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A very happy Valentines Day to you and yours. To keep tradition going for its sixth year here at GitM -- '05, '06, '07, '08, '09 -- time for the yearly musical valentines from yours truly.

First off, in keeping with the usual once-a-year romantic status-update, you'll be happy to know that this 2010 post actually comes with 44% less whining than usual. (Yay, and there was much rejoicing.) I am still single on this end, as per the norm, which means my trusty sheltie sidekick is once again holding down the official valentine spot. (Aw, he got me Bioshock 2. How did he know I wanted it?) But, having at last escaped the egregious emotional, financial, and general personal sandtrap that is late-term gradual school, it's safe to say I'm in a much happier place these days. And, since returning to DC, a town that's been swell to me so far, I've at least been taking a few swings at the plate lately. So, no wallowing this V-day. I'm in a pretty good place, all in all, and hope springs eternal. In any event, on to the music:

But can she kite the adds? First off, as always, I offer some quality cheese: Singlehandedly raising unrealistic expectations for gamergrrls the world (of Warcraft) over, The Guild's fetching Felicia Day scored a massive (multiplayer) online hit last summer with the supremely catchy "Do You Wanna Date (My Avatar)?" In some ways a peppy, poppy update to Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" (which led off the order in '06) this was one of two songs I heard in the past year that I knew -- immediately -- would make it into this post.

Now, having spent more than my fair share of time MMO'ing over the past few years -- everybody say hi to Jacklowry -- it's safe to say that the bubbly, infectious enthusiasm that drives this track isn't really a huge part of games like Warcraft. (In fact, everyone usually seems vaguely depressed -- There's a reason why some of the biggest facets of WoW-life are "grinding" levels and "farming" mats. If you take it seriously, it sorta becomes a day job.) But, all that being said, Day and The Guild crew know their WoW -- how 'bout a little tank-and-spank? -- and they've delivered a ditty that works as both a fun and knowing riff on the MMO life and a silky, effervescent pop song all on its own. Great job, y'all...Lvl 80 rogue lf healbot pst?

Don't it make you sad about it? This song probably needs no introduction -- most everybody knows it, and I'm sure a lot of people are totally sick of the durned thing. Still, since the last song, however cheesy, is already a gamer standard and perhaps not nearly as embarrassing a guilty pleasure as I've tended to offer in years past, I give you JT's "Cry Me a River."

It's easy to playa-hate Justin Timberlake, and to be honest, I think I can only name three or four songs of his anyway. Still, I'd argue this well-crafted track and "SexyBack" put JT as the truly deserving 21st century pop heir to, say, Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson. He's got the pipes, he's got the beats, he's got the production values, the dance moves, and the marketing savvy, and to my mind "Cry Me a River" just holds it own as a classically catchy pop ditty. And when the scorned lasses of this world roll out Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" as their peppy post-break-up standard on the dance floor, I in turn will call forth this track, Pokemon-style. Game on.

While I threw up some Dylan in both '06 and '07, I try not to repeat artists just yet for these V-Day posts. Still, while the sublime "I'm Your Man" -- which quite possibly can't be topped as a V-Day song -- was part of the 2007 mix, I'm going with Leonard Cohen's "That's No Way to Say Goodbye" this year from Live in London. Not only because it is beautiful, but because, frankly, I played the hell out of this record over the past year.

When he's at his best, as he is throughout Live in London, Cohen' sheer rawness -- his naked, direct emotion -- cuts like a knife. He's not one to dabble in misdirection, or to try to obscure his feelings with extended metaphors. He just goes right to the heart of it, every time.

With that in mind, I much prefer this version of "That's No Way to Say Goodbye" to the original 1967 version. At times, the young Cohen sounds too callow to me. It took years, even decades, for his voice to catch up to the power of his poetry. And the slight change in lyrics here -- Now it's "I know when to say goodbye" -- helps push this ballad from petulance to poignance. It's one of many transcendant moments on this superlative album.

And, really, who doesn't love sleep? As a love-song sorbet of sorts, here's The Dandy Warhols' "Sleep." Like Brian Eno's "By this River" and Hot Chip's "Crap Kraft Dinner" (written up in '09), this is one of those songs I find endlessly soothing. It could just play on and on like this for twenty minutes and I'd be blissfully content...perhaps eventually nodding off, fading away into the wilderness of dream...

As I said back when hyping Third in 2008, Portishead's Dummy was one of those ubiquitous albums for a few years there in the mid-nineties, with the most memorable track therein possibly being "the second single, "Glory Box." I include the late guitarist John Martyn's cover of "Glory Box" here not because it's an improvement on the original -- they're both amazing -- but because it captures so well that song's hothouse sultriness, while managing to sound quite different in the end (and switching the gender dynamic.)

Also of note on this subject: Portishead's "Scorn," the ice-cold B-side version of this same song. I love how it completely inverts the sensation of the original tune, just by switching the beats involved. Now, the whole song plays out atop that sensual, brooding oil-tanker rhythm only heard when everything goes wobbly in the original version. And, conversely, only in the climax of this mix are the original lyrical strings heard, like a moment of clear-thinking grace before the hammers descend anew. (The Youtube of "Scorn" below cuts out the end, unfortunately, although you can hear the whole mix here.)

You and me, babe, how 'bout it? Now, if forced, with a gun to my head, to pick the Dire Straits' absolute finest hour, I'd have to go with "Sultans of Swing", that testament to resolute keep-on-keepin'-on long after the crowd's gone home and all the midnight oil is burned. Still, their brief retelling of "Romeo & Juliet" is an unabashedly lovely song indeed. (Full disclosure: This was, in fact, the favorite tune of one of my former ex's, a long, long time ago. But, no plagiarism here. I ended up earning this streetlight serenade's stripes myself...the hard way. Anyway, let's move on.)

There are a lot of covers of "Romeo & Juliet" floating around -- Indigo Girls, The Killers, Edwin McCain -- but none of 'em really do the simple beauty of this song justice. Also, the original Dire Straits video is also online, but frankly it's so bad and ridiculously Eighties-ish that it detracts from the timelessness of the tune. No wonder they later plunked down big dollars for "Money for Nothing"...

As I've said 'round here many times, I'm a big Depeche Mode fan from way back. (Their "Here is the House" went up here in '06.) And I think they became a better, darker, richer band in 1982 with Vince Clarke's departure after Speak & Spell, when Martin Gore took over the songwriting full-time.

Still, with all due respect to melancholy Marty, Vince Clarke always had a way with a happy three-chord love song that the minor-key-obsessed DM never ever really got back to. Case in point: Yaz's "Only You" (as well as almost all of Erasure's many hits over the years.) There are no regrets or guilt or religious allusions or teenage scared-stiff-of-sex angst or black cars driving around in the distance. It's just a simple, very pretty ode to that one special person.

There are a lot of very good tracks on the better of Yaz's two albums, Upstairs at Eric -- "Don't Go," "Situation," and "Winter Kills," for example. Still, I'd put "Only You" as the pick of the litter: It's the perfect blend of Vince Clarke synth-pop and Alison Moyet soul.

The first time you get dumped, it feels like a tragedy. It just plain sucks. The second time, it...well, actually it's even worse. And by the third or fourth time, you start to really wonder what's wrong with you. But, after enough iterations of the dismal cycle, as the Conchords' "Carol Brown" points out, it does become farce. And a really funny one, for that matter.

Along with Felicia Day at the top, this is the other song I knew I was going to post here this year as soon as I heard it. The Flight of the Conchords' second season included a lot of really hilarious tunes: "Hurt Feelings" (and its reprise), "Too Many Dicks on the Dance Floor," "Fashion is Danger." But "Carol Brown" is, imho, their magnum opus. It's funny on its own terms (as well as a great riposte to Paul Simon's smarmy "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.") But, more importantly, it's just a funky-sweet song with truthiness to spare. (The Michel Gondry video is great too.)

I'm sure most of y'all out there know the old Annie Hall joke: "This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken.' And, uh, the doctor says, 'Well, why don't you turn him in?' The guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and...but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us...need the eggs."

That's the gag that "Carol Brown" gets so well. The whole song is a litany of ugly dumpings for most of its run. But every time that peal chimes (at 1:15) and the angelic chorus kicks in for the first time ("He doesn't cook or clean..."), you can hear exactly why Jemaine -- and so many others of us, for that matter -- keep leading chin first regardless. Carol Brown took a bus out of town...but I'm hoping the next gal sticks around.

That'll do for '10, I think. Have a safe and happy Valentines Day, everybody. I'll see y'all on the flip side. And, until next year...

"'It's fascinating for me that at this stage in my life, people are beginning to look upon me as a metal singer,' Lee said. 'When this comes out as a complete album, it's going to be sensational.'" At the ripe young age of 87, Christopher Lee promotes his new metal album, By the Sword and the Cross, a.k.a. the story of Charlemagne. "'It's pretty unexpected,' Lee admitted." Uh, yeah, you could say that.

"We've noticed the less we say about the future of the show, the more people want to talk about it, so in an effort to reverse this trend we are today announcing that we won't be returning for a 3rd season. We're very proud of the two seasons we made and we like the way the show ended." Bret? Jemaine? Murray? Alas, nobody's present: The Kiwi powers-that-be have pulled the plug on a Flight of the Conchords Season 3 (although they will remain, in real, non-HBO life, the bane of the novelty music paparazzi.) Ah well, it was a good run.

"Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks, said on Monday, 'Ken was a great guy. His personality really brought "Remote Control" to life, as well as a new style of programming for MTV. We were really flying by the seat of of our pants then, and Ken was the reason it worked.'" R.I.P. Ken Ober, 1957-2009. Well, that's surprising -- and depressing -- news.

"Guantanamo may be Dick Cheney's idea of America, but it's not mine,' Morello said in a statement announcing the effort. 'The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me.'" A group of musicians including Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, R.E.M., Billy Bragg, Pearl Jam, the Roots, Rosanne Cash, and David Byrne demand that Gitmo close, and that their music stop being used for torture. "If there are any legal options that can be realistically taken they will be aggressively pursued," Reznor promised."

Hey all. As we approach the decade mark next month, the readership around here at GitM continues to dwindle, which is primarily my fault for not updating as much as I'd like. Nonetheless, if and when it gets quiet 'round here, I encourage you to also check out my Twitter feed, which is easier to update in the midst of more frantic weeks like last one. (Memo to myself: Columbus Day, and three-day-weekends in general, will mean a lot of speechifyin' in Congress' home districts.)

Yeah, I was skeptical about Twitter earlier in the year, but I'm definitely coming around. Within an hour of news of President Obama's Nobel prize win, for example, (which I'm neither here nor there about -- it seems goofy, yeah, but I was already down on Nobel anyway), there were dozens of wry and amusing quips going around the twitterverse. My favorite two were variations on "Obama, I'mma let you finish but Bono has been working his ass off for this!" and "Uh...did the Nobel committee just miss the fact that Obama bombed the f**king moon?!"

Another good example: the Baucus committee tanking the public option in late September brought on a similar flurry of bon mots: "Senators should be required to make the little cash register 'ka-ching!" noise when they vote." "Well the insurance Industry is looking forward to its Baucanalian Orgy." "75% of Americans support #publicoption, but only 35% of the Senate Finance Cmittee support it." "Health care industry must pay capital gains on Senate Finance Committee members this year as investment is cashed out." Etc., etc.

Its immediate posting benefits aside, Twitter has definitely grown on me as a fertile hothouse environment for exactly this sort of choice, top-shelf snark.

"I thought of Jim not as my dopplegänger, exactly -- that would have been ridiculous. But we were the same age, came from similar backgrounds (his old man was a saloon keeper; mine, a cop), and had something of the same spoiled altar boy's worldview, and we both worshipped at the dual shrines of the Roundball and the Word."

In Slate, editor Gerald Howard remembers the late Jim Carroll, best known as author of The Basketball Diaries and the album Catholic Boy. "Tall, slim, athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is."

"Songs performed by Dylan on this new album include, 'Here Comes Santa Claus,' 'Winter Wonderland,' 'Little Drummer Boy' and 'Must Be Santa." Put away the Mannheim Steamroller -- In order to help Feeding America, the freewheelin' Bob Dylan will release a holiday album, Christmas in the Heart, October 13. "It's a tragedy that more than 35 million people in this country alone -- 12 million of those children - often go to bed hungry and wake up each morning unsure of where their next meal is coming from. I...hope that our efforts can bring some food security to people in need during this holiday season."

Vera, Vera, what has become of you? Does anybody else in here feel the way I do? Well, Rog', apparently they do. (And, to be she fair, she did say we'd meet again.)

"Motorists who follow Dylan's directions, however, may take some time to reach their destination. "I think it would be good if you are looking for directions and you heard my voice saying something like, 'Left at the next street.... No, right... You know what? Just go straight.' He added: 'I probably shouldn't do it because whichever way I go, I always end up at one place - Lonely Avenue.'" By way of a friend, Bob Dylan plans to voice a satellite navigation system. Yes, please.

"'For 10 years, I was a laugh,' he told CNN in an interview. '[But I] kept pounding at them and pounding at them saying hey, here's where it's at. Here's where tomorrow, this is it. You can drown out anybody with it. And you can make all these different sounds that you can't do with a regular guitar.'" Lester William Polfuss, a.k.a. Les Paul, 1915-2009. "In 1948, after being involved in a severe car accident, he asked the doctor to set his arm permanently in a guitar-playing position."

"Although this is an extremely difficult time for her family and friends, we take comfort in the beautiful times that we shared with Farrah over the years and the knowledge that her life brought joy to so many people around the world." Farrah Fawcett, 1947-2009.

Also leaving us of late, Ed McMahon, 1923-2009. "'Quit? Oh, I'll never quit,' he told Entertainment Weekly in 2005. 'This is what I do. If I'm in a wheelchair, I can still do radio. I tell everyone that there is only one way that I'm going to go. I'll be on TV, we'll be going to a commercial break, and I'll look dead into the camera and say, "They'll be back. I won't." And that will be it.'"

Update: "'Michael Jackson made culture accept a person of color,' the Rev. Al Sharpton said. 'To say an "icon" would only give these young people in Harlem a fraction of what he was. He was a historic figure that people will measure music and the industry by.'" Michael Jackson, 1958-2009.

"But to retire the very concept of 'selling out'? To dismiss the notion that an artist's reputation could ever be sullied by wanton greed? Nuh-uh. I can't allow it...We as a culture must reserve our right to shower disdain on the Black Eyed Peas." Old friend Seth Stevenson reads the riot act to will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas for shilling for Target...and, apparently, anyone else who comes down the pike. "Observe how eagerly -- how incredibly naturally -- the Peas embrace the role of discount store shill. Stop for a moment and ponder the fact that will.i.am has a giant Target logo on his hat. A line must be drawn. I draw it here."

"It's funny. Johnny Marr has a place there, and we are kind of friends. I walked into this ice cream shop, and the guy goes, 'Jesus, what a weird day.' He goes, 'Johnny Marr walked in here like 20 minutes ago, and now you. Is this like indie guitar 80s day or something?'" While cutting a few demos in the Portland area, R.E.M.'s Peter Buck discusses the band's songwriting process, and his aspirations for the next record. "There are some really pretty acoustic things, some really total noisy rock, and some kind of poppy stuff. It runs the gamut. Ideally, if it were me making all the decisions, I'd say the record would be a lot broader than the last one. But still, I want to do it really quickly and immediately and not do a huge amount of overdubs."

"Ask Muhammad All why he fights one more fight. Go ask Marlon Brando why he makes one more movie. Ask Mick Jagger why he goes on the road. See what kind of answers you come up with. Is it so surprising I'm on the road? What else would I be doing in this life -- meditating on the mountain? Whatever someone finds fulfilling, whatever his or her purpose is -- that's all it is." As a companion to Douglas Brinkley's recent cover story on "Bob Dylan's America", Rolling Stone publishes excerpts from their various interviews with Dylan over the years. (I haven't read the Brinkley article -- it's not online -- but that "United States of Bob" conceit is one Greil Marcus already pretty thoroughly explored in The Old, Weird America (nee Invisible Republic) -- listen to "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" for a good intro on the subject, or consider how much antebellum history Dylan was able to squeeze into three verses in "As I Went Out One Morning.")

In other Bob news, and in keeping with the trickster on the borderlands" persona Dylan adopts for much of the zydeco-flavored Together Through Life, there's a thin line between love and hate in the surprisingly violent new video for "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," exclusively over on IFC. "Subterranean Homesick Blues," it isn't. At best, you can consider it in keeping with a traditional murder-ballad-type ditty like "Delia's Gone," I guess. But those who believe Dylan has serious problems with women are going to find plenty of ammunition here. (And that's before they even get to "My Wife's Home Town.")

Today is Dylan Day, but before Together Through Life moves to first spot in the iPod rotation, some thoughts on Depeche Mode's latest, Sounds of the Universe, released last Tuesday. (I know it's always been fashionable to bag on DM here in the States, Southern California excepted, but I'm an old-school Mode guy from way back...as people who knew me in my youth -- and the many black ensembles in my high-school wardrobe -- will attest.)

To get the bad news out of the way first, the obscenely catchy first single, "Wrong," is far and away the high point of the album. I warmed slow to this ditty at first, but, even tho' it unfolds at a more relaxed tempo than I might prefer, it's undeniably infectious. With Dave Gahan in full street-preacher mode and Marty Gore carrying the song home in the final stanzas, "Wrong," like "Precious" on Playing the Angel and "It's No Good" on Ultra, can stand proudly with the best singles of the halcyon days, and that's no small thing.

That being said, there are a lot of filler tracks on Sounds of the Universe, and it's a hard album to recommend to anyone but tried-and-true DM fans (who don't need the recommendation anyway -- they all bought multiple versions of it, likely along with tour tix and a DM t-shirt, last Tuesday.) Along with producer Ben Hillier, who's good with the bells and whistles, I guess, but never really manages to make the DM sound "fill the room" as it did in the Daniel Miller/Flood days -- SotU is often far too tinny), the band seem to be exploring ways to resurrect and update their old synth-sound without over-forcing the issue. The results are mixed.

(Digression: For a good example of "over-forcing the issue," imho, listen to U2's recent No Line on the Horizon, which to me sounds like a bunch of quintessential-to-the-point-of-feeling-contrived U2 hooks interpersed amid long sessions of random studio noodling. No songs really coalesce therein -- it sounds like someone fiddling with the dial on a radio that only plays U2. And No Line is all glommed together with that uber-Lanois production sound. I like Daniel Lanois, he's done some landmark albums -- Achtung Baby, Us, Time Out of Mind -- and I've even bought some of his solo stuff over the years. ("Sleeping in the Devil's Bed" is a mixtape standby.) But it all does kinda sound the same after awhile.)

The question arises on SotU: What is DM's old sound? "Fragile Tension," like "Lillian" on the previous album, goes whole-hog with the early-synth pulse, recalling the very early days of the band -- Speak & Spell, A Broken Frame, etc. Alas, it doesn't really work. (As a vocalist, Gahan does some things really well -- melisma isn't one of them.) "Spacewalker" is another atmospheric instrumental a la "The Great Outdoors!", "St. Jarna," or "Agent Orange," the type of moody keyboard piece that conjures up visions of Eurothrillers like George Sluizer's The Vanishing (or, more on topic, Anton Corbijn's Strange.) "In Chains," on the other hand, is more in the later-period gospel-grunge mode of "Clean," "Higher Love," or "Condemnation" (with a touch of the bang-the-metal interlude of "Stripped") -- it's perfectly acceptable, I guess, but it doesn't really bring much new to the table.

Those tracks aside, main songwriter Martin Gore spends too many songs in the treacly New Age, post-rehab platitude rut that characterizes at least a few tracks on every album since 1993's Songs of Faith and Devotion. (See "Freestate" or "I am You," for example.) The middle of SotU in particular -- "Fragile Tension," "Little Soul," "In Sympathy," the Beatlesque by way of Tears for Fears second single "Peace" -- all run together in this fashion.

Speaking of sounding-like-TfF, my second favorite song on the album is probably "Perfect," which argues amusingly that even when you consider the Anathem-like philosophical ramifications of string theory, the DM multiverse is still on the bleak side. ("In a parallel universe that's happening right now, things between us must be worse, but it's hard to see just how.") That being said, with its mid-80's key changes and all, "Perfect" sounds eerily like a long-lost Howard Jones number.

In its favor, SotU is the first DM album where the Gahan-penned contributions intermix with the Gore fare enough to be virtually indistinguishable. Indeed, while two of the Gahan songs -- "Come Back" and "Miles Away/The Truth Is" -- are a little over-produced (The stripped down version of "Come Back" which leaked a few months ago attests to this), it's the lead singer, rather than Gore, who seems to have a better handle on "that classic DM sound." In effect, while Gore sometimes seems a bit lost in his gospel influences lately, Gahan -- as one review I read somewhere well put it -- has improved to the point of becoming a pretty good Depeche Mode tribute band.

Now even I, a DM fan of long standing, am prone to bag on how much of the classic Mode oeuvre revolves around sex, sin, obsession, religion, and redemption. (My love is a black car, and you crucify me on the steering wheel because I asked you to, etc. etc.) Still, the best moments on Sounds of the Universe are when they stop reaching for some new synthetic harmony and, as with "Wrong", just let that old freak flag fly. Put another way, it's when DM stops trying to fuse their early synth and later gospel periods into a new, cohesive sound and goes right for the crunchy, tongue-in-cheek "Master and Servant"-to-"Personal Jesus"-style crowd-stompers that the album really works best.

Gahan's "Hole to Feed," for example, is a jaunty ditty about what one might call the Benjamin Braddock problem -- once you've finally managed to land the one true love you've been writhing and pining for...well, then what? ("We are here, we can love, we share something. I'm sure that you mean the world to me. When you get what you need, there's no way of knowing what you have is another hole to feed.") As for "hole to feed," I'll let you figure that one out. But, like any number of vaguely raunchy DM songs (or like Gary Oldman endlessly stuffing the hole in his backyard with cash in Romeo is Bleeding), the metaphor here isn't very oblique.

Similarly, with its creepy-filthy blips and trademark Gahan croon, "Corrupt," the album closer, is another electroblues number that's right in DM's usual wheelhouse ("I could corrupt you, it would be easy. Watching you suffer, Girl, it would please me.") And it suggests the sexy, mordant fun the band could be having if they stop trying to grope toward some new respectable Zen plateau and just unabashedly do what they do best.

Along those lines, I'd argue that some of the best songs of the SotU sessions were inexplicably left off the album (but are included in the deluxe version, which also offers 14 very worthwhile demos of earlier songs such as "Walking in My Shoes" and "Little 15". Think DM standards done with Magnetic Fields simplicity.) That may be because they just feel looser and less forced than many of the album cuts. A sinister electronic sibling to Kristin Hersh's indie rock standard "Your Ghost," DM's "Ghost" is driven by the most infectious and mesmerizing synth backbeat of the new tracks. ("I'm the ghost in your house, calling your name. My memory lingers, you'll never be the same. I'm the hole in your heart, I'm the stain in your bed, the phantom in your fingers, the voices in your head.")

"The Sun and the Moon and the Star" is the type of throwback torch song that Martin Gore probably writes over breakfast every morning, but it's still more resonant than "Jezebel," the one that's officially on the album. (And, tbh, neither will replace classics like "Somebody" or "The Things You Said" in the hearts of Gore aficionados.) And "Oh Well," the first song co-written by Gore and Gahan, succeeds because it's nothing more or less than what it aspires to be -- a propulsive club cut designed just to get 'em dancing. I'll let that song sum up my general impression of SotU, which is a mostly harmless outing, and works best when it doesn't try so hard: "It's nothing to feel ashamed about, nothing I can complain about. Oh well."

"Cohen has explored the theme of love as an all-consuming flame, both destructive and creative, from the outset of his career -- a painting of St. Bernadette in flames appears on the back cover of his first album -- and that tortured ambiguity flickered throughout the evening. 'If he was fire, then she must be wood,' Cohen sang in 'Joan of Arc,' but the old ladies' man himself has always been dry wood, burning up, consumed by the same flame, dying endlessly. Cohen is a battered philosopher of eros, and the beauty and horror of much of his poetry derives from his alternately exhausted and triumphant response to the demigod of sex."

Rumors of the Death of a Ladies' Man have been greatly exaggerated: From the bookmarks, and based on the current tour that's recently been immortalized on the very listenable Live in London, Salon's Gary Kamiya sings the praises of one of his idols, Leonard Cohen. "'Looks like freedom but it feels like death/ It's something in between, I guess,' Cohen sings in 'Closing Time.' That knife edge, that balancing act between the intolerable and the redemptive, is where Cohen lives, both in his work and in his performances. He is a fearless explorer of darknesses of all kinds, mostly erotic and romantic, but also, and increasingly, political and spiritual. For Cohen, without darkness there is no light -- a credo summed up in his song 'Anthem,' with its exquisite chorus 'Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.'"

"There didn't seem to be any general consensus among my listeners. Some people preferred my first period songs. Some, the second. Some, the Christian period. Some, the post Colombian. Some, the Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see that my audience now doesn't particular care what period the songs are from. They feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don't hang anybody up. Like if there's an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it's not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up." On the official site, Bob Dylan talks about his new album, Together Through Life, due out April 28.

"Then we raised a glass to JFK, and a dozen more besides." A very happy St. Patrick's Day to you and yours. Be sure to wear green and have a Guinness or three, or Leo's comin' over.

(For optimal results, read the post title in Starbuck v. Hammer screech-mode.) With the new album right around the corner, Depeche Mode release the video for their new single, "Wrong." Hmm. Definitely not as catchy or as DM-definitive as "Precious" off the last album, but I could see this growing on me. That minimalist electroclash jeep-rock beat reminds me of the "In Your Room" remixes back in the day, and there's something about that chanted tinny-industrial refrain -- Wrong! -- that wouldn't seem out of place on Music for the Masses or Some Great Reward. In any case, it's good to hear the band isn't flinching from the synths anymore.

Don't get up, gentlemen -- he's only passing through: Rolling Stone gets word of a "surprise" Bob Dylan album coming out next month(!) "The magazine quotes an anonymous insider who says the 10-song set's arrival 'came as a surprise' to those around the folk-rock legend. The currently untitled album reportedly centers on 'raw-country love songs, sly wordplay and the wounded state of the nation.'"

Happy belated valentine's day, all. I know this is a few days late now, but just to keep the streak going ('05, '06, '07, '08), here's the usual yearly song-blog entry. And with that, the obligatory V-day, behind-the-curtain status-update: Well, as per the norm, I'm as single as a one-dollar-bill. (The last time I had an actual, honest-to-goodness valentine on this day, l'il Berk notwithstanding, was in 2004. Before that, 2000.) At any rate, it's now been years since the last gal, figuring she could do better, left with a shrug and disappeared forever...just like the one before and the one before that. And, since then and right up to now, there's been no one in sight.

This obviously can get to be a little depressing, and, now that I've reached my mid-thirties by myself, I sometimes struggle with bitterness over it. Didn't virtually every movie, tv show, song, and book I've ever consumed consistently promise I'd have someone in my corner? It's not like I've been a bad guy. (Then again, all the evidence tends to suggest that that might well have been part of the problem. Like the old Stephen Wright joke, women have often told me I'm "wonderful" ...usually right as they kick my sorry ass to the curb.)

