooding Lothario, strewn silk sheets, empty champagne bottles. So why are you being extra hard on Mayer? Is it because his posse looks slightly more like yours than T.I.'s does—because you've sat at that same corner table at Blue Ribbon?
I'm not singling you out, by the way. It strikes me that Mayer and his ilk get an especially tough time from critics. Sensitive white boy singer-songwriters with easy-listening proclivities and Berklee College of Music-honed chops—they're not exactly rock critic bait. Even in these poptimistic times, it's still socially acceptable to reflexively dismiss the Mayers of the world. So I'll say one more nice thing about him: the guy can write some tunes.
J.W.: Sorry, can't load those links right now, the WiFi in this private lounge on the fourth-floor of the Spotted Pig is really dodgy.
Hmm. Why am I harder on Mayer than his bon-vivant hip-hop equivalent? I'll think aloud. For one thing, I'm of course capable of reactions other than pure vicarious glee when it comes to blinged-out hip-hop and R & B video conventions. (I think the Kanye/Spike Jonze short film is a haunting critique of same). Beyond that, my instinct is to question the possibility of a true hip-hop equivalent for Mayer—I want to argue that a make-it-rain celebration in a T.I. song/video (however problematically women often figure into such fantasies) speaks from a different, more sympathetic, more interesting place than a me-and-my-Zegna-rocking-bros-getting-our-haute-bro-on celebration in a John Mayer video. Club scenes in hip-hop videos are, among other things, fantasies of power and privilege, and I guess—very broadly speaking—that I prefer to watch a former Atlanta drug dealer and his pals fantasize about power and privilege than Mayer and his dude-crew celebrating theirs.
But maybe you're right, and this distinction I'm drawing is ultimately unfair and insupportable—maybe if I tried to chase it down and get my arms around it I'd come up empty. I do know that I don't want to go out a playa hater. Floss and floss alike, I guess!
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As connoisseurs of beefcake surely know, People has revealed its choice for 2009's Sexiest Man Alive. Johnny Depp, senior editor Kate Coyne explained on CBS' Early Show, has reached an "iconic status in terms of sexiness." "He was sexy ten years ago, he'll be sexy ten years from now," she continued. "He appeals to multiple generations of women." And there's more: "He's a guy's guy, kind of a bad boy, he's a respected artist and actor. You know, he's got a little bit of everything."
People named its first Sexiest Man Alive in 1985: hunky Australian Mel Gibson. ("[T]he world is hungry for heroes, and no one knows it better than this unwilling Adonis.") For at least the last decade, the mag's editors have hit the talk-show circuit to explain their selection process. No matter whether it's Brad or George, Pierce or Matt, the People PR reps always get the same question: What makes him the sexiest? Herewith, a selection of the best answers:
2008, Hugh Jackman: "If you have ever seen Hugh without his shirt on, that is all the answer you need. This guy has one of the hottest bodies in Hollywood. But we also point out that he`s a hard body with a soft center. He's incredibly romantic and loyal and passionate. He has that down-to-earth Aussie vibe. And when you mix the ruggedness with the romance, it's a pretty irresistible combination."—Galina Espinoza, Showbiz Tonight
2007, Matt Damon: "He is a family man. He's so in love with his wife and his children. He's absolutely the guy that you just want to take home with you. He's the complete package."—Julie Jordan, Showbiz Tonight
2006, George Clooney: "He's 40. ... [H]e just gets better and better as he goes on, like a fine wine. ... He's gorgeous, first of all. He's elegant, but down to earth. He's very funny, self-deprecating, he's just pretty perfect."—Robin Michelli, The Early Show
2003, Johnny Depp: "He can wear gold teeth and still look good. He's ... really hot. ... He's in love, he has the children. It's a perfect combination."—Julie Jordan, Today
2001, Pierce Brosnan: "The sexiest man alive ... should be a ... fantasy man that you dream about. ... James Bond always saves the day. And that's a good feeling to have right now."—Liz Sporkin, Dateline NBC, explaining how 9/11 changed sexiness forever
2000, Brad Pitt: "Sexy is a quality. It's a twinkle in the eye. It's a regular guy turned up an extra notch."—Liz Sporkin, Dateline NBC
1999, Richard Gere: "He turns women to jelly. ... [He] is 50 years old, and he's better than ever. He has mellowed, and he's settling down now. ... He's expecting a baby with his girlfriend."—Liz Sporkin, Dateline NBC
1998, Harrison Ford: "He's always the hero. And there's something wonderfully ordinary about him. He's sexy in the way that you could see him next to you on the couch."—Susan Toepfer, Dateline NBC
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On Monday, we wondered whether any of Sarah Palin's folksy phrasings would make it into her new memoir, Going Rogue. In particular, how many times would "You betcha!" appear in print?
Fellow Slate staffer Christopher Beam went through the whole book yesterday, and reports just one instance of the famous phrase. On page 309, the author reminisces about the anxious hours before her appearance on Saturday Night Live in the fall of 2008. Not having seen the script for the show, she and her entourage decided to make their own comedy pitches:
"What about a skit where I pretended to be a journalist and asked Tina condescending questions: ‘What do you use for newspapers up in Alaska—tree bark?' ‘What happens if the moose were given guns? It wouldn't be so easy then, eh?' ‘Is "you betcha" your state motto?' We sent our ideas up the line, and somebody smacked ‘em down."
You'll recall that a group of linguists recently studied the transcript of Palin's vice-presidential debate and concluded that she uses the words heck and darn at least 20 times more often than other people in comparable settings. Do those figures hold up in the new book? A bit of noodling with Amazon's "Look Inside" feature reveals at least four uses of darn (e.g., "He agreed to give up chew for a day. That was a big darn deal") and six of heck (e.g., "I felt guilty as heck").
Given that the book contains about 130,000 words, the darn and heck rates are, respectively, 30.8 and 46.1 per million words. The linguists cite comparable standard rates of 3.2 and 7.4. Even in print, Palin applies these folksy expressions far more often than other people.
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Last week's episode of How I Met Your Mother proved to be controversial. The Shame Index pronounced it the worst of the season. Vulture called it the best. Others were somewhere in between. There was some disagreement about whether Barney in a fat suit was funny or, as the Index argued, plain lazy. But the more serious issue was the treatment of the relationship between Barney and Robin. It seems that many fans of HIMYM had quickly soured on the romance—they wanted the old Barney back.
They got him. This week's episode was given over almost entirely to Barney's scams, cons, hustles, hoodwinks, gambits, stratagems, and bamboozles. And flimflams.
Shameful:
—MILSWANCA. We live in a post-MILF Island world. There's no going back to MILSW-.
—The flashback within a flashback. It wasn't at all clear to the Shame Index why this episode required a second layer of recollection. Couldn't Lily have intercepted the blonde (Sarah Wright, last seen making out with Mad Men's Pete Campbell after her failed Maidenform audition) before The Scuba Diver was to begin in earnest and warned her then of Barney's plot? HIMYM is typically masterful in its handling of chronology—memories often inspire other memories, so it's natural when Bob Saget stops a story and rewinds further to explain. Here it just felt unnecessarily complicated.
—Robin joining in the chorus of "hell no" when Ted asks rhetorically whether he'd consider dating a woman Barney had hooked up with. Um, you're one of those women now, Robin.
—SNASA. Actually, SNASA is pretty funny. But the writers stepped on a fragile joke with Smoon and Smoron.
