Pop Culture Archives

I try to write up here every concert I go to. I've written more than enough about pop singer Kelly Clarkson lately (most recently here; 2009 concert review here), so I will be brief; my wife and I saw her show at Radio City Music Hall on Saturday night.

The Venue

Radio City, if you haven't been there - I'd previously only been there for the Christmas show - is a fantastic concert venue, at least if you prefer good sightlines and great acoustics and comfortable seating to intense, sweaty mosh pits. It's probably second only to Jones Beach among the concert venues I've attended. Like the Empire State Building, Radio City has retained the style of the 1930s, to the point where you feel like you're in an old movie stepping through its doors - a perfect fit, in some ways, for Clarkson's retro nature as a wholesome entertainer and traditional vocalist; the theater is built like the inside of a 1930s-era radio. Clarkson overflowed with kid-in-a-candy-store enthusiasm for playing there, openly whooping and hollering at how excited she was and mentioning that she'd never even been inside the place before.

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Sometimes you write the stories, and sometimes they write you. I awoke this morning to a big, blazing Drudge headline about Texan pop starlet and American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson having endorsed Ron Paul for president. As it happens, I'm probably the only conservative political writer in America who has taken Clarkson seriously at some length (see here, here and here; I still follow her on Twitter and Facebook and the like), while at the same time following my RedState colleague Leon Wolf's magnificant series on the lunacy of Ron Paul and his campaign (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for lots of gory details), and for that matter I've written about the intersection of music and politics with an exhaustive look at the culture and politics of my favorite musician, Bruce Springsteen, so this story has my name written all over it. There's actually some lessons to be drawn here, whether or not you have any interest in Clarkson per se.

The first point up is how Clarkson's tweets about Paul are revealing of the mindset of a lot of 'soft' Ron Paul supporters. Those of us who write about politics on the internet tend to assume that all of Paul's support comes from hard-core Ronulans, of the sort who will swarm you on the web with the kinds of barrages of talking points and - often - ALL CAPS and hate speech (or just rambling email manifestos) that carry an overpowering stench of political fanatacism. (This is a major reason why RedState has banned the Paul supporters for years; en masse, they make reasoned discourse impossible).* Even the more polite, otherwise reasonable people who support Paul in web discussions tend to be absolutely immovable in their support, to the point where there's no realistic chance they could support any other Republican.

But when you do polling and casual discussions with people not following politics all that closely, you discover a fair number of people who have gotten the whitewashed version of Paul and aren't aware of the full depth of his crazy - people I have to believe are still persuadable that Paul is toxic. And that's exactly what Clarkson sounds like here. It started with this tweet

I love Ron Paul. I liked him a lot during the last republican nomination and no one gave him a chance. If he wins the nomination for the Republican party in 2012 he's got my vote. Too bad he probably won't.

Then:

we shouldn't try & help/tell other countries how to solve their issues w/the poor when we can't even solve our own.

and

I am about progress. Ron Paul is about letting people decide, not the government. I am for this.

All of which sounds reasonable enough; Paul is certainly in favor of more liberty at home and a less vigorous American role abroad, and while I regard his brand of isolationism as deeply dangerous, the general concept of getting out of the UN and the 'world policeman' role is attractive to an awful lot of people who are not crazy. This is the sort of thing why I run into people - friends, family - who tell me "you know, Ron Paul has a lot of good ideas." It's also why some of the saner people in the GOP who have some overlap with Paul's ideas - from the more conservative types like Mike Lee, to Paul's son Rand, to the more libertarian types like Gary Johnson - might be better spokesmen for some of those ideas.

Unfortunately, you buy Ron Paul, you buy the whole batty package: the flirtations with 9/11 Trutherism and other conspiracy theories, the "we had it coming" view of anti-American terrorism, the anti-Semitism and pro-Palestinian bias, the racist newsletters, and whatnot, all of which you can find at length in Leon's posts. And Clarkson, with nearly a million Twitter followers and nearly 3 million Facebook fans and a prior record of trying to keep herself out of political controversies, got inundated with hostility she clearly wasn't expecting for backing Paul, ultimately complaining about the volume of "hateful" attacks. Thus, the backtracks:

I have never heard that he's a racist? I definitely don't agree with racism, that's ignorant.

I love all people and could care less if you like men or women. I have never heard that Ron Paul is a racist or homophobe?

I have never seen or heard Ron Paul say anything against gay people?

I am really sorry if I have offended anyone. Obviously that was not my intent. I do not support racism. I support gay rights, straight rights, women's rights, men's rights, white/black/purple/orange rights. I like Ron Paul because he believes in less government and letting the people (all of us) make the decisions and mold our country. That is all. Out of all of the Republican nominees, he's my favorite.

(There's a longer story here, which Dave Weigel has covered, as to why Paul still has apologists among gay liberals despite the content of his newsletters)

Most entertainers tend towards knee-jerk leftism, and even the more thoughtful ones - like Springsteen, who as I've discussed is in some ways a culturally conservative figure in his music despite his leftism - are often hard-core liberals or leftists. And the exceptions are sometimes no better; John Mayer came out as a vocal, hard-shell Paul supporter in 2008, and in Mayer's case that seemed to dovetail with some of his own more unsavory characteristics. One of the reasons I like Clarkson, aside from her music, is that she thinks for herself and is frequently a lonely voice for sanity in the insane world of pop music. Her words on the death of Amy Winehouse was one example of this:

Sometimes I think this job will be the death of us all, or at least the emotional death of us all. Maybe that is why as a little kid in sunday school I learned that God didn't want false gods or idols. I thought it was terribly selfish of God as a child but I think I get it now. He didn't want us following people or things that are imperfect and not so much for the followers but for the gods and/or idols who will never be what everyone wishes or needs them to be because we are made imperfect. He knew we wouldn't be able to handle the pressure, the shame, the glory, or the power the spotlight brings.

Her background ought to make her the kind of swing voter the GOP can reach: raised poor among strict Christian Texas Democrats, Clarkson is something of a stubborn holdout for decency and modesty in pop music, refuses to describe herself as a feminist, owns 9 guns and sleeps with a Colt .45 for protection, and is a self-described Republican but one who voted Obama four years ago:

I just want someone that's about change, and that's what [Barack Obama] campaigned on, and that's what I'm hoping happens. I'm very much a Barack fan.

How'd you celebrate the inauguration?

I was actually with two of my friends here in Texas -- we were in my kitchen watching it on TV. We were crying -- all three of us. Seeing Aretha Franklin -- who in her lifetime has seen oppression and now seeing a black man become President -- sing ... that in itself is such a beautiful message to the rest of the world.

A lot of people felt that way about Obama in January 2009, but the thrill is long gone, even in Hollywood.

Political coalitions, of course, inevitably involve picking and choosing positions that alienate some people you might otherwise reach. Ron Paul, now 76 years old, will be gone from the stage after this election, but the challenge of how to appeal to people who like some of the themes he projects but aren't fans of more conventional Republican ideas - people like Kelly Clarkson - will persist.

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There are many species of bad journalism, most of which involve too much opinion by the writer, but sometimes the opposite is true and a writer gives you the apparent facts without the context needed to make sense of them. Let me use an article from the NY Times about 30 Rock to illustrate a common type of bad journalism that I find to be equally amusing and annoying: reporting negotiating positions without bothering to explain to the reader to take negotiating positions with a grain of salt, let alone how to interpret statements made in the course of negotiations. This has been a common thread in scores of articles these past few months about - among other topics - the debt ceiling negotiations, the Libya war, the perpetual Israel-Palestine 'peace process,' the NFL and NBA labor negotiations, the Mets' legal dispute with the Madoff trustee and other business machinations and their efforts to re-sign Jose Reyes, and the legal imbroglio surrounding the Dodgers. I've read more articles on all these topics than I could count that failed to give the reader the guidance to put the parties' statements in the context of the underlying negotiating dynamics.

The Times tells us, first, that Alec Baldwin has said he's leaving 30 Rock after next season, a departure that of course would be a terrible blow to a show built around the tensions between his (awesome) character, Jack Donaghy, and Tina Fey's Liz Lemon. It may well be true that Baldwin sincerely has other things on his mind, maybe even a run for public office, and/or that he's feeling he's done all he could with the character. But it's at least equally likely that he could be persuaded to stay on if NBC offers money or other contractual concessions to make it worth his while.

Then we get the response from NBC brass and from Lorne Michaels, the show's executive producer:

Executives from the show and NBC aren't sure, but they made it clear in interviews here this week that his departure would not mean an automatic end to the award-winning comedy.

NBC's new entertainment chairman, Bob Greenblatt, said: "I'd love nothing more than to have Alec for the duration of the show. That's my goal. Let's see what we get."

NBC's interest in keeping "30 Rock" around for at least one more year after the coming season can be explained by the need for more episodes to enhance the show's resale value in syndication.

The executive producer of "30 Rock," Lorne Michaels, was more definitive about a future for the comedy, even if Mr. Baldwin turns down all blandishments to continue. "I would hope he would want to go on," Mr. Michaels said on Monday. "But we're going to keep doing the show."

Again: I don't doubt that NBC would very much like to extend the show's run one extra season for syndication purposes; many a sitcom past has been kept on past its proverbial shark-jumping point for that reason. If 30 Rock is still making money at that point, the network would probably try to soldier on without Baldwin. And Lorne Michaels has never been a guy who thought any of his cast members were indispensable (to put it mildly). But this all smacks strongly of a negotiating posture: the network and Michaels are doing interviews here precisely to send Baldwin the message that he's not holding all the cards. And the reporter, Bill Carter, doesn't breathe a word of that, probably because he knows full well why they are giving him these interviews.

Of course, Greenblatt and Michaels have their own competing agendas:

Mr. Greenblatt did open the door to a possible disagreement with Mr. Michaels over the re-entry of "30 Rock" onto NBC's schedule. The show's sixth-season premiere has been postponed until midseason because of the pregnancy of its star, Tina Fey.

Asked if "30 Rock" was ensured a spot back on NBC's successful Thursday night comedy lineup, Mr. Greenblatt said, "That is a good question, and I really don't have an answer for it." He added, "Nothing's written in stone."

But as far as Mr. Michaels is concerned, it is. "The show will be back on Thursdays," he said confidently.

Of course, if Baldwin's future with the show is in doubt, that's one reason the network would not want to commit valuable Thursday night prime-time space, plus Greenblatt is taking charge of a fourth-place network and probably should keep his options open. But NBC has to keep Michaels happy, too; as the creator of Saturday Night Live, he remains a vital part of the network's brand image. Michaels' certainty here is obviously intended to send an unsubtle message that he will not be a happy camper if the network moves his prime-time baby out of its Thursday night sinecure.

I don't mean to pick on Carter, who in this article has at least offered us enough quotes from each of the participants that a skeptical reader can piece together what is really being said here; that's not always the case with this sort of journalism. But in general, reporters aren't doing their jobs if they don't report how someone involved in negotiations could stand to gain from taking a particular position in public, and worse still if they straight-facedly claim that someone will never make a particular concession (e.g., Jose Reyes won't talk about a new contract during the season), when in fact they might well do so for the right price. The dynamics of negotiations and how they are handled through the media can differ across situations, but there are a finite number of basic underlying approaches to negotiating, and they crop up across many different fields of endeavor.

Consider the debt ceiling debate - surely many Republicans would have preferred to pass 'cut, cap and balance,' and some were genuinely opposed to raising the debt ceiling at all. But for many people involved in the fight, pushing for the ideal policy, even if it was the policy they wanted, was also a matter of getting leverage to extract a better deal when the time came to compromise. Similarly, many Republicans sincerely opposed any deal that would raise any taxes at all; others may have been willing to trade some revenue-raisers for something better, but found it convenient to stay in line with the ATR pledge against tax hikes as a posture unless and until that better offer materialized. None of this is insincere; it's just good bargaining.

Learn to look for the signs of negotiating postures between the lines of news articles, and they will surface again and again in every section of the paper.

RIP Clarence Clemons. Bruce will undoubtedly tour again, but it really is an end of an era, the end of a whole, long period of my life and the lives of so many other fans of the E Street Band, to think we'll never see the Big Man on stage again.

UPDATE: Read Joe Posnanski on Clarence. Just do.

I offered up some video memories here. A few more below the fold.

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Terrible news:

Clarence Clemons, hospitalized in Florida after a stroke, has had two brain surgeries but is "responsive and in stable condition," according the authoritative Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band fan website, backstreets.com.

Also, Carolyn Gusoff of Fox 5 News has reported that Clemons is paralyzed on the left side of his body, though backstreets.com quotes a "close friend" of Clemons as saying: "He was paralyzed on his left side, but now he's squeezing with his left hand."

Prayers and best wishes for the Big Man, one of rock's greatest performers in his own right. I could offer you a thousand words on his impact on Bruce Springsteen's music as well as his other projects, but instead, here's a collection of great memories on video:

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My wife and I braved the heavy rains and high winds last night to see Grace Potter and the Nocturnals at Irving Plaza. It was a vintage rock show that transported us back, for one evening, to the golden age of classic rock.

Background

I've written previously about Potter & Co. and their album, for my money the best album of 2010, in the rock section of my "State of Rock and Pop" essay. As a vocalist, Potter is basically Janis Joplin with a little Stevie Nicks thrown in, and with an exceptionally powerful voice (on occasion, she takes this just a bit far in showing off her ability to drag out really big notes, like on the studio version of 'Tiny Light,' but on the whole she's a remarkable, soulful vocalist). The band is, oddly, co-ed since adding bassist Catherine Popper in 2009 (most female-fronted bands tend to be either all-girl like the Go-Gos or male-backed like Blondie, although Fleetwood Mac would be the most notable exception and a bit of a cautionary tale in this regard), and features two guitarists (including excellent lead guitarist Scott Tournet), a drummer, and Potter on either keyboards, guitar or tamborine as the song demands. Musically, they're also very much in line with Joplin, the Allman Brothers and other roots/soul rock acts of the late 60s and early 70s. Potter, however, insists she didn't listen to Janis growing up and was more into the Kinks.

The Venue, The Crowd and The Opening Act

I said my bit on Irving Plaza after seeing the Saw Doctors there last May (they're playing the venue again this weekend). On the one hand, it's a wonderfully intimate place to see a show, and positively scandalous - when you consider some of the acts that play stadiums and big arenas these days - that a band as talented, charismatic and musically mainstream as Potter and the Nocturnals are still doing shows for a few hundred people, three albums into their career. And seeing such a great show for $28.50 a ticket is an incredible steal. On the other hand, I have really come to hate General Admission - my wife and I had good position in the center of the crowd until some taller people just forced themselves in front of us about three songs into the set, after which we had to flee to the side (where we had to make way every few minutes for a waitress carrying beers) to see the stage (I'm a shade under 5'10" but my wife is only about 5'4").

As for the crowd, it was almost entirely white (as you expect with a rock act) but otherwise pretty diverse in age, with probably the bulk of attendees in their 20s and 30s. It was also one of the lamest crowds I've seen, rivaling the Billy Joel show I attended at the Nassau Coliseum in 1993 or 94 (described here), really lacking in visible enthusiasm. Maybe it was the weather, maybe it was being a work night in Manhattan, maybe it was how densely the sold-out audience was packed that prevented people from moving or raising their hands much, and maybe in part my earplugs drowned out some of the crowd noise, but the audience really did not seem to react all that much compared to shows I've seen in the past. I suppose I was spoiled by some of the recent shows I've been to in that regard, ranging from the raucous Saw Doctors crowd to the outpouring of emotion at the Kelly Clarkson show. It was also the first time in a while I've been at a show with really noticeable pot smoke.

The opening act was a brother-sister fronted pop-rock band called Belle Brigade (as with the Saw Doctors show, no opening act was listed when I bought the tickets, so I only found out the day before who it would be). You can hear one of their songs here, they are apparently releasing their first album next month. We came in about halfway through their set, so I can't really offer much of an evaluation - I think I liked the song they were playing when I arrived better than the last two.

The Show

Potter and the band played 17 songs in a set that lasted for about two hours, including a two-song encore; the setlist, courtesy of Potter's twitter feed, is here, featuring seven songs off the band's latest album. If you're keeping score at home, that clocks in at an average song length somewhere around seven minutes. My wife complained that the set contained too many slow songs and too many long instrumentals and preferred the shorter tracks like 'One Short Night,' but of course that's the band's jam-band style (in most cases the band didn't actually stop playing between songs, just slowing down to a segue; as a result, Potter didn't do that much talking between songs). With a nod to the weather, Potter opened up with my personal favorite off the latest album, the rollicking rocker 'Hot Summer Night,' and played a particularly extended and borderline-psychedelic version of 'Oasis.' The band also played a couple of covers (including as part of the encore Heart's 'Crazy On You,' which Potter had performed with Ann Wilson on VH1 a few months ago) and some songs I didn't recognize from any of their albums, which may or may not have been covers. At the inevitable request for 'Free Bird' when Potter mentioned they'd be doing some covers, Potter sang the opening line and then quipped that "you'll have to slip a lot more dollar bills in my panties to get the rest of that one."

Here's video from last night of the blues-stomp number 'Joey,' off their first album; the video quality is better than the audio but should give a sense of the stage setup and the shaggy, white-suited band:

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Much as I love music, I basically went into hibernation on the current-music scene beginning in the years between 1995 and 1997, when - in the span of little more than two years - I got married, finished law school, started a full-time-and-then-some job and became a father. Oh, I kept up with new Springsteen and U2 releases and occasionally noticed things going on here and there, and I got majorly into the Irish pop/rock band the Saw Doctors, but for the most part I didn't listen to the radio, didn't get into new artists, didn't buy new releases by even some of my favorite veteran artists, and generally got left behind by the march of new music. For a long time, I assumed I hadn't really missed anything, but of course somebody's always making good music somewhere, and as fractured and degraded as the current music scene is, there is still good stuff out there if you look hard and have some help and advice.

I finally got an iPod for Christmas in 2007, and after spending a year loading CDs and buying up a lot of the stuff on iTunes that I'd been living without for years, I started exploring the music world again in earnest in the first half of 2009. Since then, I've dug hither and yon for "new" music, i.e., things released in the past decade or so. I've scoured iTunes, plowed through YouTube videos, music blogs, Twitter and message boards, hit up my wife's CD collection, begged help from siblings, friends and this blog's readers, scanned the pop charts, looked at everything - new releases by veteran rockers, the alt rock scene, the adult contemporary pop market, the American Idol and Disney pop factories, you name it. Ben Domenech was particularly helpful, and Keith Law's alt-influenced list of the top 40 songs of the decade of the 2000s was a valuable resource - I listened to all of them. And I should acknowledge as well that following Kelly Clarkson on Twitter and elsewhere was also very useful - other than Steve Van Zandt, there's probably not another major recording artist who spends as much time and enthusiasm promoting the work of such a varied collection of other musicians.

On to the results, broken broadly in two groups: rock and alternative, on the one hand, and pop and other radio formats on the other. Come with me as I emerge, squinting, into the light of today's rock and pop scenes.

Rock and Alternative: Overview

We live in an age without new rock giants, and there is a reason for this. Rock had its heyday, its period of riotous creative ferment, in the mid/late 60s and into the 1970s, and the format in a sense grew up and came of age in the 80s, with the maturation of the first generation of musicians weaned on rock and with perhaps the period of rock's greatest commercial success. But the pipeline of new artists and new, great music has been running ever drier since about 1990. There's still good stuff out there, but there's nothing and nobody as great as the best of classic rock.

This is the way of music. We won't have another Springsteen or another Beatles or Rolling Stones for the same reason we won't have another Mozart or Beethoven, another Gershwin, another Sinatra - when a genre of music starts being mined, a whole scene of talented people develops that's dedicated to tapping every available vein. But after a generation or so, they've run through most of the best ideas, and the really pathbreaking types of people are looking somewhere else. Look at the kinds of people who were session players, sidemen, studio whizzes and the like in the late 60s and early 70s, both the ones who went on to major stardom in their own right and the ones who stayed in supporting roles - Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Leon Russell, Jimmy Page, Joe Cocker, Elton John, Steve Winwood, Al Kooper, Phil Spector, Billy Preston, Chuck Leavell, etc. (one of my favorite factoids of that era: The Eagles were originally hired as Linda Ronstadt's backup band). But that time is over. Rock is not dead, but it is past its prime, and we shouldn't cling to the illusion that it's ever going to be 1969 or even 1987 again. Think: how many songs recorded since 2000 would earn a place in the canon of great rock songs that includes so many songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s? I can only think of three that would draw broad support - 'Beautiful Day' (U2), 'The Rising' (Springsteen) and 'Seven Nation Army' (the White Stripes). Probably a few others would make the list, but it's a short list, and you'd get very little consensus on its contents.

Is there an alternative source of great new rock? The "alt-rock" genre is something of a hybrid these days. On the one hand, I generally don't buy the argument that being an alternative or indie artist makes you somehow better or more noble (everybody's trying to make a living in the business) or musically superior, and specifically I very much doubt that the very best musicians ever go undiscovered or unsigned by major labels, at least not in the US or the UK. You were never going to find a guy singing clubs in Jersey who was better than Sinatra, or a garage band better than the Stones. Good acts can miss their chance at the margins, but you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that the very best music of the past century wasn't almost entirely made by artists signed to major labels.

And alternative music is usually alternative for a reason. Alt-rock bands often eschew the very things that make music musical - melodies, choruses, bridges, the basic building blocks of song structure. And in particular, alt rock is plagued with terrible vocals, either due to bad singers or what I think of as the alt-rock disease: mixing/mastering the recordings to submerge the vocals to the point of being barely audible over the music. This isn't a rock thing - guys like Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant, Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler were always front and center and crisply audible on most of their records - it's a deliberate decision to make the listener choose between working to hear the singer and the lyrics and just giving up on them. There's rarely a justification for that unless you're just going to go all-instrumental. And indeed, a clearly-mixed and produced record should also have crisply audible instruments that you can pick out each on their own.

As for the vocalists themselves, listen to enough alt-rock and indie bands, and you gain a new appreciation for Sammy Hagar, Replacement Level Rock Singer. Hagar's uncool and unglamorous and he'll never win you over on a song all by himself, but every time out, he gives you eight strong innings and gives the band a chance to win. So many bands out there fail for the lack of a replacement-level vocalist. A band with Sammy Hagar will never have that problem. (I put Ringo Starr in the same general class with Hagar as a singer, but Ringo was the fourth-best singer in the Beatles).

Tied to the alt-rock disease is the alt-rock worldview, the cloying attitude of fans who don't want their favorite artists to be commercially successful (see this handy chart from Cracked). I don't get this at all - I'll listen to music from people who are famous and obscure, cool and uncool, but all things being equal, I like seeing my favorite artists succeed and be recognized, have their music heard by other people and influence other artists. It heartens my faith in the music business, and it encourages imitation; if the Saw Doctors had the kind of success in the US as Nickelback or the Black Eyed Peas, we'd have a much better chance of seeing more bands with a similar sound.

For all of alt-rock's problems, there are nonetheless a lot of good bands working in the alt-rock or indie scene that really are just quality mainstream rock acts left orphaned by the contraction of the mainstream rock universe. There's no musical sense in which The Killers or Muse or the White Stripes or - of all people - Coldplay are alternative bands, any more than Pink Floyd or Rush or U2 or Led Zeppelin were alternative just because they were doing something musically a little different than the bands that immediately preceded them.

Pop and Other Current Radio Formats: Overview

What about pop, and the other styles of music that compete for airplay on today's current radio formats? Pop music is in a bad way these days, overrun by soulless machines, assembly-line corporate hip-hop and "singers" better suited for careers in silent films, but for all the failings of current pop, I still believe in pop music. Specifically, I believe in the idea, the goal of pop music as it's been since the dawn of the mass record-selling market in the 1940s: music that's fun, catchy, immediately accessible, and enduringly memorable. Whether it's traditional Big Band/pop, Beatles-style pop/rock, Motown-style R&B, 80s pop, or even styles like disco that I personally have little use for, a good pop song jumps off the radio and sticks in your head, to the point where you can sing along to it even if you haven't heard it in years. Good pop can be smart or emotionally powerful, can be uplifting or profound, can be danceable, but it doesn't have to be any of those things; it just has to be catchy and tuneful. But what's missing from so much of modern pop is the human element: real human voices, human beings playing real instruments, lyrics that speak to us on a human level. Instead we get machine-processed "voices" backed by machine-made "music" mass-produced by the same handful of paid corporate professionals, none of whom will ever have to present their creations to a live audience.

But all is not lost. The few remaining practitioners of quality pop music aren't all played on pop radio, but some of them are still soldiering on in those trenches. If you look hard enough, you can find them.

Part II of this essay is my look at the people still trying to make relevant rock in today's market, whether they're aging rock legends or young bands on the make, and whether or not they are considered "alternative" or "indie"; rock is rock. I also take a whack at a few of the acts that disappointed me, as well as some who are unique and off the beaten path. I'll pass over, however, artists like the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, the Who, Bob Seger and others who - however much I like them - simply aren't producing new music of note anymore. Part III is my overview of pop and other current radio formats: the good, the bad, the interesting and the disposable, the mass-marketed and the relative unknowns. Part IV wraps up with a look at the best albums of the past three years, a quick run through the artists I haven't covered here, and a few other odds and ends.

Pull up a chair.

Part II: The State of Rock and Alternative (the Artists)

Part III: The State of Pop and Other Current Radio Formats (the Artists)

Part IV: The Rest, and the Best Albums of 2009 and 2010

Part I - Overview

The State of Rock and Alternative

Let's take a look at the surviving rock scene, one artist at a time. In addition to a thumbnail of my impressions of each artist, for those who have some songs worth checking out, I'm offering my list of their best songs since 2000 or so, so you can check them out for yourself if you're unfamiliar.

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band - I start, as always, with Springsteen, about whom I've written more than I could hope to summarize or even link here (see here, here, here, here, and here). As I've noted previously, Bruce has had a good decade or so since turning 50 in 1999; following 1998's Tracks box set of three decades of unreleased recordings, he got the E Street band back together in 1999, released the definitive post-9/11 album in The Rising in 2002, and has put out three other original studio albums (2005's Devils & Dust, 2007's Magic and 2009's Working On A Dream), an album of covers of classic American folk songs (2006's The Seeger Sessions), a classic concert album/DVD (the 1975 Hammersmith Odeon show in London, his first overseas concert), two new live albums (2001's Live in New York City and 2007's Live in Dublin) and, most recently in the fall of 2010 opened the vaults again for The Promise, a 2-CD set of previously unreleased tracks from the Darkness on the Edge of Town sessions. And, through it all, keeping up a punishing touring schedule that would wear down a man half his age.

The production of good studio albums isn't as effortless as it once was - a man who would once leave whole abums worth of great stuff unreleased has at least a few dull filler tracks on each of his last three studio albums - but Bruce is still making quality rock, and Working on a Dream was better and, oddly, more pop-oriented than its two predecessors, with many tracks reflecting, at last, his contentment at a stable marriage and desire to hang on to those days of relative youth that remain. Now into his 60s, Bruce is very much aware of his own musical mortality. I recent read Big Man, Clarence Clemons' quirky, impressionistic look back at his life and career with Bruce, and that's one of the core recurring themes of the book - Bruce's voice just keeps getting more gravelly, Danny Federici is dead, Clarence has a battery of problems with his knees, back and heart, Max Weinberg has a bad back, Nils Lofgren's had hip replacement...the band's days are numbered, and true to form, the only way Bruce knows how to deal with that reality is to keep playing show after show like each one could be his last. And as the Live in Dublin album attests, to this day, Bruce is putting new spins and reinventions even on some of his oldest songs.

As for The Promise, it's not really new music (although Bruce has been promoting it with the full-tilt enthusiasm of a man with new songs and something to prove) but it clearly illustrates how the track selection for Darkness worked. There are nearly no hard-rocking songs left in the vault, as those all made the album. There are a number of fun pop songs; of the songs on the album only 'Prove It All Night' was remotely pop, whereas poppier tracks like 'Fire,' 'Because the Night' and 'Talk To Me' are well-known songs by now because Bruce gave them to other artists. As for the slower, mopier songs that fill out the rest of the 2-CD set, those were clearly lesser songs than others in the same vein that filled out the album (I include the title track, and I know I'm a heretical Bruce fan for not liking it much; Joe Posnanski offers the majority view).

Best Tracks (since The Rising): 'Working on a Dream,' 'Radio Nowhere,' 'Save My Love,' 'Surprise, Surprise,' 'Gotta Get That Feeling,' 'Maria's Bed,' 'Ain't Good Enough For You,' 'Tomorrow Never Knows.'

U2 - They may be younger than Springsteen, but age has caught up with the best rock band of the past three decades. Bono, now 50, no longer has the effortless powerhouse voice that seemed to fill stadiums by itself, and the band had to cancel the US leg of its summer 2010 tour after he suffered a back injury requiring surgery. Their most recent album, No Line on The Horizon, is a good listen all the way through but is clearly their worst album since their earliest days, lacking any one standout song; it's like the second side of The Unforgettable Fire stretched to a whole album. Even the Spider-Man Broadway musical they scored has been beset by production delays. Meanwhile, Bono has taken up another sideline as an occasional NY Times columnist; he comes off as a smarter, less China-toadying Tom Friedman.

U2 is promising they're not done, with as many as three albums in production (including a new rock album, an album of the Spider-Man songs and, reportedly, a "dance" album with hot electro-dance producer David Guetta and - gag - Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas). They may be down, but I wouldn't count them out just yet. Here's a taste of some of the new stuff.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Walk On,' 'Beautiful Day,' 'Love and Peace or Else.'

The Saw Doctors - Longtime readers know I never pass up a chance to talk up The Saw Doctors, the great Irish pop-rock band about which I've written repeatedly (and have a longer profile piece still in the works). With their Beatles-style pop-rock with its twinges of Irish folk influences and their rollicking live shows, the boys from Tuam in County Galway are still going strong, and released their seventh studio album and third of the decade, Further Adventures of...the Saw Doctors, in 2010, following on the heels of a greatest-hits compilation (To Win Just Once) in 2009, a compilation of unreleased songs and live recordings (That Takes The Biscuit!) in 2007, and three live albums since 2004 (2004's Live in Galway, 2008's Live at the Melody Tent and 2005's rare but awesome tsunami-charity release Live on New Year's Day), plus a single recorded for charity (a cover version of the Sugababes' 'About You Now') that hit #1 on the Irish pop charts in 2008. They were last in the news playing the inaugural ball for Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley.

The new album has a bunch of good songs, the standout tracks being the distinctive guitar riff and wistful lyrics of the lead single, 'Taking the Train' and the hard-rocking 'Hazared' (in which Davy Carton boldly declares "me, I'm back on the rock and roll"), but it does have two weaknesses: first, two corny, clunker ballads ('Be Yourself' and 'Somebody Loves You') that lack the usual Saw Doctors touch, and second, no songs by Leo Moran, the band's other frontman.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Taking the Train,' 'About You Now,' 'Villains,' "Hazared.'

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - I most recently wrote about Petty, Florida's gift to rock, here. Following on the heels of a really excellent 4-CD live anthology, Petty and his band were back in 2010 with a new studio album, Mojo, his first since 2002. Petty's voice hasn't changed in 35 years and his band's only gotten better (they recorded all the songs from this album in live studio sessions). There's nothing here as catchy as 'Refugee' or 'Runnin Down a Dream' or 'American Girl', but this is a quality vintage Petty album from beginning to end, rock with blues influences and tempered by Petty's general mellowness. Tom Petty's still in this for the long haul.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Running Man's Bible,' 'The Last DJ,' 'High in the Morning.'

The Killers - The best young (under-40) rock band, period. After they were recommended by a whole bunch of different people, I only had to sit through three or four of their songs to decide I'd go out and buy all their albums and wonder how I'd missed them before. With massive success in the UK in particular, over 15 million albums sold since their 2004 debut, and a sound that would fit comfortably on Top 40 radio if Top 40 radio still played rock, The Killers are the closest thing going to a logical successor to U2 as the world's best rock band.

You might be forgiven, especially if you were introduced to them by watching their music videos, for assuming that 29-year-old frontman Brandon Flowers is a gay Englishman who came up through the clubs (unsurprisingly, his favorite band growing up was the Pet Shop Boys), rather than a married Mormon father of three from Nevada, the band's home base. In fact, The Killers' blending and shifting of musical and visual styles is a big part of what makes them a compelling and evolving band (their videos are actually quite good, unlike much of what's done in that medium these days), but they remain unmistakably rooted in rock. The second and best of their three studio albums, Sam's Town, shows the repeated influence of Bruce Springsteen after Flowers went on a huge Springsteen kick between their first two albums; the lyrics to 'Read My Mind,' their best song, are sprinkled with little Bruce touches, and 'A Dustland Fairytale,' off their third album, Day & Age, could not possibly be a more obvious homage to Bruce. Flowers' crisp vocals stand in stark contrast to so much of the current trend in 'alternative' rock, and make the band's music immediately identifiable and accessible. If anything, his recent solo effort, Flamingo, was even more lyrically Springsteenish, but nonetheless a little weaker - as is often the case for solo debuts by band frontmen - for the lack of the musical backbone provided by the band. Fortunately, the band will end its hiatus with a return to live performance in April.

The Killers are slightly crotchety and prone to feuds with other bands, such as when Flowers blasted Green Day for filming a DVD of the America-bashing American Idiot before a UK audience, horrifying some left-wing music fans with what was really nothing more than simple patriotism (the band played a 2010 campaign rally for Harry Reid, so they're not exactly a right-wing outfit). They also put out an annual Christmas song, the best of which was 2007's tongue-in-cheek 'Don't Shoot Me Santa.'

Best Killers Tracks: 'Read My Mind,' 'When You Were Young,' 'All These Things That I've Done,' 'Mr. Brightside,' 'For Reasons Unknown,' 'Spaceman,' 'Human.'

Best Brandon Flowers Solo Tracks: 'Magdalena,' 'Jilted Lovers & Broken Hearts.'

Grace Potter & the Nocturnals - If rock-fan readers of this post come away with nothing else, I hope you all go out and listen to the work of this Vermont-based throwback rock band, fronted by a tall, leggy 27-year-old with a serious Janis Joplin vibe and a powerful set of lungs (Potter is basically Janis if she was prettier and not wacked-out on drugs; in fact, while the music scene will always have its junkies and burnout cases, my sense is that relatively speaking there are fewer people on drugs in the rock and pop worlds than there have been for a very long time). My wife and I are going to see Potter in March at Manhattan's Irving Plaza, a tiny venue where I've seen the Saw Doctors twice. One major booster of the band is Peter Gammons, who has been a devoted fan since their appearance at the 2006 Boston Music Awards.

For my money, the band's self-titled third album is the best album released in 2010, with essentially no filler. It shows their continuing growth, as each album has had progressively more strong songs. You can definitely tell that the band is making a major push to break through commercially; they've followed a tireless promotional schedule (everything from the VH1 Divas "Salute to the Troops" to performing at the Knicks game at Madison Square Garden on Christmas Day), Potter did a duet with country superstar Kenny Chesney, and she has clearly made an effort to glam up her image, with blonder hair and shorter skirts standing in contrast to the slightly frumpier, more bohemian look you can see in older concert clips.

Potter and her band revel in their old-school influences, doing classic rock tunes with the likes of Gov't Mule and Joe Satriani (they recorded a cover of 'White Rabbit,' a staple of their live set, for the recent Alice in Wonderland film). Potter can also write catchy pop when she wants to; she recently recorded a straight-up pop song, 'Something That I Want' (the song, full of bouncy organ riffs which could easily have been a Monkees tune) for Disney's animated Rapunzel film "Tangled." Potter might seem an odd choice to get picked for the soundtrack of a Disney movie (most of the other songs on the soundtrack were by Mandy Moore) until you realize that she and the band are signed to Hollywood Records, the Radio Disney house label that promotes the likes of Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Hillary Duff. Potter's other big passion is cooking; she has her own brand of chocolates, makes her own maple syrup from trees in her back yard (it's a Vermont thing), and incorporated the recipe framework in the powerhouse chorus of one of their best songs, 'Mastermind':

One part sugar/Two parts feeling... Three cups full of bottled lightning... Four parts water/Five parts believing... Mix it all together and put both feet in

Best Tracks - 'Hot Summer Night,' 'Mastermind,' 'Medicine,' 'Colors'.

Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam should be the best rock band in the business today, but even if they're something less than that now, they're still worth seeking out. I always liked them better than Nirvana, and their first three albums in the early to mid-90s were outstanding. If Kurt Cobain had somehow mastered his demons and lived on to 2011, Nirvana might well be where Pearl Jam stands today, a popular and successful touring act but generally considered past their prime and largely left behind by the music-listening public outside their fan base. Of course, to get from there to here, Pearl Jam had to wage a long series of self-destructive battles, from their war with Ticketmaster to ultimately striking out on their own independent label to pettier decisions like refusing to make music videos for more than a decade. Much as I enjoyed those first three records and their backing of Neil Young on 1995's Mirrorball, the last Pearl Jam album I bought was 1996's No Code, and other than the Eddie Vedder-less 'Mankind' (a very underrated song) I didn't bother replacing that album or any of the songs on it when I lost the CD in the fall of the Trade Center. It doesn't help that Eddie Vedder, while he has a great and powerful voice, so often sounds as if he's singing while eating a sandwich.

But their 2009 release, Backspacer, seems to signal a comeback to more listener-friendly music. After checking out a bunch of the songs I keep meaning to buy it (I can never find it in stores and there's like 12 different versions of the thing for sale on Amazon, but I'll get there eventually).

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'The Fixer'

Sheryl Crow - The female Tom Petty, in terms of being an artist who's churned out quality music year in and year out with a minimum of fuss (not that she's lacked her own personal dramas, between a battle with breast cancer and a relationship with Lance Armstrong, and as with Pearl Jam, the less said of her politics, the better) and wears her Southern heritage lightly (she's from Missouri). Her sound's softer than Petty's and even at age 48 she's only been releasing albums half as long, but she's built up a considerable catalog of hits since 1992's breakthrough 'All I Wanna Do.' Crow's latest album, 2010's 100 Miles From Memphis, sees her back to her Motown roots (she got her start as a backup singer for Michael Jackson in the late 80s), with a record heavy on the horn sections. It's a good, mostly mellow listen, even if you aren't in the mood to sit through 'Say What You Want To,' a catchy but not very thinly veiled diatribe aimed at Sarah Palin and plunked down in the middle of the album.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Soak Up The Sun,' 'Peaceful Feeling,' 'Summer Day,' 'C'mon C'mon'

Jack White - Imagine a 2-person band consisting of a singer/guitarist and a drummer, in which the singer isn't especially good at singing and the drummer's not that good at drumming. You might expect a failure of a band, but instead the Detroit-based White Stripes made some of the best, most uncompromising rock of the past decade, and 35-year-old Jack White's guitar magic, eclectic influences and relationships with other artists have made him and his various bands vital figures in the rock world. The White Stripes officially announced their breakup yesterday, perhaps an inevitable development given (1) Jack and Meg White's divorce and Meg's remarriage (which finally put to bed the longstanding air of mystery they'd cultivated over whether they were husband and wife or brother and sister) and (2) the fact that Meg was really never musically necessary to the band and was never entirely comfortable with the limelight.

The White Stripes never reached the heights of the great rock bands of the 60s and 70s, in large part because of Jack White's limitations as a vocalist; while White, like Bob Dylan, could do more with his voice than you'd guess at first glance, he was never an accessible vocalist, and an even worse vocalist live (White's reputation as a live act rests instead on his guitar wizardry). But his musical virtuosity made the vocals take a back seat anyway. The band was also masterful in its use of iconography - the red-black-and-white motif of their outfits, equipment and album covers, the hypnotic video to 'Seven Nation Army' - one element of their success that is unlikely to be carried over as Jack White moves on to other projects.

I still need to check out more of Jack White's music across his many ventures, including his other bands, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather. His most recent project, since relocating to Nashville and starting his own studio there, is backing an album by septuagenarian rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson, following on the heels of a prior effort for country legend Loretta Lynn, and with the White Stripes going the way of Cream, more collaborations are undoubtedly in the works.

Best White Stripes Tracks: 'Seven Nation Army,' 'The Denial Twist,' 'Icky Thump,' 'The Hardest Button to Button,' 'Catch Hell Blues,' 'Ball and Biscuit.'

Kings of Leon - In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and so it is with the Kings of Leon, a conventional, straight-up no-frills hard rock band that places in the top tier of young rock bands today. A Tennessee-based brother act fronted by 28-year-old Caleb Followill that originally hit it big in the UK, the Kings were on their fourth studio album when they had their crossover commercial breakthrough in mid-2009 with the success of 'Use Somebody' on the pop charts (it hit #1 on top 40 radio, an extremely rare accomplishment for a rock band these days). As Clarkson - a fan since seeing them open for U2 earlier in the decade - described the band to the New York Times on the eve of their breakout, "The rock category is not rock anymore, so I love that they're a rock band. Nothing about them is not rock." And indeed, Only By The Night, their 2008 breakout album, is a good rock album from stem to stern, without a weak song in the bunch, and I'd recommend it to anyone; the 2010 followup, Come Around Sundown, lacks the distinctive tracks that made Only By The Night a hit, but it's likewise a worthwhile listen.

But realistically, if the Kings of Leon had come out in the mid-70s, they'd have been ranked closer to Foghat, Golden Earring and Bachman-Turner Overdrive than Aerosmith or Zeppelin; it's only the weakness of today's rock scene that puts them near the head of the class. In a generation that would regard the second coming of Foghat as a blessing, it's good to be the Kings.

Best Tracks - 'Use Somebody,' 'Sex on Fire,' 'Crawl.'

Muse - Muse is a cross between pre-Joshua Tree U2 and Rush. A trio like Rush, with a reputation as a spectacular touring act, their sound is distinguished by the powerhouse vocals of 32-year-old frontman Matthew Bellamy, probably the most strongly Bono-influenced vocalist in rock (even more so than Flowers or Coldplay's Chris Martin), and they too have opened for U2. Musically, Muse is is even more synthesized and electronic than Rush, but unmistakably still guitar-driven rock. They're an intensely political British band; Bellamy is something of a 9/11 Truther and prone to pronouncements like "[t]he one thing religion has got right is that usury is a fundamental problem with the worldwide banking system." Originally successful in France and scorned at first in their native UK, they've backed into a lot of free publicity on account of Twilight author Stephenie Meyer being a fan and insisting on their music being used in the soundtracks of her massively successful film franchise. Bellamy is reportedly romantically involved with Kate Hudson, one of those useless bits of gossip-mag celebrity trivia I can somehow never avoid absorbing.

Best Tracks: 'Resistance,' 'Uprising,' 'Knights of Cyclonia,' 'Starlight.'

Nickelback - I really tried to give Nickelback's music a fair hearing, honestly I did, but their songs were so forgettable I sometimes forgot what they sounded like while they were still playing. There's nothing actively offensive about Nickelback other than that they take up airplay that could be given to good rock bands; they're by far and away the most-played rock act on radio over the past decade, which may have helped convince the public that rock is well and truly out of ideas. The only song of theirs I own is 'Into the Night,' the single Chad Kroeger recorded with Santana, suggesting that Kroeger's bland voice isn't the entire problem with Nickelback's music.

Coldplay - Like Nickelback, I worked hard to come to Coldplay with an open mind, knowing that both bands were hugely popular yet frequently derided. I didn't have an auspicious start: my initial reaction to the song 'Viva La Vida' was that it sounded like it was building up to really go somewhere, and never did. But eventually I was sold, not on Coldplay generally as a band, but on a handful of their songs. Given the narrow range of their style, I can't really imagine listening to an entire Coldplay album at one sitting, but they make a good change of pace on my iPod.

Best Tracks: 'Viva La Vida,' 'Clocks,' 'Speed of Sound,' 'Low.'

Slash - Back in the day, I was a very big Guns 'n Roses fan, and still listen a good deal to their best stuff from Appetite for Destruction and the Use Your Illusion albums, as well as more offbeat stuff like their superior but hard to locate cover of Jumpin' Jack Flash. Probably no other band has disappointed me as badly as Guns 'n Roses without the death of one of the key members of the band, to the point where I've never even mustered the desire to listen to The Spaghetti Incident and only just finally listened to the long-delayed, Slash-less Chinese Democracy after finding a copy of it in my older brother's car amidst the other possessions of his we ended up with after his death.

