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I wrote a piece in yesterday's New York Times about Sophie Tucker, whose earliest recordings, some almost a century old, have been released for the first time in decades on a new CD. I describe Tucker's rise from the burlesque and variety stage circuit to vaudeville stardom and note her origins as a "coon shouter"—a performer of blackface songs.
In Salon, Sady Doyle has written a response to my Times article titled "Can a feminist hero do blackface?" Doyle says some generous things about my piece. She also writes: "Rosen begins his piece with a list of Tucker's nicknames, but leaves one out: ‘Queen of the Coon Shouters.' Her fame came through minstrelsy." Later, Doyle concludes that "without letting Tucker off the hook," the singer's eventual abandonment of blackface performance and "move towards authenticity" makes her "worthy of lasting consideration."
Strictly speaking, Doyle is wrong on the facts: Sophie Tucker's fame didn't "come through minstrelsy." Her stardom arrived only after she stopped wearing burnt cork, sometime around 1909. (Also, for the record, an earlier draft of my Times piece included the mention of a different Tucker nickname: "A Revelation in Coonology." It was removed by my Times editors for space considerations.) More important, despite my obvious enthusiasm for Tucker's music, I'm totally uninterested in the notion of her heroism, feminist or otherwise.
What really troubles me about Doyle's post is this question of whether Sophie Tucker is "worthy of consideration." Are we to conclude that had Tucker not stopped performing coon songs, she would be unworthy of consideration? What about an entertainer like Al Jolson, one of the greatest and most influential singers of the 20th century, whose landmark performances took place behind the blackface mask? What, for that matter, about Bert Williams, the first African-American pop star, who smeared burnt cork on his own brown skin? Are they beyond the bounds of acceptability?
It is crudely ahistorical to condemn—or to speak of "letting off the hook"—an individual singer for performing racial burlesque in 1908. Blackface minstrelsy was the pre-eminent form of entertainment in the United States for most of the 19th-century and remained wildly popular for at least the first few decades of the 20th. (And as Mad Men fans learned last night from Roger Sterling's rendition of "My Old Kentucky Home," minstrelsy stuck around long after actors stopped blacking-up in Hollywood movies.) A growing scholarly literature has shown that minstrelsy was complex—a show business institution and a socio-cultural phenomenon far bigger and more complicated than any one practitioner. Yes, blackface comedy was racist and appalling, and people should never stop saying so. It is also a key to cracking the code of American culture.
It's especially important to understanding popular music, whose history—from Stephen Foster to Tucker to Bing Crosby to Janis Joplin to Mick Jagger to Eminem and on and on ad infinitum—is enmeshed with blackface tradition. For years, minstrelsy was such a hot-button topic that scholars dared not touch it. This is one reason why important musicians like Tucker have received little serious attention in the last many decades.
Now, we are realizing that minstrelsy wasn't just a sin, it was a musical seedbed. In the Times piece, I point out that the rowdily comic coon shouting mode was transformed, by performers like Tucker, into a new kind of vocal style—that minstrelsy begat pop music modernity. What's more, minstrelsy wasn't just blackface: Tin Pan Alley songwriters were equal opportunity offenders, churning out Irish sendups, Jewish "Yid" songs, Italian "wop" tunes, and other ethnic dialect lampoons. This music, by contemporary standards, is offensive; Doyle may wish to plug her ears. Those interested in history, not "heroes," will want—are compelled—to listen.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 8: "ASCII Art." Several tech blogs noted today that if you enter "ascii art" into the Google search engine, you'll find an ASCII representation of Google's logo next to the results. ASCII art is a graphic-design technique that uses only the symbols and characters available on your computer keyboard to create images. The most well-known example is probably the truck made out of @ symbols.
No. 24: "death risk rankings." Carnegie Mellon researchers launched a new Web site today that compiles public data from the United States and Europe to compare mortality risks. Visitors to the site can compare the risk of dying as a 22-year-old female in New Jersey, for example, versus the risk of dying as a 22-year-old female in France. (The results indicate it's a good time to move to Europe.) They found that while men have a much higher annual death risk than women, women in their 30s and 40s have a much higher risk of getting cancer than men. Visit Deathriskrankings.com to find out your chances of dying.
No. 98: "Pentacene." This month's issue of Science (out today) contains the first published image of individual atoms within a molecule. IBM scientists were able to capture the image by using an atomic force microscope. The molecule they chose to examine, Pentacene, is a crystal structure known for its properties as an organic semiconductor. Watch a video interview with the scientists here.
Photograph of ASCII art courtesy Porsche997SBS at Wikipedia Commons.
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Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock—about Elliot Teichberg, a young interior designer who saves Woodstock, and his parents' motel, by convincing festival producers to hold the concert on his neighbor's farm—comes out tomorrow. If the theatrical trailer is to be trusted, the film's pleasures include a good cast (Leiv Schreiber, Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch), bad '70s-era wigs, and a scene depicting Tiber's parents dancing around like morons in the rain after accidentally eating some pot brownies.
Ang Lee is not the first director to suggest that characters who get high unwittingly have more fun than those who do so on purpose. In Never Been Kissed, some new Rasta friends feed Drew Barrymore weed brownies at a club, which, in turn, inspires her to jump up on stage and perform an acrobatic boa and booty-slapping dance in front of her classmates. In Dick, Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams bring Richard Nixon pot cookies, which make him feel so jolly he signs the Nixon-Brezhnev accord. More recently, in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Shia LaBeouf's mom buys a baked good from a bake sale on her son's first day of college, then starts eagerly chatting up co-eds about her son's sex life.
We're sure that these aren't the only instances of unintentional marijuana consumption leading to outlandish—even by stoner standards—behavior. What are cinema's other classic scenes of inadvertent weed consumption? Send along examples to slatebrowbeat@gmail.com. Extra credit if you can find a clip on YouTube.
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Eight years ago this week, the R&B singer Aaliyah died in a plane crash in the Bahamas. Six London rock musicians who call themselves The xx (no relation to Slate's sister site) have paid unlikely tribute to her, covering her 1997 single "Hot Like Fire" in a way that strips away the slithering funk and calisthenic beat of the Timbaland-produced original and transforms the song into a quiet, shivering swoon.
I have a soft spot for rock bands that speak softly—murmuring where others howl, tiptoeing where others stomp. The risks of the quiet style are high. Will the songs be so slight and wispy as to evaporate? Will they smother us with their precious delicacy? Will they fail to inform us fully that they are even playing? But when a band avoids these pitfalls, they can communicate a power and heft unavailable to acts that know only how to roar.
The xx released their self-titled debut last week, and it's available for order through the band's Myspace page. While you're there, check out "Crystallised," in which the clicking drums, mumbling boy-girl vocals, and pulsing bass line are so cleanly articulated they don't seem to occupy the same space except on the wordless refrain: The effect is of a band that sounds at once intimate and slightly alienated from itself. We can hear the band's Timbaland love in the minimal, asymmetrical beat pattering through "Basic Space," whose chiming guitars suggest the Cure at their most anesthetized. "Blood Red Moon" is sultry or menacing or both—goth make-out music of the highest order.
