Entertainment : The Atlantic

Kanye West Actually Should Throw a Fit at the Grammys This Year

2012-02-09T15:27:15-05:00

The rapper's nominations for Sunday's ceremony show how screwed up the Recording Academy's priorities are—and how screwed up its attitude towards hip-hop is.

Kanye West sends a message at his post-Grammy party in Los Angeles after winning three Grammys on Feb. 8, 2006. (AP)

Kanye West does a lot of things quite well—music, Twitter, extemporaneous political commentary—but etiquette's never been his strong suit, particularly when it comes to awards. Ideally, this would make him more appealing, since rewarding musicians with trophies is about as stupid as rewarding dogs with trophies. But Kanye's gripes are rarely about the stupidity of the trophies themselves and rather about the stupidity of himself not winning enough of them. When Kanye flips out over awards it's both unseemly in its arrogance and amusing in that it flaunts the ridiculousness of the whole enterprise. My personal favorite came in 2005, when he publicly warned the Recording Academy that he (and, implicitly, they) would "really have a problem" if he didn't win the Grammy for Album of the Year, before the nominees were even announced. He didn't win.

The list of past Album of the Year winners reads like a catalog of albums you hide when your friends come over.

He won't win Sunday, either, the one night a year that Americans remember that the Recording Academy exists and that The Amazing Race will not be appearing on their televisions that week. Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, released in November 2010 (which, according to the Grammys' occult calendrical practices, means it was released in 2011), failed to even be nominated for Album of the Year. That snub is pretty remarkable even by the Academy's standards, especially considering that West received more total nominations in lesser categories this year than any other artist. Fantasy was a critical triumph, its notices so rapturous as to inspire notices about the notices. The album's impressive commercial success gave it that elusive air of extreme consensus that's preciously rare in any art form, the surest indicator of something that actually matters. Its omission is the surest indicator that the Academy is something that doesn't, but that omission has still produced a litany of justified complaints from various quarters.

What's surprising is that there's been almost no complaint from Kanye himself, who seems willing to swallow the rationale that the album suffered due to its splitting the vote with Watch the Throne, West's well-hyped (and generally well-received) collaboration with Jay-Z that dropped this past August and which also failed to be nominated.

Maybe Kanye's matured, or maybe he's just embraced the fact that being ignored by the Academy is an infinitely more reliable sign of greatness than attracting its attentions. After all, the history of the Album of the Year reads in large part like a Homeric catalog of albums you hide when your friends come over. In 1969, the award went to Glenn Campbell's By the Time I Get to Phoenix (don't all rush to Spotify at once!), which was chosen over, among other things and in alphabetical order: Beggars Banquet, Electric Ladyland, Lady Soul, Music from Big Pink, and The White Album, none of which were even nominated. Christopher Cross's eponymous yard-sale mainstay triumphed in 1981 over the Clash's London Calling and Prince's Dirty Mind, neither of which, again, were nominated. Billy Joel has been up for the award three more times than Bob Dylan, four more times than the Rolling Stones, and five more times than Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin, and Marvin Gaye combined, none of whom—you guessed it—were ever nominated.

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All that said, Kanye should be pissed, publicly, a lot more so than he is, and for a couple of reasons. First, recent history shows that he really has been screwed, repeatedly. His first album, The College Dropout, was one of the best debuts of the past decade. Nominated in 2005, it lost to Ray Charles's Genius Loves Company, a guest-spackled posthumous record that the Academy probably chose because—wait for it—Ray Charles never won Album of the Year, either. The following year, West released Late Registration, a creative tour de force that lost to a U2 album so forgettable Bono probably doesn't even remember it. In 2008, West's Graduation lost to Herbie Hancock's The Joni Letters, the pianist's tribute to Joni Mitchell (who's also never... oh, why bother). The Joni Letters is a fine record but it's unlikely that most folks who voted for it had ever listened to Graduation; in fact, I'm not sure most folks who voted for The Joni Letters had ever listened to The Joni Letters. The point is that the Album of the Year award Kanye West should (but won't) be collecting Sunday night shouldn't even be his first.

The other—and far more important—reason he should be pissed is that the Grammys' longstanding and stubborn ignorance of hip-hop is a lot worse than disgraceful. The first time the Academy gave Album of the Year to a rap record was in 1999—a mere 20 years after "Rapper's Delight"—for Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Miseducation is an undeniably great record, but it's also an undeniably great record for people who don't actually like hip-hop, or, more honestly and less politely, don't like the kind of people who tend to make hip-hop. Lauryn was a Columbia-educated, movie-star beauty who also sang; Miseducation wasn't even entered in the "Best Rap Album" category, winning "Best R&B Album" instead. The next time a hip-hop artist won was in 2004, when Album of the Year went to Outkast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, a double album that also benefited from a "rap-but-not-really" vibe thanks to the massive success of "Hey Ya!," which won a Grammy in the category of "Best Urban/Alternative Performance" (a.k.a. "Best Euphemism Coined By A Confused Elderly White Person").

Aside from those two examples, the Academy has never awarded Album of the Year to a hip-hop album, and it won't this year either. One could argue that "Best Rap Album" is its own category, but that's a pretty noxious bit of separate-but-unequal logic. Even if Kanye's right and Watch The Throne and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy did split the vote, it's a depressing thought that you could find a room full of people in 2012 who actually think that a boredom-factory like Bruno Mars made a record that comes close to either of them.

The Grammys are about prestige and cultural acceptance. Granted, it's packaged prestige and cultural acceptance of the dullest sort, but prestige and acceptance nonetheless, and those are real things that make people pay attention who otherwise might not. Hip-hop is an art form invented by a politically and economically ravaged underclass (which, by the way, remains pretty goddamned ravaged) that's risen to become the most globally significant cultural movement of the post-Cold War era. It is the living definition of what music, on its very best of days, is able to do, and if that's not deserving of prestige, we might loudly ask: What the hell is?

On late Sunday night the Academy will most likely answer with Adele's 21, a very good record with just the right cozy aroma of Starbucks to make hearts and pacemakers flutter. And come Monday morning, 21 will join the ranks of Celine Dion's Falling Into You, Toto's Toto IV, and Billy Joel's 52nd St. among Album of the Year winners, while My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy will join an essentially infinite list of records better than the three I just named. But Kanye West should still be a little outraged. For that matter, we should be too.

How to Map Time: A Visual History of the Timeline

2012-02-09T12:25:09-05:00

A journey through man's attempts at visualizing time itself

I was recently asked to select my all-time favorite books for the lovely Ideal Bookshelf project by The Paris Review's Thessaly la Force. Despite the near-impossible task of shrinking my boundless bibliophilia to a modest list of dozen or so titles, I was eventually able to do it, and the selection included Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton. Among both my 7 favorite books on maps and my 7 favorite books on time, this lavish collection of illustrated timelines traces the history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present, featuring everything from medieval manuscripts to websites to a chronological board game developed by Mark Twain.

The first chapter, "Time in Print," provides some context for the images:

While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored. This is no small matter: graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information.[Cue in Visual Storytelling and graphic designer Francesco Franchi on representation vs. interpretation.] Yet, little has been written about historical charts and diagrams. And, for all of the excellent work that has been recently published on the history and theory of cartography, we have few examples of work in the area Eviatar Zerubavel has called time maps. This book is an attempt to address that gap."

The Morning News has a wonderful slideshow of images from the book this week. A few favorites:

The Histomap by John Sparks,1931.

In this universal history Johannes Buno, 1672, each millennium before the birth of Christ is depicted by an image of a large allegorical being. This dragon represents the fourth millennium B.C.

In the 1860s, French engineer Charles Joseph Minard pioneered several new infographic techniques. Published in 1869, this endures as his most famous graphic, featuring two diagrams that depict the size and attrition of the armies of Hannibal in his expedition across the Alps during the Punic wars and of Napoleon during his assault on Russia. The faded-red color band indicates the army's strength of numbers, with one millimeter in thickness representing ten thousand men. The chart of Napoleon's march also includes a measure of temperature.

A 'synchronous chart' from Meteorographica (1863) by Francis Galton, pioneer of the study and mapping of weather. The chart represents weather conditions, barometric pressure, and wind direction at a single moment in time across the geographic space of Europe.

Discus chronologicus by German engraver Christoph Weigel, published in the early 1720s, is a paper chart with a pivoting central arm. Rings represent kingdoms, radial wedges represent centuries, and the names of kingdoms are printed on the moveable arm.

From literature to art history to technology, Cartographies of Time offers a fascinating and dimensional lens on what it means to peer from a single moment of time outward into all other moments that came before and will come after, and inward into our own palpable yet subjective perception of permanence and its opposite.

This post appears courtesy of Brain Pickings, an Atlantic partner site.

Image credits: Princeton Architectural Press/The Morning News

RIP John Christopher, Unsung Young-Adult Sci-Fi Writer

2012-02-09T10:48:06-05:00

The author, who died last week, wrote books that linked a familiar past with an unrecognizable future.

Simon Pulse

The author John Christopher died in England last Friday, and I'm guessing that most of you have no idea who he was or what he wrote. He wrote an awful lot, in a lot of different genres, under many different names, but I remember him today because of three creased and crinkled used paperbacks of science fiction I stumbled across as a child at the "for sale" carousel at the Reginald P. Dawson Library in Town of Mount Royal, Quebec. I still have the books--35 years later--and have dutifully tried to get my son to read them. Maybe I'll try again now.

The books are The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire and together they comprise what is called the "Tripod Series," named for the shape of the giant aliens who have captured Earth and enslaved the humans at the core of Christopher's narratives. I don't remember much of the details of the books except that a group of young boys were always on the run, part of a resistance to the alien conquerors, in a sort of 1984 meets Red Dawn meets the French Resistance fondue.

Here is how The Guardian led its obituary of Christopher:

The science-fiction author John Christopher, who has died aged 89, was perhaps best known for the Tripods trilogy for young adults. The books (published in 1967-68) depict a world suffering under the control of aliens from a far star, who can survive in the Earth's inimical atmosphere only by moving around in deadly tripodal machines inside which their own atmosphere can be replicated. As a result, our world has reverted to a low-technology state, almost medieval in nature. A group of adolescents, not yet fitted with a mentally controlling "cap", bravely confront the menace of the Tripods. In the end, the results they achieve are not entirely what they expected.