I'm probably overdue to catch up on Slash's work with Velvet Revolver, but I did pick up the 45-year-old London native's self-titled solo debut released in 2010, and it's very, very much worth it. The album features collaborations with a variety of vocalists ranging from Ozzy to Adam Levine of Maroon 5 to Chris Cornell, Iggy Pop and Lemmy from Motorhead. Slash also appeared on a recent single, 'Rock Star,' by Rihanna, about which I can only say I hope he was paid in cash.

Contrasting Slash with Chinese Democracy, which is in effect an Axl solo album and has maybe two good songs ('There Was A Time' and 'Catcher in the Rye'), you can definitely see that Slash - like Keith Richards and Pete Townsend - was the more important member of the band (in fact, Izzy Stradlin's 1992 solo debut Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds is also a vastly better album than Chinese Democracy, with hardly a weak track on the record).

Best Tracks: 'I Hold On' (with Kid Rock), 'Beautiful Dangerous' (with Fergie), 'Starlight' (with Myles Kennedy, who provides some of the album's best vocals and has toured as the vocalist for Slash's band).

Chickenfoot - Supergroups have a checkered history in rock, but Chickenfoot is a perfect situation for a supergroup: three low-key guys who know how to play in a band (two Van Halen veterans - Hagar and bassist Michael Anthony - and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith) unite with a spectacular talent who's never played in one (guitar god Joe Satriani). The result is a solid debut album that flat-out rocks, and more impressively, sounds like the work of guys who have been playing together for years.

Best Tracks: 'Future In The Past,' 'Soap on a Rope.'

Them Crooked Vultures - If Chickenfoot's album was a success for rock supergroups, I have to class Them Crooked Vultures as a failure. I really wanted to like this band, built around Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters. But as I went through track after track on YouTube, I heard way too much jam and not enough song. It kept sounding like they were giving us the studio sessions instead of the album. A real missed opportunity.

Gov't Mule - An Allman-Brothers style classic rock jam band, and the Allman Brothers sound isn't coincidental, as 50-year-old frontman Warren Haynes spent almost a decade as a member of the reformulated Allman Brothers starting in 1989 (he's also toured with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead after the death of Jerry Garcia). Gov't Mule is more of a live act whose studio albums are just excuses to tour, so while the band's catalog of songs is solid, it features little in the way of standout signature songs other than 'Soulshine,' a good studio track that really shines in any number of live performances.

Best Track: 'Soulshine'

Arcade Fire - Arcade Fire was another band I genuinely wanted to like, given their reputation as a quality, rising rock band, and I gave the indie darlings fronted by a husband and wife duo from Montreal a couple of looks, even going back after seeing a clip of them performing with Bruce (maybe it's just me, but the song - 'Keep the Car Running' - reminded me of John Cafferty's 'On the Dark Side'). I did like one of their songs, 'Rebellion (Lies),' and found a second, 'Intervention,' to be adequate, and might have been a good song with better sound quality. But the band fronted by a husband and wife duo from Quebec just suffers too badly from the alt-rock disease of murky production and barely-audible vocals, and seeing one of the members of the band laud "that amateur sheen, that nonprofessional sheen that I treasure," suggests that perhaps the poor production values on their recordings is a deliberate way of keeping the listener at arms' length.

Best Track: 'Rebellion (Lies)'

Ben Harper - I'll refer you to my essay on the Lost Black Voice of Rock if by now you're thinking that this list is a little too white. Anyway, there's always somebody to provide the exception to the rule, and for now that's Ben Harper, a 41-year-old Californian who combines guitar theatrics with a distinctive, gritty voice. Whichever of his various backup bands he's playing with at any given time, Ben Harper rocks.

Best Tracks: 'Shimmer & Shine,' 'Why Must You Always Dress In Black,' 'Burn to Shine.'

Spoon - One of the poppier "indie" rock bands (the horn riffs on 'The Underdog' remind me of the old Motown classic 'Build Me Up Buttercup,' but maybe that's just me), featuring the slightly gravelly voice of 39-year-old frontman Britt Daniel, Austin, Texas-based Spoon has built a steady following with seven albums dating back to the mid-90s and a fairly consistent, listener-friendly sound.

Best Tracks: 'The Underdog', 'You Got Your Cherry Bomb,' 'My Mathematical Mind,' 'I Turn My Camera On,' 'Got Nuffin.'

The Black Keys - An Akron, Ohio-based blues-rock duo that loves fuzzy guitar and throaty vocals but sometimes loves the fuzz a little too much in both, the Black Keys sound like a throwback to 50s bluesmen, but with modern technology. Like Coldplay - a very musically different band - I find them better suited as a change of pace than a band I really have a hankering to hear ten songs in a row by. The one album of theirs I own is 2010's Brothers. Their videos are often darkly witty.

Oh, and this is just concentrated awesome.

Best Tracks - 'Tighten Up,' 'Howlin' For You,' 'Unknown Brother.'

Dave Matthews Band - The 1990s jam band isn't just still going; it's coming off its most critically acclaimed album in 2009 (following the death of saxophonist Leroi Moore) and is one of the biggest touring acts of the past decade. I have two Matthews albums (Crash and Busted Stuff), one of which I got as a gift, and I still have mixed reactions to the band - I like a handful of songs on each album, but I really don't get into them.

Best Track (since 2000) - 'Grey Street'

Elton John - Some people hang it up when they're done as pop stars, some keep soldiering on in obscurity. Elton John instead headed for a natural field for his talents in middle age, finding a profitable second career writing for Broadway and Disney movies. (At last check, he was working on, of all things, an Animal Farm stage musical, when he wasn't performing at Rush Limbaugh's fourth wedding - like Bono, Sir Elton is savvy about the virtues of entertainers being civil to their political opposite numbers).

But in late 2010, Elton John went all the way back to his earliest musical roots, recording a new album, The Union, with that other early-70s piano legend, Leon Russell. (The Oklahoman Russell, now 68 and white-bearded, was last seen performing at the 2010 Grammys with the Zac Brown Band, a young country group that looks like they got lost on their way to the Lonely Mountain). The result? I went through on iTunes and found too many slow songs to be worth buying the whole album (the last thing I need in my life is nine new Elton John ballads), but the remaining tracks are really good stuff, as the gruff, flinty Russell curbs Elton John's maudlin side and brings out the best of his old time rock n' roll side.

Best Tracks - 'Hey Ahab,' 'My Kind of Hell,' 'Jimmie Rodgers' Dream,' 'If It Wasn't For Bad,' 'Hearts Have Turned To Stone.'

Kid Rock - I would never have predicted, a decade ago, that I would grow to like Kid Rock, but he has gradually been winning my respect. He's always been a guy who defied genre boundaries, and is now firmly established as a rock-country-rapper, not necessarily in that order. He's a gritty vocalist and a devotee of the sound of his fellow Michigander Bob Seger, especially his latest, the 80s-esque anthem 'Born Free.' I hated 'All Summer Long' at first for its utterly shameless use of those 70s classics 'Sweet Home Alabama' and 'Werewolves of London,' but it like Kid Rock himself, it grew on me.

He's also one of the few open Republicans in rock (he's campaigned with Sarah Palin), which is worth some good will with me but not enough that I'd listen to a Ted Nugent album voluntarily.

Best Tracks - 'All Summer Long,' 'Born Free,' 'I Hold On' (with Slash), 'Rockin' My Life Away' (with Jerry Lee Lewis and Slash).

Daughtry - Kind of a junior Nickelback, to the point where Daughtry even opened for Nickelback on a recent world tour, but Chris Daughtry does have a much better voice than Chad Kroeger, and occasionally that comes through on his songs. The 31-year-old North Carolina native also seems like a really likeable guy. I still find the band's music boring and disposable and have yet to buy any of it, but a couple of the songs are at least listenable, and I haven't ruled out Daughtry the way I have with Nickelback.

Green Day - Most of this list consists of artists who range from politically liberal to hard-shell leftist, but usually the politics is off center stage just enough to sit back and enjoy the music. Not so with Green Day, a once-juvenile punk band that must have read a few mimeographed pamphlets somewhere and decided to declare themselves public policy solons. Now, they've sent American Idiot and its Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-bashing message to Broadway. Dude: even Neil Young got over Nixon eventually.

Bon Jovi - I have to say, speaking of defying expectations, I never imagined, back in 1987 or so when I was in high school in North Jersey and listening to their albums (few of my favorite artists of that era have aged worse, besides Def Leppard, although I do still love 'Runaway'), that Bon Jovi would still be trucking along in 2011, still putting out records that get played on the radio in addition to Jon Bon Jovi's Lifetime Movie acting career; the band's put out five studio albums since 2000, and according to Wikipedia, each has sold between 3 million and 11 million copies worldwide. They're less hair band, less New Jersey and less obviously Van Halen-meets-Springsteen these days, but still very much Bon Jovi.

Best Track (since 2000): 'Who Says You Can't Go Home' (with Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland; I was astonished, after hearing the song, to discover that Nettles was a skinny white girl), 'It's My Life.'

John Mellencamp - The fifth pillar of American roots rock, along with Springsteen, Petty, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Bob Seger, the 59-year-old Indianan produced a lot of good pop-oriented rock in the 80s, and two of my favorites of his (the hypnotic 'Human Wheels' and a cover of Van Morrison's 'Wild Night') were recorded in the early 90s. The last Mellencamp album I own (or rather that my wife owns) is 2001's Cutting Heads, although I also liked his 2005 anthem 'Our Country' even after it was beaten into the ground by Chevy truck ads. Unfortunately, Mellencamp's latest album went the folk/acoustic route, so I've taken a pass.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Our Country', 'Peaceful World'.

Paul McCartney - True story: the first album I ever purchased, in vinyl, was 1982's Tug of War (don't judge: I was 10. 'Take It Away' is the only song from that album I still listen to). I basically stopped listening to his stuff after that, even when he drew good reviews for 1989's Flowers in the Dirt and 2007's Memory Almost Full, two of the eleven solo albums Sir Paul has turned out since then.

After my older brother died in November, we've been cleaning out his apartment and dividing his stuff, always a grim duty, but that means carving up his extensive CD collection. I made off with a huge amount of Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead, a bunch of Hendrix and Janis Joplin CDs, and a variety of other stuff, one of which was Memory Almost Full. And it's pretty good. A McCartney album inevitably disappoints on the first listen - for all his pop gifts, you have to listen more than once to stop expecting a Beatles record - but with only a few exceptions (the hideous 'Gratitude') it's an album you can hear through without skipping (including a number of songs in the album's second half that run together, not as a single composition like the Abbey Road medley but more like Sgt. Pepper). McCartney's voice is well-preserved for 65 (he's 68 now); you can hear the age on some songs, but not the miles. 'That Was Me' is the one track that sounds like it could have been recorded by the 1970 version of McCartney.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'That Was Me,' 'Ever Present Past,' 'Dance Tonight.'

Santana - No, I didn't expect Carlos Santana to become a pop radio star in his 50s either, and anybody who predicted that in the early 70s could only have done so by imagining a pop music landscape totally unlike the one that welcomed Santana with open arms beginning with 1999's Supernatural. His guitar style remains as distinctive as ever.

Best Tracks (since 1999): 'Smooth' (with Rob Thomas), 'The Game of Love' (with Michelle Branch), 'Into the Night' (with Chad Kroeger).

Aerosmith - To be honest, I haven't heard any Aerosmith songs other than horrible pop ballads since 1989's Pump album, and if I never heard another of those post-1990 ballads again it will be too soon. From what I can tell, Joe Perry feels the same way. For all of that, for all the band's hard-living history and threatened breakups as recently as the spring of 2010 and recent injuries (Steven Tyler's fall from a stage, Perry getting rear-ended while driving his motorcycle), they've endured remarkably well - Tyler's vocal range seems undiminished after 35 years of wailing, and they're still touring and promising new studio work, and of course Tyler is now a judge on American Idol.

Fountains of Wayne - I mentioned the Saw Doctors above as a modern heir to the Beatles' sound, but the New York City-based alternative band Fountains of Wayne qualifies as well (bassist and songwriter Adam Schlesinger wrote three songs, including the title track, for the early-60s-pop-homage Tom Hanks-written film That Thing You Do! and is also in the band Tinted Windows with members of Hanson, Smashing Pumpkins and Cheap Trick). Some of their best songs aren't entirely appropriate for mainstream radio for content or language reasons (although this didn't prevent their signature song 'Stacy's Mom' from being a hit of sorts).

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Bright Future in Sales,' 'Traffic & Weather'

The Strokes and Franz Ferdinand - Two highly similar alt-rock bands other than their geographic roots (The Strokes are from New York City, Franz Ferdinand from Scotland), both of which alternate between (1) good songs that rock over a solid grounding in pop melody and (2) songs that succumb to the alt-rock disease of unnecessarily submerged vocals. (The Killers, with the addition of a superior vocalist, are sort of the evolutionary, mainstream version of these bands, to the point where Entertainment Weekly's review of their first album quipped, "isn't it a little too early for a Strokes tribute band?").

If you've heard the Rolling Stones' 'Dance No. 1,' you have heard the roots of every Strokes guitar riff ever.

Best Tracks (The Strokes): 'Last Nite,' 'Someday,' 'You Only Live Once'

Best Tracks (Franz Ferdinand): 'Take Me Out,' 'No You Girls'

Razorlight and The Jayhawks - Two pop-rock-oriented "indie" bands with a few catchy tunes, Razorlight from England, The Jayhawks from Minnesota.

Best Tracks (Razorlight): 'Who Needs Love,' 'America,' 'Golden Touch.'

Best Tracks (The Jayhawks): 'Save It For A Rainy Day,' 'I'm Gonna Make You Love Me.'

The Wallflowers/Jakob Dylan - It's debatable who is rock's most disappointing band of the past two decades; the competition from acts like Guns n Roses, Nirvana and Living Colour, and to some extent Oasis and the Black Crowes, is stiff. But The Wallflowers are definitely on the list, a band that showed a lot of promise (and of course the Dylan pedigree) as a breakout mainstream rock band with 1996's Bringing Down The Horse. But their second album, Breach, was a step backwards and they've deteriorated ever since. I listened to a sample of each song from Dylan's last project, 2010's Women + Country, and couldn't turn it off fast enough.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Letters from the Wasteland,' 'Sleepwalker'

Radiohead - I listened through about six Radiohead songs recommended by friends and they were all slow, whiny and turgid, at which point I gave up. I know Thom Yorke has a reputation for having a great voice, and at least you can hear him loud and clear on their songs, but I ran out of patience with Radiohead before I found anything that would impress me with his vocals. They've recently made a splash in the record industry by announcing that they're abandoning albums and focusing entirely on selling individual digital song downloads.

The Ben Folds Five - I listened to a song by this band (I forget which song) and I came away thinking they were a pretty talented act that made catchy, poppy music, but that the song made me want to punch Ben Folds in the face. Fair enough, a lot of artists record something like that, so I tried another one, and another, and another - maybe about five songs. And each time, I kind of liked the music, but I still wanted to punch Ben Folds in the face. I couldn't even exactly put my finger on it, the way I can with Green Day's politics. But eventually I decided that, whatever the reason, Ben Folds' smug, hipster face would be safer if I gave up trying to enjoy his music.

Susan Tedeschi - Another female blues-rocker with a fantastic, gritty voice; I need to dig further into her music.

Best Tracks: 'Evidence,' 'Tired of My Tears'

The Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly - Given my enthusiastic following of the Saw Doctors and enjoyment of another local NY Irish band with a national following (Black 47, although I only have the one album, 1999's Live in New York City), I gave a look at some other distinctively Irish bands. Now, the Irish are probably second only to African-Americans in their impact on American music; besides Irish imports like U2, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello and the Pogues, the roster of musicians of Irish or significantly part-Irish descent includes John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, John and Tom Fogerty, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Harry Connick, Mariah Carey, Kelly Clarkson, Tim McGraw, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and Rosemary Clooney.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of Irish music: the kind you listen to after three beers at a party, and the kind you listen to after twelve beers at a wake. Your mileage may vary, but my own preference is for the former. (After one of my freshman roommates in college bombarded me with their music for a year, the only Pogues song I came away liking is 'Blue Heaven,' which not coincidentally is not gargled by Shane McGowan). The Dropkick Murphys, at least, have some upbeat songs worth a listen - I love their guitars-and-bagpipes instrumental version of 'Amazing Grace,' and 'Tessie' is an enormously fun song, plus you cannot possibly stop me from loving a song about the 1903 Red Sox that takes reasonable care to know its history (with shoutouts to Cy Young, Chick Stahl, Bill Dineen, 'Nuf Ced McGreevey and his Royal Rooters). It's maybe the best baseball rock song ever written, surpassing even John Fogerty's 'Centerfield.' They're also Springsteen fans - Bruce will appear on their next album on a new version of the nearly century-old standard Peg O'My Heart, and guitarist Tim Brennan even proposed to his girlfriend from the stage of a 2009 joint appearance with The Boss.

I'm less enamored with Flogging Molly, no doubt to the consternation of my RedState colleague Moe Lane - they're more the latter type of Irish music - but Moe has at least sold me on their song 'Float.'

OK Go - An alternative band with faintly catchy music and irritating vocals, I have to list them here because they make the best music videos ever, videos so good they landed the band's lead singer a lengthy spread in the Wall Street Journal on rethinking the economics of the music business. Really, go here and here if you've never seen one of their videos. Go now. I'll wait.

Jars of Clay - Few phrases frighten true rock fans away more quickly than "Christian rock," which conjures up images of cheesy, overly-earnest hair bands singing ham-fisted lyrics about Jesus. Yet, as I alluded to in my most recent Springsteen essay, Christian spirituality infuses the work of many of rock's giants (Bruce, U2, Van Morrison, for a time Bob Dylan) and even the occasional classic song by ordinarily non-religious artists (see The Who's 'Who Are You'). Questions of faith are too profound, and faith is too huge a part of human life, for popular music to ignore it. The difference is that artists pigeonholed as "Christian rock" acts tend to try too hard to squeeze explicit Christian witness into song rather than letting the pervasive influence of their faith flow naturally.

On the recommendation of Steve Dillard, I have recently started checking out the Christian band Jars of Clay, which has more in common in terms of sound and in terms of the more abstract, poetic lyrical style with bands like U2, The Killers and Muse than they do with Stryper, and thus far I'm positively impressed, but haven't delved far into their catalog.

Best Tracks: 'Work,' 'Good Monsters.'

Gogol Bordello - A band that mixes punk rock with Romanian folk music and sounds pretty much exactly like what you'd expect from that description. They were recommended by a reader; not my speed, but worth a look on YouTube if you're in the mood for something very different and think that might be to yours.

Wasted Tape - Patterico pointed me to HUTT, a free-for-download collection by this LA-based indie band that makes quality rock, at least some of it pop-friendly to my ears (not pop-rock, but more the kind of stuff you get from, say, the Kings of Leon if they were fronted by the Gin Blossoms' Jesse Valenzuela). I haven't explored the rest of their stuff but it's a good album.

Best Tracks: ''Too Far Gone,' 'The Bean King,' 'Friend The Monster.'

Part III: The State of Pop and Other Current Radio Formats (the Artists)

Part IV: The Rest, and the Best Albums of 2009 and 2010

Part I - Overview

Part II: The State of Rock and Alternative (the Artists)

The State of Pop and Other Current Radio Formats

Kelly Clarkson - The best thing going in current pop, and an interesting personality to boot, for reasons I explained at exhaustive length in this essay and this concert review, is the original American Idol, Kelly Clarkson, now in her creative prime at age 28.

Among Clarkson's virtues is that she's the best balladeer in current music. As should be clear from some of my comments in Part II of this essay and below, I'm fairly picky about ballads (defining ballads broadly to include any sort of slow or quiet song); I love a good one, but not everybody's cut out for them, and the presence of a whole bunch of them on an album is as often as not a sign of creative failure. Instead, too many artists seem to think that doing slower, quieter or acoustic songs is some sort of statement of artistic credibility rather than a failure to properly practice their craft. (There's a reason why I prefer the live versions of virtually every song on Springsteen albums like Nebraska and Ghost of Tom Joad). As a rule of thumb, if you have more than two ballads on an album, you better have a very good reason, and few do. Even the greatest balladeer of all, Frank Sinatra, really needed to have about half the songs on any given album be more uptempo or risk inducing the snooze. Clarkson's last album had, depending how you count them, four or five ballads, and even for her that's getting close to the limit.

Clarkson doesn't seem to be done with her famously acrimonious relationship with her record label; it appears that she's back in record-company limbo, unable to release her followup to 2009's excellent All I Ever Wanted, possibly due to a management shakeup at her label. Since I last wrote about her in 2009, however, she has managed to keep doing the things she does best. She's produced more impressive live covers; I was particularly taken with her cover of When in Rome's 'The Promise,' which took a classic 80s pop song and replaced its mournful tone with a decidedly Springsteenish edge of desperate commitment (it reminded me of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down.') She lent her voice to 'Don't You Wanna Stay,' a power-ballad duet with country star Jason Aldean. She performed the National Anthem at Game 3 of the World Series in Texas, raving afterwards about meeting Nolan Ryan (aside from current and former owners like Ryan and George W. Bush, Clarkson is about all the Rangers have in terms of celebrity fans). She's continued to find herself in controversies sought and unsought, from a broadside against the head of Taylor Swift's record label for dissing American Idol to finding herself caught in the crosshairs of a coalition of left-wing anti-smoking zealots and fatwah-waving mullahs after the promoters of her Asian tour lined up a cigarette company as a sponsor for her show in Jakarta (Clarkson complained about being "used as some kind of political pawn," but the sponsorship was ultimately pulled). Clarkson also got a bunch of her unreleased demos stolen by German hackers who apparently had a fairly sophisticated scam to hack the computers of a bunch of pop stars; while others, like Ke$ha and possibly Lady Gaga, seem to have paid the Dane-geld when threatened by the hackers with blackmail, Clarkson went to the FBI after receiving a tip from her German fan club, leading to the hackers' arrest by the German authorities. Clarkson joined Twitter about a year ago, and characteristically alternated between touting other artists, indulging her goofy sense of humor, sharing pictures of her farm animals, sniping back at random nutjobs bashing her on the internet, and indulging her music-industry-curmudgeon streak with tweets bemoaning lip-syncing, pantsless pop stars, and the poor quality of current radio hits. Typical of her relationship with her fans, on one occasion she announced on Twitter that she was headed to a bar in Nashville to do karaoke with whoever showed up off the street (you can see her in the middle doing her best Axl Rose impression here).

Best Tracks - 'Addicted,' 'How I Feel,' 'All I Ever Wanted,' 'Walk Away,' 'Never Again,' 'Since U Been Gone,' 'Close Your Eyes.'

Maroon 5 - I covered Maroon 5, the best pop band that still gets played on the radio today (which says maybe more about the state of pop bands today) and a 21st century answer to The Cars, in this summer concert review. Since then, the band has released its third studio album, Hands All Over, continuing their run of deep-in-quality records.

Best Tracks - 'Won't Go Home Without You,' 'Little of Your Time,' 'Wake Up Call,' 'The Sun,' 'Stutter.'

Hanson - I've written previously about the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based 1990s boy band's single 'Thinkin' Bout Something' (and its Blues Brothers homage video), which for my money is the best pop song of 2010. Hanson is all grown up now, ranging in age from 25-30 (oldest brother Isaac on the brothers all being married with kids: "I actually don't think that we're off the majority of this country's standards. I think it's mostly a coastal thing"). Despite clever viral promotion, the band's residual name recognition and high-profile TV appearances on shows like Letterman and the Today Show, as well as the simple fact that it's a better song than their worldwide hits of 13 years ago, 'Thinkin' Bout Something' got essentially ignored by Top 40 radio, a tribute to the difficulty of getting played on the radio without the support of a major record label.

Going beyond one song, let me now sing the praises of the entire album, Shout it Out - it's basically a Southside Johnny album (note: this is a high compliment), like Sheryl Crow's latest a deliberate homage to the Motown/Stax sound with vintage Motown horn arrangements and Ray Charles style keyboards. The band takes its influences seriously, saying the album "harkens back to the type of music they listened to as kids - '50s and '60s rock 'n' roll, Motown and R&B, like Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin." (And more contemporary throwbacks as well - on one recent tour, they regularly did a passable cover of Gov't Mule's 'Soulshine'). Granted, Taylor Hanson (the middle brother and primary vocalist) doesn't have Southside Johnny's thick, soulful voice, but he and his brothers do fine with the album's numerous upbeat tracks; the only downside is that they all lack the voice to pull off ballads, of which the album has two ('Use Me Up,' sung by drummer Zac, is especially excruciating, and 'Make It Through Today,' sung by guitarist Isaac, is also a dud), but that's a small price to pay for a talented band that's making good, fun, lively new music in a genre that's lain fallow for far too long, and doing it their way after going the indie route following a bitter and draining war with their record label.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Thinkin Bout Something,' 'And I Waited,' 'Make it Out Alive,' 'This Time Around'.

She & Him - She & Him is, as you may know, the indie-pop band that grew from Zooey Deschanel deciding to branch out into music as a recording artist rather than just an occasional on-film singer, culminating in the release of the band's first album, Volume One, in 2008. Surprisingly, not only does Deschanel have a gorgeous voice, she's also the band's principal songwriter and keyboard player, with guitarist M. Ward handling most of the rest of the musical arranging.

Basically, Zooey Deschanel is Katy Perry if Katy Perry had talent and class instead of big breasts. I'm not sure if Perry would take that trade. Yet despite the fact that Deschanel was a winsome, famous movie star for years before Perry arrived on the music scene in the same year (2008) and has more musical talent and makes incredibly catchy pop, She & Him remains a niche music act unknown to pop radio audiences. Granted, pop songs don't market themselves and the rollout for She & Him was deliberately low-key, but it's still an indictment of the current pop scene that the Top 40 radio stations that once gave Eddie Murphy a hit record wouldn't try their hand at She & Him's songs.

2010's Volume Two is in the same style as Volume One, but not quite as good; continuing my complaint about ballads there are a few many slow/quiet tunes. Still, enough good stuff to be worth buying if you enjoyed the first go-round.

Oddly for a successful actress, Deschanel's stage presence has tended to be rather wooden and disconnected from the audience (her voice is still great in clips of her live performances); or maybe not so oddly, since her stock in trade as an actress has been her deadpan, monotone expressionlessness. Either way, more recent appearances promoting Volume Two have seen her get a lot livelier and more comfortable as a live performer.

Best Tracks: 'Sweet Darlin,' 'Black Hole,' 'Why Do You Let Me Stay Here,' 'I Was Made For You,' 'In the Sun,' 'Don't Look Back.'

Gin Blossoms - One of the very best pop bands of the 1990s reunited after breaking up in 1997, and put out a new album, Major Lodge Victory, in 2006, and a second, No Chocolate Cake, in the fall of 2010. Both had the old Gin Blossoms sound - the new stuff isn't on par with their earlier albums, but it's listenable and each had a few good songs. Odds on them recording another 'Hey Jealousy' are slim. The Arizona-based band has been on the road visiting the troops overseas and performed a free concert after the memorial in Tuscon following the recent shootings.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Come on Hard,' 'Wave Bye Bye'.

David Cook - The winner of the seventh season of American Idol in 2008, Cook has the vocal chops to be the next Bob Seger (I admit I'm sort of arbitrarily listing him with the pop artists and Daughtry with the rock artists, but Cook is still establishing himself). The question mark is his material, which on his first album leaned far too heavily on ballads. Don't get me wrong: I liked the album and Cook can deliver a good ballad, but it dragged in spots and could have used some crisper uptempo numbers. Judging from early clips of his next album, there seem to be some tracks with a Police influence. I'd love to see Cook have some pop hits, if only to prove that a non-rapper who sounds like a grown man can still get played on the Top 40.

Cook has suffered family tragedy - the death of his older brother to a brain tumor - and on a lighter note, the 28-year-old Missouri native is also a dedicated Kansas City Royals fan, which should give him plenty of blues to sing for the foreseeable future.

Best Track: 'Light On'

Harry Connick; Brian Setzer Orchestra - I covered these two veteran crooners here. I'm still hoping for something livelier from Connick.

Best Tracks (since 2000): Connick: 'Your Song,' 'Jambalaya (On the Bayou).' Setzer: 'Americano,' 'Mack the Knife,' and a couple of tracks off his Christmas albums.

Michael Buble - A fantastic Big Band singer like Connick and Setzer, albeit with fewer original songs or arrangements; the 35-year-old Canadian crooner mostly sticks to singing the standards, which he does quite well. Unlike Connick, he shows no signs of departing from the formula that serves his talents best. Buble can sometimes overdose on the bombast, as with his version of 'Cry Me A River'.

Best Tracks: 'Haven't Met You Yet,' 'At This Moment.'

Melody Gardot - Traditional if quirky torch singer with a compelling, unique voice.

Best Track: 'Baby, I'm A Fool'

(I could add a writeup here on Norah Jones, who has one or two songs worth a spin, but Ravi Shankar's daughter is way more well known than there is anything interesting to say about her).

Pink - Pink (or, if you must, P!nk) is one of those artists with a decidedly schizophrenic body of work. On the one hand, the 31-year-old from Doylestown, Pennsylvania made her name singing what amounts to club music, which I can't stand, and her public image always seemed deliberately obnoxious. On the other hand, she's got a fantastic voice, with that Joan Jett/Joplin style throaty rasp, and since she started recording more pop-rock type tracks with hitmaker Max Martin, she's won me over on a few songs, especially 'Who Knew,' one of the best pop songs written on the subject of grief. The Funhouse album also has some good bluesy-rock-ish album tracks behind the singles. And from what I've seen of her in interviews, she's blunt (eg, her assessment of Kanye West) but otherwise fairly laid-back. She's also made a name for herself with her acrobatic live performances, like singing while suspended upside-down from a trapeze. Strangely for someone with her vocal talents, however, Pink's ballads are just awful, dull and lifeless; she needs somebody to get her a ballad worthy of her voice. Pink is presently on something of a hiatus while expecting her first child, but still spinning pop hits off her recently-released Greatest Hits album.

Best Tracks: 'Who Knew,' 'Please Don't Leave Me,' 'One Foot Wrong.'

Rob Thomas - The former Matchbox 20 frontman grew up as an Army brat; now 38 and with solo albums released in 2005 and 2009, he's one of the most reliable producers of mid-tempo pop-rock in the business, the most successful artist in modern 'adult contemporary' radio, occupying roughly the musical space inhabited by Phil Collins in the 80s.

Best Tracks: 'Smooth,' 'Her Diamonds.'

Colbie Caillat - An understated singer; as a vocalist, Caillat is a female James Taylor, though she's obviously not his match as a songwriter. The 25-year-old Californian actually auditioned for American Idol and failed to get out of the auditions, which is maybe unsurprising given her anemic reputation as a live performer, but her records are pleasant and mellow, good filler for a large iTunes playlist.

Best Tracks - 'Midnight Bottle,' 'Don't Hold Me Down,' 'Never Let You Go.'

The Black Eyed Peas - I hate the Black Eyed Peas, and all their works, and all their empty promises. The band's brand of mechanized hip-hop combines so many different forms of awfulness, from its repetitiousness to its artificiality to the near-complete absence of any human emotion, that it's almost impossible to list them all. It's easier to note what's missing: melodies, good vocals, instruments, and lyrics that connect with either head or heart. Their only redeeming feature was when their manager punched out Perez Hilton, who may be the most awful person on the entire internet (a crowded field). I am halfway tempted to boycott Sunday's Super Bowl rather than have to see even a promo for their halftime show.

It gets worse: listening to Fergie's song 'Beautiful Dangerous' on Slash's album and a few of her other live performances of rock songs (see here and here) only made me hate the Peas all the more for the fact that she's wasting real talent as a rock singer on this band's crimes against music (as well as her own heinous solo work). If the Peas traded Fergie to Nickelback for Chad Kroeger, both bands would be improved immeasurably (tell me you could picture Chad Kroeger singing 'My Humps' and not crack a smile).

Fun fact: Fergie got her start doing the voice of Sally on some Peanuts specials in the 80s.

Taylor Swift - I'm not a teenage girl, never was one and frankly never understood one, so Taylor Swift is not on my playlist, but through my wife and older daughter I've been bombarded with her three albums. The gangly, elfin 21-year-old pop/country singer's talent as a crafter of pop music is undeniable - you can't teach the ability to write a melody like 'You Belong With Me' (which Swift wrote with a writing partner who's collaborated on a number of her hits), to say nothing of her ability to write lyrics that capture the fairytale princess world that girls cling to as their last defense against the freighteningly cynical and responsible world of adulthood. Unusually for a country artist, Swift is from Eastern Pennsylvania, but then her monster hit record Fearless is more a pop than a country album, and its successor, 2010's Speak Now, is really not that much more country. As a vocalist, she's basically Avril Lavigne without the permanent sneer.

Swift is a pleasant, appealing personality who seems like a good role model and has good sense of herself. Parents of preteen and teen daughters agree: the world could use more like her. One hopes she'll remain relatively unspoiled by her early and enormous success, although a long string of Hollywood boyfriends is probably not the way I'd recommend for her to do that. It remains to be seen if she can seamlessly navigate the tricky transition to adulthood, musically, commercially and emotionally.

Maybe it's just me, but the tune and pacing of 'The Story of Us,' from Speak Now, sounds a lot like the Killers' 'Mr. Brightside.'

Best Tracks - 'You Belong With Me,' 'Love Story,' 'I'm Only Me When I'm With You'

Lady Gaga - Comedy, tragedy, or all just an act? Nothing about the 24-year-old Manhattanite is certain; performance art is the name of the game, so it's always an iffy proposition to take her statements, or much of anything in her biography or carefully crafted public image, at face value. The onetime Stefani Germanotta has a good voice - when she's not burying it with mechanical effects - and is a talented pianist, and she apparently started off as more of a rock artist (her stage name comes from the Queen song Radio GaGa, and she's a professed Springsteen fan), although the extent to which she moved into electronic dance music as a natural musical development, an effort to get noticed, or a marketing strategy handed her by others is subject to some debate. (She does, however, write her own stuff; the talent is genuine, just as her impact on the rest of the pop music scene is undeniable). Judging by her appearance on this MTV show from 2005 (she's the one in black), she was also once a fairly normal-looking Italian girl, not the walking freakshow in a suit of meat or Kermit the Frog heads she is today.

Gaga's mechanical music pretends to be ambitious, but that's not the same as saying there's any real content to it, as hilariously illustrated by Christopher Walken's dramatic reading of the lyrics to 'Poker Face.' She has a knack for writing memorable choruses - I even confess to liking the anthemic, ABBA-style chorus to 'Bad Romance' - but they're just brief respites from the throbbing monotony of the rest of her songs.

If Katy Perry is - as discussed below - all about the joy of lust, Gaga is her opposite. As Camille Paglia has noted, Gaga may present herself as drenched in sex, but her image and music are full of sex without fun, sex without passion, sex without genuine emotion, and of course her image is that of a sickly drag queen, devoid of even an attempt to appeal to heterosexual men. (Her marketing to, and bond with, gay men is another subject in its entirety, and certainly central to her career). Taken seriously, 'Poker Face' is nothing if not a renunciation of intimacy. In that context, her declaration of celibacy - again, if taken at face value - seems less the useful caution it might appear, and more a symptom of emotional dysfunction. "I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone, they're going to take my creativity from me through my vagina," she contends.

What makes Gaga a potentially tragic figure is the possibility that some of this isn't an act, that like Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, she has demons that are inseparable from her talents and driving her to an inevitable doom. She's confessed to using cocaine, and of course no cocaine user can ever really be trusted to accurately describe the extent to which they have it under control. Her weight has fluctuated and at times plunged dangerously, and she's collapsed a few times on stage, possibly for real (there are recurrent rumors of her record label worrying about her health). Her video and stage imagery is full of what might be cries for help, as she's frequently shown injured or bathed in blood. As dissimilar as they are, artists like Clarkson, Perry and Beyonce give off a certain zest for living; Gaga seems as if she might well prefer to be a martyr, to be hung on dorm room walls with John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix.

Or maybe she just wants you to buy the poster.

Katy Perry - Practically the dictionary definition of an "It Girl," the shapely, bug-eyed 26-year-old Californian has mastered the art of being ogled; listening to Katy Perry on the radio makes about as much sense as watching Joe Cocker with the sound off. She's the worst live vocalist I have ever seen, completely lacking in singing talent of any kind; even her studio recordings can only do so much to mask this. She can't dance or play an instrument, either, and while she's playful and occasionally witty, it's never not about her sex appeal. Even her controversial appearance on Sesame Street ended up being nixed because she insisted on wearing a low-cut dress completely inappropriate to the occasion. Her husband, chronically disreputable British actor Russell Brand (his bio reads like his life has been scripted by Ricky Gervais), won the UK Sun's "Shagger of the Year" award so many times they renamed the thing after him.

Like Lady Gaga, Perry isn't entirely what her public persona makes her out to be; her real name is Katy Hudson (discarded for obvious reasons), and she was raised by Christian preacher parents and started her career as a gospel singer, the residue of which was briefly on display when she griped in the aftermath of one of Lady Gaga's Madonna-esque videos that "Using blasphemy as entertainment is as cheap as a comedian telling a fart joke". (Anyone familiar with Perry's Twitter feed will notice that she has nothing against fart jokes, lots and lots and lots of them). But Perry is all about selling records these days, so she swiftly issued an unclarification. God forbid the girl should have any principles.

Perry's verbal wit makes her an occasionally clever songwriter - the two songs she wrote for Clarkson's last album were good pop songs, and at least 'Hot n Cold' had a memorable chorus - but as long as she's limited by her own voice and hemmed in by the need to sell sex with every syllable, she'll remain a blight on radio.

Beyonce - Diana Ross 2.0, upgraded and fully armed and operational, the New York Yankees of pop. The 29-year-old from Houston is an unstoppable commercial and entertainment juggernaut, probably the most commercially successful musician since Michael Jackson and Madonna. Even if - like me - you don't like her style of music, you can't help but respect her beauty, her tremendous voice, her dancing skills and her all-around work ethic; her success is comforting if you want to think of pop music as a meritocracy that rewards talent, effort and discipline. On the other hand, she also comes off as cold, imperious and ruthless (she's been sued multiple times for copyright infringement), and that can't help but be projected in her music; she's no more capable than Madonna of conveying real emotional vulnerability, no more a likeable underdog than Derek Jeter.

John Mayer - Mayer, a 33-year-old from Fairfield, Connecticut, is living proof that being an interesting and talented guy is not the same as making interesting music. Mayer is certainly good copy - he's smart, good-looking, independent-minded, a near-legendary Lothario with a long string of celebrity conquests, and can be wickedly funny, as illustrated by his once-frenetic Twitter feed (since discontinued; the highlight was his savage and thoroughly deserved mocking of Perez Hilton after the Black Eyed Peas incident, but some reports blamed his excessive tweeting for his breakup with Jennifer Aniston), his broadside against the Huffington Post, and his self-satirical FunnyorDie video. None of that is the same as saying he's an admirable guy, as he's courted controversy for interviews where he used racial slurs and talked wayyyy too much out of school about the famous women in his sex life. And that's before we get to his oddball politics, such as his mouthy support for Ron Paul for President.

Mayer is reputedly a very talented guitarist in concert, but his languid singing style seems to lack even the energy and ambition to finish a sentence without trailing off, and his musical ambitions seem limited to whatever can get him into the next bed. Which seems unnecessary; the man's a rock star. It's not as if, say, the members of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones ever had trouble with the ladies. But Mayer simply won't try to be anything more.

Jack Johnson - If you found John Mayer asleep and nursing a wicked hangover and shot him full of elephant tranquilizers, he'd be Jack Johnson, a singer so mellow he makes Fred Rogers sound like Motorhead. You might not hear John Lennon's 'Imagine' and think, "this song is way too hard core and needs to be slowed down significantly," but that's why you're not Jack Johnson. Suitable only for lullabies.

Jason Mraz - 33-year-old former tobacco-store operator from Mechanicsville, Virginia, Mraz is a light-pop singer but jauntier and more energetic than Mayer's ilk, and enjoyed colossal success with the 2007 hit 'I'm Yours,' which is kind of overrated but still a fun song. Mraz is living proof that if you take a goofy-looking guy and have him wear a porkpie hat everywhere, all anyone will remember is the porkpie hat.

Best Tracks: 'I'm Yours,' 'Butterfly,' 'Make It Mine.'

The Fray and The Script - Honestly, it took me a while to be convinced that these were two different bands (The Script are the ones from Ireland). I may eventually be won over to a couple of The Fray's songs, but it will take some persuading.

Mariah Carey - Has anybody ever wasted as much talent on as much terrible music as Mariah Carey? The 40-something from Huntington, Long Island is a beautiful woman with a gorgeous, almost unbelievable voice, but nearly all of her music is awful, and on top of that she's gotten progressively loopier over time. The only good stuff she's ever produced is the Motown-style tunes on her 1994 Christmas album. Presently expecting twins. It seems too late in her long and inarguably lucrative career for her to come to her musical senses.

Christina Aguilera - Same story as Mariah Carey, and despite her obvious gifts the 30-year-old ex-Mouseketeer from Staten Island seems to be sputtering commercially due to her persistently awful material and charmless public persona. Then again, her performance with the Rolling Stones suggests that maybe despite her natural vocal talents, Aguilera's not really that skilled a vocalist; given the chance to sing a rock classic, she didn't do much more than growl. (I love the sax solo in that video, by the way). You can confirm the same impression by going here to hear her do to 'Imagine' what Mark David Chapman did to its composer. She has her sights next on the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.

Whitney Houston - Drugs are bad, hmmkay? Hard living and age seem to have destroyed her once-beautiful voice.

Britney Spears - Lament all you will Britney Spears' dolorous impact on our culture and on the pop music world over the past 13 years and I will join you in every note. The Louisianan ex-Mouseketeer long symbolized the oversexualization of underage girls, needed all sorts of studio help with her voice to produce acres of terrible music, and has a rap sheet of stupid or provocative behavior a mile wide. (Clarkson, yet again, had the definitive reaction when Britney shaved her head).

But I'll give her this: Britney Spears is a survivor. Nobody thought she'd still be a major music star at age 29 (around 1999 I'd have made book on the big-voiced Aguilera outlasting her), and earlier in this past decade you'd have had even odds she'd be dead, in jail or in a mental ward by now. Instead, even with her meager vocal gifts, she's still cranking out top-10 singles, is still a first-name-basis household name, seems to have passed over the worst of her acting-out-and-possibly-mentally-ill stage, and is virtually the only under-40 artist on the annual lists of best-selling tours even though she lip-syncs her live act. Maybe the self-destructive three-ring circus of her personal life is only on a temporary lull - there are still signs of that - but for now, given the limitations of her talents and personality, she's had the last laugh.

Justin Timberlake - I knew Justin Timberlake for his comedy (he's the funniest man in music and could legitimately make a living as a sketch comic), his tabloid romances, his stylish image (three piece suits are always classy) and his involvement in the infamous Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction," but I'd never actually listened to any of his music. Turns out I'd missed nothing. Comparing his whiny hit 'Cry Me a River' to the Joe Cocker version of the classic of the same name is enough to make you weep not only for the state of music but of manhood itself. Stick to the funnies, Boo Boo.

Ke$ha - Just when you thought pop starlets could not possibly get any worse, along comes Ke$ha, the 23-year-old icon of poor hygiene and faux rap. Other pop starlets have some redeeming quality - they have a good singing voice, or are good writers, or are good dancers, or are pleasant to look at, or play an instrument, or if all else fails seem like reasonably wholesome characters or compelling personalities. Ke$ha (I believe the dollar sign is supposed to be stupidly ironic instead of just stupid) strikes out on all counts - she's basically just postured 'attitude' and marketing. Maybe this explains how she got that way.

The chorus to her hit 'Your Love is My Drug' owes a major debt to Hall & Oates' 'Your Kiss Is On My List.'

Orianthi - Picture Joe Satriani or Stevie Vai as a slim, exotic-looking twentysomething blonde woman, and you have Orianthi, a guitar hero badly miscast as a pop starlet on account of her gender, age and looks. She can axe but she sure can't sing, and hopefully will move on to a role better suited to her gifts. Like Sheryl Crow, she got her big break working for Michael Jackson, as a guitarist in his final tour (she was hired after playing the Eddie Van Halen solo for the Gloved One, once).