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Four trade magazines, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal, offer short reviews of many thousands of books. Of particular interest to editors are those that receive a "star" for unusual merit. This regular feature highlights new titles with stars from at least three of the four publications.
Our fourth When Stars Align includes 18 books that received three or more stars—a 300 percent increase from our last roundup. This isn't such a surprise, since publishers are saying that this fall will see the release of numerous great, industry-redeeming books. To save space, we've given special attention to two works that received stars from all four trade magazines and have simply listed the remaining titles.
Victor Lodato's debut novel, Mathilda Savitch, centers on a 13-year-old girl who is trying to cope with the tragic death of her older sister. Convinced that her sister was murdered, the young Mathilda hacks into her e-mail correspondence to recreate her final days and solve the mystery. Publisher's Weekly says Mathilda is "a metaphysical Holden Caulfield for the terrifying present day." Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
In Stitches, a graphic memoir, author and illustrator David Small tells the story of his difficult childhood. His father, a radiologist, subjected him to repeated X-rays that eventually led to throat cancer. A botched operation later left him mute. Kirkus calls the book "emotionally raw [and] artistically compelling," and Booklist raves: "Think no less than Maus." Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Fiction
Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow. Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Love and Summer by William Trevor. Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Mystery
Crossers by Philip Caputo. Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Nonfiction
Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan. Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel. Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
The Wolf in the Parlor: The Eternal Connection Between Humans and Dogs by Jon Franklin. Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Young-Adult Fiction
Fire by Kristin Cashore. Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck. Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo. Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal.
Children's Literature—Picture books
The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney. Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
Children's Literature—Nonfiction
A Savage Thunder by Jim Murphy. Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal.
Years of Dust by Albert Marrin. Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 23: "Rabelaisian." Searches related to the passing of longtime Senate stalwart Edward M. Kennedy dominate the listings this morning, taking the top 10 spots. As news of his death spread, those who read John M. Broder's obituary at The New York Times found a description of Kennedy as "a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride." The adjective Rabelaisian refers to Francois Rabelais, a French Renaissance writer who was known for his colorful, often grotesque characters, such as those in his masterpiece, The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel.
No. 51: "Microsoft Poland." Microsoft is catching a lot of flack today for a decision to alter a benign-looking corporate ad for use in the Polish market. In the original image, three people—an Asian male, an African-American male, and a white female—are seated around a meeting table. In the Polish version, the African-American male has been Photoshopped out and replaced with a white male—ostensibly because the Polish market is a whiter market. The Photoshoppers, however, left the body of the African-American male in the ad, altering just his face. Microsoft issued an apology tweet this morning. The Telegraph has a photo gallery of other poorly altered advertising images.
No. 69: "Chinese Valentine's Day." Today is Chinese Valentine's Day, which is known in China as the Qi Xi Festival. The holiday falls on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month and, according to Reuters, "celebrates the legend of the fairy Zhinu and her mortal, cowherd husband Niulang who are allowed to meet on a bridge that spans the Milky Way, only on that day." If it rains tonight, legend has it that it is the tears of Niulang and Zhinu crying for a lost year a part because the bridge could not be built. Cross your fingers—for now at least, the forecast in Beijing is clear.
Photograph of Edward Kennedy courtesy Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 18: "lbj." Searches for former president Lyndon B. Johnson's favorite drink dominated the Google Trends list this morning. LBJ's drink of choice was the $1 million question posed to Kevin Basin of Los Angeles on last night's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." According to the show, LBJ had four buttons installed in the Oval Office so he could order his favorite beverages on demand. The buttons included "coffee," "tea," "Coke," and..."Fresca"—not Yoo-hoo, which was Basin's unlucky answer. Watch the video here.
No. 36: "Acadia National Park." Searches for Acadia National Park were up this morning after several people were injured and a young girl killed when a rogue wave caused by Hurricane Bill swept them out to sea. A group of around twenty people had gathered at a spot in the park called Thunder Hole, where a small cavern forces incoming waves into a giant waterspout that can shoot as high as 40 feet during storms. The park is located near Bar Harbor in Maine and was the first national park east of the Mississippi River. Video of the rescue can be seen here.
No. 57: "Unassisted Triple Play." The beleaguered Mets were dealt an especially humiliating defeat by the Philadelphia Phillies last night when Phillies second baseman Eric Bruntlett ended the game with an unassisted triple play. After Bruntlett caught a line drive hit by Mets outfielder Jeff Francoeur, his teammate Shane Victorino started frantically yelling at him: "Touch everybody. Touch everything." Bruntlett did as his was told and made history: Only once before, in 1927, has a baseball game ended on a triple play. Watch the video here and read the play-by-play here.
Photograph of wave caused by Hurricane Bill courtesy Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.
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More than 100,000 people were expected at IMAX movie theaters Friday night for "Avatar Day," a 16-minute sneak preview of James Cameron's science-fiction epic. In what the New York Times called an "audacious marketing ploy," 20th Century Fox made an extended trailer for the film—which is due to be released in December—into a major theatrical event with ticketed showings on more than 100 screens. Yet despite all the hype (and all the hype about the hype), the screening I attended in midtown Manhattan was only one-third full.
It's too bad; I would have liked to see how the footage played to a crowd. The smattering of viewers at the AMC Empire theater watched in near-silence as the CGI-heavy, three-dimensional action sequences played on an enormous screen. No doubt some were put off by the movie's cornball heroes. As I watched a tribe of blue-skinned cat people wearing loincloths and glitter makeup wrestle their way through an enchanted forest of savage beasts and glowing jellyfish, I couldn't help but wonder whether this is what Apocalypto might have looked like had it been directed by George Lucas.
Much of the ballyhoo for Avatar has focused on Cameron's supposedly groundbreaking technical innovations, which may account for the film's estimated $240 million budget. (In March, a writer for Time wondered whether the revolutionary special effects might "be the thing that forces the theaters to convert to digital.") Here's what I can tell you based on the trailer: The 3-D effects do look pretty darn good—they're easy on the eyes and do a wonderful job of immersing the viewer in the film's alien-jungle psychedelia. My only complaint is that some of the off-planet scenes suffer from a rather pronounced dollhouse effect, with the real-life sets and human actors appearing weirdly small.
I'm less sanguine about the computer graphics. The scenes shown Friday were almost exclusively CGI: animated feline humanoids doing animated flips as they hurled animated spears at animated dinosaurs. I'm sure the algorithms used to construct these battles were as sophisticated as any in the history of filmmaking—but everything still looked a little off to me. The movements were too smooth and slippery, like Yoda's cartoonish acrobatics from Star Wars. For all Cameron's technical wizardry, the digital characters in Avatar remain lodged somewhere on the far slope of the uncanny valley.
