Singles 2/28

Credit Robyn for recognizing soundscapes as alluring as Neneh Cherry’s. I hope to review Blank Project next week, my favorite album this quarter. Speaking of, I gave Miranda Lambert too much. Country history can proffer myriad recollections of good times that ring about as true as Ronald Reagan’s WWII service (Merle Haggard was the king

AIDS vaccine: “We’re trying to get a magic bullet”

A possible breakthrough with an AIDS vaccine: The vaccine developed by Stone and his team can prevent mice from becoming infected with HIV, he said, by targeting a specific receptor in the immune system to trigger a significant T-cell response to the virus. The receptor is called CD40, and the vaccine uses a special form

Hey white boy — whatchoo doing in Africa: Captain Phillips

While it’s unfair to compare Captain Phillips to Gravity and All is Lost when it had the misfortune to open on the same weekend as the former and far outgrossed the latter, its elephantine approach to the white-guy-in-trouble trope should serve as a cautionary tale as sapient as Tom Hanks’ trying sweet reason on multinational

Mass hysteria!

This oral history of Ghostbusters finds the cast and makes, including the late Harold Ramis, still in a wise ass mood (has there been a more Aykroyd line than “People in the paranormal field loved it. It gave focus to their work”?). What a boys club though. Sigourney Weaver, channeling canine energy, gets cast anyway:

David Byrne and Biz Markie: they got what you need

I’ve waited my whole life for this.

St. Vincent: A smile is more than showing teeth

She’s an original, creating a songbook out of the kind of compressed studio effects that would force lesser talents to fire the engineer. So she should reconsider someone besides John Congleton, whose work on Angel Olsen’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness and Annie Clark’s other albums confirms that pouring his trademark electronic glaze over

There’s more to love than boy meets girl: Jimmy Somerville

Writing this essay on Jimmy Somerville, I realized he was a mediocrity who wrote and sang a fistful of great dance tracks. To learn that Bronski Beat and the Communards recorded music incommensurate with Somerville’s personal radicalism and the monikers he and his musical partners chose disappointed me: romantic vagaries set to big beats. The

Anti-gay florists serving gays: “It is the price of citizenship”

I haven’t posted about Arizona’s attempt to protect businesses who claim religious exceptions when serving gay and lesbians because the stupidity of columnists whose libertarian principles are as deep as birdbaths is a better target. Andrew Sullivan: I would never want to coerce any fundamentalist to provide services for my wedding – or anything else

Harold Ramis: “He made his own hats from felted fleece”

From the New York Times obit: Mr. Ramis was multitalented: he was a skilled fencer and a ritual drummer, he spoke Greek to the owners of his local coffee shop and taught himself to ski by watching skiers on television. He made his own hats from felted fleece. It could’ve been said by a Harold

“Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to roast in the depths of a Sloar that day I can tell you!

David Denby’s review of Ghostbusters, which I don’t have in front of me, praised the cast for sounding like the New York hipsters they wanted to be and have never existed (Pauline Kael’s cranky notice, in which she consumes her word count complaining about the film’s budget, gets it wrong). Harold Ramis’ script is generous;

“Yanqui, go home!

For my Venezuelan friends.

“Some low-income immigrants who live here legally to qualify for subsidies”

A development: Florida lawmakers backing expansion of the state’s Medicaid program plan to mount a new argument this legislative session: That voting against extending the program would deprive low-income U.S. citizens of access to insurance that is available to some legal immigrants. At issue is a little-noticed provision of the federal health law that allows