Avril Lavigne - I admit a few guilty pleasures among the earlier works by the diminutive, sneering black-eyed Canadian pop-rocker, who amazingly enough is still only 26.

Best Tracks: 'Complicated,' 'My Happy Ending,' 'Sk8ter Boi.'

Sara Bareilles - A similar kind of female singer-songwriter to Caillat who'd been talked up by a number of people, but while I gave her a listen, none of Bareilles' songs really had a catchy melody (too many stops and starts), and in combination with her too-precious-by-a-half lyrics, I gave up after about three or four songs.

Train - I admit it: I liked Train's earlier hits, stuff like 'Drops of Jupiter' and 'Calling All Angels' and even 'Meet Virginia.' They seem like they aspire to be Huey Lewis & the News for the 21st century. But their comeback has been utterly insipid, fueled by the trying-too-hard 'Hey Soul Sister'. A band with this little soul to start with shouldn't sell what was left. (This assault on that song is over the top but good for a few laughs.)

Owl City - I had the misfortune of seeing Owl City live this past summer, opening for Maroon 5; I wrote up the experience here, and hope not to relive it.

Carrie Underwood - If you were to set out to create the perfect female country star in a laboratory, you'd end up with something very closely resembling the winner of American Idol's fourth season in 2005: a pretty, blonde Oklahoma farm girl with a relatively demure personality with no rough edges and a powerhouse voice. My country collection is pretty slender, so I can't say I've heard anything from her I'd listen to voluntarily, but Underwood is precisely what Idol needs to find more of if the show wants to survive.

Jordin Sparks - Besides Clarkson, the only American Idol winner to make her home on Top 40 radio, and do so with some measure of success. Sparks seems like a sweet, wholesome kid with a good voice, but her music is bland and unmemorable. Physically, she's enormous, almost certainly the only female pop star I can recall who's built more like a WNBA center. She's also co-chairing a project with Nick Jonas to raise youth awareness of Ronald Reagan in time for the Gipper's 100th birthday this weekend.

Leona Lewis - In the category of Most Boring Ballad Ever Recorded, nobody's scored more entries than Leona Lewis, the best-known winner of the X Factor, the UK's version of American Idol. Last seen doing underwear commercials; she's probably the only female pop star who could make underwear boring. Her more upbeat pop track 'Bleeding Love' is listenable.

Best Track: 'Bleeding Love'

The Jonas Brothers and Justin Bieber - Yesterday's and today's pop stars du jour for teenyboppers. The Jonas Brothers are, in the classic Disney tradition, inoffensive and seemingly squeaky-clean, and their watered-down pop-rock, while without any real appeal, at least doesn't make me immediately feel the need to flee to another station. They are what they are.

As for Bieber, the 16-year-old Canadian (he was a month old when Kurt Cobain shot himself, if you want to feel old) makes the Jonas Brothers sound like Otis Redding by comparison; even his hairdo, which Tom Brady appropriated in an effort to determine what it takes for a supermodel-dating, Super Bowl winning NFL quarterback to overdraw his Man Card, is more annoying than the Jo Bros' malt-shop pompadours. That said, I do admire the kid's pluck for making his own career path; he basically marketed himself over the internet to get famous.

Best Tracks: No, really, you didn't ask me that.

Miley Cyrus - If you enjoyed the Lindsay Lohan Experience the first time, fear not, you'll get to watch it again! A completely predictable train wreck, still in the relatively early stages.

Unfortunately, what Cyrus didn't inherit from her father Billy Ray is a good singing voice.

Bruno Mars - No, I couldn't pick his music out of a police lineup from that of Jason DeRulo, Taio Cruz, Jay Sean, Enrique Iglesias, or about fifteen other of these guys that seem to come out of a factory somewhere, singing prefabricated machine-driven corporate hip-hop that sounds as if it was designed by a committee and produced by a focus group. (I at least know who Jamie Foxx is from his movies, but his music is in the same vein). The whole lot of them should be locked in a room somewhere for a month with a turntable and a stack of Wilson Pickett, Four Tops and Temptations records and told not to come out until they know what soul sounds like.

Amy Winehouse - Musicians are famous for their dissolute lifestyles, but only occasionally are they so comprehensively messed-up that it becomes impossible to enjoy their music; I like the style Winehouse works in, but she's so repellent - and her singing style so idiocyncratic - that I just can't get into any of it. A shame.

Jewel - The best, or at least most tolerable to my ears, of her generation of Lillith Fair female folk singers (Sarah McLachlan has a lovely voice but bores me to tears; Alanis Morrissette's sneering is unlistenable), the 36-year-old yodeling Alaskan is still trucking along, now married to a prominent rodeo cowboy and expecting her first child. Jewel hit it big in 1995, but she's put out five studio albums since 2000, two since moving to a small label. Her preening pretentiousness can be tiresome at times, but at others she pulls off some decent songs, especially on the pop-oriented 0304, released in 2003. She's also got a sense of humor, as seen in this FunnyorDie video of her doing karaoke undercover, and was a rare dissenting voice of sanity in the 2009 flap over Roman Polanski.

Best Tracks (since 2000): 'Standing Still,' 'Run 2 U,' 'Sweet Temptation,' 'Yes U Can.'

KT Tunstall, Duffy, and Natasha Bedingfield - Three female singers from the UK who seem to have had trouble following up their hits. Tunstall, a 35-year-old Scottish folk/pop singer who hit it big with 2004's Eye to the Telescope, has effectively disappeared from popular consciousness without a trace despite releasing two subsequent albums, in 2007 and 2010. Duffy, an odd-looking 26-year-old Welsh pop singer, had huge success with 2008's Rockferry, but from my early listen to her followup, I don't hear anything worth a second look. The same goes for Bedingfield, a 29-year-old English R&B singer, who had a couple decent enough tracks off 2008's Pocketful of Sunshine.

Best Tracks: Tunstall - 'Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,' 'Suddenly I See,'; Duffy - 'Mercy,' 'Rain on Your Parade'; Bedingfield, 'Pocketful of Sunshine,' 'Put Your Arms Around Me.'

Kris Allen & Lee DeWyze - While I've never watched American Idol, as you can see from this list, I do give the show credit for doing a decent job as a gatekeeper in identifying talented singers. But nothing emblemizes the decline of Idol as a talent pipeline more than the show's last two winners, both of whom are basically in the John Mayer mold of low-wattage male singer, too light and mellow either for rock or for Top 40 radio. I can't see either of these guys having any significant upside as recording artists, which is what a show like Idol is supposed to promise. Maybe the judge the show really needs is Bluto.

Jay-Z - I'm no rap guy and never will be - I own just a few rap songs, mostly pop-rap from my college days. But there are a few things about Jay-Z that I can at least respect. First, the man legitimately cares about music; unlike a number of his rap colleagues, he seems to make an effort to incorporate actual instruments and women with singing talent into his songs, and even went so far as to record an anti-Auto-Tune song, 'DOA (Death of Auto-Tune).' And second, he's a fantastically successful businessman, arguably far more successful as a mogul than a musician. The 41-year-old from Bed-Stuy is also pushing the limits of age in a field where the leading rappers have tended to be dead by his age. His marriage to Beyonce made them music's ultimate power couple, all the way to the White House Situation Room.

Part IV: The Rest, and the Best Albums of 2009 and 2010

Part I - Overview

Part II: The State of Rock and Alternative (the Artists)

Part III: The State of Pop and Other Current Radio Formats (the Artists)

The Best Albums of the Last Three Years

Top Ten Albums of 2010:

1. Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
2. Slash, Slash
3. Hanson, Shout It Out
4. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Mojo
5. Maroon 5, Hands All Over
6. Brandon Flowers, Flamingo
7. Sheryl Crow, 100 Miles From Memphis
8. The Saw Doctors, Further Adventures of...The Saw Doctors
9. The Black Keys, Brothers
10. She & Him, Volume Two

Honorable Mention - Kings of Leon, Come Around Sundown; Gin Blossoms, No Chocolate Cake.

Top Ten Albums of 2008-09:

1. Kelly Clarkson, All I Ever Wanted
2. The Killers, Day & Age
3. Bruce Springsteen, Working on a Dream
4. She & Him, Volume One
5. Kings of Leon, Only By The Night
6. Chickenfoot, Chickenfoot
7. U2, No Line on the Horizon
8. David Cook, David Cook
9. Brian Setzer, Songs From Lonely Avenue
10. Muse, Resistance

Honorable mention: Pink, Funhouse; Michael Buble, Crazy Love

The Remainders

That concludes my look at the people I've had enough exposure to to have something worth saying about them. Here's a quick look at the rest.

Not Worth My Time

There are a bunch of other recently active acts I've sampled or been exposed to and come away unimpressed, but who weren't really worth a full writeup:

Linkin Park
Phoenix
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Vampire Weekend
Mumford & Sons
My Morning Jacket
Limp Bizkit
MGMT
Florence and the Machine
Rihanna
Band of Horses
Susan Boyle
JoJo
Shinedown
Alicia Keys
OneRepublic
The Plain White Ts
The All-American Rejects
Adam Lambert
Wolfmother
Pomplamoose
Josh Groban
Lily Allen
The Goo Goo Dolls
Lil' Wayne (his "rock" effort; obviously I'm not interested in rap)
Rage Against the Machine (Tom Morello has a good voice and unique guitar skills, but I'm not into Stalinism)

Grades Incomplete

I'm not done; there are definitely a host of other artists I know I need to give a longer listen to, including:

-Wilco, which I'm hesitant to judge on a quick first impression.

-Most of Weezer's catalog (I only know 'Buddy Holly,' which is a really good song and a better video, and 'Island in the Sun'; I'm assured that there's more good stuff out there - they've put out nine studio albums - and Rivers Cuomo has a good pop music voice).

-Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, an old-school R&B act.

-Airborne Toxic Event (I've liked what I've heard so far, especially 'Gasoline' and 'Sometime Around Midnight,' I just haven't gone far enough to figure out how many good songs they have).

-Josh Ritter (I like 'Rumor' and 'Mind's Eye')

-Alter Bridge (Myles Kennedy, the lead singer, did a couple of solid turns on Slash's album)

-The Toadies

-AC/DC's output since 1981's For Those About To Rock, especially 2008's Black Ice.

-Bob Dylan's output since 1990's Under the Red Sky; I have a few of his later CDs now from my brother's collection.

-Rush's albums since 1991's Roll the Bones.

-Paramore, which has a couple decent-sounding songs, although I suspect I won't like enough of their stuff to buy more than a song or two.

-Tinted Windows.

-The rest of Black47's output besides 1998's outstanding Live in New York City.

-I need to give a fair hearing to Creed, but I seem to recall checking them out at one point and not being impressed. They seem to be hated by most of the same people who hate Nickelback, which should tell me something.

-Metallica's post-Black Album output (I did check out their album of covers, and didn't like most of them other than their cover of Bob Seger's 'Turn the Page,' which - this being neither here nor there - was used as Adam Dunn's music at Nationals Park).

-Possibly a few more of the suggestions from the comments to this post.

One Song Only

Other artists I've picked up just one post-2000 song by, but haven't yet heard anything suggesting I should dig deeper:

The Fratellis - 'Chelsea Dagger' (now that is a pop song).
Rock Kills Kid - 'Paralyzed'
Outkast - 'Hey Ya'
Cage the Elephant - 'Ain't No Rest For The Wicked'
Robert Francis - 'Junebug' (hat tip to Joe Posnanski on Francis, who bears watching)
The Dandy Warhols - 'Bohemian Like You'
Cee-Lo Green - 'F*** You'
Adele - 'Rolling in the Deep'
Cake - 'Comfort Eagle'
Snow Patrol - 'Take Back the City'
Macy Gray - 'Kissed It' (with Velvet Revolver - also her 1999 hit 'I Try')
Bedouin Soundclash - 'Until We Burn'
James Blunt - 'Stay The Night'
Chester French - 'She Loves Everybody'
Lena - 'Satellite'
Interpol - 'Slow Hands'
The Stills - 'Still In Love Song'
Matthew Sweet - 'Byrdgirl' (although 1990's 'Girlfriend' remains a power-pop standard)
Eric Hutchinson - 'OK It's Alright With Me'
Silversun Pickups - 'Lazy Eye'
Michael Franti & Spearhead - 'Sey Hey (I Love You)'
The Music - 'Freedom Fighters'
Sister Hazel - 'Hello It's Me'
Kaiser Chiefs - 'Ruby'
Soundtrack of Our Lives - 'Sister Surround'

Conclusion

The music scene is more fragmented than ever, and the golden age of mainstream mass-market rock, pop-rock and rock-influenced R&B will never return. But fans of Sixties pop, old time rock n' roll, Motown and Big Band shouldn't give up entirely on today's music world. If you look hard enough, there's still good music being made, interesting careers to follow, and good live shows to be attended.

When New Jersey's Republican governor, Chris Christie, was sworn into office, he chose to celebrate at his inauguration by joining a Bruce Springsteen cover band in singing the Boss' signature anthem, 'Born to Run'. Governor Christie hails from Bruce's home state of New Jersey, and his zealous Springsteen fandom is perhaps unusually dedicated for a politician. But it also symbolizes a paradox: while Springsteen has long been open about his left-wing political views and has hit the campaign trail for the last two Democratic presidential candidates, he remains enduringly popular with a broad segment of conservatives and Republicans. In part, that's for the obvious reason: Bruce is a rock legend with a ton of fans, so we should be unsurprised that he would have fans of every political persuasion. It's also partly demographic; Bruce's fans tend to be disproportionately white and, increasingly, older, and those are more conservative groups than the population at large. But my own anecdotal sense is that Bruce's fanbase is - if anything - more conservative-leaning than you would explain by those factors alone, and certainly not markedly more liberal. Speaking as a conservative and a longtime Springsteen diehard, let me offer some theories as to why that is. This is not an essay dedicated to claiming Springsteen for the Right, or arguing that he's unwittingly some sort of crypto-conservative, although I do note at a few points conservative themes in his writing and his life. Rather, my argument is that the things that appeal to fans of Bruce Springsteen and his music are, quite logically, most appealing to conservatives.

Generally, we conservatives have pretty low expectations, politically, for our pop-culture icons. We understand that most of them don't agree with us on politics or policy. So, what we look for are artists who have some tolerance and respect for us, some themes in common with our worldview, and sometimes being one of the good guys on something. Bruce delivers on all counts.

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Race is only skin deep, but so is voice; it's one attribute that is indelibly intertwined with racial identity. Let us consider the tragic loss of the black voice in rock n' roll.

Rise

Listen with me to the voice of Chester Arthur Burnett, a/k/a Howlin' Wolf*:

The birth of rock n' roll is usually traced back to the early African-American bluesmen, from Robert Johnson in the mid-1930s to Muddy Waters in the late 1940s and early 1950s. If you listen to those artists, you can see why; their vocal and guitar stylings are quite different from the prevailing Big Band, jazz and country/bluegrass sounds of their era, and you can hear echoes of the rock artists that have covered their songs and built on their foundation. But Johnson and Waters are not, themselves, rock; you would not confuse them with rock recordings. It's listening to the more raucous and powerful voice of Howlin' Wolf that you can hear, for the first time, the blues become something that would become rock. And Howlin' Wolf, even moreso than his predecessors, did so with a voice no white man could quite duplicate. It's why he was such a big influence on early rockers, especially the Rolling Stones, who - while they took their name almost by accident from a Muddy Waters song - not only imitated Howlin' Wolf but opened doors for him to perform with them on white television (which in the early 60s was the only kind of television there was):

Rock, from the time of its inception, was predominantly black music. Never solely so; for example, one of the genre's most important forefathers was electric guitar inventor Les Paul. Rock's early days included a lot of people like Jerry Lee Lewis who brought country influences into what became rockabilly (Carl Perkins, the King of Rockabilly, drew more obviously on both sources). And even Elvis, who famously got his big break because he was seen as a white man who could sing rock in the style of a black man, still drew a lot of his sound as a crooner from the Bing Crosby school of smooth singing. But many of the most dynamic, influential and oft-imitated early rockers - Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino - were African-American. As those early stars faded and the first generation of great rock bands arrived, the influences of the black pioneers were obvious - the Beatles covered songs by Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys just openly stole his riffs, and the Stones recorded standards by the bluesmen. Yet, as white bands built on what they'd started, the voice of black singers was still something distinctive and irreplaceable.

Peak

That voice had moved by the early 60s to early R&B and soul, personified first and foremost by Ray Charles and James Brown in the late 1950s, but followed over the next decade by a long series of artists on the Motown and Stax Records labels: Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, the Four Tops, the Temptations, the Supremes, and many others. Ray Charles, James Brown and the Motown/Stax artists were commercially anchored in black radio and live performances to black audiences, but they crossed over repeatedly to white radio, and their work was frequently covered or influential on white artists. The instruments, the beats, the styles of production - both black and white artists of that era had a lot in common. And the relationship wasn't entirely one-way, either; the Motown/Stax sound was influenced by white writers and producers like Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller and Phil Spector, and leading black artists would also cover songs by white artists. Consider Wilson Pickett's version of Hey Jude, written by Paul McCartney and featuring the guitar stylings of Duane Allman.

The point of the foregoing is to emphasize that the 1960s were a high watermark for the cross-pollination of the most popular genres white and black music, and that a major component of that was the mainstream white rock audience's acceptance of black artists and the unique sounds of black vocalists. True, African-American influences have always been a part of the American musical scene, from the influence of the old 'Negro' spirituals on American folk music to the influence of black jazz on the Big Band era; there's really no dispute that no other racial, ethnic or religious group has had as much influence on American music. And true, too, music's audiences were still basically segregated in the 60s - white listeners listened mainly to Top 40 and the newly-emerging FM rock radio, while black audiences generally listened to R&B and Soul stations. And true as well that while black artists influenced and were influenced by white artists, and white audiences embraced black artists, it seems that black audiences still mostly listened only to black artists. Musical integration was never truly symmetrical. But the musical ferment of that era was nonetheless the product of remarkable talents of both races feeding off one another's sounds.

Jimi

At the apex of this era, in 1967, rock got its first true black superstar. Jimi Hendrix wasn't an R&B musician crossing over to rock; he was straight-up rock n' roll, the archetypical guitar god. He was also his own lead vocalist, and while vocals were never Hendrix's forte, there was no confusing him with a white man.

Did Hendrix bring a lot of black fans into rock, or even into his own music? I can't answer that question, and I'm not sure the data is really out there to study the question in a systematic way, but it's hard to detect any real signs of a cultural shift among black audiences (check out the sea of white faces in the crowd shots at any Hendrix show). I do know that his career lasted only four short years after Monterey, and that he died at age 27, probably leaving more great music on the table than anybody in rock history (only Duane Allman and Otis Redding could really compete). Hendrix had his share of problems handling success and more than his share of drug issues, but unlike, say, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain, there's nothing in Hendrix's life that makes it that hard to imagine him surviving, as Clapton and Keith Richards did, and prospering to this day as a 68 year old creative genius carrying the blues not as a pursuing demon but as an old companion, his self-designed studio still attracting younger artists. If that had happened, I have to believe that somewhere along the line, Hendrix would eventually have attracted a following both of black fans and black imitators, and maybe helped keep a bridge open from the rock world to the African-American audience.

It was not to be. There were other black rockers (e.g. Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy), and eventually in the late 80s there were a few who tried to step into Hendrix's shoes (Lenny Kravitz, Living Colour, Slash - Slash's mother is African-American), but times had changed, and the moment could not be recaptured. There was never another time when you could find a black face among the handful of rock's biggest stars. Hendrix had come along at a moment in rock history when it was possible to imagine a genuine integration of black music and the rock world that owed so much to its black forbears. That possibility would evaporate within half a decade.

The Breakup

The world didn't change overnight when Jimi Hendrix died; it never does. But the trends started moving in different directions. Motown and Stax suffered a series of reversals between 1967 and 1972 - Otis Redding died, Sam & Dave broke up (as, later, would the Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas, as well as Sly & the Family Stone, which wasn't a Motown or Stax act but shared a similar sound), the Holland/Dozier/Holland songwriting team left Motown, and eventually Motown left Detroit in 1972, around the time Stax went into irreversible decline. Many of the signature artists of that era - the Four Tops, the Temptations - never found the same success after the early 1970s, while others (Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles) went into slower decline.

At first, the next generation of Motown artists, like Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5, recorded in something like the old style, and by the early to mid 70s, Stevie's various experiments included funkier rock (Superstition, his best song, remains the high watermark of his rock influences). But by around 1976, tastes and trends were changing quickly. R&B and Soul moved more in the direction of crooners like Barry White and Teddy Pendergrass who had little in common with anything being done by the rock bands of the era, and then the disco craze hit, propelling stars like Diana Ross, Donna Summer and Gladys Knight to success that left the old Motown sound in the dustbin. Some mainstream rock acts (the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Rod Stewart) tried their hands at disco as well, but unlike the blues, disco had no lasting imprint on the rock world.

It's debatable, given the complex racial politics of the 70s, what drove white and black audiences in divergent musical directions from the mid-70s on, but the trends away from the Motown and blues sounds were evident on both sides. Led Zeppelin drew openly on the blues roots that traced back to Jimmy Page's Yardbirds days, but the success of Zeppelin ushered in a whole era of metal that would be almost entirely white, as were the glam rock of acts like David Bowie and Queen, the ethereal sounds of the likes of Yes, Styx, Supertramp and eventually Journey, the mellow California rock of the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, and most of all punk, which rose and fell in parallel with disco (neither the prime years of Sex Pistols, the Clash, nor even the Ramones lasted much longer than those of the Bee Gees). (I'm simplifying here by skipping the rise of reggae, which had only a modest impact on the rock world.) The keepers of the flame of the integrated musical heritage of the mid-60s - Springsteen, Southside Johnny, even the Blues Brothers (backed by essentially the old Stax house band) - were audibly out of step with their times. And when the waters of disco and punk receded, the nascent genre of rap began to emerge.

The Aftermath

And that, for the most part, is where we stand today: despite its black roots, rock is made by and for white people, abandoned by African-American performers and audiences alike. Oh, every few years we get a black-fronted rock act - Living Colour, Lenny Kravitz, Hootie and the Blowfish, Ben Harper. But they don't represent a significant movement, anymore than Grant Fuhr represented a significant movement in the NHL. Michael Jackson's Beat It aside, the leading black performers popular with black audiences haven't set more than a toe in the rock world in the past 30 years; the lone exception would be Prince, who in his 80s heyday melded electric guitars with current funk. And Prince has been over the hill for almost 20 years. Black women have been even more absent in the ranks of rock vocalists - any list of the best straight-up rock acts of all time will get down in the hundreds before you locate a black female lead vocalist, even though the pool of talented black female singers is perennially deep, and their voices unique (as one can see by the number of major rock acts that have drawn on black women for backing vocals).

This doesn't mean that the music world is wholly segregated today - there's still crossover in other formats (like Elvis back in the day, arguably the biggest star in rap is a white man, Eminem), although surely the gulf between rock and other formats contributes to a more generally heightened level of segregation in radio and live entertainment. But the loss of black influence and interest in rock is surely a loss for rock, and a contributing cause in the fragmentation of the nation's musical culture. Some voices can never be entirely replaced.

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A guest post from Leon Wolf, who sent this mostly spoiler-free movie review along after seeing Tron: Legacy last night. And if it's not harsh enough for you, may I recommend this Fark review of Little Fockers.

So at the outset, I should note that as a young boy in Valdez, Alaska, there was not really a whole lot to do to occupy your time. My parents were not well off (although not fairly called poor), but we did have a VCR. However, we did not own movies as in those days it was prohibitively expensive to actually own them. The local library, however, had some that you could check out for a day at a time, and it was within easy walking distance. However, the only things they really had that interested me were the Walter Cronkite World War II collection, and Tron. Day after day after day I would make the trek to the library to renew the Tron I had checked out the previous day. It is no exaggeration to say that I watched that movie over 150 times. In other words, I had a real connection to that movie even though as an adult I have no delusions that it was Citizen Kane or something. SO I was prepared to overlook an awful lot in the sequel for the sake of reconnecting with a movie that was a meaningful part of my childhood. I even paid for the 3D and the EXTRA FEE for the "Big D 3D" - it was $28.50 for my son and I to see the movie (!!!!!!). I wanted the whole Tron experience, baby.

With all that out of the way: this movie sucked.

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In honor of the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's death, a few clips from the early days:

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Slate has a fantastic essay purporting to be Mick Jagger responding to Keith Richards' new book (which is supposedly really good). I'm told this is the parody section of Slate - which implies that some of Slate is not intended as parody - and there are other signs as well that this isn't really a straight essay by Jagger himself, but the essay captures so many truths about the band that it doesn't really matter that it's a parody. Worth reading for the gratuitous cheap shots at Jann Wenner alone. There are too many good parts to excerpt them all, but this should give you a flavor:

And yet I was surprised when it happened. I take the point that professionalism, one's word, rock 'n' roll merriment ... these are fungible things in our world. It is a fair charge that I have become less tolerant in these matters over the decades. In our organization, inside this rather unusual floating circus we call home, I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours' work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)

So I will take that point. All of the forgoing was just ... a little outre behavior on tour. Let's go to the next tier - again, of matters one is informed of with some regularity, this not over months, not years, but entire decades. Keith's been arrested with a mason jar full of heroin and a shopping bag full of other drugs and drug paraphernalia and is charged with drug trafficking. That was his baggage for a weekend in Toronto.

And this really sums up in two sentences an entire era:

Society could have effectively halted the upheavals of the 1960s simply by requiring all of us to "intervene" with one another. In any event, considering half our circle was on heroin and the rest were coke fiends, I think it wouldn't have efficacious in our circumstances.

Go read the whole thing.

The famous 1975 TIME Magazine profile of Bruce Springsteen, which I'd heard about but never sat down and read before. Some things haven't changed: even then, the media talked about "the scuzzy Jersey shore." Funny to read back now that Bruce's manager tried to get him booked to perform at the Super Bowl...in 1973, more than three decades before he finally did the halftime show. It's a good read to go with the upcoming release of The Promise, the making-of-Darkness on the Edge of Town album and DVD, which catches Bruce at the next step down the road from this profile of him as a 26 year old still finding his way.

Allow me to vent against the latest scourge of the failing music industry: the cardboard CD case. Yes, I know: it's supposed to be some sort of enviro-friendly packaging. It's supposed to ease the conscience of wealthy musicians. But let's count the problems:

(1) It's not a standard package. No two musicians seem to put these things out in the same shape or size, or with the CD removable from the same angle. Some have the CD falling out the sides, others require you to hold the package just so in a straight line to shimmy the CD out the middle. And in nearly all cases it's impossible to take CDs out of the package or put them back in with one hand while at a stoplight, as one often does in the car. And they can be hard to store: Pearl Jam's Vitalogy album, an early pioneer in this area, simply doesn't fit in any standard CD case.

(2) It's not voluntary or discounted. I pay extra for recyclable soda cans, not by choice but at least you can get the deposit back. If you're buying substandard packaging they should at least charge you less.

(3) It's not waterproof. My wife, in particular, listens to a lot of CDs in the kitchen while doing dishes and the like. Kitchens are wet places, and this is not a problem for plastic CD cases; for cardboard, it's a death sentence.

Plastic exists for a reason. It's durable, it's convenient. If I wanted a cardboard CD case, I'd ask for one.

Two videos for your...er, entertainment:

My wife and I had an early celebration of our 15th wedding anniversary yesterday, spending the day at Jones Beach capped by seeing Maroon 5 in concert at Jones Beach Theater. My review:

The Band

Maroon 5 is the best pop band that still gets played on the radio today, which says maybe more about the state of pop bands today, but they are a good band. It may not have seemed it at the time, but the 1990s and the very early 2000s were actually a great time for pop bands - among others, the Gin Blossoms, Fastball, the Counting Crows, the Spin Doctors, Matchbox 20, the Foo Fighters (I count them as a pop band), Sugar Ray, 3 Doors Down, even jam bands like Blues Traveler and the Dave Mathews Band that had their pop moments. Few of those bands are still on the pop music scene, although some of them are still recording in one form or another (I got the Gin Blossoms' last album and will probably eventually buy the one they're putting out next month; Dave Mathews is obviously still a big star).

Maroon 5 is basically a 21st century answer to The Cars, a pop music machine that manages to turn out consistently good stuff even if a lot of it sounds alike. Granted, they'd be a better band if frontman Adam Levine sounded more like Ric Ocasik or - better yet - Michael Hutchence of INXS, but Levine's voice does have its own character, and the softness of his vocals undoubtedly helps the band continue to get airplay in today's increasingly feminized pop radio market. Their first two albums, 2003's Songs About Jane and 2007's It Won't Be Soon Before Long, were both about 8-10 deep in quality songs, which is a sign of people who know what they're doing. I also liked Gotten, Levine's song on Slash's new album, although it's not one of the very best songs on that album.

The Venue

Of all the places I've seen concerts (full list here), the Nikon Theater at Jones Beach is unquestionably the best, a gorgeous outdoor waterfront amphitheater with good acoustics (this helped make up for the fact that the tickets cost as much as the last two shows we saw - the Saw Doctors and Kelly Clarkson - combined, but we had seats this time instead of general admission). This was the second show we've seen there, the first being Harry Connick about 15 years ago. The crowd was pretty varied - a lot of girls in their teens and twenties, but also a fair number of gray-haired types (my wife thought this was unusual, but hey, Billy Joel is 60 now and Ringo Starr is 70; there's a whole generation in there) and even, bizarrely, some families with small children. The show appeared to be sold out or very close to it.

I finally gave in this time and joined my wife in wearing earplugs to the concert, which turned out to be a great decision. We knew the show would be really loud when we heard the band doing sound check from the beach parking lot in the afternoon, and while the earplugs were uncomfortable and made conversation difficult, they really didn't interfere with hearing the show (even the banter from the stage) with crystal clarity, yet unlike other recent shows I didn't have ringing in my ears and difficulty hearing for days afterwards. Recommended.

The Opening Acts

While it was still daylight, the show started with an unbilled opening act named VV Brown, a woman with an English accent in a skintight catsuit. She was energetic and had some decent pop-rock songs (she also did a passable cover of Coldplay's Viva La Vida), but it was pretty clear that most of the audience had no idea who she was, an especially serious hazard for an opening act when you don't tell people in advance she'll be performing. I was wondering if maybe she was some sort of house band, playing to a half-empty theater.

Next up was Owl City, which is sort of a one-man recording artist (a guy named Adam Young who started making music in his parents' basement in Minnesota and, well, looks the part) under the name of a band. Owl City has to be the wierdest act I have ever seen live. His band opened with (counting him) three keyboardists, a drummer, a violinist and a cellist, although he and one of the other keyboardists then switched to holding guitars (there was, however, little in the way of audible guitar-playing sounds). Impossibly skinny, with a scraggly beard and dressed like Han Solo from the original Star Wars, Young seemed to be carrying on an extended Emo Phillips imitation with his helium voice, spastic dance moves, precious lyrics and - near as I could tell - performing his entire 10-song set with his eyes closed. (Quote from the stage between songs: "Hey, there are a lot of pretty girls here! I get really nervous around pretty girls.") He did have kind of a cool light show. The crowd roared its approval when he finally got to Fireflies, his big pop-radio hit, which I don't like but at least it was finally something familiar, and to Young's credit he sounded live pretty much like he does on record. I wouldn't rank Owl City with the most excruciating opening acts I've seen (those would be the 1-2 punch of Primus and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy opening for U2 in 1992), but it was definitely the most surreal.

The Main Event

Maroon 5 went on around 9:30 and played a little under 2 hours, cruising through all their singles as well as a number of songs from Songs About Jane as well as a cover of an Alicia Keys song I'd never heard (that was the only cover, although in the middle of Secret, Levine broke into a few verses of What's Love Got To Do With It) and, if I recall correctly, three songs from their upcoming album, including their current single Misery (which they opened the show with) and a song called Stutter that I liked - here's a live version from last week:

(It's a sign of a good live act that they can sell a song the crowd hasn't heard).

My wife and I were happy that they played our favorite song by the band (Won't Go Home Without You, which has an opening and rhythm reminiscent of Fastball's pop classic The Way) but each missed one song from the last album - I'd have liked to hear Little of Your Time, she wanted to hear Goodnight Goodnight. The show closed with a two-song encore of Makes Me Wonder and Sunday Morning. The band was obviously eager to show off their rock chops on a couple of songs (Harder to Breathe, Wake Up Call and The Sun all featured more guitar theatrics and a heavier rhythm section than you might have expected from the record), but balanced with the ballads and the more bouncy pop tunes, for which the band lowered a giant disco ball (the stage setting was otherwise a large curtain painted to look like a street in the band's native Los Angeles).

Levine's voice was mostly as on the records. He's kind of a wiseass and a little full of himself (the ladies love him, and he knows it, basking in the oohs and ahs when he tossed his shirt into the crowd to play the rest of his set in a tank top), but funny at times and not without some self-deprecating humor (after the Alicia Keys cover: "this next song is one of ours, if you can't tell because I sometimes sound like a girl.") He did one routine about handing out Maroon 5 condoms that drew some dirty looks from the crowd, and when he split the audience into a sing-along for She Will Be Loved, had a funny riff about the reaction of men in the crowd to being asked to sing (including the guys who were "like dude, I'm here because my girlfriend likes you, let's just get this show moving along.").

As I've noted before, I've mostly seen really good concerts, so I can't rank these guys with the top tier of shows I've seen, but it was a good concert and well worth seeing if you like Maroon 5's music.

Good news: U2 is back on tour following Bono's back surgery (after cancelling a battery of shows that had already permanently messed up the 2010 schedules for a bunch of MLB teams), and debuted two new songs at their return show Friday. This one, Glastonbury, sounds like it might be pretty good with better audio quality, and requires Bono to wail harder than he usually does these days:

The other, North Star, is below the fold:

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So, among the many half-written or written-in-my-head posts is an overdue concert review of one of my favorite bands, the Saw Doctors, at Irving Plaza May 14. Here we go.

This was the third time I've had the pleasure of seeing the Irish pop-rockers in concert, the first two being in 2003 at Irving Plaza and 2004 at the Hammerstein Ballroom, both small indoor venues in Manhattan. The band was very much in their prime then; six years later the lineup has changed and they're just beginning to show the cracks of age (lead singer Davy Carton recently turned 50, the same age as his countryman Bono; he and Leo Moran are a little grayer now, but then so am I), but it's still a tremendous show, and the band debuted some excellent new material from their soon-to-be released album, unimaginatively titled The Further Adventures of The Saw Doctors, including my personal favorite, lead single Takin' the Train:

Opening Act

When I bought the tickets, there was no opening act listed. The day of the show, I was checking the Irving Plaza website for things like when the doors opened, and saw that the opening act was a guy named Pat Dinizio. Some readers will doubtless recognize the name, but I didn't; I thought maybe it would be some obscure young local artist or something. Instead, out on stage comes a heavyset, balding middle-aged guy in a T-shirt and a baseball cap and introduces himself as the lead singer of The Smithereens. It was just Dinizio and his guitar, but it turned out to be a good opener, as it dawned on the crowd that a lot of people knew more Smithereens songs than they thought. Dinizio was affable, telling stories about his best-known songs (how A Girl Like You was originally written for the film Say Anything and how the band was basically able to bank a year's earnings when a snippet of Blood and Roses got used for a Nissan commercial) and closing with a fine sing-along cover of Behind Blue Eyes.

The Venue

From the first two Saw Doctors shows, I recalled liking Irving Plaza better, but my tastes have obviously changed. The Hammerstein (more on that here) may be kind of a dump, but Irving Plaza is so tiny and intimate, with what has to be a capacity of well under a thousand people - a good thing, you might think - that my ears couldn't handle the sound. I enjoyed the show, but I couldn't hear a thing for two days. For the next concert we're seeing (I'm taking my wife to see Maroon 5 at Jones Beach in August for, roughly, our 15th wedding anniversary), I may finally give in and try the earplugs my wife wears to shows.

The Show

Here's the set list; the band played 5 of the new songs (Takin' the Train, Addicted, Last Call, Indian Summer, and Hazard), all of which sounded good and allayed my fears that the new album might be too mellow (older rock bands are in trouble when they start heading in that direction); Takin' the Train in particular is a really good song, power pop as it was meant to be. One of the things that really marks the Saw Doctors as a great live act is their ability to sell songs you are hearing live for the first time. There were also four other songs that had been released since I last saw them - they opened with Last Summer In New York and also played Out for a Smoke, both off the 2006 album The Cure (their last studio album) and the 2008 singles About You Now and She Loves Me. I've blogged previously here about their cover of About You Now; it's one of the things I'd hoped to hear for the first time live and didn't disappoint. Unfortunately, that squeezed out room for some of the band's classics, like Joyce Country Ceili Band and the achingly beautiful World of Good, but that's live shows for you and the perils of recording too much good music. Anyway, after a protracted six-song encore including Hay Wrap (featuring a guest appearance by Carton's son) and a segue of Hope You Meet Again into the outtro from Hey Jude, it was hard to complain that the band hadn't gone on long enough.

If you ever get the chance to see the Saw Doctors live, don't think twice, get the tickets. It's truly a tremendous rock n' roll show.

With a hat tip to the surprisingly entertaining Sesame Street Twitter feed, in honor of Stevie Wonder's 60th birthday, here he is doing a tremendous live version of Superstition in front of Mr. Hooper's store. Check the kid rocking out around 4:10:

Stevie kind of got away from this sort of funk-rock after the mid-70s or so, but this clip is a reminder of what an excellent musician he was at his peak.

*The Mets have had some questionable decisions already this year. We saw Fernando Tatis try to score on a wild pitch with two outs, the bases loaded, down 3 and David Wright at the plate against a pitcher having trouble throwing strikes. We saw Jerry Manuel pinch run Tatis for Mike Jacobs and then have to use Alex Cora to pinch hit in the same inning. We saw Manuel play for one run on the road with Joe Mather pitching and Jose Reyes on first base, asking Luis Castillo to bunt before Mather had proven the ability to get anybody out. But perhaps none worse than Manuel on Saturday having K-Rod staying warmed up for 12 innings and possibly as many as 125 pitches in the bullpen before coming in tired to blow the save. Let's hope that doesn't linger. That's why you use the closer as soon as you hit extra innings on the road.

*Craig Calcaterra looks at the curious suspension of Ednison Volquez.

*Joe Posnanski's all-time NBA top 10. His mini-essays on Wilt, Kareem and Jordan are all spot-on, and in Jordan's case reminded me of his obvious, though smiling, irritation earlier this year when Jay Leno asked if he could still dunk. This, about Wilt, is an excellent point:

You know, if you think about Wilt Chamberlain's career - it really is staggering to think that he has through the years been labeled as a guy who did not win enough. I mean, Jim Kelly or Dan Marino or Charles Barkley or Barry Bonds - fair or unfair, it is true they didn't win championships. Chamberlain won TWO. What's more, he led his team to the Finals four other times. What's more than that, his teams were beaten by the Celtics six times in those years, and while so many would like to make that a Russell vs. Chamberlain thing, the truth is those Celtics teams had 10 Hall of Famers. TEN HALL OF FAMERS! Two starting lineups of Hall of Famers. Those teams at various times had Havlicek and Sam Jones and Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman and Tommy Heinsohn and K.C. Jones and so on and so on ... all in addition to Russell. They also were coached by Red Auerbach and Bill Russell.

To believe that Wilt Chamberlain - with the help of a Hal Greer here or a Tom Meschery or Paul Arizin there, guided by an Alex Hannum or Dolph Schayes - somehow SHOULD have beaten those Celtics teams is to believe that there has never been a more dominant presence in basketball than Wilt.

*Ronald Reagan and James Dean, together on film.

So, right after I wrote about the Blues Brothers, up pops a new music video from Hanson doing a homage to the Ray Charles music store scene from the film (keep your eyes peeled for Wierd Al Yankovic on the tamborine):

Thinking 'Bout Somethin'

HANSON | MySpace Music Videos

Yes, that Hanson. No, it's not 1997 again. I didn't like their boy-band hits back then, but I always thought they were talented enough musicians that they'd eventually grow up to make good music once they outgrew the Tiger Beat scene and got some maturity under their belts. I actually have on my iPod two songs they did around 2000 (If Only and This Time Around - the harmonica work on If Only is done by the incomparable John Popper of Blues Traveler), but unfortunately just when they seemed to be getting pretty good, they dropped off the face of the earth, and have apparently been putting out obscure independent records in recent years that I haven't paid any attention to.

I really like the song they do in this video, which is apparently off a new record; it's the kind of Motown-throwback pop we don't get nearly enough of these days (it's not coincidental that you get good pop music from people who respect their musical heritage), with a horn section and vintage Ray Charles-style keyboard work. That's apparently the plan for their new album, featuring Motown veteran arrangers and session players. They'll never be confused with Wilson Pickett - whichever Hanson brother it is who sings still kind of has a boy-band voice - but compared to most of what passes for pop music these days, it's a breath of fresh air.

All of that said: after watching this video, I would not recommend they dance again in public.

In the annals of unusual but awesome concert bills, this one has to be up there: the last show at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, on New Year's Eve 1978-79, headlined by Winterland habitues the Grateful Dead, and featuring, as one of their opening acts, the Blues Brothers.

The Blues Brothers remain one of music's most improbable success stories, a band fronted by two comedians, including a lead singer (John Belushi) who was actually a latecomer to the blues (Wikipedia says that he started listening to blues records in 1977 while filming Animal House), and both visually and sonically completely out of step with the prevailing disco trend of 1978. While Belushi and Aykroyd were already TV and film superstars (Animal House was released in the summer of 1978), this performance was just at the point where the Blues Brothers were taking off as a genuine music phenomenon - they debuted on Saturday Night Live in April 1978, Briefcase Full of Blues had been recorded live in September 1978 and was released in late November 1978 and would hit #1 on the Billboard album chart in February 1979, and Soul Man would be released as a single in January 1979 and peak at #4 on the pop charts in February 1979. The movie and a concert tour would follow in the summer of 1980. Belushi died in 1982, and while Aykroyd and the band have had other projects since, some of them musically productive, it's never been the same. They weren't just a comic novelty - the band, largely assembled by Paul Shaffer (then Saturday Night Live's musical director) was astonishingly talented, Belushi turned out to be a remarkable vocalist, and Aykroyd even contributed some impressive harmonica work. Their version of Jailhouse Rock may be the best Elvis cover ever, and arguably tops the original.

Anyway, the video clips are below the fold - it appears that this performance was televised and these were recorded off the TV.

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In the fall of 2009, Harry Connick Jr. and the Brian Setzer Orchestra both came out with new albums - Connick's Your Songs, and Setzer's Songs from Lonely Avenue. Both are professionally done albums, and neither will place among the best, or worst, recordings these mature, mid-career artists have made. But the contrast between the two illustrates how Connick's recording career has gone astray after a great beginning, while Setzer gives his fans what they want.

Once upon a time, Harry Connick was not just an exciting musician, but a nearly unique one. A child-prodigy jazz pianist since age six, the son of the New Orleans DA burst on the national scene in the late 1980s, gaining national stature at age 22 with the double-platinum, Grammy-winning soundtrack for the romantic comedy classic When Harry Met Sally... At the time, the world of traditional pop/Big Band/swing music had largely atrophied - there was still a mostly-aging audience for then-veteran traveling performers like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Andy Williams, Perry Como, etc., and that style of music was still vibrant on Broadway, but suddenly here we had a young crooner breathing new life and energy into the standards and - on albums like 1990's We Are In Love and 1991's Blue Light, Red Light - writing some new ones of his own.

Connick's talent and flair helped sell the form to new generations of music fans. Lots of people still listened to Sinatra even if they didn't otherwise go for the traditional pop sound. Others, like me, had grown up listening to that kind of music - it's what my parents listened to, and was really all the music I knew until my older brother got me into rock around age 9 - and had a lingering affection for it. Connick proved that a young artist making new music in the old style, with his brassy Big Band sound and retro-cool pompadour, could still sell records and make a name for himself.