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CBS and Pepsi are teaming up for a promotion in an upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly. When readers open to a two-page spread in the magazine, a tiny embedded video screen will flicker to life. Various buttons on the player will call up short promo clips from fall CBS shows, along with an ad for Pepsi Max.
The Financial Times compares the stunt to a singing greeting card and to the moving pictures on the pages of the "Daily Prophet" (the newspaper read by characters in the Harry Potter series). The FT estimates the cost to build the video screen into magazines was "several dollars per copy." Given this tremendous expense, CBS and Pepsi are placing the ad only in EW issues sent to subscribers in New York and Los Angeles—attempting to generate maximum buzz among TV freaks and entertainment-industry machers. Ad Age calls the promotion "intriguing," and claims it demonstrates that marketers are "experimenting with new technologies to get their messages out to consumers." A CBS marketing exec tells the FT that the ad is "part of the future—a way to engage consumers in new and surprising ways."
Ah, so this is the bold new future, and a potential savior for dying print-magazine ad sales: a teensy, low-fi screen that costs a huge amount of money to distribute in just two cities and can only play a few short video clips. Fascinating! If only this screen could be larger and sharper and didn't need to be shipped to people's homes because they already owned one, and it could display an unlimited array of content that people could click on for more information, and it were incredibly easy and inexpensive to distribute that content onto screens in every corner of the world. Seems like the sort of futuristic idea advertisers might get really excited about sometime down the road. Until then, thank goodness for bold marketing innovations like this one.
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After a long wait, Project Runway is back on a new network (Lifetime), in a new city (Los Angeles), at a new time (10 p.m., which, as Hanna Rosin points out on Double X, is too late for the show's younger fans). Has the shift westward changed the show's sensibility? (A little.) Has the move to Lifetime matronized its aesthetics? (No, but there are way more bladder-related commercials.) And are the contestants any good? (It's too early to tell.)
In the early weeks of the season, so many garments fly down the runway that it's tough to judge the work. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to say.
In Week 1, we met the 16 designers and watched them fashion a "red carpet look showing innovation and point of view." Unschooled Minnesotan Christopher Straub won the first challenge with a champagne-colored dress with lots of texture and movement, while Samantha Ronson lookalike Ari Gold was sent home after she used "weird, bulbous hexagonal tesselation forms" to fashion a garment for the Video Music Awards "in, like, 2080."
The Contestants
Most cunning contestant: Johnny, addicted to mentioning his "addiction problem," had a crisis of confidence that earned an on-camera out-of-the-workroom mentoring session from Tim Gunn and pep talks from several other designers.
Most boring contestant: Anthea. Her introductory anecdote in full, "The best thing was when my boss came up to me and said, 'Althea, you're the best,' and I was like, ‘OK!' "
WTF statement of the week: Malvin's "I don't watch the red carpet. I don't differentiate between different colored carpets."
The Judges
Tim Gunn's cattiest caution: "Not styled correctly, this could go cruise-line-cocktail-waitress."
Guest judge's obsession: Lindsay Lohan singled out the back of a garment for praise three times—apparently she's an ass woman.
Michael Kors critique that could most easily apply to cheese: "It was elegant and sharp but still had some bite to it."
Most unconvincing review: Nina Garcia on Mitchell's mess, "Even though it is completely sheer and completely unwearable, there is an attitude about this that I liked, that makes me wonder what else you could do."
Stats
Number of crying contestants: 3
Number of times Tim Gunn said, "Make it work!": 2
The Results
Should Christopher have won? It wasn't a complete travesty.
Should Ari have been eliminated? No. Her garment was a nightmare, but at least it was a garment, which is more than can be said for Mitchell's chokingly high-necked, colorless, shapeless slab of pantyhose.
Bold prediction for who'll be auf'd next week: Qristyl. The judges are already muttering about her "taste level."
Project Runway photograph courtesy of Charley Gallay/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 5: "Megan Wants a Millionaire Winner." Actually, there will be no winner on VH1's reality TV show, "Megan Wants a Millionaire." Accusations that Ryan Jenkins, one of the show's finalists, murdered his wife, former swimsuit model Jasmine Fiore, led to the "indefinite postponement" of the program. VH1 has canceled any future airings, removed all links and photos from its Web site, and made all previously aired videos unavailable on iTunes. Questions have arisen about VH1's casting procedures after it was revealed that Jenkins has a prior history of assault.
No. 42: "boycott Scotland." A Scottish justice's decision to release Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the terrorist behind the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, has prompted a "boycott Scotland" campaign. Bloggers are encouraging people to cancel any pending travel plans to Scotland and to stop buying Scottish products. Visit Boycottscotland.com for more information.
No. 55: "Hermann Ratjen." Allegations that South Africa's Caster Semenya is really a man instead of a woman have led to an uptick in searches for Hermann "Dora" Ratjen, the only verified case of gender cheating in Olympics history. As the story goes, at the request of the Nazi Youth movement, Hermann entered the competition for the Women's High Jump at the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics as "Dora." Ratjen won the event, but was later outed by two women who spotted him with a five o'clock shadow. After he was exposed, Ratjen stated, "For three years I lived the life of a girl. It was most dull."
Photograph of Hermann "Dora" Ratjen courtesy of Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia Commons.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.):
No. 12: "Michigan Lottery"; No. 17: "Ohio Lottery,"; No. 23: "NY Lottery"; No. 24: "NJ lottery"; No. 25: "Mass Lottery"; and No. 45: "VA Lottery." This morning's Google Trends was dominated by searches for last night's Mega Millions winning lottery numbers. As of the time of this writing, no one has stepped forward with a ticket containing the lucky six numbers. The estimated jackpot for those fortunate enough to live in a Mega Million state is $207 million. If you do buy a ticket, just don't be foolish enough to promise it away as a tip to a pretty waitress you meet, like Nicolas Cage in It Could Happen to You.
No. 31: "Hilegard Behrens." German soprano Hildegard Behrens died yesterday in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 72. With three Grammys to her name, Behrens was known for her performances of Strauss and Wagner operas. Watch her as Elektra in Strauss' one-act opera of the same name here.
No. 74: "Grotesque." Britain's film board decided today to ban the sale of DVDs of the Japanese horror film Grotesque due to the film's extreme and pointless violence. According to the Associated Press, the British Board of Film Classification says the movie is an "an unrelenting and escalating scenario of humiliation, brutality and sadism." The movie, said to be inspired by Eli Roth's Hostel franchise, is only the third that British officials have banned since 2005. Trailers are available on YouTube for the strong-stomached.
Photograph of MegaMillions tickets courtesy of Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
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I caught a matinee of District 9 today with a friend who is a devoted sci-fi buff, and who spent several years living in South Africa (in the post-apartheid aughts). Afterward, we agreed we'd had a blast—unlike Dan Engber, whose review is here—and then got to the harder work of puzzling over the film's politics. That District 9 grapples with apartheid is irrefutable, but what does it have to say on the subject? (Spoilers hover above the next paragraph, their alien turbines idling.)