But, oh well. I've got my health, my faculties, and a First World quality-of-life, so I'm already way ahead in the game compared to a lot of folks out there. And to be honest, I've got enough problems on my plate right now without getting pulverized yet again by someone else's caprice anyway. Besides, given my current steady-jobless, apartment-less, penniless, PhD-less existence, which, frankly, seems less and less "transitional" as the months go by, I probably wouldn't date me either. (As a colleague noted, nostalgically studying the depression era is turning out to be quite a bit more preferable than actually living it.)

So, no worries. Some politically-minded freelance writing gigs should get me through the next couple of months even if no steady employ is forthcoming, and one day soon, I'm sure, I'll rise like a phoenix from the ashes of my current lowly existence. And, lo, it'll be a New Day...just like on The Wire. At any rate, to the music:

As with ABBA last year and Kraftwerk in '06, I like to kick this post off with a happy, guilty pleasure. This year, it's Rihanna's "Umbrella". Yes, it got played into the ground during its single run, even getting its own Clinton v. Obama version on Mad TV last year. But, just as with Titanic, sometimes things are popular for a reason. With its Jay-Z opening, infectious hook, not-very-oblique double entendre, and inescapable chorus, "Umbrella" is pure, unadulterated pop, and a perfect lyrical counterpart to another quality hip-hop ballad, Method Man's "All I Need". ("Even when the skies were gray, you'd rub me on my back and say 'baby, it'll be ok.' Now that's real to a brotha like me baby...") And now, with a lot of things "comin' down with the Dow Jones" in this current economy, "Umbrella" is starting to sound more and more like one of the quintessential 21st-century Depression-era ballads, the kind you might find on "Sister, Can You Spare a Dime?"-type mixes fifty years hence.

[Note: I thought about writing up "Umbrella" this year before the unfortunate Chris Brown situation last week, which can't help but inflect the song negatively. At first, I figured it might be in poor taste now and that I should choose some other pop song. But, in the end, I just decided to go with it anyway -- hopefully, the song stands on its own, and will continue to long after recent events have receded.]

On the other side of the emotional spectrum from "Umbrella", Ben Harper's "Another Lonely Day" is an acoustic, bone-dry lament to the most recent smash-up. ("Yesterday seems like a life ago, 'cause the one I love today, I hardly know.") To be honest, there are elements of this otherwise-beautiful break-up song that rankle. Unlike, say, Chris Isaak (listen to anything on Forever Blue) or Tom Waits (last year's "Make it Rain" for example), this reads like an I-got-dumped song by a guy who's never, ever been dumped. ("I'd rather walk alone than chase you around." Oh, it's your call, then? How nice that you have the hand. "Further along, we just may?" Again, not up to you, pal.) If, as the song says, this final kiss-off is of Harper's doing, I wish it'd had more of the conflicted brio of U2's "So Cruel" or most any of Dylan's impressive stable of "It's been real, it's been fun, hasn't been real fun" farewells. But, not to lose the forest for the trees, "Another Lonely Day" is still close to perfect in its simple, painful delicacy, and it definitely well captures that grim "Solitary Man" sensation of "Ugh. Here we are again."

Ever looked at the words of a song you thought you knew decently well and discovered that it's not at all about what you thought it was? (I would guess a lot of Republicans had this experience when discovering that "Born in the USA" wasn't even close to a pro-Reagan anthem of the heartland.) This happened to me just this past week when I decided to write up Goldfrapp's A&E. Given the upbeat tempo, the video, and the snippets of lyrics I knew, I always thought this song was about someone slowly emerging out of the clouds of a bad break-up and enjoying a day outdoors. ("It's a blue, bright blue Saturday, and the pain's starting to slip away.") But, I was wrong. Reading more closely, it seems the "backless dress" is a hospital gown, A&E is the British term for the ER, and Alison Goldfrapp is basically waking up druggy after a botched "Then he'll be sorry!" suicide attempt. ("I think I want you still, but it may be pills at work.") Uh, oops.

Ok, so this is less like Bjork's All is Full of Love" and more like The Sundays' "Here's where the Story Ends" than I originally thought. Still, it's a great song, and not half as depressing as it reads on the page. Goldfrapp more often go for cinematic Portishead-like atmosphere (Felt Mountain) or sultry, come-hither dance numbers ("Ooh, La La," "Strict Machine"), and I'm a big fan of both settings. Still, the organic, pastoral feel of Seventh Tree is a grower, as is "A&E."

After getting "A&E" wrong, I'm not even going to try to make heads or tails of the lyrics to Hot Chip's obscenely catchy "Crap Kraft Dinner", a current staple of my driving time. At first it just seems to be about a happy, drunken party buzz (i.e. the exact opposite of "This Place is a Prison," by The Postal Service.) But, eventually amid the haze, there's clearly somebody missing, and/or sort of break-up happening. ("All you can hear is my refusal, 'cause i haven't got the time for a jerk-off loser.") Regardless, both strands intertwine, then fade into that sweet, melancholic outro. Like Brian Eno's "By this River," this isn't really a love song per se, but one I find strangely soothing.

Speaking of obscenely catchy , Felix the Housecat's "Madame Hollywood" isn't a love song either. And, granted, almost every cut featuring Ms. Kittin has almost exactly the same "ritzy, raunchy, and bored" monologue somewhere therein. (Cases in point: "Frank Sinatra," "1982," "Nurse.") So I don't have much to say about this one, except that I could listen to the crisp, old-school-Modish backbeat that drives this track for just about forever.

"And have you ever wanted something so badly that it possessed your body and your soul, through the night and through the day, until you finally get it...and then you realize that it wasn't what you wanted after all? And then those selfsame, sickly little thoughts now go and attach themselves to something -- or somebody -- new! And the whole goddamn thing starts all over again..."

Well, I've been crushing the symptoms, but I can't locate the cause. Unfortunately, The The's "True Happiness This Way Lies", the stand-up-routine opening track to Dusk, one of my desert-island discs, doesn't appear to yet be on the Youtubes. (That is, aside from one well-intentioned misfire of a cover.) [Update: It is now. Added below.] But in it is distilled much of what makes Matt Johnson's better albums (Dusk, Soul Mining) so powerful -- the relentless self-questioning ("Slow Emotion Replay"), the soaked-through melancholy ("This is the Day"), the dismal sensation of being endlessly driven astray by one's passions ("The Dogs of Lust.") So, for the next day or two, and as per the old-school method around here, you can grab this track here. And remember: The only true freedom is freedom from the heart's desire...and the only true happiness this way lies.

Happy (belated) Valentine's, y'all.

"I feel like [the record] is [about] looking outside and a yearning for somehow coming together. The world is changing. Watching Obama getting elected was great. We watched it on TV in Santa Barbara and I get goosebumps thinking about that still. It’s going to take a long time, but I think some of that same feeling, that sentiment [of hope] is in the work." Well, it's not too optimistic, I hope. Depeche Mode frontman Dave Gahan talks with the LA Times about the new album, due out in April.

For fans of the old-school sound like yours truly, there's reason for hope in any case: "'Martin’s got this new fetish which is basically buying gear on EBay,' Gahan said. 'He must have bought up half of the analog equipment around the world. We’ve got all these old drum machines from the 1970s, and even some of the stuff that we used in the ’80s as well, like old Moogs and Arps.' As an example, Gahan noted that one of the new album’s stars is a piece of gear dubbed 'The Colonel' - a vintage 1970s-era Steiner Parker synthesizer. It’s an instrument, said Gahan, 'that makes crazy noises. We found it really inspiring and used it in a lot of things [on the new record].'"

Apparently the band has finished 18 tracks, 13 of which will appear on the album (and ten of which, happily, are penned by M.L. Gore. I'm not sold on Gahan as a songwriter just yet.) "[T]he band will release a special EP or online-only add-on with the extra material next year." In the meantime, Dave's singing back-up for frYars' "Visitors" (a slightly more New Romantic version of (blatant Joy Division imitators) She Wants Revenge, it seems), and Marty will soon be braving the novelty-music-paparazzi to croon "Master and Servant" once more with lounge act Nouvelle Vague.

As discovered while tracking down the first three Coraline posters above: In an intriguing meeting of the minds, it seems Peter Jackson has locked down the very talented Brian Eno to score The Lovely Bones for him.

For a possible taste of things to come, you really can't go wrong with "By this River" (or anything off of 1977's Before and After Science, for that matter) or "And Then So Clear," from 2005's Another Day on Earth.) As these two songs suggest, Eno will no doubt come up with something appropriately ethereal, evocative, otherworldly, and beautiful for Jackson's long-awaited adaptation.

Bret? Present. Jemaine? Present. Murray and Mel? Present. Figwit? Present. Ziggy-era Bowie? Present. The novelty-music paparazzi? Present. All the ladies in the world? Present. It sounds like everyone who's anyone is present and accounted for, so cue the second season premiere of Flight of the Conchords, now on FunnyorDie through the 21st (and appearing on HBO beginning January 18.) I haven't watched it yet, but i believe I'll do so directly.

"In my mind I’m barely scratching the surface here, and not because of what my interpretation means or what inspired the actual lyric, but because there are so many possible interpretations and mine doesn’t really that much matter in the long run. So no, I don’t think I’ll regret sharing a few ‘secrets’ with those who really care about the songs." (I finally talked to Michael Stipe, he touched me on my arm...) In honor of Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog completing his recent R.E.M. side-project, Pop Songs '07-08, Stipe drops by to answer your questions about the lyrics. [Part II, Part III.] Great score, Matt, and congrats on finishing up the R.E.M. oeuvre.

Another choice link by way of Web Goddess. Until half an hour ago, I probably would've told you my favorite apocalyptic-pop Youtube video was this creepy-weird German mashup set to Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around". But now it's probably this ska-happy rendition of Dubya crooning "ITEOTWAWKI (AIFF)." Both are worth watching, if you can get around their innate "not lovely lovely Ludwig Van" eeriness.

"'He was a hard man and he made no apologies for that,' Childress said. 'When it came to me and my mother and my daughter he was the softest.'" Bernie Mac, 1957-2008.

And, if that surprising bit of news wasn't sad enough, Isaac Hayes, 1942-2008. "They're standing on our shoulders. Some of them don't realize [it] because they sample me so much."

"This is a very unusual theft and I am confident that someone locally will have knowledge about who is responsible or where the memorial stone is at present." By way of Ted, someone has walked away in silence with Ian Curtis' tombstone. (Here's the scene of the crime.)

"In the lower courts, according to a study Professor Long published in the Washington & Lee Law Review last year, Mr. Dylan is by far the most cited songwriter. He has been quoted in 26 opinions. Paul Simon is next, with 8 (12 if you count those attributed to Simon & Garfunkel). Bruce Springsteen has 5."

With great lawyers, you have discussed lepers and crooks: By way of Ted at the Late Adopter, the NYT examines Chief Justice Roberts' use of Dylan in court opinions. "Mr. Dylan has only once before been cited as an authority on Article III standing, which concerns who can bring a lawsuit in federal court...The larger objection is that the citation is not true to the original point Mr. Dylan was making, which was about the freedom that having nothing conveys and not about who may sue a phone company."

"'Actually, one of my favorites during the political season is "Maggie's Farm,"' Obama said of one of Dylan's tracks. 'It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric.'" But does he like the RATM version? While doing the obligatory secrets-of-his-iPod conversation with Rolling Stone -- he's a huge Stevie Wonder fan, which explains "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" on the trail -- Sen. Obama sings the praises of Dylan. (Dylan did the same of Obama earlier this month.)

"Elvis was not first; I was the first son of a gun out here, me and Chuck Berry. And I'm very sick of the lie...You know, we are over that black-and-white crap, and that was all the reason Elvis got the appreciation that he did. I'm the dude that he copied, and I'm not even mentioned...I've been out here for 50 years, man, and I haven't ever seen a royalty check." Bo Diddley, 1928-2008.

"There he lies. God rest his soul, and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness, and his phone numbers. There he lay: poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity. Nailed by a peeping tom, who would soon discover...even the ghost was more than one person."

Whatever happens in IN and NC, at least we're all assured of one excellent piece of news on Tuesday: My favorite film of 2007, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, comes out on DVD tomorrow. (See also my pre-Oscar Youtube appreciation.) Due to my imminent move, I'm mostly divesting myself of extraneous possessions at the moment. Still, I'm very much looking forward to picking this up tomorrow.

"To make progress, we must rise above the partisanship and the issues that divide us to find common ground. We must move the country in a dramatically new direction. I strongly believe Barack Obama is best positioned to lead the nation in that new direction." Along with Roger Waters and the Pink Floyd pig, Sen. Obama picks up another Senate super in New Mexico's Jeff Bingaman, thus putting him in the lead among his and Sen. Clinton's colleagues. Update: Clinton counters with NC Governor Mike Easley.

Meanwhile, over the weekend Matt Drudge ventured into the Wayback Machine to examine superdelegates' issues...with Bill Clinton in 1992. "'The voters haven't embraced Clinton, so I don't see any reason why I should endorse him,' Mr. Eckart said. 'Look at the exit polls. People have terrible doubts about this guy, and we're talking about Democrats.'" Cut to 2008, where, thanks to his recent transgressions, undeclared supers -- particularly African-American supers like my old rep, Jim Clyburn -- still don't think much of the man. "How do you play the race card on the ex-president of the United States? How do you do it? I would like to know how that's done and who they [are]. And I'd like to see these memos he's talking about. That's what's so bizarre about this,' Clyburn said". (Nor, it seems, is Pres. Clinton a fan of Obama, but that's not really surprising at this point, is it?)

So I guess I'm probably way behind on this one, but anyway: My sis informed me at dinner last night that not only has Portishead been working on their third album (and first in ten years), but it's in the can, it's called Third, and it officially comes out in only two weeks. The video for the dub number "Machine Gun" (the first single), is just below. Even notwithstanding the "Blue Monday"-ish rat-a-tat that drives the track, I'm loving that subterranean bass lurking under the surface. (Hearing it reminded me of the beginning of this Chemical Brothers video, which I always found more nightmarish than I think they meant it to be.) And then it gets all Kraftwerky right around 2:40, which is a direction that generally sits well with me.

I know Dummy was everybody and their brother's favorite trip-hop album back in the day, and it kinda lost some cool cachet just by becoming so gimongously popular. (Normally, I wouldn't hold that against an album, but, Dummy was kinda everywhere there for awhile. Sorta like Air or The Crystal Method a few years later.) Still, along with R.E.M.'s Monster, the Tribe's Beat, Rhymes, Life, Ill Communication, the now-insufferable, then-inescapable Pulp Fiction soundtrack, and a few others, Dummy was the score of my college years. Both melancholy and beat-intensive, it worked in the background for almost any occasion, and a lot of my fonder memories from school days are keyed to that Bristol sound.

At any rate, it seems the rest of the new tracks are also floating around Youtube: Silence | Hunter | Nylon Smile | The Rip |Plastic | We Carry On | Deep Water | Machine Gun | Small (check out that Syd Barrett bridge) | Magic Doors | Threads. At this early stage, my current favorite (other than the single) is "The Rip," mainly for that catchy acoustic-to-electronic fade right around the two-minute mark.

"The vista I see now is changing. Uncertainty is suffocating. Our hope has never felt so great..." It's become fashionable of late to hate on R.E.M.'s last album, 2004's Around the Sun, so much so that even the band has been badmouthing it lately, dismissing it as a result of them not really getting along at the time. Well, they'd know better than me, but I won't go there. Sun is clearly overproduced at times but I still think it has its grace moments, all the more so because it's an album drenched in melancholy and compromise. (And I still like it better than Reveal, and even the back half of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, their last venture with original and much-missed drummer Bill Berry.)

That being said, Accelerate, which officially came out yesterday, is no Around the Sun. It's just as political as AoS -- in some ways, Accelerate is their most overtly political album since Document. But, now, Stipe, Mills, and Buck have gotten the band back together. And, imbued with that sense of team confidence, they're picking up the pace and taking no more prisoners. The end result is short, fast, and dirty, a half-hour-long album which (as one of my colleagues in US history, southern upbringing, and R.E.M. fandom noted yesterday) probably most recalls 1986's Life's Rich Pageant.

From the first track, "Living Well is the Best Revenge," the difference is manifest. In Around the Sun, R.E.M. were just as political, but much more tentative and unsure of themselves. Remember all the relationship anguish of Sun? Well, now the men from Athens have the wind at their backs. "All your sad and lost apostles hum my name and flare their nostrils, choking on the bones you toss to them. Well I'm not one to sit and spin, 'cause living well's the best revenge. Baby, I am calling you on that." The equally aggressive second-track, "Man-Sized Wreath" (i.e. a huge, ridiculous emotional ploy and substitute for thought) takes up the standard with enthusiasm: "Nature abhors a vacuum but what’s between your ears?" That heady sense of being not only on the right side of the argument but -- at long last -- on the right side of history persists throughout Accelerate and keeps it afloat. "Mr. Richards" jauntily takes glee in a Cheney-esque figure (or at least one of Dubya's Dicks) finally receiving his comeuppance and going to prison for his transgressions, and "Horse to Water" is equally mad as hell and won't take it anymore. ("I'm not that easy, I am not your horse to water. I hold my breath, I come around.") And even the slight downers, such as the beautiful and too-brief post-Katrina ballad "Houston" ("If the storm doesn't kill me, the government will") still mostly resonate with hope of change to come: "It's a new day today, and the coffee is strong. I finally got some rest." (By the way, as a note to the R.E.M. fans out there, I love how that fog-horn sound in "Houston" calls back to "Leave" and particularly "Undertow" from Hi-Fi, which in retrospect also seem rather Katrina-esque.)

On the Peter Buck end, Accelerate interpolates and reconfigures the jingly-jangly riffs of Life's Rich Pageant with the (much-underappreciated) sonic grunge of Monster, and I can't wait to hear these cuts live. Still, Accelerate's secret weapon is probably bassist Mike Mills, who brings back the harmonizing of Out of Time and earlier albums, and single-handedly elevates tracks like "Living Well" and "Sing for the Submarine." Speaking of the latter, "Sing for the Submarine" is, for the time being, my high point of Accelerate, a dense, moody track that hearkens back to much of the R.E.M. canon. ("Electron Blue" and "Feeling Gravity's Pull" are explicitly name-dropped.) I haven't come close to unpacking it yet: "It's all a lot less frightening than you would have had it be. But that's the good news, my darling, it is what it's going to be." But I'm definitely enjoying the attempt, and I love the Pink Floydish power-chords as the song builds to chorus. (If negativity is required, I could honestly take or leave the first single, "Supernatural Superserious," -- it's a lot like "Imitation of Life" on Reveal -- and I tend to skip over it. And "Until the Day is Done," the sole mid-tempo ballad here, is less interesting than most of AoS. But neither are deal-killers.)

So, the short answer is this: if you thought R.E.M. has lost a few steps lately and have thus skipped the past few albums, then the reviews for Accelerate are true: They're back in a big way, and you should definitely check this one out. And if you've stuck with 'em all the way, then you'll be pleased to discover that they're on the same page as many of us this election year: To wit, after eight years (and arguably more) in the mire, it's nigh time we progressive-minded lefties started kicking ass and taking names. "Don't turn your talking points on me, History will set me free. The future's ours and you don't even read the footnote now!"

"Lisa Bonet ate no basil, Warsaw was raw. Was it a car or a cat I saw? Rise to vote, sir. Do geese see God? 'Do nine men interpret?' 'Nine men,' I nod." By way of THND, Weird Al Yankovic channels Dylan through palindromes, in the manner of "Subterranean Homesick Blues," I'm Not There, and "Royal Jelly." (McCain palindrome via here.)

As the Oscars are tomorrow night (remember to get your entries in for the annual Web Goddess Oscar Pool), as my favorite film of 2007 got snubbed in most categories, and as I spent an hour or two last night trawling around Youtube (which reminded me, for example, how irredeemably goofy the ending of There Will Be Blood was), here are some musical clips from the year's maligned masterpiece, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There. (Note: The Weinstein Company has posted almost all of Cate Blanchett's performance for Oscar purposes, but I wouldn't recommend watching those clips unless you've already seen the movie, since they're taken from all over the place and disrupt the careful interweaving of all 6 Dylans.)

"Subterranean Homesick Blues": I'd never seen this before, but here's the international trailer for the film, featuring all six incarnations doing the classic video from Don't Look Back.

"I Want You": Robbie (Heath Ledger) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) fall in love (directly following this scene.) Note the freewheelin' beginning and that fateful motorcycle.

"Ballad of a Thin Man": There's something happening here, but BBC's Keenan Jones (Bruce Greenwood) don't know what it is...other than that it somehow involves Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), Stephen Malkmus, circus geeks, and the Black Panthers.

"Going to Acapulco": In downtown Riddle, Billy Story (Richard Gere) attends the public funeral of young Mrs. Henry. She has slit her own throat, an ominous harbinger of dark times to come. (That's Jim James of My Morning Jacket in the Dylanesque whiteface, along with Calexico.)

"When the Ship Comes In": Wunderkind Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) wows some kindly Middle American folk with his musical wherewithal.

The trailer for I'm Not There, opening...uh...a few months ago (and available on DVD May 6.)

Happy Valentines' Day, everyone. As per previous years (2005, 2006, 2007), I've gone ahead and thrown up some songs for the day (for the first time via the magic of Youtube.) The obligatory once-a-year update from behind-the-curtain: Sadly, no romantic life to speak of around here, uh, whatsoever. But, that's fine. Particularly given that my last serious break-up metastasized into Something Awful, and I spent basically all of 2007 with a virulent case of the broken-hearted blues, I'm actually feeling pretty happy about being single right now. Even as little as two months ago, I might've gotten defensive about it, and, to paraphrase our dear Senator from New York, grumbled that "false hope" is not a luxury I can afford to indulge in at the moment. But, these days, all the old wounds feel cauterized, and I'm actually just content to live as I am, I am Legend-style, with Berk, new movies, the most exciting election in a generation, and goodly amounts of dissertoral work taking up my plate. There are much worse ways to spend your days. Anyway, to the music:

If Kraftwerk's "Computerlove" didn't tip you off two years ago, there's a certain kind of cheesy, toe-tapping, heart-on-your-sleeve love song to which I'm highly susceptible. Yep, I'll admit it, occasionally I can be a huge softy. I saw Titanic five times...in the theater. I'll go hit the dance floor when somebody plays Madonna. I thought "Cry Me a River" was an inordinately good pop song. And I'll admit to digging such obviously embarrassing groaners as "Always," "Truly Madly Deeply," and "Your Body is a Wonderland." (Hey, admit it: Sometimes, only sometimes, you must be as embarrassing as me.) Still, I figured, if you're really going to commit to outing your cheesy streak this Valentine's Day, you might as well go straight to the source. Sigh...so, here it is. All I'll say is, God help me, I can't not smile and shimmy a little when I hear this tune.

From its fragile opening to its shimmering close, "If You Wear that Velvet Dress" may just be U2's sultriest song. (I mentioned this the other day, but I'd have loved to hear this one through the IMAX system during U2 3D.) As in Achtung Baby's jauntier "So Cruel" (today's U2 runner-up), all is not right with Bono and his ladyfriend here -- The end is obviously near, but neither party wants to talk about it. ("It's ok, the struggle for things not to say. I never listened to you anyway.") In fact, the two have fallen into a self-destructive pattern that's only making things worse. ("We've been here before, last time you scratched at my door.") But, when the moon is in the sky, and she's wearing that velvet dress, the clock stops, and nothing else matters. (This isn't the official video -- I'm not sure if there even is one -- but it gets the point across: Whatever else is going on, something about that certain someone under a certain light will always take your breath away.) [Update: The fan video is down now -- it's just the song below.]

I ran a Leonard Cohen ballad ("I'm Your Man") last year, and Tom Waits is of the same gravelly, take-no-prisoners persuasion. But while the older Cohen sings with grim resignation, and often sounds like he's got a handle on his heartbreak (even when he clearly doesn't -- see "In My Secret Life") Waits is flailing about in the center of the maelstrom. You'll either see it or you won't, I guess, but I find this performance of "Make it Rain" from Letterman a few years ago almost frightening in its intensity. It's like Waits crawled out from the black, primordial, whiskey-soaked depths of the male Id to bellow away his rage and hurt. (He can sometimes ruminate on the happy times too, of course, such as in this lovely waltz (and a close runner-up for this post), "All the World is Green.") One wretched soul's undiluted howl of pain, anchored and drowning in a bluesy murk, "Make it Rain" is a song to beware of in concentrated doses. (But, as Bob Dylan once said of another classic, play it f**king loud.)

Looking at the ledger of my 33 years thus far on Earth, I'd say I've been in love four times and had three all-consuming (unrequited) crushes, none of which I will delve into here. Nevertheless, for those seven women -- and, even though none of you are in my life anymore, y'all know who you are -- this one's for you.

As a bonus track, I'm recycling this one from 2005, and why not? Even notwithstanding all the imagery from this jaw-droppingly beautiful Chris Cunningham video that I've pilfered for GitM over the years, it's really the best Valentine's Day message one can hope for. So, happy V-Day, y'all. Have a safe and happy one.

"It's almost impossible not to hear Accelerate as an attempt to win back old fans and regain the critical respect they've lost in the past ten years. That said, the music doesn't sound desperate, forced, or designed for maximum commercial impact, as with U2's last two records. If anything, they sound pissed-off and eager to brawl." Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog and Pop Songs previews R.E.M.'s Accelerate for Stereogum.

"I tried to explain how it all began, how it's all been destroyed...and built again." R.E.M. releases a trailer for their new album, Accelerate, featuring 30 sec of its first single, "Supernatural Superserious." My reaction upon first listen: Hey, drums! And Mike Mills backing vocals! It looks like the new album may be, as rumored, an All That You Can't Leave Behind-style throwback to old-school R.E.M. We'll know for sure on April 1.

Outside, it's America, with all its stirring, hard-fought, and often thoroughly draining primary election drama. Inside the IMAX at 68th St., however, it's Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington's U2 3D, an impressive state-of-the-art concert film of Dublin's famous foursome doing what they do best, and in three dimensions! Anyone who's ever thrown in The Joshua Tree -- that's millions of people, obviously -- and listened to the thrilling opening strands of "Where the Streets Have No Name" can probably imagine the potential of U2 filtered through an IMAX sound system and projected in multiple dimensions. All I can say, it's pretty darned cool. If you're not at all a fan of the band or their music, I'd guess you'd enjoy the 3D-effect but might get bored at some point. But, if you're at all into U2, it's definitely worth checking out. I'd consider myself an above-average fan of the band, although I've probably listened to the last two albums -- All That You Can't Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb -- all of twice. ("My" favorite U2 is the Achtung Baby/Zooropa/Pop period, and I thought they took a step backward when they reverted back to instant-classic-rock. But, like I said, I probably haven't given the new stuff its due.) At any rate, U2 3D really feels like the future in concert films. As a music experience, it's better than having the best seats in the house (and the drunk girl on her boyfriend's shoulders in front of you -- while in 3D -- never actually obscures your vision.)