Then, on the heels of his successful 1993 Christmas album When My Heart Finds Christmas, Connick decided to take an unexpected turn. Ditching the big band, he put out a New Orleans funk-rock album, 1994's She. Not all his fans appreciated - I was him tour for the album at Jones Beach, and there were older fans who walked out when they heard the new material. But matching Connick's vocals and piano with the funk-rock sound worked, and made its own distinctive and different sound. He followed up with 1996's Star Turtle, a solid album if not as outstanding as She. Approaching his 30th birthday, Connick had mastered three genres - the third being jazz piano - all of which tend to reward their masters with long careers.

Unfortunately, it's been mostly downhill since then. Connick's output since Star Turtle has been steady - two more Christmas albums, seven other vocal albums, plus instrumental albums, show scores - but he has never matched his promise either as a Big Band act or a funk-rock act. Albums like 1999's Come By Me and 2004's Only You were dull and barely-listenable slow jazz. He's spread himself thin, dividing his time with feature film and TV-series acting, raising a family, disaster-relief work after Katrina, even hosting a series on the Weather Channel.

Your Songs was supposed to be a return to a more mainstream sound for Connick, and at first glance, its 14 songs fit the bill, running the gamut from Sinatra standards like "All the Way" and "The Way You Look Tonight" to 70s pop like "Just the Way You Are," "(They Long To Be) Close To You," and "Your Song." The album was the brainchild of legendary record executive and co-producer Clive Davis, who explains how they picked the songs:

We embarked on this project together. Over a five- or six-month period, we'd meet every Wednesday afternoon for five or six hours and just listen to music, looking for the right songs. I felt it shouldn't just be old classic songs but also more recent composers, and that's why we included Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are" and Elton John's "Your Song."

Well, relatively recent. The good news is that the finished product is polished and pleasant to listen to - the songs are all professionally rendered with loving care, and Connick glides through standard after standard with good-natured ease. It's Easy Listening at its easiest, and there's a place for that - I pop it on in the background while I work.

The bad news is that Your Songs is yet another wasted opportunity. Not one of Connick's renditions is likely to make anybody forget the previously definitive versions, or even place him on equal footing as a vocalist with Billy Joel or Elton John or Sinatra or Karen Carpenter or Roberta Flack. He's just treading water, and he's not even doing it because he wanted to follow some artistic muse - it's an essentially commercial record.

Part of the miscalculation in the album is Connick's singing style. There remain two schools of crooning, the Frank Sinatra school and the Bing Crosby school. Sinatra, at least once he matured as an adult artist, was legendary as an emotional interpreter of songs, the guy who could climb into the lyrics and make you feel them. When you listened to the older Sinatra, you felt the miles in his voice. That wasn't all his appeal - he also had that swaggering cool and of course the great voice - but the ability to mine the words of a song was the distinctive feature of his style of singing, and one reason why he remained popular even with the rock generation.

Bing Crosby represented the apex of the opposite style, the smooth crooner who focused on making beautiful music to listen to. You could get an emotional wallop from a Bing song as well, if it hit you right - his Christmas songs do that, the warmth of Crosby's voice being all the song needs - but the focus was on the smooth sound.

Whatever doubt there may have been in his youth about whether Connick would ever develop into a Sinatra-style interpreter of songs, it's clear by now that he's remaining firmly in the Crosby camp. There's no heartache or heartbreak in Your Songs, no sense of emotional vulnerability - Connick still sounds like a guy singing to impress on a first date, not a man baring his soul. On the Big Band and funk-rock albums, that didn't matter much; the invigorating swing and the infectious groove were all he needed to set his sound apart and make great music. But singing ballads, Connick exposes his limitations.

An album of this sort is doubly frustrating because it's so unnecessary - anybody can sing these songs, or we could just listen to the originals. By contrast, Connick, Setzer and Canadian singer Michael Buble are about the only male vocalists in the business with the chops to do justice to new Big Band albums and the major-label platform to get them heard. Maybe he's just running out of ideas, but we can only hope that Connick does more with his talent on his next record.

Setzer's Songs from Lonely Avenue goes in the opposite direction. The 50-year-old Setzer, of course, started as a throwback 50s rockabilly artist in the early 80s with the Stray Cats, and reinvented himself in the mid-90s through a novel fusing of that sound with Big Band/swing music on albums like 1998's The Dirty Boogie and 2000's Vavoom! Setzer, too, has been away from making new music in his signature sound for a while - the past decade has been largely consumed with making Christmas records as well as 2007's Wolfgang's Big Night Out, a mostly instrumental record reworking classical tunes - but Songs from Lonely Avenue is a return to his wheelhouse, and the first album in which he wrote all original songs.

The focus on original music means that Songs from Lonely Avenue faces the opposite challenge from Your Songs' excessive familiarity; it has none of the instantly recognizable classics that powered earlier Setzer albums, songs like Jump Jive an' Wail or Mack the Knife. But in their place, it has a consistent film-noir-ish mood and fresh quality music all the way through. The only questionable decision is putting two instrumentals - Mr. Jazzer Goes Surfin and Mr. Surfer Goes Jazzin - back-to-back in the middle of the album rather than separating them as thematic bookends. Probably the best song on the album is the slightly bluesy, hard-luck saga Dimes in The Jar, and while Setzer's not really any more of a bluesy vocalist than Connick is, he brings his best Tin Pan Alley sound to the track. And unlike Your Songs, which gives Connick only minimal opportunity to match his dazzling piano to his vocals, Songs from Lonely Avenue gives us plenty of Setzer's signature guitar work.

Harry Connick Jr. could learn a few lessons from Brian Setzer - like not making records that don't mean a thing 'cause they ain't got that swing.

46 years ago today, the Beatles took the stage on the Ed Sullivan Show here in NY for a 5-song set that changed the world of music forever:

It's tempting to chalk up this performance to a more innocent age in rock, and it was, but if you're familiar with the Beatles' live performances before February 1964, you know it's more a reflection of a more innocent age in television; they were usually not this tame.

Three things stuck out at me watching this. One is how young George Harrison was. A second is how heavily they leaned on songs featuring Paul McCartney; you'd almost not know John Lennon was a major figure in the band. And the third was the graphic reminding the ladies that, sorry, John was already married.

ST Karnick notes one of the things that makes "24" and its characters more compelling than so many other TV shows, even in its 8th season : the shows characters may have suffered onscreen or recent offscreen traumas they have to grapple with, but few of them, at least on the good-guys side of the ledger, are driven by some canned backstory about their relationship with their parents (Kim Bauer is obviously an exception, but we've been given ample evidence of the sources of strains between Kim and Jack, including Kim's tendency to get kidnapped by Jack's enemies and her boyfriends' tendency to lose limbs).

Your moment of Bruce: a more uptempo live version of Atlantic City than usual, from a Parkinson's benefit show - and yet another reminder that while Springsteen's voice may be awfully gravelly these days, he's at his peak now as a guitarist:

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Moe Lane looks at Conan's latest revenge.

In honor of Elvis Presley's 75th birthday, Jake Tapper tweeted the video below the fold, which contains so many different wonderful things in under two minutes I lost count.

There's a fair debate over who is the greatest male rock vocalist of all time (more on which below - the women are hard to rank for distinct reasons, although Janis Joplin would probably win most polls). But there's really no debate over who the most influential rock vocalist and stage performer of all time was - everyone who came after was inspired by or reacting to Elvis.

I'd thought of someday doing a longer essay on the best male rock singers of all time, but I have so many other essay ideas unwritten and so little time to write, let me offer here for now my quick top-10 ranking and a few thoughts:

1. Bono. Just an unbelievably rich, powerful, compelling, distinctive and expressive voice, and until the last few years sounded as good or better live in a huge stadium as in a studio.

2. Roger Daltrey. Nobody else could put as much into a scream as Daltrey. An absolutely primal force.

3. Jim Morrison. Would rate ahead of Daltrey except he was such an inconsistent live performer and had such a short career - his voice was already much rougher by the time of the LA Woman album. But Morrison at his best was unreal.

4. Mick Jagger. Mick's voice has been shot for almost 30 years, and it was always idiosyncratic, but for the first two decades of his career, nobody could purr like Jagger (think of Sympathy for the Devil).

5. Elvis. I don't love his Heartbreak Hotel style, but Jailhouse Rock pretty much defines rock n' roll. Interestingly, on many his slow songs Elvis was more of a traditional crooner of the Bing Crosby school.

6. Steven Tyler. Maybe controversial to rank over Plant, but the man has incredible range (and still does to this day) without being stuck in the high end of the scale. Tremendous swagger.

7. Paul McCartney. Who still sounds pretty good even today. Paul's voice is the most melodious on this list, but he could always rock out as well.

8. Van Morrison. In some ways more a crooner and bluesman than a rocker. Notice the heavy prominence of singers of Irish nationality or descent on this list.

9. Rod Stewart. OK, Rod Stewart can be a little cheesy at times (not that McCartney or Steven Tyler can't) - Van Morrison's version of Have I Told You Lately That I Love You makes Stewart's sound like a block of Velveeta - but he's still a master at that world-weary sound.

10. Robert Plant. I know some people would rate him higher, and certainly Plant has been massively influential, but too much of Plant's work was too ethereal and not emotional enough for my tastes, at least.

Honorable mentions: Roy Orbison; Springsteen, who has never had a pretty voice but until recently had as emotionally expressive vocals, even live, as anybody; Billy Joel; John Fogerty, who has a truly unique sound; Eddie Vedder; Bob Seger; Michael Hutchence; David Lee Roth; Eric Clapton. (With the possible exception of Little Richard, we've never had a black rock singer who had the kind of great voice that the R&B masters like Wilson Pickett had). UPDATE: I should have mentioned Meatloaf as an honorable mention. Fantastic voice.

Anyway, that digression aside, the Elvis clip is below the fold.

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Last night on CBS they aired the annual Kennedy Center honors ceremony, which honors five major figures in arts and entertainment - this year, it was Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro, Mel Brooks, a jazz musician and an opera singer (no, I hadn't heard of either of them, although for most of the night I was convinced the jazz guy was Martin Landau). Politics aside* - and yes, it was hard to put aside the sense that Bruce was being honored at this time and in this venue in good part for his work for the Obama campaign - it was definitely a fitting tribute.

Jon Stewart opened with a funny and heartfelt monologue, using his trademark delivery to explain that "When you listen to Bruce's music, you aren't a loser. You are a character in an epic poem...about losers." And on a more serious note, Stewart cut to the center of Bruce's appeal: "He empties the tank every time." Which really is it; it's certainly the essence of Bruce's live show, but really it's true of his music as a whole: Bruce at his best has always been about giving everything you have to the things that matter, from music to love to the open road, and no matter the inevitable hardships along the way. It's that sense of total commitment that makes Springsteen such an emotionally compelling performer.

You can catch here Stewart's remarks and Sting's show-closing version of The Rising (Sting was apparently dressed for a night at the theater with Mr. Lincoln):

Sting isn't maybe the best voice for that song, but the climactic choruses of The Rising always give me the chills, and he does a solid job as the song goes along. Also performing: John Mellencamp did a serviceable if overly gravelly version of Born in the USA, switching back and forth between the acoustic version and the arena-rock version; Melissa Etheridge delivered a rocking version of Born to Run; blues-rocker Ben Harper and country singer Jennifer Nettles did an interesting duet take of I'm on Fire; and Eddie Vedder, who really is a more expressive and versatile singer than you'd guess from Pearl Jam's catalog (in which his vocals are always great but usually limited mostly to howling rock and brooding slow-rockers), sang a stirring version of City of Ruins (it was a little odd to pick two songs from The Rising and none from Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River, but perhaps it was just the luck of the draw).

By and large, it's been a banner decade for Springsteen between turning 50 in 1999 and 60 this year. He's toured regularly with the E Street Band since the reunion built around the release of the Tracks box set in 1999; Billboard Magazine tabbed him as the 4th highest-grossing touring act of the 2000s, behind U2, the Rolling Stones and Madonna, bringing in over $688 million from more than 400 shows before over 8.6 million fans, and the #3 tour of 2009, behind U2 and Madonna, covering 72 of those shows. He released an excellent live double album in 2001, and five studio albums - the Seeger Sessions record of folk standards and four original albums (The Rising, Devils & Dust, Magic and Working on a Dream). The Rising remains virtually alone in music, film, literature or any other art form as a successful post-September 11 effort to come to grips with even a part of that day's events. The Seeger Sessions record is really good (I highly recommend some of the additional tracks you can get on iTunes). The other three albums have been a bit half-baked in terms of quality, but each had several good songs on them; Working on a Dream is probably the strongest of the three. And Bruce isn't going gently; this fall at his last appearances at Giants Stadium he performed a good original song, Wrecking Ball, written for the stadium's demise:

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We've introduced our kids to some new Christmas entertainments lately, and it has me thinking about those rare occasions when great talents come together at the peak of their powers.

One is the Grinch. We've only just introduced the Grinch to our 3-year-old, first in book form and then the video of the TV special. And the TV special is truly a perfect storm of three great talents: you have the words by Dr. Suess, who isn't just a great children's writer but a great writer, period - the things he could accomplish and convery with a few words of the English language surpasses much of the vastly wordier and less lyrical literature and poetry aimed at adults in its artistry. You have the animation by Chuck Jones of Bugs Bunny, Road Runner and Tom & Jerry fame, the greatest of the 1930s-1970s golden age of animators - Jones was a true genius, and his signature moves are all pulled out for the Grinch. And you have the priceless narration by Boris Karloff. And on top of those three legends, you have the pitch-perfect songs and vocals by less well-known musical figures.

The other is White Christmas, the 1954 film, which we just introduced to our 10- and 12-year-olds and which frankly I only started watching - now an annual ritual - at my wife's insistence after I got married. The film may have some of the weaknesses common to the old musicals - contrived plot, cheesy scenery, songs that are wedged into the storyline - and it may have been a recycling of the idea of building a film around the song "White Christmas" (first debuted in the 1942 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire film "Holiday Inn"), but it's a classic collaboration of four great talents in their primes - two great singers (Crosby and Rosemary Clooney), a great dancer (Vera Ellen), and the great comedy/song-and-dance talents of Danny Kaye, and of course the classic music by Irving Berlin. A classic alignment of the stars.

In a similar vein, a third film that seems destined to join those two in the pantheon of Christmas holiday entertainment is Elf, a film that has worn well now over seven Christmas seasons. As I think I have written before, my guess is that aside from the obvious exception of James Caan, none of the highly successful entertainers in the film - Will Ferrell, Bob Newhart, Ed Asner, Zooey Deschanel - will turn out to have done anything quite as lasting as a classic Christmas film.

(I should add here as well my recommendation of another Christmas favorite: "Scrooge," the 1970 musical version of A Christmas Carol, starring Albert Finney, for my money the best version ever done).

This is also the time of year when I annually revisit my list of the greatest contemporary Christmas songs.

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The Wall Street Journal had an excellent look at Tom Petty as he prepares for the release of a live retrospective:

What at first sounded like drudgery, Mr. Petty says, digging through 30 years of concert recordings for the coming "Live Anthology," turned into an "adventure." Engineer Ryan Ulyate made the first pass through the recordings in the Heartbreakers' vault, including some old analog tapes that first needed to be baked in an oven before playing to prevent disintegration. He assembled an iTunes library of some 3,500 songs, then pulled out hundreds of potential highlight tracks for Messrs. Campbell and Petty to assess. "It's amazing how the best take really shines compared to everything else," the singer says.

While the recordings prompt memory flashes from each era, Mr. Petty says, it's tough for him to recall specific concerts. One, however, stands out as perhaps "the worst gig" his band ever played, which somehow yielded the standout version of "I Won't Back Down." In 2007, at a benefit concert for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Heartbreakers performed beneath the museum's giant blue whale. The posh audience ignored the band as they performed an acoustic set, capped with the defiant song which (to Mr. Petty's chagrin) has become a perennial fight song for campaigning politicians. Mr. Petty resented the indifference of the crowd of "billionaire kinds of people, many of whom you'd know," he recalls, acknowledging that this might have fired up the band. "At least I got a good track out of it," he says.

Read the whole thing. The Journal poses the question why Petty doesn't get the sort of reverence that follows Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan or other "rock gods," but to me it's kind of obvious: he's never been an innovator or influential; he's always been content with being a meat-and-potatoes rock n'roller making good records and putting on good shows (as I noted when I recently tallied up my concert-going experiences, I saw him live at the Worcester Centrum in early 1990 on the tour for his best album, Full Moon Fever, and it was a really good show). Plus, Petty's a wierd-looking guy with a quirky voice, so he never got the pop culture cache of being a matinee idol type (although he put both his look and sound to great use in his legendary video for Don't Come Around Here No More).

Anyway, there's nothing wrong with making lots and lots of really good music; not everybody has to be a pathbreaker. Within his own "roots rock" genre, I'd rate Petty ahead of the likes of Mellencamp and Bob Seger but behind Bruce; the artist he's probably most comparable would be Creedence (plus, I think of them together because Petty's a Southerner who sounds like a Californian and John Fogerty's a Californian who sounds like a Southerner).

I'm posting this one just so I can use a sentence I'm sure I will never use again:

I prefer the Raffi version to the Bob Dylan version.

The NY Daily News has more.

A dramatic reading of the Lady Gaga song "Poker Face" by Christopher Walken:

Genius. Even granting that many good songs would not hold up well under this sort of treatment...ouch.

H/T John McCormack

*Josh Painter looks at how the latest financial disclosure forms tell the story of the intense financial pressure put on Sarah Palin by the stream of bogus ethics complaints filed by left-wing bloggers, culminating in the complaint that prevented her from accessing funds raised for her legal defense. It certainly makes a compelling case why an ordinary person in Palin's shoes would step down rather than be driven under by the expenses. Whether that's enough to absolve her as a potential presidential candidate is another matter; we tend to expect potential presidents not to act like ordinary people. Of course, most politicians would have escaped the mounting debts by writing a book or giving speeches for money, but Palin may have felt, not without reason, that any such activities while serving as governor would lead to further ethics complaints that would tie up those sources of income as well. Meanwhile, Melissa Clouthier looks at a CNN poll finding 70% of the public currently thinks Palin unqualified to be president.

I'm not picking a horse for 2012 yet, nor will I until after 2010. It's unclear if Palin will run, anyway. I do know a few things. One, for reasons I've been through many times, I'd much prefer to support a more experienced candidate - we're not the Democrats, after all, who have permanently forfeited the right to say anything on this subject by backing Obama - and the fact that people in my position are even open to Palin at all at this juncture is a sign of the weakness of the field so far. Two, Palin has proven to be extraordinarily effective at retaining the public's interest and even at exercising her influence as a guerilla opposition leader armed with nothing more than a Facebook page; by mostly absenting herself from the public eye except for Facebook and a few op-eds and obscure speeches, she's kept 'em wanting more (witness the explosive early pre-orders for her book, which non-fiction publishing people viewed as unprecedented), while still driving the public debate (i.e., "death panels"). But the Newt Gingrich experience is vivid proof for Republicans that effective guerillas don't always make good leaders when they come into power.

Whichever way Palin chooses to go, the book tour (including the appearance on Oprah, who is naturally hostile but not really accustomed to tough interviews) will be a sort of second coming-out for her on the public stage that will be critical and should reveal whether she has spent well her time out of the limelight in terms of boning up for future policy debates. We'll be able to assess her future much better in a few months.

*Meanwhile, a man to watch if he gets persuaded to run is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. (H/T) I'll have more on him another day...upside: Daniels is serious, tough-minded, won re-election in Indiana in 2008 (while it was carried by Obama) after being given up for politically dead in 2006 (when his low approval ratings were blamed as a cause for heavy GOP House losses in the state, paralleling a similar trend in Ohio and Kentucky). Downside: Daniels is as yet reluctant to run (recall how well that worked out with Rudy and Fred), and as a public speaker he's dry as dust.

*The Democratic circular firing squad over health care continues. And Jay Cost explains why the continuing threat to Lieberman from the Left has made it politically necessary for him to oppose the public option.

*Dan Riehl looks at how the GOP made the disastrous decision in the Congressional race in NY's 23d district to nominate Dede Scozzafava, who now seems likely to finish third in that race. Meanwhile, Newsbusters notices that the NY Daily News still refuses to acknowledge the existence of Doug Hoffman, the Conservative candidate in the race. Jim Geraghty is unsparing on the folly of Newt's continuing support for Scozzafava.

*George W. Bush, motivational speaker - without a teleprompter. The WaPo seems astonished that a man who won something on the order of 110 million votes in two national elections is actually a decent speaker. Key quote from Bush: "It's so simple in life to chase popularity, but popularity is fleeting."

*On the anniversary of his death, Bill Kristol remembers Dean Barnett.

*Naturally, he's retracted it, but you can't top Anthony Weiner's initial assessment of Alan Grayson as being "one fry short of a Happy Meal."

*Interesting breakdown of TV ad rates.

*ABA Journal on the tragic saga of Mark Levy.

Another college friend has been blogging on pop culture with her siblings at a relatively newly-established blog entitled "Relatively Entertaining." Check it out, if it's to your taste (it's well-written, although her taste in entertainment is not mine).

For your morning music, a duet with Bonnie Raitt of one of the most underrated Stones songs:

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Last night, my wife and I went to see our (for once, mutual) current musical enthusiasm, Kelly Clarkson, in concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. I am here to tell you that if you have any interest whatsoever in Clarkson's music, you owe it to yourself to see her live while she's in her prime as a concert performer. There's no other way to put it: Clarkson's voice goes to 11. It's a fun show, it's cheap (our $49 tickets were a fraction of what I'd have had to pay to see U2 or Springsteen again), and there's no substitute for the energy of a performer who's still young (she's 27), at the peak of her talent and still has something to prove. And as I'll discuss below, her live show, at least at this stage of her career, is unmistakably a rock show.

Now, obviously, versatile a singer as she is, Clarkson's music isn't for everyone. There's a reason why people are often a little embarrassed to like her music or describe it as a 'guilty pleasure.' Personally I have a fairly high tolerance for cheesy, as long as the end product is really fun music, real emotion, or both, rather than ersatz, generic Hallmark crapola. Thus, for example, music made by Meatloaf in the 1970s or Aerosmith or Bryan Adams in the 1980s: cheesy, but good. Music made by any of those artists from about 1990 on: makes me want to gouge out my eardrums. And Clarkson is definitely cheesy, cheerfully and unapologetically so; she makes Jon Bon Jovi look like Mark Knopfler by comparison. But she succeeds on both grounds: she makes a lot of fun music, and she pours genuine emotion into nearly everything she sings, even the fluffier pop tunes. I may be an emotional guy, but I'm a grown man and I have well over 2,000 songs on my iPod and more than that in my CD and tape collections, and I can count on one hand with room to spare the songs that still have the power to choke me up a little after repeated listening - but Clarkson's unreleased song "Close Your Eyes" is definitely one of them. Not without reason, she has swiftly surpassed Blondie as my favorite female artist and surpassed - well, nobody - as my favorite young (under-40) artist. As has been often pointed out, she's not just a singer of songs but an interpreter of them, and that talent has matured significantly in the years since her arrival at age 20. And very gradually, she's been accumulating some actual respect for being, basically, a musician's musician, the kind of artist other people in the industry want to work with: veteran performers, including rock warhorses like Jeff Beck, Melissa Etheridge, and Joe Perry, always come away impressed from working with her. Cheesy or not, my own guess is that if Clarkson's voice holds up well enough to have a long career in the business, she'll end up as one of those pop music stars (like Brian Wilson or Tony Bennett) who comes in for a round of more serious later-in-life re-evaluation. But whether that day comes or not, I'm not the type to miss a good show just because it's uncool.

The Ghost of Concerts Past

The concert was definitely a break from my past concert-going habits in two ways: Clarkson's the first female headliner I've seen, and the first who was younger than me. Here's the full roster of previous concerts I've seen, so far as memory (supplemented by Wikipedia) holds:

-Billy Joel, Worcester Centrum (Storm Front tour Nov. 1989) (no opening act)

-Tom Petty, Worcester Centrum (Full Moon Fever tour circa spring 1990) (opening act: Lenny Kravitz)

-Billy Joel, Giants Stadium (Storm Front tour summer 1990) (no opening act)

-Rush, Worcester Centrum (Roll the Bones tour, December 1991) (opening act was a guitar-only guy...Joe Satriani, maybe? Eric Johnson? I think it was Satriani.)

-Meatloaf, Holy Cross College (May 1992) (no opening act I can recall)

-U2, Yankee Stadium (Achtung Baby "Zoo TV" tour, August 1992) (opening acts: Primus and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy)

-Bruce Springsteen, Boston Garden (Human Touch/Lucky Town tour, December 1992) (no opening act)

-Billy Joel, Nassau Coliseum (River of Dreams tour...this must have been December 1993 or January 1994, though I thought I remembered it being later in the 1990s than that) (no opening act)

-Rolling Stones, Giants Stadium (Voodoo Lounge tour, August 1994) (opening act: Counting Crows)

-Harry Connick Jr., Jones Beach (She tour, I believe summer 1995) (no opening act I can recall)

-Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Giants Stadium (Reunion tour August 1999) (no opening act)

-U2, Madison Square Garden (All That You Can't Leave Behind "Elevation" tour, June 17, 2001) (opening act: PJ Harvey)

-Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Giants Stadium (Rising tour circa July 2003) (no opening act)

-Saw Doctors, Irving Plaza, Manhattan (March 14, 2003; reviewed briefly here) (opening act: ex-band member Padraig Stevens)

-Saw Doctors, Hammerstein Ballroom, Manhattan (March 20, 2004) (no opening act I can recall)

That's the full shows I've paid to see (although the Meatloaf show, I believe, was just a few bucks), excluding things like seeing Bruce do a few songs at Rockefeller Center for the Today show in 2007 when he released the Magic album, and excluding cover bands and people like John Cafferty or the Mighty Mighty Bosstones that I've caught pieces of shows by. I've been fortunate: I've never seen a bad concert.

The best show, unquestionably, was the first Bruce show, even though he was playing without the E Street Band (thus: no "Rosalita," although we did get "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town"). Partly that was seeing my all-time favorite artist live for the first time, and it was a classic college adventure: a friend loaned us her car for the drive to Boston on condition that we first dig it out of a foot of ice and snow. But it was also a sensational show: Bruce went on at 8:20 and played past midnight, closing the show when the Garden clocks struck 12 by bringing out Peter Wolf, the lead singer of the J. Geils Band, for a duet of "In the Midnight Hour," after which the crowd screamed for 10 minutes for more encores. After "Badlands," always the emotional high point of any Bruce show, he played a blazing stop-and-start version of "Light of Day" that held the entire crowd in his hand for close to 20 minutes.

The show that sold me the most on a band was the first Saw Doctors show; my younger brother had given me one of their CDs, the Sing a Powerful Song collection, so I knew I'd have a good time, but I was totally sold after that on a whole raft of songs I heard for the first time live - "Tommy K," "Galway and Mayo," "Villains," "That's What She Said Last Night," etc. Definitely another act a lot of people haven't seen, but they're amazing live, and I highly, highly recommend them.

The band that sounded most exactly like their records was Rush. A high-quality, impressive and enjoyable show, but the only spontaneous moment was the fistfight that broke out near my seats. But then, you listen to Rush to think, not to feel, which is different from what I usually look for in music.

Hard to pick the worst. Meatloaf was at the low ebb of his career, on the eve of his mid-90s comeback; that's why he was available for a small-college campus gig. At the time, I was unprepared for the crudity of his stage act, but his voice was tremendous and he performed his biggest hits with verve. The most pot smoke was definitely at the Petty show, the most beer-drinking crowd at the Stones show. The worst crowd was the third Billy Joel show, a Friday night crowd of working adults too worn out to get out of their seats, and that's probably the least-fun of the shows I've seen, but while he wasn't quite as good as the first two times I saw him, it was still a good set.

Unfortunately, I can't say I've never seen a bad opening act. None have been all that great - Lenny Kravitz was pretty good...as for Rush's opening act, my patience for guitar-only guys is pretty limited no matter how technically impressive. The most disappointing opening act was the Counting Crows, who literally were barely audible; they just weren't loud enough to be heard in a huge stadium on a sound system designed for the Stones. By far and away the two worst acts I have ever seen were the two opening acts for U2 at Yankee Stadium in 1992. Primus, a metal band, lived up to their fans' slogan ("Primus Sucks!") by, so far as I could tell, hitting one note and staying there for 45 minutes. I love metal as much as the next guy - Zeppelin, early Aerosmith, AC/DC, Guns n' Roses**, Pearl Jam, even a little Metallica - but these guys forgot that good metal is still supposed to be music. The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy were even worse - granted, I (like probably a majority of U2 fans) loathe most rap anyway, but these clowns' big hit was some song called "California Uber Alles" about - I kid you not - how Pete Wilson, that icon of squishy liberal Republicanism, was a fascist. I'm sure that one goes over real well in concert in the 21st century. The fact that there were two opening acts only added to the atrocity. U2 was great, but they didn't take the stage until around 10:30; throw in gridlock on the Tappan Zee Bridge, and we didn't get home until after 2am.

The Continuing Story....

I thought, after penning an exhaustive profile of Clarkson for The New Ledger back in mid-June, that I was done writing about her, but I confess that I've stayed hooked on keeping an eye on her doings as the perennial scrappy underdog of pop music, the populist pop star who sings what she wants, says what she thinks, and doesn't give a damn about being cool, trendy or fashionable - and watching the ongoing befuddlement of a celebrity culture and music industry that still don't know quite what to make of her. She is, as a result, great copy. She's had an eventful and newsworthy few months since then, being embroiled in a series of increasingly ridiculous controversies, none of her own making (although in a few cases she poured gasoline on an existing fire):

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*Is there a bigger example on the web of not knowing your audience than ESPN.com automatically playing video content - i.e., with sound - when you open the page?

*I'm still unclear on why exactly the Twins-Tigers game has to be tomorrow instead of today....I'll have a more detailed post - whether you like it or not - on my Roto team, but I enter that game tied for first place, and if I lose the pennant by one home run or one RBI (both a real possibility) despite having the possible AL MVP, Cy Young and Rookie of the Year on my team, I swear I'm gonna sue Grady Sizemore.

*This video of Mark Sanford's confession speech set to the laugh track from David Letterman's confession is genius. (Hat tip: Rob Neyer).

It's been sad watching the direction of Letterman and his show the last few years. I've had progressively less time to watch anyway since I started working for a living, but I'd been a fan on and off for decades. If there's one lesson here, it's that if you wanted to keep an affair secret, you don't take the woman you're sleeping with, put her on air on your national TV show and flirt with her shamelessly. Well, that and a guy who's a producer at 48 Hours shouldn't be dumb enough to think he could get away with blackmailing a public figure. Another glorious chapter in the history of CBS News.

*The Olympics story is pretty much a dead horse at this point, but this American Thinker piece does a bang-up job of dissecting the Obamas' sales pitch to show how it violated pretty much every rule of sales pitches.

*The Washington Post's paid left-wing activist Greg Sargent is proud that the Left is playing the race card on health care - seriously, read this post. Sargent's thesis is that the ad in question is racial code and that that's a good thing. Regardless of what you think of the ad itself, that speaks volumes about Sargent's mindset. What remains less clear is why the Post employs a full-time left-wing activist in the first place.

I thought I was a serious Bruce fan, but you know, I've only been to 3 shows, 4 if you count seeing him at Rockefeller Center on the Today Show in 2007; NJ GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie has seen the Boss 120 times, including 9 of 10 shows of a set and scheduling a Paris trip with his wife around Bruce's European tour. Now that is dedication.

It's an uncharacteristically nice piece from the NYT, but of course only in a non-substantive puff profile way; they capture pretty well the uncomfortable position for Christie being a Springsteen fan while Bruce was out campaigning against his party.

Arguing that drugging and forcibly penetrating a non-consenting 13-year-old girl isn't one of the bad kinds of rape.

I knew Whoopi was rude, an ignoramus (she told John McCain last year that the Constitution doesn't prohibit slavery) and a walking crime against comedy, but even I was startled to discover her cavalier attitude towards the violation of a young girl.

Oh, and also following the same story with what only tries to be parody: the Onion.

As part of my recent effort to locate new-ish music worth listening to, I have finally decided once and for all to listen to some songs by three of the biggest "rock" acts of the past decade - Nickelback, Linkin Park, and Coldplay - and decide whether they have made anything worth listening to (my suspicion for some time has been "no," especially as to Coldplay, but I may as well see if I am missing out on anything. Also on my list are Wilco and the White Stripes).

Anyone have suggestions as to where in their catalogue a beginner would start?

British police are reopening the 1969 drowning death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones.

Here's an argument-starter for the hard-core Springsteen fan: a 1-200 ranking of his songs, with an effort to justify each slot.

A lot of these just seem very wrong to me, and reflect the biases of the guy doing the list. Near the bottom, "Mary's Place" was one of the high points of The Rising, and doesn't deserve being rated so low. Near the top, "Thunder Road" is rated way too low at #18. And the writer goes way overboard on Bruce's wordier pre-Born to Run tunes and mopey Nebraska tunes, at the expense of some of his masterpieces: "Incident on 57th Street," though a good song, is way too high at #3 and "Lost in the Flood" at #7 (personally, I never, ever listen to the studio version of either, preferring the live version of "Incident on 57th Street" that I picked up from a Japanese release of extra songs off the 1975-85 Live album, and "Lost in the Flood" off the 1999 Live in New York album). Yet, inexplicably, the same guy puts "It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City" way down at #155. And seriously, "Highway Patrolman" at #13, ahead of "Thunder Road" and "Badlands" ("Badlands" is always the high point of any Bruce concert)? "Meeting Across the River" at #17? "Stolen Car" at #19? "Your Own Worst Enemy" at #23?

I did appreciate the love for "Loose Ends" at #24, though, one of the classics that was held off too long until the Tracks compilation.

You know, I love Bruce Springsteen, have for many years, and I've scarcely ever heard him do a bad cover, so I was fairly enthused when I saw on his YouTube channel a live rendition of the Clash classic "London Calling." But unfortunately, this just doesn't work:

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Is 30 Rock really a ripoff of....well, go see.

H/T Jonathan Last.

Longtime readers know that - as discussed here - I'm a very big fan of the Saw Doctors, the great Irish pop/rock band, who in a just world would be international musical superstars. Anyway, here is a study in contrasts for you: among their more recent releases, which hit the top of the Irish pop charts last fall, is a cover of "About You Now," originally recorded in the U.S. by the Sugababes, but translated into something rather different by the Saw Doctors (a cover tune is a departure for a band that typically writes their own stuff, but this one was originally done to raise money for a cystic fibrosis charity...and yes, writing that made me think of Dean Barnett again). Check out three versions of the song. First, we have the Sugababes' decidedly R&B flavored original, which I will confess is not at all to my taste, here. Second, a version by teenybopper singer Miranda Cosgrove, here, which is basically the same thing but slightly less funky and more...well, for lack of a better word, white. Then we get the Saw Doctors' guitar-driven version, which of course is more rock n' roll and also, naturally, less girly and more wistful:

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I'd always expected Michael Jackson to go by slipping into the Cracks of Doom while clutching his Precious....Seriously, I never had any sympathy for him, given that he was a pedophile or something very like it (leave for another day the people who thought it was a good idea to send their children over to his house), but Jackson was a figure deserving mainly of pity. His family, especially his father, wrecked him, and he spent most of his life mutilating himself and indulging his increasingly bizarre fixations, and seeking the company of children, old women, animals, basically anyone but adults who could have dealt with him as a peer. I have to wonder if his death was more or less intentional, especially given some of the financial problems the Wall Street Journal had been reporting he'd been having lately.

Musically, Jackson wasn't my cup of tea - I loathed him when he was big in 1983, and other than some of the pure Motown-ish Jackson 5 stuff, once the craze was gone the only one of his songs I liked (which is on my iPod) was "Beat It," his collaboration with Eddie Van Halen, which really does rock after all these years. But I came to appreciate the fact that he was a great musical talent and, in his day, a great entertainer. But his personal wierdness did that in as well - an entertainer needs some sort of connection with the audience, and after Thriller, Jackson was just too bizarre for anybody to identify with or connect with him at all. Smeagol was long gone by then.

Irony alert: Brad Pitt's film version of Moneyball appears to have been cut from the roster, presumably to save money.

I don't read interviews with Bruce Springsteen all that much anymore - although Bruce's music is still mostly only vaguely political, as I discussed at some length back in 2002, in recent years he's gotten sufficiently actively partisan that I prefer to just listen to the music and tune out the politics. But this interview has some telling (if in a few places overly grandiose) musings on the thing that - other than the music itself - I've always loved and admired about the Boss, and that's the fact that the man truly gives a damn about connecting with his audience, and works at it, which is why he remains the best live showman in the business:

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I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd recently gotten into the music of Kelly Clarkson. Well, I ended up digging up enough material on her to turn out a fairly exhaustive profile for The New Ledger of her formula for success and place in the culture (consider it a counterbalance to all the Bob Dylan content on the site). I've always had a soft spot for people who made a career path where one didn't exist before, and Clarkson isn't quite like anybody else in the music business. I also came to the conclusion that she is, with the exception of Justin Timberlake, probably the naturally funniest person in the music business.

When American Idol debuted in the summer of 2002, it was not a complete novelty. Star-making talent competitions have existed throughout TV history (remember Star Search?), and in fact Idol was itself spun off from Simon Cowell's short-lived Pop Idol in the UK. But Idol's colossal media footprint and massive voting base give its winners a huge and unprecedented head start in built-in popular endorsement before they've ever released a single song. Reliable vote totals are hard to come by, and viewers can vote multiple times, but compare estimates ranging from 20 million to 100 million votes for final episodes to the 100-120 million votes cast in recent presidential elections; the fact that the comparison can even be contemplated is proof of a popular phenomenon in an age when TV shows and the music business alike are feeling the splintering of the mass shared audiences of the second half of the 20th century.

But even after Idol established itself as a TV phenomenon, the question remained: would artists popularly elected by a television audience match the success of those chosen and cultivated by record company executives, radio programming directors, critics, clubs, concert promoters and other traditional gatekeepers? Would musical democracy provide a continuing pipeline of new talent, or would it just be a TV gimmick, its products treated as a sideshow by the music world?

The answer, seven years into the show's run, is that it can be done. The overall record has been mixed; Idol has produced plenty of flops, and often the winners have gone on to less success than the runners-up, but the show has turned out enough real stars to lend the process some credibility. More than anyone else, the burden of earning that credibility for the show from scratch was carried on the diminutive shoulders of Idol's own would-be George Washington, its first winner, Kelly Clarkson. A look at her success provides some important lessons about turning an initial wave of goodwill into a durable popular fan base.

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Well, we all have our ways of moving on from tragedy in our lives. If you're Liam Neeson, that entails....assembling the A-Team!

Liam Neeson is in talks with movie bosses to star in the upcoming big screen version of The A Team.

The Schindler's List actor has reportedly been lined up to play John 'Hannibal' Smith, the role made famous by George Peppard in the hit 1980s television show.

He is currently in negotiations with 20th Century Fox and producers Tony and Ridley Scott to appear in the movie about four war veterans who escape from a prison to become vigilantes.

The Hangover star Bradley Cooper was recently rumoured to be taking on the role of Lieutenant Templeton 'Faceman' Peck, originally played by Dirk Benedict, but he has since denied the claims.

The roles of Captain 'Howling Mad' Murdock and Sergeant 'BA' Baracus have yet to be cast, but rapper-turned-actor Common is rumoured to be in the running for Mr.T's iconic role.

Production for the film is due to begin in late August for release next year, according to Daily Variety.

I pity the fool who's not excited about this. There's actually a good deal to be said for remaking something that was cheesy at the time and is now terribly dated; there's a lot more freedom. Of course, it could still be awful, as most Hollywood rehashes are. As for Neeson, well, I hope it's a fun movie to make, he could use that.

A collection of Dylan's idiosyncratic observations from his radio show, some of which can't help but crack you up. H/T. And while I am at it, my New Ledger colleagues have more on Dylan: Pejman on Dylan's self-education, Sean Curnyn on Dylan's new album, and Paul Cella on "The Patriotic Bob Dylan." I'm not a huge Dylan fan but enjoy the best of his work, and as Paul has often reminded me, he's a man who has always defied easy classification.

Interesting list from Yahoo of the best-selling artists (by albums sold) of the decade. It says something about the state of rock that the top seven are two rappers, three country artists, Britney Spears and The Beatles, although there are still a handful of rock acts on the chart.

There really is no possible objective way to measure the greatest rock n' roll song of all time, but pretty high on any list would be whether a song was so essential that just about everybody who's ever picked up a guitar had to try their hand at it. I say you can't go wrong with the original, primordial, classic rock standard that's one of the very few songs of the 1950s that sounds as fresh today as it did five decades ago (warning, the volume of these is variable):

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This video, featuring an appearance by Kelly Clarkson on what appears to be German TV, cracked me up for some reason...picture a foreign pop star who speaks barely any English appearing on David Letterman, with the attendant awkwardness and translation problems, and ending up in one of his stunts, and you start to get the effect.

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H/T

UPDATE: Moe Lane has some more philosophical thoughts from Mr. T on the nature of pitying the fool.

This could be a metaphor for any number of things in different walks of life, but really it's awesome enough to deserve its own post:

In the upcoming movie version of "Moneyball," starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, Bill James will appear as an animated character.

H/T

Law & Order is expanding into a UK series.

The good: reader Rob B points me to the Tauntaun sleeping bag, which of course I now want...or at least, wish I had had when I was about 11.

The not so good: Brian Faughnan looks at the new General Motors ....vehicle. Um, yeah, let's see how this drives on the highways of Minnesota in winter. And this Iowahawk video Brian links to is too good not to share:

Speaking of things Japanese, this is awesome:

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Old college friend Mike Sergott has a new site, "Appetite for Deconstruction." His look back in horror at the 2008 movie season is here. Check it out.

Via Jonathan Last, an interview with Christopher McQuarrie, screenwriter of "Valkyrie" (which I have not seen, although I think I can guess how it ends). A lot of interesting stuff; I liked this:

Q. ... Saw "Valkyrie" and really enjoyed it. What struck me was that the film is a throwback to a time before "Saving Private Ryan" -- when movies about World War II didn't have to be Big Important Statements and could just be thrillers.

A. Thank you. What we've been trying to get across -- and what the criticism of the film seems to be -- is that we had the audacity to make a World War II movie that wasn't "important" -- as in, a giant statement about war. I mean, what more do you need than a bunch of Germans trying to kill Hitler? Isn't that all kind of obvious -- do they really need to be sitting around talking about their objection to war?

Joe Posnanski, the best working baseball writer, has a fine Hall of Fame column (although I seriously disagree with him on Tommy John, and kinda disagree on Grich and Trammell), with a marvelous digression about Barry Manilow and the songs of the 1980s. His earlier effort on the Hall was good too, and has some interesting historical walk data - basically, the recent high tide of walk rates in 1994-2000 in the AL (in the NL it was just 1999-2000) has largely receded to historical levels akin to those of the 1969-93 period (walks have always been less common in the NL, even before the DH; the all-time high was the AL in the late 40s, with the NL season high set in 1894).

I watched the ball drop New Year's Eve on CNN (we decided we'd had enough of Dick Clark's Rockin' New Years Deathbed Watch), and I have to say, the co-hosting team of Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin had to have the worst chemistry of any on-air partners since the heyday of Monday Night Football's bad booths. I'm not a terribly big fan of Cooper, but he's a Jennings/Brokaw type, a newsman who tries to take his job seriously and has a dry, deadpan sense of humor - and they had him matched up with the unwatchable and unfunny Griffin, whose shtick is slapstick and saying inappropriate things. All she did was step on and undermine his lines, and I swear on several occasions Cooper looked like he wanted to punch her in the mouth, and I'm not sure too many of the viewers wouldn't have sympathized with him. Talk about terrible programming. (She added insult to injury with some heavy-handedly staged flirting with Cooper - a little semi-flirtatious banter is sort of expected in a male-female TV pairing like that, but c'mon, at least half the audience knows Cooper is gay). Meanwhile they sent Erica Hill, Cooper's usual co-host and who normally is on the same wavelength with him, down to the street in a vain effort to get frozen revelers to say something interesting (one area where Griffin's shtick as a provocateur might have at least caused something unexpected to happen). Terribly incompetent TV.