My friend was troubled by the depiction of the stranded aliens as "shiftless" "intergalactic schlubs," as Dan puts it. There's something unsavory, he argued, in director Neill Blomkamp portraying his allegorical shack dwellers as dumb, hapless, and helpless members of a community so thoroughly rent by poverty and oppression that the only hope for their betterment lies either in intervention from the outside (Wikus van der Merwe) or the lone efforts of an anomalous, intellectually advanced insider (the alien called Christopher Thompson). This logic can take on an infantilizing, unempowering aspect, he said, that denies oppressed parties agency, the ability to organize effectively from the ground up.
We were both uncertain about Blomkamp's ultimate point about miscegenation, for lack of a better word, as represented by Wikus's gooey transformation into a prawn. Right through the film's final image, Wikus regards his othering from himself as a horror he wants reversed—he fights the evil MNU not out of virtue but out of self-interest and, in the process, becomes a microcosmic model for any "native" body that fears "foreign" contamination. The transforming/transformed Wikus isn't the embodiment of post-racial harmony. Rather, the metamorphosis alienates him twice over, strands him between categories that are themselves left intact: He's not a human and he's not a "prawn," either.
That's fine—it makes him a more interesting character and District 9 a more complicated film. But while it's clear Wikus isn't a radical, Blomkamp's own position remains opaque. It occurs to me that we could easily imagine the South African Lou Dobbs, say, sympathizing with and championing the prawns—after all, they don't peskily want jobs or equal rights as citizens; they just want to wash our hands of themselves and fly on home.
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Dan, if it's not too late I'd love to respond to your post on District 9, Armond White and the "can a film critic be too contrarian?" dustup. Maybe it's just because, on that nifty widget designed to graph the relative "contrarianness" and "conformity" of various critics, I came out occupying the bland middle of the spectrum, but I want to protest the idea that liking or disliking a movie that a majority of critics feels the same way about constitutes "conformity." Insofar as that word implies obeisance to a pre-established norm, it simply doesn't make sense in this context. Since most critics are writing their reviews at the same time, in that brief window between screening and opening, they wouldn't have a chance to make a survey of the general response to the film even if they wanted to. I know, in my case, that I actively try to avoid reading too much about a movie before reviewing it; I might follow industry-type coverage (actor and director profiles, news about upcoming movie deals, etc.), but I certainly don't look at straight-up reviews of a movie I'm about to write on. According to your graph, the majority of critics have around a 75 percent consensus rate—or only 25 percent above a random coin flip. (This math also doesn't allow for the ambiguity of reviews that are less "thumbs up or thumbs down" service pieces than attempts to think through a a movie's cultural impact, and which may be hard to tag as "rotten" or "fresh.") To suggest that reviewers who hated Transformers 2 are somehow cravenly beholden to critical dogma does a disservice to their integrity (not to mention their taste). More absurdly, though, it mistakes critical disagreement for free speech, as if championing Transformers 2 (or dissing District 9, which I haven't seen) were some kind of blow against censorship. God love the often-contrarian (and always fun to read) Armond White, but maybe the lockstep contempt for Transformers 2 had something to do with the fact that it sucked.
As a reader and practitioner of film criticism, I'm less worried about where I fall on the "conformist" spectrum than about the recent studio practice of selectively screening certain films only for the fanboy sites most likely to gush about them (as Paramount did with G.I. Joe, a movie I'm happy to have an excuse to boycott). The only product movie critics have to sell is their honest, unbiased, hopefully well-stated opinion. If that opinion is regularly misrepresented by sneaky marketing strategies, it won't be long before all our movie conversations are taking place in an industry-funded echo chamber.
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I shuddered when I read that Twyla Tharp is planning a new dance-musical, Come Fly With Me, built around the Frank Sinatra songbook. I never saw Tharp's Billy Joel show, Movin' Out but have vivid acid-flashback memories of The Times They Are A-Changin', the choreographer's 2006 "action-adventure fable" set to Bob Dylan music—a cross between Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines dinner theater and Mummenshanz, which dramatized Dylan's songs with tumbling circus clowns, bouncing exercise balls, guys on stilts, guys in jumpsuits, guys in ghoulish whiteface, and a seven-foot-long sequined cardboard-cutout guitar. How will Tharp stage Sinatra classics like "I've Got You Under My Skin" and "Witchcraft"? The mind boggles.
Sinatra-iana has been in no short supply in the decade-plus since the singer's death. In the fall of 2003, I attended Sinatra: His Voice, His World, His Way, a "virtual concert" extravaganza at Radio City Music Hall, featuring a full orchestra, hologram projections of the man himself, and a garish sequence of big-budget production numbers. (Memo to Ms. Tharp: if you're planning a dance routine starring forty-foot-tall marionette likenesses of Frank, Dino, and Sammy—don't bother. It's been done.) Publishing houses have churned out books like The Sinatra Treasures, a lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome with reproductions of telegrams and concert programs, compiled by Charles Pigone, the Sinatra family archivist and the president of the Sinatra Society of America fan club. And now hardcore Frankophiles can get their fix on Siriusly Sinatra, the all-Sinatra-all-the-time satellite radio channel.
What these and other Sinatra Industry products have in common, besides an orientation towards kitsch hagiography, is the imprimatur of Sinatra's children, Nancy, Frank Jr., and Tina, who are notoriously iron-fisted managers of their father's estate. When it comes to copyright issues, their stance is understandable: The royalties from Sinatra's recordings should rightly go to his heirs. But the family has also restricted access to Sinatra's voluminous papers—no one outside the family and its inner circle has seen them. Nancy, Frank's eldest, has made no secret of her distrust of would-be Sinatra biographers, an attitude that may be traceable back to Kitty Kelley's rancid 1986 hatchet job, His Way, which barely mentioned Sinatra's music and all but accused him of being a mafia hitman.
But do shows like the one Tharp plans—which the Sinatras OKed—really serve the singer's legacy? Vegas-style spectacles like Come Fly With Me and Sinatra: His Voice seem destined to fix in the minds of those that know no better the crudest images of Sinatra: the grotesque lounge lizard "celebrated" by the likes of Joe Piscopo. The news that the family has signed-off on a Martin Scorsese-directed biopic is perhaps a step in the right direction. But given Scorsese's florid tendencies—his romanticization of all things goombah—are we really going to get a clearer picture of Sinatra the man and the musician?
What the world needs at this point isn't a Sinatra dance musical, or a biopic, but a decent book. There may be no cultural figure of comparable stature so ill-served by the vast literature devoted to him. Where is the biography that places Sinatra in the sweep of 20th century history, probes the psychology of the self-described "18 carat manic depressive," and explains the alchemy by which the broads and the boorishness was transmuted into some of the most emotionally nuanced and musically thrilling pop records ever made? That book won't arrive until the family realizes it has an obligation to history and places Sinatra's papers in the care of an institution like the Library of Congress. The greatest singer of the 20th century—one of the greatest American artists, period—merits more than an action-adventure fable.
