Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

Verlyn Klinkenborg Discovers the Bicycle

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.

Oprah's "Aha Moment"

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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Project Runway: We Have a Winner!

"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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The DORFiest of the DORF

Track of the Week: John Mayer "Who Says"

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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“He's a Hard Body With a Soft Center”

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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Only One "You Betcha" in Going Rogue

The How I Met Your Mother Shame Index: Episode 8

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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How Many Times Will Sarah Palin Use the Phrase "You Betcha" In Her New Book?

Ripped From Which Headline? "For the Defense"

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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Notes Toward a Close Reading of the New Lady Gaga Video

1. 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.
   
2. 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."
   
3. 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.
   
4. "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.
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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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Field Trip: "Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No"

The True, Considerably Less Rocking Story Behind "Pirate Radio"

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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Track of the Week: Jamie Foxx ft. Gucci Mane, "Speak French"

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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How Did Precious Get So Fat?

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.

Funny Things Rappers Do With Their Hands

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.

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Vamps and Volvos

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 How I Met Your Mother Shame Index: Episode 7

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Fox’s Secret Weapon

Could James Cameron's Avatar kill 20^th 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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Google 2012 Profiteers

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.