Patterico goes to the archives with a quote from the late and very much lamented Michael Crichton on why we believe the newspapers even though we know better:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

One of my recurring themes on the media is that the preference for liberal politics - big government, social liberalism, political correctness, disdain of conservatives and the religious - is really only the tip of the iceberg of what is wrong with the mainstream media. The state of sportswriting, business and legal journalism, pretty much anything that gets covered in the papers and on TV is subject not only to political bias but also to a whole host of other individual and institutional biases and prejudices and axes to grind, laziness, sloppiness, failures of substantive knowledge and logical reasoning...the blogosphere has no shortage of flaws of its own, but the fact that so many bloggers have had careers doing things (the law, the military, business, medicine, etc.) means in general that you get a class of people who have substantive knowledge and exposure to more rigorous disciplines than the typical journalist. Crichton, with his medical background, brought that same advantage to his craft as a novelist, and we were richer for his work (I read a whole bunch of his books; my favorites were The Great Train Robbery and Disclosure).

Over at RedState yesterday a bunch of us had some Election Day fun with a little tongue-in-cheek geostrategy about the Council of Elrond. A good diversion from a discouraging day.

Via Gabriel Malor at Ace's place. Amazingly, Billy Dee Williams was available.

Michele Catalano looks back at the first day's playlist on MTV.

The new animated Star Wars film may actually be pretty good. It actually sounds as if the director is following the same lines of thinking I laid out in my argument about how the prequels could have been better.

Unlike past vacations, I don't have much to report in the travelogue from last week's brief trip to West Palm Beach. I did finally get to see an Obama ad on TV, which featured him taking credit for welfare reform, tax cuts and other Republican-sounding things, and catch just a little of that epic 18-17 Rockies-Marlins game, and we did get to experience the joys of daily thuderstorms. During one of those, we took the kids to see Wall*E.

I'd definitely give the film a thumbs-up, especially the first half and the short at the
beginning, which had me in stitches. The lengthy silent-film-ish parts and the homage to 2001 made the film awfully artsy for a kids' cartoon, but on the whole it was very well done and entertaining, and the animation during the earth-bound sequences was breathtaking. I was surprised that the kids liked it - my two-year-old said her favorite part was the people falling off their chairs, which she found funny. I would not rate it among the best of the Pixar films, like the Toy Story films and The Incredibles, but it's a good one that will bear re-watching.

There's been some minor debate over the movie's anti-consumer environmental politics, but the movie wasn't dominated by heavy-handed propaganda like the NGO-shilling penguins of Happy Feet or even the enviro-silliness of Evan Almighty, and in any event the trash-will-overwhelm-us doomsday scenario was self-evidently absurd even within the context of the movie (they show the humans' new spaceship home as gleamingly spotless because they have the technology to jettison their garbage into space). I did think they hit one or two slightly sour notes when Fred Willard tried to sneak in Bush-bashing references to his dialogue (a completely out-of-context "stay the course!" interjection), which I didn't find annoying so much as sad in the way it will date the film - imagine watching that 40 years from now, as if you were watching Peter Pan and they threw in a random potshot at Dwight Eisenhower.

A marketing note: when we talked about going to a movie, my 2-year-old daughter piped up with "I want to see panda movie." She watches only Sesame Street and Teletubbies videos and Jetsons and Muppet Show DVDs - nothing with ads (my wife and I have no particular axe to grind with commercial TV, but aside from baseball the kids don't really watch it, mainly because the things we think are worth showing them are the things we grew up with on video or DVD). So, how did she know about Kung Fu Panda? Maybe she saw it on a breakfast cereal box or something, I do not know (my son thinks maybe she caught an ad for it on a Mets broadcast).

One might even say that this list from Cracked.com is the most fundamentally conservative thing you will ever read about the movies.

This is also hilarious, and could also be applied to the world at large. I like the Venn diagram about Sweeney Todd. They don't mention the worst offender of all, which was the ad campaign for the animated Lord of the Rings movie in the 1970s, which led filmgoers to believe it was the entire trilogy, not just the Fellowship of the Ring.

I took the kids Saturday to see the fourth Indiana Jones movie, and I must say, it exceeded my expectations, which I had worked to keep modest. You have to remember that the original Indiana Jones movies were not such film legends because they were compelling human drama or fantastically realistic; rather, they succeeded because they offered three things:

1. A classic action hero (I know I was a minority in enjoying Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but the film was nonetheless a vivid reminder of how much a film like that loses when it has a bland hero instead of a charismatic swashbuckler);

2. Non-stop action that keeps you on the edge of your seat too consistently to allow for reflection on the amount of disbelief you have to suspend; and

3. A tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the fact that this is a movie; they were supposed to be a fun throwback to the action films of the 30s and 40s, and all three of the originals had their share of explicit winks to film convention or homages to specific films of old.

I was reminded of this by recently re-watching them. All three are still a lot of fun, but there's still plenty that's outright preposterous, from the action sequences to the romantic dialogue to the 'monologuing' villains to the inevitable deus ex machina supernatural ending. Temple of Doom, which may have been my favorite of the three when I saw it in the theater as a young teenager, has undoubtedly aged the worst and/or holds up the worst when watched as an adult (it's also the most politically incorrect of the three), although the opening action sequence remains a classic.

On to the new installment (a few very mild spoilers, but the main spoilers will be below the fold). First of all, Harrison Ford's still got it. He looks great for his age, but he definitely looks his age (65); he basically defines "grizzled" at this point. And he's still got some of the old charm, much moreseo than in interviews with the real Ford, who has been a crusty old man for years now. That said, Indy comes off as more serious and sober now, which is inevitable with the passage of years (we're reminded early on that Indy's father has died - Sean Connery chose not to return for the film - as has Indy's professorial colleague Marcus Brody, played by the late Denholm Elliott; John Rhys-Davies' absence is not explained, and mercifully Short Round does not turn up). We are definitely given to believe that in the years between 1939 and 1957, treasure hunting and womanizing have had to take a back seat to the grim business of defending the free world from Nazis and Communists, a reality that's consistent not only with the world's history at that time but with why Lucas and Spielberg originally set the first three films before the outbreak of world war, when it was still possible for an American rogue to travel the world and fight the bad guys without a lot of friendly military help or polarized local resistance. Indy by now, like Han Solo in the later Star Wars flicks, has largely been absorbed into the chain of command. In fact, an early plotline about Indy being the victim of a sort of McCarthyism (in today's Hollywood, you can't have Commie bad guys without a little McCarthyism, even as late as 1957) serves mostly to ensure that Indy can function once again as a free agent.

The second really crucial decision was bringing back Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood to be Indy's love interest rather than pair up Ford with some young starlet. Not only does this spare us the spectacle of a woman in her twenties or thirties falling for a guy twice her age, but by bringing back the best of Indy's old flames, we get to skip almost entirely over the whole process of flirtation and courtship, which almost invariably goes down badly in a George Lucas film, and stick to the action. When you see Indy and Marion together, you don't need to be sold on their immediate attraction; it's baked into the characters and our history with them. And the 56-year-old Allen is still appealing, even cute if you can apply that word to a woman her age who - like Ford - definitely looks her age.

The movie has plenty of fun action sequences, my favorite being a lengthy, rollicking chase sequence in the Peruvian jungle that borrows very liberally from the speeder bike sequence in Return of the Jedi and features the meanest ants since Them. Early on, we also get to see Indy one-up Jack Bauer by surviving the shockwave from a nuclear blast, which is amusingly ludicrous.

Lucas and Spielberg, as children of the 50s (in Lucas' case, also a veteran of the first wave of 50s nostalgia with American Graffiti), lovingly slather on every detail, both realistic and cliched, to evoke the time period, from Elvis to malt-shop bobby-soxers to "I Like Ike" to the Red Scare. There are more than a few obvious tips of the hat (some literal, some figurative) to the prior movies as well as to other films. The most obvious is when Shia Lebeouf, with his hair compulsively slicked back to look like a ringer for James Dean, makes his first appearance dressed exactly like Marlon Brando in The Wild One:

More spoilers below

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Your nostalgia for the day:

Apparently, at least somebody thinks the new Indiana Jones is really good, as the Daily News gives it four stars. Frankly, I was going to take the kids to see it even if everyone said it was horrible, so it's good to see that the reviews are at worst mixed. George Lucas may have lost his touch, but Spielberg hasn't, which bodes well.

Dan Federici, founding member of the E Street Band, has died at 58 of skin cancer. A great loss; the E Street Band has several key components, but Federici has always been one of them.

CBS, besides defending a $70 million lawsuit over the dismissal of its last Evening News anchor, is now pondering dumping Katie Couric, who has failed to earn her own $75 million paycheck.

For Couric, this turned out to be a bad case of hubris: she assumed that, having been a commercial success in morning TV, she could switch to the different format and audience of evening news and not only succeed but turn around a floundering, scandal-tarred news division. It didn't happen; not only did she lose one of her principal assets along the way (Couric's chipper demeanor always went over well with the morning-TV crowd), but once CBS made the decision to stay a nominally straight news outlet rather than becoming an openly left-leaning news source, Couric was always the worst possible person to try to correct CBS News' decades-long reputation as the most liberal news source on TV.

Clearly, CBS should have listened to me when I suggested back in December 2004 that they hire CNN's Erica Hill instead. Hill's career has only headed up since then; Headline News ended up rebranding her prime-time shift as "Prime News with Erica Hill," and more recently she moved to the mother network to pair with Anderson Cooper on one of CNN's two most prominent news shows (the other being The Lou Dobbs Really Hates Foreigners Hour). Hill probably wouldn't have singlehandedly turned around CBS overnight either, but hiring a younger, lower-key and undoubtedly less expensive anchor would have kept costs and expectations lower, and signalled a commitment to rebuilding the brand from scratch rather than trying to poach from NBC. Instead, CBS is now reduced to denying reports that it's going to outsource newsgathering to ... CNN.

*This analysis of major league managers' tendencies illustrated as cartoon faces is...well, you have to click on the graphic to get the full effect. It's bizarre. H/T Rays Index.

*Today is the 97th anniversary of the introduction of baseball's MVP Award by automaker Hugh Chalmers. The first-ever MVPs? In the AL, 24-year-old Ty Cobb for his first and best .400 season, batting .420/.467/.621 with 47 doubles, 24 triples and 83 steals, scoring 147 runs and driving in 127. In the NL, 28-year-old veteran Cubs rightfielder Frank "Wildfire" Schulte, narrowly over Christy Mathewson, for batting .300/.384/.534 with 21 triples and 21 homers (only the third 20-HR season ever if you exclude the fluky 1884 Cubs), 105 Runs, and 107 RBI.

*Our old friend Dr. Manhattan is back blogging! While I was tied up doing my baseball previews, he had a fine column taking John McCain to task for his knee-jerk ignorance on the connection between vaccines and autism. As a general rule, the more science is involved in an issue, the worse McCain is. He seems sometimes to have a superstitious faith in junk science.

*Former equipment manager Yosh Kawano is leaving the Cubs clubhouse after 65 years. That's a very long time to work for one baseball team and not get a World Series ring. I think Kawano's name is familiar to me from one of Joe Garagiola's books...as in, he was there when Garagiola played for the Cubs.

*Via Pinto, Travis Nelson at Boy of Summer has a lengthy attack on Melky Cabrera. I'm more optimistic about Cabrera's potential for across-the-board growth as a hitter, but I'd generally agree that his prospects are much dimmer if you don't regard him as a competent defensive center fielder.

*There's no such thing as an innocent non-Muslim? This may go a ways to explaining what this means. I can't buy into Hawkins' notion, which has been pushed for some time by my RedState colleague Paul Cella, that the U.S. should bar immigration by Muslims, but when you consider Hawkins' logic, I have to admit that that's more an emotional reaction than a reasoned position on my part.

*While I don't agree with all the analysis, David Frum and Bill Kristol have some useful points about the perlious passivity of the Bush Administration in responding to criticism, most particularly the conviction that there's no point in fighting over the past. The Administration's enemies have nourished a number of myths about the past 7 years that have proven terribly corrosive of its credibility, goodwill and, ultimately, ability to get anything done. (On a related note, consider how little press went to the Army Corps of Engineers' ultimate admission that its design defects caused the flooding of New Orleans).

*Yes, Glenn Greenwald is still a fool who has trouble with elementary logical reasoning.

*The Nineties economy in a nutshell. This, too.

*Guns don't kill people, guns kill movie scripts.

*24 is coming back! Maybe that means Jack Bauer will stay out of trouble.

This story about Chuck Norris' cult following among U.S. troops in Iraq is pretty amusing, but he is apparently popular with the locals as well:

Norris' appeal is not restricted to U.S. troops either. At an Iraqi police graduation ceremony in Fallujah, graduates called out for their "Chuck Norris" to pose with them for photos.

"Truthfully, I didn't know who he was. I asked the Americans, and they said he was a great fighter, and that's why they named me after him. They showed me a video, and it's true, he's a great fighter" said police trainer Mohammed Rasheed.

With his handle-bar moustache, Rasheed has a vague resemblance to Norris.

Another police trainer said Chuck Norris was a role model for the police in Fallujah, which until 2007 was an al-Qaida stronghold and the scene of fierce battles with security forces.

"I've seen his videos, he's a hero. He saves the city, he protects women and children and he fights crime wherever it is. We should all be like Chuck Norris," Khaled Hussein said.

One of yesterday's biggest stock losers was Build A Bear Workshop, which saw its stock price plunge 20% on a disappointing earnings report. Motley Fool looks at the roadblocks the company has faced, mainly escalating costs and a general sense that the novelty of bear-building has worn off. The suggestion that someone like Disney snap up the company makes some sense, and probably a lot more sense if the price continues to drop.* When we took the kids to Citizens Bank Park last summer, they had a Build-a-Phanatic store; I would think that Disneyworld could do something similar. The good news for a brand like this is that if kids get bored with it, there's always another generation of little ones for whom everything is new.

One thing that isn't mentioned here but should be, though, is the rising threat of Webkinz. If you're not familiar, Webkinz sells stuffed animals, much like a slightly larger version of Beanie Babies, but the hook is that each Webkinz can be registered on a website so that kids can then play online games with an online avatar of their stuffed character, buy things for the character (e.g., furniture for its room). The site is engaging and it's kid-safe, in that while kids can interact with others over the site, such as by playing games with them and exchanging some canned forms of communication, there's no way for them to actually talk to other kids on the site - and thus no way for them to talk to people pretending to be kids, either. It's enormously addictive, and the Webkinz site has definitely drawn my kids away from Build a Bears to Webkinz.

That said, we were back at Build a Bear this weekend (much to the particular joy and amazement of my youngest, who is almost two). Why? Because Build a Bear has opened its own website, and in addition to registering all new stuffed animals on the site they are having a limited time offer to register previously purchased stuffed animals. While "Build a Bearville" doesn't seem to be on a par with "Webkinz World," it at least got my kids back to wanting to go to the store and check out the site.

So that's the real story from the trenches. It remains to be seen which of the two prevails in the long run (Webkinz has the advantage of lower margins, since they don't operate retail stores), or whether perhaps there is even an opportunity for the two companies to merge their operations (less likely). But it's proof that even so prosaic a company as Build a Bear needs to adapt to the internet to stay competitive.

* - I should note that (a) I'm not giving investment advice, nor would anyone in their right minds take investment advice from me and (b) I haven't checked on whether Build a Bear is one of my law firm's many clients and I don't personally have any non-public information about the company or any of the other companies mentioned here or in the Fool.com article.

Looks like the writers' strike may be close to an end, which means no more of this. Hopefully, the actors won't go out next.

Season 7 of 24, if it ever arrives, will be missing this thrilling plot:

Come spring, the show's writers and their Fox bosses began having informal telephone conversations about how to recover for next season. By the May 21 season finale, the audience had dropped to just over 11 million. Fox gave the writers carte blanche to "reimagine" the show. One of the team's chief considerations was how to address the controversy surrounding Jack's use of torture. Should Jack be feeling the guilt the media would have him feel?

On May 31, the show's head writers went in for a meeting at the studio to present their first big idea: sending Jack to Africa. In various incarnations, Jack would begin the season digging ditches, building houses, tending to orphans, providing security for an embassy or escorting around a visiting dignitary. "One of the themes we discussed was penance, that Africa was a place Jack had gone to seek some kind of penance. Some sanctuary too, but also penance for things he's done in his life," Mr. Gordon says.

Ms. Walden and Gary Newman, chairmen of 20th Century Fox Television, were receptive but believed it was too much of a departure. "It felt like we were throwing the baby out with the bathwater," says Ms. Walden. The Africa plot also had several glaring problems, the first of which was that at some point Jack would have to fly back to the U.S. The writers proposed that for the first time ever, "24" would break from its real-time conceit; the show would skip the period when Jack was on his 14-hour flight.

The writers agreed to work on the plot. Just three weeks before they were due to start shooting the first episodes, Messrs. Gordon and Surnow joined fellow head writers Bob Cochran and Manny Coto for a pancake breakfast at an IHOP to talk through the elements of Jack-in-Africa that still weren't working. Jack was too far away, they felt, both from the immediacy of domestic terror and from the character he had been in prior seasons.

As Dave Barry would say: 24 has writers?

Yes, another video in lieu of content.

Via Allahpundit.

The good news: there will be a movie version of The Hobbit, and Peter Jackson will be involved.

The bad news: I gather the "sequel" discussed here will be set between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Rings, which means it will have nothing to do with Tolkein, who wrote very little occurring in that period, and nothing resembling a fully fleshed out adventure. The Silmarillion and other parts of the Tolkein canon, including the LotR appendices, provide more than enough material for pre-Hobbit storytelling; I have no idea why Jackson would want to do that other than a positive desire to make his own stuff up. I mean, I want to see the fall of Gondolin, the flight of the Noldor from Valinor, the fight of Morgoth and Fingolfin. If he wants to do a story with a lot of creative liberties, he could do a full film treatment of the Last Alliance or some of the battles in the earlier Third Age.

UPDATE: More than a few people are questioning whether the "sequel" is really going to be something other than doing the book in two parts. I hope it won't, and maybe I have heard incorrectly. When I get a chance, I'll look for more sources on this.

*Studes says Jose Reyes' problem down the stretch last season was not hitting too few ground balls.

*TIME Magazine looked into Vladimir Putin's heart, too, and named him their Man of the Year for discarding the remaining constitutional breaks on dictatorship in Russia. Unlike President Bush, TIME can't excuse this as diplomacy.

*You'll shoot your eye out! Mike Huckabee may have a serious problem with granting too many clemencies to violent criminals, but Mitt Romney's refusal to grant any pardons or clemencies at all took him to the ridiculous length of refusing to expunge the conviction of a decorated Iraq War veteran who was convicted at age 13 of shooting a friend in the arm with a BB gun.

*Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister, who was supposed to be the responsible one, has announced that she is pregnant. At least she's keeping the baby.

*Businesses that should exist but don't.

My wife and I have been watching some episodes of FrankTV lately on TBS. The show, if you're not familiar, is basically as low-budget a concept as you can get this side of a reality show: Frank Caliendo does sketches in which he plays nearly all the characters, and the sketches are broken up by Frank on a couch with a semi-randomly selected member of the studio audience.

The writing on the show isn't particularly good, but it's worth tuning in for an episode or two if you haven't seen Caliendo's impressions, which are uncanny. Longer term, of course, the show is yet another point in the evolution of original TV programming towards budget-consciousness. Even some scripted shows these days seem to be under pressure to make do with smaller casts and fewer sets. It's an economically rational response to the decline of mass-market ratings.

Julia Roberts designs Armani bracelet for World AIDS Day. Mother Theresa should have been so virtuous.

In light of the writers' strike, Jonathan Last asks why the writers don't get paid more simply by operation of the market:

Writers make a lot less money in comparison to directors and actors than they used to. And the less money you make on a project, the less control you can exert over the creative process.

And I think it's safe to argue that, in general, the more control writers have on a project, the better it generally turns out. (By better, I mean both commercially and artistically.)

The importance of writers in TV is, I think, self-evident. They trump everyone else (except the showrunner, but on good shows, the showrunner is normally a writer, too) in terms of their contributions to the success or failure of the finished product. . .

Actors are quarterbacks, directors are running backs, and writers are offensive linemen. That's about how they contribute to the product, and how they're paid. And just like it was a welcome change when left tackles finally started being compensated more closely to their value a few years back, I think we should be happy to see writers moved a tiny bit closer to their real value.

His whole post is worth reading...the analogy isn't perfect in terms of market structure: writers have more of a free market than NFL linemen had pre-free-agency, but as Last notes in the comments, the market they have is not the most effective one, given the stranglehold a handful of consumers (i.e., network heads) have on the decision to hire them.

As Last notes, writers bring a large marginal value to the table: it's far more common to see TV shows fail for bad writing than for bad acting, so improving the writing can dramatically improve the expected return on investment on a show (unless the show's concept is so bad as to be beyond salvage by any writer). That's partly a function of an inefficient market (i.e., inability to identify the best writers, as compared to a relatively efficient market for locating good actors), possibly partly a scarcity-of-quality issue, and partly that - unlike novelists or movie writers - TV writers are signed in advance of turning out multiple stories, so the network heads may not want to pay in advance without assurances that a given writer will produce consistently good work.

The problem with writers not getting their due in terms of their marginal value to the projects they work on is, I would guess, the combination of the first and third points: networks don't have - or don't feel they have - a really good system for telling the difference between good and bad writers, and lack confidence that today's good writer will continue to churn out quality tomorrow. At least, that's my speculation. Because if the networks really did believe they could measure the difference between good writers and bad ones there would be a very big marginal investment return to be made by expanding your writing budget to snag the best ones.

I was, at one time or another, a regular viewer of something like half the shows on this list.

Sean Connery's golfing buddies: Craig T. Nelson and Joe Pesci.

Warning: contains spoilers if you have not watched all 6 prior seasons (I learned things here I did not know, not having yet caught up on seasons 4 & 5):

Via Allahpundit.

Matt Welch links to a cool video of the Beatles performing "Hey Bulldog," one of their lesser-known but still excellent tunes:

Boba Fett: Delicious Cookie Receptacle.

Just a moment to blog here - I just got back from seeing Bruce Springsteen live at Rockefeller Center (which is just a block from my office). It was awesome (and a good deal more fun than last night's Mets game, which I was at Shea for, and which quickly turned from desperation to a funereal atmosphere). Granted, I couldn't see Bruce from where I was standing, and I couldn't hear nearly any of what he said when he bantered with or hectored the crowd or chatted with Matt Lauer, but (a) I was still closer to the stage than I have been for the three times I saw him in concert, and (b) hey, it's free. It was sort of surreal, since I was across the street and while Bruce was playing there were an endless stream of cabs, trucks, cop cars, buses, etc. streaming by. I also got to see Tim Russert, who wandered in front of one of the big panoramic second-floor windows on his cell phone and waved to the crowd.

Bruce was scheduled to go on at about 8:30, but he came out to do a warmup at 8am sharp - and oddly, he played "The Promised Land," which he then played a second time as his opener on the air. Bruce and the band both sounded great. After that he played two of the new songs that for various reasons I had not heard previously. First was "Radio Nowhere," which rocks, and if anything reminded me of "Trouble River," but bouncier. Second up, and preceded by some political screed about tearing up the Constitution and whatnot (I couldn't make out enough of it to really be irritated, and besides, we know Bruce's politics by now) was "Living in the Future," which has a real vintage E Street Band feel to it. Then he did a fairly somber version of "My Hometown," and came back out (I assume for the last time - I left a few minutes later) for an encore of "Night," a little bit of an odd choice at 9am but the longtime Bruce fans in the crowd ate it up.

UPDATE: From YouTube, audio of Bruce doing "Radio Nowhere" in Asbury Park Tuesday night:

And here is "Living in the Future"

It would appear that Bruce may have done one more song after I left....grrr.

Will Collier explains how the record companies' declining profit margins from selling music in the age of iTunes are pushing them to focus on acts who generate profit from things other than their music, with inevitable declining returns on the quality of the music.

It's the feel-good story of the year:

Via Jane Galt.

UPDATE: This is good too.

So, late Thursday night I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final installment in the series. My review of the book is below the fold.

WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS! WARNING! SPOILERS!

In other words, don't read further unless you have finished the book or don't mind finding out how it goes and ends.

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I'm still appalled that the NY Times broke embargo and published a review of the seventh Harry Potter book yesterday, though given the Times' attitude towards far more serious and dangerous secrets, I can't say I'm surprised. At any rate, I will never forgive anyone who spoils the ending for me, doubly so because I'm swamped with work at the moment and will take longer than usual to get through the final 784 pages of the saga. This isn't like the Sopranos, where we could all watch a single episode the same night. My one consolation is that the media is so fixated on "does Harry die?" that that may be all they report. Either way, I will have to avoid a lot of media for the next week or two.

As for my predictions for Book #7, I can't add much to my lengthy analysis after Book #6. Jonathan Last has more here, including a link to a lengthy analysis of the "evil Snape" theory (i.e., that Snape is actually a Saruman-like figure). I continue to believe that we will find that Snape was never fully loyal either to Dumbledore or Voldemort.

It being my son's brithday last Thursday, we took the kids (sans baby) out to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. On the whole, it was yet again an enjoyable film, as the first four were. But a good many of the scenes felt rushed - they didn't just trim out scenes to squeeze an 870-page book into a single movie, they also simplified the scenes that were left, taking out many of the delicious ironies, clever plot twists and one-liners that make Rowling's books more than just fun kiddie stories. I swear, if they made a movie version of Gilligan's Island today the first thing the studio would do is tell the director that the plot needed to be simplified and there were too many characters. The film ran something like 2 hours and 20 minutes, and while a 3-hour movie is always a hard sell, especially for kids, you could easily have added 20 minutes to the film and lost nothing in terms of pacing. Remember, the bulk of the kids in the audience have plowed through multiple 700+ page books, they will have the patience.

Of course, the book is always better. And I'm not unsympathetic to the problem of condensing a book of that length. More after the fold - I'm writing for the audience of people who know the books here, so spoilers will follow if you don't.

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H/T

An exhaustive explanation from the setting of the final scene of why Tony is deader than Paul McCartney. Via HotAir. Of course, all of this is equally consistent with Chase teasing us to build suspense. I still think the whole "show ends when Tony's point of view ends" assumption is inconsistent with the show's prior seasons, in which we saw plenty of things Tony never saw.

By the way - another spoiler here, albeit from an older film:

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An interesting interview with the Sopranos creator, including an unsurprising admission:

[R]emember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.

Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9.

"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.

Translation: if it feels like filler, it is filler. The Kevin Finnerty thing went on at least an episode too long as well.

Let's talk about the ending of The Sopranos. Spoliers, of course, aplenty. DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDED

(NOTE: POST HAS BEEN UPDATED SEVERAL TIMES)

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Now, now, we are really in the home stretch. SPOLIERS from last night's Sopranos included, so don't go below the fold if you are still waiting to watch it.

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Jonathan Last has been pumping up the Harry Potter 7 speculation with posts discussing the possibility of an early-in-the-book death for Mrs. Weasley and speculation that Professor McGonagall is a double agent. I don't buy the latter at all - I don't think even a fictional character could be convicted in a court of law of treason on such flimsy evidence, most of which consists of (1) sour facial expressions and (2) questionable decisionmaking.

I'm a little bleary-eyed from watching the Sopranos last night after the Mets got shut down by Tyler Clippard on the way to his junior prom....thoughts in the extended entry below, SPOILERS INCLUDED.

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I was switching back and forth last night between the GOP debate and the Met game before catching up on last night's "24," so let me give you my observations on what I did catch, plus a few other bits:

*It may almost be time to add Shawn Green to the list of Omar's successes - I'm really amazed that he is hitting .324 and slugging .525, when he looked for all the world like he was headed irreversibly downhill last season. It's a Mike Lowell-style resurgence. Green doesn't look like a power hitter; he's built like a finesse pitcher. The Mets have batboys beefier than Green.

*24 has just gone catastrophically off the rails since the end of the plot with the Arabs. They should probably have ended the season right there. In particular, we have seen no explanation of how Chaing new where and when to call Jack to start this whole thing, and no good reason why the White House should have agreed in the first place to negotiate with a state actor holding a U.S. citizen hostage in Los Angeles. It's gone downhill from there. The Russians seem awfully touchy about nuclear technology that their own consul was basically handing out like Halloween candy, yet blase about threatening war with the U.S. when they know that the U.S. has access to that technology. The simplest explanation is this one.

It looks like Jack is finally leaving Los Angeles after this season. This means we can ask a question that would come up for no other show: will they kill off Los Angeles?

*The account of the White House hospital visit to John Ashcroft, by the way, sounds so much like something from 24... a scene very, very radically different from the caricature of Ashcroft as a jackbooted thug. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for Bush's talk with Comey to know how his concerns were ultimately dealt with or whether Bush just twisted his arm on the importance of the intelligence being collected.

*That set for the debate looked like a bad game show...I missed the rules, were the candidates actually buzzing in for rebuttal time?

*Rudy had the best response of the night when he slammed Ron Paul for essentially saying the U.S. had invited 9/11. I think Paul misread his invite to the Green Party debate. As I have said before, one Ron Paul in Congress is a good thing, but more of them would be a disaster. Any time he opens his mouth on foreign affairs you see why.

*Runner-up line goes to Mike Huckabee: "Congress has been spending money like John Edwards at a beauty shop".

*Of course, both of them have stiff competition from Fred Thompson's brilliant and hilarious response to Michael Moore.

*Having seen only transcripts of the first debate, I had not seen Paul or Tom Tancredo live before, and they were much unlike my image of them from reading their statements for years - Paul seemed like a frail old man, and Tancredo seemed meek and nervous; I was expecting a guy who looked and sounded like Bob Dornan.

*Goldberg and Vodkapundit had basically the same reaction to Romney - of course, Romney's father was a car salesman (well, a CEO of a car company, actually). In positioning himself as a conservative, Romney is basically a smart businessman pursuing an underserved market, not a man seeking higher office out of a firm belief in anything in particular, and it shows.

*There is really, really no purpose to Thommy Thompson and Jim Gilmore being in this race, none.

*Other than his position on trade, I can't think of a single thing I have seen from Duncan Hunter to dislike. Hunter has no realistic chance of getting the nomination, but he might not be a bad running mate - he's a serious guy who looks and sounds like a serious guy.

*From what I saw, compared to some of the last debate's questions, I have to say that the Fox team was just miles better than the MSNBC team in asking questions that GOP primary voters would actually want to see answered (one exception was the justly-booed question to McCain about the Confederate flag) and avoiding speechifying by the moderators. From here on out they should just have Brit Hume & co. do all the GOP debates and Tim Russert do the Democrats.

More environmental propaganda from Hollywood children's movies. Oh, goody. Quoth Cameron Diaz: "Well, hopefully there'll be a planet in four years." Ya think?

A California appeals court throws out a lawsuit against the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), holding that under California's SLAPP statute (designed to reduce lawsuits targeting public speech), IMDb was entitled to immunity from suit for basing its listing of film credits on the credits used by the studios. The plaintiff claimed an entitlement to be listed as a producer on three films but had had his credits deleted by the studio after he left its employ.

Thoughts on tonight's episode - SPOILERS INCLUDED so don't say you were not warned...but I will warn you that you should watch this one ASAP if you recorded it. There were Things that Happened in this episode.

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This sounds like news, at least incrementally:

Lucas... says he is readying "Clone Wars," an animated series for TV that's derived from "Star Wars." Many "Star Wars" characters appear in "Clone Wars," but voiced by other actors.

And here's a little news: Lucas tells me he will make two more live-action films based in the "Star Wars" era.

"But they won't have members of the Skywalker family as characters," he said. "They will be other people of that milieu."

The two extra films will also be made for TV and probably be an hour long each. But, like "Clone Wars," Lucas doesn't know where on TV they will land.

I wonder if the Clone Wars show will rehash the stuff in the animated micro-series or be different.

So I have been pondering in recent days how The Sopranos will or should end, with 6 or 7 seasons (depending how you count) behind us and 4 episodes to go. There's much speculation that David Chase, the creator of the series, really doesn't want to give us a neatly wrapped, satisfying ending, and of course there is the fact that many long-running serieses leave us with endings that go wrong in one of two opposite directions: either it leaves us hanging or it ties things up with a forced, didn't-see-that-coming ending. (A discussion for another day is the best and worst ways that long-running shows have ended).

More below the fold, for those of you who aren't caught up. If for any reason you have genuine spoilers rather than educated speculation about the last four episodes, TAKE THEM ELSEWHERE.

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The Imus controversy has had a number of ripples, including the car accident that nearly killed the Governor of New Jersey. But now we see the opening of a door that just might lead to some good:

Prominent U.S. hip-hop executive Russell Simmons Monday recommended eliminating the words "b___h," "ho" and "n____r" from the recording industry, considering them "extreme curse words."

+++

Simmons, co-founder of the Def Jam label and a driving force behind hip-hop's huge commercial success, called for voluntary restrictions on the words and setting up an industry watchdog to recommend guidelines for lyrical and visual standards.

Good for Russell Simmons, one of the few people with enough clout and enough credibility to make something like this happen.

* - YMMV as to whether this story was an imbroglio, a kerfuffle or a brouhaha.

So the Rutgers women's basketball team held a team press conference yesterday to respond to Don Imus:

Rutgers' outraged coach, C. Vivian Stringer, wiped away tears as she recounted her own battles with racism and said she won't let Imus "steal our joy."

Then each player stood up, walked over to the microphone and introduced herself.

Towering over her teammates, Vaughn gave a cheery "Good morning, everyone." But her broad smile faded as she opened up about the hurt she feels - as an African-American and a woman. "I'm not a ho, I'm a woman. I'm someone's child," she said.

The decision to hold this press conference is a horrible failure of leadership on the part of Stringer and anyone else in the athletic and academic establishment at Rutgers who let this happen.

To recap, for those of you just tuning in, radio 'shock jock' Don Imus is in hot water, and justifiably so, for referring to the Rutgers women's hoops players as "nappy headed hos," and a fair debate is to be had as to whether this proves that Imus is

(a) a racist and/or sexist;
(b) a boor and a moron with no sense of propriety;
(c) a cranky old coot whose brain is permanently addled by drugs having a 'senior moment' on the air;
(d) an aging shock-radio guy trying desperately to stay relevant by talking like a 22-year-old rapper; or
(e) my personal favorite, all of the above.

I'm not here to defend Imus, as his remark was indefensible, and besides, Imus endorsed and relentlessly touted Kerry in 2004, so let the Left defend him. On the other hand, as I have long argued, not everything that is indefensible is necessarily a capital crime. Imus has, appropriately, been given a two-week suspension for the same reason you hit the dog with a rolled-up newspaper when he poops on the living room rug. Whether he should be fired depends on what you think more generally about shock-jock radio, since this kind of thing is basically an occupational hazard of employing people like Imus. Of course, there's also the fact that Imus isn't funny (granted, I've never been a regular listener, and I first heard him around 1980 so I may be selling his early work short, but in my book a guy who is unfunny for going on three decades is not funny).

But here's the thing: whether or not they think they are just in the business of winning ballgames, college coaches are role models to their players. College students are at a particularly impressionable stage in their lives: finally old enough to first start to see adults as peers rather than distant authority figures, they naturally begin to model themselves on whomever they meet that most impresses them. Most college athletes - and I assume this is true of the Rutgers women as well - will not become professional athletes, and thus are preparing themselves for life and jobs in the real world. It is incumbent on their coaches to teach them lessons that will help them there.

Imus' remarks were crude and ugly, but the lesson Stringer should have been sending these young ladies is that they say a lot about Imus but nothing about them. Different people handle these things differently, but a coach worth his or her salt could have played this at least two perfectly reasonable ways. One is to laugh it off with the traditional "sticks and stones" attitude, and show the players that this really shouldn't mean anything to them; there will always be people who say inappropriate and mean-spirited things in life, and you shouldn't take that seriously. A more combative personality of the Bobby Knight variety would respond by taking some personal public potshots at Imus, drawing the story away from the players and into coach vs. shock jock; this would teach the players the valuable lesson that when somebody sucker punches your people, you hit them back in kind and teach them a lesson.

What you do not do is call a press conference like this:

"I want to ask him, 'Now that you've met me, am I ho?'" said Rutgers center Kia Vaughn of the Bronx. "Unless they've given 'ho' a whole new definition, that's not what I am."

Declaring that Imus has "stolen a moment of pure grace for us," the wounded women spoke out for the first time about Imus' racist radio remarks.

"This has scarred me for life," said guard Matee Ajavon of Newark. "I've dealt with racism before. For it to be in the public eye like this, it will be something I will tell my granddaughter."

Somebody gave these young women the message - or at least failed to disabuse them of the notion - that they should take Imus' words seriously, take them to heart. This press conference was a show of the coach and the players wallowing in Imus' words, embracing them, and thus elevating them as if any serious person would think less of them - rather than of Imus - for what Imus said. This story should never have been about the players, because Imus' words were generic (indeed, that's precisely why they were offensive). It's the Culture of Victimology at its most destructive, teaching these young women that they should consider themselves to have been genuinely maligned by an aging boor and to seek out the status and posture of one to whom a deep wrong has been done and who is owed.

Put more succinctly, when someone calls you a 'nappy headed ho,' you should not feel the need to call a press conference to deny it. Maybe these young women don't know that - but if they don't, it was the business of someone in a position of authority to teach them. Shame on Vivian Stringer and Rutgers University for failing to teach them that.

Josh notes the passing of B.C. creator Johnny Hart, who suffered a fatal stroke (at age 76) while working on his comic strip: "the dude died at his drawing board. That's hardcore."

As Josh notes, B.C. was a deeply idiosyncratic strip, with thick and sometimes impenetrable doses of Hart's Christianity and a lot of running gags, most of which were not funny. I bought a book of B.C. strips some years back; when Hart was on he could, in fact, be both funny and thoughtful, even though a lot of what he did wasn't really my cup of tea. I agree 100% with Josh that the strip shouldn't be continued by Hart's family.

More details here.

You know you want it. They're asking $150K. Of course, some disclaimers are apparently thought necessary:

Although it cannot achieve the 300 mph speeds that KITT reached, soar 50 feet in the air or throw smoke bombs, key features of the star car are intact. Perhaps most important, the red scanner light on the nose glows and makes a humming noise.

The car has two working video screens on the dashboard, and the cockpit features buttons that light up in green, yellow and red: ski mode, rocket boost, micro jam, silent mode, oil slick and eject.

Most of the buttons don't do anything, Verhoek said. Nor can the car hold a conversation or drive itself.

Well, I'm glad they cleared that up. Of course, you will want the car David Hasselhoff drove before he ended the Cold War.

A potentially relevant provision of the US Constitution:

(Note: Spoiler involved for those of you who are not caught up. Double note: I won't see tonight's episode until later this week and have not seen seasons 2-5 or the second half of season 1, so please don't spoil anything for me, either)

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Jonathan Last noted last week that Law & Order may actually be in danger of getting cancelled. That seems daft to me - while people like Jerry Orbach and Sam Waterson have been major factors in the show's success, the Law & Order format doesn't depend on keeping particular writers or cast any more than, say, the Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, or the Evening News do - if the show isn't working, the answer is to replace the people, not cancel the show.

That said, obviously if the show were to go off the air, Fred Thompson - who is increasingly being urged to run for president by Republicans dissatisfied with the 2008 field - might have one less reason to stay out of presidential politics.

Boston lead singer Brad Delp's death has been ruled a suicide by carbon monoxide posioning. Delp was 55; his body was found by his fiancee. Boston did little enough of note after its legendary first album, but that's more than enough memories for one lifetime. Rest in Peace.

Kiefer Sutherland is headed to West Point to explain to rabid "24" fans among the cadets that torture isn't OK in real life.

While I remain deeply skeptical - putting aside for a second the moral and legal arguments - of claims that torture is never the most effective way to get information, there's no question from what I've seen (bear in mind I've only started watching the show this season) that 24 way overstates the practical case for torture - Jack Bauer basically never gets any useful information until he starts abusing people, and always gets more (and it's always accurate) when he turns the screws on them. I have no problem with that as a theatrical convention, but the real world is a lot messier.

FTTW is holding a poll on the funniest film comedy ever.

UPDATE: Of course, I voted for Holy Grail.

Well, I didn't watch the Oscars on Sunday; I ended up getting sucked into an Iwo Jima documentary on PBS instead. I don't get to the movies much anymore and it's rare these days that I see anything that gets nominated (well, except for those agitprop penguins).

Matt Welch did, and he had quite enough of Hollywood's self-congratulation:

I live in East Hollywood. I do not like that Bush fellow. I'm worried about Global Warming. I really liked An Inconvenient Truth (except for the horror bits where Robot Al whispering his haunted memories about some river, his son, Katherine Harris, whatever). I'm really happy that lesbians rock the mic and get married and make babies with evil David Crosby's sperm; I'm on that team (well, not David Crosby's, but you get the point). But watching these people congratulate each other for their enlightened views, their activism, their spreading of "awareness," kinda makes me want to do one-handed pushups with Brent Bozell, or at least lick my hand & slap that Guggenheim kid on the back of his Gore-loving neck.

Isn't the simplest explanation for Britney Spears shaving her head that she had some hygiene-related need to do so (the word "lice" comes to mind)? I mean, we're talking about a woman who rarely appears to have washed her face or hair.

MTV is facing a wave of layoffs amid plunging ratings, placing even the future of the once-iconic "Total Request Live" in doubt.

If this keeps up, the network may have to fill time by showing music videos.

Apple Computer has settled its longstanding trademark dispute with Apple Music, the publisher of the Beatles catalogue. The good news is that this means some hope of finally bringing the Beatles to iTunes.

Re-watching some of Revenge of the Sith the other day finally crystallized my thoughts on the Star Wars prequel trilogy, now with a distance of some 18 months from the completion of the last of the prequels.

When each of the prequels came out, I enjoyed them (my review of Episode III is here). Of course, any male born between about 1965 and 1975 was hard-wired to embrace the prequels, given how much the original trilogy dominated popular culture in our childhoods and preteen years. It took a lot to alienate us Star Wars fanatics; although George Lucas nonetheless succeeded in alienating a good number, most everyone who loved the first three could find something to like in these - the Phantom Menace, for example, had all sorts of problems as a film, but the lightsaber duel between Darth Maul, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan was the best lightsaber fight of the whole Star Wars series; likewise you would need a heart of stone not to get excited about finally seeing Yoda square off in combat at the end of Attack of the Clones.

Looking back, Lucas produced two uneven films (Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones), each of which had a bunch of fun scenes but also with plenty of cringe-inducing scenes and neither of which hung together that well as a complete film, and one good movie (Revenge of the Sith) which could and should have been a great movie but for a few potholes along the way.

If Lucas' goals were simply to complete his story arc his own way, make a bucketload of money from films, books, games and other merchandise, and play around with modern special effects, then he succeeded. But there was no reason to set his sights that low. The prequels could have been genuinely outstanding films.

The particular errors that Lucas made are well-worn ground by now - Jar Jar was a bad joke told for far too long, the midichlorians unnecessarily de-mystified the Force, the fish-faced Neimoidians with the Charlie Chan accents were silly and off-putting at best, racist caricatures at worst, and the handful of efforts at contemporary political commentary were distracting and incoherent. I'm more interested in not just the excising of particular mistakes but rethinking how the films could have been better, even within the parameters of the basic prequel storylines and characters as they have been laid out in the films, novels and the animated Clone Wars microseries.

Lucas started the films with two related and significant disadvantages - first, a lack of suspense, since everyone knew that the prequels had to end with Anakin turning into Vader, Obi-Wan headed to Tattooine, Yoda to Dagobah, Palpatine becoming the Emperor, etc. And second, limited ability to get creative with the storyline for the same reason - his endpoints were already set in stone.

But the films also started with tremendous advantages that most filmmakers would kill for: (1) an emotionally powerful, built-in double dramatic arc of downfall and betrayal, both Anakin's and that of the Republic; (2) a stable of pre-existing characters with known and in some cases reasonably vivid personalities, who require little further introduction, combined with a pre-existing fictional universe free from current realities of human existence; (3) employment of the best special-effects teams and the best film composer of our times; (4) a huge, built-in audience; (5) complete creative independence and an essentially unlimited budget, given Lucas' wealth and the justifiably high box office expectations; and (6) the combination of pop culture cache (especially for male performers of roughly my generation) with the prior two factors, making it child's play to attract the best talent in Hollywood to work on the films.