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Everyone loves District 9. The sci-fi action flick took in more than $37 million in its opening weekend, and drew raves from just about every movie critic in America. It's been called a "genuinely original science fiction film," one that's "visceral yet philosophically sophisticated" and a "biting social commentary." As of this writing, the film's score on RottenTomatoes.com sits at 88 percent, with 142 positive reviews against just 19 negative ones.
I'm one of those rotten tomatoes. (My review, published last week, bemoaned the film's plot inconsistencies and reliance on genre clichés.)
That fact is beginning to make me nervous. In recent days, New York Press film critic Armond White has been targeted by an angry mob of sci-fi fanboys and film bloggers. His review has now garnered almost 600 angry comments on RottenTomatoes, many of which call for him to be kicked off the site's meta-ranking system, since his hyper-contrarian take skews the numbers.
On Thursday, Roger Ebert came to White's defense, calling him "an intelligent critic and a passionate writer" and pointing out that "his opinion is often valuable because it is outside the mainstream." But Ebert had changed his mind by Friday morning. After consulting a list of films that White had praised (e.g., Norbit, Transformers 2), and dismissed (Wall-E, There Will Be Blood, Knocked Up), he conceded "that White is, as charged, a troll."
I guess the argument here is that Armond White takes controversial views on movies just to provoke a reaction—that he calibrates his opinions to go against the mainstream. But a look at his record shows that's not the case. As Ebert points out, White votes with the mainstream exactly half the time: He's neither conformist nor contrarian.
For comparison, I looked up the profiles of 20 film critics whose reviews are regularly featured on RottenTomatoes. White is certainly the most contrarian of the group, but that's because the others happen to be bunched up at around 75 percent on the scale. In other words, most film critics tend to agree with the mainstream as a general rule, but every once in a while—once per four reviews—they go against the grain.
What, if anything, can we draw from this? The first lesson is that you can't be a successful critic if no one agrees with you. (No one in the group lives on the contrarian side of the scale.) Second, you can't be a successful critic if too many people agree with you. (The biggest conformist, Keith Phipps, tops the list at 83 percent.) I wonder if there's a third lesson, too. It's striking that White is so perfectly positioned at the center of the graph, while his colleagues cluster so neatly a little farther down—at what might be deemed a respectable level of dissent. Could it be that professional film critics (not amateurs like me) somehow keep track, consciously or not, of how often they rock the boat?
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.):
No. 2: "Dancing With the Stars" and No. 3: "Tom Delay." No, this is not a mistake. Today on Good Morning America, Tom Bergeron, the host of the popular reality TV show, announced that former Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay will be among those to try to emulate Fred Astaire this season. DeLay is the first politician to appear on the show.
No. 14: "aurora spy plane." Today, Britain's Ministry of Defense opened its secret UFO files containing the details of hundreds of sightings between 1981 and 1996. The so-called "real-life X-files" includes the report of an incident on March 31, 1993, in which more than 70 people reported seeing a large, low-flying object. Many have speculated that this was no UFO but actually a secret unmanned U.S. spy plane called "Aurora," rumored to be capable of hypersonic flight. Read the reports and judge for yourself on the Telegraph's Web site.
No. 99: "Radiohead Wall of Ice." Radiohead released a free single on its Web site today called "These Are My Twisted Words." Some have speculated that the band itself leaked the song last week, while others are postulating that the text accompanying the leak hints at the release of a full-length EP called Wall of Ice. Last week, the band followed up the release of a download-only single dedicated to Harry Patch, Britian's last living World War I veteran, by telling The Believer that it had no interest in releasing full-length albums. "None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again," frontman Thom Yorke said.
Photograph of Tom DeLay courtesy of JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images.
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This week's New York Times Magazine has an epic preview of The Beatles: Rock Band, the video game in which you'll be able to pound plastic instruments to the beat of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." In the article, we learn that all four of the Beatles' "shareholders"—Paul, Ringo, Olivia Harrison, and Yoko Ono—gave their blessings to the project in 2008. But another big name was missing: Michael Jackson. Didn't M.J. also have to sign off on the project, given his estimated $500 million stake in the Beatles catalog?
No. Jackson wasn't involved in the decision to license the 45 Beatles songs in Rock Band. That negotiation was handled by Sony/ATV Publishing, the company created to manage the Beatles' catalog after Jackson sold half of his stake to Sony in 1995. While it's conceivable that Jackson could have personally nixed the licensing, he was largely a silent partner in Sony/ATV, leaving the day-to-day operations up to company executives. The fact that Jackson had already heavily mortgaged his stake in the company to pay off debts would have made any effort to kill such a lucrative deal improbable.
Jackson didn't really "own" the Beatles' catalog, as has been widely reported. What M.J. did control at the time of his death was 50 percent of the composition rights to about 250 songs written by Lennon and McCartney. While these songs add up to nearly the entire Beatles catalog, Jackson's rights don't apply to the actual recording of, say, "Revolution" as it appeared on The White Album; they covered only the composition—that particular combination of notes and lyrics that make up the song "Revolution." (The rights to the recordings are owned by EMI Records.) These rights meant M.J. got royalties if anyone wanted to perform or re-record the song, play it on the radio, or use it in a movie, advertisement or video game. (Paul McCartney recently complained about having to pay up every time he played "Hey Jude" on tour.) Harmonix, the company behind The Beatles: Rock Band, needed those composition rights in order for the songs to appear in a video game, but it also needed rights to the actual recordings—not to mention the Beatles' name and image.
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According to the Live Feed, the broadcast networks launched more than a dozen new TV shows this summer, and not a single one of them took off. Among the most spectacular failures: ABC's space drama Defying Gravity and its retro pro-am sports contest The Superstars; NBC's The Listener (a crime show), The Philanthropist (a globe-trotting do-gooder drama), Merlin (a British import), and Great American Road Trip (a reality contest); Fox's "scripted psychological procedural" Mental; and CW reality show Hitched or Ditched.
I haven't seen a single episode of any of these eight shows—and not because I'm a TV lightweight. I've been a shut-in all summer, killing my eyesight by soaking up new shows like Drop Dead Diva, Make It or Break It, and Royal Pains and returning favorites like Burn Notice, The Next Food Network Star, and The Closer.
It's one thing not to have watched the networks' new summer shows, but it does seem weird that I hadn't even heard of most of them. Well, The Superstars I knew because I was a big fan of its original incarnation; The Philanthropist was on my radar because a screener came in to the office (if I'd known that Law & Order alum Jesse L. Martin and The Wire's Michael Kenneth Williams—Omar!—were series regulars, I'd've given it a shot), and I heard about Merlin in the British press. Oh, and some sci-fi nerds I follow mentioned Defying Gravity on Twitter. Still, I had no idea of the shows' time slots or stars or selling points.