So...U2 3D recounts the tale of four Irishmen -- arguably the biggest rock band of the last 25 years (although I'm personally partial to R.E.M.) -- in the midst of a huge sold-out stadium tour on the far side of the world (South America, to be exact.) Let's see, we've got Bono (Paul Hewson) on vocals, Adam Clayton on the bass, Larry Mullen, Jr. on the drums, and The Edge (David Evans) on guitar. And, that's about it, really -- It's just the show, no backstage banter or time on the bus or anything. With perhaps one exception (the start of the encore), the guys are definitely in their post-ironic, UN high commissioner mode for the show's entire run, and the setlist mostly reflects that. Ok, sure, I had the usual concert quibble: Despite all the rousing political numbers in their back catalog, I'd love to have heard some of their more conflicted love songs therein too ("Love is Blindness," "So Cruel," "Running to Stand Still," "If You Wear that Velvet Dress.") (And, for that matter, I kept thinking it might've been more fun to catch the more subversive MacPhisto or PopMart tours in 3D instead, but ah well.) But while there are very few surprises therein, U2 do a surprisingly good job of covering most of their main bases over the past three decades. You can guess most of the songs they play, sure, but, they still fit almost all of 'em in there.

And, the actual concert notwithstanding, the 3D aspect of U2 3D is particularly impressive. I didn't really know what to expect going in, but based on Beowulf I figured there'd be a lot of Bono trying to brain me with his mic stand. But that's not how it plays. Yes, Larry Mullen has the most hyperreal three-story drum kit I've ever seen. But the real magic of 3D here is in how directors Owens and Pellington use it to transpose different images over each other to fashion a unique and wholly different visual perspective, just as The Edge layers various guitar parts atop one another to create his own sonic landscape. In short, too much is not enough. It's actually possible to watch completely different things at once, because the various shots are operating in disparate planes -- We may have Bono singing in the foreground, a close-up of Clayton jamming in the middle distance, a shot of the crowd in the lower background, and a view of the screens along the upper tier, all at the same time. It's actually a much more striking effect than just a regular 3-D image, and it indicates more than anything else I've ever seen that 3D technology could really create an entirely new cinematic language. (See also Matt Zoller Seitz gushing about the medium.) At any rate, look, I gotta go, I'm running out of change (although, hopefully, Sen. Obama isn't.) But, to sum up, if you're into U2 or 3D, see U2 3D -- you won't be disappointed. Okay, Edge, play the blues!

"Would you hear his voice come thru the music, Would you hold it near as it were your own?" The surviving members of the Grateful Dead are reuniting to back Obama. "Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir will be joined by Jackie Greene, John Molo and Steve Molitz at the concert, which will be simulcast live onto the internet on iclips.net. This will be the first time that the members of the band have performed together since 2004."

In related news, Jesse Dylan (not his brother Jakob of the Wallflowers, as I earlier reported, but still of the same esteemed lineage) has directed a video for "Yes We Can", a music-speech hybrid by Senator Obama, the Black-Eyed Peas, John Legend, and a smattering of celebrities. (For her part, Super Obama Girl works alone.)

Some patient fans over at Murmurs have reconstructed the album cover for R.E.M.'s Accelerate, their follow-up to 2004's Around the Sun, from the rotating pictures currently at REMhq. (It looks a bit like the Beasties' To the Five Boroughs.) As noted earlier, the album arrives April Fool's Day and features 11 new tracks.

A fun meme via Max at Lots of Co., if you're up for five minutes of photoshopping. Obtain your own band name, album name, and album cover through the miracle of Internet randomness. Your band name is the first Wikipedia entry you get here. (Mine was Rinspeed Mono Ego.) Your album name is the last four words of the first quote you get here. (Mine was from Irving Berlin.) Your album cover is the third Flickr picture obtained here. Throw 'em together, and voila -- you're in the music biz. Just be careful not to pull a Dewey Cox.

On my way out of There Will Be Blood, I thought the ludicrous ending might've spawned a goofy catchphrase, and this song was the first thing that came to mind. Sure enough, someone's taken that ball and ran with it. Draaaaainage! (See also I Drink Your Milkshake!, via THND.) Update: More of the same.

It may feel like spring in New York, but Alison Goldfrapp is in an autumnal mood in the new video for "A&E," from Seventh Tree, their new album out next month. The song's a bit Frou Frou at first, but it's a grower. (Via Quiddity.)

Probably a little late in the season for this, but here's a belated moment of goofy, sweet-natured christmas cheer (by way of the comments at Looka): Shane MacGowan of The Pogues may have recently turned 50, but, despite all the drinking, drugging, and carousing, he doesn't look a day over three... [the original.]

News leaks that the next R.E.M. album is titled Accelerate, and it'll be out April 1, 2008. The tracks appear to be: Living Well Is The Best Revenge | Man Sized Wreath | Supernatural Superserious | Hollow Man | Houston | Accelerate | Mr. Richards | Until The Day Is Done | Horse To Water | Sing For The Submarine | I'm Gonna DJ. Further information should pop up on New Year's Day, when R.E.M.'s promo site ninetynights.com goes live.

Wait, what? Maybe I'm just late to the plastic pantomime, but my sister informed me over the holidays that Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords was previously Figwit(!) Strangely enough, I'd never made that mental connection. In any case, in honor of one of my two favorite new shows of 2007 (the other being Mad Men), here's one of the funnier television moments of the year: Jemaine as Bowie (Ashes, Labyrinth.) It is quite freaky, isn't it?

Charles, Cash, Curtis, Dylan, Strummer...Given the glut of rock biopics and documentaries we've seen in recent years, it's well past time that influential musical chameleon Dewey Cox got his due. Unfortunately, just as James Mangold's Walk the Line felt too staid and conventional to capture the true appeal of the Man in Black, Jake Kasdan's Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story -- which I saw in the days before Christmas -- never really gets inside the head of the Giant Midget. Sure, it covers most of the important facts about his life -- the childhood tragedy, the struggle with smell-blindness, the breakout single, the dark f**king middle period, the LSD decade, the selling out. But, while John C. Reilly does what he can as Cox (and the resemblance is admittedly uncanny), I never felt while watching Walk Hard that Kasdan actually "got" the man or his music...or his monkey or giraffe, for that matter. Given his famous father and his earlier affiliation with Freaks & Geeks, Kasdan seemed like he would be the guy to do Cox justice, but this is sadly a missed opportunity. It's just too bad Todd Haynes was busy with I'm Not There...Once again, nearly fifty years after the fact, Zimmerman will be walking-hard away with all Dewey's laurels.

Kasdan's take on Dewey's story begins just before Cox's final performance at the Lifetime Achievement Awards -- You may remember Eddie Vedder's memorable tribute speech, and the Jewel/Lyle Lovett/Jackson Browne/Ghostface Killa mash-up of "Walk Hard" got a lot of radio run over that summer -- before flashing back to that defining moment in the White Indian's life as a boy, the famous accidental cleaving-in-two of his prodigy brother. ("I'm cut in half pretty bad, Dewey.") Rallying to his brother's fallen musical standard, the teenage Dewey soon finds himself thrown out of the house, married young (to Edith, as played by SNL's Kristen Wiig), and working as a busboy at a local black club, where he one day wows the crowd with a version of his early hit, "(Mama) You Got to Love Your Negro Man." Soon thereafter, he lands a band and a record contract, and after the cutting of "Walk Hard," the rest is history: Cox buys a monkey, lapses into a vicious drug habit, falls for his voluptuous backup singer Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer), gets clean, lapses into another vicious drug habit...well, you know the rest.

Ok, ok, let's go ahead and break the fourth wall. As a played-straight parody of the rock biopic genre, Walk Hard is admittedly uneven most of the time. But, it makes for a relatively amusing two hours if you're in the mood for it. It's nowhere near as funny as the original Airplane or Top Secret, but I'd say it holds its own with the Hot Shots flicks, and it's miles above Scary Movie and its ilk. Yes, the film can be unfocused and scattershot (There's even a decently funny recurring gag involving the kitchen sink.) A lot of the jokes seem like leftovers from the last Will Ferrell script, and, like Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America, Walk Hard occasionally follows the beats of its object of parody so closely that the movie loses its edge. Still, there are definitely some quality moments therein, from Tim Meadows trying not to seduce a naive Dewey into a marijuana habit to Cox meeting Buddy Holly (Frankie Muniz, inspired casting) and the Fab Four (Surprisingly, Justin "Mac Guy" Long is far and away the funniest as George, while Jack Black's Paul is woefully bad and Paul Rudd's John is just...strange.)

At any rate, I'm not going to give all the jokes away here, suffice to say that Cox's black-and-white Dylan period tickled my funny bone the most. Dewey does two Dylanesque ditties here: The first, "Royal Jelly", is a gloriously inscrutable poetic epic a la "Desolation Row" ("Mailboxes drip like lampposts from the twisted birth canal of the coliseum, rimjob fairy teapots mask the temper tantrum, O say can you see 'em?") [See it live.] The other, "Let Me Hold You (Little Man)", is an un-PC The Times They Are A Changin' screed directed at the injustice faced by all the, uh, little people. ("Let me hold you, midget man, pretend that you're flying in space. Let me hold you, little man, so the dog will stop licking your face.") High art it's not, and I can't recommend rushing out and seeing it or anything. But, for a few solid chuckles over the course of two hours, Dewey Cox and Walk Hard deliver the goods decently enough. Someday -- perhaps soon, given that Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, and Drillbit Taylor are all due next year -- the helium will probably leak out of the Judd Apatow comedy factory's balloon. But Cox, thankfully enough, isn't the canary in the coalmine just yet.

Friend and colleague Liam of Sententiae et Clamores has tagged me with a meme of eights. And since GitM recently turned 8 and Berk's nearing that age himself, the theme seems apropos anyway...So, without further ado:

8 Passions in my life: film, history, politics, science-fiction, civic progressivism, Berkeley, Guinness/Jamesons, basketball.

8 Things to do before I die: finish the dissertation; conduct a Great American Road Trip; get immersed in the world's Great Cities; have kid(s); write a truly memorable speech; hit the buzzer-beater 3; attend my own book reading; see an Earthrise.

8 Things I often say: "One ticket please."; "Sit!"; "Ok, let's go!"; "Want to go outside?"; "Get on the couch!"; "If you bark again, you're going in the crate."; "Get in the crate!"; "G'night, little buddy."

8 Books I read (or reread) recently: An Aristocracy of Everyone, Benjamin Barber; The Final Solution, Michael Chabon; The Dissident, Nell Freudenberger; Confessions of a Reformer, Frederic Howe; Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann; Paris 1919, Margaret MacMillan; Watchmen, Alan Moore; Villa Incognito, Tom Robbins.

8 Films that mean something to me: Amadeus, Brazil, Miller's Crossing, Annie Hall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, High Fidelity, The Empire Strikes Back, Fellowship of the Ring.

8 Songs that mean something to me: "Almost Blue," Elvis Costello; "Get the Balance Right," Depeche Mode; "Romeo and Juliet," Dire Straits; "Visions of Johanna," Bob Dylan; "The Beast in Me," Nick Lowe; "Country Feedback," R.E.M.; "If You Wear That Velvet Dress", U2; "Make it Rain," Tom Waits.

8 Living people I'd like to have as dinner guests: The Coens, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Russ Feingold, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Barack Obama, Camille Paglia, Stephanie Zacharek.

8 People I'm passing this on to: This gets tricky, so I'll just pass it on to whomever feels like partaking...enjoy.

"Most of the time, I'm halfway content. Most of the time, I know exactly where it all went." Maybe it's the impending holidays. Maybe it's dissertoral stress. Or maybe it's the weather, or something like that. Still, it was one of those weekends...So, in light of that, Bob Dylan's "Most of the Time" meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I never would have chosen this sort of hermit life for myself. But, given this is the hand I'm currently playing, at least there're great movies and great music on my side.

"A song will lift, as the mainsail shifts, and the boat drifts on to the shoreline." If you've been reading this site for any length of time, you probably already know that I drank the Bob Dylan kool-aid a good while ago. So, more than likely, my opinion of Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, which I raced down (on the D-train, no less) to catch at the Film Forum this morning, should be taken with at least a shaker of salt. And, to be honest, it's hard to imagine how this film plays to people who aren't all that into Dylan -- If you don't already have a basic sense of his story and his various periods, I could see it being as incoherent and irritating as Southland Tales (although it's assuredly better-made.) But, if you do have any fondness for Bob, oh my. The short review is: I loved it. Exploding the conventional music biopic into shimmering, impressionistic fragments, Todd Haynes has captured lightning in a bottle here. The movie is clearly a labor of love by and for Dylan fans, riddled with in-jokes, winks, and nods, and I found it thoughtful, funny, touching, and wonderful. Put simply, while No Country for Old Men is right up there, I'm Not There is my favorite film of the year. I can't wait to see it again.

Like Navin Johnson, Bob Dylan was born a poor black child. (Marcus Carl Franklin) Ok, perhaps not. But Hayne's movie doesn't really aim to tell the story of one Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota. anyway. -- He's not there. Instead I'm Not There refracts Dylan through a prism of sorts, giving us multiple versions of the man (and myth) at various stages in his life and work. And, so, after a first person POV shot of "Dylan" (us?) taking the stage in '66, and a title shot involving a potentially-momentous motorcycle, we are introduced to one Woody Guthrie (Franklin), an 11-year-old folk wunderkind traveling hobo-style along the rails, singing union songs and making up his past as he goes along. But the times they-are-a-changin', and, as a kindly matron informs Woody, the old songs don't necessarily do justice to the problems of 1959. Enter Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), an earnest young troubador who once lit Greenwich Village on fire with his ballads of social protest ("finger-pointin' songs"), and, having rejected the folk scene and found Jesus, is now the subject of a No Direction Home-style documentary. (Julianne Moore does a Joan Baez impression here, straight out of Scorsese's doc, which is pretty hilarious, and maybe even a little mean -- note the business with the cat.)

By now, you probably see where this is going. Post-Newport, Cate Blanchett shows up as Jude, a.k.a. the reedy, combative, drugged-out, and dog-tired Dylan of (blonde on) Blonde on Blonde and Don't Look Back. (It takes a woman like her, to get through, to the man in him.) Ben Whishaw shares the load of society's probing as Arthur Rimbaud, a Bob who spends most of the movie facing down some unknown interlocutors. Heath Ledger's Robbie is the romantic and the womanizer, the Dylan who woos the heartbreakingly beautiful Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing an amalgamation of Suze Rotolo and Sara Lownds), looks for solace in a normal life outside Woodstock, and eventually stares into the abyss of Blood on the Tracks. And Richard Gere is Billy, an aging outlaw hiding out in Riddle, MO, part of the mythical American landscape conjured by Bob in "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," "Desolation Row," John Wesley Harding, The Basement Tapes, "Blind Willie McTell," and countless other songs.

Each of this fellowship of Dylans does quality work in the role. Cate Blanchett is getting the most press these days, perhaps deservedly so, but I was as impressed with Bale, Whishaw, Franklin, and particularly Ledger -- After seeing the extent of his range here, it's pretty clear he's going to kill as the Joker next summer. And other actors resonate here as well. I already mentioned Julianne Moore and the exquisite Charlotte Gainsbourg. (My crush on the latter, already simmering after The Science of Sleep, will no doubt grow by leaps and bounds now, particularly once you factor in her fragile, breathy version of "Just Like a Woman" on the soundtrack. With a face that's at once honest, open, statuesque, and melancholy, she's the perfect sad-eyed lady of the lowlands.) Also notable is David Cross, the spitting image of Allen Ginsberg, Michelle Williams invoking Factory Girl Edie Sedgwick, and a well-preserved Richie Havens delivering a Joe Cocker moment with his version of "Tombstone Blues." Bruce Greenwood (of Thirteen Days, The Sweet Hereafter, and recently John from Cincinnati) does particularly impressive work as Jude's nemesis, a BBC newsman who wants to pin both the mercurial singer and the meaning of his (her) music to the wall like a butterfly. Clearly, something is happening here, but he don't know what it is...

Do you need to know a lot about Dylan going in? Well, it undoubtedly helps. I'm Not There is rife throughout with Dylanalia, and, yes, at times it's dropped as blatantly as the groaners in Across the Universe: Jude mutters "Just like a woman!" at one point as a punchline, and an LBJ on the wall during a party strangely exclaims "It's not yellow, it's chicken." But, others are more obscure, hidden in the fabric of the film like a crossword puzzle for Dylanophiles. Many of the strange denizens of Gere's Riddle recall characters in songs or various Dylan incarnations, from the whitefaced troubador at Ms. Henry's funeral to the Union solders and passing Lincoln on stilts. As Robbie and Claire (Renaldo and Clara?) have one of those tired, terse phone discussions that signifies the end is near, a movie poster over her shoulder reads "CALICO" (i.e. "Sara," the "calico sphinx in a scorpio dress (you must forgive me my unworthiness.)") Or, in the scene accompanying one of Dylan's masterpieces, "Visions of Johanna," the Ledger Dylan, a movie star of sorts, is bored on the road and skirt-chasing one of his co-stars. As this goes down, we happen to see some elderly crones in neck braces ("the jelly-faced women all sneeze"), Ledger walking in a museum ("Inside the museum, Infinity goes up on trial"), the Mona Lisa (who "musta had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles"), and the co-star he's tailing, of course, is named Louise. ("Louise, she's all right, she's just near. She's delicate and seems like the mirror. But she just makes it all too concise and too clear that Johanna's not here.")

If this all is starting to sound like two and half hours of insufferable inside-baseball for Dylanheads, well, I guess it might be. But I really don't think it plays like that. (And I also don't think that was the appeal for me either. Both Masked and Anonymous and Twyla Tharp's The Times They Are-A Changin' trafficked in similar inside gags, and I didn't enjoy those anywhere near as much as this film.) Basically, I'm Not There is too vibrant and enthusiastic to feel smug, remote, or exclusive about its fondness for Dylan. It never purports to define the meaning of any particular song, showing instead that more often than not their beauty lies in their ambiguity. (For example, both defenders of the cultural Old Guard and the Black Panthers feel "Ballad of a Thin Man" is about them.) And it often pokes fun at the Dylanophiles among us, throwing in a number of disgruntled fans at various times (particularly after Bob plugs in) and having Jude get pestered by an overeager amateur Dylanologist after hanging with the Beatles (a very jolly cameo indeed.) Plus, for all the reverence, Dylan himself isn't as whitewashed as he was in No Direction Home -- His drug habit, his youthful arrogance and occasional thin skin, and some questionable views on women poets are all on display here.

A talented artist in his own right (case in point: Safe and Far from Heaven), Haynes employs all the magic of the movies to tell Dylan's story. The Robbie-and-Claire scenes are filmed in color occasionally as riotous as in Hayne's homage to Douglas Sirk, Jack's social protest and Christian periods are told in faux-documentary fashion, and Jude's England tour is all black-and-white cinema verite, a la Don't Look Back. That's why I'm pretty sure i'm Not There will work even for people who don't know the first thing about Dylan. It remains visually interesting throughout, and never falls into the usual biopic rut, that standard, hackneyed rise, fall, and rise again narrative which tends to bring down even otherwise well-made entrants in the genre like Walk the Line.

And, of course, it benefits from having one of the better soundtracks out there, and Haynes has expertly weaved Dylan's music (and some quality cover versions) into almost every moment of the film. Let me put it this way: Within the first five minutes, I'm Not There features some period NYC subway footage set to the irrepressibly toe-tapping "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again." (Also another visual pun -- the subway folk are "stuck inside of mobile.") From that moment on, the movie pretty had much me. In the end, I don't know if non-Dylan folk will vibe into it or not, but I found I'm Not There a splendid gift from one Dylan fan to the rest of us, and assuredly one of the more inventive and captivating biopics in recent filmdom. "And the sun will respect every face on the deck, the hour that the ship comes in."

"'Isiah has to start me,' Marbury fumed, according to the source. 'I've got so much (stuff) on Isiah and he knows it. He thinks he can (get) me. But I'll (get) him first. You have no idea what I know.'" (Some choice suggestions on what Starbury knows in the comment thread here: I like "It was Isiah's call to cancel Arrested Development" and "Isiah does not care about black people.") Yep, the once-promising 2007-2008 Knickerbockers imploded early this year, with our overpaid, underachieving, untradeable "star" point guard Stephon Marbury leaving the team in a huff over coming off the bench -- at the start of a tough four game road trip -- and now threatening to expose Isiah Thomas's dirty laundry (as if we didn't get enough of that with this past summer's sexual harrassment case.) How will the saga of the Traveling Marbury pan out? Will Stephon be handled with care or sent to the end of the line? Either way, I expect the Knicks to stay moribund so long as this PG, this GM, and this owner are running the show at the Garden. (NY Daily News and Deadspin links sent to me via Ben of The Oak, who also birddogged a great find last week with these graphical representations of hip-hop.) Update: The prodigal Knick returns to a loss in LA, but something's still rotten at MSG.

Ooh la la! "A sensual counterpoint to the glitterball glamour of [previous LP] Supernature, Seventh Tree is gilded in the butterfly colours of an English surrealism shared from Lear to Lennon. It shimmers and shines with the warmth of a hazy summer, an electric whirlpool over which Alison's glistening voice soars." By way of Megg at Quiddity, Goldfrapp are currently working on a new LP, Seventh Tree, which will come to flower on Feb. 26, 2008. Count me in.

"You know what's even better than a great road tune? Not having some DJ talkin' all over it...unless, of course, that DJ is me." Sigh. On behalf of his XM radio show, Bob Dylan hawks Cadillacs. To be honest, I much preferred when he was pushing ladies' lingerie. At least that's a product I can get behind.

"As a rule, film score classical music is used as a shorthand: Handel indicates that the snobs have arrived, Mahler that someone is about to die, but not before pouting about it, and Wagner is a sure sign that big trouble's a-brewing." By way of Girlhacker, The Guardian's Joe Queenan dissects the most overused classical music tropes in film. "Vivaldi's ludicrously overplayed Four Seasons invariably indicates that the stuffed shirts are having brunch; Beethoven's Ode to Joy announces that Armageddon may be just around the corner; and anytime an aria by Verdi, Bellini or Puccini is heard, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone is going to get raped, stabbed, blinded, buried alive or impaled."

As noted in countless Woeful State of the Industry pieces over the past week, In Rainbows, the new Radiohead album, is now available for download directly from the band. (I figure I'll give 'em ten bucks.) Also, it seems R.E.M. is premiering a new song on Anderson Cooper 360 tonight. The song, "Until the Day is Done," will be featured in a CNN ecodocumentary, Planet in Peril, later this month. (If you've watched the Youtubes of the Dublin rehearsal shows a few months back, you've already heard it.) Update: 160kbpgate for Radiohead?

For the R.E.M. fans among us, Stereogum has compiled Drive XV, an Automatic for the People tribute album to commemorate that record's fifteenth anniversary. (The album's site also contains thoughts on the songs by Mike Mills and, as a special treat, an essay, Sweetness Followed, by Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog and Pop Songs '07.) AftP came out the fall of my senior year in high school and, as I said in my top 50 REM songs post of a few years back, it hasn't aged with me as well as I'd hoped. (In fact, I'd probably put both Monster and Up above it these days.) Still, while "Man on the Moon" and "Everybody Hurts" may be well beyond played out (and "Nightswimming" might be getting there), the mournful record also features "Drive" (still an amazing video), "Sweetness Follows," and "Monty Got a Raw Deal," all minor-key dirges which resonate now as they did then. In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing what the bands here came up with.

So where are the strong? And who are the trusted?> Why, Bob and Elvis, of course, and they're in the Nutmeg State, or at least they were last night. As promised, I caught the traveling Dylan-Costello tour over the weekend in (relatively) nearby Bridgeport, CT. The setlists:

Elvis: (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes | Either Side of the Same Town | Veronica | The River in Reverse | Down Among the Wine and Spirits | Bedlam | From Sulfur to Sugar Cane | Radio Sweetheart/Jackie Wilson Said | (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding? | The Scarlet Tide

Bob: Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat | It Aint Me, Babe | I'll Be Your Baby Tonight | You're a Big Girl Now | Rollin' and Tumblin' | Workingman's Blues #2 | 'Til I Fell In Love With You | When the Deal Goes Down | Honest With Me | Spirit on the Water | Highway 61 Revisited | Nettie Moore | Summer Days | I Shall Be Released

Encore: Thunder on the Mountain | Like a Rolling Stone

Taking the second act first (well, third -- as in Bob's Beacon stand in 2005, Amos Lee was the *real* opener), Bob's set -- as you can see -- was heavy on the Modern Times, which is an album I never really listened to all that much. (It came out just before I was kicked to the curb last year, at which point it just got consigned to the iPod shuffle dustbin.) And, as I've said before, when it comes to new Bob, I prefer the looming darkness of Time Out of Mind to the rockabilly antics of Love & Theft, which was also represented here a few times. Still, there were a few gems interspersed throughout the set. Bob's post-apocalyptic croak these days doesn't really suit tender ditties like "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," and on "I Shall Be Released" I was thinking it might even be time to go the Leonard Cohen backup-singer route. But he still got a fair amount of mileage out of "Like a Rolling Stone" and the raucous opener, "Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat," and he looked spry as ever while playing most of the new stuff. Plus on this, my eighth Dylan show (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), I happily got to scratch off "You're a Big Girl Now" on my own mental checklist of songs to hear the man play live. And, while I'm not sure last night's version quite did the song justice -- A line like "I'm going out of my mind with a pain that stops and starts!" needs the plaintive howl of 1975, not the world-weary rasp of 2007 -- I was glad to hear it made the list regardless.

If I'm being a bit harder on Dylan than usual, it may be because Elvis had just left the building, and he pretty much tore the roof off the place in his set. When I heard he was on the bill, I was wondering who his back-up band might be: The Attractions, The Imposters, or some other permutation thereof. Well, as it turned out, this was a solo stand: just Elvis in black, a few guitars, a spotlight, a microphone, ten chords, and the truth. He played more of his standards when I saw him at the Beacon, but that wasn't a problem here; His too-brief set included a few well-known hits ("Veronica," "PLU"), some golden oldies ("(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes", "Radio Sweetheart"), some as-yet-unreleased songs ("Down Among the Wine and Spirits," "From Sulfur to Sugar Cane"), and even a cover of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said," and each one burned with clarity and conviction. Among the highlights for me were "Either Side of the Same Town," my favorite song from The Delivery Man, "The River in Reverse" (from his album with Alan Toussaint -- it was a blistering call-and-response number last night), and the anti-war lament "The Scarlet Tide" (also from Delivery Man.) (To his credit, Costello also had a remarkable amount of Bridgeport-specific stage patter last night, from name-dropping the old arena there to paying respect to the father of show business, Bridgeport native P.T. Barnum. Somebody had done his homework.)

Woke up, got out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
and looking at the blog I noticed I was late (heah, heah, heah, heah) in posting a review of Julie Taymor's sadly insipid karaoke-musical Across the Universe. Ever since Ms. Quarles' fourth-grade class in Florence, SC spent a full week on the Beatles -- discussing lyrics, watching A Hard Day's Night, etc. -- they've been a part of my mental landscape. (We also did a week on Edgar Allan Poe -- that had more morbid ramifications on my young brain.) In fact, the Beatles were the first musical group I remember being cognizant of. (Hmm, upon further reflection, that's not entirely true: It seems like ABBA got some run in the house when I was a pre-schooler -- I remember my brother getting this record for Christmas one year...You'll have to ask him if that had anything to do wih him marrying a Swedish gal.) At any rate, from that fateful week of musical schooling to about eighth grade, when I discovered Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and Depeche Mode's "Black Celebration" and anguished adolescence began in earnest, the Beatles were far and away my favorite musical act, (In fact, I was justifiably eviscerated by friends and foes alike for crooning "Yesterday" in the seventh grade talent show -- before my voice had broke -- later prompting the waggish schoolyard riposte: "Suddenly, I'm not half the man I used to be...ever since that vasectomy...")