On the back cover of my copy of The White Mountains, there is this blurb from some long-ago review by the Chicago Tribune:

The strength of this book's grip is less in its elements of fantasy than in its elements of reality, less in the horror of the Tripods than in the normality of Will, Henry and Jean-Paul. Their flight through a strange world 100 years from now will remind readers of that greatest of boyhood flights, through a stranger world 100 years ago, down the Mississippi with Huck Finn

Well, I wouldn't go that far. John Christopher was no Mark Twain. And he was no George Orwell, either, although (as with Orwell and H.G. Wells) there is something overwhelmingly British--stiff upper lip and all--about the heroes/victims of Christopher's stories. In fact, in the very first paragraph of the very first book, the main character, "Will," describes a scene that makes me think today of those endless English-themed movies, the period pieces, where you feel like Anthony Hopkins at any moment is going to jump out of a cloakroom at you:

Apart from the one in the church tower, there were five clocks in the village that kept reasonable time, and my father owned one of them. It stood on the mantlepiece in the parlor and every night before he went to bed he took the key from a vase and wound it up. Once a year the clockman came from Winchester, on an old jogging pack horse, to clean and oil it and put it right. Afterward he would drink camomile tea with my mother and tell her the news of the city and what he had heard in the villages through which he had passed.

Even the last line of the series is notably British: "'Yes,' I said, 'I'll leave my seas and island.'" In the Commonwealth's Canada, a lifetime ago, I liked the books because they linked a familiar past--the traveling salesman, etc.--with an unrecognizable future. I don't know why so many other people liked the Tripod series, too, but there was a television series about it and, for a while, it was evidently serialized here in the United States in Boys Life. I wonder how many of those Boy Scouts who read the series would remember Christoper today?

My version of The White Mountains, written in 1967, was already on its fourth paperback printing by 1974. The last in the series, The Pool of Fire, written in 1968, was already in its third paperback printing in 1973. Christopher's New York Times obituary explains why he wrote so much and so quickly on so many topics:

The financial demands of a growing family set the blistering pace of his output of books and short stories in the early years, he said. He wrote most of his stories in a single draft, until Susan Hirschmann, an editor at his New York publishing house, Macmillan, cajoled him into rewriting and polishing the young-adult novels that later became the "Tripods" series. He frequently acknowledged her contributions to his books' success.

"The original version of 'The White Mountains' was probably just about worth publishing," he wrote in the preface to a 2003 anniversary edition of the first book in the trilogy, which first appeared in 1967. "But would it, without Susan, have remained in print and worthy of a commemorative relaunch, three and a half decades after its original publication? I've no doubt about the answer to that."

Across the pond, the obituaries were, predictably, both gentler and more insightful. From The Guardian's "Books Blog:"

Christopher was one of a generation of British writers who exploited the mass popularity of science fiction as a way of holding the mirror of art up to a wide spectrum of British society. The Tripods owes a debt to the martian invaders of HG Wells's The War of the Worlds, and both stories in different ways comment on the authoritarian culture of British society. The influence of John Wyndham's "cosy catastrophe" novels such as The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids is clear in Christopher's very British depictions of apocalyptic settings and, like Wyndham, Christopher fills his stories with oblique character studies drawn from everyday life in Britain. And while they shared little stylistically, both John Christopher and his near contemporary JG Ballard shared a healthy cynicism about just how long Britain's polite society would last without the comforts afforded by wealth.

Wealth, schmealth. If you have a kid between the ages of 10 and 14, who likes science fiction, take a shot at having them read these books. John Christopher, who also wrote under the names Stanley Winchester, Hilary Ford, William Godfrey, William Vine, Peter Graaf, Peter Nichols and Anthony Rye, deserves to have this work absorbed by another generation of young readers. Oh, and because you won't likely hear about him ever again, Christopher's real name, all this time, was Sam Youd.

Eli Manning Hugs Michael Vick, and Other Portraits of NFL Tenderness

2012-02-09T09:08:19-05:00

A brief glimpse at the softer side of America's most violent sport

As a web producer, much of my 2011-12 NFL season was spent flipping through endless photo sets, looking for ways to illustrate stories on team rivalries, playoff matchups, or particular players. This often called for depictions of players at the crest of their powers, plowing through defenders at the apex of their aggression, clawing at facemasks and burying their opponents deep in the dirt.

But the spectrum of emotion on the field runs equally in both directions. In between the hi-resolution photos of rib cages being splintered under the weight of a 300-plus-pound linebacker were pictures of tenderness on the field. These moments serve as a reminder that despite the NFL's best efforts to treat them otherwise (read: commodities to be traded, profited from, and discarded when damaged beyond repair or no longer useful), the players are still human beings that experience joy and heartbreak in equal measure, together on the field as both teammates and opponents.

Below is selection of photos that illustrate the softer side of those mean machines we most often see tearing each other to pieces.

Image credit: AP Images

Track of the Day: 'I Belong In Your Arms'

2012-02-09T08:39:32-05:00

Chairlift broke through to a certain level of success—the kind that lands your single in an iPod Nano commercial—back in 2009, as a baby band. Despite some personal drama in the intervening years, they are back with a lush, sonically streamlined second album, Something, and it is a major step forward in terms of songwriting and production. Caroline Polachek's voice can be intimidatingly showy sometimes, but not on this song. And Patrick Wimberly's backing track is both soaring and low-key, with a Cure-ish bass line and a few washes of golden-age Cocteau Twins shimmer in the mix. Taken as a package, what stands out to me about this song is how heartfelt it is. It's difficult to capture the warmth of romance without tipping over into syrupy territory, but here Chairlift get the balance exactly right.

On iTunes: Chairlift / "I Belong In Your Arms"

Past tracks

America's Best Literary Journalist

2012-02-09T08:21:39-05:00

The Times profiles the intrepid Katherine Boo:

Ms. Boo graduated from Barnard in the late '80s, still typing -- for The Columbia Daily Spectator, for which she wrote editorials -- and was hired by Jack Shafer, then the editor of the Washington City Paper. Mr. Shafer, now a columnist for Reuters, said recently that he was impressed less by her writing then by her voluminous reading and her ability to think on her feet, and was amazed by how accomplished her first article was. "She had the soul of a poet but the arm strength of an investigative reporter," he recalled.

What stands out for me is Boo's work, now almost 20 years ago, on the impact of welfare reform. It's always interesting to think back on how the literature of your youth shapes your path. At the time policy wonkery about the potential effects of welfare reform was all the rage. But Boo's work treated the wonkery as an excuse to write about what ultimately mattered to me as a reader--the people.

The mandate, at the time in my life, appeared simple--"Tell stories." The point here isn't that narrative is superior to stats but that narrative has a different power, and one--in our current age--which is hard to capture. Stats fit into six minute debate segment in a way that stories do not.

At any rate, I've always been impressed that Boo has taken her gifts and applied them to the impoverished corners of the world, given that there is always a lucrative market for talented writers interested, solely, in rich people.

If you're unfamiliar with her work, this piece on the aftershocks of Katrina is an excellent start. Here's a taste:

The recreation center looked out on the bayou, which most of the evacuees avoided--there were alligators there. So it was considered daring when Carolyn and Gus began taking their toddlers to the water's edge each afternoon, when the light made everything around them glimmer gold and red. "I want their eyes to be steady full of something beautiful," Carolyn said, "enough beautiful to push the ugly things they've seen out of their brains."

One afternoon, Jasmine went to the bayou, too. It was the most beautiful place she'd ever been. Like many neglected children, she'd grown used to her lot in life, and barely paid attention when her mother asked the volunteers, "You got kids? I been trying to get rid of mine for some time." Jasmine had an eleven-year-old brother, and neither of them expected their mother to do "regular stuff," like helping with homework. Their mother said, "My kids don't even ask me anymore--my nerves is bad, so they gets beat up after one problem. Other thing they know is when I put that forty dollars' worth of food on the counter every month and they eat it too fast, they be going hungry until next month comes around."

One kind of poverty is that of the imagination--the inability to envision a future truly different from the present. Jasmine had long judged people based on whether or not they gave her food and clothing, but, as she watched Carolyn and Gus and other families, she found herself mulling different gauges of worth. She'd been working lately on a definition of love. "Maybe it's that, like, you honor somebody and they honor you back," she said carefully. "If you do for them without being all, like, See, I did this for you, now you best do something for me--like, you just do it for the kind of your heart."

Jasmine had seen her father only once since she was five. She knew that he had been in prison for selling drugs and attempted murder, and that he now put siding on houses. He was six feet two, had a place in suburban Minneapolis, and had sponsored the three best days of her life: "It was February and he was in a car, and he came by his cousin's house. I was playing in the parking lot then, so I caught a look of him. I knew right away--I said, 'That my daddy,' but because I'd grown big he didn't know me. But then he did know, and he took me eating at Manhattan's in New Orleans and bowling and to a movie, then he took me by my other cousin's, then we ate doughnuts, then he brought me to Avondale, too." Jasmine's furious dialling now had direction: she would ask her father to take her in.

This is how you write when you take people seriously. Boo's new book Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is now in your area.

Linsanity: How the Internet Made Jeremy Lin a Star in Less Than a Week

2012-02-08T13:25:35-05:00

The Knicks point guard's lightning-fast journey from benchwarmer to phenom could only have happened in 2012.

AP Images

"Lin's rapid rise from benchwarmer to crowd favorite also stoked a 13-percent spike in average prices for the game [Friday] against Kobe Bryant's club, to $312.51 from $276.39, and bump of 36 percent for next Wednesday's more affordable matchup against the Hornets ($89 to $121)."
-- New York Post

"It's the perfect beginning of what could either be Knicks fans' latest colossal disappointment or the league's favorite marketing figure since Yao Ming."
-- Deadspin

Minutes played by Jeremy Lin this season: 135

How to explain Linsanity? How can a cast-off point guard who couldn't crack the 12-man rotation of two different NBA teams galvanize one of the largest and most cynical fan bases in the league? How can two above-average games against two terrible defenses by a 23-year-old point guard cause ticket prices for upcoming Knicks game to skyrocket? How, in the city of Eli and the Giants, can Jeremy Lin be above the fold?

Some of Linsanity can be explained by Knick-fan desperation. Lin plays the position that has plagued Knick fans since Chauncey Billups was cut to make room for free-agent center Tyson Chandler: point guard. The New York faithful have ample reason to yearn for a quality PG, currently the most glaring weakness on a team with two dominant scorers in Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire and a defensive stopper in Chandler. The mantra for Knicks fans during the team's awful 8-15 start was: Just wait for a point guard to run the offense, get our stars the ball and run some pick and rolls, and then you'll see.

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The team's need for a good point guard is so overwhelming that fans (including myself) have been waiting with bated breath for a 32-year-old cast-off with a herniated disk in his back and a history of weight problems to hopefully get healthy. So when Lin reeled off 25 points and seven assists off the bench against the New Jersey Nets Saturday night and followed that up with Monday's 28-point, eight-assist bonanza in a win over the Utah Jazz, New York fans were justifiably overjoyed.

But Linsanity is bigger than New York—much bigger—and the phenomenon is more a function of the calendar than anything else—the year, not the date.