I suppose there are lots of explanations for my ignorance of network programming. Among the most obvious: Hulu and its ilk chipping away at "appointment viewing," the "they all look alike" quality of reality shows, and the rise of the mid-major cable networks. But I put the brunt of the blame on the failing print media. I read the newspaper carefully each morning, but I do so on an electronic device that doesn't even include the TV listings. I subscribe to TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly, where I take viewing suggestions from very brief capsule write-ups. I don't even look at TV Guide's listings pages—they're just recycling-in-waiting as far as I'm concerned. Between recommendations I get from magazines, blogs, and Twitter feeds, and my DVR's season pass recordings, I have more than enough shows to fill up my viewing hours without looking at an old-school "what's on tonight" grid. If the networks can't make a TV geek like me aware of their new shows, what hope is there?
Photograph of The Philanthropist star James Purefory courtesy of Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.):
No. 6: "Vj Day." Today is Victory over Japan Day, or V-J Day for short. On this day in 1945, at a little after noon Japan standard time, Emperor Hirohito announced his acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, marking the official end to World War II. President Truman cautioned that "the proclamation of V-J Day must wait upon the formal signing of the surrender terms by Japan" which happened on Sept. 2, 1945—the day Truman actually declared to be "V-J Day." The day is celebrated as a holiday only in Rhode Island—if you live there, enjoy the day off!
No. 8: "Damon Weaver." In November, then-10-year-old Damon Weaver sent a message to President Obama on YouTube asking for an interview. Yesterday, he got his wish. Weaver grilled the President on how to improve education in poor communities, if it was possible for him to improve school lunches, what to do if you get bullied, and whether or not the president could dunk. He also played his sources off each other, asking the president: "When I interviewed Vice President Joe Biden, he became my homeboy. Would you like to become my homeboy?" Watch the video and read the transcript at ABC.
No. 60 "Chris Brown Changed Man." Tracks from Chris Brown's upcoming album, Graffiti, were leaked to the Internet yesterday. The biggest news is the title of the first single: "Changed Man." In the chorus, Brown promises, "I'm a make it up to you and show the world I'm a changed man/ Cuz you mean that much to me." No word yet on whether the track is dedicated to Rihanna, but Brown's public apology on July 21 and Rihanna's recent statements protesting the court's restrictive restraining order hint at a reconciliation. A low-quality version of the single is here.
Photograph of Chris Brown courtesy of Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.
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Popular music history might best be narrated not as a succession of styles or superstars but as a tale of sonic technology—a story of sounds and the stuff that makes the sounds. In which case, Les Paul, who died today at age 94, might just be the most important rock-'n'-roller of them all. Just as the golden age of popular song was shaped by the piano, and hip-hop by sequencers and samplers, the rock era was dominated by the electric guitar. Paul's invention, in 1941, of the first solid-body electric gave rock 'n' roll (and come to think of it, blues and country and western and dozens of other genres) a defining sound and enduring icon. For generations of rockers, the Gibson guitar that bore Paul's name was indispensable—a perfect, pure-toned instrument; a talisman; and a phallus nonpareil.
Les Paul wasn't just a gearhead; he was a virtuoso. In the 1950s, Paul's limpid, lyrical, fleet-fingered guitar picking powered the dozens of hit records he made with his wife, singer and guitarist Mary Ford. (Ford's vocals were eerily multitracked in these songs—another of Paul's technological breakthroughs.) But Paul kept playing for decades after his heyday. I was lucky enough to see the maestro several times at the regular Monday-night gig that he played, into his 90s, at the Manhattan jazz club Iridium. He was old and looked it: slight, wizened, bent. But his fingers hadn't aged much. He didn't play as briskly as in the old days or attack his solos as forcefully. But the tone was as clear and radiant, particularly on ballads. If you closed your eyes, he didn't sound like a stately elderly legend. He just sounded like a great guitar player—some guy really killing it on a Gibson Les Paul.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 8 a.m.)
No. 1: "facebook lite." Wait, Facebook is actually taking features away!? After years of adding tabs, apps, and polls, Facebook has started beta testing a new "lite" version that trades Mob Wars and Superwalls for a stripped-down, quick-loading interface. Some are speculating that Facebook is making a move on Twitter; Techcrunch insists Facebook Lite is meant mainly to make the site faster for users without a broadband Internet connection. Currently, the beta test is only available to a small number of users in India.
No. 8: "perseid meteor shower." The sky is falling, and it should be spectacular. Tonight is the peak of the annual Perseid meteor showers, when 60 to 80 visible meteors per hour will shoot out of the Perseus constellation (for those able to get away from bright city lights, at least). According to NASA, the best time to catch the showers will be from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m., when glare from the moon is low. Look to the Northeast.
No. 64: "Wallace Souza." Imagine if Unsolved Mysteries host Robert Stack had gone around kidnapping young women and shining weird lights in people's eyes from southwestern mountaintops. This is essentially the charge against Brazilian TV host and legislator Wallace Souza, who has been accused of commissioning at least five murders in order to cover them on his popular true crime show."To say that a program that has had a huge audience for so many years had to resort to killing people to increase this audience is absolutely absurd," Souza told the AP.
Photo of meteor shower courtesy of Flickr user Retro Traveler.
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LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger—co-authors of the LeBron-coming-of-age story Shooting Stars—are two names you'd never expect to see separated by an ampersand. Flip the soon-to-be-released book over and the bedfellows get even stranger. The blurbers for Shooting Stars, in order of appearance: Jay-Z ("When I first saw LeBron James play as a professional, it was his selflessness that dazzled me the most"), Bob Costas, John Grisham, Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, Warren Buffett ("Reading about LeBron James's transition from boyhood to manhood was a thrill for me"), The Soloist author Steve Lopez, and In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle writer Madeleine Blais.
This group of six rappers, sportscasters, writers, coaches, and tycoons will clearly never be in the same room together. What's yet to be determined, however, is whether there's a blurbing contingent that has even less of a chance of having a poker night or writing one another birthday cards. If you know of a book with a less likely collection of blurbers, please send your submission to slatebrowbeat@gmail.com by 6 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Aug. 12.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 10: "world's smallest deer." The world's smallest deer is just one of 353 new species discovered in the Eastern Himalayas in the past decade, according to a new report by the World Wildlife Fund. The adult "leaf deer" measures just 20 inches tall, weighs 25 pounds, and was discovered in 1999 by American researchers. The staggering biological diversity of the Eastern Himalayas, estimated to host 10,000 plant species, is due to its location at the confluence of two continental plates. Naturally, the region is being threatened by logging and agriculture.