But, really, there's no point in going on trying to prove my Beatles bona fides. The fact of the matter is, everyone loves the Fab Four in their own way (and those few who don't are either too cool for school or just certifiable Blue Meanies.) It's hard to think of any band that's as universally beloved as the boys from Liverpool...which is one reason why Across the Universe seems like such a misfire. Given Julie Taymor's considerable talent, on display in Frida and elsewhere, and the ubiquitous fondness for the music she gets to play with, how did the final product end up as tepid and uninspired as what we've got here? Perhaps it's a fault of the karaoke-musical genre -- I didn't much care for Twyla Tharp's riff on Bob Dylan either. But really. Surely a band as influential and inspired as the Beatles deserve something better than a remake of Rent with better music. Unless you're really a completist on matters Liverpudlian, or your iPod's broken or something, I wouldn't recommend crossing the street to see this, much less venturing across the universe.

"Is there anybody going to listen to my story, all about the girl who came to stay?" So pleads Jude (Jim Sturgess, looking like Paul with a hint of George) from the bleak gray oceanfront of what could only be North England. You see, before he started quoting Rubber Soul for effect, Jude was a working-class stiff in Liverpool who, on a youthful journey of self-discovery, set out for the green fields of Princeton University to find and confront his absent WWII GI father. Once arriving at the Ivory Tower, he reunites with dear old Dad, and, more importantly, meets up with the fun-loving, dissolute Max (Joe Anderson), who -- in the natural manner of all Ivy League undergrads -- spends his nights playing drunken golf with his father's borrowed set of "silver hammers." But here's the important point: Max happens to have a little sister with kaleidoscope eyes, the lovely Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), and -- as you can probably guess -- as soon as Jude sees her standing there, he's got to get her into his life. In any case, Max drops out of college, and he and Jude -- and ultimately, Lucy -- procure tickets to ride to the bohemian paradise of New York City, whereupon they fall in with sultry singer Sadie (Dana Fuchs, a.k.a. Janis Joplin), guitar hero JoJo (Martin Luther, a.k.a. Jimi Hendrix), and crush-heavy misfit Prudence (T.V. Carpio, who, in one of many Beatles puns throughout, first comes in through the bathroom window.) All is groovy in East Village Bohemia, for awhile...but, there's a war going on, man, and all things must pass. Soon enough the Magical Mystery Tour has come to an abrupt halt: Max is drafted, Prudence tunes out, Sadie and Jojo break up the band (with nary a Yoko in sight), and Lucy discovers SDS...leaving Jude once again a loser in Liverpool. But, hey Jude, don't let us down. You have found her, now go and get her...

So, as you can see, the movie is basically just a bunch of Beatles songs assembled in a sort of narrative order. That's fine -- that's what we were all expecting, and the Beatles obviously have a lot of great tunes to work with. But, while there are a few nice visual flourishes at times, more often than not, Across the Universe turns gold into lead: It tries to be transporting, but ends up feeling forced. Part of the problem -- for me at least -- is the rather pedestrian choices made, of which the Lower East Side Rent angle is only one. Obviously, I enjoy American history, or I wouldn't do what it is I do. But, frankly, the Forrest Gumpian, TV miniseriesish "Summer of Love derailed in the jungles of Vietnam" trope has gotten really, really old over the past few years. Can we please find some other period in American history to fetishize, or find some way to tell this story differently? In all honesty, the hackneyed "Paradise Lost" version of the Sixties presented here has become as wheezy a historical contrivance as "The Greatest Generation." (And is there a lazier way to string together a bunch of Beatles songs than "the Sixties experience"? Are they that bound up with their time? Even Tharp's botched Dylanpalooza had its own traveling circus conceit.)

And, speaking of wheezy contrivances, I know I'm probably going to be an army of one on this, but oh well, go ahead and crucify me: I'm so deadly sick of the tired rom-com subgenre whereby our hero/ine does or says something irredeemably stupid in the second act of a movie and loses the object of his/her affection, but then goes all out in the third act with some zany, fearless, and/or bravura romantic display and all is forgiven. You see it all the time, and does life ever really work out like this? Um, no. Yes, I know it's a trope that's as old as the hills, but it is totally and utterly played out. (Offhand, I can think of only Annie Hall and maybe The Science of Sleep as movies that show this type of third-act Hail Mary blowing up in the protagonist's face.) I fully realize that a happy-go-lucky musical based on Beatles tunes may not be the appropriate film to make this stand, but screw it -- I've reached my tipping point. This bird has flown, Jude, so next time hide your love away and cry instead. (And, Ms. Taymor, what with all the Beatles characters here, where's Eleanor?)

Even notwithstanding my more curmudgeonly issues, though, Across the Universe takes some missteps along the way. "Let it Be" makes for a lovely gospel rendition, but it's just about the worst advice you can imagine as a civil rights anthem. And perhaps I'm living easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all I see, but the "bleeding fruit" presentation of "Strawberry Fields Forever" here seemed almost completely wrong to me. But, hey, at least those two songs made an impression. Most of the tunes here never even get that far: Usually played deadly earnest and mostly stripped of any subversiveness therein, the songs as sung by the lead actors here tend to be flat, uninspired, and virtually interchangeable. The only way to tell them apart is in the very occasionally striking visual flourishes, from the myriad of Salma Hayek-y nurses present for "Happiness is a Warm Gun" to the teen-dream Bowlmor lanes conceit of I've Just Seen a Face" (which isn't even the best musical number ever set in a bowling alley -- that still goes to Kenny Rogers' "I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In" from The Big Lebowski.) Indeed, the trippy visuals often overshadow the bland versions of the songs. The eeriest image in Universe may have been Taymor's weird Jungian bent on the famous Kim Phuc photo, but I'll be damned if I know what it was in there for or remember what song it was in reference to.)

As for the musical guests, Eddie Izzard all but sleepwalks his way through a pained version of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," and U2's Bono shows up midway to embarrass himself as a Ken Kesey-type character. This AICN comment nailed it: Bono sings "I am the Walrus" as if it's "MLK" or "Sunday Bloody Sunday," like it's the most important thing ever written. He's meant to be ironic, I guess, but he can't seem to get past his own vanity. But, to be fair, one musician here does ring true: In fact, almost everything that's wrong with Across the Universe is made manifest by his fifteen-second cameo. Joe Cocker is partially famous for his blistering rendition of "With a Little Help From of My Friends" at Woodstock," and, as a homeless guy here, he imbues his one verse of "Come Together" with all the heartfelt passion and hard-fought wisdom he brought to that earlier performance. (After it happened, the audience at my showing spontaneously applauded.) Don't let him be misunderstood: Cocker makes clear these songs mean as much to him as they do to us. He's the only one here able to strip away the saccharine, shrink-wrapped Rent-lite blandness of this whole enterprise and, at least for a moment, do the Beatles proud.

Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine, I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government. And Tessa? Well, she's sending me this swanky link to the new Dylan messaging site, where you can create your own version of the seminal 1965 Subterranean Homesick Blues video. (Also up here is the video for Mark Ronson's brand new remix of "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine.)" I'm not sold on the horn section, to be honest, but it'd be hard to improve on Blonde on Blonde in any event. Time will tell, just who fell, and who's been left behind...)

In case you missed it or were otherwise dissuaded by the lousy format last time, the teaser for Todd Haynes' off-kilter Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There is now officially online, along with a new red-band trailer for Robert Zemeckis' stab at Beowulf. Definitely catching the former, probably seeing the latter.

Bret? Present. Jemaine? Present. Murray? Present. Good...Everyone's present and accounted for as HBO renews Flight of the Conchords for a second season (along with more Entourage.) Due to Deadwood, I tried valiantly, but I could never grok David Milch's puzzling and pretentious John from Cincinnati all that much. And, so far, the much-praised Mad Men and Damages are just filling up DVR space -- I haven't broken into them yet. But, I do love me some Flight of the Conchords these days, and am glad to see Bret and Jemaine getting more run. It's Business Time.

A tour to look out for: The freewheeling Bob Dylan is, as ever, on the road, but this September and October he's bringing along Elvis Costello to boot. I've seen Bob a lot, and I've seen Elvis, but seeing 'em back-to-back should be more fun than you can shake a stick at. (I'm definitely going to the Bridgeport, CT show...undecided about Albany.)

As you can see, Heath Ledger's been busy. First off, new pics surface of Ledger and others as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, including more images of Cate Blanchett eerily channeling the Blonde on Blonde-era Bob. (See below and here for more.) And, apparently much to the consternation of the Time Warner powers-that-be, eighteen early and spoilerish stills from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight have leaked onto the Internets, including a few of Ledger's Joker seeming to enjoy a police interrogation more than he probably should. Check 'em out before they disappear.

Speaking of I'm Not There, the Todd Hayne's new Dylan biopic has a teaser out, where you can catch brief glimpses of all the varied permutations of Bob. (Blanchett, Bale, Ledger, Gere, Whishaw, et al.) And, also in the trailer bin, Woody Allen ventures back into Match Point territory with Ewan MacGregor, Colin Farrell, Tom Wilkinson, and newcomer Hayley Atwell in the new (French-subtitled) preview for Cassandra's Dream. And John C. Reilly brings to life one of Dylan's formative influences in the parody-heavy trailer for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, brought to you by the Freaks & Geeks team of Jake Kasdan and Judd Apatow and also starring Jenna Fischer, Kristen Wiig, and Tim Meadows (as well as Jack White as Elvis and Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Mac Guy, and Jason Schwartzman as John, Paul, George, and Ringo.)

She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she don't look back. (Although if I had to guess, she's been watching the heck out of Don't Look Back lately.) With (a non-levitating) Bruce Greenwood in tow, Cate Blanchett channels Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan and meets never-nude Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) in this brief You-tubed clip from Todd Hayne's forthcoming I'm Not There. Other Dylans in the production: Christian Bale, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw.

R.E.M. held their first "live rehearsal" in Dublin last night, previewing not only ten new songs but a set of mostly way-early stuff ("Second Guessing," "Letter Never Sent," "1,000,000," "Little America," "These Days," etc.) The show intro and first new song have been Youtubed...hopefully there'll be more to come. Update: Ah, that was quick. Just as I post this, many more quality videos surfaced, including Youtubes of new songs such as "Until the Day is Done," "Living Well's the Best Revenge," and "Horse to Water."

"I think were seeing the life of hip-hop coming back with songs like 'Aunt Jackie.' It's the kids acting like kids used to act when I was growing up, and I love it because, to me, hip-hop has been too cool for school lately." While I'm linking to music on YouTube, I meant to post this while in Seattle and forgot: Slate's Jody Rosen examines the Aunt Jackie phenomenon. Who's Aunt Jackie? She's "new rap music with an old-school flow," i.e. a goofy, ridiculously infectious throwback jam that's been blowing up on the Tube over the past six months. No gangstas, no bling -- just old-school beats, rhymes, and b-boyin' invoking the early days of NYC hip-hop. (NSFW, due to language and the fact that you'll likely try to imitate the Aunt Jackie after awhile.)

Elijah Wood as Iggy Pop? Um, I'm not sure I see it. But, in more intriguing entertainment news, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan MacGregor will team up for Othello on the London stage, as Othello and Iago respectively. That'd be great to see.

By way of Quiddity, Matthew Perpetua of the always enticing (and mp3-stacked) Fluxblog has dedicated himself to writing on every R.E.M. song over at Pop Songs '07. I'll definitely be checking it out, even if I think he's way off on "Saturn Return"...(it made #15 on my own list awhile back, and is still up there in my esteem.)

Her name is Yoshimi, she's got a black belt in karaoke...Two choice links via Webgoddess. I thought for sure this was a Slings and Arrows-type April Fool's joke at first, but no: The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is coming to Broadway. "There's the real world and then there's this fantastical world. This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It's almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that." And, weirder still, it's apparently being written by Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing and Sports Night.

And, also via Kris, my old site The Leaky Cauldron has posted the cover art for the final Potter installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which you can see at right. Clean, simple, I like it.

"R.E.M.'s music is truly all-encompassing. They used every color on the palette, they invented colors on their own and they put up this huge mural of music and sound and emotion." I neglected to post this during my West Coast vacation, but in case anyone is still interested, via Youtube: Eddie Vedder inducts R.E.M. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. [Part 2 | Part 3 | Gardening at Night | Begin the Begin | Man on the Moon (w/ Eddie Vedder) | I Wanna Be Your Dog (w/ Patti Smith)]

Nothing's gonna change my world...except maybe the bean-counters at the studio. Word is Julie Taymor is getting the Terry Gilliam treatment from Revolution studios -- her forthcoming Beatlepalooza Across the Universe has been recut by studio executive Joe Roth without her knowledge, and Taymor may drop her name off the movie. Whatever Taymor put on film, I have to assume it's more interesting than anything Roth -- he of Christmas with the Kranks -- could come up with.

It doesn't seem to play nice with Internet Explorer at all, but this parody mash-up, Dylan Hears a Who: Seuss via Zimmerman -- sent via my sister Tes -- is definitely worth checking out. The joke aside, whoever put this together did a great job of capturing that vintage Dylan sound -- I particularly like the "Ballad of a Thin Man"'ed up version of "Miss Gertrude McFuzz," but all seven tracks are surprisingly catchy and on point. Huzzah.

Oof, Valentine's Day. Not a holiday I've been looking forward to of late, even if it does provide the chance to write up some favorite songs here, as per recent tradition. As many of y'all surely know, V-Day and all the attending hoopla is rarely much fun when you're single, and it's even worse when you're walking wounded, as I'd number myself these days. To wit: Late last year, I got kicked right in the teeth by someone I was really fond of, and even though it's been many months now since it all went down -- long enough that I really should've just gotten over it and moved on -- most days since then are sadly still kind of a struggle.

But, oh well...no hope, no harm, just another false alarm. I've loitered on the Injured List before -- in fact, you could say much of my adult romantic life has been Grant Hillish to the extreme, all burgeoning potential cut short by season-ending injuries -- so I'm pretty sure, at an intellectual level if not yet a gut one, I'll get back in the game someday. In the meantime, here's some music for ya. Usual rules apply: the files will be only up for a few days, right-click to save them, and please don't link to them directly.

For all the genre's many strengths, the slice-of-life relationship song isn't normally what you'd consider a central feature of hip-hop. Cuts like Method Man's "All I Need," Outkast's "Mrs. Jackson," or the Tribe's "Bonita Applebaum" notwithstanding, shake-your-booty jams and odes to the playa lifestyle outnumber romantic ditties by at least five or six to one. "You Got Me," from the Roots' 1999 album Things Fall Apart, numbers among the exceptions.

Co-written by Jill Scott (who performed the song in Dave Chappelle's Block Party and on tour for the Roots) and co-sung by Eykah Badu (on the original cut and video), "You Got Me" is a story of a meet-cute ("We used to live in the same building on the same floor and never met before until I'm overseas on tour") that grows into a relationship that works despite the odds ("When you out there in the world, I'm still your girl"), and despite the loose talk all around. ("Lies come in, that's where the drama begins.")

It ain't easy for the couple in "You Got Me," but they're making do. They got each other, and most of the time, that's enough to get by. (And bonus points for ?uestlove's infectious drum-and-bass outro -- our time with this pair ends with the fade, but their story clearly continues.)

You Got Me -- The Roots feat. Erykah Badu (3.9MB, 4:19)
(song removed)
From Things Fall Apart.

[Update:]

I picked a Bob Dylan song last year ("Most of the Time"), and I freely admit that, however brilliant, Blood on the Tracks is now one of the hoariest of breakup-album cliches. Still, "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" was on my mind a lot over the past year (see also my review of The Fountain), so it's going up anyway (and, hell, maybe I'll pick a Dylan song every Valentine's Day from now on -- he's got enough to go around.)

Here, unlike most of the cuts on the album, Bob is actually happy ("I could stay with you forever and never realize the time.") -- Life is good to him, he's got a good woman by his side. But, though he's ignoring it, the insurmountable problem -- "the crystal...in the steel at the point of fracture," to borrow a phrase from All the King's Men -- is already manifest, a tiny speck on the horizon soon to loom over everything. Despite his euphoria, Dylan can already recognize that this relationship is finite: Eventually, "Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know." So, Dylan listens to the crickets and the river instead, and does his best to relish what happy moments still lie ahead, before the axe inevitably falls.

(Everybody and their brother owns Blood on the Tracks -- if you don't, buy it! For you and your brother! -- so I've also thrown in a cover version by Mary Lou Lord. It's a bit alt-chickish, sure, but I prefer it to other versions I can name, such as Elvis Costello's too-jaunty-by-far take on Kojak Variety.)

You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go -- Bob Dylan (2.8MB, 2:55)
(song removed)
From Blood on the Tracks.

You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go -- Mary Lou Lord (5.3MB, 3:46)
(song removed)
From Hard Rain: A Tribute to Bob Dylan, Vol. 1.

[Update:]

Canada's answer to Dylan, the inimitable Leonard Cohen has also been mining the joys and perils of romantic entanglements for four decades now. To be honest, I'm hit-or-miss with his early stuff, but I just can't get enough of his "Satan's lounge act" later period. (As I've said before, and as with Dylan, Tom Waits, etc., I'm basically a sucker for the "broken, gravelly voices with tales to tell" genre.)

Like "Everybody Knows" and "First We Take Manhattan," "I'm Your Man" is one of the better-known songs from Cohen's later incarnation (and the name of a recent tribute documentary to him, which I haven't seen.) "I'm Your Man" combines a lot of Cohen's strengths -- that debauched, plaintive, and world-weary croak, a knack for memorable imagery and earthy allusions (even at his most bathetic, Cohen never lets you forget there's a primal beast that "won't go to sleep" raging inside him, one with carnal appetites inseparable from his professions of love -- see also "In My Secret Life," "Waiting for the Miracle," or countless others), and a second-act twist that complicates what initially seemed to be a straightforward pop ditty.

Here, what appeared to be a confident ode to that special gal in his life becomes instead a hail-mary plea for forgiveness. ("I've been running through these promises to you, that I made and I could not keep"), one that he already knows is not going to shake out as he desires ("A man never got a woman back, not by begging on his knees...") The joke is, Cohen's not her man anymore. No matter how many times he says otherwise or tries to contort himself to regain his muse's affections, Cohen is stuck being himself, the guy who blew it somewhere along the line. Sorry, Leonard. At least you got Manhattan.

[Update:]

Since I already lyric-checked the Smiths earlier in this post, why not go straight to the source? Maybe they just captured a certain zeitgest of feeling alone, different, and melancholy in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Still, the Smiths have a lot to answer for their part in helping to fashion a generation of angst-ridden, self-absorbed romantics (in which I include myself.) Either way, nobody does "way over yonder in the minor key" quite like Morrissey, Marr, & co., who built an entire career on the twisted, solipsistic pleasure one comes to take in excessive moping.

What the Smiths perfectly capture in song after song is the narcissism of the whole enterprise. With all the horrible things happening in the world every day to people who don't deserve them, it takes no small amount of self-absorption and lack of perspective to luxuriate in a slough of despond for weeks on end. And yet, we all do it all the time, dwelling on our own petty problems while the world seems to crash and burn -- it's virtually inescapable.

In "A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours," probably my favorite Smiths song (well, along with "This Night Has Opened My Eyes"), the band brings this irony front and center. In the lyrics' biting condescension even in the midst of gloom ("people who are uglier than you and I, they take what they need and just leave"), in the vague disreputability of the land-grab metaphor at the heart of the song ("A rush, a push, and the land that we stand on is ours! It has been before, so why can't it be now?"), and in Morrissey's trademark wailing, swooning, and growling, "A Rush, A Push, and the Land Is Ours" captures both the varied emotions and uglier facets of heartache that will attend all too many of us this holiday Wednesday. (Also, courtesy of Youtube, here's what appears to be the vintage video.)

However you stand on this Valentine's Day, have a safe and a happy one out there, as always. (And, as I noted last year, if you want more music, Fluxblog does the mp3blog thing day in and day out, and is considerably better at it than I am. And Max of Lots of Co. offers choice dance/techno/pop mixes around the start of every month.)

Hey Jude, don't make it weird: A Paullish Jim Sturgess and Thirteen's Evan Rachel Wood fall head over heels in love during the always-turbulent Sixties in the new trailer for Julie Taymor's Beatlepalooza Across the Universe. Hopefully, it comes off better than The Times They-Are A Changin'. (And where's Clarence?)

Need a boost to help shake off the winter doldrums? Lots of Co. points the way to this end-of-2006 collection of fun, downloadable mash-ups.

The freewheelin' Bob Dylan has a lot to answer for in this intermittently amusing Post Show send-up of Dylan's No Direction Home. Admittedly, this guy's singing-Bob impression is pretty funny. (By way of Tes.)

Are Sting, Stewart Copeland, and Andy Summer reuniting for a 2007 Police tour? It still sounds pretty speculative in this article, but I'd go, as long as they stick to the classic material and don't play anything later than Sting's first, decent solo album. If I see "Fields of Gold" or any of the other easy listening stuff on the setlists, I'm taking a walk (as, I suspect, would Copeland.)

"Gentlemen don't get caught, cages under cage." Congrats to Athens' finest, R.E.M., who will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this March, in the first year of their eligibility. The rest of the class of 2007 includes Van Halen, Patti Smith, Patti Smith, The Ronettes, and the Hall's first rappers, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. (By way of WebGoddess.)

"I checked up on the late great J.B., His death is said on national TV..." Alas, James Brown is dead, 1933-2006.

"The pistols are poppin' and the power is down, I'd like to try somethin' but I'm so far from town..." Ok, I'll admit it -- I reupped for more time, to catch up on political news. And, while doing so, I discovered that Slate, of all places, is not only premiering Bob Dylan's new video for Thunder on the Mountain, which is chock-full of vintage Dylan footage, but offering a chance to win a guitar signed by the man himself. Cool...but is it strung lefty?

"When U2's songs weren't on-the-nose political anthems, they were vague but heroically uplifting -- filled with signifiers but signifying nothing. Whereas R.E.M. songs, drenched in Southern detail, allusive and elusive, sounded like fables or folk wisdom, U2's majestic uplift often felt like the outtakes of a melodically gifted youth-group minister." Ted of The Late Adopter sends along this side-by-side comparison of R.E.M. and U2 from Slate. I like them both, but, if forced to choose, definitely come down on the R.E.M. side of things. And I'd disagree with this guy's periodization -- I much prefer the most recent R.E.M. album to U2's last few discs of self-referential "instant-classic-rock," and thought U2 were actually at their best during their Achtung Baby/Zooropa/Pop experimentation phase. Still, worth a read.

Found while looking for an online version of the recent Rolling Stone story on Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (which includes a shot of Cate Blanchett as the Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan), writer Jonathan Lethem picks out some forgotten Dylan gems as a sidebar to his recent cover story on Modern Times.

So, my sister, her boyfriend, and I went to check out The Times They Are A-Changin', the new Twyla Tharp-choreographed reimagining of famous Bob Dylan songs, last Thursday (with, as a star-gazing aside, some heavy-hitters in attendance: Annie Leibowitz sat directly in front of me, and Tharp herself sat directly behind. Yes, I'm a celebrity hound.) And the verdict? Well, first let me say, that -- some early dabbling in community-theater notwithstanding -- I'm really not much of a musical guy. I tend to find the American Idol-ish histrionics of Broadway singing really distracting, and particularly when the song in question is something like "Masters of War." Nor have I seen Moving Out, Mamma Mia!, Ring of Fire, Almost Heaven or any of the other "Broadway Karaoke" shows that currently seem to be the rage, so I can't really compare it to any of the others -- I was really more interested to see some intriguing interpretations of Dylan than I was to partake in a group sing-a-long (which, thankfully, Times is not.) With all that said, I found Times to be...kinda hit-or-miss. While some of the visions here do their source material justice in memorable fashion, others fall flat or just seem ill-conceived. And, while the circus acrobatics on display are amazingly well-performed and at times mesmerizing, too many numbers slip into the same dark carnival-of-the-absurd pattern. The cast works hard, but surely, when you get down to it, there is more to Dylan's oeuvre than just aggro carny folk.

To its credit, Times samples songs from across Dylan's career, from the hoary ("The Times They-Are A Changin'," "Blowing in the Wind") to the obscure ("Man Gave Names to All the Animals," "Please, Mrs. Henry"), through the lean years ("I Believe in You," "Dignity") and up to the recent critical revival ("Not Dark Yet," "Summer Days.") Set in a traveling circus run by the vicious, heavy-handed Captain Ahrab (Thom Sesma) -- a character from one of Dylan's great American fables,"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," not included -- the play basically centers around a love triangle among Ahrab, his son Coyote (Michael Arden), and the lady Cleo (Lisa Brescia), one of the circus performers. Through their story -- and the larger tale of a power struggle over the circus -- are refracted these thirty or so Dylan tunes, strung togther in haphazard but decently compelling fashion.

I'd like to say there's a formula for when a song works and when it doesn't, but it doesn't go over like that. One of the two best numbers, "Simple Twist of Fate" (the only cut from Blood on the Tracks here), is played basically straight. Alone in spotlight, Ahrab sings wistfully in the foreground (as seen at left) while the younger couple cavorts behind him, a haunting memory. "He woke up, the room was bare. He didn't see her anywhere. He told himself he didn't care, pushed the window open wide. Felt an emptiness inside, to which he just could not relate." The bleak, melancholic staging matches the song perfectly, and Ahrab/Sesma channels both its poetry and its pain.

But, in the other most successful number, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (a song I can usually take or leave), Tharp & co. have taken a tune that's ostensibly about a drug deal and just ran with it. Now, it's a gripping, Bergmanesque dance of death, with one of the sadder clowns (Charlie Neshyba-Hodges) holding center stage as the ensemble circles around him in black, recalling the doomed pilgrims of The Seventh Seal. Obviously, Tharp isn't the first to read "Tambourine Man" as a disquisition on mortality. ("I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade...into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.") Nevertheless, the staging both feels innovative and cuts close to the bone of the song in surprising fashion.

There are other good moments scattered throughout the show, although few that hold their power over the course of an entire track: For example, a contortionist writhes horribly on a hospital bed during the "Dr. Filth" passage of "Desolation Row," flashlights whirl and twirl (held by people brandishing them vaguely like tusken raiders) during "Knocking on Heaven's Door", the cast memorably get their drink on for "Please, Mrs. Henry," and one clown reenacts Dylan's "Subterranean" signage during the latter half of "Like a Rolling Stone."

But, when a song's off, it's pretty off. The most obvious offenders are "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Blowing in the Wind," and arguably "Lay, Lady, Lay," all of which are performed in a deadly earnest Broadway patter that just stop the show dead. (This is particularly unfortunate in the case of the first one, since that's how the show begins.) But, there are other problems. The bizarre welcome-to-the-carnival-of-beasties routine works well for "Desolation Row" (since, after all, "The circus is in town") and maybe even for other rousing numbers such as "Like a Rolling Stone." But, it's overdone -- in "Highway 61 Revisited," "Everything is Broken," "Gotta Serve Somebody," "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" -- to the point that the musical numbers become indistinguishable. ("Masters of War" also falls somewhat into this pattern -- I liked it better than most, but was reminded more of ABT's splendid recent revival of "The Green Table," which captured the same sentiment better.)