—Don. That guy is going to be the love of Robin's life? She deserves better. (The Shame Index recognizes this is a snap judgment based on the briefest glimpse of the guy. But come on.)
Awesome:
—"Civil Union and planning to get married pending passage of legislation currently on the floor of the New York State Senate." Funny and timely.
—Marshall's fumbling comparison of Barney to Stephen King.
—Marshall's extended frozen waffles metaphor, followed up by his quite serious request that Robin pick up some frozen waffles.
—As indicated above, some of the gambits from Barney's playbook were better than others (whereas Robin's two-volume playbook is thrilling from cover to cover). But, on balance, Barney's collection of strategies were imaginative, cleverly enacted, and handsomely calligraphed. Of particular merit:
—The Lorenzo von Matterhorn—"spelled like it sounds." Kudos to Barney for his inspired set of fake Web sites, and to the art director of this episode for actually making the Internet look like the Internet. (The cartoonish rendering of Web sites on network television is a pet peeve of the Shame Index.)
—The Ted Mosby. Barney impersonating Ted—that can't help but be funny.
—The Cheap Trick. Elegant in its simplicity.
The Shame Index suspects that most viewers were thrilled to have the old, promiscuous Barney back last night. The Index enjoyed seeing him in action as well, but couldn't shake a nagging feeling—that HIMYM fans were on the wrong end of a different cheap trick. The series spent nearly an entire season establishing what felt like a very real, very believable relationship between Barney and Robin, only to abruptly dissolve it last week on the thinnest pretense. Barney and Robin deserved better than that, and so do viewers, who were led to believe the series was invested in its characters enough see the relationship through. Barney's coup de grâce in this week's episode was to land the blonde by feigning sympathy for Robin's lingering sadness about their breakup. It felt like a joke on the audience—you fell for that whole Barney and Robin thing? Sucker. You thought for a moment that Barney felt empathy for Robin? Sucker. Robin seemed unfazed by all this, but it may be a while before the Shame Index can fully appreciate Barney's antics again.
Previous Shame Indices: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
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Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, finally hits bookstores on Tuesday, long after preorders on Amazon.com made it a best-seller. According to the AP, the new book is "folksy in tone and homespun," suggesting that Palin has translated her distinctive speaking style to the printed page.
What, exactly, is the former governor's style? In a new study for the Journal of English Linguistics, a team of linguists from University of Wisconsin-Madison found that she uses the words heck and darn at least 20 times more often than her contemporary Americans. Using transcripts from the 2008 vice-presidential debate, they also found that she engaged in "g-dropping" (e.g. "people are hurtin'" or "takin' personal responsibility") at an unusually high rate of 12 percent. Then, of course, there's her signature phrase: You betcha!
Now we're wondering whether Palin's verbal tics will make their way past the copy editors at HarperCollins and into the typeset pages of the memoir. How many times will You betcha! appear in the 432-page, published book? At least one of my colleagues believes it won't show up at all; I'm guessing she'll drop the phrase at least 10 times. I'd be shocked if it doesn't turn out to be the last sentence of the introduction—something like, "Do I love America? You betcha!"
We'll report back on our findings later in the week.
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We all know that Law & Order rips its stories from the headlines--but which headlines? Every week, Brow Beat matches L&O's plot points to the events that inspired them.
Nov. 13, 2009: "For the Defense"
These Are Their Stories
The episode begins when Maggie Hayes is killed before she can testify in a murder trial. The detectives discover that Hayes' employer had mob connections and convince Paige Regan, a co-worker with whom Hayes was romantically involved, to testify against their boss. While Regan is in hiding, an attempt is made on her life. Eventually, the detectives and attorneys realize that the common element in these and other cases involving violence against potential witnesses is the involvement of defense attorney Marcus Woll. Woll, who started out in the ADA's office, was the lawyer whose drug-cartel-connected clients were freed after a witness was intimidated in the Nov. 6, 2009, episode "Boy Gone Astray."
This Is the Real Story
On May 20, 2009, the Newark Star-Ledger reported that Paul Bergrin, a former-federal-prosecutor-turned-defense-attorney, had been indicted for orchestrating "a racketeering operation out of his Newark firm that regularly intimidated—and, in at least two cases, plotted to murder—witnesses scheduled to testify against drug dealers and gang members" whom he represented." According to the story, Bergin's mantra was "No witness, no case." The charges filed against Bergrin included witness tampering, racketeering, mortgage fraud, and murdering a federal witness.
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- Foremost among the many products advertised here is the song itself, "Bad Romance," a disco strut quoting "Billie Jean" and ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down," among other synthesized sources. The lyrics express a desire for sex ("I want your love"). Specifically, the lyrics express a desire for a lot of superfreaky sex, psychologically charged, perhaps even damagingly so. In getting this point across, Gaga demonstrates both a command of basic French ("Je veux ton amour") and at least a rudimentary grasp of Hitchcock ("Want you in my rear window, baby, it's sick"). In the third verse, she belt outs a line about what she does not want: "I don't wanna be friends." How exactly is that? She prefers a fantasy of stormy passion and sublime doom? She doesn't want a relationship? She doesn't even want to go to brunch in the morning? Or is she an active enemy? Is that all there is? If so, then let's keep dancing.
- Directed by Francis Lawrence and shot by Thomas Kloss, the video is a mean pastiche, cruel and gorgeous, designed to pervert young people in the best way possible. Think Cindy Sherman does Marilyn Manson. Or Stanley Kubrick presenting a Paris runway show. The color palette is strict—platinum white, boot black, harlot red, mostly, though Gaga is pretty in pink in one important setup. Perfectly artificial—especially at those moments when the performer appears least heavily made up—and also richly ambiguous, the video might as well be adapted from a secondary definition of glamour in the OED: "a delusive or alluring charm."
- Good pop stars borrow. Great Gaga steals her choreography from a number of classic sources, most ostentatiously David Fincher's clip for Madonna's "Express Yourself." I count 12 costume changes involving 208 total inches of platform heels. The most fabulous outfit—and the most fetishistic, those values being identical here—hails from the house of Alexander McQueen and seems to have been designed as an exoskeleton for Marie Antoinette to wear out to the Limelight.
- "Bad Romance" is a pulp fiction with something like a linear narrative. Its action starts rising when two women abduct Gaga from a bathtub and force the contents of a martini glass down her throat. According to the artist herself, this scene represents a drugging—a prelude to coerced sex with Russian gangsters. (Alternate interpretation: pregaming.) The gangsters bid on Gaga's services. Screens within the screen place her value at 1,000,000 of some imaginary currency. Gaga (the Pop artist) gives feedback to Gaga (the multi-platinum pop star) on the subject of moving units.
- Gagalogists schooled in theology should start a discussion in the comments section untangling the clip's religious symbolism. Gaga trained for her career in performance art on the burlesque stage—"Bad Romance" is essentially a five-minute striptease—but also at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. You can't spell romance without Roma. Is Tub-Time Gaga having a baptism? Are the girls with the martini serving communion? What's the Salome angle? Count the crosses in the video, many of which maintain the modesty of the singer's personal lady areas.
- Of course, the symbolism indicates that the heroine—looking as serpentine as Natasha Henstridge in Species here, vamping in a mirror like a heartless widow there—is bad news from the start. The femme-fatale finale pictures her as an apple of desire rolling around a torched orchard. Robert Rauschenberg, I'm really happy for you, and I'ma let you finish, but Gaga's closing tableau is one of the great combines of all time.