Bearing those in mind, here's four things Lucas should have done differently:

1. Don't Go It Alone. I'm hardly the first to make this point, but it was the original error that spawned so many of the others. Lucas is a man of considerable gifts, and some of these are still evident in the prequels - his imagination, his talent with special effects, his gift for the pacing of action sequences. But he has always had weaknesses as a filmmaker - he has no talent for directing actors, his dramatic and especially romantic dialogue can be horrendous - and one thing he did well in the original trilogy (well-timed wisecracks and one-liners) seems to have ossified in the intervening years as he went from quirky and ambitious film buff to merchandising tycoon.

All of that would have mattered a lot less if Lucas had made the decision to bring in the best help he could get from talented directors and writers to work over the films and make them wonderful and realistic and human. It's not as if Lucas would have had to worry about losing creative control, since he owns the place, and it's not as if fans and reviewers would have forgotten that this was a George Lucas production (how many besides Star Wars fanatics can name the directors of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi?). The use of a revolving door of directors has worked quite well for the Harry Potter films, for example. If Lucas had only been willing to get the input of some other people, he could have worked with better dialogue, better performances, and people to point out huge mistakes before they hit the screen.

2. Combine the First Two Films. Since the original Star Wars ("A New Hope") billed itself as "Episode IV," the prequels had to be three films. But they didn't have to be these three. In fact, I think most Star Wars fans expected the first of the three films to introduce Anakin, the second to cover the Clone Wars, and the third to bring Anakin over fully to the Dark Side.

Had Lucas stuck with that order, a huge number of the narrative problems and omissions in the prequel trilogy would have fallen away. First, Lucas himself has admitted that he had to pad out Phantom Menace to get to a full-length film. Making an Episode I that covered Phantom Menace's storyline in 45 minutes before jumping ahead 10 years to pick up the Attack of the Clones storyline would have immediately removed or drastically shortened a lot of the filler and the redundant plotlines - the Gungans (Jar Jar even would not have been so bad with five minutes of screen time), the storyline where Anakin accidentally destroys the Death Star-lite, the fun but overlong pod race, the repetitive fight scenes at Padme's palace. As a corollary, instead of being off in a star fighter Anakin should have been present for the final battle with Darth Maul. That would have presented several opportunities - have him witness the death of his first mentor, intensifying his emotional scars. Have him play some role, through a not-entirely-intentional use of the Dark Side of the Force (perhaps even a Force-choke on Darth Maul that isn't noticed by Obi-Wan) that saves Obi-Wan and lets him kill Darth Maul, thus (1) establishing Anakin's unusual precocity without the need for a midichlorian blood sample and (2) serving as a sort of original sin in his relationship with Obi-Wan. Personally, I would also have laid out near the beginning the death of Sifo Dyas, whose critical role in ordering the clone army is never explained onscreen.

Granted, Attack of the Clones covers a lot of plot, some of which would get submerged if you combined the two, but with a full Clone Wars film to work with, the reworked first episode could have cut a lot of the romantic scenes with Padme, to be developed during the war. Some of the more video-game-y scenes could have been dropped (i.e., the conveyer belt scene). Certainly there was a half hour's worth of fat to be cut, and the films could have run close to three hours without exhausting audience patience if done right.

The resulting space cleared for a full-length film treatment of the Clone Wars would have given the trilogy much-needed epic scope (we see far too little of how the main characters' dramas affect the wider galaxy) and dramatic depth, as well as giving us a lot more insight into the character development and growth to manhood of Anakin, a little backstory to make cartoonish villains like Dooku and Grievous less incomprehensible, and perhaps space to let Sam Jackson take Mace Windu out to play more. Certainly the novels and the microseries offered numerous examples of the kinds of storylines available during the war - seiges, hostage situations, the deaths of Jedi in battle, intrigue among the villains, opportunities for Anakin to learn how to command, the whole whodunit story of the Jedi pursuing Sidious (leading to Palpatine needing to get off Coruscant to dry up the trail and thus motivating him to stage his own abduction). A full Clone Wars film could also have given us a live-action Asajj Ventress, a character who is vividly drawn in the novels, and who is naturally theatrical, with her shaved tattooed head, taut, leather-clad figure, double lightsabers and depthless rage; in fact, she could well have been a sort of Boba Fett crossed with Princess Leia in terms of combination geek factor and weird sex appeal. She would also have given us a chance for either Anakin and Obi-Wan combined, or perhaps Yoda or Mace, to get another lightsaber kill.

3. Rethink and Recast Anakin: Hayden Christensen took a lot of grief for his performances, but in Attack of the Clones I thought some of the criticisms unfair - he was asked to play a whining, petulant, self-important teenage boy, and he gave a very realistic portrayal of one. In Revenge of the Sith he was asked to do more as an actor, with decidedly mixed results - he stuck one key scene perfectly (the final showdown with Obi-Wan), gave a weak performance in the other (his conversion to the Dark Side), and proved incompetent at any scenes with Padme.

The core problem, though, wasn't so much Christensen himself as Lucas' failure to grasp Anakin's full potential as a character and cast him accordingly. While Obi-Wan is important to the plot, Anakin's personal drama is, after all, the center of the prequel trilogy. And the Anakin we could have expected from watching Vader in action and hearing about his youth had enormous potential as a classic film role: a young man who is cocky, ambitous, and supremely talented, but also rash, reckless, impatient, and subject to passions and rages he can't control and that ultimately consume him. Any screenwriter worth his salt would kill to write that character, any actor to play him. He could have been the ultimate bad boy anti-hero, James Dean with a lightsaber, the guy every teenage guy admires and every teen girl wants (indeed, ask Peter Jackson how it helps the box office to have teen girls swoon over your male lead). The role could have launched the next Brando, if written and cast properly - more swagger, more smirking, more volcanic temper, less whimpering and speechifying. Leo DiCaprio would have been perfect for the role if he was a foot taller.

4. Find A Han Solo: One of the critical elements of the original trilogy was the balance between the whiny, self-centered Luke and the wisecracking, free-wheeling Han. Throughout the films, Han (and his relationships with the other characters) kept the movies light-hearted, deflated some of the pretensions of even Obi-Wan and Leia, and generally injected the same retro 1940s charm that Harrison Ford would later bring to Lucas' Indiana Jones films. Han was at all times the movies' sense of humor about the absurdity of its own cosmology.

Obviously, neither Han nor Harrison Ford could appear in the original trilogy, but some character could and should have been given a Han-like personality to lighten the mood. There's no reason it couldn't have been a Jedi (the first two Jedi we meet are the mischievous Yoda and the dryly witty Obi-Wan, so there was no rule that says Jedi have to be somber and dull to be self-controlled), maybe even Mace Windu, but regardless, somewhere in the films we needed a foil for the overly serious tone. As discussed above, a better Anakin would have provided a little of this mood-lightener in the re-imagined second film in particular, and in fact a whole film focused on the Clone Wars would have created more room for a gun-wielding character who helps command the Clone Troopers.

You must read Dave Barry's year in review (via Instapundit). I could not believe it when he had jokes in there about the Winter Olympics - that was less than a year ago? It seems like another century. It's been a long year. A few classic lines:

This was the year in which the members of the United States Congress, who do not bother to read the actual bills they pass, spent weeks poring over instant messages sent by a pervert. This was the year in which the vice president of the United States shot a lawyer, which turned out to be totally legal in Texas.

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[January] dawns with petty partisan bickering in Washington, D.C., a place where many people view petty partisan bickering as honest, productive work, like making furniture.

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In Paris, thousands of demonstrators take to the streets and shut down the city to demonstrate the fact that, hey, it's Paris.

Read the whole thing.

The final Harry Potter book is titled.

Like any good fable, the Harry Potter books can be read to support a variety of worldviews and political viewpoints, although if there's a common theme in the politics of JK Rowling's writings it's more libertarian than anything, as she plays up the value of individual self-reliance and self-defense and trashes goverment in all its forms - dovish government, hawkish government, law enforcement, government interference in schools, government interference in the media, etc.

That said, only a lunatic would look at the fifth Potter book, in particular, as supportive of left-leaning politics as applied to the post-9/11 world (perhaps the sixth, to some extent, with its running storyline about an innocent detainee, but not the fifth). Jonathan Last has more, on an article I had meant to blog about myself but he's got it covered.

Yesterday I took my 9-year-old son to see the film version of Eragon. I read to him every night, and in between the six Harry Potter books, the Hobbit and (currently) the Fellowship of the Ring, we did Eragon and its sequel in a proposed trilogy, Eldest.

The Eragon books are well-done, and certainly an impressive achievement for a teenage author. My son enjoys them, and while they are perhaps not books I would bother to read on my own, Christopher Paolini keeps the story going well enough to keep my interest.

That said, they aren't the most original things in the world. Some people have suggested that they are a Tolkein knockoff, but they are more accurately described as a Star Wars knockoff transplanted into a Tolkein-like universe:

*Ancient order of guardians of peace and justice reigns for a thousand years, gets done in by the treachery of one of their own.

*Ignorant farmboy who lives with his uncle discovers that he is the last heir to the order, is guided by old bearded hermit type who used to be one of them after the bad guys toast his farm and his uncle.

etc., etc., etc. The parallels grow stronger as the story goes on and into the second book (for any of you who may read the books or see the movie without having read both books, I'll keep the spoilers below the fold). What is stolen from Tolkein is more the world this takes place in - Paolini's elves and dwarves are almost entirely indistinguishable from Tolkein's, for example.

The movie wasn't terrible, taken in its own right, but I had a couple of specific problems with it. The most baffling problem was that the filmmakers systematically eliminated all of the plot elements that tied the story to its sequel, including eliminating key characters (Katrina, Jeod, Elva, Solembum, the dwarves, the Twins, the Cripple Who is Whole) and even appearing to kill one other character who survives to the third book. I assume they made this movie without either reading Eldest or consulting with Paolini, because the sequel will make far less sense without an explanation of how the threads of the story connect. Either that or they just assume that no sequel will be made.

A second problem is that the film changed all sorts of things big and small that did not need to be changed, and in many places by doing so removed the elements of Paolini's book that were original, or at least were cribbed from sources other than Tolkein, Peter Jackson and George Lucas. The Shade, for example, is a very vividly distinctive character in the book, with pale skin and red eyes to signify the extent to which he is possessed by evil spirits. In the film his skin doesn't approach that hue until the end, and his eyes are normal. But other characters, the Urgals, have red eyes. And about the Urgals: unlike Tolkein's orcs, they aren't supposed to be simply misshapen but rather are almost minotaur-like, standing taller than humans (the tallest breed run some eight feet tall), broad-shouldered and with horns. In the movie, no horns, and they are basically just ugly men with bad makeup, and look like rejects from a Peter Jackson casting call.

Read on...

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I was reading a few weeks back an article in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, discussing high-end neckties. There were a variety on offer at different prices: $79 tie, $100+ tie, even a $220 tie. And then...a $1200 tie.

See, this is where I get lost. I mean, while I personally don't have the kind of disposable income to go throwing $220 after a tie, I can imagine the situation where it would seem reasonable to do that. Say you are a corporate CEO making millions, and always need to look impressive. Or you're Jay Leno: you appear in a suit and tie on national television something like 200 times a year. A $220 tie, I can see.

But $1200? I don't care how rich you are, I just can't see where it would ever seem worth it. How much visibly better can it be than the $220 tie? Plus, even if I was a billionaire I'd still be worried about spilling something on a tie that expensive.

So let me get this straight: we know that Princess Diana's driver was drunk, speeding and trying to flee paparazzi, and she wasn't wearing a seatbelt...and yet some people still find her death mysterious?

Gwyneth Paltrow says she relies on Madonna for "advice about how to say no". The punchline pretty much writes itself, doesn't it?

If you have small children I would highly recommend that you not take them to this movie (if you don't, you surely won't go anyway). First off, the film is often dark, depressing or scary, probably too much so for kids under 8 or 9. Second, the second half of the film is basically an extended diatribe in favor of a UN ban on fishing in the Antarctic. As with so many cartoons today featuring talking animals, carnivores and humans are uniformly evil (well, except for the penguins themselves - the fish they eat are not anthropomorphized). And the anti-human, anti-fishing messages are not subtle but heavy-handed and preachy.

The film had other weaknesses, of varying degrees of obviousness. The bouts of sexual suggestiveness among the penguins were reasonably subtle enough to sail over smaller kids' heads, and to some extent necessary to a film the first half of which centers on penguin mating rituals. There were Hollywood stereotypes abounding: unfavorable characters were given Southern or Scottish accents, misguided religious superstitions and a bluenosed insistence on tradition and conformity (even though the film's beginning dramatically emphasized the reality that tradition and conformity are essential to the survival of emperor penguins), while favorable ones got Latino accents, rythym, a sense of humor and a lust for females; and the scene in a penguin house in a zoo may turn kids against the joy of watching penguins in the zoo, something my kids love. (These would all be minor grievances - I'm not suggesting I'm outraged about giving penguins ethnic accents - if the movie was funnier or less preachy). The movie also never explains why the lead character ends up with blue eyes and a permanent adolescent fuzz, although presumably this is just to let audiences keep him straight from the other penguins.

This is not to say that the movie is all bad. The animated landscapes and action scenes are breathtaking, for example. The voicework is pretty good, notably by Robin Williams in dual roles. But inhuman (or at least, anti-human) environmental propaganda wrapped in the veneer of a kids' movie is not the best way to spend a Saturday afternoon with the family.

Please tell me I did not just see an ad for a Broadway musical with the music of Bob Dylan.

Slash of Guns n' Roses advertising Volkswagens.

The last thing you expect if you hire Keith Richards is for him to show up drunk, right?

Kids, in particular, will have to be crushed to learn of the death early this morning of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, stung fatally by a stingray while filming a documentary. Like Dale Earnhardt, Irwin made his name by taking risks in full view of the public, so you can't really separate his death from the way he lived.

UPDATE: CNN headline: "'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin dies, Al Qaeda official captured"

And here I had thought the two stories unrelated ...

Cruise has cornered the market.

Actually, Bruno Kirby was a cut above the usual "that guy". I was actually surprised that his role as the young Clemenza in Godfather II didn't rate a more prominent entry in his obit, given the series' iconic stature, but he had so many memorable roles. RIP.

Coming to a TV near you:

Mr. T, whose real name is Lawrence Tero, stars in "I Pity the Fool" debuting in October on TV Land. He dispenses advice to viewers who are struggling with life's problems.

Keith Richards will appear as Johnny Depp's pirate father in the second Pirates Of The Caribbean sequel, playing "a whisky-soaked buccaneer." I'm guessing that won't be a stretch.

In the future, at the fifteenth minute, everyone will have a blog. In that spirit, welcome Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings to the blogosphere. Via Orin Kerr.

Can't the court use its equitable powers to enjoin the issuance of such an album for the good of the general public?

It's nearly impossible to keep up with the steady stream of criminal activity by people associated with "The Sopranos," but this just cracked me up - Louis Gross, who just joined the cast as Tony's bodyguard (the one Tony picked a fight with to prove he was still top dog), has been arrested twice in recent months:

[Gross] was busted Sunday for allegedly bashing in the front door of a home in St. Albans in Queens, N.Y., and walking off with $2,700 in property.

As he left Queens Criminal Court last night, Gross, 23, called the home's owner, Trinny Hill, 38, "my landlord - my ex-landlord," though cops countered that Hill is really his ex-girlfriend.

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He was busted on Feb. 3 for allegedly stealing a shirt from Michael K, a trendy SoHo men's shop, and then beating the store manager and a security guard when they confronted him, law enforcement sources said.

What I just loved was Gross' response:

"I don't know nothing. I'm innocent. I'm always innocent," he said last night. "They were personal items - they belonged to me," he added. "I had the right to take them."

I think I would not advise him to say that one in front of a jury.

George Lucas is re-releasing the original Star Wars trilogy, in the form originally shown in theaters, in a limited-edition DVD. Via Jay Reding.

OK, let's hear it: what song can you just not resist singing along to, however unwise it may be to do so? There's a couple of them I can't resist at least singing along to quietly, but I think #1 on that list is the Eagles' "Already Gone". Which I cannot sing, yet I am compelled to do so. And, I should add, singing along when it comes on your iPod makes you look twice as ridiculous. I also whistle along to pretty much all the sax parts of Springsteen songs, but whistling's not quite as bad.

(On a separate subject, the only song I've tried my hand at at karaoke is Elvis' "Burning Love" - surprisingly, alcohol was involed.)

I missed blogging on this when it came out, but it was reported about a month ago that filming on the new Star Wars TV show will begin in 2008. So far, so good. But then there's this:

The series will be set between episodes three and four of the film saga.

It would cover the 20 years in the life of Luke Skywalker growing up that remains a mystery to most film-goers.

[producer Rick] McCallum said there would be "a whole bunch of new characters" and the series would be "much more dramatic and darker".

Please tell me that this franchise, which has made so many critical missteps in the past decade and which has something of a chance to start afresh with a TV series, isn't going to make a TV show about young Luke Skywalker. I mean, the entire point of Luke's character in Episode IV is that he's been off the scene for 20 years, at a distance from the battle against the Empire, frustrated and bored living life on a moisture farm in the middle of the desert. Nothing interesting ever happens to him, and at the start of Episode IV he's never seen a lightsaber and never practiced the Jedi arts. Are they gonna rewrite that history, or is this going to be a bunch of tedious stuff about Luke's teen angst having only a tangential connection to events outside of Tattooine? (UPDATE: Anyone want bets on how many episodes they do before we get to see Luke buying power converters at Tosche Station?)

What would be doubly frustrating is that there are a whole raft of existing Star Wars characters who would be interesting to follow in that 20-year period - Darth Vader, Tarkin, Chewbacca (OK, I recognize the dramatic limitations of a series with a Wookie as the main character), Han, Lando, R2D2, C3PO . . . short of watching Yoda alone in the swamp, Luke is about the worst character you could pick. Perhaps most obviously, you could break the mold by building around a female character: Princess Leia, who is at the center of things in Alderaan, watching her father navigate the politics of staying in the Senate while he leads the Rebellion. Leia has obviously been active herself in the Rebellion, has dealt with R2, 3PO, Vader and Tarkin . . . but instead, we are to be treated to Smallville: Tattooine?

UPDATE: Tim Harden at Flying Sparrows says I've been led astray and that the series will actually focus on other characters. If Lucas knows what's good for him, one of the first 2 or 3 episodes should feature the death of Jar Jar Binks, ideally involving either the Sarlaac or how Boba Fett got a reputation for disintegrations.

SECOND UPDATE: Hey, a love interest for Admiral Ackbar!

Well, The Sopranos certainly opened the new season with a dramatic flourish last night. I'm glad we managed to watch, since today's NY Daily News had not just a writeup but a photo spread inside the front page of this episode's big development. Click below the fold for more, but beware that there are spoilers here.

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I hope you can watch video on your PC, because I couldn't describe this with all the words at my disposal.

KITT was still a better singer, though.

If you ever want a time-wasting walk down memory lane, spend a few minutes with the five-decade-spanning IMDb page of Hanna Barbera voice specialist Don Messick. What a career: Scooby Doo, Bamm Bamm, Boo Boo, Ricochet Rabbit, Muttley, Mumbley, (gag, cough) Papa Smurf . . . the list of cartoons this guy was in is just amazing.

And if you really want to waste some time, try Toonopedia.

RIP Wilson Pickett. Nobody in the worlds of rock, pop and R&B ever had a better singing voice.

Christopher Lee:

The problem today, and I think it's a very dangerous one for the people concerned, is that there are quite large numbers of very young men and women - boys and girls to me - from 18 to 30, and they are playing very large parts in huge films and they simply, through no fault of their own, don't have the background and the experience and the knowledge to pull if off.

Via Althouse. He doesn't actually say the name "Hayden Christensen," . . .

Kaus:

It's . . . hard to believe that [Jake] Gyllenhaal is in demand because, as recounted by Snead, "there is nobody else around to cast as an under-40 romantic male lead." She's asking readers to suggest names. ... Wasn't it only a few days ago that The New York Observer was telling us about a shortage of romantic female leads? No wonder Hollywood is in trouble. ("Can't we get a penguin in that role?") ...

Of course, I doubt very much that there's a shortage of attractive and talented young actors and actresses in the movie business. If Hollywood is having trouble making young stars who can handle these kinds of roles and connect with the public, maybe it needs to start casting them in movies with better scripts and more appeal to the public. Bad movies don't make stars.

I keep seeing ads for the new ABC series "Emily's Reasons Why Not," starring Heather Graham as Ally McBeal. One thing about the show that doesn't bode well is its title. A TV series' chances of long-term success decreases exponentially with each additional words in the show's title - successful shows nearly always have short titles (usually one or two words, especially if you omit the words "the" "and" and "show"), while shows with really long, clever titles usually bomb, and if they don't they find a way to shorten the title (e.g., "Buffy"). On that evidence alone, I'm skeptical that this one will fly.

You know, I can respect Dick Clark not wanting to have last year's stroke be his career's end, and I can respect how hard he worked to get in shape for last night, but really, the man sounded awful last night (he looked healthy, but weak and frail), and I can't imagine any good will be done by bringing him back again. Last night's performance looked like a cruel SNL skit imagining what Clark would be like when he's too sick to go on and nobody will tell him not to. Hat's off for the try, Dick, but it's time to go now while you still have some dignity.

From 2003, my favorite Christmas songs.

By this point in rock history, they're running out of novel ways for rock stars to die. But as far as I know, firing squad hasn't been done yet.

As reported by Friday's Wall Street Journal ($), the new Arab-language version of The Simpsons sounds more like a parody of Arab cultural hypersensitivity:

"Omar Shamshoon," as he is called on the show, looks like the same Homer Simpson, but he has given up beer and bacon, which are both against Islam, and he no longer hangs out at "seedy bars with bums and lowlifes." In Arabia, Homer's beer is soda, and his hot dogs are barbequed Egyptian beef sausages. And the donut-shaped snacks he gobbles are the traditional Arab cookies called kahk.

A teetotaling Homer Simpson pretty much misses the point. The article doesn't mention the fate of Ned Flanders and the show's occasional scenes in a Christian church, which are presumably even more problematic than Moe's.

Following up on this earlier post and this discussion thread at Michele's, I thought I should go ahead and put on record now my fearless predictions for the concluding Book Seven of the Harry Potter cycle. It should go without saying that YOU SHOULD NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT READ ALL OF BOOK SIX, UNLESS YOU LIKE PLOT SPOILERS.

I should add that, with one or two exceptions I will detail below, my thoughts are not so much original observations as my best guesses and intuition after reading the informed speculation from a number of other sources. So, if I've said something here without explicitly crediting the person who thought it up, my apologies.

Anyway, if you don't mind playing along with this guessing game, read on for my predictions. As Dumbledore would say, "from this point forth, we shall be leaving the firm foundations of fact and journeying together through the murky marshes of memory into thickets of wildest guesswork." Specific predictions are in bold.

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This sequence of stills from a Revenge of the Sith bootleg with English subtitles badly re-translated from Chinese back into English is hysterical. I think Obi-Wan's advice to Anakin about the Jedi Council is cribbed from Jerry Maguire.

When I think that Hollywood can go no lower in terms of bad taste or unoriginality, the movie business finds a way to surprise me. But it's a rare treat when both are accomplished in one fell swoop, as they were this weekend when I started seeing billboard ads for a sequel to "Duece Bigelow: Male Gigolo."

Locusts, famine and pestilence to follow.

(On a similar note: I accept that the new "Bad News Bears" movie is raunchy and not at all suitable for chidren . . . but is it really necessary to advertise the not-suitable-for-chidren parts on baseball broadcasts?)

UPDATE: Wizbang has graphic evidence of unoriginality.

I just finished the new Harry Potter book last night. It's well-done and entertaining once again, although the book in general hewed rather more closely to the formula of the prior books than I would have expected, given how far along we are into Voldemort's terror war (and at the risk of overdrawing the parallels, Voldemort's organization is a classic terrorist group, working in secret and spreading fear through random and/or unexpected violence). A more detailed review below the fold, but be warned that there are MAJOR SPOILERS, so don't click through if you haven't read the book yet but still intend to (in fact, one reason I pressed on to finish the book rather quickly was the fear that I'd hit major spoilers on the web, having already encountered one of them quite accidentally some months ago - click here for details). Now for the SPOILERS - READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK:

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Princess Leah is born:

Norwegian Princess Leah's name was inspired by a character in a "Star Wars" movie, the mother of the infant princess was quoted as saying Thursday.

"I must admit that I have always been a big 'Star Wars' fan, and Princess Leia has always been the most beautiful in the whole world," Princess Martha Louise said in an interview with the Norwegian daily Aftenposten.

Princess Leah, born on April 8 this year and fifth in line to the Norwegian throne, was due to be baptized Thursday.

As long as they don't give her the hairdo . . .

OK, I'm not a fan of Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, but here he's unleashed on a deeply deserving assemblage of Michael Jackson supporters and reporters. Viciously funny stuff. Via The Intern.

Maybe this musical tribute is really funny. Or maybe I'm just a gigantic Star Wars dork. (via Michele)

Michele mourns the loss of oldies radio station WCBS-FM. Now, some of her sentiment is about good memories, and everyone's got their own memories. But let me tell you: I will not miss this radio station.

When I was in college, I had a dismal summer job working at a book packing warehouse, usually working 12 hours a day (6am-6pm) in a breathtakingly dusty environment, filling orders on a sort of assembly line. The warehouse had a split-day radio policy: from opening until noon, we heard WCBS, and from noon to closing, WNEW, when it was still classic rock. Which meant six hours of the same old "oldies," starting at 6 in the morning, every single day. These oldies were mainly late 50s/early 60s pop too soft to really qualify as rock (a more complete description can be found here); if I never hear Paul Anka again, I will be very happy.

This bizarre, gruesome bicycle safety video is definitely a blast from deep in the past. I'm not even sure where or how I saw it, but it's certainly memorable.

With Mickey Kaus, Jay Tea at Wizbang and Dale Franks at QandO still kicking at the politics of Star Wars, let me note the one contemporary parallel to Palpatine that should be jaw-droppingly obvious (one other blogger has noticed the same thing). Just think:

*Rises to power in a weak, corrupt and dysfunctional republic in a time of civil war.

*Gradually consolidates extraordinary executive powers, mainly with popular approval if not entirely legitimate assent, to deal with security threats.

*Assumes direct control over the regional governors to consolidate his power outside of the purview of the legislature.

*Possesses civilization-destroying weapons.

*Is, to public appearances, warmly embraced by the leading power for good.

*Isn't above using assassination attempts as a political tool.

*Ruthlessly dispatches corrupt oligarchs who had supported his rise.

*Was trained by an old order now thought extinct, and stuns observers with nostalgia for its accomplishments.

You don't have to be the biggest critic of Vladimir Putin to see a parallel. I assume Russian audiences will pick them up. Will Putin? This is a man, after all, who complained that Dobby the House-Elf from Harry Potter looked too much like him.

Gary Farber has a long, interesting post on Revenge of the Sith, including a link to the original script and discussion of deleted scenes, some of which might have been useful to developing the plot. (via Instapundit). Farber and his commenters stress the usefulness, in understanding the broader story leading into Sith, of checking out the animated Clone Wars series and the Lucas-authorized novel Labyrinth of Evil, which leads directly into the opening of Sith. I missed the series but I'll probably check out both, eventually.

Also, Orson Scott Card has a big-picture review worth reading (via Will Collier).

In addition to busting several box office records in the US with a $160 million opening weekend, Sith had "the most successful film-opening in UK cinema history" and "grossed $144.7 million overseas for a total of $303 million worldwide," including more than $26 million in the UK and $22 million in France.

Well, I went to see Revenge of the Sith yesterday; my wife and I took the kids, ages 7 and 5. I should say that the movie was rather intense for their age, and my daughter had to hide her face in a few places. I think it's OK for a 7-8 year old, but if we'd been able to get away with it I wouldn't have brought a 5-year-old to see this.

I went in really wanting to like this movie, and if it wasn't perfect, it was a heck of a thrill ride and a fittingly satisfying end to the Star Wars saga, one that I think will stand up as the equal to Return of the Jedi in terms of action, drama and the resolution of loose ends. And yes: the Wookie army is cool, and serves as a crucial plot device. The bottom line: this was so much fun, and there was so much going on (some of which I missed, due to the mumbling of some dialogue and the kids peppering me with whispered questions) that I'm dying to see it again. (You should read the reviews (including spoilers) by Michele and Will Collier, who had much the same reaction).

I'm not quite ready to say "all is forgiven" - in particular not turning the Force into a biological phenomenon - but most of the misfires that marred Episodes I and II were but distant memories after Sith. Of course, I didn't hate Episodes I and II - Phantom Menace was enjoyable at the time, but the whole Jar Jar thing, among several other key failings, makes it painful to rewatch much of the movie. Attack of the Clones was better, but the love scenes were deadly and the entire thing was more a series of entertaining set pieces than a cohesive story.

Sith is better in that regard - everything is finally working together in a single multilayered plot held together by the masterful evil of Palpatine/Sidious, and the pacing of the movie (as well as its one startlingly graphic sequence) reminded me more than anything of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The movie's climax packs an emotional wallop despite the inevitable lack of suspense, as both Anakin and the remaining good guys watch everything they have fought for slip from within their grasp.

The special effects are great, and only in a few places - the big lizard, and some parts of the opening space battle - do they look a bit cheesy.

The dialogue isn't . . . well, it just isn't the point of the movie, but for a guy who gets a rap for bad dialogue, Lucas sure has written a lot of memorable lines. He gets in a few well-placed one-liners here.

Many of the knocks on the acting are misguided: while the acting is uneven in places, and even Ian McDiarmid - who gives the film's showstopping performance as the Emperor - takes a few lines a bit too far, most of what you want from the acting in a movie like this is not to detract from the plot.

I still think Hayden Christensen gets a bit of a bad rap - he was entirely realistic in his portrayal of Anakin in the last movie as a whining, melodramatic, self-important teenager, and he expands on that performance here as a young man who is long on courage and ego and short on patience and good judgment. In fact, if you go back and think about the Darth Vader scenes in Episodes IV-VI and imagine Christensen's voice and expressions, they actually fit quite well. Darth Vader was never, after all, an evil genius - he was always a villain whose downfall was his impatience and rash, impetuous decisions. When the Death Star is under siege, does he devise a clever, multifaceted defense of the station? No, he hops in his own specially designed Tie Fighter to go take care of what his damned incompetent subordinates can't do themselves. He runs through generals and admirals like Steinbrenner used to run through managers, sends a fleet of star destroyers into an asteroid field, and lets the good guys get away repeatedly.

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Via Pejman, a scathing IMDb review of the infamous Star Wars Christmas Special, which I am thankful not to have seen, or at least remembered. I assume that a condition of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher returning for the sequels was no more TV specials.

NY Times movie critic AO Scott on Revenge of the Sith.

Update: Ace thinks the NYT's enthusiasm for anti-Bush themes is a bad sign (via Basil). I still haven't heard anything from the advance reviews that you could identify as an actual Bush criticism without a microscope; yes, the movie has villains, and for some people any villain is a reminder of Bush. Whatever. But I loved this, from the comments to Ace's post:

[T]here was always this one brief shot (competely irrelevant to the story, I know) that said a lot about the Empire.

When the [Death Star] is fired up for the first time, and the guys in the split-level helmets are working the controls on the video editing board (that's supposed to be the ray beam control center), they fire a ray beam that is supposed to be the most powerful weapon ever devised.

Did you ever notice that this channel of unprecedented energy zips right past two guys who are manning a station that is rather oddly located inside the in the ray's exit hole? Can you imagine what kind of s**t job that is?

"Corporal, your assignment is to man this station."

"What's that big tunnel for?"

"That's where the planet-destroying ray beam comes out."

"Where's my desk?"

"Right there."

"You mean the one that's, like, eight feet from this ray beam you mentioned?"

"That's the one."

"Where's the plexiglass wall between me and it?"

"There isn't one. Here's some earplugs."

In the interests of balancing my sight-unseen irrational exuberance about Revenge of the Sith, I present to you a nasty, sneering essay in the New York Observer. (via Instapundit). Frankly, in complying with the First Rule of Sequel Reviews - tell the reader what you thought of the earlier movies - the author, Dale Peck, gives the game away with his assertion that "[t]here has not, in fact, been a good Star Wars movie since the first one." And frankly, the entire article is almost a parody of sneering contempt for the whole Star Wars enterprise and its fans, to the point where I sincerely doubt that Peck enjoyed the first one, either. Plus, of course, the picture of the elitist New York movie critic unable to enjoy a good show wouldn't be complete without totally non sequitur anti-Bush rants.

Look: the Star Wars films are not everyone's taste, but you really have to work at this kind of animosity towards the entire project. Among other things, you need to separate yourself wholly from the ability to enjoy films with even a shred of the joy and innocence of childhood (just from reading this "review" - which scarcely discusses Revenge of the Sith, so it's really more of an essay on Star Wars in general - I would bet good money that this guy has no kids of his own).

I didn't understand this line at all:

[T]he real loss in the immediate sequels was the cantankerous sexual triangle of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia that had given Star Wars a recognizable and genuinely compelling psychological frisson . . . Mr. Lucas jettisoned the sex stuff, along with any other traces of personality that had crept into his original story . . .

Did this guy see The Empire Strikes Back? I mean, you don't have to like the romantic angle in that movie - I certainly don't - but there's really quite a lot more of it than there was in the original Star Wars.

I should add that, in general, I've never liked the romantic stuff in these films. At first, looking back, I thought that might be because I saw them first in boyhood, when my natural reaction to such scenes was "yuck." But now that I'm an adult and enjoy romantic comedies and drama and the like as much as the next guy (romance, that is; not sex scenes . . . I've never really grasped the appeal in watching two people making out if I'm not one of them), I still don't like these scenes. I think it's a combination of two things. One is that Lucas just doesn't know how to write these scenes, or for that matter to write female characters in any mode other than scrappy, sassy and wisecracking. The other is, really, that I almost never enjoy this kind of stuff in action/sci-fi/fantasy films, because that's not what I'm in the mood for when I go to one of these movies; the scenes very often seem forced and artificial and I wind up feeling like I wasted valuable time that could have been spent advancing the action.

Will Collier has a history lesson for those dismayed by John Pohoretz's slam on Revenge of the Sith.

A mostly-good review of Revenge of the Sith, but awfully harsh on the film's lone significant female character. Of course, Natalie Portman's not as unpleasant to look at as Jar Jar, but given Lucas' track record of attempts at writing romance, I'm not optimistic.

Michele, who's obviously getting as sucked in to the Revenge of the Sith hype as I am, has a wee problem with Princess Leia's reaction in the original:

Tell me something: how would you react if you watched your home planet blown to smithereeens right in front of you? Would you collapse in grief? Break down in uncontrollable sobs? Faint? Go deaf, dumb and blind from the horror of watching everyone you have ever known or loved be wiped out in milliseconds? Or would you gasp, let out a stifled cry and then, a short time later, engage in flirtatious banter with a rogue space captain?

UPDATE: Another glowing review for Sith (with a few spoilers), this one from Variety. (via Todd Zywicki). I drop whatever I'm doing when an ad for this movie comes on TV. This is gonna be good.

Jonah Goldberg has an amusing column on Cookie Monster. Who else but Goldberg would invoke Marcus Aurelius and Hannibal Lecter in defense of a muppet? I particularly liked this point:

The whole point of the Cookie Monster character was to have a character who was silly because he ate so much. If Cookie Monster were a Greek god, he'd be the god of gluttony. Wouldn't it have been more honest and simply better to implore kids not to be too much like the Cookie Monster rather than make the Cookie Monster like everyone else? We all understand we shouldn’t be like Oscar the Grouch.

Who says that making Cookie Monster into moderate eater will improve kids' behavior anyway? Indeed, for years, Cookie Monster has devoured not only cookies, but things which merely look like cookies, including plates, Frisbees, and the moon. If Cookie Monster is so influential, why haven't I heard more about kids going to the hospital after trying to eat plates?

Frankly, it doesn't take a very bright 4-year-old to grasp that Cookie Monster's behavior is not acceptable. But it's funny.

I've got the first single off the new Bruce album, and unfortunately it sounds like we're back to the mopey, acoustic Bruce, although I'll wait and hear the whole album. Thought for the day, from Springsteen: "Talking about music is like talking about sex . . . Can you describe it? Are you supposed to?"

If you noticed his recent appearance on "Law & Order: Trial by Jury,"
Richard Belzer has now played the same character, Detective John Munch, on six different series, granting that half of those are of the Law & Order franchise - he's also been a regular character on L&0-SVU and Homicide, as well as appearing on the original L&O, The Beat, and The X-Files, the last being perhaps the most improbable because it was on another network.

Another sign that we'll never again see children's entertainment that actually places entertaining children first: Cookie Monster is shilling for moderation in eating cookies. Wile E. Coyote wouldn't even get on the air today. "Sesame Street" has always been both educational and moralistic, and that's a good thing. But Jim Henson understood that a little plain old childish mischief is what made the show work well enough to keep kids coming back for more letters and numbers.

Mmmmmm . . . new Springsteen album April 26. I haven't kept up with all the Bruce news, but I am concerned that he's touring solo for this album, which makes it sound suspiciously like the subpar "Ghost of Tom Joad" album.

I'm not sure if the link works, but this Today Show interview with Jennifer Aniston is just a clinic in bad interviewing - this dude is obviously so star-struck and overexcited about getting an "exclusive" interview he barely lets her get a word in edgewise and winds up eliciting absolutely no information from his subject. You can almost see her move from preparing to answer, to mentally drifting, to feeling sorry for the poor sap.

A friend of the site sends this link and notes, "I think we will see actual Chinese democracy before anyone ever sees this album."

Well, in a world where Brian Wilson can finally release "Smile," anything can happen, but I'm not holding my breath. And it's possible that after all the waiting and tinkering, a new Slash-less Guns n' Roses album would be more like the NBA career of Lloyd Daniels than like the late-60s reemergence of Elvis.

Tom Wolfe calls Dr. Hunter S. Thompson "the [20th] century's greatest comic writer in the English language." I know Thompson was a friend of Wolfe and traveled in the same circles, and admittedly I haven't read Thompson's best work. But it really seems quite unlikely that anywhere near a majority of people given the opportunity to read both would find Thompson funnier than Dave Barry, who I've argued in the past is "the funniest writer in the history of the English language." My sense of Thompson was that he was something of an acquired taste, and - like P.J. O'Rourke, only moreso - not to the taste of a lot of people who didn't share his point of view.

Bill Simmons is back with more Ramblings, and this one cracked me up:

I wish there were cameras on hand for every parent that watched the "Happy Days" reunion, then tried to explain to their kids that Henry Winkler was once the coolest man on the planet. I just picture the kids pointing to the TV and saying: "Really, that guy? Are you sure? Every kid wanted to be like him? Really?"

Jane Galt, noting the latest horrors in North Korea, asks:

I was an enormous fan of M*A*S*H when it was first on the air, though I was far too young to grasp the political implications (I think I was nine when the series ended.) Now, of course, I realise that it was a thinly veiled metaphor for the Vietnam war: American boys and innocent asians being killed by a bunch of power-mad brass waging war for the fun of it.

I often wonder if Alan Alda--or any of the other producers, directors, writers or actors of either the movie or the television series--ever looks at the news coming out of North Korea and thinks "Yeah, I guess maybe we were wrong about that." I doubt it, though.

I suspect not; I doubt that Alda ever seriously believed that the show was really about Korea rather than Vietnam, and if asked they probably would have said something about how it didn't matter much to the men who were fighting the war . . . I suspect that, in the end, it wasn't just Alda, it was the audience; I don't think M*A*S*H did much one way or the other to affect Americans' views of the Korean War. M*A*S*H was as much about Korea, really, as Beetle Bailey is about the modern Army.

Just catching up on the Johnny Carson obits - David Edelstein argues that Carson is miscast by recalling him as gentle and genial, when his best work (especially in the 60s and 70s) was sharp-edged comedy and unsympathetic interviews with guests. In a way, this reminds me of similar arguments about another droll Midwestern cultural icon, Charles Schulz (see this Jonathan Franzen tribute in the New Yorker) - like Carson, Schulz's best work was often dark and sarcastic, yet by the end of his long career Schulz was remembered more as a wholesome and genial entertainer.

For many years, the number of original prime-time TV programs (i.e., shows with actors and a script), or at least the number of hours of original prime-time TV programming, was basically fixed. There were three networks, and after the collapse of prime-time game shows in the 1950s, only a few hours of prime time were set aside for movies, newsmagazines, Monday Night Football, and other non-scripted programs like Candid Camera and That's Incredible! The main variable in the number of shows was how many 1-hour dramas would be on vs. how many half-hour sitcoms.

That started to change in the mid/late-1980s, with the arrival of the FOX network as the first credible fourth network. Over the following decade or so, the supply of original programming exploded, with a fifth and sixth network (The WB and UPN), as well as original programming on pay cable (HBO, Showtime) and basic cable (USA Network, Comedy Central).

Of course, expansion of the supply of shows can only mean one of two things on the supply end - expansion of the supply of good writers and good ideas, or dilution of quality. Rather obviously, it has meant the latter. Worse yet, I suspect that what results is less a sharp division between good ideas written well and bad ideas written poorly, but fewer shows being able to sustain a core of good writers, as writing talent gets dispersed more widely. And writing talent is the key variable: there's always more good actors and actresses than there are well-written TV shows and films for them to populate (it's far more common to see good actors struggling to save bad material than the other way around).

The other inevitable consequence of increased supply is that, in the absence of increased demand - and the evidence is that with the rise of movie rentals and the internet and the proliferation of other entertainment options, overall demand for original TV programs has dropped - the increased supply will be chasing a smaller and smaller audience.

The consequences of this should have been obvious, and they are being manifested today. "Reality TV" may be a fad as far as TV viewers are concerned. To network execs, though, reality shows, expanded newsmagazine lineups, and prime time game shows are a rational response of substituting cheap-to-produce substitutes (reality shows, with few writers, essentially volunteer casts, and often poor production values, are famously cheap). Another consequence is that networks are taking a harder line with replacement-level actors and actresses - witness ABC's attempt to save "The Practice" before its final season by firing everyone on the show who made decent money (i.e., everyone but the ugly people), or CSI's abrupt firing of two cast members (later re-hired) who wanted more money. Even USA took a hard line with Bitty Schram, now-former co-star of "Monk." "Frasier" went off the air in large part because its cast was so expensive.

Of course, it's not an anomaly that, in such an environment, as in the movie business or in pro sports, the elite who can guarantee big ratings get an even bigger salary - like Ray Romano, who's both a star and writer of his own show, or James Gandolfini on The Sopranos. But the overall dynamic of network TV is unmistakable: with more players and a shrinking pie, networks in the future will allot fewer prime-time hours to original programming, and will spend less money on all but the biggest stars of those programs.

Slate.com carries a negative review of Ed Bradley’s mailed-in Sunday interview with Bob Dylan and sees a Viacom connection as the motivation behind Dylan’s rare appearance and Bradley’s fawning. The Crank mentioned in passing here the tendency of CBS to shamelessly plug books put out by its corporate masters.

Aside from ethics, I guess there’s nothing necessarily wrong about it - Dylan is certainly a worthy interview subject - but you have to wish that “60 Minutes” would be a little more forthright about this type of thing.

UPDATE: I misread the end of the Slate piece, which, as a more alert reader points out in the comments, says that Steve Kroft had apparently mentioned the Viacom-CBS-Dylan connection at the top of the show. Having just caught the tail end of the interview and reading the Slate author’s tone, I assumed that CBS had failed to disclose it. Anyway, as a result, I don’t see any real problem here except for a boring interview. My bad.