And, sometimes, in my humble opinion, the attempted interpretation falls flat on its face. I thought turning "Not Dark Yet," Dylan's gloomy but resigned rumination on death around the corner, into a rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light completely misses the point of the song, which is that he's given up and given in to the coming darkness. ("I've been down on the bottom of a world full of lies. I ain't looking for nothing in anyone's eyes.")

Most egregious in this regard is what's been done to "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." Perhaps because it remains such a personal song -- a song about two people rather than a generation -- I'd say it's aged much better than almost all of the other hugely popular early-Dylan standards ("Blowing in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.") In fact, I might go so far as to say that "Don't Think Twice" may just be the quintessential Dylan break-up song in a career full of them (although now that I write that...Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks...ok, never mind. That's too bold a statement.) At any rate, here, all the complexity of competing emotions that drives the track -- "I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind, you could have done better but I don't mind, you just kinda wasted my precious time" -- is wasted, as it's become, inexplicably, a number sung by a woman to her overly eager dog. (Although I will concede that the canine in question -- I believe it was Jason McDole -- was convincingly and creepily Berkeley-like.)

In sum, A Times They Are A-Changin' is at times engaging, and may be worth catching if you have a hankering for the carnivalesque, if you're a Dylan completist, or if you have a higher tolerance for showtune renditions than I do. But, as an exploration of Dylanalia, I found the show too narrowly circumscribed within its three-ring circus, and ultimately unsatisfying. (Then again, in the play's defense, I didn't think much of Masked and Anonymous either, so perhaps I'm just ornery about such things.)

Original drummer Bill Berry returned to R.E.M. for a few short sets this past week to honor their new place in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame (and longtime blogger Eric of Kestrel's Nest even caught a show at the 40 Watt.) But will he stick around?

Is it any wonder I reject you first? David Bowie rips up Ricky Gervais on Extras. And, while I'm snarfing arch Youtube links from Ed Rants, see also Kirk and Spock get "Closer," in the Trent Reznor sense. (Some profanity...but you've probably heard the song by now.)

As part of his Modern Times publicity blitz, Bob Dylan hawks iPods in a new commercial. Call him a sell-out, but, hey, things have changed. And besides, I have no real problem with iPods...or lingerie, for that matter. And, also in recent Dylanalia, Louis Menand reviews Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews for The New Yorker (courtesy of Ralph Luker at Cliopatria.)

"I hate to break it to Justin Timberlake, but a wheezy old man has recorded the best make-out songs of 2006. Put Modern Times in the CD player, pull your sweetheart close, and -- as a young man advised a lifetime or so ago -- shut the light, shut the shade." Also in Slate, Jody Rosen swoons over Bob Dylan's new album, which I'm listening to for the first time right this minute. So far, it sounds like a more accessible version of Love and Theft...I think I kinda dig it.

He's a smooth operator, it's time we cut him down to size. The indignities of dial-up being what they are, I have yet to see the whole thing. Still, this Monty Python-ish and Dubya'ed up remix video for Depeche Mode's version of "John the Revelator" seems worth a look-see, DM fan or no. Update: Thanks to a brief and random wireless connection, I watched it all. (Poor Tony Blair.) Ok, the Revelations bit at the end is a bit shrill, and Afghanistan is not Iraq, but I did like the crusader outfit and particularly the 7x7x7 cube of lies.

Some amusing links via other blogs: Pureboredom offers an appreciation of John Hughes soundtracks, with a number of worthy mp3s available for download (via Freakgirl), and Webgoddess points the way to this slew of decently funny motivational posters. We're going to need more monkeys.

"What we do understand, if we're listening, is that we're three albums into a Dylan renaissance that's sounding more and more like a period to put beside any in his work. If, beginning with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan garbed his amphetamine visions in the gloriously grungy clothes of the electric blues and early rock & roll, the musical glories of these three records are grounded in a knowledge of the blues built from the inside out...Dylan offers us nourishment from the root cellar of American cultural life. For an amnesiac society, that's arguably as mind-expanding an offering as anything in his Sixties work. And with each succeeding record, Dylan's convergence with his muses grows more effortlessly natural." In the new Rolling Stone and on the eve of Modern Times (due out this Tuesday), author Jonathan Lethem interviews Bob Dylan. (Via Ed Rants.)

"I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be, I been looking for her even clean through Tennessee." Dylanologists, get your pencils ready: Word is Bob namedrops Alicia Keys on the first track of his new album, Modern Times, due out August 29.

I'm a bit late in hearing this excellent news: Bob Dylan's 44th album, Modern Times (and his first album of original material since Love & Theft, released on 9/11) comes out next month: August 29, to be exact. Tracks include "Thunder on the Mountain," "Spirit on the Water," "When the Deal goes Down," and "Beyond the Horizon."

And if you survive till two thousand and five, I hope you're exceedingly thin. For if you are stout you will have to breathe out while the people around you breathe in...Shine on, Syd Barrett, 1946-2006.

By way of Ed Rants, and along with several quality links about early American popular music, Folded Space posts twenty mp3s (in the public domain) of Progressive Era musical hits, including "Come Josephine in my Flying Machine," "That Haunting Melody," "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny," and "Over There."

Salute him when his birthday comes...a very happy 65 to the freewheelin' Bob Dylan. May your heart always be joyful, may your songs always be sung. Update: My fellow Americans: The State of the Dylan is strong.

Quiddity points the way to some offbeat rumors concerning the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's forthcoming Marie Antoinette: "An unofficial soundtrack listing has been floating around the internet, claiming that in addition to the Bow Wow Wow songs ["I Want Candy," "Fools Rush In"], the movie also features music from Gang of Four, Windsor for the Derby, Radio Dept., Aphex Twin, Air, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, New Order (whose 'Age of Consent' appears in the trailer), Squarepusher, Adam and the Ants, the Strokes, and Phoenix."

This is why events unnerve me...By way of Ed Rants, the new trailer for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is out, and it maintains the New Order conceit of the teaser. (Although this time the background ditty is "Ceremony," not Age of Consent.")

"The Grail Stakeholder will be allowed one sip from the vessel of a beverage of the Grail Stakeholder's choosing, which beverage to be provided by the Grail Stakeholder at the Grail Stakeholder's sole expense. The Grail Stakeholder may thereby gain eternal life and the healing of all physical ailments. However, because the Grail Finders cannot be held responsible for the mysterious powers of the Grail and all that, the Grail Finders shall not be held responsible for any failure on the part of the Holy Grail to give eternal life to the Grail Stakeholder, or to alleviate physical ailments, and the Grail Stakeholder hereby warrants to make no claims of any kind against the Grail Finders in the event of such failure." Looking for a long-term investment? Here's your chance to own a 2% equity share in the Holy Grail, courtesy of punk rocker and Grail-seeker Rat Scabies. (As sent along by my friend Aimee.)

According to Dark Horizons, Heath Ledger will replace Colin Farrell as Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' forthcoming Bob biopic I'm Not There. Purportedly also playing Dylan in the film are Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Richard Gere, and Julianne Moore.

"Don't call it a comeback, he been here for years, rocking his peers, putting 'em in fear, making tears rain down like a monsoon, explosions overpowerin', over the competition LL Cool J is towering. LL Cool J -- stands for Ladies Love Cool J." On the eve of the premiere of his new XM "Theme Time Radio Hour" (which premieres Wednesday,) Bob Dylan shares some of his early show playlists (organized around themes such as the weather, mothers, drinking, and cars) and his on-air comments about some favorite selections.

Man, you should have seen them kicking Scott McClellan. In related news, "I'm the Decider," to the tune of I am the Walrus." (Where did I find this? The walrus was Paul.)

Big doings in our lively little village: Friday night, I caught one of rock's greatest and most influential ironists, the inimitable Ray Davies of the Kinks, in town for a weekend stand at Irving Plaza. A spirited and well-preserved 61 (Having gone to so many Dylan shows, where Bob has settled into a late-period rasp behind the keyboards, I'm always surprised to remember that time has been kinder to many of Dylan's contemporaries), Davies offered up two sets of rollicking good ditties ranging all the way back to 1964's seminal breakthrough "You Really Got Me." Here's the setlist:

Set One: I'm Not Like Everyone Else | Where Have All The Good Times Gone | Till the End of the Day | After the Fall | 20th Century Man | Oklahoma U.S.A. | Village Green | Picture Book | Animal Farm | Johnny Thunder | Sunny Afternoon | Dead End Street | Apeman | Next Door Neighbor | Creatures of Little Faith | Over My Head | The Tourist | Low Budget

Set Two: Stand-Up Comic | Things Are Gonna Change (The Morning After) | A Long Way from Home | The Getaway (Lonesome Train) | Tired of Waiting for You | Set Me Free | All Day and All of the Night

Encore: You Really Got Me | Lola

All in all, a very fun evening. Looking quite a bit like Jonathan Pryce these days (particularly in his Miss Saigon period), Davies enlivened the older-leaning, fan-heavy crowd with mid-song banter and fraternally condescending anecdotes about his Kinks companion and younger brother Dave. ("He's still a big kid, really.") To be honest, I'd would've preferred to hear less of the early Brit-Pop standards and more of Davies' grimly funny ballads of class and character. (For example, "Shangri-La", "A Well-Respected Man", "Dedicated Follower of Fashion", "Celluloid Heroes", or "Waterloo Sunset") But, with a back catalog as long and rich as Davies' (and a new album to promote), there are always going to be songs you don't get to hear on a given night. (And besides, the one-two punch of "Sunny Afternoon" and "Dead End Street" was a nice, wry combo of essential Davies.)

Hush, my darling, don't fear, my darling, the Lindas have been done right. By way of Ed Rants, Vidiot tells the story of Solomon Linda and his 1939 hit song, "Mbube" (a.k.a., "The Lion Sleeps Tonight,") for which his family has -- at last -- been paid.

"In his conversation with Robert Kennedy, King refused to heed an appeal for moderation: 'I am different from my father. I feel the need of being free now.' This impatience for freedom, acted out by the courageous young Freedom Riders, helped propel a reluctant America at least part of the way down the road to racial justice." In the same NYT Book Review as the Brinkley piece posted on Monday, Columbia's Eric Foner favorably reviews Raymond Arsenault's Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. And, also in history news, the AP profiles historian, Dylanologist, and recent Bancroft winner Sean Wilentz. "There isn't much that's gone wrong with the country's institutions that a good election can't cure. Or a few good elections. So I have a kind of willful optimism."

True, a day as nice as today should really be spent outside. That being said, it's hard to come up with a better "first-day-of-spring" movie than the wickedly funny, rousingly optimistic hip-hop concert flick Dave Chappelle's Block Party, directed by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's Michel Gondry. Chronicling a September 2004 shindig thrown in Bedstuy and featuring performances by Kanye West, Common, Mos Def & Talib Kweli, Dead Prez, Cody Chestnutt, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, The Roots (w/ oldschoolers Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap), and the reunited Fugees, Block Party bounces with cool, infectious verve and power-to-the-people, DIY exhilaration. In short, this movie just brings a smile to your face. (Yeah, ok, it definitely helps to have an appreciation for hip-hop, but as this movie points out, you may have one and not even know it.)

For those of you anxiously awaiting Season 3 of Chappelle's Show, be heartened: This is Chappelle's show. Be he ambling through his Ohio hometown doling out "Golden Tickets" to unsuspecting passers-by, tooling around Brooklyn hyping the event ("Attention, Huxtables!"), or MC'ing the Bedstuy proceedings with a deft, light-hearted touch (and a James Brown rimshot), Chappelle's wry irreverence and broad, encompassing good humor are contagious. Often, it seems, he can't believe his luck at becoming the jester-king of Brooklyn for a day, and he grounds and permeates the film with his antic enthusiasm and sardonic, puckish charm.

And then there are the performances. From Kanye West amping up "Jesus Walks" with the aid of the Central State University band, to Def & Kweli jamming over "Umi Says", to Dead Prez getting PE/KRS-1-righteous with "Turn Off Your Radio," to sirens Erykah Badu and Jill Scott dueling over The Roots' "You Got Me," to Lauryn Hill's sultry, heartfelt "Killing Me Softly," Block Party definitely delivers the goods in terms of the hip-hop. All the performances are infused with enough energy and momentum to get the whole theater audience jumping. (Slightly off-topic, when I was ten years old, I was pretty sure the coolest guy in the world was Han Solo. Now that I'm an older and wiser 31, I have to concede that, that GMC Denali ad notwithstanding, it may just be Mos Def. And, speaking of Def, his "straight-man" (a la Ed McMahon) sounds a lot like Ford Prefect.)

In the end, after all the jokes, beats, and rhymes, two hip-hop truths emerge from Dave Chappelle's Block Party: "Life is a funny, unpredictable thing," as Chappelle puts it at one point. And, as many others -- both rap superstars and ordinary people like you and me -- come to point out throughout the film, this world is what you make it, so do something good and have some fun out there, y'all.

Capitalizing on the computer world they live in (and life in general), Depeche Mode recut their latest single, "Suffer Well," in Simslish for The Sims 2: Open For Business.

Also in music news, the freewheelin' Bob Dylan is in the studio working on his 31st studio album (and the follow-up to 2001's Love and Theft.) "Work...began early this month with four days of rehearsals with his touring band at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie, New York. The crew have now moved to Manhattan to record the songs." And, for the Springsteen fans out there, the story also reports that the Boss is currently cutting an album of Pete Seeger covers, The Seeger Sessions.

"This'll be the last time (I think I said that last time.)" As DYFL, Lots of Co, and Quiddity have all pointed out, this week's free download at iTunes is the quintessentially catchy "Ooh La La" by Goldfrapp. Get it while you can. And, while the Depeche Mode setlists have been relatively static this tour, as per the norm, Martin Gore unearthed an old chestnut from 1982's A Broken Frame (right-click to save) last night for their third night in Paris. Booyah! Hopefully, this'll be part of the main set when they swing back stateside this spring.

"America, your head's too big, because, America, your belly's too big, and I love you, I just wish you'd stay where you is." Oops...watch yourself, Morrissey. On the eve of a new album, the former Smiths frontman says the FBI and British Intelligence have come 'round his door.

"The problem with Bob Marley in white America is one of perspective. Many of Marley's songs are about resistance and violent revolution. The threat implicit in the lines 'Them belly full but we hungry/ A hungry mob is an angry mob' or the song 'Burnin' and Lootin'' isn't too far from the surface. But lyrics about armed resistance make America's secular-progressive middle classes -- those most responsible for the cult of Marley as a cuddly 'One Love' Rastafarian -- uneasy." Contending that "[l]istening to Legend to understand Marley is like reading Bridget Jones's Diary to get Jane Austen.," Slate's Field Mahoney argues the merits of Bob Marley's back catalog, and suggests that US fans tend to overemphasize the stoner and underemphasize the revolutionary.

Happy Valentine's Day. In keeping with a GitM tradition started last year, and since y'all out there, dear readers, are once again my Valentines for the day whether you like it or not (I long ago stopped delving into personal detail around these parts -- Suffice to say that, my fellow Americans, the State of the Love Life is, um, not good. In fact, like those pesky WMD, its existence has been almost entirely theoretical for some time...Ah, well.) -- I've thrown up more tunes for your holiday perusal. At any rate, as per the usual mp3blog rules: the files will be only up for a day or two, right-click to save them, and please don't link to them directly. Otherwise, enjoy!

For sundry reasons involving the Internet Age, Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" has taken on all kinds of ulterior meanings since it first debuted on 1981's Computer World, when 300 baud modems ("I call this number for a data date") and TRS-80s operating on tape decks were the order of the day. When these German electronica pioneers weren't creating the music of the future, it seems, they were presciently anticipating our current era of Instant Messaging, online dating sites, and the like. Still, its newer resonances notwithstanding, I've always found something giddily innocent about this track. While the lyrics suggest a much more downbeat affair, the chirps and whistles in this song never fail to bring a big goofy grin to my face -- particularly in this clubbier 1991 remix version, when those syncopated synths take off like a bird in flight. There are some songs that just make ya happy, no matter what -- for me, this is one of those.

Computerlove -- Kraftwerk (6.2MB, 6:37)
(song removed)
From The Mix.

[Update:]

As I've wrote in this review of Ultra years ago, Depeche Mode is a band that's been misunderstood and misunderestimated by a lot of people here in America. Which is not to say they're some hidden secret -- obviously, they're one of the biggest bands in the world, and have had a huge US following for decades now.

Still, even today, in the reviews of DM's recent Playing the Angel, rock critics trod out the doom-and-gloom "Depressed Mode" copy that's been circulating since at least 1986's Black Celebration. But they miss the point. Very few DM songs -- Ok, "Satellite," from A Broken Frame is one -- are out-and-out depressing in the way, say, most Nine Inch Nails songs are. Rather, almost all of the songs on Black Celebration, one of my Desert Island discs, work in the same groove, including this one, "Here is the House." As one review of "Enjoy the Silence" summed it up, it's "me and you against the world."

Yes, Celebration argues, this earth can be a cruel, unrelenting place, filled with misfortune and disappointment. But, maybe, just maybe, you and I can rise above all that, and together light a candle that'll warm us both through another unforgiving night. In sum, DM's best romantic ballads aren't depressing so much as poignant and ever-so-slightly hopeful. I'll be the first to admit that the band has come close to over-mining this particular mode after 25 years, but still, when they do it right, it's a thing of beauty. (Also, since I'm sure a lot of people out there already have this song in their collection, I've also posted Martin's early demo version, which actually fits the song really well in a lo-fi Magnetic Fields kinda way.)

Here is the House -- Depeche Mode (4.1MB, 4:19)
Bonus Track: Here is the House (Demo) -- Martin Gore (4.3MB, 4:35)
(songs removed)
Original version on Black Celebration.

[Update:]

I had a hard time figuring out which song I wanted to post from Peter Gabriel's sublime rumination on romance, Us (1992), 'cause almost every song -- particularly on the A-side -- is a certifiable classic. (A younger friend of mine once musically conflated Gabriel's oeuvre with that of his Genesis bandmate Phil Collins, which almost drove me to apoplexy. I mean, I don't hate Phil Collins or anything, but, c'mon now -- Gabriel is a lot more than just "Sledgehammer," and even "Sledgehammer" isn't "Susudio.")

In the end, I opted for this cut of "Blood of Eden" from Wim Wender's Until the End of the World (which for some odd reason was left off that otherwise great soundtrack.) The Us version is disarmingly beautiful, but the lack of Sinead O'Connor's backing vocals here lend the track a different resonance.

On the album, you can actually hear "the union of the woman and the man" in O'Connor and Gabriel's lush harmony, but here, with Gabriel plaintive and alone, it's just a fading memory, the echo of happier times. And yet, at certain moments (such as in the bridge), the memories come flooding back. "The blood of eden keeps rushing through me, when I'm sure there's none that remains." With love in the rear-view mirror, disappearing over the horizon, Pete still has the echoes of the past to keep him keepin' on.

Blood of Eden (Wim Wenders Version) -- Peter Gabriel (6.2MB, 6:40)
(song removed)
From Blood of Eden (Single).

[Update: The Wim Wenders version is hard to find on the tubes, but below is the original version with Sinead O'Connor.]

Speaking of which, nobody does keep-on-keepin'-on like its coiner, the inimitable Bob Dylan. From "Don't Think Twice" to "Like a Rolling Stone" and Blood on the Tracks to Time out of Mind, one of Bob's career trademarks has been the post-mortem relationship song. Some are angry and vindictive, some are haunted, some are jaunty and could care less, some are resigned and reflective, some are (love)sick with remorse and regret. There are so many great songs that could have gone here, but I ended up choosing "Most of the Time," from the somewhat underappreciated Oh Mercy (1989), the forerunner to Dylan's recent revival. In this song, Bob's basically got his act together and has moved on from an old love...most of the time. In direct contrast to Gabriel in "Eden," the past here is treacherous. ("Most of the time, I can't even be sure, if she was ever with me or if I was ever with her.") Dylan's learned to live with his scars, but at any moment -- a passing haircut, a fleeting remembrance, a scent of perfume in the air -- and he is undone once again, as if it were yesterday. After all, even for a guy like Bob Dylan, who once seemed to carry the weight of the world as if it were nothing, you don't get very far in life without some ghosts in the machine.

Most of the Time -- Bob Dylan (4.5MB, 5:03)
(song removed)
From Oh Mercy.

[Update:]

Ok, hopefully five tunes won't kill my bandwidth...Have a safe and happy Valentine's Day out there, y'all. (And, as a side note, if you're looking for more quality music, be sure to check out the splendiferous Fluxblog almost-daily, and don't miss out on the Max Music Mixes every month at Lots of Co.)

"Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I'd never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God." A very happy 250th birthday to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (And, just to be fair to that patron saint of mediocrity, Salieri turns 256 in August.)

Wonder upon wonders, SNL actually had a decently funny sketch the other night (at least if you're both fanboy and Beastie-inclined): Lazy Sunday (a.k.a. The Chronic!-les of Narnia)...cause Mr. Pibb & Red Vines = crazy delicious. Update: It's a phenomenon.

Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine, and Bob's in...the DJ booth? Apparently Dylan will host his own show on XM Radio beginning in March. "Dylan will offer regular commentary on music and other topics, host and interview special guests including other artists and will take emails from XM subscribers."

From the Age of Consent to the Age of Revolution comes this spiffy new trailer for Sofia Coppola's biopic of that monument of '80's excess, Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, and Asia Argento. Somehow, I don't think the real Marie Antoinette had much love for (the) New Order.

Big concert week in these parts: After Goldfrapp on Monday, the inimitable Depeche Mode held their Garden stand. (A happy confluence: I've seen DM several times over the past fifteen years, but never right under the Knicks championship banners.) The openers this time 'round were The Bravery, a spirited New York outfit who are basically a synth-friendlier version of Franz Ferdinand or The Strokes. They played most of the songs off their solid first album, including "Public Service Announcement," "Fearless," "An Honest Mistake," "Give In," and (my personal fave) "Tyrant." Then, the main act:

The Setlist: A Pain That I'm Used To / John the Revelator / A Question of Time / Policy of Truth / Precious / Walking In My Shoes / Suffer Well / Damaged People (Macro) / Home / I Want It All / The Sinner In Me / I Feel You / Behind The Wheel / World In My Eyes / Personal Jesus / Enjoy The Silence


1st Encore: Somebody (A Question of Lust) / Just Can't Get Enough / Everything Counts

2nd Encore Never Let Me Down Again / Goodnight Lovers

So, as you can see, their new album -- Playing the Angel -- was featured heavily in the first half of the show. While I like Angel a good deal, and DM's anti-Dubya screed "John the Revelator" has the makings to be a stadium-shaking call-and-response showstopper akin to "Personal Jesus" and "NLMDA," I'd say some of the album's best songs haven't yet found their legs live. "Precious" is their best single since "Enjoy the Silence," IMHO, but it sounded a bit washed-out at MSG (perhaps partly because Martin plays the keyboard hook on guitar. "The Sinner in Me" had a similar problem -- that inexorable stalker-beat that drives the track should've been much, much louder.) And "I Want it All" never really gets going, particularly coming as it does after "Home," which is Martin at his most saccharine. (Frankly, I would have taken pretty much any other Mart-track in the catalogue over it.)

But, right around halftime, with the surprisingly good version of "I Feel You," the show turned into a hit parade, with the band pulling out all the stops to get the crowd -- who, like me, are getting a mite long in the tooth these days -- up and dancing. "Personal Jesus" (with Pump Mix), "Enjoy the Silence," "NLMDA" (with Aggro), "Everything Counts"...heck, they even dusted off "Just Can't Get Enough." Ok, sure, it'd have been nice to hear some obscure gem like "Get the Balance Right," "Monument," or "Ice Machine," but the hits are hits for a reason, and all of 'em have been honed over years of live play into remarkable feats of showmanship. (My own geek-out moment was at the double-beat start of "Behind the Wheel" -- I'd looked at the setlists before going, but had completely forgotten that it was in there.)

All in all, a grand show. Ok, Dave Gahan probably still overdoes the sing-along thing (particularly this far into the tour), but, on the flip side, he seemed happy, healthy, and energetic. I caught 'em on the back half of the Devotional tour in '94, and Dave was on auto-destruct, flubbing songs and boozing with abandon. Now, though, DM look to be in top form and in bright spirits...well, as bright as their spirits get.

Oh, one more thing: lose the "giant orb of gloom," as the NY Post dubbed it. Over on the left side of the stage, the band had a big ball looking almost exactly like ET's mothership, which flashed words -- "guilt" "dissipate," "suffering" -- appropriate to a given song. Other than the timer on "AQOT" and the stock ticker on "Everything Counts," it was almost inevitably goofy. At best, it shows somebody backstage has a thesaurus; at worst, it's self-parody. (And, truth be told, the its/it's grammatical error during "The Sinner in Me" was driving me nuts.)

As a nightcap to Kong (who, as it turns out, was sitting outside the venue) yesterday evening, I caught Goldfrapp for their only US performance (although they're rumored to be touring here in 2006) at the surprisingly spacious new Nokia Theatre in Times Square (it used to be a mega-sized theater...I saw Titanic there back in the day.) All in all, an excellent show -- Allison's voice sounded studio-perfect and their sultry electrobeat bounce really filled the room:

The (Supernature-heavy) Setlist: Train / Tiptoe / Koko / Slide In / Number 1 / U Never Know / Lovely Head / Fly Me Away / Satin Chic / Beautiful / Ride A White Horse (a particular highlight) / Ooh La La

Encore: Strict Machine / Black Cherry

The stage show (if you don't count the Jesus lookalike playing synth-violin) basically involved two dancers writhing in various costumes: as bikini-clad werewolves in "Train" ("Wolflady sucks my brain"), glittering horses in "Ride the White Horse," spidery green winged-things for "Strict Machine," and so on. Meanwhile, the comparatively demure Ms. Goldfrapp, looking a bit like Debbie Harry in a dark pantsuit, held court at center stage, and she sounded amazing. (Damiella/Dream Out Loud has posted some pics. If you invert the angle and add a few more heads, you basically get the show from my perspective on the right side of the room, where I'd fallen in with fellow bloggers Chris/Do You Feel Loved and Matt/Fluxblog.) At any rate, if they come to your town, check 'em out (and preferably in a spacious venue like the Nokia Theatre -- you'll want room to bop and dance.)

Ground Control to Major Tom: So Michael Caine won't be Nikola Tesla in Chris Nolan's The Prestige (also with Christian Bale & Hugh Jackman)...That's part's gone to the inimitable David Bowie, who's been basically out of the film scene since Basquiat in 1996. Now that's fun casting.

While there's no one hard and fast rule to a good artist biopic (and, indeed, last week's Capote belies to some extent what I'm about to say), it should capture what's innovative and idiosyncratic about its subject, and help to explain why we should care about their artistry. And, while James Mangold's reasonably entertaining Walk the Line has its moments, and Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon are both excellent, I ultimately found this movie somewhat frustrating. For, except for occasional flashes, the movie, I think, misses the chance to do Johnny Cash justice -- you never really get a sense of what was so unique and extraordinary about him. And, even considered solely as the romance of the Man in Black and his long-suffering muse, June Carter (of the fabled Carter Family,) Walk the Line stumbles ever so slightly. If you came into this film knowing nothing about Johnny Cash or June Carter Cash, I'm not sure this movie makes their case. Too often, it follows a standard Behind the Music "rise, drug-addled-fall, and rise again" structure, which makes it feel like it could be about, well, anybody.