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On June 12, 1970, the Pittsburgh Pirates right-hander Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter in a game against the San Diego Padres. In an interview 14 years later, Ellis stated that he had dropped acid before the game and was tripping the entire time. The claim might have seemed farfetched coming from another player. But Ellis, who died last year of alcoholism-related liver disease, was one of baseball's fiercest competitors and most dedicated eccentrics, prone to outrages on and off the field. In 1972, he was maced during an altercation with a security guard at Riverfront Stadium, the home of the Cincinnati Reds. Two years later, Ellis was removed from a game against the Reds in the top of the first inning after attempting to hit every batter he faced. The two incidents were apparently unrelated.
Ellis' LSD no-hitter, though, is his most folkloric achievement—a piece of Nixon-era Americana that has been celebrated in sonnet form, in the pages of High Times, in visual art, and in song. And now, in animated film. "Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No," a new four-and-a-half minute short by the artist James Blagden, combines narration by Ellis himself (taken from a 2008 NPR interview), with Blagden's vivid pen-and-ink-style animation, and funky blaxploitation ambience. As a work of art, it's a delight. (I especially love the scene where Ellis and his teammates stand open-mouthed beneath a rainstorm of "greenies"—green Dexamyl tablets, ballplayers' amphetamine of choice in those days.) As cultural history, it's eye-opening: a reminder to belly-aching baseball declensionists that drugs, recreational and performance-enhancing, have been floating around our national pastime for decades.
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The film Pirate Radio, which opens in the U.S. on Friday, has a raucous premise: enterprising disc jockeys commission a leaky sea vessel to start a pirate radio station just outside of English waters, introducing rude, crude rock n' roll to the land of tea and crumpets. Rock the Queen! Wake up the BBC! Free love on the high seas! And, according to film adverts, it's "Inspired by a True Story."
But whose story? Fictional accounts of true events routinely streamline stories by creating composites of multiple characters, but Pirate Radio goes one further by making a composite of an entire culture. The mid-'60s witnessed a brief golden age of pirate radio, with at least a dozen floating stations emitting signals to the U.K. These stations circumvented British laws that prohibited private radio transmission by positioning themselves just beyond British waters. Radio Atlanta, Wonderful Radio London, Radio Invicta, Radio Sutch, Radio Essex, and Radio 270 all operated from repurposed rigs.
Real pirate radio stations weren't particularly rock focused. For those who lived during this period, the film's fictional Radio Rock is bound to recall Radio Caroline, the most fabled of the 60s pirates. It started broadcasting in 1964 and enjoyed a brief heyday before a governmental crackdown in 1967. Radio Caroline played as much Sinatra as it did the Beatles, and programming listed toward the middle of the road. Another station, the Texas-owned Swinging Radio England, was slightly closer in spirit to the fictional Radio Rock, but SRE's format was aggressively Top 40, not rock.
Actual pirate radio's clash with the English establishment ultimately had less to do with the Kinks or the Rolling Stones than it did with commercial opportunity. From its inception in the early 1920s, English terrestrial radio was noncommercial and state-owned. By the early '60s, the BBC's three official, antiseptically named stations—the Home Service, the Light Programme, and the Third Programme—struggled to satisfy the broad and changing tastes of the nation's listeners. Into the void steamed pirate radio, bringing with it not only more choice, but also sponsored shows and slick advertisements. Pirate radio proved that markets were neither being served nor exploited by the BBC, a bad-for-business reality that even buttoned-up Britain had to acknowledge. Although the government succeeded in killing off the pirates with the Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act in 1967—a buzz kill not dramatized in the film—the commercial revolution had already begun. The BBC soon expanded its offerings and added new stations, and in 1973 commercial radio was legalized. Henceforth, English radio stations were free to play whatever style of music they wanted. Needless to say it hasn't been all long hair and Hendrix ever since, but writer-director Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Notting Hill) is probably wise, if not terribly truthful, to dramatize the fight for the right to party instead of the fight for the right to sell adverts.
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Jonah Weiner: Hi, Jody. I'll start this week's chat with a confession. Or maybe it's a brag about my advanced teenage tastes. Sixteen-year-old Jonah loved him some Jamie Foxx Show, the WB sitcom that ran from 1996 to 2001. Before he was an Oscar winner and R & B superstar, after all, Foxx was a B-list comedian. Okay, my love was fleeting, because, thinking back, I can only remember one episode: He married an axe murderer or something, she ties him to a bed on their honeymoon, busts out her weapon, and says, "First I'm going to chop off your feet!" And Foxx goes: "But if you cut off my feet, how we gonna kick it?"
"Speak French," a tie-your-lover-to-the-bed-type slow jam, has a similar appeal to me: It's faintly menacing and totally ridiculous. One thing I love about the song is that it doesn't really have a center: just different, oblong parts that sort of fall into place next to each other. So many R&B singers promise to take you to a pleasure/comfort zone, but this song is severely off-balance. Foxx's singing is as restrained as it gets—the best thing he does might be his moaning when the girl is repeating the daffy, daffy refrain: "I don't speak French but I'll tongue ya down."
This song is also significant because it marks the mellow reappearance of Bangladesh, the guy who produced Lil Wayne's "A Milli." Bangladesh has had trouble replicating "A Milli"'s concrete-rumbling assault, but between this and Mario's "Break Up," he's carving out a nice niche for himself as one of the weirdest R & B producers out there. And I haven't even gotten to the Gucci Mane verse!
Jody Rosen: It's bad form to pick fights with bright-eyed boy-youths, but I'm not so sure about 16-year-old Jonah Weiner's taste. Foxx has never been my cuppa. He's a talented guy, sure, but modestly so; he seems to me totally unoriginal in all his pursuits. Plus, he's a real preener—so extravagantly pleased with himself out of all proportion to his merits. Now, being pleased with oneself isn't a problem in the R & B Casanova game. It's a prerequisite. But, sorry, Foxx is no R. Kelly. He's not even Jeremih.
That said, the guy's songs are getting better, and he's got good taste in collaborators. "Blame It" was fun in the way that all records with T-Pain on them are fun. And "Speak French" is terrific. Foxx merely has to competently execute, which he does, as you say, with admirable understatement. But the hero is Bangladesh, who stitches together three tasty musical bits—the portentous synthy bit, the rubbery bass bit, and (my favorite) the eerie piano bit—with a great feel for dynamics and drama. It's the latest example of the (very welcome) weirdification of baby-making music. The leader in the field, of course, is Kelly, who realized several years ago that the hoary girl-Imma-freak-you Love Man clichés had been abused to the point where they were no longer entertaining even as self-parody and pushed the genre completely into the realm of opéra bouffe, embracing outrageous sex farce and sonic oddity. "Speak French" is a song in this mode. Among other things, it has also almost no utilitarian value: the song's too strange, too lurching, to work as a booty-call soundtrack.
As for Gucci Mane: "I took a picture of my dick and sent it as a gift"! Chivalry's not dead, ladies!
J.W.: I'll save my "Why The Jamie Foxx Show Was the Better than The Sopranos" #slatepitch for another time. Maybe I'll rewatch it first. Perhaps it was terrible! But I clearly find Foxx more ingratiating than you, and I think he deserves a smidge more credit on this song than you're giving him. We agree he's a member of a supporting cast and that Bangladesh is the star, but I think he enhances the music's mood—the (tortured? ecstatic?) way he sings, "Take the elevator up to the 22nd level," turning it into a cryptic hook, is a slight touch, but it's marvelous.