This IMDB news item caught my eye:

Movie-maker Oliver Stone is lining up another historical figure for his next biopic - former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The director is refusing to let the critical mauling and disastrous box office performance of his latest film Alexander - based on Macedonian warrior Alexander The Great - and is pursuing his current dream of bringing the British leader's life to the big screen. And Stone is determined to land Meryl Streep for the lead role. He says, "Margaret Thatcher is an amazing woman and a good subject for a film. I'm thinking about Meryl Streep to play the Iron Lady." Pals claim Stone - who's documented the lives of shamed President Richard Nixon, assassinated leader John F. Kennedy and rock star Jim Morrison - is now keen to focus his films on some of his female idols. One friends says, "Oliver is one of Baroness Thatcher's greatest fans. Alexander was slammed by critics, so maybe he think it's time to concentrate on a great woman for a film. Thatcher was one of the most powerful political figures in the world and her life has been as colorful as any superstar." [Emphasis added]

I confess to being more than a little surprised that Stone is an avid admirer of the famously conservative “Iron Lady” but, then again, I wouldn’t have thought he would be a fan of an unapologetic conqueror like Alexander the Great either.

The City Journal, lamenting New York’s long, unpleasant experiment with “modernist” architecture, has some great suggestions for a rebirth of classical architecture on the West Side.

It is long past overdue for the City to stop alternately constructing hideous eyesores and bland, nondescript office buildings and move back to the classical architecture of Grand Central Station, the Flatiron Building and the Empire State Building. As the authors here state:

Well, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is a lost opportunity; but New York suddenly has another chance to move beyond the stale, seven-decade-old cliché of the endlessly repeated glass box, or the glass box twisted, deconstructed, or otherwise contorted as much by computer-design programs as by any human imagination. The City Planning Commission has proposed re-zoning for redevelopment a vast area of the Far West Side—more than 60 blocks from Seventh to Twelfth Avenues and from 30th to 43rd Streets...For this north-south street, called Hudson Boulevard, City Journal has asked six renowned architects to design a half-dozen truly postmodernist buildings, skyscrapers that bypass modernism's dead end and bring New York's long and vibrant tradition of classical tall buildings triumphantly into the twenty-first century.

Here’s hoping this idea gets somewhere.

Took the kids to see The Incredibles yesterday, and it was, in fact, as tremendous a movie as advertised, a thrill-a-minute action flick with more than enough adult emotional depth to make it more than your typical action movie. Actually, in a number of ways the movie reminded me of the recently released Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, since the movies shared many settings and plot devices, but while Sky Captain, was a very enjoyable ride, it was the added emotional depth that makes The Incredibles by far the superior movie.

If you’re looking for a nice break from politics or sports, you may want to check out the teaser trailer for what may be the final "Star Wars" movie. Hint: it prominently features both Alec Guinness and the voice of James Earl Jones.

I thought it was pretty neat.

Michele is appalled. I do think there will and should eventually be a good movie or TV treatment of September 11, but more years of time, distance and perspective are still needed, as was the case with movies about, say, the Holocaust. ABC and NBC shouldn't be touching this right now. Of course, Hollywood being what it is these days, they'll probably change it so neo-Nazis fly the planes into the towers.

LT Smash provides a roundup of links from around the web reviewing the “Team America: World Police” (Link via Instapundit).

I saw the movie, which is entirely filmed with puppets, yesterday and admit to having laughed a lot. The film is completely offensive to just about everyone, of course. What strikes me as interesting is that a lot of people seem to see this as a revolutionary right-wing movie for basically arguing that America often causes more damage than its enemies in the War on Terror, but that we are still right to fight it. That this is considered a daring statement from a Hollywood film says more about modern-day Hollywood and what we have come to expect of it than it does about this particular movie. During World War II, theaters were consistently jammed with movies about the righteousness of fighting against German and Japanese fascism. Today, almost 3,000 Americans were killed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania and this may be the first major studio movie to come out which is even somewhat in favor of fighting back.

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Michele Catalano has apparently been replaced by the Grumpy Old Man! Be sure to check it out. It’s a very amusing post.

Speaking of grumpy old men - just kidding – happy birthday wishes to the Crank!

I went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow this weekend (I wasn't excited enough about the movie to redesign my blog on that theme, but I was pretty intrigued). Visually, the film was an absolute masterpiece, every bit as compelling as advertised, with the film noir-ish play of light and shadow and the spectacular computer-generated backdrops. One thing that worked extremely well was the fact that the movie opened in familiar settings - the Empire State Building, Radio City - and when that worked, the suspension of disbelief was cemented. The movie's high points were the spectacular aerial dogfights, especially the chases through the narrow streets of Manhattan. You could fill a film-school paper with all the visual references, notably The Empire Strikes Back (for a Cloud City-style airborne aircraft carrier scene and a duel on a bridge over a seemingly bottomless pit), and an early scene against a large picture window in Manhattan that was lifted directly from Citizen Kane.

The plot and dialogue weren't anything exceptional, but they held together without much in the way of cringeworthiness, and a plot twist near the end was amusing. If I had a quibble with the movie it was the casting of Jude Law, who was rather a dry action hero, lacking in the charm and flair of a Harrison Ford or Mel Gibson. Law co-produced the film, though, so I gather a different lead would not have been possible.

Anyway, if you like sci-fi/retro adventures in an Indiana Jones-ish vein, this is definitely one to catch on the big screen.

OK, I admit it: I saw the ads for the WB series "Jack and Bobby," and when they described the premise, I thought, "maybe not my kind of show, but sounds like a cool idea." Kind of like "Joan of Arcadia," which I don't watch but which I seem to enjoy every time I catch 10 minutes of it flipping channels. Then they gave the show's title, and they lost me. Please, not another walk down faux-Kennedy memory lane. Even if the show's content has nothing to do with it, I'm just not buying something in that wrapping. Make it stop.

Joe Piscopo says he may abandon his lucrative career as . . . uh . . . well, anyway, he may run for governor of New Jersey as a Democrat.

Piscopo, of course, stopped being funny when he started lifting weights, which makes him the prime example of what I might term Picsopo's Laws of Thermodynamics for Comedians:

*The talent of a small-to-average-size comedian decreases in direct proportion to the increase in the mass of the comedian.

*The talent of an average-size-to-large comedian decreases in direct proportion to the decrease in the mass of the comedian.

Not sure why exactly this is. Partly it's because fat comedians who make jokes about being fat and sloppy get less funny when they get in shape, skinny comedians who do a lot of pratfalls and physical comedy lose some of that if they get fat (think: Dan Aykroyd), and comedians generally get less funny if they start working out and taking themselves seriously. Which is another way of saying that growing up is bad for comics.

From one of Bill Simmons' readers, on the "Vengance Scale":

Where does Gwen Stefani rank on the Vengeance scale? I was expecting to see her at a 10.0, and was disappointed that she failed to make the cut. Here's a recap -- teenage girl joins her brother's band. Falls in love with the bass player. Dates the bass player through high school. Gets dumped by the bass player. Gets very angry and writes a multi-platinum album of songs about the breakup, and what a jerk the bass player was. Bass player spends the rest of his life touring behind ex-girlfriend, who's now a huge star. Bass player's primary accomplishment in life is providing musical accompaniment to lyrics about what a jerk he is.

Department of Embarrassing Corrections, from the same column: "Joe De's is on Cambridge Street, not Main Street." Bill, you're getting old . . .

One thing I was thinking about this week with the death of Marlon Brado - in the mid/late 50s, four of the biggest stars in Hollywood, were Brando, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. At the time, they were all about the same level and type of star, although Monroe had probably been a star the longest (excluding Taylor's original incarnation as a child star). They were all considered steamy sex symbols.

We know how the story went from there; Brando and Taylor went on to greater artistic heights but eventually decended into self-parody, getting fat, old, batty and beset by tragedies great and small; Dean and Monroe died young and beautiful, but left behind less of a comprehensive body of work, at least compared to Brando. Dean and Monrore, though, have an aura that nutty old Liz and Marlon gradually dissipated.

Which makes you wonder about how images change; who Taylor and Brando were in the 50s hasn't changed, yet their memory is much clouded by who they became. You wonder, if they had died and Dean and Monroe had lived, how different the memories would be.

As for Brando, in a way, his image is liberated by his death, free again to be remembered for his best work; you can see that already in the tributes. Maybe, in the long view, the better part of his life will reclaim center stage.

Seven Inches of Sense sends word that Marlon Brando has died.

Chris Suellentrop argues that Garfield has, since its inception, been basically a cynical merchandising concept in search of a comic strip. Personally - and maybe it's just because I was 10, 12 years old at the time - I thought Garfield was a genuinely funny strip the first few years (especially the very early strips when Garfield was squarer and poorly drawn), granting that it jumped the shark some 20+ years ago.

Looks like there won't be another Mad Max movie after all.

Newsweek on the new Harry Potter movie and the transition in directors. Some choice quotes on the new cast members, Gary Oldman (who plays Sirius Black) and David Thewlis (who plays Remus Lupin):

For his part, it didn't even occur to Oldman that his costars might be intimidated. "I was intimidated by them," Oldman says. "I still come from that place of insecurity. This whole world is established, and it seems to be working pretty well. I am the Prisoner of Azkaban. It's called 'The Prisoner of Azkaban,' so really, the only person who could f—- this up was me." Thewlis, meanwhile, still can't stop raving about the lad who plays Harry: "He's fantastic, remarkably sane and quite eccentric. He's quite the little punk, and so self- deprecating. We used to joke that he'd be in rehab by the time he was 18, and by 27 he'd be hosting a game show called 'It's Wizards!' He's very funny."

Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts expands on some observations by his brother about the absence from TV portrayals of teenage sexuality of what is euphemistically referred to as second and third base. It's an interesting argument.

Has the malaprop-wielding Little Carmine on The Sopranos been modeled after George W. Bush? That's one I had not thought of, but the quote at the end of this entry makes clear that this had to be deliberate. (Via Steve Silver who notices that Sunday night's episode - in which he finds himself in a "stagmire" - pretty much does away with the parallel).

Note to viewers of The Sopranos who aren't up to speed through tonight: Things Happened on tonight's episode. If you don't want to know, begin avoiding the media immediately, with particular emphasis on Slate.com, the New York Daily News, and the Letterman show, among others. Thank me later.

We now resume our regularly scheduled broadcast.

I'm kicking off a new intermittent feature here on the site (bearing in mind the unfinished nature of many of my prior serieses of posts): Five Songs, in which I'll post about five selected songs that I've been listening to lately. Hope you enjoy.

1. Forgotten Years, by Midnight Oil - "Who can remember, we've got to remember" - a heartfelt tribute to the tribulations of generations that fought wars (written in that whole "end of history" mood of the early Nineties), with a driving beat and a moving video shot amidst rows of crosses. Of course, it's no longer entirely true of America (though for the moment it remains true of Midnight Oil's native Australia) that "Our shorelines were never invaded, our country was never in flames".

2. Night Train, by Guns n' Roses - The Gunners at their best. One funny thing: there's a line in the song where Axl, in full "see how much of a badass I really am" mode, sings, "I got a dog eat dog sly smile." But until I read the lyrics, I thought he said, "I got a dog he doubts my smile" (listen some time and you'll see what I mean), which conveys a much more menacing thought - a man whose dog doesn't even trust him. Two bonus Guns n' Roses items. First, the band did a demo cover of the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash" that got leaked to New York's Z100 back when I used to listen to the station (hey, I was in high school), and it went in heavy rotation for a few weeks until some sort of legal action quashed it. I hope they find a way some day to unearth this one - it was just dynamite, fast-paced full-tilt rock that made the classic original sound pokey by comparison. Second, and listen closely before you laugh at me: listen to the "sparks flying" part of the bridge in "Welcome to the Jungle" (the part leading up to where Axl screams, "you're in the jungle baby, you're gonna dieeeee); then listen to the sound of Satan's fiddlers in The Charlie Daniels Band's 1979 novelty country tune "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." Tell me they aren't basically playing the same sound.

3. Comfortably Numb, by Van Morrison - The Pink Floyd original is definitive, of course, but Morrison's interpretation, from the concert at the Berlin Wall, is quite different; while David Gilmour's purposely flat vocals give expression to the singer's drug-induced distance and emotional alienation, Morrison invests the song with a lot more emotion, singing about the pain of loss rather than portraying absence.

4. I'm the Ocean, by Neil Young with Pearl Jam - Young, famously, is a master of both heavy metal and easy listening; this is in the former vein. The "Mirror Ball" album he did backed by Pearl Jam is uneven, but has some good stuff, this song among it.

5. Human Wheels, John Mellencamp - Another song for just the right mood - melancholy, without being depressing, and with a hypnotic, cycling beat. Should rank with Mellencamp's best.

Bill Simmons faced off with Ralph Wiley on Monday, talking basketball and other stuff. As Aaron Gleeman noted, Bill "did the unthinkable" and "made Ralph Wiley seem almost likeable." He did the even more unthinkable by playing the first race card in a chat with Wiley - that's like winning the tipoff against Wilt Chamberlain.

There's a mountain of interesting arguments to be had over their lists of the top basketball players of all time, but one that got me was Bill choosing Moses over Kareem. I know he hates Kareem, but c'mon here - if titles are everything, as the rest of his list seems to suggest, how can you rank Moses that high? He was basically just a rich man's Ewing who only won the one title. He couldn't score with Kareem, pass with Kareem, block shots with Kareem, he was at best even as a rebounder, and he didn't have a single killer offensive move.

NOTE: SOPRANOS DISCUSSION AHEAD

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A thought on the end of "Friends" tonight . . . it's a commonplace, and one I'd certainly agree with, that there's altogether too much sex and sexuality in mass entertainment these days. And yet, for all the panting and bumping and grinding, the portrayals of sex tend to be rather incomplete. The typical mode of sexual expression tends to be raw, animal passion, people grabbing each other, tearing their clothes off, etc., conveying a sense that sex is a powerful force that completely overhwelms us. Which is fine as far as it goes, but in the real world, even the most passionate relationships won't sustain that sort of demonstrative intensity for very long stretches; even fires that burn very hot won't always send up such visible flames. At the other end of the scale, particularly among long-married sitcom couples, we see the portrayal of sex as the logical conclusion of playful, wholesomely leering banter; the big inside joke of a married couple. Which, again, isn't so much a false picture as a woefully incomplete one.

What brings this all to mind is that Jennifer Aniston has to be one of the best, perhaps the best, actress I can recall at portraying genuine sexual longing - not just theatrical lust but the powerful cocktail of affection, need, and desire that forms the real foundation of a sexual relationship. The episode this season that really powerfully dramatized this was the one where Rachel's father had a heart attack and she was hanging closely on to Ross; their scene in her childhood bedroom was one of the most sexually charged things I've ever seen on television notwithstanding the fact that the scene concluded with essentially nothing having happened and the characters still fully clothed. Watch that one again some time and pay careful attention to her. It should be added, of course, that Aniston's acting in this regard has sustained the credibility of the Ross-Rachel storyline this season despite the obvious fact that Ross, who was the funniest thing on the show the first season or two, has been acting like an annoying idiot for the last 6 or 7 years on end.

Of course, Aniston's not the only one who does this well; Linda Cardellini and Goran Visnjic have put on similar performances on "ER" this season, and even Tony and Carmela's scene in the pool on the Sopranos two weeks ago was a good example of going beyond the usual TV cliche on sex. But Aniston has long been particularly impressive, in "Friends" and her film roles, in this regard.

For those who have complained - rightly - of Hollywood's post-September 11 squeamishness about making movies about terrorism where the bad guys are (duh!) Muslim and/or Arab fanatics, there is hope: Steven Spielberg, who's likely to be pretty damn unsympathetic to lunatic Jew-hating Palestinian terrorists, is making a movie about the terror attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

I don't know much about "Buckethead," but suppose you could have predicted that his collaboration with Guns n' Roses would not go entirely smoothly. Gawker has an amusing press release in which Axl Rose vents.

Somebody at MTV News sure has a way with headlines. That's the best one since "Hobbits Whup Leonardo DiCaprio's Ass".

Tim Blair, noting Maureen Dowd's line about how President Bush "did his "Beavis and Butthead" snigger" at a Dutch reporter, asks the burning question:

Thing is, Beavis and Butthead had entirely distinct and separate sniggers. Performing both simultaneously would rupture a person’s snigger glands. So, which is it, Maureen? Is Bush a high-pitched Beavis man, or does he tend towards the deeper Butthead style?

I believe tickets are still on sale (check Ticketmaster here) for this Saturday's concert by one of this site's favorite bands, the Saw Doctors, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan. They're a great show; see here and here for more on the Galway-based rockers. They've also got a live CD hitting the stores (as well as available through the band's website), which I'll have to pick up shortly.

Barbra Streisand signs on to play Ben Stiller's mother (Dustin Hoffman will play his father) in Meet the Fockers, the may-or-may-not-be-funny sequel to Meet the Parents. Of course, watching Robert DeNiro trying to hold his temper in check while listening to Barbra Streisand may be worth the price of admission by itself.

CNN reports that filming has begun on the new Batman movie, starring Christian Bale as Batman, with Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Katie Holmes, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, and Ken Watanabe. Neeson will play a familiar role as "Batman's mentor."

Advice to Neeson: this time, if they ask you to do dialogue with a computer-generated character, get a look at him first before you agree to do the scene.

NRO's Mike Potemra quotes an amusingly overoptimistic take on Christianity's (very temporary) cache in Hollywood after the blockbuster opening weekend for The Passion of the Christ. Of course, let's face it: like political conservatism, Christianity will never be particularly popular in show business because it's not readily compatible with the sort of hedonistic sex-and-drugs lifestyle long favored by wealthy entertainers.

I was certainly satisfied to see Return of the King take the Oscar last night; it wasn't necessarily the best film of the trilogy, but the whole masterpiece really deserved recognition.

When they announced the Best Actor, Bill Murray definitely had that "I'm never gonna have another chance at an Oscar" look on his face . . . I did see Lost in Translation a few weeks ago, and while some of the hype was overdone, it was quite good. Murray gave a fine performance, albeit one that was mostly your typical Bill Murray, just more subdued. I actually though that the person who really deserved recognition was Scarlett Johansson, who gave a really vivid portrayal of an aimless young woman.

At least, that's what I thought until I read that the movie was semi-autobiographical. If you saw Godfather III, you know that Sofia Coppola projects only the most minimal emotional range. Having seen Coppola's 'acting,' I came away wondering if Johansson's performance was more an extended (and highly accurate) impression rather than a characterization from whole cloth.

Stryker, who is something of an afficionado of Jesus movies, has a decidedly mixed review of The Passion of the Christ. Given how infrequently I get out to the theater, I'll probably wait for this movie to come out on video. But, having read a number of reviews and articles on the movie, I suspect that Stryker has hit the nail on the head with this observation (after comparing the film's violence to that in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan):

For what purpose, I ask, would someone pay money to watch American servicemen and innocent Jews mocked, beaten, broken, and murdered? And why are those films rightly praised, while The Passion of the Christ seems to be judged by a different standard? For the answer, we have to turn to The Empire Strikes Back. When Yoda instructs Luke to enter the Cave, Skywalker asks, "What's in there?" Yoda replies, "Only what you take with you." What you bring into the theater will largely determine how you view this film.

It's all here; I particularly liked the diagram (Via Slings and Arrows).

The SciFi Channel reports on bonus footage that will be included in the DVD version of Return of the King:

Among the excised scenes: a humorous bit between Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) and Legolas (Orlando Bloom) having a drinking competition. "I really quite liked [it]," Jackson said. "But we felt [it was too comedic] at a point when we wanted to set up the tension of the story. And there's a sequence of Sam [Sean Astin] and Frodo [Elijah Wood] disguised as orcs, where they end up in the orc army for a while."

Personally, I'll be very disappointed if even the DVD version doesn't have the scene with the Mouth of Sauron. I think I had read somewhere that the parley with Saruman was also filmed, but maybe not; that would make a good scene.

Aaron Schatz' report that the Super Bowl halftime show was "the most-searched event in the history of the Internet" gets picked up by CNN.

By the way, I gotta say, it warmed my heart to hear Biz Markie in one of the Super Bowl ads. I gotta figure ol' Biz could use the royalty money.

I missed the now-notorious peep show at halftime at the Super Bowl; I only caught a little of halftime before changing the channel in disgust and disinterest. My wife's reaction to a glimpse of the show even before Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction": "don't they know that children watch the Super Bowl"?

The Corner had the two best reactions. From Jonah Goldberg:

LOOK AT IT THIS WAY.... Your daughter comes home crying, driven home by a boy you never liked in the first place. Before you can ask what happened she runs up to her room. You ask the boy what happened. He says, "Mr. Goldberg it's not my fault. She had a wardrobe malfunction!"

From John Miller:

"Dad, why are they doing that?" asked my son, age 6, just before his bedtime. What was I to say? "Some people call it dancing," was my lame reply. I should have told him that maybe all the dancers forgot to go potty before they went on stage.

Also, it occurred to me afterwards that Justin Timberlake has done things like this before.

I hope you haven't missed out on this week's rare treat: Bill Simmons is back and blogging twice a day. Bill's Boston Sports Guy site, of course, was a hit blog before most people knew what a blog was -- for the last few years of the 1990s, he was a mostly one-man show offering daily links and sidesplittingly funny commentary on sports and pop culture. (As many of you know, I got my own start on the Net on Bill's site from May 2000 to its demise a year later). Anyway, he's been reduced to two columns a week lately while working for the Jimmy Kimmel show, but this week he's been in Houston for the Super Bowl and back in top form. Click here for yesterday's entry and links to the rest of the week.

I confess to not having followed football that much this season, but Bill's Thursday column completely sold me on why the Patriots should be heavy favorites:

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Nothing scratches the blog itch quite like a little bout of list-making. With that in mind, I decided to draw up a list of my all-time favorite books. For reasons that will become obvious, I limited myself to one book per author, and in some cases the one book is something of a stand-in for a larger body of work. The top 10-15 of these are the real immortals, the ones I go back to again and again. In some cases, I suppose, I've also stretched the definition of "book," but hey, it's my list. I also decline to apologize for the paucity of literature and the prominence of baseball memoirs on this list; I've always preferred polemics, analyses, humor and great storytelling, and I've never made pretense at being deeply intellectual in my interests:

25. Michael Lewis, Moneyball: This would rank higher except that so much of the story was already familiar to me, although in a few years' time I might change my mind. I discussed Moneyball here.

24. Raymond Woodcock, Take the Bar and Beat Me: I enjoy my job and the law, but not to the point where I can't see the humor in the profession of law. Woodcock, a reformed lawyer, graduate of Columbia Law School and practitioner at a big New York firm that has since gone under, wrote a scathingly humorous look at law school and the legal profession, and one I highly recommend to anyone considering a career in the law. Woodcock's take is blithely cynical in some places, but also self-critical, as he looks at how the law changed him, including his divorce (an occupational hazard of lawyering).

23. Leo Durocher, Nice Guys Finish Last: Leo's book, like Leo himself, is funny, vindictive, manipulative and an essential key to understanding six decades of baseball history, from Leo's run-ins with Ty Cobb to his frustrations with Cesar Cedeno.

22. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged: A cliched choice for conservatives, although I came to read this one relatively late in life (just a few years ago) after I was pretty well set in my thoughts, and I still haven't read any of Rand's others. It's a tale well-told (even if John Galt's didactic speech drags a bit), skillfully playing on the unfairness, pettiness and venality of a system that gives some people the ability to decide how to dispose of the fruits of others' labors.

21. Joe Garagiola, Baseball is a Funny Game: Garagiola's was one of the first baseball books I read as a kid, and dog-eared it rather severely. It's unmistakably pre-Ball Four in its G-rated treatment of the game (it was published in 1960), and thus will seem horribly dated to the modern adult reader, but still manages to capture the earthy humor of ballplayers and the genuine love for the game of guys like Garagiola and his boyhood pal Yogi Berra, who came up from a working-class Italian-American section of St. Louis. Garagiola also captures an up-close look at important figures like Branch Rickey and Frankie Frisch. A similar collection of humorous stories about the game from the 1970s can be found in the late Ron Luciano's books.

20. Stephen Carter, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby: A tough choice between Carter's books on church and state, affirmative action, and judicial confirmations, so I picked the one I read first. Carter describes himself mostly as a political liberal, but he fits comfortably in the neo-liberal camp in his willingness to challenge orthodoxies of the Left, especially on questions of race and religion. His writing is also a model of clarity and directness.

19. Scott Turow, One L: Yes, this was particularly influential because (like most everybody else in my law school class) I read it the summer before starting law school at Harvard. Harvard and law schools generally have changed a good deal since the 1970s, but Turow captures perfectly (and contributes to) the essentially internal psychodrama of the place. I'm also giving Turow credit here for his works of straight fiction, which are intricate and absorbing, however seamy.

18. Stephen King, Christine: King's books are always gripping, most of all The Shining and Christine. The latter gets extra points here for King's vividly accurate portrait of the minds of high school kids and the real and imagined terrors that can overcome them.

17. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: As frightening as any Stephen King book, but much sadder; Bowden not only rescued the Battle of Mogadishu from historical obscurity, but in the process drew a compelling picture of the modern American military and the men who populate it, the mindset and tactics of its Third World adversaries (sometimes in spite of decent men in their midst), and the gulf that separates the two. The book's indictment of foreign-policy adventures like Somalia is almost an afterthought but one that stays with you.

16. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August: If Bowden provided a readable and engrossing look at war from the ground level, Tuchman's World War I classic did the same from the top down. Tuchman recognized the Shakespearean tragedy of the onset of the Great War, and presents the plans of the various generals and the vissicitudes of the onset of war to maximize that effect. I also loved her book A Distant Mirror, a chilling compendium of the ills (literal and figurative) of 14th Century Europe.

15. Raymond Smullyan, Alice in Puzzle-Land: One of the many things I got from my mother was a love of logic puzzles, and Smullyan is the master of them. This book isn't just a collection of increasingly brain-bending puzzles, like his book The Lady or The Tiger?; it's also a clever and stylish takeoff on Lewis Carroll's bizarre cast of characters. The book is out of print and hard to find, but it remains a favorite.

14. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: I was a bit of a latecomer to the Harry Potter books, having seen the first two movies with my wife (who'd read the books) before diving into this, the third installment (I've subsequently read the first two to my son); now I'm hooked. Having read all five, the third is the best, with a taut, fast-moving plot carrying lots twists (granted that a number of the surprises are telegraphed in advance). Perhaps as importantly, for the adult reader, Prisoner of Azkaban introduces the series' serious adult characters (i.e., characters who are more than just quirky authority figures).

13. The Opinions of Justice Antonin Scalia: The Caustic Conservative: Yes, I'm cheating here by citing a book that hasn't been released yet, based on its likely contents consisting of judicial opinions. I'll narrow it down here to its essence: the two opinions I particularly have in mind, and which have greatly influenced my thinking about American government and its principles, are his lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson (in which he argued that the independent counsel statute was unconstitutional, in terms that his nearly unanimous critics eventually had to concede a decade later), and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (his denunciation of the theoretical emptiness and illegitimacy of the Court's abortion jurisprudence). Taken together, the opinions set out a central theme of conservative thought about government: the need to draw governmental power only from sources whose legitimacy can be reaffirmed by keeping them accountable to the people.

12. Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who: In enumerating favorite and influential books, too many people neglect the books they learned from first. But Dr. Seuss deserves a special place, and not only for charming this and many other hearers of his books to become readers of books in the first place. (I've also noted their usefulness in teaching children to read aloud). His longer books, with stories that have a moral to them, are masterpieces of precise and whimsical use of the English language, and in most cases manage to make their point without getting preachy, even on subjects (e.g., The Lorax and environmentalism) that are prone to heavy-handed one-sidedness. And they hold up so well that they are the rare children's book that an adult actually enjoys reading for its own sake.

My current favorite of these is I Had Trouble In Getting To Solla Sollew, which is a none-too-thinly-veiled slap at utopianism of all kinds. But the one that's endured the most in my consciousness since childhood is Horton Hears a Who, with a mantra that should be the creed of any pro-lifer: "A person's a person no matter how small." And its message of Horton's solitary courage when surrounded by neighbors who wish to define the Whos out of existence (one with undoubted Holocaust overtones) remains a powerful one for readers tall and small alike.

11. Baseball Prospectus 1999: I've arbitrarily picked the first of the BP books I bought. The Prospectus hasn't always been on the right side of the many arguments its staff has raised. Nor has it been as influential or groundbreaking, or nearly as entertaining, as Bill James' work; but the comparison is unfair. What matters is that they've consistently asked the important questions that were needed to move serious analysis of the game forward in the 1990s and beyond, and in so doing they've done a lot to drive the terms of debate ever since. I would never have understood baseball's post-1994 business environment and its ramifications without BP, and their work on projections, translations and pitcher workloads has often been groundbreaking. This is the first book I turn to every year to get a handle on the new season.

10. Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities: Wolfe's novel about a Wall Street investment banker who becomes a cause celebre after hitting a young African-American teen with his car after taking a wrong turn in the Bronx just perfectly sums up all the ills of pre-Giuliani New York (only some of which have been fixed since then). The satirical bite of the book is only enhanced by Hollywood's ham-handed efforts to sanitize its portrait of New York's ethnic politics. My dad, who was on the NYPD until the late 80s, swears by the authenticity of many of the scenes in this classic.

9. Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need: If you've only read Dave Barry's columns and skipped his books, you've missed a lot. I had a tough choice between the Travel Guide and Barry's Short History of the United States, which is basically his annual year-end column writ large, but the Travel Guide packed in just an unbelievable number of laughs in a short space.

8. Lawrence Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: Simply the best oral history of baseball ever done, and the one all the others copied. Ritter got a number of ballplayers from the early 20th century to open up to him; all or nearly all of them are dead and gone now, but not their stories.

7. The Book of Job: As you can no doubt tell from the balance of content on this blog, I'm a Catholic who doesn't think about religion as often as I should. But the Bible undoubtedly informs my thinking in ways I can't even perceive, and when I have read Scripture, the book I've most enjoyed reading (from the Old Testament, ahem) is Job. Job deals with the toughest questions that face any believer in an omnipotent and benevolent God must grapple with -- why bad things happen to good people, where sin and suffering belong in the world -- and doesn't provide any easy answers.

6. Peter Gammons, Beyond the Sixth Game: The best assignment I ever had in school was when my sophomore English teacher, Mr. Donnelly, gave us a list of books to report on and one of them was this classic by Peter Gammons. Gammons is a lot of things to a lot of people, and these days he's best known for (1) having the game's most extensive network of sources, and (2) uncritically repeating everything those sources tell him (which is not unrelated to the maintenance of (1)). He is at times an open mind friendly to statistical analyses of the game, and at times gives a soapbox and his imprimatur to denunciations of statistical analyses of the game.

But first and foremost, Gammons is a guy who loves baseball, loves the Red Sox, and can really write. Beyond the Sixth Game is the tale of the Red Sox from 1976-1985, when Gammons was the Boston Globe's beat writer for the team, and it's a love letter to every fan whose heart was broken by those teams, and a cold-eyed analysis of how it happened (Gammons' thesis is that the ownership of the Sox failed to appreciate the new financial realities of the free agent era). His portraits of the players are detailed and affectionate (especially Carlton Fisk and Luis Tiant, two guys Gammons obviously really did think were very special people), and his narratives of the pivotal 1977 and 1978 seasons soar. No Red Sox fan - no baseball fan - should do without this book.

5. Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution: Ask conservatives of my generation about Ronald Reagan or conservatism, and chances are pretty good that you will get a picture heavily influenced by one of his "wordsmiths," Peggy Noonan. The book is only secondarily a memoir, although it does capture (with Noonan's eye for sympathetic detail) numerous Washington figures of the 80s, as well as her previous boss, Dan Rather, of whom Noonan was very fond despite his politics. More importantly, it's a book about writing -- about a particular kind of writing (political speeches), how they get created, why they matter, and what's important in crafting them. It's also a tribute to a set of conservative ideals, and how they continued to inspire conservatives even when their practitioners didn't always live up to their promise.

4. The Orwell Reader: Yes, I'm cheating again by including an anthology. Another invaluable assignment -- the best thing I got out of college, academically -- was buying this book for Professor Green's British Empire class. I re-read it end to end again after September 11. Orwell hardly needs my introduction; his depictions of working-class life in the 1930s (coal miners, dish washers) are famously vivid, and his jeremiads against those who wouldn't stand up to fascism are the stuff of legend. My favorite essays are "Politics and the English Language" and "England Your England" (I reached for the latter in the opening of my September 11 column, as well as reaching for a scene from the Council of Elrond from the next selection) and I'm sure I'm not alone in those choices.

3. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring: I had a tough choice here; The Hobbit was the first "grownup" book I ever read, back in the second grade, and it remains Tolkien's best-written book. But Fellowship of the Ring perfectly bridges the gap between the lighthearted adventure of The Hobbit and the epic sweep of Lord of the Rings, and launches the greatest fantasy epic of all time. The question: what will good men do in the face of unremitting evil? Tolkien's answer isn't always reassuring.

2. P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: As far as I'm concerned, still the best book ever written about American government; O'Rourke brings his vicious humor to every branch and agency of the federal government he can locate. His chapter on farm policy is the best thing I've ever read on the subject, and his account of a Housing NOW! march is sidesplitting. Along the way he encounters everyone from Pat Moynihan to Mike Dukakis to Ken Starr. But the book does have just one terribly cringe-inducing line, in retrospect; in his look at American foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, O'Rourke states that

the main thing to be learned about foreign policy in this part of the world is that a wise foreign policy would be one that kept you out of here. There are some things you ignore at your peril, but you pay attention to Central Asia at the risk of your life.

If only.

1. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract:

Well, you knew that was coming; if I hadn't limited myself to one book per author, I'd have had a top 10 of Bill James books. As I've repeatedly noted, James has had a tremendous influence not only on my thinking about baseball but on my entire thinking process. I picked the first edition of the historical book because it is, on balance, the largest compilation of James' most pointed and entertaining writing and original thought, effortlessly spanning twelve decades of baseball history and bringing even the most distant past vibrantly to life. (I reviewed the new Historical Abstract here).

Honorable Mentions:

Read More »

One of the beauties of the internet is that you can find the answers -- or at least someone else asking the questions -- for just about anything. I've been re-reading the Appendices to the Lord of the Rings lately, and one question occurred to me that I hadn't focused on before: during the Second Age, the forging of the One Ring precedes Sauron's captivity in Numenor. What happened to the Ring when Numenor was drowned in the sea and Sauron lost the physical form he had taken? Was he wearing the Ring, or had he left it somewhere?

Anyway, turns out that there are indeed sites that deal with questions such as this; the answers are here and here, with the short answer being Tolkein's statement in one of his letters that

Though reduced to 'a spirit of hatred borne on a dark wind', I do not think one need boggle at this spirit carrying off the One Ring, upon which his power of dominating minds now largely depended.

So, now we know that.

Is it just me, or doesn't the grown-up, thinner, lighter-haired Jon Cryer look increasingly like the late Donald O'Connor?

Well, this was news to me, at least: Princess Di had an affair with Bryan Adams?

Busy week for the Kinks' Ray Davies, who was named a "Commander of the Order of the British Empire" by the Queen forur days ago, and was shot in the leg while attempting to live up to the honor by chasing down a purse snatcher on Sunday. Davies was apparently not seriously injured and has been released from the hospital.

You know him - I know you know him. Who is Steven Zirnkilton?

Take your best guess and click here to find out.

OK, in the spirit of list-making, I've drawn up a list of my favorite popular music performances of Christmas songs. Not necessarily favorite songs, as much as favorite recorded performances. Thus, for example, I haven't included "Joy to the World" here, even though it's just about my favorite Christmas hymn, because I have yet to hear any one artist put to record a version of the song that can match a church choir raining down the hymn as you process out of Mass on Christmas morning, an experience that's about as close to God as man gets on this earth. A few others missed the cut as well because I couldn't think of one definitive performance, like "Let it Snow! Let it Snow!," and I left off the songs from one of my favorite Christmas movies, "Scrooge," starring Albert Finney, since on their own they aren't really that Christmasy. I wound up with 17 tunes that made the cut.

Here we go:

17. Bing Crosby - Adeste Fidelis (O Come All Ye Faithful) - Crosby does the Latin version of this, interspersed with the modern hymn in English, in a way that perfectly captures the virtues of the old Catholic Church.

16. Bruce Springsteen - Merry Christmas Baby - An excellent tune, albeit a bit less Christmasy than some of the others on the list. Clarence Clemons' sax carries this one.

15. Elvis Presley - Blue Christmas - Elvis wouldn't seem to go with Christmas, but he gets it right with "Blue Christmas."

14. Various Artists - Do They Know It's Christmas? - Yes, it combines 80s cheesiness with liberal condescension, but the impulse - giving to the less fortunate at the holidays - has its heart in the right place, and this is a fun song.

13. John Lennon/Yoko Ono - Merry Xmas (War is Over) - See #14; Lennon's wacky peacenikery strikes the right note for a Christmas aspiration, even if it was foolish politics at the time (after all, the Vietnam War didn't really end until one side was overrun and enslaved by the other).

12. Burl Ives - Holly Jolly Christmas - I left off the list songs that were truly inseparable from TV specials, like the themes for the Grinch and the Heat Miser, but this tune (always identified with Rudolph) makes the cut. Ives' voice is like a warm fireplace and a cup of hot chocolate all by itself.

11. Johnny Mathis - Winter Wonderland - One of the oddities of Christmas music is that people will listen to artists from genres they wouldn't listen to normally; you wound't catch me listening to Johnny Mathis any other time of year. But at Christmas time, he's one of the ones who makes his annual reappearance.

10. Nat King Cole - The Christmas Song - You know, the "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" song, Cole's signature tune.

9. Mariah Carey - All I Want for Christmas is You - I'm not much of a Mariah Carey fan, but there's some decent stuff on her Christmas album, and this old-time Motown-style tune is really good; if she did a whole album like it, she could revive her career in very short order.

8. Bing Crosby - White Christmas - The all-time classic.

7. Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) - I first came to know this one through the U2 version, which is quite good, but Love's voice gave this song just a little extra emotion. I'm very partial to "A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector," which remains the greatest Christmas record ever made (in spite of Spector himself being a psychopath); besides the two songs listed here, many others were close runnerups to other versions.

6. Gene Autry - Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer - Autry's gentle, genial version still tops what's come after it.

5. Leon Redbone/Dr. John - Frosty the Snowman - Thumpity thump thump, thumpity thump thump . . . Redbone and Dr. John complement each other perfectly.

4. Harry Connick jr. - (It Mus've Been Ol') Santa Claus - It's very hard to write a new Christmas song that stands up to the classics, but this one, from Connnick's Christmas album from about 10 years ago, is as close as it gets, with just the right mix of humor and Christmas magic.

3. The Ronettes - Sleigh Ride - Another Phil Spector production.

2. Bruce Springsteen - Santa Claus is Comin' to Town - Bruce just owns this tune. I saw him perform it live in 1992, complete with a dancing Christmas tree onstage, albeit without Clarence Clemons. Brought the house down.

1. Bing Crosby - I'll Be Home For Christmas - Well, that's what we all want - home for Christmas. Of course, this song had its heydey when millions of Americans could only listen to it on Armed Forces Radio somewhere in the South Pacific, or in Europe or anywhere else but home.

Honorable Mentions: "Christmas is the Time to Say I Love You," by Billy Squier; and "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer," which barely elicits a chuckle today but which I thought was the funniest thing I ever heard when I was about 8 years old.

A must-read, from Mac Thomason. Here's the first installment.

Looks like Mick Jagger gets his good looks from his father.

Longmire has some amusing thoughts on the wolfman's clothes.

Just ran across this one from some months back: The Guardian reported that Osama bin Laden's 26-year-old niece, Waffa bin Laden, is trying to launch a pop music career in England. This smacks a bit of trading on one's notoriety, but you can't blame her for who her family is. Waffa is apparently an American-educated lawyer who lived near the World Trade Center (ironically enough) in downtown Manhattan until (hmm?) just around or before September 11. You can check out a picture of the very Westernized Ms. bin Laden over at the Iranian magazine Salam Worldwide.

Nothing sets this site apart quite like my ability to start things I never get around to finishing. But let's see if we can't push to the finish line my series looking at famous people in my generation, i.e., born between October 1969-October 1973; here's Part IV of V. (If you're interested, check out Part I, Part II and Part III).

Robb Nen, MLB
Phil Nevin, MLB
Gena Lee Nolin, actress
Ed O'Bannon, NBA
Chris O'Donnell, actor
Chad Ogea, MLB
Shaquille O'Neal, NBA
Rey Ordonez, MLB
Terrell Owens, NFL
Gwyneth Paltrow, actress
Chan Ho Park, MLB
Jay Payton, MLB
Barry Pepper, actor
Amanda Peterson, actress
Andy Pettitte, MLB
Kristie Phillips, gymnast
River Phoenix, actor
Martha Plimpton, actress
Jorge Posada, MLB
Megyn Price, actress
Bill Pulsiher, MLB
Brad Radke, MLB
Manny Ramirez, MLB
Gabrielle Reece, volleyball
Trista Rehn, bachelorette
Errict Rhett, NFL
Arthur Rhodes, MLB
Manon Rheume, hockey
Alfonso Ribiero, actor
Denise Richards, actress
JR Rider, NBA
Kelly Ripa, actress/talk show host
Mariano Rivera, MLB
Willie Roaf, NFL
Dave Roberts, MLB
Grant Roberts, MLB
Glenn Robinson, NBA
Felix Rodriguez, MLB
Ivan Rodriguez, MLB
Elisabeth Rohm, actress
Rebecca Romjin-Stamos, model
Jalen Rose, NBA
Kirk Rueter, MLB
Winona Ryder, actress

For men of my generation, even old married guys like me, all you have to do is say the name "Amanda Peterson," and you're 16 again . . . yes, it was less than a decade ago when Ed O'Bannon was in college . . . Barry Pepper is just one of several of the guys on this list who played the soldiers in "Saving Private Ryan"; that movie hit guys like me so hard in part because we were just the age of the cast. By now, I'd identify more with Hanks . . . River Phoenix has been dead for many years now, and as Bill James once said, you can't get older than dead.

I see that Reese Witherspoon had a baby boy, and named him "Deacon." Now, given that her husband is actor Ryan Phillippe, this would make the boy Deacon Phillippe. Well, since Deacon isn't exactly a common first name these days, that set me a-thinkin': is he named after the six-time twenty-game winner (born Charles Louis Phillippi) who pitched for Honus Wagner's Pirates in the early part of the century, won 3 games in the inaugural World Series, never had a losing season and finished his career with an admirable 189-109 record and a 2.59 ERA despite not arriving in the major leagues until age 27? Is Ryan Phillippe a relative (the original Deacon died in 1952), or perhaps a baseball fanatic? Or was there some other origin to the original Deacon's nickname (a literary reference I'm missing here?) that the new baby shares in common?

Gary Coleman turns out to be one of the California gubernatorial candidates who comes out of the recall looking better than he did before; Coleman has landed a gig as a political commentator for the All Comedy Radio Network. (Presumably, this is a different venture from Al Gore's rumored youth-targeted news network, although both sound like pale imitations of The Daily Show).

Personally, I thought Coleman's campaign was good-natured and appropriately tongue-in-cheek; he didn't take himself too seriously, but he gave due respect to the overall seriousness of the election. And it turns out that it got him a job. Not bad.

The Dixie Chicks have essentially divorced country music. This was an inevitable development; there's no art form quite like country music in terms of the fans' demand for an emotional, one-of-us connection with the artists. The Chicks may have impaired that bond with Natalie Maines' ill-chosen anti-Bush and anti-Texas remarks, but if they'd left it at that, it would have been all. But once the Chicks started portraying themselves as First Amendment martyrs (probably the key moment was the nude magazine cover), they basically set themselves into a melodrama with their own fans cast as the villains. You'll win a lot of new friends in Hollywood that way, but you can never again go back to the country crowd once you've sided with people like Bob Herbert (who called country music fans "flag-waving yahoos").

How long until the "Dixie" is dropped from the band's name?

We rented Chicago over the weekend, and it was pretty much as advertised, a very musical musical; if you like musicals, you'll enjoy it. (Unless I'm missing something, it has to be the first major Hollywood release where two of the top 3 stars' last names started with "Z").

Anyway, considering that the cast mostly broke down between people who hadn't sung and danced in the movies before and people who hadn't sung and danced, period, they pulled it off well. The one part I didn't buy was ubiquitous That Guy John C. Reilly's lead-footed dancing to the song "Mr. Cellophane."

