Singles!

As we approach the end of the year, we review fewer singles. The last batch, I presume:

 

Lady Gaga – Dancer in the Dark (8)

DJ  Khaled ft. Usher, Young Jeezy, Rick Ross, Drake - Fed Up (4)

Roisin Murphy – Orally Fixated (8)

“It’s not a lifestyle choice, Bella”

Roger Ebert on The Twilight Saga: New Moon:

In his absence she’s befriended by Jake (Taylor Lautner), that nice American Indian boy. “You’ve gotten all buff!” she tells him. Yeah, real buff, and soon he’s never wearing a shirt and standing outside in the winter rain as if he were–why, nothing more than a wild animal. They don’t need coats like ours, remember, because God gave them theirs.Those not among that five percent of the movie’s target audience that doesn’t already know this will (spoiler) be surprised that Jake is a werewolf.

Bella: So…you’re a werewolf?
Jake: Last time I checked.
Bella: “Can’t you find a way to…just stop?
Jake (patiently): “It’s not a lifestyle choice, Bella.”

Natalie Imbruglia: Still Torn

I still stand by what I wrote a couple of months ago about Natalie Imbruglia’s “Want,” except now I love it love it love it. It really does remind me a lot of a track like “The Beginning,” a dance club hit in late ‘91 for Seal: disco-inflected house, creamy, with a chalky aftertaste. I still love “Torn,” but “Want” is even more affecting: cooler, because the situation it limns hurts that much more.

Although embedding is disabled for the video, check it out anyway.

Sarah Palin: Anything for cheap applause

In the most recent Newsweek, Christopher Hitchens returns to what he does: penning lucid, vicious denunciations. If you think Sarah Palin inspires too many easy titters, please remember that “her” memoir Going Rogue currently sits atop Amazon’s bestseller list and for whose sake she’s submitting to abject promotional interviews. I do feel sorry for Oprah and Meredith Viera: they have to pretend to take this woman seriously.

Anyway, Hitchens:

The Palin problem, then, might be that she cynically incites a crowd that she has no real intention of pleasing. If she were ever to get herself to the nation’s capital, the teabaggers would be just as much on the outside as they are now, and would simply have been the instruments that helped get her elected. In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them. It’s also much more dangerous, because it meanwhile involves giving a sort of respectability to ideas that were discredited when William Jennings Bryan was last on the stump. The Weekly Standard (itself not exactly a prairie-based publication) might want to think twice before flirting with popular delusions and resentments that are as impossible to satisfy as the demand for a silver standard or a ban on the teaching of Darwin, and are for that very reason hard to tamp down.

 

On the other hand, he shows less appreciation for Levi Johnston’s endowments (a “scapegrace and nudity artist”) than either Andrew Sullivan or yours truly.

Singles! Er, single!

With the Singles Jukebox down for a week, we only posted one single: Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance,” which swiftly became the most played song in the newsroom last week.

The Dumb Approach

Poking fun at the monsters in The Corner is as easy these days as insulting a three-headed baby, but once in a while one of those guys post something whose cynicism takes the breath away. Editor in Chief Rich Lowry tonight:

At this point, Obama needs to settle for a “dumb” Afghan strategy. He’s clearly trying to be too cute and clever, and micro-managing aspects of the military campaign that are beneath his pay-grade. If he believes success in Afghanistan is important and a counter-insurgency campaign is the best way to achieve it, he should give McChrystal the troops he says he needs (actually, he should probably give him more if possible, to reduce the risk of failure). This business of examining the troop numbers province-by-province, and devising various “off ramps,” and parsing out what troop commitment will best pressure Karzai is a foolish attempt at an impossible exactitude. No plan so finely tuned from on high is going to survive its first contact with reality. Obama needs a “dumb” approach — figure out the basic strategy, resource it, and leave it at that. If it’s a successful strategy, most of the other things will probably follow — the off ramps, the welcome effect on Karzai, etc.

Wow. To Lowry, trying to avoid sending more American men and women to die is “cute” and “clever,” a symptom of “micro-managing” — unlike, say, George W. Bush, who never turned down a troop request from Donald Rumsfeld or the Joint Chiefs of Staff even when the strategy was generally recognized a failure. In fact, Obama’s cuteness is an “impossible inexactitude.” Look, stop niggling, Barry. Do what the Beltway insiders say General McChrystal should do: commit the troops and get the hell out of the way. It worked for Bush, right? After all, success means that “most of the other things will probably follow — the off ramps, the welcome effect on Karzai, etc.” Please study that last phrase. Focus on the “Karzai, etc” bit. Lowry doesn’t even pretend to suggest that the decadence of the Karzai government matters in anyone’s calculations. For Lowry, the Dumb Approach to Afghanistan will inevitably lead to Afghans treating us as liberators, like the Iraqis did in 2003: throwing flowers at our feet, that sort of thing.