If Tim Tebow was the first athlete whose fame and cultural impact vastly outstripped his playing abilities, Lin is the first who created a Tebow-like impact in less than a week. Both owe the vast majority of their Q rating to the Internet, social media, and the user-generated buzz of whatever sociologists are calling this latest generation.

Lin has several prerequisites for Internet superstardom. He's the first graduate of Harvard to play in the NBA since 1954. He's the only Asian-American (Taiwanese-American, to be exact) currently playing in a league that has been desperately seeking them since Yao Ming hung up his oversized spurs. And he's battled through adversity to make it to the Knicks: Undrafted and cut by two teams in the last year, he's currently sleeping on his brother's couch.

So when this boy-from-nowhere delivered 81 minutes of high-quality play over two games, the Twitterverse/blogosphere/Internet in general went berserk. While the Utah game was still going on, the #Linsanity meme permeated all manner of social media sites. A status update on Lin's Facebook account after the Nets game prompted more than 1,000 comments. Deadspin created a 'Linsanity' tag for all things Jeremy. And the icing on the cake came from YouTube user random2g, who created an original tribute video for the "talk of the league".

When Lin takes the court Wednesday in Washington against the Wizards, most eyes will be on him even when he doesn't have the ball. When the Knicks host the Lakers on Friday in a nationally televised game, fans will be looking for a 45-point, 20-assist game where Lin also teaches Andrew Bynum good manners and tears Kobe Bryant's ACL.

As impressive as his last two games were, Lin's skills on the court are dwarfed by his larger-than-life image online, and his ceiling as a player is probably a serviceable backup point guard/poor man's J.J. Barea. But because he's playing in 2012—not 2002 or 1992 or 1982—he's a lock to be a relevant for at least the rest of the season even if he doesn't break 10 points or five assists in another game. He checks all the Tebow-esque boxes: college star who was expected to fail in the pros, member of a group with staggering purchasing power (Asians/Asian Americans vs. devout Christians), key position on a team that needs helps to make the playoffs (point guard vs. QB)... the list goes on. And given the NBA's desire to continue its expansion into Asian markets, it's in the league's best interest to keep Lin in the public eye for as long as possible.

So if you pay through the nose to see Lin face off against Kobe on Friday, remember that you're not really seeing Jeremy Lin: second-year point guard. You're seeing JEREMY LIN: cultural phenomenon, Twitterverse-exploder and Tebow Lite. The point guard may go away after a couple bad starts, but the cultural icon is here to stay—at least for a while. So sit back, enjoy the ride and join in the chants of "MVP!" after a routine first-quarter layup. It is 2012, after all.

The Most Promising Network TV Pilots of 2012

2012-02-08T11:48:27-05:00

Why you should be excited for new shows from Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman, and Mindy Kaling.

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Now that they've gotten their mid-season shows off the ground, it's pilot-buyin' time for the major networks. That means that, in the past few weeks, we've been deluged with news about shows in development, with headlines featuring such names as Louis C.K., Mindy Kaling, J.J. Abrams, and Roseanne Barr.

Thankfully, for those of us who've had some trouble keeping up, The Hollywood Reporter was kind enough to post a full list of what we can look forward to from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and The CW in the 2012-13 season. Since that roundup is still pretty daunting, we've narrowed the list to the 11 shows we're most looking forward to.

This post also appears on Flavorpill, an Atlantic partner site.

Image credit: AP Images

The Misunderstood Power of Michael Jackson's Music

2012-02-08T11:14:42-05:00

His influence today proves him to be one of the greatest creators of all time, but Jackson's art—like that of many black artists—still doesn't get the full respect it deserves.

AP Images

More than two and a half years after his untimely death, Michael Jackson continues to entertain. Cirque du Soleil's crowd-pleasing Michael Jackson Immortal World Tour is currently crisscrossing North America, while a recent Jackson-themed episode of Glee earned the show a 16 percent jump in ratings and its highest music sales of the season. Even Madonna's halftime Super Bowl spectacle harkened back to a trend first initiated by Jackson.

But there is another crucial part of Jackson's legacy that deserves attention: his pioneering role as an African-American artist working in an industry still plagued by segregation, stereotypical representations, or little representation at all.

Jackson never made any qualms about his aspirations. He wanted to be the best. When his highly successful Off the Wall album (in 1981, the best-selling album ever by a black artist) was slighted at the Grammy Awards, it only fueled Jackson's resolve to create something better. His next album, Thriller, became the best-selling album by any artist of any race in the history of the music industry. It also won a record-setting seven Grammy awards, broke down color barriers on radio and TV, and redefined the possibilities of popular music on a global scale.

Yet among critics (predominantly white), skepticism and suspicion only grew. "He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables," predicted James Baldwin in 1985, "for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael."

Baldwin proved prophetic. In addition to a flood of ridicule regarding his intelligence, race, sexuality, appearance, and behavior, even his success and ambition were used by critics as evidence that he lacked artistic seriousness. Reviews frequently described his work as "calculating," "slick," and "shallow." Establishment rock critics such as Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus notoriously dismissed Jackson as the first major popular music phenomenon whose impact was more commercial than cultural. Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Bruce Springsteen, they claimed, challenged and re-shaped society. Jackson simply sold records and entertained.

The point of his ambition wasn't money and fame; it was respect.

It shouldn't be much of a strain to hear the racial undertones in such an assertion. Historically, this dismissal of black artists (and black styles) as somehow lacking substance, depth and import is as old as America. It was the lie that constituted minstrelsy. It was a common criticism of spirituals (in relation to traditional hymns), of jazz in the '20s and '30s, of R&B in the '50s and '60s, of funk and disco in the '70s, and of hip-hop in the '80s and '90s (and still today). The cultural gatekeepers not only failed to initially recognize the legitimacy of these new musical styles and forms, they also tended to overlook or reduce the achievements of the African-American men and women who pioneered them. The King of Jazz, for white critics, wasn't Louis Armstrong, it was Paul Whiteman; the King of Swing wasn't Duke Ellington, it was Benny Goodman; the King of Rock wasn't Chuck Berry or Little Richard, it was Elvis Presley.

Given this history of white coronation, it is worth considering why the media took such issue with referring to Michael Jackson as the King of Pop. Certainly his achievements merited such a title. Yet up until his death in 2009, many journalists insisted on referring to him as the "self-proclaimed King of Pop." Indeed, in 2003, Rolling Stone went so far as to ridiculously re-assign the title to Justin Timberlake. (To keep with the historical pattern, just last year the magazine devised a formula that coronated Eminem—over Run DMC, Public Enemy, Tupac, Jay-Z, or Kanye West—as the King of Hip Hop).

Jackson was well-aware of this history and consistently pushed against it. In 1979, Rolling Stone passed on a cover story about the singer, saying that it didn't feel Jackson merited front cover status. "I've been told over and over again that black people on the covers of magazines don't sell copies," an exasperated Jackson told confidantes. "Just wait. Some day those magazines will come begging for an interview."

Jackson, of course, was right (Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner actually sent a self-deprecatory letter acknowledging the oversight in 1984). And during the 1980s, at least, Jackson's image seemed ubiquitous. Yet over the long haul, Jackson's initial concern seems legitimate. As shown in the breakdown below, his appearances on the front cover of Rolling Stone, the United States' most visible music publication, are far fewer than those of white artists:

John Lennon: 30

Mick Jagger: 29

Paul McCartney: 26

Bob Dylan: 22

Bono: 22

Bruce Springsteen: 22

Madonna: 20

Britney Spears: 13

Michael Jackson: 8 (two came after he died; one featured Paul McCartney as well)

Is it really possible that Michael Jackson, arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, merited less than half the coverage of Bono, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna?

Of course, this disregard wasn't limited to magazine covers. It extended into all realms of print media. In a 2002 speech in Harlem, Jackson not only protested his own slights, but also articulated how he fit into a lineage of African-American artists struggling for respect:

All the forms of popular music from jazz to hip-hop, to bebop, to soul [come from black innovation]. You talk about different dances from the catwalk, to the jitterbug, to the charleston, to break dancing -- all these are forms of black dancing...What would [life] be without a song, without a dance, and joy and laughter, and music. These things are very important but if you go to the bookstore down the corner, you will not see one black person on the cover. You'll see Elvis Presley, you'll see the Rolling Stones...But we're the real pioneers who started these [forms]."

While there was certainly some rhetorical flourish to his "not one black person on the cover" claim, his broader point of severely disproportionate representation in print was unquestionably accurate. Books on Elvis Presley alone outnumber titles on Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson combined.

When I began my book, Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson, in 2005, there wasn't one serious book focused on Jackson's creative output. Indeed, at my local Barnes & Noble, I could find only two books about him, period. Both dealt with the scandals and controversies of his personal life.

It seemed the only way Michael Jackson could get covered was if he was presented as a freak, a curiosity, a spectacle. Even reviews of his albums, post-Thriller, focused on the sensational and were overwhelmingly condescending , when not outright hostile.

Of course, this poor coverage wasn't only about race. Biases were often more subtle, veiled and coded. They were wrapped together with his overall otherness and conflated with the "Wacko Jacko" media construct. In addition, as Baldwin astutely noted, there were not entirely unrelated apprehensions about his wealth and fame, anxieties about his eccentricities and sexuality, confusion about his changing appearance, contempt for his childlike behavior, and fears about his power.

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But the bottom line is this: Somehow, in the midst of the circus that surrounded him, Jackson managed to leave behind one of the most impressive catalogs in the history of music. Rarely has an artist been so adept at communicating the vitality and vulnerability of the human condition: the exhilaration, yearning, despair, and transcendence. Indeed, in Jackson's case he literally embodied the music. It charged through him like an electric current. He mediated it through every means at his disposal—his voice, his body, his dances, films, words, technology and performances. His work was multi-media in a way never before experienced.

This is why the tendency of many critics to judge his work against circumscribed, often white, Euro-American musical standards is such a mistake. Jackson never fit neatly into categories and defied many of the expectations of rock/alternative enthusiasts. He was rooted deeply in the African-American tradition, which is crucial to understanding his work. But the hallmark of his art is fusion, the ability to stitch together disparate styles, genres and mediums to create something entirely new.

If critics simply hold Jackson's lyrics on a sheet of paper next to those of Bob Dylan, then, they will likely find Jackson on the short end. It's not that Jackson's lyrics aren't substantive (on the HIStory album alone, he tackles racism, materialism, fame, corruption, media distortion, ecological destruction, abuse, and alienation). But his greatness is in his ability to augment his words vocally, visually, physically, and sonically, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Listen, for example, to his non-verbal vocalizations—the cries, exclamations, grunts, gasps, and improvisatory vernacular—in which Jackson communicates beyond the strictures of language. Listen to his beat boxing and scatting; how he stretches or accents words; his James Brown-like staccato facility; the way his voice moves from gravelly to smooth to sublime; the passionate calls and responses; the way he soars just as naturally with gospel choirs and electric guitars.