That Gucci Mane line might be even better than you think. I hear it as: "I took a picture of my dick and sent it as a .gif!" That's right—he's rapping about file extensions! I'm still absorbing the mixtapes this Atlanta rapper has released at a Lil-Wayne-pace this year, but his immediate appeal involves his willingness to goof around. (He does something similar on "Break Up," too, which may be my favorite R & B song of the year.) He raps like Young Jeezy trying to land a Comedy Central special.
J.R.: I will say this for Foxx: the lyrics he sings, which I assume are of his creation, are really funny—intentionally, I think. Consider: "Parlez-vous français?/ That's not the language that I speak/ But your body got me sayin' some things/ That people in France don't speak." And: "Take the elevator up to the 22nd level/ That's when the violins play." And the priceless couplet: "Only red roses for you baby/ And only white roses for you baby." These are the words of a horndog trying to woo a girl with some Harlequin Romance-talk, a task that's just a bit beyond his powers as a linguist. He should take a tip from Gucci Mane. Chicks today, they don't need poems and flowers—all they want are .gifs!
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Lee Daniels' Precious provides a hellish tableau of petty theft, physical abuse, attempted infanticide, rape, incest (both paternal and maternal), welfare fraud, HIV/AIDS, homophobia, school violence, teen pregnancy, self-hatred, and illiteracy. But the film's most arresting figure of urban poverty is the one that lumbers through nearly every frame: The 300-pound Gabby Sidibe. "Her head is a balloon on the body of a zeppelin," writes New York's David Edelstein, "her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits."
That’s part of the movie’s XXXtreme social realism, no doubt. Obesity rates are higher among poor, black females than among any other major group. (The numbers may shock you: More than half of all black women in the United States are counted as obese, and they’re three times more likely than white women to be “severely obese”—with a body mass index over 40.) The broad-bodied Precious and her overweight mom are shown as the victim and perpetrator of the most outlandish ghetto cruelties, and they’re set off against the slender, gorgeous (and light-skinned) members of the bourgeoisie who try to help them.
So fatness serves as a marker of race and class—no surprise there. But what does the film have to say about the causes of obesity among poor black women? The mainstream liberals who are likely to be the movie's biggest fans tend to argue that poor people get fat because they lack access to fresh produce, health clubs, green spaces, or any of the other luxuries that keep rich white folks thin. According to the movie, though, Precious has grown enormous for reasons that have little to do with her "obesogenic" environment.
How, exactly, did Precious get so fat?
1) Her mother force-feeds her. When Precious confesses the depravity of her home life to a social worker, she makes a point of saying that she's coerced into eating even when she's not hungry. In another scene, the abusive mother makes Precious eat a dish of pig's feet and macaroni and cheese. Neglectful moms are often blamed for childhood obesity, but the idea that a parent might force-feed her kids derives from a rather antiquated theory first posed 60 years ago by the doctor and psychoanalyst Hilda Bruch. According to Bruch, mothers express their own anxiety and disappointment through overfeeding.
2) She wasn't breast-fed. When Mom has her own climactic meeting with the social worker, she tearfully admits to having bottle-fed Precious. Why? Because her man was drinking all of her breast milk. There's at least the implication that some of Precious' problems—including, perhaps, her weight—were the result of lousy postnatal care. A number of studies have suggested that nursing offers some protection against childhood obesity, perhaps because breast-fed infants are better able to gauge when they're satiated. (These claims are hotly disputed.)
3) She's a binge-eater. The film doesn't place all the blame on poor parenting. At one point, Precious consumes a 10-piece bucket of purloined fried chicken in one sitting—and then vomits at the end of her binge. Once she's escaped from her abusive home, she owns up to eating "too much sometimes" and gobbles down a second helping of dinner. The message is clear: This girl knows how to stuff her face, even when Mom's not around.
4) She loves McDonald's. Nor could Precious have been saved by a trip to the farmer's market. While she's at the hospital, having just given birth to her son, a sexy male nurse tries to persuade her to change her diet. But she and her friends have no interest in his "organic fruits and vegetables"; they just want to go to McDonald's.
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One of the most important components of a rap performance is one of the easiest to overlook: What a rapper chooses to do with his hands when he's rapping. Notwithstanding hip-hop's ancestral sibling, break dancing, it's a resilient trope in the genre that MCs don't dance—some might bop a little bit, rock their shoulders some, but like the archetypal pouting indie-rock frontman, the archetypal MC is too cool to move very much. This means that a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to selling a hip-hop performance (one we watch, that is, at a concert or in a music video, as opposed to one we listen to) falls on a rappers' hands—the one part of the body in which dramatic movement is unrestricted.
Typically, though not always, a rapper devotes one hand to holding a microphone. (When was the last time you saw one planted at a mic stand?) There's a stock vocabulary of gestures open to the free hand, most of which incorporate a square-one move: scything through the air in time with the words. Sometimes the hand forms a fist with the index finger extended, as though a lesson is being taught or a problem child is being scolded; sometimes the hand is flattened, so as to chop more aerodynamically.
In the video for "Juicy," the Notorious BIG's gestures are frequently unarticulated: He keeps his arms billowing at his sides in time with the beat; occasionally, his palms rise up above his shoulders as though borne aloft by a momentary slipstream. In the "Hypnotize" video, his hands moves are more precise, but still basic: pointing, waving, not much else. Biggie may have (rightly) decided that he had plenty physical presence as it was.
The slighter-framed Lil Wayne moves his entire body when he raps: doing little jigs, careening forward, whipping his spine. One hand move I've seen him do live more than once involves pressing together his forefinger and thumb, raising his three other fingers, and moving his hand as though he's signing an autograph on the air. He also likes to plant his feet, throw his arm backward so that his hand is about waist-level, and flatten his palm, as though calming some temperamental toddler a half step behind him. Kanye moves even more spastically, throwing his body into his lines—he does the toddler-calming move a lot (sometimes with more violence, as if he's shooing the kid away) and he also likes to touch his hand to the top of his head, like, "I can't believe I'm hearing this."
Eminem and his protégé 50 Cent share similar hand styles. They'll sway from side to side, either with their feet planted or lifting up one foot after the other as if they're climbing a little Stairmaster, all the while swinging an arm up and down before them like a pendulum.
Some of the most virtuoso rap handwork comes in the video for Jay-Z's "99 Problems." The clip owes as much to Mark Romanek's stunning Brooklyn street photography as it does to what Jay-Z does with his mitts: The way his palm almost jump-cuts from right to left when he raps "you could press fast forward"; the way he spirals his fists tightly on the line "pull over the car"; the way he turns his hand into a little chattering mouth on "loud as a motorbike."
Fred the Godson, a relatively new underground MC from the Bronx, has one of the best names in rap, some of the best punch lines, and, as illustrated in the video for his song, "King Kong," he's an especially good hand actor.
Unlike Biggie, Fred the Godson is a very big man whose hands are constantly slicing, tumbling, catapulting, and otherwise acting out his rhymes. He is not a wild gesticulator—his hands cut tight little figures. This juxtaposition of weight and nimbleness has a corollary in Fred the Godson's rhymes, which are sneaky, quick, and sound more like chuckles than the bellows you'd expect from a guy of his build. There isn't much to the video, and yet it's more transfixing than it has any right to be: I could enjoy watching Fred mime flicking dollar bills, throwing touchdowns, and aiming assault rifles with the sound off.