No. 12: "red dawn." A remake of the '80s action flick Red Dawn is slated to pit a team of American high schoolers called the Wolverines against Russian and Chinese invaders when it's released in 2010. Sparking a Google trend today is news that Tom Cruise's 14 year-old adopted son, Connor, has been cast in the film. Last year, Connor made his big-screen debut in the Will Smith film Seven Pounds.
No. 36: "angelina breastfeeding statue." Not too much to say about this Daniel Edwards sculpture of a silver, nude Angelina Jolie breast-feeding one black baby and one white baby. Happy Monday.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 15: "xbox live down" and No. 57: "cyxymu." Gamers are seeking out Google to find out why they couldn't get their Xbox Live fix yesterday. The social media blog Mashable reported that the site was down for an hour and lamented that "gaming was once again a solitary experience." It's likely the glitch was part of a larger Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that also affected the social networking sites Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal. Russian patriots attempting to silence Cyxymu—a Georgian blogger who was critical of last year's war between Russia and Georgia—were behind the attack, according to the Guardian.
No. 32: "Alison Byrne Fields." John Hughes fan Alison Byrne Fields revealed on her blog yesterday that the recently deceased famous director was her pen pal for two years while she was in high school. He consoled her when her English teacher gave her bad grades, telling her to write to "please herself" and confessed that he wrote to her more than any living member of his family. In one letter, he admitted: "Truly, hope all is well with you and high school isn't as painful as I portray it."
No. 81: "Chelsea Clinton." What's it gonna be, Chelsea, yes or no? On Thursday, when a Kenyan man offered 40 goats and 20 cows for the former first daughter's hand in marriage, Hillary didn't reply with a firm "no." "My daughter is her own person, very independent, so I will convey this very kind offer," she told Fareed Zakaria of CNN. This comes after the Clintons denied rumors in early May that Chelsea would marry boyfriend Marc Mezvinsky in the town of Chilmark, Mass., on Martha's Vineyard this summer. (Yes, the same town that the Obamas will retire to at the end of August.)
Photograph of Chelsea Clinton courtesy of Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images.
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TMZ is reporting that John Hughes, director of The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off among many classic teen movies, has died at 59 of an apparent heart attack. In 2006, Michael Weiss asked in Slate whether the famously reclusive Hughes was a closet Republican. "Ferris Bueller," Weiss argues, "mouths his creator's worldview early in the famous day off: Ism's, in my opinion, are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself."
For those in need of a quick Hughes nostalgia fix, enjoy this montage from The Breakfast Club set to Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me."
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Farewell to Budd Schulberg, dead yesterday at 95, a writer famed for charting Hollywood underhandedness and Hoboken corruption, not quite famed enough for his script for Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957). In his film debut, Andy Griffith played Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes, a garrulous Arkansas hick who becomes a star of radio and television by laying on the down-home charm. The Mayberry-type charisma curdles once he goes on up to New York City and becomes a demagogue, something of a hybrid of Will Rogers, Glenn Beck, and Sweet Smell of Success' J.J. Hunsecker. Is it possible for a movie to be selected for the National Film Registry and still be underrated? Everyone who owns a TV set needs to know that A Face in the Crowd is unsurpassed as the great American story about television. I haven't found any obits of or tributes to Schulberg that make mention of Vitajex, a snake-oil stimulant that sponsors Rhodes' show and that he cravenly endorses as a proto-Viagra. The rocking set piece below—a delirious montage of special messages from the fictional sponsor—stands alone as a potent riff on advertising and desire.
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If any musician has had the opportunity to hone his onstage banter to a razored gleam, it's Paul McCartney—he of the iconic, '60s-era press conference rapport (goofy and absurd with the Beatles where Dylan was aloof and eviscerating); he of the decades of interviews; he of the 40 years of looking out at crowds and filling the silence between songs with words.
And so it was a surprise, during the first hour of his set last night at Boston's Fenway Park, to find the interstitials so ... Unfocused? Rambling? Noncommittal? He told a long story about Jimi Hendrix that went nowhere. He told a story about screaming teen fans. "By the way," he noted, pointing at video screens towering behind him, "those big images back there are from the new Beatles Rock Band thing," punctuating this with a twiddle of the thumbs, as though that's a gesture anyone makes when they're playing Rock Band.
There was a sense of distraction or doddering, and it carried over to the first handful of songs, augmented by a blow-dried, Sunset Strip-looking backup band, which tried to overcompensate with volume and wanky guitar fireworks for what it couldn't deliver in genuine thrill. (The Boston police on hand could have done a great public service by ordering them to step away from "Day In The Life," lest they smother it.) Fenway is home to the Green Monster, but for a while it seemed as though this night was brought to us by that other green monster, the one that contractually obligates you, for instance, to hit the road in support of a new high-ticket video game bearing your likeness.
Then McCartney broke out a ukelele for "Something" and everything started to change. As Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters famously proved in The Jerk, the emotive properties of that midget guitar shouldn't be underestimated. In McCartney's hands, the performance was dinky, tender, surprising, playful: the first great point of the night, the one where McCartney seemed to come off autopilot (even if he does the same bit at the same moment on every night of this tour).
In between more blustery, not ineffective runs through beefed-up beefy hits like "Back in the USSR," "Get Back," and "Helter Skelter," there were other moments of weird intimacy: a solo acoustic rendition of the exquisitely sweet "Blackbird," prefaced by a few revelatory (to me, at least) words about the song's roots in the civil rights era: "I wrote the song imagining a young black girl and the troubles she went through." It was well-meaning, a bit cringe-worthy, and might have torn the wings off a lesser song.
It was true what they say on the Internet. He does look like an aging lesbian. But when things took off, he played with the winningness and verve of a lesbian at least half his age.
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When Paula Abdul typed the tweet heard around the world, we asked Slate's resident Idol-ologist, Kathy Meizel, to send us her thoughts:
My jaw, and my stomach, dropped when I read about Paula Abdul's departure from American Idol. I'm much more upset over it than I would have imagined. (I've just had to go back and change all the verbs here to past tense, because the first time I couldn't bear to think it was really over.)
I've been a judge for several college talent competitions. All of them were styled after Idol, and every time I was asked to "be Paula." I don't know if it's because I'm a nurturer, or because I sing about as well as she does, or because my students think I'm nuttier than a chipmunk's outhouse, but having inhabited her persona even briefly, I'd like to think I understand something about her decision to leave American Idol: It is hard work to do what she did, and maybe she does deserve an obscene amount of money instead of just an outlandish amount.
Whether swiveling in her chair to chastise Simon, vaulting to her feet and applauding in that peculiar grown-up-cheerleader way she had, or dancing like there's no tomorrow to promote her own single, Paula was the only really kinetic presence at the judges' table. And she was emotionally present, when all her colleagues had to offer was eye-rolling and casual "cooliosis." She quivered and stammered with love for the finalists (it was almost definitely love and not the painkillers) and cried more than eight seasons' worth of rejected contestants. Don't go impugning her intelligence, either—a video clip in the Season 8 finale pointed out her extensive vocabulary, her "musicality" and "balladeer" far more varied than Randy's "dawg's" and Simon's "ghastlys."