Listen to his virtuosic rhythms and rich harmonies; the nuanced syncopation and signature bass lines; the layers of detail and archive of unusual sounds. Go beyond the usual classics, and play songs like "Stranger in Moscow," "I Can't Help It ," "Liberian Girl ," "Who Is It," and "In the Back." Note the range of subject matter, the spectrum of moods and textures, the astounding variety (and synthesis) of styles. On the Dangerous album alone, Jackson moves from New Jack Swing to classical, hip hop to gospel, R&B to industrial, funk to rock. It was music without borders or barriers, and it resonated across the globe.

However, it wasn't until Jackson's death in 2009 that he finally began to engender more respect and appreciation from the intelligentsia. It is one of humanity's strange habits to only truly appreciate genius once it's gone. Still, in spite of the renewed interest, the easy dismissals and disparity in serious print coverage remains.

As a competitor on par with the legendary Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson wouldn't be satisfied. His goal was to prove that a black artist could do everything a white artist could (and more). He wanted to move beyond every boundary, earn every recognition, break every record, and achieve artistic immortality ("That is why to escape death," he said, "I bind my soul to my work"). The point of his ambition wasn't money and fame; it was respect.

As he boldly proclaimed in his 1991 hit, "Black or White," "I had to tell them I ain't second to none."

Track of the Day: 'Default'

2012-02-08T08:10:00-05:00

Not quite a year ago, I reviewed a song called "WOR" by a young band from Scotland, by way of East London, named Django Django. That track reminded me of the joyous oddity that was The Beta Band, with a faster metabolism. Fast-forward to 2012 and Django Django is back with a formal debut album, and it's a cracker! The lead single, "Default" has all the nervy strumming and primal stomp of earlier efforts, and yes, the malfunctioning sci-fi robot synth presets are back, too. But overall, the songwriting has matured and what we get is a proper single. Yes, the edges are slightly bent, but that's exactly what they were aiming for.

On iTunes: Django Django / "Default"

Past tracks

Sophie Blackall's Illustrations of Craigslist Missed Connections

2012-02-07T16:05:21-05:00

This episode of Etsy's Handmade Portraits series, directed by Alex Rappoport, profiles an artist who finds inspiration in the stories of strangers trying to find one another on the Internet after a chance encounter. Sophie Blackall's whimsical paintings illustrate Craigslist's Missed Connections posts in humorous ways, perhaps interpreting their details more literally than the authors intended. She also captures the diversity of crowds on New York's subways for a project commissioned by the MTA. Her illustrations have been published as a book and are available on Etsy, of course.

Stills from the video

For more videos by Etsy, visit http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/video/.

Via Vimeo Staff Picks.

10 Greatest Charles Dickens Characters

2012-02-07T14:30:49-05:00

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Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian era—and possibly some other eras as well. Though Dickens was skilled at creating plot and much loved for his winking sense of humor, perhaps his greatest talent was creating characters, many of whom are still household names a century and a half after their creation.

His biographer, John Forster, wrote that Dickens made his "characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves." Indeed, his characters are extremely rich, and even the most cartoonish of them glow with a certain kind of truth, not to mention some incredible names.

To honor Dickens on his 200th birthday, we've put together a list of what we consider to be the best of the great author's many fantastic figures. See our choices below.

This post also appears on Flavorpill, an Atlantic partner site.

Image credit: Gutenberg Press

Promised 'Red Tails' Update: Go See It

2012-02-07T12:10:29-05:00

As anticipated last month, I finally saw the George Lucas adventure movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails. Here is how some of the real Tuskegee Airmen looked:

And??? OK, it's not Shakespeare. The dialogue is sometimes laugh-out-loud corny -- I mean really, several times I actually burst out laughing in the theater -- and the characters have a kind of comic-book obviousness. The naturally talented virtuoso who takes one risk too many; the college boy weighed down by parental expectations; the doomed sweethearts; the bigot who sees the error of his ways -- and the ones who don't; etc. Still, I'm glad I saw it, and I hope it registers as a success.

Reason one: It's not supposed to be Shakespeare! If put in its real artistic class -- not just contemporary aerial-Westerns like Top Gun and even Star Wars itself but also World War II standards like 30 Seconds Over Tokyo or Sands of Iwo Jima, all of whose real message is, "See how brave and good our people are! And how they must cope with personal problems, and how they miss their loved ones at home, as they resolutely fight for us"-- it's no cornier or thinner than the others.

Reason two: It's fun to watch. At least if you have any interest in seeing good guys vs. bad guys as they zoom around, engage in derring-do, and blow things up. Or, as a veteran flyer put it when defending the movie against nit-picking critiques of its accuracy:

None of them seem to understand that the film is for an audience of teenage boys--particularly African-American boys--and not 60-year-old rivet-counters.

Reason three: I hope it is officially considered a success, so that when movie people talk about "another Red Tails" that will be a green-light signal rather than a kiss of death. Lucas has said that he imagines the current film as part of a trilogy, which he'll make if the first one succeeds. For all the complaints about thin characters, I would actually would like to see a "prequel" movie explaining, for instance, how "Lightning" and some other rural-South characters ended up as fighter pilots (yes, I realize that this pattern was common among rural-Southern whites at the time) or how "the old man," Colonel Bullard, got to that rank. Or a sequel showing what happened to the flyers when they went back home. Including "Easy," who struggles with a drinking problem and his father's expectation that he'll follow him into professional life. Also, it wouldn't be bad to have Hollywood take it for granted that a movie with a nearly all-black cast could have mainstream success.

So: if you have a chance, check it out. Think of it not as Henry V but as a precursor to Top Gun
and you'll be set for a good time.

For 'Hugo' Author Brian Selznick, Life (Thankfully) Imitates Art

2012-02-07T11:57:53-05:00

The author, whose children's book was turned into a Martin Scorsese-directed, Academy Award-nominated film, is starting to resemble some of his own characters.

Paramount Pictures

In his lavishly illustrated books for children, author-artist Brian Selznick writes about magic—but not the wand-waving, quidditch-broom kind. Selznick takes up the real-life wonders conjured by history's big dreamers: the impossible illusions of Harry Houdini; the phantasmagoric landscapes of cinema's first auteur, George Méliès; the iconic exhibitions in New York's Museum of Natural History. Once a well-published but little-known illustrator, Selznick has catapulted to the very top of his profession in recent years. In this regard, he's starting to resemble his characters—visionaries who dream big dreams and strive, against great odds, to make them real.

Selnick's biggest success to date is The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007), which won the country's most prestigious illustrator's prize, the Caldecott Medal, and was the basis for Martin Scorsese's film adaptation, Hugo (2011). The film's many Oscar nominations has resulted in a redoubled interest in the original; since the Academy's announcement on January 24th, Hugo Cabret ranks in the top five of the New York Times children's bestseller list, even beating Selnick's latest offering, the popular and acclaimed Wonderstruck (2011).

Hugo's story unfolds in Paris, 1931. He's an orphan who winds the clocks in Montparnasse Station; a broken automaton leads him to a disgruntled and disenchanted toymaker who we gradually discover is the filmmaker Georges Méliès. In time, Méliès rewards Hugo for his creativity, persistence, and technical skill. In turn, Hugo helps Méliès, who has renounced his career, remember how to make-believe.

Oscar Wilde claimed that life tends to imitate art, but in Selznick's case, the parallels are downright spooky. Hugo Cabret's fictional storyline foreshadows events the real-life book brought about: a talented but hard-up artist (Hugo/Selznick) joins forces with a famed director looking for a new story (Méliès/Scorsese). It's only one of many ways that Hugo's journey has been as strange, surprising, and delightfully unlikely as a Brian Selznick plotline.

AS SELZNICK NOTES in The Hugo Movie Companion, his vibrant, behind-the-scenes treatise on Hugo's path from print to screen, Méliès fell into debt and out of fashion late in his career. His studio closed and his films were only worth the celluloid that they were stored on. During World War I, the French government melted down Méliès' archive to make boot heels—a vicious irony for a child of cobbler parents who'd turned to cinema to escape the awl and hammer.

The specter of failed promise haunts Hugo Cabret, in part because the book was written as Selznick struggled with his own creative and professional frustrations. Hugo's wrecked automaton, originally built to draw and write at the turn of a crank, can no longer perform its functions; by 2002, Selznick feared the same fate for himself.

"I hit a point where I thought I might not work anymore," he told me in a phone interview last week. "I felt like there was something else I should be doing, but I didn't know what it was."

At the time, Selznick had what he calls "a very good career" creating illustrations for other authors' books. But somehow, the thrill had gone out of his work. Editors seemed to offer him only one kind of project—illustrating children's picture book biographies, like ones he'd made about Amelia Earhart and the Victorian artist Waterhouse Hawkins. An illustrated book about Walt Whitman, eventually published in 2004, proved especially difficult—"Whitman just isn't a children's poet in any way," Selznick told me, laughing—and afterwards, he decided to take some time off. "I didn't want to illustrate any more biographies," he said, "but I didn't have any other ideas." For an alarming six-month period, he didn't work at all.

It was during this time that Selznick met one of his artistic heroes: Maurice Sendak, the iconic author-illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are. Growing up, Selznick told me, he bristled at friendly suggestions that he make books for children. As an undergraduate at RISD, he skipped a campus lecture by Sendak, whose work he'd never seen, just to prove a point. "I didn't know anything about the genre, or what children's books could do," he told me. "It was my own ignorance, but they didn't interest me." Over time Selznick "came to his senses." The second time around, he was thrilled to meet one of the genre's modern masters.

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"Sendak and I became friends and would have long conversations," Selznick said. "He'd just finished a big book, I think it was Brundibar, and he was in between projects, too. He wasn't sure what was next, I wasn't sure what was next." The challenging Whitman book, by happy coincidence, helped solidify their bond: "He'd just started reading Whitman for the first time in his life, and had fallen in love with him. We had these long, amazing talks about Whitman's life and poems."

Then the crucial moment came. "He asked me to send him a box of my books," Selznick recalled, "because he didn't really know my work." And so he looked. As it turned out, Sendak--who is famously forthright and blunt—had mixed reviews for his new disciple. "He basically said 'You know, you're very talented. I see that you can draw. But you haven't reached your potential yet. There's more in you.'"

The lukewarm, almost backhanded quality of this reaction—you're good, but you could be better—initially baffled Selznick. "At first, I had no idea what it meant," he said. "I was proud of the books I'd made before Hugo." On the other hand, Sendak's response resonated with Selznick's own feeling that he needed a new direction, and that he still had more to give. "That was the bottom line," he told me. "When someone like Maurice Sendak tells you that you have more potential than what you're reaching, you don't ignore that."

