Dig if you will the list: the best of Prince

As y’all know, Prince died last year. Until now I never updated this ILM ballot sent six years ago. As usual I didn’t quite play along: just forty twenty Prince songs I liked without much thought and away it went. I’ll explain any one of my choices. By this point so familiar are we with

“Preposterously overstuffed with hooks and sensations”

Jody Rosen, awesome on the new Britney: “The rare dance-pop album that never flags, each track preposterously overstuffed with hooks and sensations.” The comments below are a feast.

Farley Granger R.I.P.

Star of They Live By Night, Strangers on a Train, Rope, and Visconti’s Senso. Noted bisexual too: he not only counted Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents as lovers, but cowrote a memoir with his partner Robert Calhoun. Although far from a good actor, Granger projected queerness rather unambiguously; even in high school I didn’t have

Naughty girls need love: Britney Spears’ “Femme Fatale”

Half of Femme Fatale lives up to its title: Britney Spears as the polymorphic essence of every disco dolly who’s so post-feminist/post-sexual/post-woman that to wonder whether she’s used or being used by the purported objects of lust she’s dancing/fucking is as beside the point as comparing “Libya” and “Iraq.” Unfortunately, because the half-life of self-reflexiveness

Obama: Marxist and redistributor of wealth

Greenwald: Since Obama was inaugurated, the Dow Jones has increased more than 50% — from 8,000 to more than 12,000; the wealthiest recieved a massive tax cut; the top marginal tax rate was three times less than during the Eisenhower years and substantially lower than during the Reagan years; income and wealth inequality are so

Happy Saturday

Singles Jukebox 3/25

To commemorate Nate Dogg, The Singles Jukebox dedicated the week to him. Edifying to say the least. I hadn’t heard Shade Sheist’s great would-be summer hit, and I’d been meaning to own my own copy of “Regulate” since I lost the cassingle in spring 1995. I’m no fan of early Snoop-Dre; a post earlier this

*Sigh*

For the what-else-is-new file: the Obama administration curtails Miranda rights for suspected domestic terror suspects: New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades. The move is one

Reflections on a sensuous life: Elizabeth Taylor R.I.P.

I hope no obit calls her “classy” — no one as vulgar as Elizabeth Taylor could survive this slander.  Although the physical deterioration of the last twenty years was painful to behold, I found it apt and in keeping with the personality that Taylor projected in her movies. Vulgar, careening helplessly from one state of

Loleatta Holloway RIP

Surely it’s not blasphemous to claim the late Loleatta Holloway’s greatest contribution to music was as an astounding tremor-sized sample in house (Black Box’s “Ride On Time”) and kiddie house/hip-hop (Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations”). I prefer both tracks to 1980’s “Love Sensation,” penned by Dan Hartman (the man’s resume is astounding,

On the uses of offense

From an ILM thread, regarding how one responds to hateful subject matter in art: Here’s another experiment: as a gay man most of the situations proffered in songs are alien to me. I have to either attempt to understand them on their own terms (not a problem; I’ve been doing it all my life) or

Nowhere film: Nowhere Boy

Let’s assume you know nothing about John Lennon’s early years. Kristin Scott-Thomas’ Aunt Mimi, Lennon’s guardian for most of his life, is convincing from her first moment: cold, snappish, beholden to a lower-middle-class ethos to which she is furiously attached. Like Olivia Williams, Scott-Thomas projects the most empathy when she’s showing up a man without