To its credit, the film starts off well -- We begin on a chilly day outside Folsom Prison in 1968, as a guard nervously listens to an ominous throb emanating from and through the high, grey walls. Slowly, it resolves into a readily identifiable Cash backbeat, and we go inside to find the Man in Black's band waiting for him to take the jailhouse stage. But Cash is lost in reverie, struck by the sight of a buzzsaw blade in the prison shop room. For a soon-to-be-obvious reason, it takes him back to his boyhood days picking cotton in rural Arkansas, where the sounds of trains going someplace else are always in the distance, and the only respite from the sweltering heat is the voice of young June Carter on the radio. Ok, so far, so good...Mangold has shown that he's not afraid to keep everything a little impressionistic, to color his palette with iconographic Cash-isms and help the man's music breathe through the picture.

Unfortunately, though, most of the film thereafter feels depressingly literal. After apprising us of a childhood tragedy, the film takes us through Cash's early days in the Air Force, his increasingly loveless first marriage to Vivian Liberto (Ginnifer Goodwin, looking like Audrey from Twin Peaks and feeling like a stock biopic trope), his rise to fame, his subsequent addiction to Go Pills, and his ultimate redemption thanks to a good-hearted woman, always there to help out a good-timin' man in his hour(s) of need. This is all capably handled, I guess, but too often it feels rote, in an Insert-Rock-Star-Here kinda way. Worse, aside from one discerning monologue by rock-n-roll impresario Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts) at Cash's first audition, the film never really gets to the bottom of the singer's appeal. We see Cash on his all-star Sun Records tours -- and thus get impersonations of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Carl Phillips, among others -- but the film never explains what was unique about Cash among Phillips' impressive stable of talent. (No Dylan here later on, though...but Cash's close friendship with Bob is explicitly referenced several times, including a timely cover of "It Ain't Me, Babe" and a lively use of "Highway 61"'s police whistle intro.)

In fact, allow me to digress -- one of the many fascinating aspects of the Dylan-Cash camaraderie (also briefly featured in one of the most memorable moments of the recent No Direction Home) is that, aside from a shared affinity for murder ballads and mind-altering substances, they were a study in contrasts, at least in the Sixties. Often, the young Dylan seems impetuous and invincible. Keenly aware of injustice, he nevertheless remains unfazed. He's unrepentant in his anger -- To paraphrase Herbert Croly's colorful description of Theodore Roosevelt, the early Dylan wields righteousness like a hammer, throwing the sins, taunts, and ridicule of this world right back from whence they came. Or, at many of his best moments, he turns his back on it all. Instead, he illuminates our experience by imagining the world anew, conjuring a landscape (what Greil Marcus has called the "invisible republic") that renders both grievous sins and exalted sacraments to be often socially conditional, if not absurd and irrelevant.

But Cash -- Cash can't escape his critics, because his worst critic is himself. Nor can he either simply condemn or intricately reimagine Evil, because he has been Evil's instrument. He's a man of our world -- In fact, he's the Last Man, the Fallen Man. ("But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back, Up front there ought 'a be a Man In Black.") Forget righteousness: Cash's characters are just as cognizant of injustice as Dylan's, but they also know they've done wrongs that can't and never will be forgiven. They've been living desperate for so long they've become resigned to it. They walk the line, because they know what it's like to stray far off the path, and they've paid the price in spades. And their adherence to their creed -- be it a woman, the Savior, or something else, depending on the song -- is all the more heartfelt and admirable because it has been tested, and even broken. In short, Cash has suffered grave consequences, and persevered in spite of them. He's been through the Ring of Fire and out the other side, and his gravelly-delivered tales of guilt and penitence have set the stage for any number of later artists, including Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, and, by no coincidence at all, the older Bob Dylan.

Well, that's my take on Cash, and there are many others (For example, Ed Champion had a nice read on him last week contrasting Cash with Franz Ferdinand.) But, back to the movie -- I barely got any sense of a Cash critique at all in Walk the Line. At best, it assumes you already have an opinion and appreciation of the man coming in, which may be true but still seems like lazy writing. (Or, alternatively, I guess you could say that it attempts to explode the Cash myth -- "He wasn't really a jailbird!" -- but that gets us back into staid Behind the Music territory again.) That being said, the fault with the film is not Joaquin Phoenix's by any means. Admittedly, his singing voice is off -- although, whether it be to his getting better or my brain sorting out the cognitive dissonance -- he improves as the film goes along. But, otherwise, Phoenix goes for it, and despite often seeming physically and vocally far afield from Cash, he delivers a powerful performance from the inside-out. As Dave Edelstein noted, it's hard to watch him wrestle with drug abuse and the memory of his dead brother here and not think of River Phoenix. (If anything, I was reminded of Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's Nixon, which is another brilliant performance, although arguably one that doesn't suggest Tricky Dick to anyone who remembers him.)

Reese Witherspoon is also superb (indeed, award-worthy) as June Carter, who, as in life, I suppose, was both a vivacious stage presence and a model of forbearance. (It's also great to hear a genuine, unaffected southern accent onscreen. Too often, they sound actorly and are off by hundreds of miles -- I'm looking at you, Cold Mountain.) But, the romance at the heart of the film is missing that certain je-ne-sais-quoi. From what little I know about it, Johnny and June Carter Cash are one of those love stories for the ages. She was his angel, his ray of light in the dark (images which the film does try to bring to life.) But, here, and I'm not quite sure exactly who's at fault, Johnny Cash just comes off as a disciple of the mega-creepy Anakin Skywalker school of courting -- i.e., act like a stalker for long enough and eventually she'll come 'round. Again, I don't really blame the actors. They do what they can with what they've got (although perhaps memories of Phoenix's turn as Gladiator's Commodus are partially at fault.) But, to my mind, if the movie tried harder to sell us on Cash's unique artistry, perhaps we'd have a better sense of what June, daughter of an estimable clan of folkies, saw in him. As it is, he just seems like an extremely lucky, albeit talented, amphetamine junkie.

And, to close an overextended review, that's the basic problem with Walk the Line. The parts are all here, but, aside from the occasional flicker of life, the soul of Cash is mostly absent. Perhaps it'd be impossible to do right by him, to capture all the mystique of his music and his persona on celluloid. But, that doesn't make this film any less frustrating. Try as Walk the Line might, the elusive and unforgettable Johnny Cash remains a ghost rider in the sky.

"'Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand, or a decent job or a helpin' hand, Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free, look in their eyes Mom you'll see me.'" By way of Medley, Jon Corzine gets some unsolicited advice on picking the next Senator from New Jersey. After all, the GOP may have the Governator...but we've got the Boss.

In a strange turn of events this late in the game (particularly given this production diary), Howard Shore is off King Kong, to be replaced by James Newton Howard, late of the Batman Begins score. Says PJ: "During the last few weeks, Howard and I came to realize that we had differing creative aspirations...Rather than waste time arguing with a friend and trying to unify our points of view, we decided amicably to let another composer score the film." Well, he was right about Stu Townsend, I suppose.

Bucks Mills Stipe Berry? Original drummer Bill Berry recently returned to R.E.M. for a seven-song wedding set that included "Sitting Still," "Don't Go Back to Rockville," "Wolves, Lower," "Begin the Begin," "The One I Love," "Permanent Vacation" and "Radio Free Europe." Now, that's a right nice wedding gift and no mistake.

So that's why David Brent grooves so remarkably well...apparently, Ricky Gervais of The Office and Extras was in a New Wave band called Seona Dancing. I must say, he looks very Spandau Ballet...but at least he didn't get stuck with the grotesque '80s hair. (Via Quiddity.)

"Have you ever been called home by the clear ringing of silver trumpets?" Alas, for the first time in three years, we don't have a new extended LotR DVD in the works this Christmas. But to ease the pain of its passing, the full, three-disc, 180-minute Fellowship of the Ring score will be released November 22, which will include a DVD-version in 5.1 surround sound. Presumably, the other two films will follow in due course. In the meantime, this site has assembled mp3s of some of the missing musical moments from the trilogy. (Unfortunately, they haven't yet included the culmination of the Rohan theme, as heard during the Ride of the Rohirrim.) I will go there, I will go there...and back again.

AICN posts screen caps of the Episode III DVD's deleted scenes, which seem to include an extended (and more grisly) opening and Yoda's touch-down on Dagobah. Also on the fanboy front, Wired's cover story this month is a discussion with a svelte Peter Jackson on King Kong and KongisKing.Net, with accompanying photo gallery. Is Naomi Watts trying to make a run at Tilda's Nico?

Just a reminder: Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, the Martin Scorsese-assembled documentary that's been getting middling to great reviews, premieres tonight on PBS at 9pm (check local listings.)

"Our generation has envied our elders' experiences more often than we've questioned them. Growing up in the shadow of the '60s, we couldn't help viewing the political involvement of the age as nobler, the culture and the music as more vital, the shattering of social norms more exciting, than the zeitgeist of our own formative years." Slate's David Greenberg invokes popular culture's (and the academy's) rampant Sixties-ism to suggest why post-John Wesley Harding Dylan gets so little love.

As also noted at DYFL, Depeche Mode announce their Fall 2005 tour dates, and they look to be playing the Garden on December 7. (I may also venture out to the Borgata on 12/3...we'll see.) Whatsmore, the full video for "Precious" is now online, and, just as the single has a great throwback feel to it, the video includes several thematic elements -- ship, gears, Dave walking around -- from the Some Great Reward era, and particularly the old, outrageously dated video for "People are People." Hopefully, the rest of the album also measures up as a return to form. (Better video links via Quiddity.)

"As we pulled up in front of the Rollingstone Feed & Grain store, the first-take bootleg album version of the song blasted by chance from the car's CD player. 'Coincidence?' Doc said, hinting that the unseen hand was mine, 'or science?'" Bob fan Steve Dougherty ventures down Highway 61 in search of Dylanalia.

In the trailer bin, Philip Seymour Hoffman channels In Cold Blood-era Truman Capote -- I presume that's how he actually sounded -- in the preview for Capote, also with Catherine Keener and Chris Cooper. Elsewhere, 1880s Aussie Guy Pearce gets an offer he probably should refuse in The Proposition, written by Nick Cave and also starring Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Danny Houston, David Wenham, and Emily Watson. Finally, I should've posted this before, but only now found it: the trailer for Martin Scorsese's Dylan-doc No Direction Home, appearing on PBS Sept. 26th and 27th.

R.I.P. Robert Moog 1934-2005.

From White Witch to Gallic chanteuse, Tilda Swinton gets set to play Nico in a forthcoming biopic scripted by Blade Runner scribes David and Janet Peoples.

The official Bob Dylan site retools for No Direction Home, a 2-hour documentary on Bob circa 1961-1966 and directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. It'll premiere on PBS on 9/26 and 9/27 (and on DVD 9/20), and will be accompanied by a seventh volume in the Bootleg series.

"I see ourselves alongside U2 and R.E.M. more than any of the bands we came up with, although really we don't fit in and we never have, and I've come to embrace that." Dave Gahan and Depeche Mode start up the publicity for Playing the Angel, their new album due out in October. The first single -- "Precious" -- has leaked, and after a couple of listens I already like it better than anything on the last album, with the possible exception of "When the Body Speaks." It's good to hear Dave, Andy, and Marty kicking the old-school synth flavors again.

Here's one I'm actually looking forward to: Joaquin Phoenix channels the Man in Black (with Reese Witherspoon as long-suffering June) in the new trailer for Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic.

"It was unbelievable. They didn't show a lot of what really went on with the enemy attacks and the shelling. There was so much stuff that went on and somehow the tapes got mysteriously misplaced." Jessica Simpson discovers her and husband Nick Lachey's experiences in Iraq have been edited down for carefree consumption. Yep, they keep lyin' when they oughta be truthin'.

Tell me is something eluding you, sunshine? Is this not what you expected to see? Twenty-four years after their last concert together, Roger Waters will reunite with Pink Floyd for Live 8.

Exemplifying MTV's consistent downward spiral since the heady days of Rock the Vote and Randee of the Redwoods (yes, I just dated myself), Nine Inch Nails drops out of a performance at the Movie Awards after the network got nervous about (gasp!) a "partisan political statement." "'We were set to perform "The Hand That Feeds" with an unmolested, straightforward image of George W. Bush as the backdrop. Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me,' Nine Inch Nails' leader Trent Reznor said in a statement posted on the band's Web site." Hmmm. Well, maybe the Breakfast Club will pick up Reznor's standard... (Last link via Freakgirl.)

"'He never missed a single Little League game I had. He's collected every home run ball I ever hit. And he's still affectionate to me.' He paused and smiled. 'Maybe he doesn't want people to know that,' he said. 'But I'll tell you, because it's my interview.'" On the eve of The Wallflowers' fifth album, Jakob Dylan relents and opens up about his famous father.

Bob at the Beacon, Night 3 (for me) [Monday/Tuesday]:

Maggie's Farm / To Ramona / Cry A While / Bye And Bye / Ballad Of Hollis Brown / If You See Her, Say Hello / Lenny Bruce / Honest With Me / The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll / High Water (For Charley Patton) / I Shall Be Released / Highway 61 Revisited

Encore: Po' Boy / All Along The Watchtower

In all honesty, I think this was my least favorite setlist of the three shows (that missed Wednesday gig still haunts me.) Although I did get to hear my favorite song on Love & Theft this time around -- "Cry A While" -- I generally prefer the Time Out of Mind cuts when it comes to the new stuff. Still, the show wasn't a bad one by any means, and while my own personal highlights came early in "Maggie's Farm" and "If you See Her, Say Hello," it was also nice to hear "Hollis," "Hattie," and "I Shall Be Released." (And even after two previous shows, nine of tonight's 14 songs were new to me during this Beacon stand.)

So, that wraps up this leg of the Never-Ending Tour...Next up for Dylan: A ball park summer swing with Willie Nelson, which unfortunately won't be making it to the city. Catch it if you can. (And by the way, if you ever hit up the Beacon for a summer show, dress light. It's a great venue in terms of acoustics and view, but the air flow in there leaves something to be desired.)

Aw, man. Drifter's Escape, Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power), Girl Of The North Country, Tangled Up In Blue, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, and Blind Willie McTell? That's a killer setlist, and no mistake. Monday and Tuesday were both grand, but I hope at least some of these cuts -- particularly Senor and Willie -- show up on Dylan's Saturday night closer. Update: Shelter from the Storm, Love Sick, Not Dark Yet, and Things Have Changed? Bob, you're killing me.

Night #2 of Bob's Beacon Stand:

Tombstone Blues / Love Minus Zero/No Limit / Lonesome Day Blues / This Wheel's on Fire / Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum / John Brown / Under the Red Sky (Listen here) / Highway 61 Revisited / Bye and Bye / Shooting Star (Listen here) / Honest With Me / Masters of War

Encore: Don't Think Twice, It's All Right / All Along the Watchtower

So, only two repeats from last night (Highway 61, Watchtower) in a 14-song setlist...that's not bad at all. Tonight's choices were more esoteric than Monday's show, with "This Wheel's on Fire" and "John Brown" the main standouts in the middle going. "Masters of War" has been given a spooky and even somewhat jarring update -- as my friend Jeremy noted, it's not exactly the type of song you expect to rock out to. And, while I don't think I was as moved in this show as I was by "Visions of Johanna" or "Desolation Row" the night before (the stifling heat in the upper deck cheap seats didn't help), any evening in which you hear the freewheelin' Bob Dylan perform "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" has to go down as a good one.

Unfortunately, we missed Amos Lee this time around. As for Merle & the Strangers, I'd say their setlist was about 50-60% the same, although, Greatest Hits-wise, "Silver Wings" and "Okie from Muskogee" had been replaced by "The Bottle Let Me Down" and "Are the Good Times Really Over." And, on both nights, Haggard has crooned a ditty called something like "Wish I Was Thirty Again," which strikes a favorable chord in this corner.

At any rate, I'll be missing the next two shows, but am greatly looking forward to the last stop of this tour, Saturday night at the Beacon. (Yea, I know three shows is kinda decadent, but tix went on sale the Tuesday morning after Hunter checked out, and it seemed to me then that it's worth catching Dylan as many times as possible if given the opportunity. Two shows into this swing, I'm not regretting my decision at all.)

The Bob Dylan Show's freewheeling week in NYC began here last night at the Beacon Theatre, and it was a doozy. Bob's got two opening acts this time around: First up was Amos Lee, a young guy who seemed pretty talented and exuded a sort of John Mayer/VH1-Storytellers vibe, and his three-piece band. Unfortunately, I arrived late and only caught the tail end of their set, but what I heard sounded pretty good.

Then came Merle Haggard and the Strangers, a well-traveled outfit (according to them, 40 years and running) with -- as my friend Alex pointed out -- the spitting image of Boris Yeltsin on the drums. Haggard & co. offered some old-school, easy-listening, toe-tappin' country...I'm not a fan by any means, but I recognized some of the songs, including "Workin' Man's Blues," "Okie from Muskogee," and a cover of Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable." (Well, it's Merle Haggard...I wasn't expecting "London Calling.") And, despite some stage banter that sounded like it'd been in the can for a really long while (replete with rim-shots), the Strangers offered up a decent hour of countrified ditties that made for a solid, if somewhat quietening, kick-off to the Dylan set.

Finally, at around 9:30 or so, the man of the hour. Dylan's show hasn't changed all that much in the past couple of years, but he's honed further his crack team of back-up musicians, and the stage design -- red velvet curtains, a starry backdrop -- has a choice David Lynch surreality to it this time around. Here's the setlist:

To Be Alone With You /
I'll Be Your Baby Tonight /
It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) /
Visions Of Johanna (listen here) /
Cold Irons Bound /
Moonlight /
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again /
High Water (For Charley Patton) (Listen here) /
Summer Days /
Standing In The Doorway /
Highway 61 Revisited /
Desolation Row

Encore: Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues / All Along The Watchtower

Aside from the occasional harp solo at center stage (during "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" and "Desolation Row," for example), Dylan spent the evening on the keys. His voice is not it what once was, obviously, but I generally get over that by the first song or so -- In fact, on some cuts, like "It's Alright, Ma" or "Watchtower," I actually find Dylan's current raspy, menacing delivery an improvement.

For me, last night's highlights were "Visions of Johanna" and "Desolation Row," both of which remain two of Dylan's most transcendent wordscapes. And the Hendrix-esque closer "All Along the Watchtower," while not really a surprise, just keeps getting better and better -- Bob's now added a very eerie echo-effect to the last couplet ("Outside in the distance / A wildcat did growl / Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howwwwll...") I'm very much looking forward to seeing how he'll top that tonight.

"'This is basically boomer rock 'n' roll and more recent music out of Nashville made for boomers. It's safe, it's reliable, it's loving. What I mean to say is, it's feel-good music. The Sex Pistols it's not.'" Joe Levy of Rolling Stone and the NYT evaluates the content of Dubya's iPod...no real surprises, as you might expect.

By way of my sis, Beyonce Knowles is on the short list to play Bob Dylan (or at least one of his seven incarnations) in Todd Haynes' forthcoming I'm not there: Suppositions On A Film Concerning Dylan. Yeah, I can see it.

By way of Lots of Co. and Webgoddess, Flagpole Magazine picks the 25 Best-Ever R.E.M. Songs. I actually think their list is really good -- and I concur with several of their top pics (including #1), but for the sake of it, here's my own Top 50, at least for the moment. As per Max, the Flagpole ranking is in parentheses. (I did try originally to keep it down to 25, but found I was leaving too many excellent tunes by the wayside. And then the numbering got screwed up and...well, in short, fifty will have to do ya.)

50. "Talk About the Passion": "Not everyone can carry the weight of the world." Anticipating Mel Gibson's filmic use of Aramaic by a good two decades, Michael Stipe chose to conduct his own disquisition about the Passion in French. Combien de temps? I dunno...ask Jefferson.

49. "Let Me In": "I've got tar on my feet and I can't see. All the birds look down and laugh at me, clumsy, crawling out of my skin." A troubled tribute to the late Kurt Cobain, with tortuous waves of feedback threatening to overwhelm Stipe's plaintive delivery at every turn.

48. "The Outsiders": "So am I with you or am I against? I don't think it's that easy -- We're lost in regret." One of R.E.M.'s more accomplished experiments on Around the Sun, and Q-Tip's cameo at the end works much better than KRS-1's similar appearance on "Radio Song."

47. "King of Birds": "Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold, leaves me cold." I remember "King of Birds" being a favorite of mine for a very long time. But it's slipped in recent years, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on...perhaps it's the droning D chord. At any rate, it's a quality tune regardless.

46. "Nightswimming" (2): "You, I thought I knew you. You I cannot judge." Like "King of Birds," "Nightswimming" is an undeniably bewitching song...but for some reason it hasn't aged well with me. It's much better than, say, "Everybody Hurts" on the same album, and nowhere near as schmaltzy as "Strange Currencies" or "At My Most Beautiful," but still -- right now it's just off my radar.

45. "Gardening at Night" (19): "I see your money on the floor, I felt the pocket change though all the feelings that broke through that door just didn't seem to be too real." Early and elegant, "Gardening at Night" still holds up almost 25 years after the fact...If only college rock was still this captivating.

44. "First We Take Manhattan" (20): "Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win. You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline." Besides being a band for the ages, R.E.M. also has impeccable taste in covers, as illustrated by their crunchy take on Leonard Cohen's dark, swelling "First We Take Manhattan." (Other excellent covers that could have gone here are U2's "One," Lulu's "To Sir With Love," Mary Black's "My Youngest Son Came Home Today," and Sinead O'Connor's "Last Day of Our Acquaintance," but I disqualified them 'cause they're usually Stipe-centric and bereft of the entire quartet.)

43. "You are the Everything" (16): "Here's a scene: You're in the back seat, laying down. The windows wrap around to the sound of the travel and the engine." It loses some points for the "teeth in your mouth" bit, but still, one of R.E.M.'s better forays into naked sentimentalism. If you're like me and between 25 and 37, this was classic mixtape-for-the-girlfriend fare.

42. "Sweetness Follows" (5): "It's these little things, they can pull you under. Live your life filled with joy and thunder. Yeah, yeah we were all together, lost in our little lives." According to Michael Stipe's stage banter, this is apparently Peter Buck's favorite song, and it is quite a beauty. Frankly, I find Automatic for the People a hard album to listen to all that much, but this is a track that remains powerful with every playing.

41. "King of the Road": "Trailers for sale or rent. Rooms to let, fifty cents." The boys from Athens butcher Roger Miller's classic at the end of a very long bender, and yet somehow it's in perfect keeping with the tune's zeitgeist. One of the better examples of how fun R.E.M. can be when they just get silly (See also their covers of Suzanne Vegas' "Tom's Diner" and Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive", as well as "Bandwagon" on Dead Letter Office.)

40. "Pilgrimage": "Speakin' in tongues, it's worth a broken lip." "Laughing" or "Moral Kiosk" could've gone here too -- there are no real bad cuts on Murmurs. But there's something about "Pilgrimage," particularly coming as it does right after "Radio Free Europe," that shows that R.E.M. was a band with more than one setting, and a long future ahead of them.

39. "I Took Your Name": "I sequenced your arrival, I sealed your fate. I pushed the button and erased your master tape." Peter Buck fools around with feedback while Stipe sings of the perils of popularity. Breezy but memorable.

38. "Pretty Persuasion": "Reasoning cannot shuffle in this heat, it's all wrong." A prototypical early R.E.M. song, but a good one nonetheless.

37. "High-Speed Train": "I'm long in the eye. I cry when I try. I just want to fly, just you and I, together" In contrast to the churning pistons of "Driver 8", this "High Speed Train" moves along to a throbbing sonic hum. And it's inexorably leading our moon-eyed hero in what's probably the wrong direction, further and further away from a lover that doesn't quite seem to share his enthusiasm. Alas, he can travel anywhere in the world, except exactly where he wants to go.

36. "Wolves, Lower": "Suspicion yourself, suspicion yourself, suspicion us all. Wilder lower wolves. Here's a house to put wolves out the door." Wow, these guys have talent. If I were I.R.S., I'd sign these fools immediately.

35. "Disturbance at the Heron House": "The gathering of grunts and greens, cogs and grunts and hirelings, a meeting of a mean idea to hold." A perfectly executed mid-era R.E.M. jingly-jangle.

34. "I Don't Sleep, I Dream": "I'll settle for a cup of coffee, but you know what I really need." One of the more fetching tunes from the lust-tinged Monster. As this song suggests, sometimes it's best just to ignore that monster lurking in the corner...y'know, the one clearly and unabashedly trying to get your attention.

33. "We Walk" (9): "Take oasis, Marat's bathing." The Feedback entry on this one was dead on -- This nonsense rhyme off of Murmur should be a throwaway, but somehow it's exceedingly catchy. Up the stairs, to the landing...

32. "She Just Wants to Be": "It's not that she wasn't rewarded with pomegranate afternoons of Mingus, Chet Baker and chess." One of the more lyrical outings from Reveal that (particularly when paired with Up's "Walk Unafraid") really comes into its own live.

31. "Voice of Harold": "We are associated with United Music World Recording Studios, Inc., West Columbia, SC. The finest sound available anywhere." Adding credence to the post-modern applicability of found texts, R.E.M. re-record their earlier song "7 Chinese Brothers" with Stipe reading the liner notes of some random gospel album. Hey, for whatever reason, it works.

30. "Turn You Inside Out": "Divide your cultured pearls in haste, I'm looking for to lay to waste." Stipe used to scream this one through a bullhorn during the Green tour, and "Turn You Inside Out" calls for exactly that type of frenetic energy. It's a ballad of self-empowerment for the slightly deranged.

29. "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?": "I'd studied your cartoons, radio, music, TV, movies, magazines. Richard said, 'Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.'" 1994 spawned a Monster, and this ode to Dan Rather's stalker kicked it off with both our first look at a bald, flailing, hyperactive Stipe and our first listen to a new grungy crunch for the band post-Automatic. I dig this frequency, Kenneth.

28. "Exhuming McCarthy": "You're beautiful more beautiful than me. You're honorable more honorable than me -- Loyal to the Bank of America." The band serves up a dose of Document-era politics with tongue firmly in cheek and a groove you can't help shimmying to (that is, assuming you have no sense of decency, sir.)

27. "Underneath the Bunker" "I have water, I have rum, wait for dawn and dawn shall come, underneath the bunkers in the row." 90 seconds of goofy bliss, and just the type of mental sorbet that an album as rich as Life's Rich Pageant required around the halfway mark.

26. "Half a World Away" "This storm it came up strong. It shook the trees and blew away our fear, I couldn't even hear." Pretty straightforward, sure, but "Half a World Away" is still an exquisite ode to faraway love, and one of the better signposts in Michael Stipe's evolution from cryptic mumbling to more heartfelt fare.

25. "Leave": "Suffer the dreams of a world gone mad, I like it like that and I know it. I know it well, ugly and sweet, A temperament that said believe in this dream." Propelled by a frantic air raid signal in the background (and, as the A Life Less Ordinary soundtrack showed, the song doesn't work very well without it), "Leave" best captured the synergy of live performance energy and studio production values that the band seemed to be going for with New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

24. "Lotus": "Opposing thumb, dorsal fin, that monkey died for my grin. Bring my happy back again." The one unabashed rocker on Up, the band's first album without Bill Berry, "Lotus" has the same type of infectious and demented thrill as earlier standouts "I Took Your Name" and "So Fast, So Numb." Good stuff, that.