Selznick began reading widely, just to cast his imagination around, and by chance he discovered the book that set everything into motion: Gaby Wood's Edison's Eve, which explores the human desire to create lifelike mechanized creatures. To Selznick's surprise, the book had a whole chapter on George Méliès, who had built and collected automatons throughout his life. Méliès' automations, he learned, were donated to a French museum after his death, where they were stored in an attic and eventually destroyed by rain.

Years before, after seeing Méliès' masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon (1902), Selznick had vaguely considered writing a book about him. This time, the poignant detail about the ruined machines stayed with him. "This weird story began to percolate," Selznick said, "about a boy who finds this broken machine that leads him to the French filmmaker George Méliès. I just started working on it, because I had nothing else to do."

Once he started, Selznick quickly became enthusiastic about the project. "I got completely caught up with the story, and the research," he told me. "I spent two and a half years immersing myself in Hugo's world." He steeped himself in early French cinema, watching hours of Méliès' work and films by other directors like Jean Vigo, Rene Clair, and Jean Renoir. He visited the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to view historic automatons in the cog-wheel flesh--there, he discovered the writing, drawing Maillardet automaton that inspired the one in Hugo. Finally, he traveled to Paris to research the life and culture of the city in the 1930s, and to learn more about Méliès. He tracked down an apartment once tenanted by the filmmaker, as well as his grave.

Selznick was doubtful that the book would find an audience, and insists that Hugo was initially a personal and aesthetic venture, not a career or professional decision. "I was working on a children's book about French silent movies," he told me, laughing. "This was not a guaranteed bestseller at the time. I thought I was spending years on a book that no one would ever read."

Still, a nugget of Sendak's wisdom fortified him against self-doubt: "Maurice was the person who said to me, 'you know, Brian, you have to make the book you want to make.'"

AS IT TURNED OUT, the author and his protagonist had a lot in common. Hugo wanted to fix his broken automaton in the hope it would write out a message from his father. Selznick saw the whole book as a cracked machine, one that would write and draw itself if only he could find the right parts. "I started feeling like all these pieces of the story that I was moving around were part of the machine," he said. "Like, is Hugo's father alive? Is he dead? Is he the good guy? Is he the bad guy? And what does the automaton write?" Like Hugo, the author had no idea what the automaton would do when finally switched on. He worked for a year and a half before he unlocked the secret message trapped within in the mechanical hand.

When Hugo and Isabelle first turn the key inside the mechanical man, he appears, at first, to write--a series of unfathomable, runic pen-scratchings. His hopes are dashed; the robot is unfixable, and Hugo feels broken himself. But then it becomes clear that what seemed to be writing is actually drawing—a picture, heavily crosshatched like a Selznick illustration, appears on the page. "The mechanical man hadn't been writing," Hugo's narrator tells us, "it was drawing!" This moment, though crucial to the plot, also dramatizes a moment in the author's own creative awakening—his eventual realization that artwork, not text, would be crucial to Hugo's conception.

Selznick decided that he wanted his drawings to reflect the conventions of early cinema, but he wasn't sure how. Inspired by the "wild rumpus" section from Where the Wild Things Are, in which the words drop out entirely and the illustrations take the story's reigns, he began experimenting with full-spread illustrations that contained no text. This, he found, approximated the way silent films alternate between text and moving pictures—without ever using both at once. Additionally, he was thrilled by the way the illustrations gave the reader special agency. The reader of a prose page typically flips when he's finished all the words, but an illustrated page without text gives the reader more control—like a viewer in a museum gallery, the reader can stare for a long time, or a little.

When applied to Hugo Cabret, Selznick told me, this technique "makes time an aspect of the storytelling—how you move forward through the book, and at what pace you go, becomes part of the experience." The book's presentation self-consciously hints at these temporal and mechanical dimensions: divided into two long sections of 12 chapters each, the structure calls to mind the daily double-orbit that an hour-needle makes around a clock.

ANOTHER MAJOR INFLUENCE on the book's illustrations was Remy Charlip--a children's author and friend of Selznick's who, by another strange chance, closely resembles George Méliès (art imitated life again when Charlip became the model for the drawings of Méliès in Hugo). His essay "A Page is a Door" concludes this way:

"A thrilling picture book not only makes beautiful single images or sequential images, but also allows us to become aware of a book's unique physical structure, by bringing our attention, once again, to that momentous moment: the turning of the page."

With Charlip in mind, Selznick became enchanted with notion that page-turning is the book creator's first, best magic trick. What sleights-of-hand could he accomplish? "I started thinking about how you can turn the page and simulate some of the things that simulate that happen in the cinema," he told me, "the way that the camera can zoom in or pan across something, or cut form one moment to the next, or watch something unfold like a tracking shot." Drawing on small pages—3 by 4 inches, an homage to the scale used by the Maillardet automaton for its illustrations—Selznick began replacing the book's prose action scenes with picture sequences.

"The book immediately grew from 150 pages to 500 pages," he told me. "Take the line, 'Victor followed the old man home.' 'Followed' is a verb, and you can't really convey a verb very strongly in a single image. It's action. So that became six drawings of Victor following Hugo through the streets of Paris. And because every drawing is on a double page spread, that became twelve pages. So six words became 12 pages. The size of the book blew up."

The final book is a wonder to behold. At 533 pages, The Invention of Hugo Cabret stands several inches off the table. There are 142 illustrations across 284 pages--over half the book is drawn. The prose sections contain ever-shifting amounts of white margin space, speeding and slowing the time it takes to read a page. The illustrated sections are a marvel, too—you can stare at each one like a museumgoer before a series of high art canvases, or you can turn the pages quickly, frames of film running through a projector. In this way, Selznick says, the pictures help "invite the reader into the process of telling the story." In length, subject, and execution, Hugo is unique among children's books, a curiosity and a treasure unlike any other.

While preparing for this piece, I got to see Hugo Cabret start to work its magic upon an unsuspecting young person. I was on the train reading when a boy sat down next to me, fiddling with a Nintendo DS. Each time I reached a picture section, he'd peer up from his game at the tome outstretched across my lap, watching me turn the pages. I think he started to suspect that, between the two of us, I had the better toy.

THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET met with the kind of universal, high-profile acclaim that most illustrators dream about but very few receive. Publishers Weekly called Hugo "a true masterpiece." It was a #1 New York Times bestseller. It won the Caldecott Medal, and was a National Book Award finalist. But the most gratifying praise came from Maurice Sendak. "He told me that this was the book he was waiting for, that he knew was in me," Selznick said. "And that, of everything that's happened, is one of the most satisfying and amazing things."

Before Hugo was even published, an advance review copy ended in the hands of Martin Scorsese. The Departed producer Graham King initially passed the thick book on, insisting that Scorsese would love Hugo's story and sophisticated homage to early film. But before he even cracked the spine, Scorsese noted a filmic lineage in author's last name. Brian Selznick is a distant cousin of David O. Selznick, who helped make many classic movies, including Gone With the Wind and the original King Kong. The first film Scorsese ever saw was "Duel in the Sun," a David O. Selznick picture, a coincidence that links artistry and genealogy, just like the twists in Hugo.

In an interview with Selznick in the Hugo Companion Book, Martin Scorsese says that "the goal of the storyteller is to strike a balance between realism and myth"; Selznick remembers being happy when Scorsese said a version of the same thing during their first meeting. "One of my goals with Hugo was to make a magical fantasy story without using any actual magic," Selznick told me--he wanted his book to navigate a space between the miraculous and the entirely-possible. "Realizing that we were going to have Martin Scorsese translating that same idea onto screen was such a big thrill."

Ultimately, Scorsese's vision met Selznick's high expectations. "I love the movie," he told me. "I think it's brilliant--and one of the most satisfying things to me is how faithful Scorsese and John Logan, the writer, and all the collaborators, were to my work." Scorsese had a copy of Hugo with him for the entire shoot, and he referred to it constantly; Selznick's drawings ended up being used as storyboards for the film. "I didn't work directly on the movie," Selznick continued (though he has a brief credited cameo in the final scene), "but I feel like they all worked with me—because they used my book so completely."

THIS MONTH, in the latest of a long string of surprises, happy coincidences, and unexpected parallels, Scorsese's film has garnered a field-leading 11 Oscar nominations. And so Hugo's public story will end in the same manner as the book and movie: at a red carpet event in a bright theatre filled with cinaphiles (though it will be Hollywood this time instead of Paris). No matter who walks away with the Best Picture trophy on Oscar night, it's already clear that Brian Selznick is one of the night's big winners.

Why Is It So Hard for New Musical Instruments to Catch On?

2012-02-07T10:44:57-05:00

The turntable, invented 36 years ago, ranks as the most recently created music-making device with staying power. Have computers replaced the need for the next guitar?

Composer and inventor Tod Machover poses with a Beatbug, a percussive instrument, in a 2003 AP photo.

For the musically daring, it's hard to beat the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, which takes place later this month at Georgia Institute of Technology. One previous winning entry turned whisks and garlic presses into music makers. Another, the Double Slide Controller, borrowed the trombone's slide mechanism—a 15th-century innovation—to shape digitally produced tones into an otherworldly drone.

Events like these would seem to signal a golden age for the adventurous musician. New instruments have come to market at a steady clip in recent years, offering novel and occasionally fanciful ways to perform music. Maybe you've heard of the the Eigenharp, the Tenori-on, or the Harpejji?

I've talked to a number of instrument makers, and frankly, it seems like a really hard way to make a living.

Or maybe not. Good luck hearing any of these contraptions on the recordings of prominent modern artists. You're more likely to come across Tibetan singing bowls (Fleet Foxes), 17th-century Indonesian angklung (Okkervil River), or the zither (P.J. Harvey). In other words, established pop and rock musicians seem more inclined to try just about any instrument other than a new one. The turntable might be the last new implement to break into pop music; there's even debate over whether that qualifies as an instrument, despite having its own form of notation and a course at Berklee College of Music. According to hip-hop lore, Grand Wizzard Theodore invented scratching 36 years ago. Suddenly, the turntable became a device used not just for listening to music, but performing it. And like the guitar, it turned into a focal point in live performances.

Now consider some of the instrumental developments in the 36 years prior: the solid-body electric guitar, the pedal-steel guitar, the steel drum, the electric bass, the synthesizer, and the drum machine.

Music technology in general has charged forward, and computers, digital sampling and MIDI have dramatically shaped music. But no one mimes to music on the "air sampler" and the idea of a "Software Hero" video game, with its own simulated laptop, is a little glum. Will a brand-new instrument ever capture hearts, minds, and speaker systems again?