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The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens nationwide one week from Friday. The attendant hype machine is already in overdrive. Among its more curious offshoots: a promotional tie-in with automaker Volvo. The marketing effort includes product placement (lead vamp Edward Cullen drives a Volvo XC60 in the film), a contest (to win an XC60 just like Edward's), a Web site (WhatDrivesEdward.com), and a Twilight-themed Volvo television ad.
When I first saw this ad, two questions sprung immediately to mind: 1) Aren't 'tween girls the core audience for the Twilight series? A 'tween can't obtain a driver's license, never mind afford a relatively pricey set of wheels like a Volvo. 2) Aren't vampires basically immortal? Volvo's central brand attribute is safety, which makes it an odd choice for a driver who can't die. Shouldn't Edward be tooling around in something delightfully risky, like a two-seater convertible without a roll bar? Or a vintage Pinto?
According to Volvo national advertising manager Linda Gangeri, the relationship with the Twilight series happened partly by accident. Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, made Edward a Volvo driver before there was any financial benefit to doing so. When the first Twilight film came out, Volvo execs were shocked to see how much screen time Edward's Volvo received—a full four minutes, which is a lifetime in the world of product placement. The first film's huge success made it imperative for Volvo to get involved with the sequel.
Gangeri claims that while 'tweens can't drive or buy cars, they have significant input into their parents' car-buying decisions. Also, she argues that Twilight in fact appeals to female fans of all ages—including "Twi-moms." Gangeri says that Volvo as a brand skews slightly female, and the partnership with the film is an effective way to get visuals of the XC60 in front of female moviegoers.
As for Edward the vampire, it turns out he drives a Volvo not for himself but to safeguard human friends who ride in the passenger seats. So his character is nurturing and protective, yet also sleek and sexy. Those are exactly the qualities that Volvo hopes consumers will associate with its cars.
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The Shame Index declared last week's episode of How I Met Your Mother the best yet this season. Last night's was surely the worst. A fat suit? Porn jokes? A rough patch, indeed.
Shameful:
—Barney's gift of his porn collection to Ted: This typically Web-savvy series wants us to believe that Barney still watches porn on VHS? The series of easy jokes about porn plots and titles was just plain lazy.
—"Relationship gut": The Shame Index almost always finds the fat suit a comic cop-out, and this was a particularly shameful use of it. The joke never got more sophisticated than "it's funny because he's fat." The only upside was that the fat suit revealed just how good Neil Patrick Harris is at using his physiognomy to sell his material. The few potentially funny lines from this sequence—"I'm my own wingman tonight"—fell flat when they came from Fat Barney's expressionless mask.
—Lily's absurd plan to break up Robin and Barney. A claustrophobic scene—stuck in a station wagon with a bunch of bad running jokes: Marshall's insistence that Ted should have rented a van, Ted's persistent references to the porn collection, etc. Even a cameo from Alan Thicke couldn't save the scene, and that's saying something.
—Robin and Barney's breakup: After all that—a season's worth of will-they-or-won't-they—this is how Robin and Barney's relationship ends? Because they've been fighting about dirty dishes and how best to describe the codpiece of an Imperial Stormtrooper? (Barney's womanizing past—a more believable concern for Robin—is lumped in with these frivolous issues and not seriously explored.) "Maybe there's just too much awesome here," Robin concludes. The Shame Index begs to differ.
—This isn't a breakup—we're getting back together as friends. Was that line left over from a Robin-Ted breakup scene that never aired? Jeepers.
Awesome:
—"That's not how you spell Buckminster Fuller." (OK, there was one funny porn joke.)
—"It was Legend ... wait for it ... s of the Fall."
—The Lost in Space robot gamely asking whether anyone wanted to get high after Lily's breakup plot fails.
—Crazy Meg to Alan Thicke: "So, you still on 73rd Street?"
After last week's episode, the Shame Index was bullish on the Robin-Barney relationship—it seemed that after a few false starts, the writers were beginning to find ways for these two to be funny together. Yet others—the HIMYM experts at New York's Vulture blog especially—have argued that putting Barney in a committed relationship deprives HIMYM's best character of his signature trait. The Shame Index would have liked to see the series try a little harder to make Swarkles work. But maybe awesome really does neutralize awesome.
Previous Shame Indices: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
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Could James Cameron's Avatar kill 20th Century Fox? According to today's New York Times, probably not. Michael Cieply reports that Fox has brought in outside investors to minimize the company's risk in the event that the $500 million Blue Man Group-in-outer space flick turns out to be a Heaven's Gate-style megaflop. Along with this smart financial buffering, the Times piece reveals that "Fox is backing up Mr. Cameron's movie with what an executive recently called the studio's ‘secret weapon.' " What is this secret weapon that has the power to stave off potential bankruptcy? Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.
Fox's confidence in the Squeakquel is easy to understand: Despite rotten reviews, the company's first foray into computer-generated rodentia—2007's Jason Lee starrer Alvin and the Chipmunks—brought in $217 million. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which opens on Christmas Day (a week after Avatar's debut), appears to follow the same high-pitched formula. Check out the trailer below—interspecies romance! the best furball football catching since Air Bud: Golden Receiver!—and judge for yourself if Fox's confidence is misplaced.
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Alongside images of modern cities fractured like cracked ice, or a colossal Jesus statue toppling down on helpless hordes, posters, billboards, and trailers for Roland Emmerich's upcoming action film, 2012, invite you to Google 2012 to learn more. Doing so calls up the film's official Web site, as well as its IMDB and Wikipedia entries. But since 2012 is not only the name of a movie, but also the year that—according to certain interpretations—the Mayan calendar predicts the world will end, Googling 2012 further summons a slew of amateur scholars, fearmongering opportunists, and fly-by-night profiteers, all of whom are seeing Web traffic skyrocket as the release date nears.
Sponsored Links—sites that chose 2012 as a keyword in Google's paid advertising scheme, AdSense—include a numerologist, survival kits of canned goods and bagged soup, the University of Metaphysical Sciences, a New England environmental group, and "survival land" for sale in Montana and Wyoming. The site Prophecy News Watch has used 2012 as a keyword since 2004 (in fact, most of the mentioned sites had previously employed the term), but site rep Kade Hawkins said Google impressions have increased tenfold in 2009, spiking to nearly 3 million in October alone. An estimated 1 percent of those impressions yield a click-through to the site.
Other sites are seeing increased action, no thanks to AdSense but simply because Google's matrix ranks them high for the search term 2012. John Kehne, whose Web site www.December212012.com is a cheery depot of apocalyptica that maintains a running countdown to the big date and a roster of "celebrity believers" like Lil' Wayne and Montel Williams, said he moved to a more powerful server to accommodate the new traffic. Australian Robert Bast, who since 2000 has slowly published chapters of his book, "Survive 2012," on his Web site, has seen an increase in unique visitors from 5,000 per day to 20,000, though some days it's been as high as 80,000. "The free promotion of my site via Sony was nice," he said via e-mail, referring to 2012's global distributor. "But you never know, the idea for the movie may have begun from a visit to my site." Bast was joking—but it's possible that his site and others like it inspired the marketing campaign if not the film itself.