23. "Tongue": "Call my name, here I come. Your last ditch lay, will I never learn?" One of R.E.M.'s filthier ditties, crooned in gender-bending falsetto, "Tongue" is also one of the high points on the very agreeable Monster.

22. "Drive": "Smack, crack, bushwhacked. Tie another one to the racks, baby." After blowing up to international regard with Out of Time and "Losing My Religion," R.E.M. returned to the fold with this haunting rock dirge (and equally haunting video) to open the surprisingly low-key Automatic for the People. It showed everyone that, despite all the acclaim, the boys from Athens still marched to their own drummer (and, at least for a few albums, he wasn't going anywhere.)

21. "I've Been High" (24): "What I want, what I really want is just to live my life on high. And I know, I know you want the same -- I can see it in your eyes." One of the most beautiful songs in the band's recent oeuvre, and proof positive that the folks out there who feel R.E.M. has lost a step in the post-Berry era should give the newer albums at least one more whirl.

20. "Harborcoat": "They crowded up to Lenin with their noses worn off. A handshake is worthy if it's all that you've got." Like "Pretty Persuasion," one of the other standout cuts on Reckoning, "Harborcoat" is fast-paced poetry in the early R.E.M. style.

19. "World Leader Pretend" (13): "I proclaim that claims are left unstated, I demand a rematch, I decree a stalemate, I divine my deeper motives." Following the issue-oriented politics of Document, "World Leader Pretend" proved Stipe also had his eye on the big picture. A song full of nuance, compromise, and beauty.

18. "Diminished": "I watched you fall. I think I pushed." Put aside OJ, Robert Blake, Michael Jackson, and Martha Stewart for a sec...court is now in session for the celebrity trial of Stipe & co., and it's a doozy. The "Sing Along" hook in the middle is criminally catchy.

17. "Driver 8" (8): "I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm. The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged." Peter Buck has derided this song as exactly the type of jingly-jangly minor-key rock he could write on autopilot. Perhaps so, but "Driver 8" is still a very well-done jingly-jangly minor-key rock song, with one of the more transcendent bridges ("Way to shield the hated heat, way to put myself to sleep") in the early R.E.M. canon.

16. "Boy in the Well": "It's that sinking feeling. you know what it's bringing on (You might as well say it) I see it, I feel it. This town is going wrong." Like a number of songs on Around in the Sun, "Boy in the Well" tells a sordid tale of self-inflicted wounds and love gone sour. I almost put the more sonically adventurous "High Speed Train" here, but in the end "Boy in the Well" seems the most iconic and well-realized foray on this very solid album.

15. "Saturn Return": "Harder to look yourself square in the eye. Easy to poke yourself, easy as pie. Easy to take off, harder to fly. Harder to wake Galileo." This piano and synth-laden cut from Reveal never got much hype, but I can't get enough of it. In some ways, "Saturn Return" is a darker, twisted version of "You are the Everything," for those moments in a long road trip when peace yields to unease, shadows darken into doubts, and your thoughts become your own worst enemy. (Thematically, it also seems very similar to "Feeling Gravity's Pull.")

14. "Welcome to the Occupation": "Hang your collar up inside, hang your freedom higher. Listen to the buyer still, listen to the Congress." While "Exhuming McCarthy" has the benefit of a great sense of humor, "Welcome to the Occupation" -- about How the Southern Hemisphere Was Won (And What It Got Us) -- is arguably R.E.M.'s most powerful tone poem on Document. Ten years ago, I'd probably have put "King of Birds" in this spot, but, as I said earlier, I don't listen to that one so much anymore.

13. "How the West Was Won (And Where It Got Us)": "I made a mistake, chalked it up to design. I cracked through time, space, Godless and dry. I point my nose to the northern star, watch the decline from a hazy distance." For their first New Adventure in Hi-Fi, R.E.M. tried on a trip-hop groove, anchored by Mike Mill's Monkish piano hook, to great effect. A spiritual descendant of "Feeling Gravity's Pull" that stands miles above some of the other, goofier tracks on this spotty record.

12. "Monty Got a Raw Deal": "I saw you strung up in a tree. A woman knelt there said to me, said, 'Hold your tongue.'" When I first heard Automatic back in high school, I adored "Nightswimming" and "Find the River"...but these days, I have trouble listening to them (and skip right through "Everybody Hurts" and "Man on the Moon.") Nowadays, it's this paean to Montgomery Clift which seems like the hidden gem on the album.

11. "Bang and Blame": "You've got a little worry, I know it all too well. I've got your number, but so does every kiss-and-tell who dares to cross your threshold." On an album chock-full of great songs about sex (notably "I Don't Sleep, I Dream" and "Tongue,") this one really delivers the goods. (Word is Stipe was trying to emulate Kurt Cobain's lyrical sensibility with this track, and if so, it worked.) A calm moment amid the distortion that characterizes the second half of the underappreciated Monster, "Bang and Blame" is a memorable ode to being in lust if not in like, and one of R.E.M.'s sultriest singles.

10. "Orange Crush": "We are agents of the free. I've had my fun and now its time to serve your conscience overseas." Between the not-very-oblique Agent Orange reference and the boot camp bridge, this is Platoon R.E.M. style, as well as one of the band's catchier rockers. Ten-hut!

9. "Swan Swan H" (3): "A pistol hot cup of rhyme, the whiskey is water, the water is wine." Berry, Buck, Mills, and Stipe get a little closer to home with this venture into Civil War territory, one that manages to capture both the terrible loss ("Tell that to the Captain's mother") and joy of jubilee ("Hurrah we are all free now") of that long, low time ago.

8. "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" (25): "Uh oh, overflow, population, common group, but it'll do. Save yourself, serve yourself!" A trademark lesson in how not to give a goddamn when the wheels come off, "ITEOTWAWKI(AIFF)" also happens to be more fun than you can shake a stick at. The band have only opened a show with this ditty once -- their first post-election gig in 2004 -- and we all knew exactly how they felt.

7. "So. Central Rain" (4): "Did you never call? I waited for your call. These rivers of suggestion are driving me away." Flagpole hit this one on the head -- Along with "Driver 8," this song encapsulates R.E.M.'s trademark early sound, redolent of spanish moss and stormy days.

6. "Losing My Religion" (10): "Consider this the hint of the century, Consider this the slip that brought me to my knees." Somehow, amazingly, this tune -- easily the best mandolin-driven pop song of the late twentieth century -- never got played out. Bonus points for Stipe teaching us all the appropriate sign language to signal "Help, I'm grotesquely impaled on the horns of an interminable crush" in the Tarsem video.

5. "Begin the Begin" (14): "Answer me a question I can't itemize, I can't think clear, you look to me for reason, it's not there, I can't even rhyme." As Flagpole noted, "Begin" is one of those quintessential R.E.M. rockers. Really, really hard not to jump up and down to.

4. "Feeling Gravity's Pull" (17): "Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around..." Like "Low Desert," "How the West is Won," and "Saturn Return," "Feeling Gravity's Pull" features one of R.E.M.'s most malevolent and formidable soundscapes. As Stipe wrestles with newfound powers and forces beyond his control, Buck, Berry and Mills show they plan to deconstruct the trademark R.E.M. jingly-jangly sound of their first few albums into something much more fractured and dissonant for Reconstruction of the Fables (well, at least until "Driver 8.")

3. "Perfect Circle" (18): "Pull your dress on and stay real close. Who might leave you where I left off?" The quietest moment on Murmur is also one of the best. Big ups also to the 1991 Unplugged version, with Mike Mills providing a falsetto coo that offsets the "standing too soons" very nicely.

2. "Fall on Me" (6): "There's the progress, we have found a way to talk around the problem."" One of Stipe's most plaintive and mercurial laments, and probably the band's best harmonizing, right down to Bill Berry's soft-spoken "It's Gonna Fall" in the background. If you don't like this song, you probably don't like R.E.M.

1. "Country Feedback" (1): "This flower is scorched, this film is on, on a maddening loop..." Wracked with spite, doubled over with thwarted love, and shimmering with regret, "Country Feedback" is R.E.M.'s magnum opus and a heartbreakingly beautiful ballad. (It's also the song I probably enjoy playing on the guitar more than any other, even if I can't ever do it justice. There are also plenty of great live versions floating around, including one with Neil Young providing the feedback and another unplugged version that segues nicely into Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone.") In short, "Country Feedback" is raw pain distilled, moonshine-style. Crazy what you could've had, indeed.

And, just to be a completist (and to take the air out of this exceedingly long and gushing entry a bit), I'll go ahead and throw in my 5 worst R.E.M. songs (and, yes, "Shiny Happy People" gets a pass...however bad that ill-advised ditty turned out to be, I can think of worse.):

5. "Bittersweet Me"

4. "Revolution"

3. "Hairshirt"

2. "Beachball"

1. "The Wrong Child"

An event of note last night here at Columbia's Miller Theater: Music critic Greil Marcus, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, and Oxford poetry scholar Christopher Ricks came together to contemplate Dylania old and new. Marcus began by speaking on the many lives of "Masters of War," including Dylan's Gulf War I Grammy performance and the recent "Coalition of the Willing" episode at a Boulder, Colorado high school. Wilentz followed by discussing Dylan's debts of gratitude (and debt to history) in the recent Chronicles. And Ricks punned his way through a priceless disquisition on Blonde on Blonde and the differences among poetry, prose, and song, finishing his remarks with a defense of "Just Like a Woman," which apparently has been deemed misogynistic in certain academic corners. (I asked the panel about the mixed reception to Masked & Anonymous, and Wilentz & Marcus in particular praised it as an underrated film...I'll probably have to see it again at some point.)

All in all, it was quite an interesting evening of Dylanology, although I must admit, I was a bit put off by some of Ricks' comments in the Q&A session -- He called "Masters of War" (and, for that matter, "The Death of Emmett Till") self-absorbed and overly tendentious songs, which I think there's a good deal of truth to, but then proceeded to castigate the audience for indulging its generally anti-Bush sentiment (via some mild chuckling) during Marcus' Coalition of the Willing anecdote. Ricks began by deploring knee-jerk political responses in either direction as a typically American (and occasionally Dylanian) vice...ok, fine, that's a criticism we've all heard before. "Fist fighting is here to stay,
It's just the old American way." But Ricks then went on to bemoan the tribulations faced by his poor right-wing friends in Massachusetts, who thought -- correctly, in Ricks' view -- that "John Kerry didn't deserve the presidency." (As you might expect, this gave the smattering of right-leaning folk amid the audience a chance to clap vociferously and to indulge anew the currently-popular fallacy that they're an oppressed minority.)

Yes, unfortunately, the decline of civility in debate and the "MacNeill-Lehrerization" of every issue into two opposite and irreconcilable poles are lamentable repercussions of the way politics is practiced today, as Jon Stewart famously noted on Crossfire several months ago. (Or, as Bob once put it, "Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull...Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.") But that doesn't mean that Americans' opinions of the war in Iraq aren't well-thought out and hard-won. Ricks treated the issue as basically six-one, half-dozen-the-other, that to voice an opinion about the Iraq War is somehow irresponsible and -- worse -- uncouth. (Whatsmore, I had no idea what anybody's politics were until Ricks began complaining about the presumed incivility in the room, at which point the audience immediately bifurcated into lefties and righties.) In sum, incivility is a serious problem, sure. But, for that matter, so is war.

The Q&A aside, though, the evening made for an eloquent appreciation of the many gifts of Bob Dylan, gifts further illuminated by the warmth and regard with which Marcus, Wilentz and Ricks held these songs to the light and uncovered some of their fragile tendrils of meaning and allusion. And if nothing else, the conference made for an excellent excuse to go home and delve into Bob's back pages for the remainder of the evening, and listen to old songs with new ears.

"But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Take the rag away from your face. Now ain't the time for your tears." Another quality Dylan link sent by way of All About George: Mother Jones' Ian Frazier delves into the story behind and after The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.

"Of Dylan's many achievements, the most fundamental was his hitching together of the folk-lyric tradition and Western modernism, connecting them at the point where their expressive ambiguities met...Dylan did not do this to prove a point; he was naturally omnivorous, and he intuited the connection without worrying about pedigree." Sent to me by All About George, Luc Sante surveys recent Dylan literature for the NY Review of Books. Speaking of which, tickets for Bob's upcoming five-night stand at the Beacon Theatre go on sale this morning at 10am. In a perfect world, I'd go to all of 'em (while catching a matinee of Hitchhiker's on that Friday, April 29.) But, financial constraints being what they are, I'll probably settle on either 2 or 3 shows. We'll see.

I'm off early this morning to catch up with college friends for one of our semi-annual reunions, so I expect it'll be quiet around here until next week. But, since it's a holiday weekend of sorts, and since I've been perusing a number of MP3 blogs lately, I figured I wouldn't leave on a jet plane before regaling you, my dear readers, with the Valentine's gift of music. (The usual mp3blog rules apply: the files will be up this weekend and this weekend only, and please do not link to them.) So, without further ado:

As y'all know, iconography from the stunning video to Bjork's "All is Full of Love" has graced this site for years now, so it seemed a logical choice for GitM's Valentine. It'd be hard for me to introduce the song any better than Bjork did herself: "That song's from a moment when I'd had a pretty rough winter and then it was a spring morning and I walked outside and the birds were singing: Spring is here! I wrote the song and recorded in half a day. It just clicked - you know: you're being too stubborn, don't be so silly, there is love everywhere. The feeling, the emotion of the song was like completely melting and loving everything and feeling like everything loved you, after a long time of not having that. The song, in essence, is actually about believing in love."

Strangely enough, I experienced a very similar revelatory moment, traipsing around outside after a blizzard several years ago, while listening to this "Plaid" version of the song. It's missing the languorous beat that's so memorable in the single version, but I adore the fugue-like intro and textured, contrapuntal rhythms of this mix -- They lend it a timeless, ethereal beauty that perfectly matches the celestial coo and growl of its Icelandic muse. I don't want to hate on Love, Actually for too many posts in a row, but to my mind this song brilliantly encapsulates what that movie tried and failed to get at -- Even in our loneliest moments, love surrounds us and binds us.

All is Full of Love (Plaid Mix) -- Bjork (5.88MB, 4:17)
(song removed)
Original version on Homogenic.

[Update:]

***

I want you
I'm not ashamed to say I cried for you

I want you
I want to know the things you did that we do too

I want you
I want to hear he pleases you more than I do
I want you
I might as well be useless for all it means to you...

Bjork too sappy? Well, if, on the other hand, you prefer to spend Valentine's Day prodding scars and excavating the thin line between love and hate, then here's a streetlight serenade for you -- a blistering-hot live version of Elvis Costello's most savage, searing slow burn. Much of the resonance of the original "I Want You" lies in how what starts off as a run-of-the-mill torch song slowly degenerates into something much more complicated and sinister. This spooky, haunted-house version from the 2002 tour skips the set-up, but it's nevertheless a poisonous mirrorball of rage and regret, bitterness and betrayal, loss and (self-)loathing...all those quintessential consequences of a love implosion that they just don't seem to make Hallmark cards for (and it's all topped off with a brief twinge of Yankee Power.) Our man Costello may be enthralled with Diana Krall these days, but as this song makes emphatically clear, there are still some things you just don't wanna know about his dark life.

I Want You (Live in Nashville 2002) -- Elvis Costello (15.1MB, 8:15)
(song removed)
Original version on Blood and Chocolate.

[Update]:

Either path you choose, have a safe and happy weekend, and I'll catch y'all next week.

"Bob Marley, all of his songs are fire to Satan, the dragon quake. Bob Marley is still alive, vibrant style, Rastafari." On what would have been his sixtieth birthday, Ethiopia (and Time Magazine) celebrate the genius and legacy of Bob Marley.

By way of Lots of Co. and Web Goddess, Pitchfork lists its Top 100 Singles of the Decade's First Half. (Strangely enough, I also received in the mail today a similarly themed mix-CD from a friend of mine in the program, and most of his choices also made the Pitchfork count.) At any rate, while I might quibble with the order here in certain places -- I haven't heard all of these by far, but I'd put 94, 82, 79, 63, 41, 18, 17 and, yes, 5 higher -- this list includes most of my favorites in recent years...and it's nice to see a countdown that doesn't sacrifice hip-hop and electronica at the altar of indie-rock cred.

"Did you think to try to warn them, or were you working on something new?" This may not come as a surprise to many folks, but apparently U2 recently made the business decision to screw over their biggest fans, from forcing fan sites to remove lyric postings to misorganizing a botched online ticket presale that turned into a seriously Dirty Day. I've never been much more than a casual U2 fan, really -- I have all their studio albums, love the A-side of The Joshua Tree like the rest of the Western World, and was most intrigued by them during their more experimental Achtung-Zooropa-Pop phase (To be honest, I haven't had much use for their "Instant Classic Rock" incarnation since.) Still, while Bono's continuing work for Third World debt relief is obviously a very worthy cause, it's sad to see the band turn their backs on their hardcore following like this...and in such patently dumb ways.

"I don't give a f**k about being a rock 'n' roll star. I just want to do the things that interest me." The Guardian looks into Elvis Costello's next fanciful side project, an opera on the life of Hans Christian Andersen.

Hope everyone in the local environs had a safe and lovely blizzard. I spent a good part of the weekend at a junkyard in Queens, surprisingly enough, helping a high school friend of mine attending the NY Film Academy with his latest project, an underground video for Death Cab for Cutie's "Title and Registration" (Not this one.) Unfortunately, the interminable cold and some continuing camera problems interrupted our shoot, so it looks like my inauspicious video debut will never see the light of day. (Probably for the best -- I think my face was frozen into a grimace most of the time anyway.)

Fortunately, during the actual full-on Saturday evening blizzard, Berk (who's having serious issues with the snow-salt) and I were safely ensconced in my apartment, catching up on the remainder of The Office. A brilliant show, that, even tho' the final 2-hour special turned out a bit more upbeat and saccharine than I might have preferred. And what's Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman/Tim) going to do when he can't look directly at the camera?

Via Quiddity, the third Portishead album is at last on its way, their first since 1997 (notwithstanding the live album or the Beth Gibbons-Rustin Man side project.) As Dubya might say, bring it on.

"Part of the advantage of being hideously, cripplingly self-conscious is that I feel free to use cliches, rather than feeling compelled to seek out original expression." (Yeah, I'd say that's pretty cliched.) The AP talks briefly with Stephin Merritt, the prodigious musical mind behind The Magnetic Fields, The 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and the Future Bible Heroes.

"'Cause we're moving right out of Babylon, and we're going to our father's land." On what would be his 60th birthday, the late, great Bob Marley will be exhumed and reburied in Ethiopia, his "forefather cornerstone" and spiritual home of the Rastafari. Said his widow, Rita Marley, of the move, "How can you give up a continent for an island? He has a right for his remains to be where he would love them to be. This was his mission. Ethiopia is his spiritual resting place."

The long-rumored Ian Curtis biopic, Control, is now a go, with none other than U2/REM/Depeche Mode rock photographer Anton Corbijn at the helm. I still think it'll be hard to do this any better than 24 Hour Party People, but at least with Corbijn running the show, it should look nice.

Sent to me by way of All About George, the Washington Post rambles through "Bob Dylan: American Journey 1956-66," a new exhibit at the EMP in Seattle. Now there's something for y'all historians out there attending this week's annual AHA meeting to peruse, should the presentations wear thin and the job hunting grow disconsolate.

"It was like being in an Edgar Allan Poe story and you're just not that person everybody thinks you are, though they call you that all the time." In his first TV interview in 19 years (60 Minutes this Sunday), Bob Dylan tries once again to shake the burdens of expectation. "'You're the prophet. You're the savior.' I never wanted to be a prophet or a savior. Elvis maybe. I could see myself becoming him. But prophet? No."

Call him King of the Mountain....via the newly reconstituted JJG, Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett (who suffered a fainting spell over the weekend) was recently elected to the Australian Parliament. I saw the Oils ten years ago during their WOMAD tour with Peter Gabriel, and Garrett was an electric presence, offering what is still far and away the best stage banter I've ever heard. (And, whatsmore, it wasn't canned...I remember him riffing on their Letterman appearance only a few days earlier.) The people of Kingsford Smith are lucky -- in this day and age, you could do a lot worse for an elected rep than Garrett.

Damn, it feels good to be a scoundrel...By way of the slightly relocated Lots of Co., and because the world demanded it, here's an amateur Geto Boys video ("Mind Playin' Tricks on Me") done with Star Wars figures. As you'd probably expect, some harsh language herein, so keep the sound down in your workplace.

By way of Do You Feel Loved?, Depeche Mode announces they're beginning work on a new album. I'd love to see the band get out of the "I adore you like a black crucifix" thematic rut they've been in for almost two decades now and try to recapture some of their earlier political period ("Everything Counts," "Monument," "Get the Balance Right") But, Martin Gore's recent work hasn't been all that promising in that regard.

R.I.P. ODB 1969-2004, definitely the strangest of the Wu.

"But there's one thing I know, though I'm younger than you -- Even Jesus would never forgive what you do." By way of a friend of mine (and in a striking confluence of the music and civil liberties posts earlier today), a high school band in Colorado -- Coalition of the Willing -- has the Secret Service sicced on them for practicing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." Hmm...I've been known to belt that one quite loudly in the occasional times I plug in around here (It's basically A-minor throughout.) I guess I'd better begin with a disclaimer from now on to assuage the neighbors.

For the historians and Dylanologists out there (or for those wondering why Dylan would contribute a new song to a flat-out stinker like Gods and Generals), here's another intriguing passage from Bob Dylan's Chronicles, on his early days in the archives as a Civil War enthusiast. (Besides Clausewitz, he also professes an admiration for Reconstruction-era Republican Thaddeus Stevens, who "championed the weak" and "made a big impression on me," in a separate passage. (Chronicles, p. 40))

"I couldn't exactly put in words what I was looking for, but I began searching in principle for it, over at the New York Public Library, a monumental building with marble floors and walls, vacuous and spacious caverns, vaulted ceiling. A building that radiates triumph and glory when you walk inside. In one of the upstairs reading rooms I started reading articles in newspapers on microfilm from 1855 to about 1865 to see what daily life was like. I wasn't so much interested in the issues as intrigued by the language and rhetoric of the times. Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Brooklyn Daily Times, and the Pennsylvania Freeman. Others, too, like the Memphis Daily Eagle, the Savannah Daily Herald, and Cincinnati Enquirer.

It wasn't like it was another world, but the same one only with more urgency, and the issue of slavery wasn't the only concern. There were news items about reform movements, antigambling leagues, rising crime, child labor, temperance, slave-wage factories, loyalty oaths and religious revivals. You get the feeling that the newspapers themselves could explode and lightning will burn and everybody will perish. Everybody uses the same God, quotes the same Bible and law and literature. Plantation slavecrats of Virginia are accused of breeding and selling their own children. In the Northern cities, there's a lot of discontent and debt is piled high and seems out of control.

The plantation aristocracy run their plantations like city-states. They are like the Roman republic where an elite group of characters rule supposedly for the good of all. They've got sawmills, gristmills, distilleries, country stores, et cetera. Every state of mind opposed by another...Christian piety and weird mind philosophies turned on their heads. Fiery orators, like William Lloyd Garrison, a conspicuous abolitionist from Boston who even has his own newspaper. There are riots in Memphis and in New Orleans. There's a riot in New York where two hundred people are killed outside of the Metropolitan Opera House because an English actor has taken the place of an American one. [Sic -- 23 dead. Bob's probably conflating the 1849 Astor Riot with the 1863 Draft Riots.] Anti-slave labor advocates inflaming crowds in Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Cleveland that, if the Southern states are allowed to rule, the Northern factory owners would then be forced to use slaves as free laborers. This causes riots, too.

Lincoln comes into the picture in the 1850s. He is referred to in the Northern press as a baboon or giraffe, and there were a lot of caricatures of him. Nobody takes him seriously. It's impossible to conceive that he would become the father figure that he is today. You wonder how people so united by geography and religious ideals could become such bitter enemies. After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It's all one long funeral song, but there's a certain imperfection in the themes, an ideology of high abstraction, a lot of epic, bearded characters, exalted men who are not necessarily good.

No one single idea keeps you contented for too long. It's hard to find any of the neoclassical virtues, either. All that rhetoric about chivalry and honor -- that must have been added later. Even the Southern womanhood thing. It's a shame what happened to the women. Most of them were abandoned to starve on farms with their children, unprotected and left to fend for themselves as victims to the elements. The suffering is endless, and the punishment is going to be forever. It's all so unrealistic, grandiose, and sanctimonious at the same time.

There was a difference in the concept of time, too. In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sun-set, spring, summer. In the North, people lived by the clock. The factory stroke, whistles and bells, Northerners had to "be on time." In some ways the Civil War would be a battle between two kinds of time. Abolition of slavery didn't even seem to be an issue when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. [Sic! Tell that to John Brown or Alexander Stephens. To be fair, though, elsewhere in Chronicles (pp. 74, 76), Dylan notes other theories for the war's coming.]

It all makes you feel creepy. The age that I was living in didn't resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write.

I crammed my head full as of much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later." {Chronicles, pp. 84-86 -- emphasis and paragraph breaks mine.)

On the release of DM's 3-disc remix album (which, since I obsessively bought all the singles in high school, is something of a letdown given the paucity of new tracks), Douglas Wolk talks about Depeche Mode and the history of the remix for Slate. I've complained in the past about the general lack of respect for DM's early period, so it's nice to see 'em getting their due here.

Some choice words on moral values and politics, courtesy of Bob Dylan's Chronicles (my current read):

"Clausewitz's book seemed outdated, but there's a lot in it that's real, and you can understand a lot about conventional life and the pressures of environment by reading it. When he claims that politics has taken the place of morality and politics is brute force, he's not playing. You have to believe it. You do exactly as you're told, whoever you are. Knuckle under or you're dead. Don't give me any of that jazz about hope or nonsense about righteousness. Don't give me that dance that God is with us, or that God supports us. Let's get down to brass tacks. There isn't any moral order. You can forget that. Morality has nothing in common with politics. It's not there to transgress. It's either high ground or low ground. This is the way the world is and nothing's gonna change it. It's a crazy, mixed up world and you have to look it right in the eye. Clausewitz in some ways is a prophet. Without realizing it, some of the stuff in his book can shape your ideas. If you think you're a dreamer, you can read this stuff and realize you're not even capable of dreaming. Dreaming is dangerous. Reading Clausewitz makes you take your own thoughts a little less seriously." (Chronicles, p. 45)

So, in their first stop since Dubya Day, REM played the Garden last night. A good show, and they played my favorites from the new album ("Boy in the Well," "High-Speed Train," "The Outsiders") But there was obviously a very strange and subdued vibe to the proceedings. Angela McCluskey, the opening act, struck an appropriately funereal tone with a swelling rendition of The The's "Love is Stronger than Death." And Stipe, for his part, seemed as staggered as most of the crowd, and barely spoke at all -- (not that it much mattered...85% of the people there seemed to be waiting for "Losing My Religion" the whole time anyway.) All in all, I enjoyed last year's stop more, but obviously those were happier times for both the band and the nation. Setlist below:

R.I.P. John Peel 1939-2004...He's signed off for the last time, and the music world is smaller without him.