But most importantly, Paula was America's conscience. When the boys were snickering behind their notepads and snidely questioning the gender identities of contestants in Dallas, they acted out our most juvenile instincts, but Paula's kindness reminded us that we are supposed to react to cruelty with outrage. (Also, it's Paula's compassion that makes me feel bad for that comment about painkillers. And I am a better person for the shame.) It's an effort to be the conscience, and a thankless job. Paula was also forever our girl in the midst of a good old boys' club. If she's leaving the show because producers would not pay her a salary comparable to her male co-stars', then good on her for gently saying "I'm sorry, it's a no" to the glass ceiling of talent show judging.
I want to be bitter that she's left us and resentful that she did it with a tweet. Don't fans of the show that she "helped from day1 become an international phenomenon" deserve a breakup in more than 137 characters? An extra emoticon, even? But in the end, when it comes time for Kreischer Hall Idol this spring, I'll still want to be Paula. And when next season is lost to Kara DioGuardi's coolly professional "sweeties" and melisma fights in bikinis, I'll be thinking of her. I believe with every fiber of my being, Paula ... you're a star, and this is not the end of the road for you. Just remember that the moth who finds the cornflake always finds the melon.
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Meryl Streep has two irresistible performances running side-by-side this summer: her role as Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia and her promotional tour on behalf of same. On TV, on the radio, on food blogs, you can’t escape Meryl these days, and here’s the strange part: You don’t really want to. Streep’s air of casual enthusiasm on the talk-show circuit is yet another example of her ability to turn show-business clichés on their heads—when it comes to Meryl, 60 is sexier than 30, comedy is more moving than tragedy, and spending a month answering the same questions in hotel rooms from an endless succession of journalists is an occasion for sparkling conversation. For God’s sake, the woman managed to give a substantive and thoughtful interview to Access Hollywood, despite the canned questions. (Note to unseen interviewer: When sitting down with a subject, remember to look up from the script long enough to listen to what they’re saying.)
Perhaps my favorite Streep appearance so far was her spot on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien last week. In a low-cut red dress and black spike heels, Streep flirts poor Conan into a jelly, describing how she stuffed her bra with paper towels to convince Sydney Pollack to cast her in Out of Africa. After a commercial break, she whips out a concertina, which she received as a birthday gift from a friend last week (let me repeat, for emphasis—she just turned 60!) and demonstrates her first composition on the instrument, entitled “Siren Song.” “You know the Greek myth about the Sirens who would lure men onto the rocks?” she asks Conan by way of setup. Oh, yes, Meryl. We most certainly do.
Photograph of Meryl Streep courtesy of Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 18: "paula abdul american idol." Paula Abdul's improv prose-poetry will no longer grace America's most-watched TV show. After contract negotiations fell apart, Abdul broke the news over Twitter last night: "With sadness in my heart, I've decided not to return to #IDOL. I'll miss nurturing all the new talent, but most of all being a part of a show that I helped from day1become an international phenomenon." The New York Post has a slide-show retrospective of Abdul's Idol career.
No. 22: "psycho donuts." The media is going "crazy" with "insane"-ly bad puns about Psycho Donuts, a mental illness-themed pastry shop in Campbell, Calif., with doughnut names taken right out of the DSM-IV. ("The Bipolar" looks pretty tasty.) Shortly after the shop opened, the National Alliance on Mental Health and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia urged Psycho Donuts to change its name, and co-owner Kipp Berdiansky debated a mental-health advocate on local television.
No. 86: "sturgeon moon." According to The Farmer's Almanac, tonight's full moon is also known as the "Full Sturgeon Moon" because Native Americans used to catch the huge Great Lakes-dwelling fish most easily during August. Let's be thankful that it's not March, when lovers stroll arm-in-arm through the park under a "Full Worm Moon."
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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is a noxious green substance capable of dissolving the Eiffel Tower. Oh, no, sorry—it’s a movie about a noxious green substance capable of destroying the Eiffel Tower. Such mixups are understandable, given that, like most other critics in the United States, I won’t get the chance to see G.I. Joe before it opens. Paramount is taking the unusual step of shielding its film from all advance press coverage, a PR strategy usually reserved for movies that are both lousy and not eagerly anticipated by the public. (I Know Who Killed Me, the 2007 bomb starring Lindsay Lohan as a serial killer’s victim, is a classic example of a movie given the no-advance-screening treatment.) Since G.I. Tract—I mean Joe, sorry, haven’t seen the movie—isn’t a cheapo exploitation flick but one of Paramount’s summer tent-pole releases, it’s odd that the studio has done everything it can to block access to the movie, going to great lengths to make sure it’s seen only by focus groups, military personnel (the movie premiered Monday night at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland), and a few fanboy-friendly blogs like Ain’t It Cool News.
However relieved I might personally be to not have to sit through G.I. Joke, this news ain’t particularly cool for the future of film reviewing. When major releases start to get waved past press scrutiny and rammed directly down audiences' throats with hugely expensive marketing campaigns, we’re that much closer to a world in which the only voices talking about movies come from the people who stand to make money off them. As Nathan Rabin puts it in the Onion’s A.V. Club blog, “Who needs a cultural conversation about a film’s merits when you can have a massive one-sided publicity blitz?” The G.I. Joe action figures of old were brave and stalwart men (and one soon-discontinued and now highly collectible woman), ready to battle not only the Cobra Command but the leotard-clad Intruders with their fearsome “Crusher Grip.” Hiding from a few puny-armed, laptop-wielding critics is hardly the G.I. Joe way.
Photograph of G.I. Joe action figures courtesey of Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.):
No. 5: "Trina Thompson." A 27-year-old Monroe College graduate is suing her alma mater for $70,000 because she can't find a job. "They have not tried hard enough to help me," Thompson said of the Bronx-based college, where she majored in Information Technology. If Thompson wins her lawsuit, New York colleges could be inundated by unemployed comp lit majors looking to recoup their tuition: The city's jobless rate jumped to 9.5 percent last month.
No. 42: "Sudan Trouser woman." Meanwhile, in Sudan, women are being arrested for wearing pants. Lubna Hussein is a former U.N. worker who was picked up at a restaurant in a raid by morality police and sentenced to 40 lashes for wearing "indecent" trousers. Hussein is appealing the verdict in order to draw attention to women's rights issues in Sudan.
No. 94: "1916 shark attacks." It's shark week. The Discovery Channel's annual aquatic bloodbath kicked off yesterday with a two-hour dramatization of a spate of 1916 shark attacks on the Jersey Shore that eventually inspired Peter Benchley's Jaws. Mike Hale in the New York Times explains the misleading-but-enthralling "shell game" Discovery plays each year with Shark Week: "exploiting the queasy fear that sharks inspire while noting in passing how rarely they attack."