Sony's marketers chose a deliberately diffuse method for drumming up interest in 2012. A more precise search term, like "2012 The Movie," would have better directed traffic to Emmerich-related sites. But in this case, imprecision is good currency, because by sharing attention and traffic with crackpot sites, Sony draws attention to the existing paranoid hysteria and makes the film seem like a more significant cultural event. Likewise, in addition to the alarmist-sounding official home page, www.Whowillsurvive2012.com, Sony has created a network of six satellite sites, all launched during the past year, that deftly blur the lines between the film's fictional world and actual armchair paranoia, given names like Corruptiontheory.com and Thisistheend.com (easily mistaken for the Church of God's The-end.com). One of the dummy sites, Instituteforhumancontinuity.org, mixes fictional conceits like a human lottery system and boutique personal bunkers with links to real-world organizations like the Alliance to Rescue Civilization and even a Guatemalan real estate agency. Down this rabbit hole, it can be hard to distinguish between true believers and hustlers, survivalists and Sony, but all are happy to take your money.
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We all know that Law & Order rips its stories from the headlines—but which headlines? Every week, Brow Beat matches L&O's plot points to the events that inspired them.
Nov. 6, 2009:
"Boy Gone Astray"
These Are Their Stories
In the first act, a female drug dealer is murdered by two 14-year-old American boys who learned how to use firearms at a training camp in Mexico.
This Is the Real Story
According to an April 2008 story in the Dallas Morning News, Mexican drug cartels operate military-style camps "to train cartel recruits—ranging from Mexican army deserters to American teenagers—who then carry out killings and other cartel assignments on both sides of the border." A June 2009 New York Times story described how Mexican cartels recruit American teens "with promises of high pay, fancy cars and sexy women."
These Are Their Stories
One of the teenage assassins seems completely unmoved by his actions; he laughs about the victim and sings a song about "la gringa brava" to his parents when they come to visit. The detectives discover that the song is a narcocorrido tribute to a Mexican gang so badass it has "hot Yankee blonds" selling its dope. On the day of the murder, a group associated with a rival cartel releases another song about la gringa brava's death, mentioning details the police had not released.
This Is the Real Story
Elijah Wald's 2002 book Narcocorrido: A Journey Into the Music of Guns, Drugs, and Guerrillas recounts the history of corridos from anti-colonial ballads to a sort of musical newspaper educating listeners about the drug world. In a 1999 New York Times story, an accused trafficker explained the purpose of the songs: "[T]hrough the corridos comes the philosophy, how the members of the cartel have to behave. They tell you what they did wrong. Why they were killed. You learn what you have to do so they won't kill you."
"Doped"
These Are Their Stories
Brenda Sawyer is driving four children—two of her own and two nieces—to a weekend getaway when she becomes disoriented. She drives erratically and enters the highway in the wrong direction, where she crashes head-on into an oncoming vehicle. Only her son survives.
This Is the Real Story
On July 26, 2009, Diane Schuler drove her minivan the wrong way onto an exit ramp and rammed into an SUV. She was killed, along with her daughter and three nieces; the three men in the other vehicle also died. Only her son survived. According to the New York Daily News, tests revealed that Schuler had smoked pot and drunk at least 10 ounces of liquor during the 90-minute drive.
These Are Their Stories
The detectives find alcohol in Brenda's system and in her car and assume she was drinking, but then they realize that her allergy medicine had been spiked with Propofol, a powerful anesthetic. They discover that Brenda and her boss, Zack Marshall (Mad Men's Harry Crane, looking just as ineffectual in a straight tie), had gathered evidence proving that a highly profitable but medically ineffective drug manufactured by the pharmaceutical company they worked for was being marketed illegally. Whistleblowers can receive a slice of settlements, and Brenda was threatening to donate their cut to charity, so Marshall poisoned her nasal spray and slipped booze into her smoothie. He had no idea there would be children in the vehicle.
This Is the Real Story
Under the False Claims Act, whistleblowers are entitled to between 15 percent and 30 percent of recovered damages, and according to a Gannett story from Nov. 4, 2009, "Of the top 20 False Claims Act cases, measured by the amount of money recovered, 12 involved judgments or settlements against pharmaceutical companies, accounting for billions of dollars in recoveries." In September, a whistleblower earned $51.5 million from Pfizer as a result of a suit alleging the company had promoted pain drug Bextra and 12 other drugs for unapproved uses and doses.
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The final challenge involved a trip to the J. Paul Getty Museum, where the designers were told to create a look using the Getty Center as inspiration.
Only three of the five remaining contestants could go on to Fashion Week in Bryant Park, and they didn't make the judges' jobs easy. John William Godward's sexy 19th-century painting "Mischief and Repose" inspired Irina to create a dowdy below-the-knee dress in what looked like sea-foam crepe; an ornate French bed led Carol Hannah to design a full-length gold gown; and the Getty's architecture drove Althea to produce a pleated-pattern skirt that, according to Tim Gunn, looked like "a panel of puckering." Nevertheless, they won the right to show 12 designs in New York.
Christopher stared at some algae-spotted rocks and conjured a garment typical of his style: a cute top paired with an unnecessary corset and an absurdly heavy stiff long skirt. Gordana was inspired by Monet's The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light to make a gorgeous dress in silk organza that everyone agreed was both beautiful and clearly connected to the original painting. They were the final designers of the season to hear Heidi intone the words, "You're out."
Stats
Number of times Tim Gunn said, "Make it work!": Tim was far too busy reminding the designers how much was on the line to utter those three little words.
Number of crying contestants: Even Irina got a catch in her throat. Who would've thought that Althea was the most tear-resistant contestant!
The Contestants
Gordana may have lost her grip on the fan favorite prize this week. She and Irina ganged up on Carol Hannah, and she didn't thank the judges when she bade them "Auf Wiedersehen." But her biggest error was to make too much of her humble origins in the former Yugoslavia. Believe me, I know very well that the race of life has a staggered start, but her rivals were a self-taught gay man from the sticks of Minnesota; an autodidact from Charleston, S.C.; a big-haired bottle blonde from Dayton, Ohio; and an immigrant from the Republic of Georgia. Not exactly the Harvard Sewing Class of 1999.
The Judges
Talk about womanpower! With Michael Kors absent, and only one male contestant in the final five, Episode 12 was an estrogen explosion. Fashion designer and former Design Star judge Cynthia Rowley and "supermodel and style icon" Cindy Crawford took their places next to Nina Garcia.
The panel didn't make much effort to disguise their true feelings. The praise for Irina's ugly dress was comically faint: "I liked the inspiration that she chose" (Rowley); "She had a very clear vision, and it definitely did refer to the painting" (Crawford). Nina didn't even dissemble, declaring it "very old lady." Irina is the clear leader of this year's middling pack, but if this had been a normal week, she would have made her first appearance in the bottom three.
I hear America screaming: When Nina confessed, "I don't know who Gordana is as a designer," you could hear Project Runway viewers across the land yell, "Maybe that's because you missed five weeks of judging!"
Did the judges send the right people to Fashion Week?: Yes. It has been a mediocre season, but the three designers who are heading to Bryant Park are the ones with the strongest points of view. I haven't liked a single outfit that Althea has made, but aesthetically and trendwise, she fits into the fashion world far better than Christopher or Gordana.
Bold prediction for who'll take the big prize: At this stage, the smart money has to be on Irina.
Previous Project Runway Recaps: Week 1, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 8, Week 9, Week 10, Week 11
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Jonah Weiner: Hi, Jody. In deciding the song we'd discuss this week we considered a few candidates, but "Ambling Alp" excited us most. Yeasayer is a New York band, and this is the lead single from its forthcoming 2010 album, Odd Blood. We start the song ankle-deep in noise, out of which bursts an ecstatic eighth-note clatter, snares that thwack with some serious '80s-style reverb, and a poignant hooting melody that serves as the musical and emotional anchor. (Animal Collective, to whom Yeasayer have been occasionally compared, start their great single "Grass" with a somewhat similar dynamic build, although this one opens up even bigger.) "Ambling Alp" rewards headphone listening: There are all these little sounds scurrying and rattling in the mix, including a little gasping vocal sample I only heard on my fifth spin.