As GTA: San Andreas edges closer, the gang at Rockstar preview the ten in-game radio stations to be had this time around, and as expected the selections seem as deep and diverse as they were on Vice City. More info will be out Monday, but the artists featured so far (along with G'n'R and A Guy Called Gerald, which we already knew about) include James Brown ("Payback"), Slick Rick ("Children's Story), Bel Biv Devoe ("Poison"), Rage Against the Machine ("Killing in the Name"), The Ohio Players ("Funky Worm"), Eddie Money ("Two Tickets to Paradise"), Max Romeo ("Chase the Devil"), Willie Nelson ("Crazy"), 2Pac ("I Don't Give a F**k"), and Raze ("Break For Love"). Good driving music, that. Update: Rockstar reveals the official soundtrack listing, which includes a lot of the songs above, and extends many of the radio station previews to include tracks by Heart, Cypress Hill, Eric B & Rakim, and others.

"This administration is amazingly inept and incompetent. John Ashcroft in charge of justice? The man thinks dancing is a sin." Following in the footsteps of the Boss and similar remarks in Rolling Stone, Mike Mills of R.E.M. again makes the case against Dubya in the Orlando Sentinel.

Bored by the pre-debate spin cycle and inspired by Lots of Co's alt.homecoming mix, I went scouring the Internet yesterday evening for some of the mixes Max mentioned (such as "Without Vader", a.k.a. Eminem v. John Williams) and found Bass 21, which includes a number of versus versions for perusing and/or downloading to the iPod. Enjoy. (I must admit a particularly guilty fondness for "Go Toxic," a.k.a. Britney v. Yaz.)

"'Chronicles: Volume One' leaves much to be said in future installments, and much good reason to look forward to them." Ex-film critic Janet Maslin peruses Dylan's "flabbergasting" Chronicles for the NYT. Update: Along related lines, Salon compiles a list of First Dylan meetings.

"The 50-50 split is not between Democrats and Republicans, but those who vote and those who don't. That's right: nearly 50% of eligible voters chose not to vote in 2000. The underlying challenge of our democracy is to change this non-participation and to ensure that the core values of citizenship and active participation in the electoral process overshadow the domination of big money and corporate power." Sent to me by Chris at Do You Feel Loved, the inimitable Bill Bradley emerges from hiding to admire the Vote for Change tour in USA Today.

"So am I with you or am I against? I don't think it's that easy, we're lost in regret." This line (from "The Outsiders," featuring A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip) emerges as the central theme in Around the Sun -- R.E.M.'s 13th album -- which was released today. And, while it may take a few more listens than usual to differentiate among the many glum mid-tempo tracks on this album, I'd say Around the Sun is easily R.E.M.'s most cohesive album since Monster. Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and new drummer Bill Rieflin have finally emerged with a confident sound that incorporates the musical experimentation of Up and Reveal with the classic jingly-jangly R.E.M. we all remember from the Bill Berry era. In fact, I think Around the Sun compares favorably to the Automatic days, when the Athens boys enjoyed their widest popularity stateside with a similarly disconsolate set of songs.

Early word on Around the Sun was that we were in for a very political album, one swept up in and honed on progressive outrage over Dubya excess. And, while such sentiments appear explicitly on "Final Straw" (released in 2002 during the build-up to the war in Iraq) and "I Wanted to Be Wrong" ("We can't approach the Allies because they seem a little peeved."), Michael Stipe's political sermonizing is never as overt as, on say, "Exhuming McCarthy," "Cuyahoga," or "Welcome to the Occupation" in the Life's Rich Pageant/Document era.

Instead, for R.E.M. this time around, the political is personal. In fact, the band doesn't seem angry so much as disheartened. From the opening track (and first single) "Leaving New York" ("It's easier to leave than to be left behind") a large majority of songs on Around the Sun dwell not on political causes but on the "Aftermath" (also the name of the second single) of shattered relationships...the turmoil, bitterness, conflict, and -- eventually -- grudging acceptance that accompanies a love run its course. On the cascading "Make it All Ok": "So you worked out your excuses, turned away and shut the door. The world's too vast for us now, and you wanted to explore." On "High-Speed Train" (whose crunchy metallic drone makes the minor-key railroad rock of Driver 8 seem like a pleasure ride): "You've mirrored my best disguise and turned it back on me." On "The Worst Joke Ever": "Some things don't hold up over the course of a lifetime." On "The Ascent of Man": "I'm so in love I won't attract, and with my hands tied I won't crack, 'cause in my mind I called you back." This despondent cloud over the album reaches its apex -- or nadir, actually -- in the album's relentlessly downbeat stand-out track, "Boy in the Well": "It's that sinking feeling, you know what it's bringing on...I see it, I feel it, this town is going wrong." Forget "Fall on Me": On Around the Sun, the sky has already fallen, and it's all about picking up the pieces.

To be sure, all this oppressive dwelling on lost loves can be tough to take, and I can see how some critics might feel like R.E.M. have hit a thematic rut here. Even "Wanderlust," the only relatively peppy track on the disc, doesn't avoid the album's general gloom: "Looks like the world revolves around me. Looks like it's falling down." Simply put, it's hard not to come out of a listen to Around the Sun feeling somewhat dejected. But the payoff is there, in a way, in the last track (strangely enough for R.E.M., also named "Around the Sun"): "Hold on world 'cause you don't know what's coming. Hold on world 'cause I'm not jumping off. Hold onto this boy a little longer, take another trip around the sun." Soon thereafter, in the final moments, "Around the Sun" changes keys, a ray of light pierces the clouds, and the album floats away in a sort-of-Beach-Boys shimmer (done much more successfully than any of the attempts to do this on Reveal): "Let my dreams set me free. Believe. Believe. Now now now now now now..."

As with love, Around the Sun seems to argue by the end, so with America. R.E.M. could easily have hammered the anti-Dubya agenda much harder on this album, and judging from early reports on the Vote for Change tour, it sounds like they'll be doing so extensively at their live shows. But, in a way, Around the Sun sets its goal at something broader. Don't let Dubya's travesty of an administration dishonor your admiration for the American ideal. And don't let the pains, compromises, and betrayals of this world steal from you your heart. "Do I even dare to speak? To dream? Believe?," asks "Around the Sun." The answer is Yes, "Give me a voice so strong I can question what I have seen." Hold on to the dream. Believe.

"Unlike a lot of political issues, this is literally life or death. Kerry understands how the world works, in a way that Bush does not. When Bush ran the first time, I realized something: I want my president to be smarter than I am. I don't ask much, but I want him to be smarter than me." Mike Mills of R.E.M. and several other musicians make the case for Kerry to Rolling Stone.

"Being the patron saint of a certain kind of woman-hating dweeb is not a great career. Let me say that, right out." Also in Rolling Stone, Elvis Costello reflects on his journey thus far, on the eve of two new albums, The Delivery Man and Il Sogno.

"A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of The Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, 'And here he is...take him, you know him, he's yours.' I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis had never even been introduced like that. 'Take him, he's yours!' What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now." On the eve of Chronicles, his long-awaited first volume of memoirs, the freewheelin' Bob Dylan sits down with Newsweek and offers up a choice excerpt on the price of fame (which reveals why Self-Portrait is pretty lousy.) It sounds like he's elided over some of his more interesting periods for now (Blood on the Tracks, the Christian years), but this should still be quite a fascinating read.

In anticipation of Around the Sun (out October 4), R.E.M. have released a free download of new song snippets on iTunes (also available here and here), which includes "Leaving New York," Around the Sun," "Wanderlust," "Electron Blue," and "I Want To Be Wrong." That goofy voicemail intro aside, I think this is strong stuff by our boys in Athens, easily better than Reveal and definitely more confident-sounding than the intermittent greatness of Up. "Electron Blue" -- R.E.M.'s best run at an synth-driven tune yet -- just might be my new favorite song-of-the-moment. And with the official word that the Tribe's Q-Tip is also on one of the tracks ("The Outsiders"), this could be the choicest R.E.M. album in a decade or more.

R.E.M. talk Around the Sun and, in discussing their dwindling popularity Stateside, pay credit to Bob Dylan. Notes Peter Buck, "In 1975, people thought he was going to be president. Now he plays 3,000 seat theatres. His last two records are the best things he's done in years. So I won't calculate who our audience is. I'll take whoever I can get at whatever level I can get them.'"

Play "Free Bird"! Actually, hold that, don't. Apparently, Lynyrd Skynyrd will jam for the GOP, along with ZZ Top, the Charlie Daniels Band, 38 Special, and the Marshall Tucker Band. Not exactly a Murderer's Row of musical talent, are they? I'd take the Vote for Change lineup over this crowd any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Dig out the swan costume and get your acapella group back together, 'cause she's back and stranger than ever. You can preview Medulla, Bjork's new and completely all-vocal album (not that it sounds like it, thanks to The Roots' Rahzel) here. So far, "Where is the Line" and "Triumph of a Heart" seem like stand-out tracks.

"It's easier to leave than to be left behind..." The boys in Athens (REM, not Michael Phelps) release "Leaving New York", the first single from Around the Sun, on BBC Radio. (Mirror/Mirror 2.) All in all, I'd say it's growing on me. One part "Parakeet," one part "Wrong Child," maybe a dash of "E-Bow the Letter," it's definitely REM jingly-jangly without being as self-consciously imitative as "Imitation of Life," the first single on the last album. And it's got a very catchy chorus, particularly when Stipe also comes with the backing vocals (must've been Mike Mills' off day.) At any rate, the rest of the album is listed here. Update: Bowing to the inevitable, the official site is now streaming the full song, if all the previous links go down.

There's talk about that Jude Law will play Ian Curtis of Joy Division in a forthcoming biopic. That's pretty good casting (better, for example, than Ashton Kutcher as Flash Gordon), although after 24 Hour Party People I'm not sure a Curtis biopic is really necessary (but cast Paul Bettany as Bernard Sumner and we'll be getting somewhere.) Also in the Jude department, the trailer for Mike Nichols's Closer is now online, and it looks pretty solid, if you can buy that anyone would actually leave Natalie Portman for Julia Roberts.

A few days out of date now, but still worth reading: Bruce Springsteen on the need for regime change. "It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities - respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals - that we come to life in God's eyes. It is how our soul, as a nation and as individuals, is revealed. Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward."

From REM.HQ: "The band officially confirmed today that the new record will be titled Around the Sun...Around the Sun will be released on Warner Bros. Records October 4th (internationally) and October 5th in the United States. The first single will be 'Leaving New York.'" And, in other R.E.M. news, the band will be part of MoveOn's Vote For Change Tour, with Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Jurassic 5, and many others.

R.E.M releases some details about their forthcoming album out in October, which features new drummer Bill Rieflin (formerly of Ministry.) According to Stipe in RS, "'there's some stuff on here that's pretty hard-core, and fairly political.' The political tracks include a fleshed-out version of the Internet-only release 'Final Straw,' which was written prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and 'I'm Gonna DJ,' about the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle...[But] R.E.M. dabble in more than just politics, as Stipe characterizes 'Leaving New York' as a love song and 'Wanderlust' as a pop song." Sounds grand.

Slate ruminates on whether lovebirds Elvis Costello and Diana Krall are lousy influences on each other. A bit mean, perhaps, but I've thought for awhile that a happy Elvis might mean trouble.

On her upcoming album Medulla, due out at the end of the summer, Bjork goes acapella (with the aid of The Roots' Rahzel and Faith No More's Mike Patton.)

Found while perusing the five star RS review of the all-new (and very old skool) Beastie Boys album, To the Five Boroughs, which is very much both a post-9/11 ode to NYC and a virulently anti-Dubya album ("Put a quarter in your ass, 'cause you played yourself.") As has been the case since Ill Communication, MCA gets a bit too preachy at times (For example, "We've got a president we didn't elect/The Kyoto treaty he decided to neglect" on "Time to Build," or "Never again should we use the A-bomb/We need an international ban on/All W.O.M.D's gone/We need a multilateral disarm." on "We've Got The.")

Nevertheless, I think the new Beasties project is a success, redeemed by (1) the catchy mid-eighties beats and samples (Check out "Rhyme the Rhyme Well") and (2) the unleashing of the B's perennial secret weapon, the King Ad Rock, who seems to be having more fun in the game than the other two guys by miles. (For example, "Yo, what the falafel/You gotta get up awful early to fool Mr. Furley" on "Oh Word", or when he channels a mean Smooth B on "Crawl Space.") You already know by now if the Beasties are your bag, so if you want Licensed to Ill-era beats with Hello Nasty rhymes, To the 5 Boroughs is worth picking up. But, one word of warning from "3 the Hard Way": "If you sell our CD's on Canal before we make 'em, then we will have no alternative but to serve you on a platter like Steak-umm") Hey, don't say you didn't know.

"You are able to take an idea and give it form: the idea that Harlem has hands, feet are flaming, lips are cracked and country, hail hammers and skies crack poems." In a burst of NY Times Dylanania, Jonathan Lethem reviews Dylan's Vision of Sin, the new tome of poetry criticism by acclaimed Oxford Professor Christopher Ricks, while Lucinda Williams pays her own respects to Robert Zimmerman. And, elsewhere in the music-themed Book Review this week, Time politico and Primary Colors author Joe Klein proclaims his fondness for Wilco.

"Popular culture usually comes to an end very quickly. It gets thrown into the grave. I wanted to do something that stood alongside Rembrandt's paintings." Via reader Jeff some time ago, Bob Dylan opens up about his songwriting process.

"The creepiest on-screen clone army of 2003 wasn't The Matrix's league of Agent Smiths at all, but Masked and Anonymous's cast of Bob Dylans. He was everybody, everywhere. Or, rather, everybody was him." Via my friend Mark, an intriguing take on Bob Dylan's recent run, including M&A, Live 1964, and the new book on Blood on the Tracks. (No Victoria's Secret, however.) Also in Dylan news, by way of Absolute Piffle, Bob's apparently also gotten into the wine business. Lingerie, wine...are Dylan-brand scented candles next?

Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box linens... Good friend Seth Stevenson holds forth on the Dylan Victoria's Secret ad. I found this particular tidbit quite interesting: "Asked in 1965 what might tempt him to sell out, Dylan replied: 'Ladies undergarments'." Hmmm...Well, now that Bobby D has fallen for Victoria, will Ray Davies be next?

"As I went out one morning to breathe the air around Tom Paine's,
I spied the fairest damsel that ever did walk in a new unlined demi with lace..." The times they are a-changin', 'cause apparently Bob Dylan is now hawking Victoria's Secret. Ah well, as the guy notes in this article, I'd rather have Dylan selling lingerie than the new BMW or something. In fact, this may even be a step up for the big fella after Masked and Anonymous.

So, I don't know what's stranger...the claim that P. Diddy, Snoop, and Jay-Z are allegedly donning rubber masks for the new Dr. Who revival on BBC, or the assertion that Diddy's got a full-size gold-plated Dalek of bling. Puff Davros? Diddy Digs Daleks? I think somebody's having me on. (By way of Triptych Cryptic.)

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew...

Want to send a singing telegram? Let them sing it for you, via Absolute Piffle. Mother, I regret I'm unable to come to your parrrrty...

By way of Scrubbles, the Greatest Album Covers that never were, including Kurt Vonnegut's Phish cover.

TORN.net get the full version of Annie Lennox's "Into the West," soon to close a splendid fantasy trilogy at a theater near you. Those of you who found the Soundtrack.net excerpt to be a tad shrill will be happy to discover that that 30 seconds was the loudest part of the song. Also, in LotR news, I missed out on the TTT:EE Grand Central extravangaza yesterday, although it may have been just as well given some of the complaints coming in.

Eat your heart out, Glenn Yarbrough. Soundtrack.Net posts their review of the Return of the King score, complete with 30 second clips from each song. For the third time in a row, it sounds like Howard Shore hit it out of the park...I don't think you can overestimate how much he's improved these films with his work, particularly after you consider the pedestrian and distracting score of the new Matrix movies. If you've never read the trilogy and don't know how it all ends, I wouldn't click through. But if you have...some of these snippets are really beautiful and tantalizing ("Hope and Memory" and "Twilight and Shadow," for example), and none more so than "The End of all Things" and "The Grey Havens." The Annie Lennox song that closes the film isn't exactly what I was expecting, to be honest, but I can see it growing on me.

With the greatest hits tour coming to a close, the Times checks in with REM again. They must be getting sick of the "Over the Hill?" angle of all these stories by now.

By way of Cheesedip and Do You Feel Loved?, test your knowledge of 80's lyrics. As a child of the Eighties, I got a 97.

Chris Suellentrop ponders R.E.M. at the crossroads. From the concert the other night, it's plainly evident that many people do see R.E.M. as a nostalgia act these days [A good two-thirds of the Garden crowd got up twice - for Losing My Religion and ITEOTWAWKI (AIFF).] Still, I thought Up -- their album before last -- was brilliant stuff (with a lousy single, "Daysleeper.") I'd much rather hear Stipe, Buck, Mills continue to play with their sound than to churn out instant-classic-REM stuff like "Imitation of Life" and "Bad Day." More Bowie, less Eagles.

NYU alums and other lovers of Gotham's rock 'n' roll history scramble to save the Bottom Line, one of the most venerable nightclubs in Greenwich Village. If you get a chance, please take a moment to check out the site and/or sign the petition. It'd be a tremendous shame if such a classic New York institution was destroyed for the sake of a dorm and a few classrooms.

A long-time Elvis Costello fan sours on North. "Now he's a navel-gazing romantic who apparently let all those Gershwin comparisons go to his head." Well, I haven't heard Costello's latest yet, but I dunno if this is really fair. As the article notes, Elvis was superb on tour last year, and he still seems miles away from Billy Joel country.

So R.E.M. came to town Saturday night and played probably the best show I've seen by Athens' finest. (This is my fourth over the past decade.) First the setlist:

So all in all, a truly excellent show. There were other R.E.M. songs they're playing on this tour that I'd have loved to hear (Exhuming McCarthy, Feeling Gravity's Pull), but they played my two favorites (and my top two requests) -- Fall on Me and Country Feedback -- so I left happy. I was particularly impressed with Walk Unafraid and She Just Wants to Be, two songs off Up and Reveal respectively that really came into their own tonight, when Peter Buck chose them to show off his considerable guitar mojo. And the band wisely skipped some of their more saccharine moments -- Everybody Hurts or Strange Currencies, for example -- to showcase old hits (Rockville, Gardening) and political tone poems (Final Straw and World Leader Pretend, a special treat.) In sum, Stipe, Buck and Mills still got it, and I'm very much looking forward to their next swing through the area.

Bobby Dylan remembers Johnny Cash: "If we want to know what it means to be mortal, we need look no further than the Man in Black. Blessed with a profound imagination, he used the gift to express all the various lost causes of the human soul. This is a miraculous and humbling thing. Listen to him, and he always brings you to your senses. He rises high above all, and he'll never die or be forgotten, even by persons not born yet -- especially those persons -- and that is forever."

Sent to me via All About George, writer Hannah Griffith discusses how she learned to stop worrying and love Dylan.

By way of Do You Feel Loved, how cool are these? Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondy will each be coming out with tricked-up retrospective DVDs this fall. Here's one way I can repay Cunningham for unauthorized use of his Bjorkbots in the GitM title image.

Hey y'all...busy weekend over here in these parts. Aside from a final orgy of TIME-reading to put an end to my summer research work, I also went to go check out the Creative Time fireworks show, where I spent most of the 4-and-some-odd minutes trying to prevent Berkeley from having a coronary (Lousy judgment on my part bringing him...I thought he might enjoy night in the Park, but he clearly thought he was back on Hill 243.) And I got to see St. Felix Station, my friend's great bluegrass band over at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg (and was delighted to find said candy store has a weekly trivia night...booyah.)

R.E.M. ready their new song "Bad Day" (off In Time, the Greatest Hits for the Warner years, due out next month) for release by creating MorningTeam.Com. I guess now we know what Buck and Mills would've been doing if the Athens Fab Four had never taken off.

In a similar vein to this January 2003 New Yorker piece, Salon pauses to appreciate Bjork, the other white meat.

Via Pearls that are his Eyes, the Guardian talks with Elvis Costello on his new album and newfound love. While I'm glad the guy's feeling peachy, I must say the jury's still out for me on the idea of a blissful Elvis...I prefer my Costello lacerating, verbose, and irreconcilable.

When the three remaining members of Depeche Mode broke off to pursue solo projects this year, did anybody out there think it'd be Andy Fletcher's time to shine? Most DM fans know that Dave's the frontman, Marty's the songwriter (and lynchpin), Alan was the technician, and Fletch...well, Fletch sort of stands behinds the synthesizers and claps. But, while Martin Gore's Counterfeit 2 seemed a bit soft, minimalist, and underdone (particularly in comparison to the classic Counterfeit EP) and Dave Gahan's Paper Monsters sounded too hard, hookless, and overproduced, Fletch's new female duo - Client (he's the producer; in synthpop automaton fashion, they're simply "Client A" and "Client B") - came off just right.

While DM's strangely been running from their trademark sound ever since 1990's Violator, Fletch seems perfectly happy recycling the low-fi synth grooves that were the band's bread and butter in the pre-Black Celebration years, except he's replaced the Dave-and-Marty front-line with two very naughty British birds. (And, what with Kate Beckinsale's Underworld around the corner, it seems to be a saucy Brit fall.) The result is basically Tigra and Bunny (who like the boom) hanging out with Kraftwerk, or an eighties hybrid of Yaz and Garbage (although these two are rarely as soulful as Alison Moyet or as grungy as Shirley Manson.) Ok, the album's a bit spotty in places, and Miss Kittin's already tread a lot of this ground, but "Rock and Roll Machine," "Here and Now," "Pills," and "Leipzig" are all decent quality tracks for those of you weaned on A Broken Frame and Some Great Reward. And it only took two listens of "Price of Love" -- the first single, propelled by one great, simple, filthy beat -- during my run today before I was completely hooked.

Alas, I'm not going to be around (and my limited discretionary funds for concert-going was already spent on R.E.M. tickets), but if you live in NYC and you're looking to wash the taste of Masked and Anonymous out of your mouth, Dylan's playing the Hammerstein Ballroom August 12-14. Should be grand.

So I went down to the Angelika yesterday afternoon (always a strange experience - you can hear and feel the subway running under you during films) to catch Masked and Anonymous and, well, I can only recommend this film to two types of people: Hard-core Dylanologists, and those cinema completists who need to see Ed Harris in blackface. I consider myself a pretty heavy-duty Dylan fan, and even I was a bit bored at certain points. The movie is basically Dylan's version of Waking Life, or what might happen if Bob had entered his own portal a la Being John Malkovich. All of the characters in the film speak in Dylanistic soliloquys (You actually get a very good sense of this from the website), and thus you end up with Giovanni Ribisi's disquisition on war, Val Kilmer's take on animals, etc. The movie takes place in a strange alternate present, where (I'm guessing) the revolutions of the Sixties went sour and ended up tearing the nation apart. Dylan's dad seems to be the ailing leader of the Bearflag Republic or something, and...well, there's no point in trying to explain it.

The movie is basically an extended riff on Dylan and Dylania...at (brief) moments it has the scope and absurdist grandeur of "Desolation Row," "Idiot Wind," or "It's Alright Ma." And some of the renditions of Dylan's music, from the new "One More Cup of Coffee" to the acapella "The Times, They Are a Changin'" are truly beautiful. Most of the time, however, it fails to capture Dylan's spark, and comes off flat and, well, embarrassing (particularly in some of the more questionable racial choices.) I think the extended monologues on life, death, and humanity are meant to have you dwell on the fundamental questions, but as the movie wore on I found myself contemplating altogether different queries: Did Chris Penn eat one of the Baldwins? Who would win in a caged deathmatch between Penelope Cruz and Audrey Tautou? Who knew it would end so badly between Walter and the Dude? When did Mickey Rourke turn into Billy Bob Thornton? So on, so on. I guess I'd recommend that Dylan fans see this film (particularly if you've sat through Renaldo & Clara), just to see where our man is at these days. (In fact, some Dylan fans seem to love it.) All in all, though, I can't say I recommend the film as a film.

On another note, in the two hours I had to kill between this movie and seeing a friend's (very good) band at the Baggot Inn, I stumbled upon a huge line at Tower Records, dutifully waiting to get Dave Gahan's signature. Times change, I guess. Ten years ago, I probably would have staked out this line with a handful of vinyl 12" DM singles. Nowadays, I just skipped it in favor of Forbidden Planet and The Strand. Must be getting old.

Although not as much news about Return of the King leaked out from Comiccon as I would have liked, ex-Eurythmics siren Annie Lennox has announced she's singing on the "title" track (like Enya ["May it Be"] and Emiliana Torrini ["Gollum's Song"] before her.) Well, I prefer this to the Liv Tyler song rumor that went around a few months back, even if that is a bit unfair (I've never heard Tyler sing.) Perhaps they'll both make the final cut.

This Modern Age plays Hipster Bingo at the Siren Music Festival on Coney Island. (Via Listen Missy.) I was there on Saturday too, and was kicking myself for not printing out a card. (I must say I also quite relished being at a beach and being well within the skin tone median - usually I'm the whitest guy for miles, but with indy rockers galore about I felt certifiably tan.) At any rate, the only acts I caught were Hot Hot Heat (interesting), The Datsuns (bleah), and Modest Mouse (ho hum) - I spent most of the time enjoying ancient amusement park technology and eating carny food. All in all, it was a beautiful day to enjoy a quintessential NYC summer attraction.

Mermaniac points the way to SILENCE! Silence of the Lambs: The Musical. Some profanity involved, but if you saw the movie you can probably take it.

A Japanese writer finds himself quoted in Dylan. Sounds like he's got the right attitude about it...I wouldn't think this really constitutes plagiarism.

Via Do You Feel Loved?, R.E.M. is taking online song requests for their 2003 tour, which kicked off last night in Utrecht. Good to see they're playing "Welcome to the Occupation"...I'm all for Document-era protest songs over saccharine ditties like "Imitation of Life" and "Electrolite," particularly in these trying times. Update: Now this is more like it. "Exhuming McCarthy," "Cuyahoga," and "Fall on Me" all were part of the second show, as well as good ole "Country Feedback," still my favorite song to play on the guitar (2/14). Update 2: These setlists are off the hook - the third show of the tour (in London) saw "Life and How to Live It," "Feeling Gravity's Pull" and "Pilgrimage." And the NYC show (10/4) has moved from Liberty Park to the Garden, so now I'm definitely going. W00t.

Bleah...so much for ABC's "Old School" advertising strategy. Game 3 was some of the worst NBA basketball I've ever seen, and this is coming from a guy who really enjoys watching Knicks-Heat series. Just plain ugly...Kinda sad when the most memorable part of the game is the halftime show. Speaking of which, I'm more out of it than I thought. From what alternate universe did this Lil' Kim version of Jewel come from? I remember her as an adorable snaggletoothed and deadly earnest folk chanteuse. She's the last person I ever expected to drop the acoustic guitar and start hip-hopping to a Britney bounce. Well, I can't say I've ever been a big fan, but with its infectious hurdy-gurdy backbeat, "Intuition" seems like it might just be this summer's "Get this Party Started" - the bubble-gum pop song you can't get out of your head. And from Jewel too...Who knew?

The LA Times checks in with REM as they gear up for a fall tour, pay their respects to Dylan, and talk about what songs they'll never play again. "Shiny Happy People" is no surprise, but I always kinda liked "Pop Song 89."

Martin Scorsese signs on to create a Bob Dylan documentary not unlike The Last Waltz. Cool...I assume this'll be Marty's next project after The Aviator.

Via Lots of Co., the Annotated R.E.M. So that's what Stipe's talking about...