Anyway, as I'm thinking this, I realize that one reason I noticed this is that I remember the incomparable Ben Vereen performing the same song on "The Muppet Show," gliding effortlessly about. Looking back, I realized how many songs and people I was exposed to in those childhood years from watching that show, many of which I might not have heard until years later or not at all otherwise. And it wasn't just show tunes, but pop, rock, country . . . from Sly Stallone singing "Bird in a Gilded Cage," which I believe is a 19th century standard (or sounds like it), to Debbie Harry doing "The Tide is High," which was then near the top of the pop charts, to people like Paul Williams and Leslie Uggams who I would just never have heard of otherwise.

How strange, in a way, that one of the last successful shows to truly present a variety of entertainment was a show aimed at children and starring muppets.

Part III of a series (see Part I here and Part II here) looking at athletes, actors/actresses, musicians and others in my generation (including a few bloggers where I knew or could infer their ages), defined generally as people born between October 1969-October 1973. Today, our march through the alphabet reaches from I to M (bearing in mind that some cases require creativity in assigning alphabetical order):

Kazuhisa Ishii, MLB
Jason Isringhausen, MLB
Goran Ivanisevic, tennis
Jason Jacome, MLB
Jimmy Jackson, NBA
Jaromir Jagr, NHL
Jay-Z, rapper
Wyclef Jean, singer
Charles Johnson, MLB
Keyshawn Johnson, NFL
Chipper Jones, MLB
Eddie Jones, NBA
Steve Karsay, MLB
Chris Kattan, comedian
Jamie Kennedy, actor
Nancy Kerrigan, figure skater
Jason Kidd, NBA
Ryan Klesko, MLB
Vitaly Klitschko, boxer
Queen Latifah, actress/rapper
Jude Law, actor
Ty Law, NFL
Matt Lawton, MLB
Jared Leto, actor
Emmanuel Lewis, actor
Dorsey Levens, NFL
Jacob Levy, blogger
Jon Lieber, MLB
Mike Lieberthal, MLB
Eric Lindros, NHL
Esteban Loaiza, MLB
Paul Lo Duca, MLB
Lisa 'Left Eye' Lopes, singer
Javier Lopez, MLB
Jennifer Lopez, actress/singer
Derek Lowe, MLB
Jamie Luner, actress
Ewan MacGregor, actor
Dr. Manhattan, blogger
Ricky Martin, singer
Pedro Martinez, MLB
Jamal Mashburn, NBA
Mike Matheny, MLB
Marshall (Eminem) Mathers, rapper
Matthew McCaughnahey, actor
Rose McGowan, actress
Joe McEwing, MLB
Steve McNair, NFL
Natrone Means, NFL
Ramiro Mendoza, MLB
Phil Mickelson, golf
Midori, violinist
Alyssa Milano, actress
Sam Militello, MLB
Kevin Millar, MLB
Lawyer Milloy, NFL
Jay Mohr, actor
Gretchen Moll, actress
Raul Mondesi, MLB
Herman Moore, NFL
Alonzo Mourning, NBA
Bill Mueller, MLB
Georghe Muresan, NBA

Notes: Yes, Sam Militello . . . As I've noted before, lotta Red Sox on this list; the future is now . . . I missed LaPhonso Ellis on the last list . . . Man, Alonzo Mourning just seems like he should be a lot older . . . And Muresan and 'Webster'; I can't help but wonder if Muresan, like Andre the Giant before him, labors under the likelihood of a short life expectancy due to the conditions that made him so tall.

Interview with the indispensable P.J. O'Rourke over at the Onion, including a classic O'Rourke story that combines Animal House with stock options and some well-earned contempt for Rick Reilly. (Link via The American Scene). On the difference between himself and Hunter Thompson:

His political stuff is just wonderful, but basically nothing happens. It's all about his reaction to a situation. And my stuff is much more externally driven. He brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.

On the plague of lawyers:

I buy a tractor two years ago, and four-fifths of the tractor manual is about not tipping over, not raising the bucket high enough to hit high-tension wire... not killing yourself, basically. The tractor itself is covered with stickers: Don't put your hand in here. Don't put your d___ in there. And in that manual, I found out—and it cost me a thousand dollars—that when the tractor is new, 10 hours into use of the tractor, you have to re-torque the lug nuts. If you don't, you will oval the holes. This is buried between the moron warnings. I never found it. I take the tractor in for its regular servicing, and they say my wheels are gone. A thousand dollars worth of wheels have to be replaced because I didn't re-torque after 10 hours. How am I supposed to know that? "It's in the manual." You f___ing read that manual! You go through 40 pages of how not to tip over!

And some good advice for bloggers and other creatures:

O: Do you ever have a crisis of confidence when you're writing, where you say, "Man, I don't know if I'm right about this?"

PO: If I do, I say so. That's the only way out of that. If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words "I don't know." I mean, there are certain basic principles... There are certain things that I feel pretty confident about. But when I get in deep water, I prefer to announce that I'm in over my head.

Bloom County creator Berke Breathed is bringing back Opus in a new weekly strip! (Thanks to Jackson Murphy for the link).

While we're on the subject of looking at my generation, here's something that should give you some nostalgia for being a kid in the 70s.

Part two of a series on people within a year or two of my age (i.e., born late 1969-late 1973); here's part one. Today: D through H:

Omar Daal, MLB
Matt Damon, actor
Tiffany (Darwsich), singer
Brian Daubach, MLB
Jeremy Davies, actor
Terrell Davis, NFL
Carlos Delgado, MLB
Portia deRossi, actress
Cameron Diaz, actress
Dido, singer
Ani DiFranco, singer
Trent Dilfer, NFL
Viet Dinh, former Assistant Attorney General
Shannen Doherty, actress
Brendan Donnelly, MLB
Doug E. Doug, actor
Hugh Douglas, NFL
Minnie Driver, actress
Ray Durham, MLB
Fred Durst, singer
David Duval, golfer
Jim Edmonds, MLB
Tyus Edney, NBA
Carmen Electra, actress
Omar Epps, actor
Theo Epstein, MLB General Manager
Shawn Estes, MLB
Janet Evans, swimmer
Marshall Faulk, NFL
Brett Favre, NFL
Corey Feldman, actor
Joseph Fiennes, actor
Michael Finley, NBA
Darren Fletcher, MLB
Cliff Floyd, MLB
Harold Ford jr., Congressman
Keith Foulke, MLB
Liam Gallagher, singer
Rich Garces, MLB
Jeff Garcia, NFL
Nomar Garciaparra, MLB
Jennifer Garner, actress
Jennie Garth, actress
Brent Gates, MLB
Eddie George, NFL
Jason Giambi, MLB
Debbie Gibson, singer
Brian Giles, MLB
Doug Glanville, MLB
Missy Gold, actress
Adam Goldberg, actor
Juan Gonzalez, MLB
Ekaterina Gordeeva, figure skater
Jeff Gordon, NASCAR
Karenna Gore-Schiff, political person
Heather Graham, actress
Brian Grant, NBA
Danny Graves, MLB
Elvis Grbac, NFL
Brian Austin Green, actor
Shawn Green, MLB
Todd Greene, MLB
Ken Griffey jr., MLB
Eddie Guardado, MLB
Carla Gugino, actress
Corey Haim, actor
Geri Halliwell, singer
Mia Hamm, soccer
Jeffrey Hammonds, MLB
Mike Hampton, MLB
Penny Hardaway, NBA
Tonya Harding, figure skater
Marvin Harrison, NFL
PJ Harvey, singer
Ethan Hawke, actor
Jimmy Haynes, MLB
Rick Helling, MLB
Todd Helton, MLB
Jose Hernandez, MLB
Sterling Hitchcock, MLB
Grant Hill, NBA
Dave Holmes, veejay
Priest Holmes, NFL
Robert Horry, NBA
Juwan Howard, NBA
Bobby Hurley, NBA
Butch Huskey, MLB

Also, one I missed last time: Netscape founder Marc Andressen. I cheated a little on the young end to get Theo Epstein in there (December 1973), while Jonah Goldberg missed out just a bit at the other end. You'll also note most of Epstein's players here as well as some recent Sox alumni like Daubach, Floyd and Garces. Dave Holmes, the former MTV veejay, was actually a college classmate. Bobby Hurley -- now there's a guy who peaked early. Hurley's car accident was just early enough in his career that we'll never know if he might have made a decent pro player if he hadn't had that setback. I saw a report recently that said Cameron Diaz is now the world's highest-paid actress; look at these lists and you'll see that right around 30 is a real good age for an actress' career; an awful lot of them are right around their primes. Running backs are another matter (ask Terrell Davis). I'm going by reported ages here, so don't ask about El Guapo.

I turn 32 next month, and thought it would be fun to take a look around at who else out there is part of my generation (Generation Y, is it? I lose track of these things), roughly defined as people within a year or two of my age (born between late 1969 and late 1973), although I wasn't entirely scientific in every case, and in any event the list is somewhat arbitrary based on who I could locate the ages for and who I had heard of (I left out a lot of musicians where I'd heard of the band but not the individual). Baseball-reference.com and IMdB were invaluable in this process, since both have lists of individuals born in particular years.

It's interesting to do this because you wind up being surprised at some of the people who are all around the same age, from people who are seen as rising stars in their fields to people who are years past their primes. Some fields of endeavor are missing here -- for the most part, politicians and business people are not well-known in their early 30s, so there's only a few people from the political world. I also wasn't sure on a number of bloggers and pundits, so those get fairly short shrift here, but I did stick a few in. By contrast, there's the rappers -- I'm not a rap fan, but even I could tell that the list wound up covering a huge proportion of the biggest rap stars.

Let's go alphabetically, starting today with A-C, although I may add on people I run accross as I march through the alphabet:

Ben Affleck, actor
Benny Agbayani, MLB
Andre Agassi, Tennis
Edgardo Alfonzo, MLB
Mike Alstott, NFL
Serena Altschul, newscaster
Wilson Alvarez, MLB
Garret Anderson, MLB
Kenny Anderson, NBA
Christina Applegate, actress
David Arquette, actor
Jill Arrington, sportscaster
Pedro Astacio, MLB
Sean Astin, actor
Rich Aurilia, MLB
Steve Avery, MLB
Erykah Badu, singer
Vin Baker, NBA
Brent Barry, NBA
Dan Bartlett, White House aide
Beck, singer
Armando Benitez, MLB
Jason Bere, MLB
Jerome Bettis, NFL
Peter Billingsley, actor
David Blaine, magician
Selma Blair, actress
Drew Bledsoe, NFL
Tempestt Bledsoe, actress/talk show host
Mary J. Blige, singer
Aaron Boone, MLB
Tony Boselli, NFL
Lara Flynn Boyle, actress
Terrell Brandon, NBA
Shawn Bradley, NBA
Rico Brogna, MLB
Mark Brunell, NFL
Homer Bush, MLB
Kirk Cameron, actor
Mike Cameron, MLB
Neve Campbell, actress
Mariah Carey, singer
Ki-Jana Carter, NFL
Sam Cassell, NBA
Michael Chang, tennis
Dave Chappelle, actor
Robinson Checo, MLB
Wayne Chrebet, NFL
Tony Clark, MLB
Stubby Clapp, MLB
Ben Coates, NFL
Toni Collette, actress
Kerry Collins, NFL
Bartolo Colon, MLB
Sean "Puffy"/"Puff Daddy"/"P.Diddy" Combs, rapper
Jennifer Connelly, actress
Rob Corddry, comedian
Wil Cordero, MLB
Craig Counsell, MLB

Yup, some hard-hitting investigative journalism, we do around here. Really, where else can you get this stuff? I mean, can you picture Peter Billingsley from "A Christmas Story" out on a date with Mariah Carey? OK, scratch that one. Or think of Wil Cordero as a contemporary of Bartolo Colon, or Garret Anderson close in age to Kenny Anderson? Kenny was "Mr. Basketball New York" my senior year in high school, but he's 71 now. I also just found it amusing to put Tony Boselli's name next to Lara Flynn Boyle's. The one that gets me is Agassi -- the guy's been famous nearly as long as I can remember paying attention to tennis, and he's been bald for about a decade now. And he's only about a year older than me? Wow.

*Recently rented The Recruit. You know, Al Pacino is the Aerosmith of acting -- he's given us decades of entertainment with no sign of slowing down, but it's really only the first few years of his career that you can take seriously.

*I caught some of Meet the Parents again the other night -- as Bill Simmons would say, I wish I could buy stock in things like "Meet the Parents will be the highlight of Teri Polo's film career."

The lefty side of the blogosphere -- and the media -- has done a good bit of hyperventilating about the charge that radio congolmerate Clear Channel Communications supposedly ordered a nationwide ban on playing the Dixie Chicks on the radio, depite the company's denials. Washington Post media critic Tom Shales charged that "Clear Channel stations led a ridiculous national campaign to smear the musical group the Dixie Chicks after one of its members insulted President Bush. The group's songs were banned on its stations for a time." Paul Krugman stopped just short of pinning this on Clear Channel, but some left-wing news outlets have pushed the story. The argument goes that the network's reach shows the evil of media concentration, and Clear Channel has been Exhibit A in the case against FCC deregulation of media ownership.

I hadn't followed this story all that carefully, but then I stumbled accross an interesting fact. You know what company is the promoter of the Dixie Chicks' current concert tour?

That's right: Clear Channel Entertainment.

This isn't exactly a secret; Clear Channel has touted the success of the Chicks' tour to the business press, and you can go to the company's website to buy tickets to their shows.

Moral: maybe you should distrust what you hear on the radio, but don't believe everything you read, either.

Pictures from the third Harry Potter film -- but I wouldn't go there if you haven't read the book. And the fifth book debuts in Vietnam.

This story about a pan-African version of the TV show "Big Brother" is actually a little bit hopeful: unlike in Europe, where the concept is mostly being used to stamp out accountable government, shackle free enterprise and crush non-French foreign policy, the building of a continent-wide (i.e., non-tribal) identity in Africa may actually be a good thing, and if a common interest in even the trashiest pop culture can encourage that, good for reality TV.

This story from a few weeks back is simultaneously amusing, humbling and a little depressing about how little attention the average American pays to inside-the-Beltway power plays: a Democratic pollster not only finds that 61% of Latino voters are unaware of President Bush's nomination of Miguel Estrada for the DC Circuit, but concludes that

it was clear many of those who supported Mr. Estrada were also confusing him with actor Erik Estrada, who was on the 1977-1983 television police drama "CHiPS" and is now a popular Spanish-language soap-opera star.
"Many of them think President Bush nominated Erik Estrada — I'd say a good third think that way," Mr. Bendixen said, adding that he heard one person say Mr. Estrada should be confirmed because he did such a good job playing a policeman on "CHiPS."

Hey, anybody who can talk his partner out of giving a traffic ticket to H.R. Puffenstuf is ready for the D.C. Circuit . . .

Sorry, no blogging this morning; I've been racing through the new Harry Potter book (I'm around page 633 as of 7:15 this morning), and the time to read it had to come from somewhere. More on the Potter books when I've finished, but I'll say this much: Order of the Phoenix is really not a children's book; it's a teenagers' book in its tone and plot, as befits the now 15-year-old lead character. In fact, I'm rather glad that it will take us some time to get my son, who's almost 6, through the third book before taking on the fourth and fifth.

Still, if you'd told me 7-8 years ago that a new author would have 8- and 9-year-olds lining up to read a nearly 900-page book, I'd have said you were out of your mind. Just another reminder that you can never say you've seen everything.

Turns out that the Power of Oprah can even put a classic book by a long-dead author back on the best seller list.

Following up on The Mad Hibernian's post below, the thing I always remember about David Brinkley -- even more than his dry, sarcastic wit -- was his funereal manner. Every time Brinkley popped up behind a news desk and started to speak, between his somber tone and pregnant pauses, I expected him to announce a death or a tragedy of some sort. It got to where you'd hear Brinkley come on and name someone:

BRINKLEY: Good Evening. President Reagan

(Pause)

(By this point, I've mentally inaugurated Vice President Bush and am thinking about who will replace him as VP)

today visited an elementary school . . .

A link to a classic, if you haven't read it: Conan O'Brien's commencement speech to the graduating class of 2000 at Harvard. (Link via the Corner). The speech is hilarious and even a little wise. Here's one thing that set Harvard apart from my alma mater, Holy Cross:

I was, without exaggeration, the ugliest picture in the Freshman Face book. When Harvard asked me for a picture the previous summer, I thought it was just for their records, so I literally jogged in the August heat to a passport photo office and sat for a morgue photo. To make matters worse, when the Face Book came out they put my picture next to Catherine Oxenberg, a stunning blonde actress who was accepted to the class of '85 but decided to defer admission so she could join the cast of "Dynasty." My photo would have looked bad on any page, but next to Catherine Oxenberg, I looked like a mackerel that had been in a car accident.

What this means, apparently, is that they went straight from O'Brien to Oxenberg, with no other O'Briens, and no O'Connors, no O'Learys, no O'Keefes, no O'Tooles . . . at Holy Cross, that was good for 2-3 pages in the campus phone book.

Here's a fun game if you're looking for time to kill -- what's your Gene Hackman Number? Real simple - just tick off how many of Hackman's movies you've seen, and "Hoosiers" only counts once no matter how many times you've seen it. (I think mine is 14).

(Not that I'm not one). For $19.95 per year to George Lucas, you can get:

* A personal SW-themed e-mail address, such as john @darthvader.net or julie @padme.com. (The service will forward the e-mail to a subscriber's actual e-mail address.)

* Constant Webcam video from the set of the final prequel, Episode III, which begins filming next month in Australia.

* Access to the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated shorts once they begin appearing this fall on the Cartoon Network.

(Go to starwars.com for details)

My wife and I took the kids to see Finding Nemo yesterday morning, and I have to give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up [Ed. - Isn't the "thumbs up" copyrighted to Siskel and Ebert? Ask me when I start making money off movie reviews] -- the movie was a bit scary for my daughter's age (not quite 4), but it was fun and funny, especially the scenes with the seagulls.

I have to say that I don't have a strong stake either way in the Martha Stewart saga; I've never been interested in her show or her products simply because I'm not much interested in the subjects of how to entertain, how to fix up your home, etc.

Mark Steyn, oddly enough, has some fond memories of Martha, and penned a sympathetic piece in the Wall Street Journal on Friday (subscription only). Steyn is undoubtedly correct that the "Martha brand" of products can't really be separated from Martha the personality; her company will survive only if she, in some sense, survives.

Steyn seems to think that Martha might come out of the criminal case OK in the end, but personally I suspect that Martha The Cottage Industry will come out OK even if Martha winds up serving jail time; I'd suggest my own analogy -- to Marv Albert. Marv, as you may remember, was convicted in an incredibly ugly case a few years back (I seem to recall it involved some sort of sex-related assault charge, with all sorts of sordid testimony about Marv biting his girlfriend). Today, he's back doing Knick games. And he's back, not because the public thought he was innocent or forgave his crimes; not because we're a particularly benevolent society or Marv a particularly beloved figure. He's back for one reason: he calls a good basketball game. And once he'd paid his debt to society, people wanted to hear Marv Albert do basketball again.

That's how it may be with Martha. Maybe she's not loved, and maybe she's not innocent; but she's good at what she does, and a great many people watch her show and buy her magazine and her products because people believe that Martha Stewart is a good guide to homemaking. And, once a decent interval has passed, they'll still feel that way.

The New York Philharmonic moves from Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center to Carnegie Hall.

The NY Daily News calls David Schwimmer "the Judge Reinhold of his generation".

Noel Redding, the bass player for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, has died at age 57 of undisclosed causes.

Seems like everyone's favorite peace activist, Cat Stevens, is unable to issue a strong denial to the allegation that some of his contributions to "Islamic charities" ultimately got routed to Hamas. If "no one ever knows where the money goes," wouldn't that be a sufficient reason not to contribute to a particular "charity"? Read more about it here.

The '70s folkie formerly known as Cat Stevens has become a voice of moderate Islam since the the Sept. 11 attacks. But Israeli officials are charging that thousands of dollars donated by the "Peace Train" songwriter for humanitarian causes in 1988 were rerouted to the terrorist group Hamas, GQ magazine reports.

The article by Jake Tapper claims that Stevens, who changed his name to Yusef Islam in 1977, gave the money to Mouhammad Abdel- Rahman, a son of the notorious blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"We don't think this - we know it," Israeli government spokesman Daniel Seaman tells the magazine.

Islam also helped radical cleric Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad get a lawyer after he was jailed for saying Britain's then-Prime Minister John Major was "a legitimate target" for assassination, the mag reports.

His brother, David Gordon, says Islam has distanced himself from radicals and argues "no one ever knows where the money goes" with such charities.

Peterson promises to find the real killer.

Now this sounds like my kind of lawsuit.

Read that Jon Stewart just signed a new contract with Comedy Central that will have him continuing to do his show through the 2004 election. Although not good news for George W., this is good news for those looking for nightly political humor. Although my politics are much more in line with Dennis Miller, I do enjoy watching Jon Stewart. Although liberal, he does try to play it fair, which results in him skewering both sides.

A little nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the NY area: Rye Playland is celebrating its 75th anniversary. Go back in your mind's eye to the Kiddie Coaster . . .

Yes, I had to take this silly quiz:

Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who!

What Monty Python Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Jesse Walker of Reason's Hit&Run blog, discussing the Smoking Gun's capture of premature CNN.com obituaries, links to the transcript of a hilarious SNL skit where Tom Brokaw pre-tapes possible announcements on the death of Gerald Ford. Read the whole thing.

Biker gangs and corrupt small-town sheriffs hold on to your hats, Knight Rider: The Movie is coming!

I actually used to watch Knight Rider as a kid. It's interesting how few shows like this still exist on network TV (although the small cable networks still produce action shows that aren't adult dramas). You occasionally see a 'Walker Texas Ranger' or 'Nash Bridges' or '24,' but mostly the action genre has been overtaken by the X-Files-style sci-fi/fantasy show.

Looks like Hollywood's offended the wrong group again.

Now, here's a bizarre story: The Moscow Times reported as follows:

In a surprise move Monday, President Vladimir Putin named Russia's former Miss Universe as a deputy prime minister. Oksana Fyodorova takes over the post vacated by Valentina Matviyenko, who left the government earlier this month to become Putin's envoy in the Northwestern Federal District.

* * *

Fyodorova, 25, was stripped of her Miss Universe crown last year after only four months. Pageant organizers said she failed to fulfill all her duties and had gained weight. The New York Post reported at the time that she might be pregnant from a well-connected older boyfriend named Vladimir.

Putin said Monday that he was sure Fyodorova would prove up to the task. "Being a deputy prime minister is not the same as being Miss Universe," a visibly annoyed Putin said in remarks shown on Channel One and later rebroadcast on "Spokoinoi Nochi, Malyshi." "She has a beautiful mind, will fulfill all her duties and will not gain any weight."

Of course, the article is bylined April 1. Who knew that they celebrated April Fool's Day in Russia?

Seen at CVS tonight: 'Croc Hunter' Valentine's Day cards (25 pack!), amazingly, still left over from Valentine's Day. What were the odds of that?

Well, one non-baseball entry . . . I went to see the Saw Doctors last night at Irving Plaza in lower Manhattan. (Apparently, according to their website, the Galway-based band played at a St. Patrick's Day luncheon the day before in DC for President Bush, Dennis Hastert, and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern). They put on a raucous show, and you can't beat a small venue like that.

Frankly, there's no rational reason why the Saw Doctors aren't international superstars; they're that good, and their mainstream pop-rock sound could appeal to basically any audience other than hard-core hip-hoppers or metalheads. I only recently got into them, so I didn't know all their songs, but most of the ones I hadn't heard were catchy enough to sing along to or at least keep time with after one verse. Probably the most similar recent American band is the Gin Blossoms (who are, by the way, still touring some 6-7 years after their second and last album), but the Saw Doctors' up-tempo stuff is a bit livelier.

The crowd looked to be overwhelmingly Irish-American, as you would imagine, and there was particular enthusiasm for some of the band's blood-and-soil anthems to their native land. There's an exceptionally strong, romantic attachment to Ireland among second- and third-generation Irish-Americans; it's not just the Irish, of course (Italian-Americans, among others, have a similar pull to their Old Country). But it's mistaken to see it as something artificial; there's still a deep emotional attachment, even for people who have never laid eyes on the land of their ancestors.

Do book reviewers actually read the books? Sometimes they don't. (Link via The American Scene).

Bill Simmons likes to write about "That Guy" actors, familiar character actors you see over and over but never know their names. Here's one I finally bothered to look up: James Rebhorn (Here's a picture)

John Hawkins of Right Wing News catches up on an appalling pro-terrorist album cover (for the album "Sonic Jihad") and matching lyrics by rapper Paris.

Ross Douthat has the best eulogy I've read for Fred Rogers.

I wasn't going to blog today, but this demands comment: Mister Rogers has died.

We can all remember, warmly, the TV personalities of our childhood; as we grow older and outgrow them, we lose our innocence and move into a harder world. Yet, the loss of innocence that accompanes adulthood makes it all the more admirable to see a grown man who so efortlessly, for so many decades, produced the sort of kind, gentle entertainment that connected instantly with generations of preschoolers. Even with our own children, it can be hard to have that connection, to put aside all the trappings of adulthood. And everyone who knew Fred Rogers testified to the fact that he was really like that -- soft-spoken, patient, understanding, deeply religious (he was a Presbyterian minister) and committed to an old-fashioned, small-town sort of decency.

You could've been my neighbor any day, Mister Rogers. Rest in Peace.

I'm not sure if it says more about the state of the Grammys or the state of rock music today that Bruce Springsteen's awards for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Album were not even featured on the telecast, but presented off the air with the polka awards and the Grammy for "best liner notes."

Controversy erupts over the sport of . . . bull flipping! Who'd a thunk? (Link via Dave Barry).

According to this UPI wire report:

The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network Thursday announced a last-minute agreement with PepsiCo Inc. in New York averting a boycott of the company's products. The organization had said earlier in the day that it would call an immediate boycott over what it called Pepsi's "cultural disrespect" of hip-hop. HSAN Chairman Russell Simmons first called for a boycott last week, accusing the company of applying a double standard for hip-hop in its national TV advertising. Simmons said the company demonstrated disrespect for hip-hop culture by dropping an ad campaign for Pepsi-Cola featuring rapper Ludacris because of public protests over the sexually explicit context of his lyrics -- then featuring foul-mouthed metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne in ads for one of its soft drinks. Simmons said Tuesday that HSAN had reached a "multi-million dollar, multi-year agreement" with the company and the Ludacris Foundation. He told United Press International Thursday that he decided to renew the call for a boycott because the company had not yet signed on to a formal agreement. . . Simmons said Pepsi accepted a formal agreement Thursday, calling for the company to contribute "millions of dollars" to the Ludacris Foundation -- a non-profit organization founded by the rapper.

A few thoughts:

1. "Disrespect for hip-hop culture" is an awfully serious charge, and should not be thrown around lightly in a mere commercial dispute.

2. I bet you didn't know there was such a thing as "the Ludacris Foundation." Do they give college scholarships? ("I've got the Ludacris scholarship to go to Stanford!") Endow scientific research? ("Here at Ludacris Laboratories, we're working on cheap, renewable sources of energy.")

3. Would litigation have focused on comparing and contrasting the vices of Ludacris and Ozzy? Man, that would have been an entertaining case.

4. I have to respect Simmons' candor in this quote:

When HSAN first raised the threat of a boycott last week, the organization demanded that Pepsi not only donate $5 million to the foundation, but also issue a public apology to Ludacris and reinstate his ad. Asked Thursday whether the company had issued a public apology, Simmons said, "The millions of dollars is pretty much the same thing."

John Podhoretz, writing for NRO, refers to "Tom Cruise (whose last name is well-chosen, but I can't say any more about why)." I'm not 100% sure I get this, but I suspect that Podhoretz is making a reference to Cruise being gay (a subject that has launched lawsuits by Cruise in the past). Whatever he means, if Podhoretz can't say it, he shouldn't imply it.

I saw a bit of the Golden Globes, and Nicole Kidman won best actress for the movie where she plays a sad lesbian with a big nose. OK, there's more to it than that, but I'd wager that about a third of the Oscar voters don't know much more than that either (it's just scandalous that they let people vote on movies they haven't seen). Anyway, Kidman's speech was all about how this award is a triumph over Hollywood's failure to give women good roles.

I bet she and "The Hours" win -- precisely because the film is campaigning on a feminist platform that says that a vote against this movie is a vote against good roles for women. The merits got nuthin' to do with it.

You can always count on American celebrities, when in Europe, to bash some aspect of the United States. Interviewers over there eat this stuff up. But what's ironic about George Clooney ripping reality television is that, at least from this Washington Post report, it appears that he has no inkling that nearly all the concepts in American reality TV are taken from shows that first debuted in Europe.

If, like me, you read a lot of Dave Barry columns, you probably reacted to the latest spate of gross-out TV reality shows by wondering when they would air Barry's long-touted "Eat Bugs for Money" show. Turns out that Dave himself has been wondering the same thing. Here's the column that launched the idea.

Next up: Hello, and welcome to Saw Your Head Off!

This sounds too wacky to be true; the London Evening Standard claims that the makers of the latest Harry Potter film may be sued in Russia -- presumably by Vladimir Putin -- on the theory that Dobby, the computer-generated self-flagellating house elf in the movie, bears too close a resemblance to Mr. Putin. I swear I am not making this up; judge for yourself. (Link via Drudge).

It may be heresy to say this, as a Bruce Springsteen fanatic, but I can't agree with the sentiment that Thunder Road is the greatest rock 'n roll record ever. First, I'd pick 'Born to Run' as Bruce's best, because it's so elemental, and second, my all time #1 rock song is still "Sympathy for the Devil," with its challenging lyrics and the great variety with which its tune can be adapted.

Now, I haven't seen the movie, although I did sit through what I believe was the longest trailer I've ever endured in a theater. But 'Kangaroo Jack' looks like the stupidest kangaroo movie since 'Mathilda the Boxing Kangaroo.' Which would be saying quite a lot, except that I can't think of any other movies starring a kangaroo. I guess there's a reason for that. On the other hand, unlike Mathilda, at least Kangaroo Jack doesn't feature a guy in a kangaroo suit that looks like it was rented from a Halloween costume store ("Quick, Elliott, we've got to finish this scene in time to get the security deposit on the kangaroo suit back!")

Much as I'd like to ignore the story, the Pete Townsend thing is hard to avoid, when the man has been such a foundational figure in modern rock. It ain't exactly a secret that Townsend's lyrics are full of stuff that's hardly G-rated. He sang about homosexuality in "Rough Boys," to say nothing of the lyrics to "5:15" Heck, his most prominent work thirty years ago was about a boy who withdraws from the world after being sexually abused by an older male relative. At the time, people thought of this as a metaphor.

Nonetheless, even if it turns out - as it appears - that Townsend has been consuming child porn, regardless of the purpose, we can still enjoy his music. In fact, one of the benefits, for political conservatives, of the idiot leftism of so many actors, musicians, etc. is that we learn early to distinguish between the artist and the art.

Thus, when Robert George on NRO comments that "Pete Townshend['s] arrest on child-porn charges must cause CBS and the producers of CSI a little discomfort (Its theme song is, "Who Are You")," I say: No, it shouldn't. Say what you will about the man, the song "Who Are You" is not just great rock & roll, it is, in fact, a song about man's search for God - an angry expression of that search ("tell me who the f__k are you?"), to be sure, but the lyrics include a description of Jesus' love for sinners that most Christian rockers would give their right arm to write:

I know there's a place you walked
Where love falls from the trees
My heart is like a broken cup
I only feel right on my knees

I spit out like a sewer hole
Yet still recieve your kiss
How can I measure up to anyone now
After such a love as this?

We are being treated, this week, to a TV movie about JFK junior and a TV movie (about Benedict Arnold) in which Kelsey Grammer plays George Washington. Egads. The idea of a movie about JKF Jr. . . . I mean, the guy was "intriguing" in the "People Magazine" sense when he was alive, mostly because people wanted to know what he might accomplish with his famous name, good looks, wealth, and ease in the limelight. While seems to have been a decent enough fellow despite being a Kennedy, the answer was always "wait 'til next year." Then he died, the job unfinished, the interesting parts of the story unwritten. Why put that on film?

I'm pretending this story never happened. I can do that, right?

I should add, by the way, that if you haven't read Dave Barry's entire 2002 year in review, you missed a classic. (One of my favorites: "In entertainment news, the surprise hit TV ''reality show'' of the spring is India and Pakistan Threaten to Start a Nuclear War. But after a few weeks of waiting for something to happen, viewers become bored and go back to watching the perennial ratings favorite, Amateur Video of Police Officers Beating Up a Motorist.")

How can you resist clicking on a story headlined "Hobbits Whup Leonardo DiCaprio's Ass"? Unfortunately, the attached story is just box office receipts, not an action video. Still, it's an interesting mental picture.

Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash, has died at 50 of an apparent heart attack.

My wife and I rented "Big Trouble" recently. You may remember what happened to this movie - it was made from a hysterically funny first novel by Dave Barry (the book was funnier than I expected, and I had pretty high expectations given that Barry is the funniest man alive), but because the plot revolved around a nuclear bomb on the loose in an American city (well, Miami, anyway), the film's projected release in fall 2001 had to be pushed back to the spring, and the movie bombed (so to speak) at the box office.

Go rent it. It's not as good as the book - it's always hard to live up to the book - but it's mostly faithful to the book and a very funny film. It's also wall to wall with familiar faces - Tom Sizemore from 'Saving Private Ryan,' Janeane Garafolo, Stanley Tucci from 'Big Night,' Puddy from Sienfeld, Dennis Farina from 'Crime Story', Andy Richter from the Conan O'Brien show - which is one reason I'm sure the studio was crushed that it failed. Tim Allen actually has surprisingly little comedic heavy lifting to do as the star; he mostly plays the straight man. In a way, we've moved on to living with the terrorist threat to the point where maybe it's not so bad to laugh at the dark humor of 'Big Trouble.' If you can get past that, it's a very funny movie.

Lileks goes Christmas shopping with his toddler daughter: "[W]e went down to the children’s book section of Barnes and Noble. I was looking for gift ideas; she seemed to like the Curious George backpack - it looks as if the little fellow is clinging to your back. Very cute. It would be different if he had red eyes and sharp teeth, of course; if the bag looked like that, I’d train Gnat to run around screaming whenever she put it on, shouting GED OFF! GED OFF MONKEY! Just for fun."

This Wall Street Journal article (subscribers only) is one of the funniest things I've read recently, about how consumer-behavior tracking software in products like TiVo can freak people out ("My TiVo thinks I'm Gay!"). One of the best parts is when Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com goes to demonstrate the "preference tracking" features on his company's site in front of a live audience, and he logs on, and it tells him the top recommendation for Jeff Bezos is a DVD called "Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity."

Dawn Freeman, 23, a tax analyst in Lexington, Ky., has bought lowbrow videos, such as "American Pie," from Amazon.com. But she was aghast when the site suggested Tom Green's gross-out performance in "Road Trip."

"I thought, 'I know I don't like high cinema, but have I really reached the point where I'd like to watch Tom Green lick a mouse?" To even out her Amazon profile, she went through the site finding "witty independent films."

Her TiVo also thinks she's a sophomoric-humor-loving 12-year-old, she says. It keeps giving her cartoons. "I know it's dumb to take it personally, but it's in your face. These are supposedly objective computers saying, 'This is what we think of you.' "

I was watching TV with the kids yesterday, and what should come on WPIX but an old episode of "The Magic Garden," in all its Seventies glory, from bell-bottom trousers to the wacky pastel colors everywhere. The show, for those of you who never saw it, was a preschool show, with two women (Carol and Paula) who sang songs, acted out stories, interacted with puppets, the usual kids' show stuff. My kids, 3 and 5, loved it. What amazed me was how quickly something like that can take you back, bring back all the little details of the show that have sat dormant in your memory all these years. I'm quite certain I haven't seen the show since I was about 6 years old (I'm 31 now), but the gimmicks (the Chuckle Patch, daisies that tell corny jokes, to the Storybox with its low-budget costumes for storytime playacting) and the jingles ("you don't need a key, so follow me, there are no locks on storybox, on story box"; "see ya see ya, hope you had a good good time . . . ") all came piling out of the recesses of my brain.

It was also a reminder - today's kids' shows are quite good, some of them, and so were the shows I used to watch, but they're different now - shows like Blues' Clues and Dora the Explorer are just busier, more crowded with THINGS TO SEE AND LEARN!!! than the shows I used to watch as a preschooler. Better? Worse? Just that the world keeps moving faster and getting more complicated, and times never stand still. It's the reality we all deal with, either way, and the world my kids have to prepare for will already be different than the one I live in now, which is plenty modern enough for my tastes.

Slate's Dear Prudence advice column tells a guy to break up with his girlfriend rather than let her go to an office Christmas party at her law firm where spouses and 'significant others' are not invited. Leave aside the general asininity of this advice, although it may be harmless; the fact that the guy has written to an internet advice columnist to say he doesn't trust his girlfriend suggests that this particular relationship is doomed anyway. But consider Prudence's first reaction: "Office Christmas parties are famous occasions for drunken women lurching at the boss ... or the other way around." Am I naive, or is this a totally outdated stereotype? I mean, my law firm has an annual Christmas party, and people are generally too uptight about the possibility of making fools of themselves to dance, for crying out loud. I mean, not that extramarital affairs and the like don't happen in the business world, but I really can't see the office Christmas party as a major culprit in that kind of thing, especially at a party full of lawyers in these days of hair-trigger sexual harassment litigation. Get a grip!

Mark Steyn, who once wrote an extended and not entirely tongue in cheek attack on 'barbophobia,' would love these guys.

The appearance of the phrase "Spinach McNuggets" in Saturday's kausfiles suggests that Mickey Kaus has spent too much time on the road.

Personally, I think it's about time to get someone to Smacko Wacko Jacko. Heck, maybe if we ask him real nice, we can even get Shaqo to Smacko Wacko Jacko until he's Backo to Blacko. And the obscenity laws ought to prevent newspapers from putting photos of Mr. Jacko on the front page . . .

I don't have HBO, but my wife and I got hooked over the summer on renting "The Sopranos" on video. We are, at this writing, halfway through the third season. So, it was with extreme consternation that last week's major plot development on the show was mentioned in prominent links on Slate (not the articles, the links on the front page), in a large picture and appropriate captions in the NY Daily News, in Letterman's monologue, and even in Peggy Noonan's column, for crying out loud! In today's Bleat, Lileks feels my pain.

Instapundit thinks Harry Potter is like George W. Bush - which explains why Slate's staff hates Potter as much as it hates and hates Bush.

LILEKS on the arrival of his DirecTV package:

Hooked it up, called DirecTV, went through the procedure to activate it - and here we enter mumbojumbo land. I chanted the magic numbers into the phone; the shaman on the other end moved his fingers, and the birds in the sky and the snakes on the land woke as one, and yea: the picture appeared on the wall, and seemed to move; the words appeared as if writ by an invisible hand, and I fell on my knees and said I will order the NFL Total Access Game Package, O my liege. I will! I am not worthy of this package but I shall accept it nonetheless. Blessed be unto you.

CNN and MSNBC have pieces on the brillance of Bob Newhart, the white-collar standup comic, on the occasion of his receiving an award. My mom had the old records with Newhart's standup routines, and as good as his sitcoms were, if you never heard his standup act, you missed a lot. What was really revolutionary about Newhart's act was his ability to create an act with no funnyman, just a straight man.

The Washington Post with a good roundup of the faults and bad reviews of the late, unlamented 'girls club'. All I saw were the ads and reviews - from the ratings, I gather I was not alone in this - but among the show's numerous flaws were its Lifetime-network-ish assumption that nothing in the least has changed in the way women lawyers are treated at work (in San Francisco, no less) since the Fifties, and its equally absurd presumption that a successful law firm would be sending first-year associates out, without training, no less, to do things like the opening statement of a murder trial. What planet did David E. Kelley practice law on?

You hate to link to the same people every day, but I laughed so hard at Lileks' Bleat this morning I almost fell off my chair. He takes on the Pet Shop Boys, Avril Lavigne, and Walter Mondale, and likes only one of the three. A taste of his observations on Mondale: "I was a hardcore Democrat [in 1984], and I remember watching the [convention] speech and thinking: we are going to lose. We are going to lose 51 states. Puerto Rico will demand statehood just for the chance not to vote for this guy. . . [Now] I just feel sorry for the guy. If he wins, he has to leave home, leave his family, leave his nice job, and go back to the ossuary of the Senate for six years. One night he’ll find himself staring at the lovely ceiling, listening to Robert Byrd drone on - for heaven’s sake he was talking when I left and twenty years later he still hasn’t shut up . . ."

USA Today has a great headline (fifth down): "ZZ Top still rocking after Beard surgery". Actually, it's just an appendectomy for drummer Frank Beard.

Also in today's issue: President Bartlett's post-September 11 bounce didn't have the same staying power as Bush's. What will he do? Scare the old folks about Social Security? Play the race card? I'm betting on a sex scandal and a special prosecutor . . .

IS THIS THE WORLD'S FUNNIEST JOKE? I'd say 'you decide,' but apparently scientists already have. I've seen way too many of these Onion-esque stories lately.

Dave Shiflett takes Larry King to town:

"It is in fact something of a surprise when a low-life newsmaker does not show up on Larry's show, or a show like his. Back over pedestrians at a swank club, get some face time. Ditto for marrying your horse, staying stoned for six years, or for simply gobbling down wanker-enhancement pills. Profess yourself a cannibal and you might get a full hour.

Larry: So tell me, what does a human taste like?
Guest: Fish.
Larry: Well, there you have it folks. We taste like fish. I guess that's not surprising. We are believed to have come from the sea. So it all makes sense. Closing thoughts?
Guest: Thanks for having me on!
Larry: And thank you for your unique insights. Please come back."

This was in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: JK Rowling has finished a 700+ page manuscript of the next Harry Potter book, she thinks she can have it cleaned up enough to go to the publisher in 3-6 months, she's four months pregnant (I'm guessing she'll want the book out of her hair before the baby comes, assuming the pregnancy goes smoothly), and the desperate publishers plan to turn it around in about 2-3 months. Net result: the book should be out some time around April or May 2003.

ABC is bring back "Monk," the quirky whodunit starring Tony Shahloub of "Wings" and "Men in Black" as a detective with a severely advanced obsessive/compulsive disorder. I've seen it a few times, and it's a good show; it also fills a niche, for the lighter mystery show of the "Murder, She Wrote" or "Columbo" variety, a genre that's not that big with 18-24-year-old TV viewers, but that should draw good ratings nonetheless. Kudos to the network both for correcting a mistaken decision to pass on the show and for putting something on the air that's neither tailored to the under-25 crowd nor a sop to the Emmy voters, but is just good entertainment.

Jerry Seinfeld tells the Sunday NY Times, in a long profile, that "I've kind of graduated from show business. I have no further need of this business. It's not about money any more, and it's not about fame. Now, it's just about maintaining a creative arc."

Death to Free Willy!

Turned on Channel 5 (WNYW-TV) this morning and saw an infomercial. Nothing unusual there, except that the beaming visage of the down-on-his luck celebrity hawking some tooth cleaning system to people who appered to have been drinking PaperMate ink was none other than Robert Urich - who, if you recall, has been dead for several months, clean teeth or no.

In a similar vein, I was at the Bronx Zoo recently, where they have signs informing the visitor of helpful facts such as that, among other countries, "the USSR has outlawed the hunting of polar bears." Well, if it's good enough for the Soviets, it must be good enough for us, right?

Click on this link. Go to "M.I. Lounge." Run your mouse over the clock and you can download an extremely creepy screensaver: it's from the animated movie "Monsters, Inc.," which has a character (voiced by Billy Crystal) with one gigantic eye. The screensaver is just this huge blinking eye.

It's always been easy for people who fancy themselves to be cool and sophisticated to bash Bruce Springsteen. Bruce's work has always been highly emotional, and his appeal visceral, with none of the too-cool-for-school detatchment that is the signature of rock poseurs everywhere. That's what made him such a man of the moment in the flag-waving 80s and such an easy target in the Seinfeldy, irony-ridden 90s. And, contrary to what some people seem to think, the unguarded sincerity of Bruce's music is precisely what makes him once again a vital force in the post-September 11 world, the world where even David Letterman got choked up on national television.

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Is it just me, or does this picture make the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks look like a dead ringer for Sally Struthers?