I don't mean it as an insult when I say that the song puts me in mind of a hipster Rusted Root. (Rusted Root is best known for its minor 1995 hit "Send Me On My Way," which I loathed then for its white-guys-in-dashikis vibe but have since come to enjoy, albeit suspiciously, for its unabashed corniness.) I guess I'm thinking mostly of the unabashedly corny themes of personal affirmation in Yeasayer's lyrics (the refrain goes, "Stick up for yourself, son," and the song, like Yeasayer's breakout single "2080," is about keeping your head up: "Your lows will have their complement of highs," Chris Keating assures us at one point) and the way this positivity jibes with the polychromatic, polyrhythmic music. I'm sure Yeasayer spend much more time listening to David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but it's nice to hear a band working in indie-rock/art-rock—sly, oblique genres, by and large—that is all to happy to pen a jubilant self-help anthem. Also there's a line about giving fascists hell, and who can't get behind that?
Jody Rosen: Jonah, forget Rusted Root. Try Baha Men. One of the things I love about “Ambling Alp”—and there’s lots I love about this clattery art-pop freakout—is the fact that it’s a stealth jock jam. As best I can make out, the second verse goes like this: “Oh, Max Schmeling was a formidable foe/ The Ambling Alp was too, at least that’s what I’m told/ But if you learn one thing, you’ve learned it well/ It’s true, you must give fascists hell.” The user-generated lyrics sites that I checked have a totally mangled version of the words. (“Old Man Schlemming” etc.) Evidently there’s a history-literacy problem in the hipster community. Worse: there’s a boxing-literacy problem. See, the song’s about Joe Louis and two of his famous opponents: Primo Carnera, the pugilist-hero of Mussolini’s regime, and, of course, Hitler’s beloved Schmeling, Louis’ foe in two legendary 1930s bouts. “Ambling Alp” sounds like some “poetic” indie-rock nonsense; it was actually Carnera’s nickname. (The dude was a man-mountain.)
But, yeah: Yeasayer uses this boxing stuff as the jumping-off point for an admirably unfashionable uplift anthem. Keating sings: “And if anyone should cheat you/ Take advantage of or beat you/ Raise your head/ And wear your wounds with pride”—sentiments so insipid they could comfortably snuggle up inside a circa-1990 Whitney Houston ballad. Just what you’ve been waiting for, Williamsburg: your very own “Greatest Love of All.”
The thing is, Yeasayer is an amazing band. I’m not as instantly smitten with this song as I was with “Sunrise” (2007), which, for me, rates as the absolute apotheosis of this decade’s bizarro Brooklyn psychedelia. (Sorry, TV on the Radio.) But I love the way the band takes what could be a fairly standard exercise in '80s revivalism—I hear more Depeche Mode here than I do Byrne/Eno, by the way—and just screws it up. Check out the little breakdown around the 2:24 mark—that freaky falsetto chorale. Also, the terrific organ solo that erupts at 3:44: a little circa-1967 garage rock plopped into the middle of 1987. All these flourishes enhance “Ambling Alp” without overstocking it. (Unlike a lot of indie arty-farties, Yeasayer are real songwriters; they take care not to disrupt their music’s momentum with too much fussiness.) Plus, the bassist is a straight ninja.
J.W.: Funny you mention Depeche Mode—listening to the rest of the album, which will be out in February, I heard singing that reminded me in places of Dave Gahan. Keating is a bit of an over-singer in a way I like—he sells his stuff. I didn't hear much Martin Gore, but then again I wasn't listening for it.
J.R.: You’re right about Keating. He knows what line of work he’s in: show business. I like that. He has a nice upper register, too, which he loves to show off. (In just about every Yeasayer song, he breaks out the falsetto by the time the bridge rolls around.) He really could be a rock star, if Yeasayer weren’t such dedicated weirdos.
But, wait, Jonah, how come you have the Yeasayer album advance and I don’t? Who’s the flak that’s servicing you with this product? What is it—do you have more indie cred or something? Aren’t you the guy who likes Creed?
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As I write this, the apostrophe-deprived search term big bird s birthday tops Google Trends, proof that Sesame Street's publicity department is hard at work marketing the show's 40th season. In his innocence and eagerness, Big Bird is enormously endearing, but could we also devote a moment to his blobbiest blue colleague? Here is Renata Adler writing on Cookie Monster—"part of the intellectual history of a generation"—in The New Yorker in 1972, a passage especially entertaining in the way the Muppet's fuzziness brushes the writer's cold, brushed-metal style:
Cookie is a fanatic, undeviating in the quality of his obsession. He eats things. Many lessons on Sesame Street are terminated when something eats them. But Cookie, who has of late been eating mainly cookies, is a junkie. "To me, your nose is a cookie," he once said to another Muppet in a desperate moment. When cookies arrive, he tends to eat the entire shipment, but he is moved to empathy at the sight of a human being temporarily deprived of a cookie.
The most monstrous of Sesame Street's monsters, he is desire turned comic-grotesque. In an important sign of his derangement, Cookie Monster is the only core character to sport bobbling pupils in his eyes. His signature song, "C Is for Cookie," is a pub song invested with rousing grandeur, an anthem to monomania. "Let's think of other things that starts with C," he growls, before entertaining second thoughts. "Ah, who cares about the other things!" His lack of interest in much other than eating extends even to grammar. Him wants proper declension.
His diet is these days more balanced, having come to include fruits, vegetables, and Stephen Colbert's Peabody Award, but his soul is immutable. He is brought to you by the insatiability of every child. Sesame Street taught us how to watch television, and Cookie Monster taught us how to want it.
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Late last month, I wrote an essay about Miley Cyrus's "Party in the USA," a song produced and co-written by Lukasz Gottwald. Gottwald, who also goes by Dr. Luke, has had his Swedish fingerprints all over pop radio for several years, and around the same time the Cyrus piece ran, the video for another of his creations hit the Web: a single called "TiK ToK," performed by the 22-year-old rapper-singer Ke$ha. The song sets up shop on the fault line between charmingly daft and deeply irritating. The rapped verses are sub-Fergie-grade, proudly stuffed with groaners and to-hell-with-the-expiration-date slang ("Errbody getting crunk/ Boys tryina touch my junk"). The plotline plays like a sequel to Lady Gaga's "Just Dance": girl wakes up drunk, stays drunk, finds a dance floor and (spoiler alert) gets even drunker. (There are several YouTube videos of girls who look to be seventh graders goofily acting out the words.)
Some listeners probably noticed a more-than-passing similarity between the song and "Pop the Glock," a minor 2006 club hit by the French-American sorta-rapper Uffie, who records for the small Parisian dance label Ed Banger. "TiK ToK" rides a minimalist, 8-bit-video-game beat; "Pop the Glock" is built around a spare drum machine pattern. Ke$ha's faux-bad-girl rhymes are tweaked by AutoTune; Uffie's faux-bad-girl rhymes are run through a vocoder effect, which supplies the song with its only hint of melody.