Or, instead, study the image posted upthread. Lowry is the lackey who claimed we were winning the war in Iraq in 2005.

“I’ve never been so good at shaking hands”

Julian Casablancas’ first solo album Phrazes for the  Young has two superb tracks: the adolescent shaggy-dog story “Left and Right in the Dark” (which a friend said made him imagine young Julian listening to his parents having sex in the next room), with help from a synthesizer riff pilfered from a Rod Stewart track circa 1981, proves that Casablancas can shout quite effectively without a megaphone, thank you very much (e.g. the aw-how-cute “wake up wake U-H-H-H-P!” punctuating each chorus); and the single “11th Dimension” cobbles together a bunch of aphoristic doggerel (“your faith has got to be greater than your fear”) into a manifesto that only an art-damaged recovering alcoholic can believe in.

The rest of the album is attenuated synth-pop in search of a context, and Casablancas a singer in search of vocal melodies.

Old news is good news

Unsurprising news, considering the state of the industry. I can’t say I ever agreed with the segregation of older (or “catalog”) albums, as if they were nursing home habitues who had no business mixing with the young. A continuing pleasure in my Billboard-obsessive days in junior high and high school was noting the likes of Led Zeppelin IV and Prince’s Controversy scraping the bottom of the Top 200, surrounded on either side by Teena Marie and Hooters albums. The interaction created a plausible narrative: people cared about the old and new with equal affection. A year in which Michael Jackson and the Beatles outsold their progeny means that the public’s aware of it too.

Singles!

Hollywooders like John Mayer and Pete Yorn and Scarlet Johansson scored the highest this week.

 

Timbaland ft. Soshy – Morning After Dark. (3)

Q-Tip ft. Norah Jones – Life is Better (5).

Marina and the Diamonds – Mowgli’s Road (3).

Wild Beasts – All the King’s Men (5).

The xx - Islands (5).

Pete Yorn and Scarlet Johansson – Relator (6).

John Mayer – Who Says (6).

It’s the rich who are socialists

I don’t much care for Frank Rich, but today’s column is notable for accusing the Democrats on the Hill and in the White House of endorsing and, more grotesquely, duplicating the conditions under which the economy tanked last fall. It came as no surprise that corporate media — born out of the deregulation madness by which the Clinton administration was possessed twelve years ago — buried the news last week that Congress voted to emasculatekey provisions in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in the wake of the collapse of Enron and WorldCom in 2001 (disasters which no one talks much of anymore, by the way). Rich:

Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, told me on Friday it was “surreal” that Democrats were now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing “the golden chalice” of reform. If investors cannot have transparency, Levitt said, “the whole system is worthless.”

To those conservatives who think Obama is Stalinizing the United States, please ask yourselves how you can accuse an administration of socialist tendencies when it boasts Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers in the cabinet, MBNA whore Joe Biden as vice president, and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut in the Senate? Maybe they’re right — what this looks like is oligarchy or plutocracy. Or maybe these conservatives had Gore Vidal’s adage in mind: socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.

History as farce

A Serious Man closes with the most apocalyptic, devastating (literally), appropriate  shot of the Coen brothers’ career. It’s hard to explain why I found the meanness in this movie preferable to just about everything these prolific directors have done in the last twenty years. Maybe the clue is realizing that the movie boasts no real sourness. In detailing just how far you can beset a humorless but essentially decent Midwestern Jew with troubles that would break Job, they go way past misanthropy to a muted compassion. Their virtuosity finally settles on the right objective correlative; A Serious Man is Ingmar Bergman’s Through the Glass Darkly edited and shaped like Drag Me to Hell. Although the first ten minutes, set in Poland at the turn of the century, don’t gel with the rest of the film, its point is clear: establish A Serious Man as a modern folk tale.

For the first time in their careers, the Coens immerse themselves in a milieu without trying to distance themselves from it; you don’t need to know they’re Jews to appreciate what they’ve done here (it makes the “fatalism” of Woody Allen’s Match Point all the more pathetic). The film is alarmingly well-cast, which goes a long way towards dispelling the suspicion that casting grotesques is easier when your film has a thesis. Besides the round, fishbowl-sized face of Michael Stuhlbarg, who registers every horror without putting quotation marks around it, there’s Aaron Wolff as his son, projecting a detachment so complete that his weed smoking is incidental; an unnerving impersonation of fatuousness by Fred Melamed, actually playing a character named Sy Ableman; and Richard Kind as Stuhlbarg’s brother-in-law, a useless man whose secrets represent his only tie to the rest of the world. It’s the most moving performance in a Coen film since John Goodman’s in Barton Fink.

“I’m homosapien like you”

Dedicated to the citizens of Maine.