THE PROBLEM WITH NEWNESS

It's hard to overstate the importance of new musical instruments in history. The piano's dynamic range allowed for a subtlety in composition previously unimagined. The modern drum set paved the way for jazz. Rock and roll would not have happened without the electric guitar. As composer Edgard Varese put it in 1936, "It is because new instruments have been constantly added to the old ones that Western music has such a rich and varied patrimony."

So what happened? Why has there been such a drought of new instruments—especially in rock and pop, which thrive on novelty?

Inventor Aaron Andrew Hunt blames it in part on the "music industrial complex." He created the Tonal Plexus in 1996 and has since sold, by his count, "not many." With 1,266 keys, the instrument is designed especially for microtonal composition, so it would be a tough sell at just about any time. But Hunt said the deck is particularly stacked against new instruments now that a standard repertoire has been locked in, as has the popular idea of what a proper instrument is.

"The biggest barrier is the institutionalization of Western music and the mass marketing of all the instruments," he says. "The problem is that no one can break though this marketing barrier and this education barrier because it's become this machine."

In the past, support from the establishment has made a difference in whether new instruments find a market. The research and backing of universities and corporations like RCA helped make the synthesizer happen. In Hector Berlioz, the saxophone got a major boost from a major composer. But many instruments have risen from very humble origins. The steel drum evolved from frying pans and oil cans after the Trinidadian government banned other musical instruments. Folks of limited means also turned household objects into music makers with washboards and turntables.

It might just be a symptom of modern life. We don't have as much leisure time as we once did to learn a new musical instrument. And why would parents invest years and thousands of dollars into lessons for some newfangled instrument for which no music has been written, when the violin is right there? Even if so inclined, who would they find to teach it?

One of the most successful instruments of the 20th century skirted that problem when Robert Moog outfitted his synthesizer with a piano-style keyboard, giving the radical a touch of the familiar. Donald Buchla also developed his own modular synth at about the same time, but instead used pressure-sensitive touch plates on the principle that a new instrument should sport a new interface. Moog's synths took off immediately; Buchla's did not.

I've talked to a number of instrument makers, and frankly, it seems like a really hard way to make a living. Bankruptcy and years of strife are recurring themes in their tales. John Lambert, inventor of the Eigenharp—an elaborate device with a grid of keys and a breath controller that he spent eight years and millions of dollars developing—told me he keeps in his home a small museum of others' failed musical instruments to remind him of the hard road he has chosen. Even successful instruments don't always pay off for their creators. Bogged down by competitors' bogus patent infringement claims on the saxophone, the destitute Adolphe Sax declared bankruptcy three times and appealed to the Belgium government for a stipend to live on. He did, however, survive two assassination attempts by rival instrument dealers.

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But perhaps such a calling has less to do with making money than, say, propagating the species. Some of the oldest known artifacts are musical instruments, carved from the femurs of bears and woolly mammoth tusks. The oldest known musical instrument, dated to about 35,000 years ago, is a five-holed flute fashioned from a vulture's wing bone. The archaeologists who discovered it in 2009 cited their find as evidence that instruments contributed to keeping humans in close social networks—and ultimately outlasting the more isolated Neanderthals.

Of course, our distant ancestors didn't see the conundrum faced by today's instrument makers. Digital technology gives musicians unprecedented access to a diversity of sounds. But instruments that use it run up against a common complaint that they lack expressiveness. The performer doesn't get the immediate feedback that comes with a traditional instrument. Granted, a similar complaint was made about the piano—specifically, that its mechanics remove the pianist a few steps from the sound source.

"You can literally make any sound you can imagine, but the means of controlling them in real time have really lagged behind," says Randy Jones of Madrona Labs, a company that's rolling out its first instrument, the Soundplane, in the next few months. Jones boasts that the Soundplane, which goes for $1,695, has "a new interface that allows you to play the computer with the responsiveness of an acoustic instrument."

Roger Linn, who invented the first digital drum machine in the late 1970s, also hopes to have his new creation, the LinnStrument, ready for sale sometime in 2012. Like Jones, he says his instrument bridges the divide between performer and technology. The LinnStrument features "three-dimensional" keys to allow for more nuanced expression.

Linn is one of the best-known instrument makers alive, but he realizes that this hardly guarantees the LinnStrument's success. Even the violin would have a tough go of it, Linn says, were it invented today. You hold it under your chin ("that's a horrible idea for an interface!") and distances between notes get smaller the further up the fingerboard. It's the perfect set-up for carpal tunnel and deafness in one ear. "It'd be laughed out of the music store," he says.

REVENGE OF THE OLD, WEIRD INSTRUMENT

But not only are musicians ignoring new instruments, they're taking up with some very old ones. Feist has used the nyckelharpa, a keyed fiddle that traces back to 14th-century Sweden. The Decemberists use bouzoukis (a sort of Greek lute), and Joanna Newsom has made the harp an unlikely indie music accessory. Its a rare article about Janelle Monae that doesn't include the word "futuristic," but the most futuristic instruments on her album are the Theremin (invented 1920) and the Mellotron (1948).

Perhaps this is what Pierre Schaeffer had envisioned: bold new music freed from the constraints of instruments.

How did old, weird instruments become so popular? For this, I turned to Jeremy Barnes, who's one half of A Hawk and a Hacksaw and a former member of Neutral Milk Hotel. He's in New Mexico recording new songs with the help of a homemade hurdy-gurdy, a santoor (related to a cimbalom, which is related to the dulcimer), and an autoharp. Much of independent music's burgeoning interest in exotic instruments of yore can be traced back to Neutral Milk Hotel's influential In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, released in 1997. Barnes points out that the album came out around the time when home recording took off. "I think the process of working on recordings at home naturally leads a musician to explore new sounds," he said in an email. "If you shy away from MIDI and computer-based sounds, then you have to start learning new instruments."

The tricks of recording-studio auteurs like Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and George Martin "are now being used by everyone from Dr. Dre to the 15-year-old kid in suburban Wisconsin." And that, he says, freed people to move beyond "the homogenous Guitar Center-ization of Western music."

But old instruments don't make these musicians revivalists. Besides the ukulele, Merill Garbus of the acclaimed avant-rock act tUnE-yArDs is also known for her deft use of looping. Perhaps this is what Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of musique concrete, had envisioned: bold new music freed from the constraints of instruments. An extreme example is found in Matthew Herbert, who has made a career of fashioning a singular kind of dance music from unlikely sound sources: people eating, the chirps of chickens and, most recently, a pig. And maybe all my bellyaching about the lack of new instruments is its own form of nostalgia, a longing for cultural symbols irrelevant to the production of music today.

But new gadgets have their champions. Bjork, for instance. She's brandished on stage futuristic devices like the Reactable and Tenori-on. For her latest album, Biophilia, she and her team invented instruments like the gameleste, a cross between the gamelan and celesta. This puts her in a small club of musicians, Tom Waits and Paul Simon among them, who have applied the DIY ethic to instruments.

Jordan Rudess, keyboardist for prog rockers Dream Theater, not only seems to have performed with every new musical device on the market, but has developed the impressively sophisticated music-making apps, MorphWiz and SampleWiz, for iPad and mobile phones. These and a handful of other apps suggest that there's a real future for that kind of thing. The best-known instrument app is the Ocarina, developed by Smule. Whatever its limitations, the Ocarina reminds users that music doesn't have to be a passive activity.

But it's an open question whether a mobile device is much of an improvement over a laptop in a performance setting (imagine, for instance, Paul Simonon's bass guitar replaced by an iPhone 4S on the London Calling cover). Many musicians now rely more on live performances for their revenue than their recordings. And while all those kids at Skrillex shows don't mind that their idol spends a lot of time behind a MacBook screen, for plenty of other artists putting on concerts, an instrument helps.

At least, that's what Jones of Madrona Labs is counting on.

"The tide is turning back to people wanting that live connection," he says.

Bill Monroe's Bluegrass Legacy: A Genre Forever Driving Ahead

2012-02-07T08:12:43-05:00

Tony Rice's new The Bill Monroe Collection shows how the music style Monroe invented endures.

AP Images

In 1953, Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, was driving home to Nashville in the early hours of the morning with his bass player and girlfriend Bessie Mauldin. According to Richard Smith's 2001 Monroe biography Can't You Hear Me Calling, Mauldin noticed there was a vehicle coming towards them, and told Monroe, "Bill, he's coming into our lane, get over."

Monroe, though, was having none of it. He was in the right lane, by God, and there was no way he was going to let some random idiot run him out of it. "Let him get over!" he said. Seconds later, they collided. Mauldin wasn't seriously hurt, but Monroe broke 19 bones, including his spine, and avulsed one of his eyes out of its socket. Even so, he got himself out of the wreck, walked around to Mauldin's side of the car, and pulled her free of the wreckage. After he was taken to the hospital, he was in a body cast for three months.

Bluegrass remains relevant not because it's a pure repository of ye olde tradition but because, to some extent, it isn't.

Monroe, in short, was a stubborn, stubborn man. Bluegrass, the music he created, has been stubborn too; a rough-hewn bone lodged irremovably in country music's smooth pop larynx. Last September marked what would have been Monroe's 100th birthday, and his music stands alone among the mélange of early country styles that were current when he was performing in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Western swing, hillbilly boogie, honky tonk, rockabilly, blues, old timey -- they're all been assimilated into a largely undifferentiated substratum, barely audible under country's dominant blend of retro-pop and retro-rock. Only bluegrass remains a coherent subgenre, and as such, a touchstone of authenticity. When Patty Loveless wanted to show her rootsy bona-fides a couple years back on her Mountain Soul II album, she naturally gravitated to bluegrass, covering (among other things) the traditional, Monroe-associated "Working on a Building" in the company of reigning bluegrass king Del McCoury.

Del McCoury himself released an album this past October called Old Memories in honor of Monroe's centenary. As you'd expect given McCoury's reputation as the most prominent keeper of the bluegrass flame, it's an extremely, even excessively, faithful set. McCoury, who played and sang with Monroe briefly in the '60s, nails the master's high, lonesome tenor vocals. His band, too, could have stepped right out of the '40s, with a scraping, old-timey edge that makes the music sound tightly wound and ready to snap rather. Playing tracks like "Close By" and "Girl in the Blue Velvet Band," I kept forgetting that I wasn't listening to the original Monroe recordings.

That might have pleased Monroe, who, as his determination to stick in his lane suggests, liked things to be done the way they were supposed to be done. Still, bluegrass as embalmed period piece is not exactly in Monroe's spirit. Now that the genre has become the icon of all things authentic and traditional, it's easy to forget that the music was originally a syncretic innovation. Monroe and his bandmates (like the brilliant banjoist Earl Scruggs) combined elements of old timey and hillbilly music with the drive, energy, and soloing structure of then-modern jazz. Alan Lomax called it "folk music on overdrive."