This isn't the first time Gottwald seems to have hit the indie bins for inspiration—the breakdown on Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" (cued up here), which Gottwald co-produced, echoes the breakdown from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps" (cued up here). Nor is Gottwald the only pop producer to have done so. Compare the razored synthesizer riff, four-on-the-floor pulse, and syncopated pops of Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" (cued up here) with the razored guitars, disco beat, and syncopated cowbell clatter of The Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers" (cued up here)—an influence Timberlake and the producer Timbaland have freely admitted. (A few years earlier, Timberlake's former girlfriend Britney Spears worked with The Rapture's former production duo, The DFA, on this never-released demo).
The pop mainstream's interest in the sounds of the hipster mainstream shows no sign of flagging. Last week, bedroom mewler Owl City scored the No. 1 song in the country with "Fireflies," a song that could not exist without The Postal Service's 2003 excursions into sighingly romantic, precisely enunciated synth-pop. I'm sure there are other examples of pop indie-jacking I'm forgetting (and vice versa, as recent experiments with AutoTune by Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend help to illustrate). Jot down any that occur to you in the comments section.
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After a brief hiatus, How I Met Your Mother returned this week with a new episode and set about addressing, once and for all, this season's nagging question: Can Robin and Barney be funny as a couple? The Shame Index is happy to report that the answer is a rather resounding yes.
Shameful:
—Ted's coinage of the term "New Relationship Smugness." Not particularly clever, not really necessary. The episode would have worked just as well without it.
—Barney advising Marshall that in order to win his fight with Lily, he needs a "surge." Not funny enough to overcome the questionable tastefulness of invoking the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the context of a spat about dirty dishes.
Awesome:
—The bagpipers upstairs. A wonderfully realized series of jokes: Equating the sound of the neighbors having sex with the drone of bagpipes was funny on its own, the reveal that the perpetrators were a pair of geriatrics was a nice twist, and it all came together when a bagpiping session inspired Ted to expose Barney and Robin's secret by seeking out their downstairs neighbor, the well-cast Phil from 12B.
—Marshall's Bull Durham-esque speech to Barney extolling his superior relationship skills, reprinted here in its full awesomeness:
Look at you, had a relationship for five minutes and think you can play with the big boys. That's adorable. Son, I been in a relationship since you had a ponytail and were playing Dave Matthews on your mama's Casio. I'm a good boyfriend in my sleep. I can rock a killer foot rub with one hand and brew a kick-ass cup of chamomile with the other that would make you weep. Hell, I've forgotten more about microwaving fat free popcorn and watching Sandra Bullock movies than you'll ever know. But thanks for your concern, rook.
—Ted and Barney's slap bet. The Shame Index loves a good slap bet.
—Barnstormer, Ro-Ro, and T-Mos. Especially T-Mos. "You have to wake up pretty early to slip one past the T-Mos."
—The Shame Index is on record opposing HIMYM's occasional flirtations with special effects yet couldn't help but enjoy the multiple Marshall/Lily pairs fighting simultaneously. The snippets from the various fights were spot on—"my mother doesn't hate you; she's neutral about you"—and the kicker—all the Marshalls freaking out over Lily's Shining impression—took the joke to an unexpected new level.
—Barney's ability to lead Marshall astray. Did a flashback to Marshall getting an ear pierced in '03 hit the cutting-room floor? If so, the Shame Index implores CBS to put it on the DVD.
—Lily's brutally effective strategy for winning fights with Marshall: cook his favorite meals—for herself. "On Sunday morning she made pancake, Ted. Pancake. And bacon strip."
Best episode yet this season? Bagpipe yeah.
Previous Shame Indices: Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
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Frederick Wiseman's La Danse, a 158-minute documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet, opens this week for a two-week run at New York’s Film Forum, followed by a national rollout through December. If you know the director’s work already, that sentence stands on its own as an argument for seeing the film. For the past 42 years, Wiseman has been patiently and rigorously documenting the life of assorted institutions, including homes for the criminally insane (Titicut Follies), public schools (High School), the Belmont racetrack (Racetrack), and hospital intensive-care units (Near Death). Without voice-over, intertitles, music, or other directorial interference, Wiseman enters a world with his camera (usually 16mm; here, HD video) and lets that world define itself. As a result, his films have a sober, meditative quality that makes other documentaries—even the smart ones—seem like glib propaganda. Given Wiseman’s fascination with both institutional culture and extralinguistic behavior (his subjects tend to say one thing with words and something else entirely with their bodies), it makes sense that he’d be drawn in his late career to the world of professional dance (his 1998 film Ballet chronicled a season at New York’s American Ballet Theater).
If you don’t like watching great dancers rehearse, you probably won’t appreciate La Danse—but, honestly, if you don’t like watching great dancers rehearse, what kind of life-loathing dullard are you? Dance is one of the few art forms that can be more fascinating to watch in the process of being made than it is in finished form. (Filmmaking is another—even a bad movie can make for a worthy making-of featurette.) But in between seeing some of the world’s best dancers practice everything from The Nutcracker Suite to work by the modern choreographers Pina Bausch and Angelin Preljocaj, viewers get a glimpse of all aspects of the company: the lunchroom, where dancers chow down on surprisingly large plates of steamed fish and crème brûlée, and the costume room where seamstresses stitch, iron, and hand-bead tutus. At a board meeting, an American board member bargains with the company’s stern artistic director for perks for the biggest benefactors. (Could they come and observe a live rehearsal? Absolument pas.) And in a reminder that these seemingly ethereal beings are also laborers, a principal dancer visits the director to complain about her overwhelming workload: “I’m not 25 anymore,” she points out, a commonplace that has a whole different ring when your career is guaranteed to be over by age 40. When that dancer's knees go out, she should consider picking up a film camera and reinventing herself as a documentary filmmaker. Frederick Wiseman is about to turn 80, and he shows no sign of tiring.
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We all know that Law & Order rips its stories from the headlines, but which headlines? Every week, Brow Beat matches L&O's plot points to the events that inspired them.
Oct. 30, 2009: "Human Flesh Search Engine"
These Are Their Stories
The first act of the episode, co-written by Slate contributor Matthew McGough, focuses on the murder of Sid Maxwell, the founder and CEO of Skintight Apparel, a company that "sells $5 T-shirts for $40." In the early stages of the investigation, the detectives suspect a former employee who sued for sexual harassment. (The company's lawyers countered that she should have understood she was working in "a highly sexualized work environment.")
This Is the Real Story
Sid Maxwell bears more than a passing resemblance to Dov Charney, founder and CEO of American Apparel, a purveyor of sweatshop-free skintight apparel. According to the New York Times Magazine, in 2005, "three former employees and an independent contractor filed three sexual-harassment lawsuits against Charney and American Apparel." Workers are now required to sign a document that acknowledges, "Employees working in the design, sales, marketing and other creative areas of the company will come into contact with sexually charged language and visual images."
These Are Their Stories
The detectives soon discover that a photograph of Maxwell texting while driving had been posted to Flashposse.net, a Web "forum for corrective social action," along with exhortations that he should be killed before he kills someone else. Flashposse community members identified the make and model of the car from the photo and hacked into DMV records to find the owner; Maxwell's address and his building's security entry code were also posted on the site. A schizophrenic Flashposse.net member used the information to enter the apartment and kill Maxwell.
This Is the Real Story
The episode's title is a reference to the Chinese nickname for "virtual mobs" that strike back at corrupt officials by bringing online attention to cases censored by Communist Party officials. According to a June 16, 2009, New York Times story, in several recent cases, "the Internet has cracked open a channel for citizens to voice mass displeasure with official conduct, demonstrating its potential as a catalyst for social change." As the article notes, some online vigilantes have posted personal information about alleged offenders.
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