He might have called it "folk music as pop." Before it was a festival staple, Monroe's music was a popular style. He had hits, and he kept looking for gimmicks that would allow him to get more of them. One of the most notable experiments was his 1954 revamp of his own "Blue Moon of Kentucky" which shamelessly rips off Elvis' uptempo cover version. The 1957 "Sally Jo" has a mandolin intro that almost quotes the guitar of Monroe fan Chuck Berry. And then there's "Scotland" from 1958, a remarkable combination of old and new in which the twin fiddles keen like bagpipes and Monroe's mandolin solo has the joyous percussive force of clog dancing.

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McCoury's note-for-note imitation, then, may actually be less in the spirit than guitarist Tony Rice's The Bill Monroe Collection, released last week. An anthology of Rice's Monroe covers from 40 years of picking with the Bluegrass Album Band, as a solo artist, and with other combination, the album stays away from Rice's most newgrass and jazz impulses. Even so, it has a very different feel from classic Monroe. On his version of "Mule Skinner Blues", for example, Monroe would soar up into the ether, yodeling like his voice was determined to scramble out of his throat and never come back. Rice's version has little of that urgency; instead, it's a shoulder-shrugging roll, the yodel less a yodel than a lazy, comfortable, drawn-out phrase. Similarly, when Monroe performed an instrumental like "Kentucky Mandolin," he bludgeoned folk music till it turned into death metal, every note a hammer cracked against the inside of a skull. Rice's instrumental, like "Jerusalem Ridge", on the other hand, are certainly fleet-fingered, but they aren't driven. Far from metal, they instead tremble on the verge of New Age comfort music.

This isn't to dismiss Rice. On the contrary, I have a lot of affection for his easy version of bluegrass. For example, I love his 1992 spiritual "You're Drifting Away," included here as the final track. The duet vocals with Rice's brother Larry alternate, not pushing each other so much as lending each other a hand. "You're drifting away, you're drifting away...don't wait to let Jesus hear you pray," they sing, and the performance itself is as smooth and gentle as the water, poignantly lyrical brimstone.

Not everything that's happened to Rice's brand of bluegrass has been pretty; Bela Fleck is an abomination, and the bulk of Alison Krauss gives me stomach pains. Still, for better and sometimes for worse, bluegrass remains relevant not because it's a pure repository of ye olde tradition but because, at least to some extent, it isn't. As a driver, Monroe might not have swerved, but as a musician he and his legacy have been quite willing to veer about, from Monroe's flirtations with rockabilly, to Emmylou Harris' influential mixture of bluegrass, country and folk, on over to the Del McCoury band's interesting, if not exactly successful, album last year with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. With any luck, the music will continue to experiment with new forms, both sublime and misguided, for the next 100 years.

The Strange Reasons Foreign Countries Find to Ban American Movies

2012-02-06T15:16:11-05:00

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Keeping in mind the amount of gratuitous violence and rape that goes on in David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, India's decision to bar the film from showing there is easy to understand, albeit unfortunate from a creative standpoint.

But the highly publicized decision got us thinking about some of the less obvious justifications some countries have used to keep foreign movies from their theaters. We've rounded up a handful of the oddest bannings from around the world for your consideration.

This post also appears on Flavorpill, an Atlantic partner site.

Image credit: 20th Century Fox

As 35mm Film Dies, How Do Revival Theaters Cope?

2012-02-06T13:06:43-05:00

The cost to update to digital projection can be prohibitive for independent cinemas showing classic movies—and many think it's not an upgrade at all.

AP Images

The reports of film's death have been exaggerated. While in danger of becoming a fetish object for specialists, celluloid is not going away. It will always exist.

Whether we'll be able to see it, though, is something else entirely.

For decades, independent repertory theaters have relied on 35mm film stock for everything from midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show to matinee Akira Kurosawa retrospectives. But with first-run movies reportedly making the transition completely over to digital projection by 2013, many repertory programmers and owners fear that the classics will quickly follow suit, making it harder for revival cinemas to show old movies in their original format. Already, some in the industry say that major movie studios have clamped down on the number of classic reels they'll loan out—meaning that small theaters showing throwback films may need to adapt.

"I would say, more and more these days, we are told by a studio that they can only provide a digital copy," says David Schwartz, chief curator at New York's Museum of the Moving Image. "There are even cases where they suggest we even just go out and get a Blu-Ray. Much more common is getting a DCP of a film."

"More and more these days, we are told by a studio that they can only provide a digital copy," says one film curator.

The DCP (Digital Cinema Package) is the standard for projected digital cinema, a collection of media files with specifications set by the Digital Cinema Initiatives, a joint venture between Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Bros. Studios. Delivered to a theater via hard drive, the equipment to project these files often costs upwards of $75,000, a burden far too heavy for many small theaters.

Marty Rubin, associate director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, doesn't think the visual aspects of a DCP measures up to a 35mm print, giving the example of a recent screening of Tommy as lacking in sharpness and detail. Others say the flat digital image can't match the robustness of celluloid. "There is a special quality to the experience of seeing a film in 35mm," Rubin says. "It has an impact. People may not even be consciously aware of it, but when you start giving them someone else, they might have less and less of that special feeling when they do see a movie at the theater and start drifting away."

Julia Marchese, an employee at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, created a "Fight for 35mm" petition, which is currently close to its goal of 10,000 signatures.

"For revival houses, the threat is less imminent [than for first-run theaters], but more severe," she says. "Most independent theaters are struggling to remain open as it is, and this may be the final blow which kills them off forever."

Theaters that can't afford the DCI-compliant equipment may eventually go out of business, or survive on the limited amount of prints available to them; even without the studios, there are still archives and private collectors that own prints and are open to working with smaller theaters. The theaters that can afford the equipment will tip-toe their way in to the digital world. The attitude, maybe because there is no choice, is that film and digital will exist side by side, and there is not much we can do about it. Digital will be the norm, and film will become a precious object.

But studios say that the move away from 35mm not only makes financial and technical sense, but that there's a demand for digital—and that quality is part of the reason why.

"The fact of the matter is, we get just as many requests at the studio for our library of restored films from theaters to show them digitally as we do for new prints," says Grover Crisp, executive vice president at Sony Pictures. "We've tried to accommodate both aspects of this, and for many of our restored titles we record out to a new negative that has the entire cleanup that the digital does, and we make a few select prints. Those are for the venues that can show film, and then we have the DCP for the venues that can show digital."

"There is a tradeoff, however," Crisp continued. "The manufacturing process of the prints is a degrading process. Even if you have a brand-new digitally restored negative that you make a print from—it will look very good, probably be the best looking print you've ever made—it still won't look as good as the digital in terms of sharpness and detail, because you're not going through that photo mechanical process of making a print."

Reparatory theater directors are divided on whether digital can ever match or exceed film. "In an ideal world, right now, I would prefer to show a pristine 35mm print," Schwartz says. "But the quality of the DCP is extremely close. In some cases, there are advantages. Sometimes the soundtrack will be better, because it is digital sound. Sometimes there will be a brighter image."

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In March, Film Forum in New York City is launching a week-long series called "This is DCP." A test of run of sorts, the series is designed to present some of the best DCP restorations available and let the audience decide if the experience is worth it. "I'm on the fence on the DCP," says Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at the Film Forum and founder of Rialto Pictures. It was only after Crisp sent Goldstein some of the new 4K restorations they were preparing at Sony that he was convinced to give the format a chance. "Some of the DCP's are absolutely spectacular."

"I thought our doing the series would be really controversial," Goldstein says of the 'This Is DCP' program, which features classic titles such as Dr. Strangelove, The Searchers, and The Red Shoes. "I only got really positive response from everybody on the series idea."

Crisp, who will be present during the series at Film Forum for after screening discussions, is hoping to convince a skeptical audience. "I'm trying to get ahead of the curve," Crisp says, "and I want people who are film fans to understand that there are some of us who are trying to do this so that you have a really good cinematic experience. But, they have to get on board that it can be good."

Super Bowl XLVI's 10 Most Pivotal Plays

2012-02-06T11:36:21-05:00

Wes Welker's dropped pass, Tom Brady's interception, Ahmad Bradshaw's bizarre touchdown, and more

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Super Bowl XLVI is over and the New York Giants have beaten the New England Patriots 21-17. Much like the 2008 version of this game, the Giants used a late drive to seal their victory.

Throughout the game we saw numerous plays change the momentum and entire course of the matchup.

Here are 10 plays that, had they gone differently, could have changed Super Bowl XLVI

This post also appears on Bleacher Report, an Atlantic partner site.

Image credit: Reuters

Madonna's Super-Bowl Halftime: A Perfect Pep Rally for Pop Music

2012-02-06T09:18:35-05:00

Even M.I.A.'s bad vibes couldn't tamp down the campy joy on stage Sunday.

AP Images

It's a credit to cinematography and choreography that for the near entirety of a Super Bowl halftime performance with so, so much to look at, Madonna remained the center of attention. That is, until the end, when white light and smoke engulfed her and she dropped down through the stage, out of sight. The camera pulled back to reveal the stadium floor's graphical display glistening with the final words on halftime 2012: "World Peace."

World peace? Really?

Well, sure. Madonna's exquisite pep rally was nothing more, and certainly nothing less, than 12 minutes of broadly pitched, seen-it-before, feel-good material. Why shouldn't it end with the most broadly pitched, heard-it-before, feel-good message?

To listen to Madonna's work over the years, in the periods of both calculated provocation and shamanistic woo-woo, is to hear her repeatedly deliver empty-sounding lines that all come from pretty much the same guiding principal: music = love = dancing = understanding = peace. And so it was on Sunday, where high-kicking, flirtatious, lip-syncing Madonna pulled off the impression that she was genuinely having fun. Peace was with her even during her opening turn as a war goddess, carted in by a phalanx of Spartan soldiers. The soundtrack, "Vogue," was enhanced for this performance by sword-unsheathing sound effects presumably lifted from the Game of Thrones editor's room. But the lyrics remain as forgettable and as instructive as they ever were: "You try everything you can to escape / The pain of life that you know," and then, of course, "Let your body move to the music." There it is: Madonna philosophy 101. Pop philosophy 101.

"Music," went one chorus, "mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel." So it was at the Super Bowl.

And that philosophy was expressed in nearly every enthralling, ridiculous second of Madonna's show Sunday. On paper, it could have been a disaster. Here were four themed birthday parties thrown in succession, and the themes were played out: ancient Greece, boy-band break dance, Bring It On cheerleading, Sister Act choir. But, of course, this is part of the genius of pop music, the way it wrings pleasure out of recognition. The other part of pop's appeal—the visceral, thump-your-chest, move-your-feet, impress-your-eyes, wag-your-tongue part—came across flawlessly. There was the crowd-pleasing trio of marching bands, gospel choirs, and acrobats. The tight, tight pacing and gee-whiz set-changes. The well-placed celebrity cameos, in which each supporting star was used for what they're actually supposed to be used for, from LMFAO's campy shuffling, to Nicki Minaj's lighting flow and amusing facial expressions, to Cee-Lo's voice, to M.I.A.'s dyspepsia.

Speaking of M.I.A., she served up the one glitch (well, other than when Madonna stumbled off a bleacher) that's already dominating conversations. Our perennial, mind-numbing debate over obscenity is upon us again. Certainly, a middle-finger to America doesn't seem like it fits with he "world peace" party line. But here, too, was pop music reductio ad absurdum. Madonna, queen of attention-grabbing, stood astride the biggest stage in America, overseeing an immaculately planned tribute to music, spectacle, artifice, and herself. And there was her guest M.I.A., making good on her "Give Me All Your Luvin'" line that she "don't give a shit," playing the role she's always played, introducing a hint of shock, upstaging her hostess. Pop's insurgent-vs.-establishment meme lives on. "Music," went the chorus of the preceding song, "mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel." So it was at the Super Bowl. World peace indeed.

Morning Coffee

2012-02-06T09:00:00-05:00

In some of my own writing I'm always thinking about how the sound of certain words--meaning aside--leave us with feelings, impressions and evocations. That is to say how the shape of words make us feel a certain away, regardless of literal definition.

Longtime readers will recognize that this thread of the sub-literal, the sonic, is one I've been after for awhile. My most recent thoughts come from my nascent French studies. I don't want to make any broad, sweeping declarations about which is the more beautiful language. I'm not qualified, and hope never to be in that business anyway. But there is something to learning how to say the same thing in different way--sometimes softer, sometimes harsher. Et Alors feels different than "So what." It's a similar feeling, but played with a different drum.

I'd like to do some serious research on Wu-Tang Clan with this thought in mind. I've been thinking, as always, about Raekwon whose ear for the shape of words, is, to my mind, second to none:

Hit the cell phone, regulate with well known tone
A Wally kingpin, who also slam and strike edition
Whattup, Corleone, smoke the bone, Tone phone me
Whattup he tried to slang there? Address him with chrome only...
Switchin Benzes, ten carat nigga with gold lenses
Frontin like he's sittin on a lump, he sittin on junk
You wanna pull a heist, draw guns in robberies?
You wanna rock rep, step in yellow Wallabies?

Beyond research, I'd love to take 20, or so, Wu-Tang verses and break them out into poems. I actually believe--with some thought about structure--they could work on the page. They basically need to be translated, not for literal meaning, but for feeling on the page.

Literal meaning is overrated.

The Disappointing Triumph of 'Smash'

2012-02-06T08:30:57-05:00

NBC's new musical series makes plenty of mistakes, but it still leaves the audience wanting more.

NBC

"It's Glee for grown-ups!" TV critics and news releases have been relentlessly chirping this line about NBC's upcoming musical drama Smash... as praise? As caution? To build buzz? The hope, one assumes, is that both fans of Glee and viewers who are turned off by Fox's once great, now middling song-and-dance soap opera would think of Smash as a more mature, serious alternative. But while Smash is certainly more sophisticated television than Glee—at least in the promising, though ultimately disappointing pilot—it's bogged down by the same problems that plague the kids of New Directions.

Smash has an undeniably impressive pedigree. A sort of how-the-sausage-is-made look at the creation of a Broadway musical, Smash was conceived by Steven Spielberg, who oversaw production on the pilot; written by superstar playwright Theresa Rebeck, who penned the current Broadway hit Seminar; and boasts original songs from the Tony-winning team of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray). Emmy-winning Will and Grace star Debra Messing and Tony-nominated Broadway star Christian Borle are the composer-lyricist team who have the fortuitous, if somewhat random, inspiration to pen a new musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Oscar-winner Anjelica Huston plays the musical's producer, while Broadway veteran Megan Hilty and American Idol alum Katharine McPhee (who, despite what Smash's relentless ad campaign says, has already been introduced to the American public) are the two actresses vying to play Monroe in the production. The DNA of the show, certainly, is very grown up.

So, in many respects, that "grown-up" moniker does apply to Smash. The characters, for one, are literally adults, saving viewers from episodes that portray prom dates and first kisses as life-or-death situations. Instead, these characters have realistic obstacles and goals, which are set up nicely in the pilot as relateable, slice-of-life plot alternatives to the razzle-dazzle outlandishness of staging a Broadway musical. Messing's Julia, for example, has a home life: She and her husband are in the process of adopting a baby, and he's not happy about her going into production on a new musical. The subplot shows promise—certainly more so than the attempts to peek at any Glee character's domestic life (ugh, Mr. Schuster especially). In the pilot, we meet McPhee's Karen's entire family: Her (often implausibly) supportive and dreamy British boyfriend and the Iowa parents who think she's foolish to foster acting ambitions. Ivy (Hilty) is a chorus girl who's paid her dues, eager for her big break, and absolutely terrified she won't get it. In other words, there are no outlandish fake pregnancies or found-religion-in-a-grilled-cheese-sandwich plots here.

Also playing into the pleasing naturalism of Smash is its lived-in cinematography. Whereas Glee (and Hairspray, Mamma Mia and nearly all recent musical theater efforts on TV or film) live by their cartoonish colorblocking, Smash uses dim, soft lighting (lots and lots of blues) and on-location New York City shooting to give the show a mature aesthetic, providing it with suitable gravitas. But—as should be no surprise with Spielberg on board—the show truly blossoms with its musical numbers.

The producers wisely take the classy Chicago route for the staging of its musical numbers. All them begin as real-life performances—audition songs, music rehearsals—before transitioning into fully costumed, choreographed, and lit fantasy sequences. They're beautiful, expensive-looking, and often thrilling, while Shaiman and Wittman's original songs—particularly the finale, "Let Me Be Your Star"—have a way of earworming into your brain despite not seeming too memorable at first listen. While watching, you find yourself anxiously tapping your foot waiting for the next musical number—very much as most of us do while watching Glee—and it quickly becomes clear that this is as much a symptom of the rest of the show's faults as it is a testament to their exciting staging.

Like Glee, Smash is riddled with caricatures and cliches. Smash panders to nearly every eye-rolling cliche about musical-theater artists, churning out an ensemble of Broadway cartoon characters. Borle's lyricist Tom is sassy and flamboyant in an almost degrading way. Jack Davenport's Derek Wills is a theater director plucked straight from a '90s sitcom: a gruff, egotistical, womanizing asshole who's notoriously "hard to work with." And one can only assume that Huston was meant to do her Jane Lynch-as-Sue Sylvester best to chew scenery and steal scenes as producer Eileen. But, as is, the character is flat and Matthew Morrison-as-Will Schuster boring.

Smash also shares Glee's dialogue problem. Perhaps in an attempt to raise the stakes, the show resorts to maudlin tropes and trite maxims about goals and struggles and—ugh—dreams that are so overly earnest they come off as stilted and forced: "Sometimes, dreams are hard," Karen passionately tells her parents. At one point while describing his love of theater, Tom's assistant (Jaime Cepero) is forced to say with a straight face," "Even just being backstage, I felt... I dunno... (long pause) whole." Messing is unfortunately saddled with the corniest of lines—"She wanted to love and be loved. She glows with it."—but actually elevates the material with a sincere, warm delivery and characterization that grounds the show despite the ridiculous dialogue.

That's not to say there isn't promise. The legion of Broadway nerds who tune-in will get a kick out of inside-theater jokes (particularly a wink to notorious New York Post theater critic Michael Riedel, who Tom refers to as a "Napoleonic Nazi"). And McPhee is spellbinding as Karen. It's easy to see why the Marilyn musical casting committee would be instantly smitten with her. Her pure, crystalline voice is stirring, as she manages to infuse new, raw emotion to her cover of the done-to-death Christina Aguilera ballad "Beautiful." She shows surprising vulnerability, too, single-handedly rescuing what could've been the pilot's most maddening scene—the director invites her over for a late-night "private audition" at his apartment&mdsah;and subtly turns it into one of the best.

Just as Glee has managed to hook an army of addicted fans despite its major flaws, the Smash pilot should deservedly wrangle a large following. Sure, it's messy, cheesy, and a bit of a letdown (those were some damned good commercials NBC showed). But it's more entertaining than it is disappointing. This is a show about putting on a show—a show produced by Steven Spielberg, no less. It's unsurprising then, that's it's a lot of fun to watch. Glee has a way of, on a weekly basis, absolving itself of its creative sins in any given episode by delivering an emotionally thrilling, rousing, bring-you-to-your-feet and make you shout, "I want more!" final number. With "Let Me Be Your Star," an adrenaline-pumping vocal pas de deux brilliantly belted by McPhee and Hilty, Smash does just that. For better or worse, I'm shouting, "Encore."

Before 'Smash,' 9 Other Shows That Were Supposed to Save NBC

2012-02-06T08:29:33-05:00

From My Name Is Earl to Leno in primetime, a look at the at the shows that were hyped as hits for the last-place network

NBC

Can Smash save NBC? The fourth-place network says it needs the splashy, expensive musical series to be a big hit. ""We're in a pretty bad situation," NBC's entertainment director, Robert Greenblatt, told the New York Times last month. "We desperately need something to catch fire, and we hope this is it."

As desperate as Greenblatt sounds, Smash isn't the first show that's been tasked with "saving" the once-dominant network. For the past several years, series ranging from My Name Is Earl to The Event to a Betty White reality show have all been cast as NBC's last best hope. Here, a look at other series that were hyped as much-needed hits for the network—and how they ended up doing.

Giants Beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl, Again

2012-02-05T21:56:48-05:00

The Giants beat the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI , 21-17, a repeat of their 2008 victory over New England in 2008. It's also the second Super Bowl win for Giants quarterback Eli Manning, whose status as an "elite" quarterback was in question earlier this season.

The game was a showcase for Manning's talents as well as those of Tom Brady, QB for the Patriots:

This was the first Super Bowl with two starting quarterbacks who previously won the big game's MVP award -- and they took turns being brilliant. Manning became the first QB to open a Super Bowl with nine consecutive completions. Later, Brady put together a run of 16 completions in a row, breaking another Super Bowl mark.

But in the end, it was Manning who directed the nine-play, 88-yard drive that put New York ahead.

Read the full story at ABC News.

'Smash,' A.S. Byatt, 'Rampart': The Week Ahead in Pop Culture

2012-02-05T15:39:03-05:00

A look at the things we're most excited about watching, reading, browsing, and listening to: