The Age Of Epic

Review: Nickelback, "Here and Now"

2011-12-06T01:24:00.000-08:00

Nickelback
Here and Now
Roadrunner
11.21.11

Nickelback songs have always been the clarion call of the American douchebag, the soundtrack for endless armies of male suburbanites pretending that their anger at their ex-girlfriend -- or more likely, the woman they wish was their ex-girlfriend --somehow elevated them to the level of existential angst. It was a canny move, too, retooling the sound of more serious, artistic postgrunge angst merchants into simple, effective anthems that were loud enough to sound dangerous but pop enough to not actually be dangerous. The rock world howled as it always does when this trick is pulled, knowing that Nickelback wasn't hard but rather try-hard. Yet they've sold more albums in the past decade than almost any other rock band -- 21 million -- and the only explanation for moving that many discs in the Naughties is the strip-club theory: until recently, titty bars and NFL stadium booths and the like usually relied on physical music for their playlists. This is not the kind of music you listen to on an iPod while jogging.

So now that Nickelback hate has reached critical mass, culminating in Detroit fans petitioning to not have the band play a halftime show at Ford Field, what to do? Go pop, of course -- but without sacrificing any of the "virtues" that makes the brand so marketable. 2008's Dark Horse went a bit too far in that direction: calling in veteran producer "Mutt" Lange made them sound a little like a modern version of Def Leppard's Hysteria. Which also meant it was their biggest seller, but their frat-boy base started to look at them a little funny, as if they were starting to appreciate women as human beings or something. So out came the public announcement that Here and Now would be a "return to form," when in reality it's just a compromise between the two extremes. They didn't didn't get this huge by being stupid, bro.

Of course, being stupid and acting that way are two different things. Singer-songwriter Chad Kroeger still has lots of shamelessly dumb and offensive things to say about women, lines that are the polar opposite of clever: "She's a scene from a Baywatch rerun / Hotter than the barrel on a squeeze machine gun." "She's gonna climb all over me. I'm like a pony in my own rodeo." "You and me sitting in a tree / F-U-C-K-I-N-G." (That last one is also real.) The difference this time is that the band, like the dbags, have stuck around long enough to become a bonafide subset of society, which means they're free to sell out now: the band's flair for the giant stadium hook and thirst for porno-soundtrack level aggression have finally merged perfectly. Production is the only thing separating "Midnight Queen" from Warrant's "Cherry Pie," but it's also the only thing separating meaningful, socially-aware (!) ballads like "When We Stand Together" from a Coldplay track.

So Nickelback isn't quite as laughable now that they're not pretending to be tortured; as long as they keep making aggressive postures, they can get away with being shiny. After all, this is a band that has always been content to stare dumbly at the sleaze around it, like a drunk at 3 am, neither reveling in it like Guns N' Roses when they were feral street urchins or romanticizing it like Limp Bizkit when they decided they wanted to be taken seriously. They just want to look at the strippers and go home, which is not unlike the kind of carefully orchestrated, emotionally suspect experience you get from their music. Their recent conversion to semi-respectability, however, does make their ear candy a little more attractive. Looks like somebody went up a cup size over the weekend.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 38. Not quite as hard as their earlier stuff, but just as sleazy.
Invention: 28. The lyrics are worse than ever, but there's less posturing, which is a good trade-off.
Integrity: 44. Chad does not really hate strippers or care about the planet. But you don't come to this hole in the wall for the single-malt, anyway.

The Loaded Question: Exploiting Occupy

2011-12-05T13:47:00.000-08:00

Review: The Black Keys, "El Camino"

2011-11-29T14:09:00.000-08:00

El Camino
The Black Keys
Nonesuch
12.6.11

Recently, myself, my younger sister, and a mutual friend had one of those "blind men identifying an elephant" discussions where we all realized we saw the Black Keys in a different light. Our friend identified them as blues-rock, I saw them as a garage rock outfit, and my sister considered them a blue-eyed soul group.

We were all correct, of course. Certainly Akron's answer to Detroit's White Stripes is all those things and more: they both know how to combine epic blues tropes with low-fi grit and a classicist pop sensibility. The difference is that the Blacks, perhaps owing to their respective areas of formation, are a little sweeter and churchier than the Whites, the steady Blind Willie Johnson to Jack White's dark, declamatory Blind Willie McTell.

So it was absolutely no surprise that Danger Mouse, a producer who knows all about bridging the unbridgeable chasm between indie rock and modern R&B, was able to help transform these critical darlings into Grammy gold with last year's "Tighten Up" from the album Brothers. Now DM is back full-time, and the duo's recorded the follow-up in that modern-day mecca for hipster roots authenticity, Nashville. The result is a record as unprepossessing, yet as gaudy and fun, as the white trash chariot it's named after. Not to mention the equally cheesy cover which houses it.

It'd be tempting to say that the Keys were retreating on El Camino, downplaying their bid at pop gold to reinforce their indie cred. And to a certain extent it's true: there's no crossgenre jumping like "Everlasting Light" or the single which broke them big, "Tighten Up," nothing as immediately arresting and emotionally resonant as "Ten Cent Pistol" or "The Go-Getter." The crunch is definitely back, a more subtle (but no less loud) variant on the glitter sludge of everything from The Big Come Up to Rubber Factory. The subtleties are there, though, mostly in the mix -- the airbrushed bells and whistles adding ghostly menace to "Dead and Gone," or the slightly psych-bubblegum shiver that runs up the leg of the best thing here, "Sister," and the slick ironic go-go feel of "Stop Stop."

Those touches are unfortunately in short supply, overall, so while it's not a full march back into the cave, it's hard not to feel like the Black Keys are trying to reconnect with roots they never really had. Ironists they are not, but they also don't have the personality of their fellow indie kids who suddenly got popular -- their romanticism isn't strong enough to ground them like Kings of Leon, and they don't possess Jack White's blood-on-the-floor vision of personal relationships. They're great, rootsy ear candy, but that's all they are, and while there's enough lingering essence of Brothers to sweeten the deal and suggest they haven't forgotten everything they've learned, El Camino often feels like the most unnecessary of respectability bids, the kind that makes a group more anonymous rather than more real. Which means they may end up getting classified as garage rockers after all: their default move is to rock out.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 62. Fun to go out and get drunk with, but you wouldn't fall in love with it.
Invention: 53. Not as trippy as Attack and Release, not as radio-ready as Brothers, not as adventurous as the Blackroc project. And not much of an identity beyond what it isn't.
Integrity: 68. The BKs never trade visceral punch for indie cred. Even when they maybe should.

The Loaded Question: The War on Christmas

2011-11-28T11:41:00.000-08:00

A public apology.

2011-11-25T23:33:00.000-08:00

I called you all here for this press conference to apologize. I want to apologize specifically to my true fans, the fans that let me do whatever I want because I'm famous, and who realize that because I'm famous, there's a reason for everything I do. I know that some of you in the media want to take me down, accusing me of setting that children's hospital on fire, and then shooting those blind kids in the face as they hobbled down the steps in fear. But that's what the media does, you know? They build you up and then they take you down. In fact, I helped them build me up, which makes them even more to blame, because them making me famous was obviously just another excuse for them to try and make me not famous. That's how the system works, you know? It's a crazy world.

You saw the tape. You can judge for yourself. I won't hide from this so-called scandal; I will be a man and be accountable and apologize, from the bottom of my heart, for some people taking what I did out of context and not realizing it was a joke. I'm here to burn down children's hospitals and shoot fleeing kids in the head. That's what I'm paid to do. It's my job.

Excuse me. I'm being told it is not my job. So I apologize. I'm sorry that people misunderstand what happened, especially people who are trying to destroy me. If I could take it back, though, I'd like to let everybody know that I would do it all over again. Because I have integrity. I'm honest. Who I am is who I am. I ain't gonna change for nobody. This is just like when I beat my wife up. Y'all didn't even ask why. Y'all all out to get me. But that's cool. I'm stronger than you are. I can take it.

I have been told that my boss is very angry at me for being caught. And for that, I also apologize to him, for he's the one paying me. If certain people wanna make something out of nothing by deliberately misrepresenting something I did, well, that hurts my boss and his company. And eventually, that hurts me. So I'm sorry for that. I don't like to be hurt.

I'm out there every night, trying to protect myself. People don't understand, this is a hard job. You probably have a really easy job at a gas station or something. When you're finished work, you get to go home. And go right to sleep, so you can go right back to work. Nobody's out to get you, at least not in the media. You don't know what it's like. This has been very hard on my family, but they are standing by me, because they need my money. That's right, I'm providing for my family. And I'm the bad guy? Whatever.

I also want to apologize to the victims for being there when I did what I had to do. I was just trying to protect myself. Y'all saw the tape. Them kids was running. What was I supposed to do? Let them live? I just trusted in God to guide me. I won't apologize for loving Jesus. Or for telling the truth. If you don't like the truth, that's your problem. The truth can't be stopped.

Speaking of the truth, I also want to come clean and say that I don't remember any of that other stuff that people say happened. If people wanna fling wild accusations, well, bring it on. I was made famous in order to do things, and I did things. Those other things have nothing to do with anything, which is probably why I don't remember them. Why would I spend time remembering things people can't prove? Does that make sense? I'm a busy man.

So, in conclusion, I just wanna say again, that I'm sorry that everybody took this wrong when they were trying to destroy me. I guess it's what you get for being better than most people, but I won't let it stop me from doing whatever I have to do. I just want to keep being famous, and rich, for doing whatever y'all wanna make me rich and famous for doing. If some kids get killed, I'm sorry. But to those who want me to apologize: fuck you. I'm sorry y'all want me to apologize, and I deeply regret that I have to say fuck you. We should just all put this behind us, starting right now.

I'm not taking questions.

The New Dead Ball Era

2011-11-23T15:22:00.000-08:00

The end of the franchise quarterback era? Maybe

We should probably just go ahead and agree that it's not working. Or, more to the point, not working for everyone.

Remember the Year of the Quarterback? That's what 2011 was supposed to be, the consummation of an entire decade where big-as-trees QBs with Superman-quality vision, teen idol good looks, and arms as precise and accurate as predator drones led their teams down the field and into Super Bowl glory. Defense? Ground game? Yeah, I guess if you like that sort of thing. But! But! Come on! Quarterbacks!

It's not as if the NFL was hurting for fans around the time 9/11 changed the world. However, the powers that be took their cues from the insanely popular dream teams of '90s basketball -- you remember, when everybody wanted to Be Like Mike? When sports stars tried to rap? When Looney Tunes did cross-branding? -- and injected some marquee glory into what had been a team game. Of course, not everyone gets to score in football, but hey, centers don't move custom jerseys. To take it to the next level, the league made a conscious decision to glorify the gunslinger.

They helped out by tightening the rules on what could be done to a QB, tossing around fun stats like the Quarterback rating, and hyping fantasy football as a jock wannabe's nerdcore fantasy. Suddenly, the field generals were blowing up the record books, and football easily became America's #1 pastime. Or obsession. These days, whenever a team that isn't "ours" takes the field, we say things like this: "Eli is going up against Vick." Or "Romo's taking on Brady." The quarterback became what the heavyweight champ was to the 70s, except his jab was the tight end and his uppercut the wide receiver.

Like boxers, however, QBs are proving to be mortal after all, even when handled with kid gloves. Worse, it turns out the position has so much weight on it these days, has come to depend so much on ridiculous, superhuman accuracy, that you don't have to smash your helmet into their jaw to make them ineffective. The Steelers and Bears' supposedly unstoppable express ride back to the playoffs has been derailed by broken thumbs. Peyton Manning's bid to beat Joe Montana's legend into submission failed because of neck surgery. Even Aaron Rodgers' record-shattering 2011 could have easily never happened, had last year's concussions ganged up on him.

It wouldn't be so damaging if owners hadn't put all their eggs in one franchise basket, depending on (and paying) these guys to be the weakest link. Peyton, who re-signed for 90 million even though he was 36 and undergoing his third surgery, now looks like he was running everything in Indianapolis but the ticket sales; what was a Superbowl powerhouse 21 months ago is now 0-10 and getting, somehow, worse. The Texans have gambled their first ever playoff hopes on Matt Schaub and lost, thanks to a foot injury so seemingly inconsequential he played on it for a whole half in order to beat a team that was 4-4 and in another division. The Eagles have spent one tenth of one billion dollars on a man who likes to run in traffic.

Yes, Tom Brady's wearing three rings. Big Ben's got two. Peyton and Eli probably sit around with Drew Brees, comparing their single rings when kicking around NOLA. That's just the point: those teams were all balanced, just as Green Bay is this year, not depending on passing alone to win the day. They had good-to-great run games and decent-to-good defenses, not to mention some genius, unorthodox play calling from the likes of Belichick, Cowher, and Payton. What might be called Quarterback Creep has infected the league over that time period, causing a lot of mediocre-to-bad teams to put their faith in a lot of inconsistent leaders. Joe Flacco. Philip Rivers. Donovan McNabb. Mark Sanchez. Tony Romo. All brushed up against greatness and had no idea what to do. Even newcomers like Josh Freeman and Matt Ryan look like the job is too big for them. Cam Newton and Colt McCoy are up to it, but can't make up for the dearth of talent around them.

Worse, when the starter goes down, the team seems utterly lost. What happened to rolling three deep at the position? How many fans can even name their second-string QB? When was the last time you saw an elite quarterback bow out when his team was up by, say, 28?

Then we have the case of Tim Tebow. Love him or hate him, he earned that Heisman. So what happens when he gets to the big time? The Broncos sit on him for two years while they try out another supposed elite, then when he finally gets his shot, he's so bad at the long pass that the offense totally redesigns itself around him. And you know what? It's been working. Not because of Tebow's line to God, or because Denver has so much talent, but because he's not passing. He runs half his plays and the defense picks up the rest of the slack, and it's so shocking that the rest of the league's forgotten how to deal with it.

Sounds like the Broncos know something the NFL's refused to acknowledge for the last decade: there's only so much talent to go around, and when you cut off the head of the beast, it dies. Stanford's Andrew Luck, this year's recipient of the Heisman hype, will probably live up to it better than Tim has, but for real job security, he should sign with a team that pays a little less and runs a lot more. These are the realities of the era we may very well be about to enter in football. Somewhere, Vince Lombardi is smiling.

Review: Rihanna, "Talk That Talk"

2011-11-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

Rihanna
Talk That Talk
11.18.11
Def Jam

Everyone's favorite Barbadian R&B dancefloor diva has always been very specific about her goals, claiming early on her desire to be the "black Madonna." And she's followed that playbook even closer than she herself may have realized, or even wanted to: she starts in the clubs, making the DJ the center of her world, then expands out into shiny, big-league pop, gets a big-name boyfriend with anger issues, cuts a dark and dramatic record, then dives headlong into hypersexuality and hits a brick wall. True to her time and place (and Madge's work ethic), Rihanna did it in half the time. Now we reach the level Ms. Ciccone did in the mid-Nineties: love songs.

Not that RiRi is foolish enough to remake Madonna's own mistakes; Talk That Talk is a lot dancier than, say, Bedtime Stories, but if you shuffled it with Something to Remember and Music, you'd get the general thematic idea. Always expected to slow it down at least some of the time -- that's the "black" part of the "black Madonna" plan, because R&B stardom demands it -- she also glosses it up hard and keeps it positive, as if realizing that riddims and rage, in 2011, are not nearly as important as radioplay. Like Madge, the club is no longer her top priority. Pop rules.

Also like her idol, she has a problem getting real. Rihanna has emotions, mind you, she just doesn't let them into her work much. She's an entertainer first, unfairly tagged with the "ice queen" label because she didn't run out and do a bunch of angry songs about Chris Brown. She's not here to be deep, she's here to get you jacked up and then, maybe, to ease you down afterwards. When she tries for anything more, like Madonna coming up short on "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" or getting utterly lost in "American Pie," she disappears.

You wouldn't know unless you paid attention, though, not with the cream of the crop designing club beats and rich, gentle soundscapes for RiRi to wear like couture. Dr. Luke makes the opening ballad "You Da One" into a irresistibly choppy, poppy dedication jam. Stargate gives "Farewell" twice the import as Rihanna can with her voices. No I.D. does a great job at fashioning the faux-rock guitars of "We All Want Love" into a perfect romcom happy ending. Unfortunately, except for a pair of appealingly shallow (and non-Caribbean) jams in "Drunk On Love" and "We Found Love," that's about all there is to the ironically-named Talk That Talk -- even Jay-Z's turn on the title track feels like a retread. What sex there is gets short shrift. And at 11 tracks running 37 minutes, it's impossible to see how she can keep this on the radio until next November's obligatory album. If pop music doesn't quit being so perfunctory and incestuous, ambitious pros like Rihanna will become so anonymous they'll disappear right into the background. Madonna was never having any of that.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 60. No fake attempts at being hard or kinky, but no new "Umbrella," either.
Invention: 50. She's at the stage where she's finding an interesting middle ground for all her stylistic ambitions...
Integrity: 41. ...but it'll just sound bland without a really distinctive producer.

The Loaded Question: Future Thanksgiving

2011-11-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

Who's the New Girl? Episode 201: Rocketship X-M

2011-11-18T04:51:00.000-08:00

Having both an unhealthy obsession with classic pin-up style, which is coming back, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, which lives on forever, I've decided to combine my two lusts and create yet another series, this one based around pin-ups of the lovely ladies that starred in the b-movies MST3K skewered so hilariously. I will be taking on every single one of the relevant episodes, in order, because I have problems. Enjoy!

The series begins here.

Episode 201: Rocketship X-M (1950)

One of the first movies to seriously advance the idea of America conquering space, but surely not one of its best, Rocketship X-M was the braindeadchild of executive producer Robert L. Lippert, who went on to torture Joike and the bots with films like Lost Continent, Radar Secret Service, and Last of the Wild Horses. Lippert had read in Life magazine about a proposed moon expedition, and rushed this turkey into production in order to beat George Pal's Destination Moon to theaters. He didn't quite make it, so, here, Lloyd "my lungs were aching for air" Bridges pilots his annoying crew to the moon, but misses it due to the threat of a George Pal lawsuit and winds up on Mars instead. Total filming time: 18 days.

About that annoying crew. There's the usual lantern-jawed captain, the sketchy foreign scientist guy, the "comic" relief (an agitated Noah Beery, who compares everything he sees to Texas), and, of course, the love interest. Strikingly (but stupidly) everyone on the crew dooms themselves; our boy Lloyd is forced to hold said love interest and fantasize about their entire future imaginary relationship as they turn into a fireball, so at least they don't die alone. And whom does the Dude's dad cling to as he becomes crispy? Why, no other than...

Osa Massen

"The reason Miss Van Horn is making this trip is because
of her pioneering research with monatomic hydrogen."
"...and she's cute as a button."

Born Aase Madsen, the slightly-easier-to-pronounce Osa hailed from wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen and had little interest in stardom as a teen -- her passions were newspaper photography, and, later, film editing. But while studying under Danish director Alice O'Fredericks, she agreed to appear in two of her films, which were released at the exact time Hollywood was prowling Europe for new cheesecake. Osa was snapped up by 20th Century Fox, and by the time she was 20, she'd made a splash in 1939's Honeymoon in Bali (playing a Polynesian, of all things).

Her film career in the 40s was steady, the highlight being her catfight with none other than Joan Crawford in 1941's A Woman's Face, and being multi-lingual, she also found herself doing work as an accent coach on the side. Fox's attempt to turn Osa into the next Betty Grable failed, however, not helped by audiences confusing her with other foreign femme fatales like Ilona Massey and, oddly, older American character actress Ona Munson. Her turn as a cold and angry, then suddenly weepy and emotional, scientist in Rocketship X-M was her last major film role. She appeared steadily on television through the '50s, notably on the old Perry Mason series, and then left the business, returning to her hometown. She died in 2006 at the age of 91.

Too Big Not to Fail

2011-11-17T06:51:00.000-08:00

Why a scandal like Penn State's was bound to happen

Of all the insane stories history will shake its head at while remembering the Joe Paterno / Penn State scandal, one stands out: when the story broke, the 84-year-old Winningest Coach In College Football history stonewalled the media all day, then returned home to find dozens of supporters waiting for him. To show their support, they sang the Penn State fight song:

Fight on State (GO!)
Fight on State (GO!)
Strike your gait and win, (LET’S GO STATE!)
Victory we predict for thee
We’re ever true to you, dear old White and Blue.

It's unclear what they thought they were fighting. Assistant Coach Jerry Sandusky's urge to have sex with boys he recruited through a foster program designed to give them a safe place to live and thrive? The resolve of Paterno, his immediate superior, to fail to take action for nine years after being informed children were being raped? The Penn State faculty's near-complete, practiced obliviousness to all this?

Those would have all been things to fight. But no, Penn State was fighting for itself -- to protect itself against the charges leveled at it so that those attending could continue to enjoy whatever sense of tradition, unity, and solidarity they got from being students there. The children badly abused by an authority figure, those who'd have to live with the molestation their whole lives? Unfortunate side effects.

Yeah, we're all furious about it. I'm not saying anything new. But when Paterno finished crying conspicuously in his front window, he came out to address the supporters, and said this:

We’re always going to be Penn State, regardless of what happens to certain people. We’re Penn State. I’m proud of you. I’ve always been proud of you. Cheer our football team on Saturday, all right? Beat Nebraska.

That's right. The focus was on beating their next opponent, and maintaining solidarity. The rapist and his conspirators, whatever vague things they may have committed, were relegated to being "certain people."

It's okay, though, because JoePa proved how much he cared with his next statement:

We’ve had some criticism of how we’ve handled some of the poor victims. My wife and I, we have 17 grandkids from 16 to 3 and we pray for them every night. And we’re going to start praying for those kids who got involved in some of those problems we've talked about. They don’t deserve it. We owe it to them to say a prayer for them. And make sure they understand that their life is one that can be enriched, one that they can make a significant impact on other people and do a lot of different things, as all of you can. So God bless everybody.

Clearly, the important takeaway for Joe is that he remember to pray. Praying fixes everything. The only thing worse, apparently, than systematically allowing child rape to occur on your watch for a decade is to not be worshiping Jesus. Do the "poor victims" get an apology? No. Just a prayer. I mean, we owe them that, right? Because it costs nothing to pray. And even less to talk about it. The lawyerspeak was particularly galling, relegating the abuse to the level of "getting involved in problems," as if the kids had all gathered together one night and decided to vandalize a storefront because they were bored. Disgusting.

The immediate parallel which leapt to everyone's mind was the Catholic Church, who has its own history of institutionalized abuse. Their response was even more appalling:

"It reopens a wound in the church as well," said [Timothy] Dolan, the New York archbishop. "We once again hang our heads in shame." Dolan made the comments in response to a reporter's question at a national meeting of bishops in Baltimore.

He said the scandal shows that abuse of children is not limited to any particular faith or to clergy. Still, he said the church has "a long way to go" in making up for its mistakes.

Dolan declined to offer advice to Penn State University on how to deal with its scandal, because the church "has not been a good example of how to deal with this in the past," he said. "No one has suffered more than the Catholic community."

"Our love and prayers go out to the victims, the families and the whole Penn State community," Dolan said. "I know it's a bit of a cliché, but we know what you're going through."

Once again, you see the intentional disconnect. The victims are always, but always, lumped in with the criminals, and then with the community, so that their pain becomes "our" pain. Then come the excuses: Everyone does it.

Of course, the problem is not that pedophiles can be found wherever young boys (or girls) can be found. That's like saying that robbers like banks. What is neither normal or acceptable is the cover-up. From a journalistic standpoint, writers are always taught that the cover-up is worse than the crime, because the cover-up requires collusion. It requires multiple criminals and multiple crimes. It is institutional by nature.

And so we come to the institution. The central authority, that which becomes a religion to people, whether it's a secular or religious institution, because of what they're told and believe it represents. Because of what we need such things to be.

Institutions breed corruption, every one of them, if they're large and established enough. The actual thinking conservative -- not whatever Herman Cain and Rick Perry are supposed to be -- realizes this about government. The actual thinking liberal -- not the hippie in the drum circle -- realizes this about corporations. Athiests see it in every religion. Religious people see it in other people's religious institutions. No doubt students at The Citadel in South Carolina shook their heads in wonder at Penn State until they discovered that they, too, had a skeleton in their academic closet.

Worse, institutions that are too centralized lose all sight of everything but the bottom line, becoming bloated and unwieldy and unable to move without first sloughing off a ton of red tape -- a hard lesson learned by FEMA's response, or rather lack thereof, to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Political parties consolidate until they're so ideologically opposed they can't talk to one another, much less legislate.

It affects products and services on the most basic levels, too. The radio stations and record companies consolidate, making popular music sound uniform and uniformly terrible. Complaining to the manager at, say, McDonald's is a sick joke. The guy at Lowe's has never heard of drywall.

The institution always takes on a life of its own, given world enough and time. Power becomes centralized. Corporations become people. Unions become corrupt. Communism becomes totalitarianism, capitalism becomes corporatism, military leaders become dictators. "Defense" of one country suddenly becomes about invading another country. The flag and the uniform and the fight song become tools of oppression.

And the dystopia spreads outward to everything it touches.

By May of 1988, the allegations -- not rumors, allegations -- about Sandusky had spread, not just through the coaching staff, but to the University Police, the county DA, the university's lawyers, the Second Mile lawyers (that's right, a foster charity had lawyers), and the PA Department of Public Welfare. By the fall of 2000, those allegations had spread to the University's janitorial staff, and by 2002, even to the Penn State athletic director and its senior vice president for finance and business. By 2007, it had reached the Second Mile executive director, the Penn State president, and the university's wrestling coach.

Everyone knew. More than one person saw it with their own eyes. Yet no one said a word. The victims themselves were afraid to come forward. Because Joe Paterno is the Winningest Coach In College Football History. Not just good at winning football games (bringing in a cool $50 million a year to the University by doing so), not just the best at winning football games, but an icon, a man so popular he'd gotten a statue made of him without even dying first. You know, like Michael Jackson.

Paterno was, as the metaphor sometimes goes, an institution on campus.

Penn State, 1855.

If you don't think sports has devolved from a statement of community pride into a desperate secular religion, you haven't seen Detroit after the Lions lose. Or win. Detroit's still falling apart, too, even though the government bailed out its storied automakers not long ago. Also the banks. We apparently couldn't let either go under, despite their rampant corruption and poor business practices, because, well, they're institutions, now inextricably wired to every other area of the economy, like a tumor growing deep inside the brain of the body politic. That's what they mean by "Too Big to Fail."

The sense of small, tribal community that once raised barns, built schools, and formed town councils has now all but disappeared, replaced by a slavish devotion to institutionalization, secular religiosity, centralized power, to the symbols of things rather than the things themselves.

Worse, this kind of thinking is starting to infect individuals themselves, inducing them to think and behave like institutions. Corporations became people, in part, because people were willing to become corporations. When someone's daughter is murdered, they don't sit at home any more and mourn in privacy or with the support of friends and family -- they lawyer themselves up and hold press conferences on CNN, as if their pain were any different than anyone else in the same tragic circumstance. Celebrities talk about themselves in terms of "branding." We can always spot the real self-important douchebag at the party: he's the guy talking about himself in the third person, as if he were some separate entity that was cutting himself a paycheck. We are a nation of people living from the top down, desperately pretending we're at the top of anything. A nation of privileged sociopaths. And God or Joe Paterno help anything weaker than us that gets in our way.

It doesn't have to be this way. Anarchy is a dirty word in America, and lots of other places, but it's not about rioting in its purest, philosophical sense; it's about decentralization, about being flexible, about transparency, about organizing by what the community, and not the institution itself, requires.

Today.

It happens already. There's no other word for what happens every day on the Internet. It was the internet, you'll remember, that allowed the Arab Spring to happen by mobilizing people without prior benefit of approval by societal institutions. It broke the back of the music industry, allowing musicians to make profit without a middleman. Hackers do more damage than protesters. And when a corporate web page tries to force a new invasion of privacy on us, someone's right behind them with a script that undoes their insidious work.

Even "IRL," there are examples of decentralization that work. The local co-op. The credit union. The representative town meeting. Or in my hometown of New Orleans, for example, where charter schools cropped up after Katrina and provided a much better alternative to state-run educational you-know-whats. See, when a small school has autonomy, it not only does a better job mentoring its students -- much like teachers with small classes teach better than teachers with big ones -- but they also don't get big enough to produce any Sandusky incidents.

Hopefully we can all learn a lesson from that. Turns out all that corny Frank Capra stuff was right: in order to keep Bedford Falls from turning into Pottersville, you have to make sure Old Man Potter doesn't control everything. Bigger is simply not better any more.

She's back, y'all, and she's Black, y'all

2011-11-16T04:23:00.000-08:00

...and she's Blackity Black and she's Black, y'all

About Rebecca Black's new video, "Person of Interest."

Usually, when we talk about an artist "maturing," we mean finding their identity -- not something that's necessarily unique, like art, but a slight but interesting variation on the current theme of pop, a mutation of the virus. Whatever gets into the marketplace and spreads, is strong; whatever dies off is weak. And it's not even usually a bad thing for the artist; in popular music, selling out at least gives you focus. And more often than not, it does utilize whatever particular talents that musician has.

In Rebecca Black's case, however, she has to first upgrade to mediocre. The disturbing news isn't that she's there -- she isn't for a while yet -- but that this pop-culture in-joke is moving towards it at all. Just shows you what a little publicity can do; I mean, hipsters are always upset that being mediocre, in the entertainment industry, gets you automatic points towards being awesome, but thanks to the interwebs, being awful now gets you automatic points towards being mediocre.

I'm not beating up on Rebecca. We all know she just did what she was told, and she's either too determined or too nice or too oblivious to care that we know. Despite what you've been told over the past decade by a PR campaign Patton might have orchestrated, however, Britney Spears doesn't deserve this kind of attention either. There's nothing wrong with Rebecca that wasn't already wrong about pop music. No, it's the d-listers writing songs for Miss Black that are ruining her quinceañera. I mean, look at this. This is her new song, and it's called "Person of Interest."

(Remember that title. It becomes important.)

Shhh. Shhh. It's okay. I know you want to kill yourselves. That's normal. Actually, you know, that chorus wasn't half-bad, if you just -- damn you, industry! Remove your cock from my mouth!

Anyway, Rebecca is, as always, blessed with an insanely sunny smile, a guilelessness that verges on the eldritch, perfectly calibrated to blind you while her handlers attempt to rob you. She's like the Tim Tebow of pop music -- we know she's not ready for the big leagues, but, d'awwww. She's so nice. As with Tebow, however, Nice quickly graduates to Super Fucking Annoying. It just hasn't manifested itself in this particular -- Wait. Wait a minute. Go back over those lyrics.

There's a crime scene on the dance floor
Ring the alarm

Uh-oh.

There's a chalk line on the dance floor
In the shape of my heart
Crime scene tape on the front door
And you are
A person of interest

Oh God.

Can't deny you're implicated
in a mayhem in my mind

There we go. Okay. Now that's professionalism. I had to check to see if it was bad. She's definitely graduated up from reciting her day planner.

Officer! Officer! He stole my heart! Get the UV light! I wanna see if he left sperm all over it!

Okay, like I said, I know this hurts. She has no right to inflict this on people, the privileged little mall rat! But before you judge, listen to her back story. Yes, she comes from money. But when she was just a little girl, her parents took her to the opera, and after it was over, they decided to take a detour down what was known as Metaphor Alley.

A Metaphor jumped out at them and demanded their money. Then he shot both of Rebecca's parents. And ran off.

Rebecca determined, there and then, sobbing on her knees in the rain over the bleeding bodies of her family, that she would avenge their death by personally seeking out metaphors and torturing them until they died, hiring amateur (very amateur) songwriters to craft her weapons and utility belt. That's right. Rebecca Black is to metaphors what Batman is to crime. That's a metaphor inside a metaphor inside a metaphor. A turducken of metaphors, if you will.* Which actually constitutes a fourth metaphor.

You are welcome.

Actually, I made all that up. Metaphors can't kill people. This vigilantism has got to stop. Who protects us from you, Rebecca? Who protects us from you?!

*actually, it's an analogy. Shhh. Don't let her find out about analogies!

Review: Lou Reed and Metallica, "Lulu"

2011-11-15T13:22:00.000-08:00

Lulu
Lou Reed and Metallica
10.31.11
Warner Bros, Vertigo

Lou Reed has made a whole side career out of pissing people off. A former art student trained in music theory and a pop songwriter who chained himself to a cubicle and cranked out four-chord hits before he entered the Velvet Underground, Lou has always been a case study in how to use noise to manipulate others. As a result, there's probably not a single Reed fan who loves everything he's ever done: for every languid exercise in decadence like the Velvets' "Some Kinda Love" or "Venus In Furs," there's a caustic act of ear rape like "European Son" or "Sister Ray."

When he went solo, at a time in the music industry when seemingly all things were allowed, the divide got worse. Metal Machine Music was the big fuck you, a full hour of absolutely nothing but white noise feedback scooping out your brains, no songs, no beats, but Berlin has entered the historical horse race recently due to its extreme uncomfortableness masquerading as a rock album. Doomed lovers are a staple in entertainment, but you don't often get to hear their children crying as they're taken away. What Lou lacks in melodic range, he's always more than made up for in big clanging balls.

At first, Lulu looked like another exercise in sonic terrorism, and it is. But Lou's always taken an aesthete's approach to even the most rudimentary rock and roll -- he has to build up from a concept. He's also been one of the most literate guys to ever wear a leather jacket and snarl at a mic, and while that instinct doesn't fail him here, getting Metallica to back him while he spits out his spoken word results in his wobbliest foundation since Sally Can't Dance. Which, as you Lester Bangs disciples might remember, failed artistically because Lou was barely present when it was recorded.

Same goes here. The old man enlisted Metallica for this project after performing with them two years ago at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary ceremonies, feeling their sound was as tough as his aesthetic. So far, so good. And the project he put them to work on -- an adaptation of two German plays from the turn of the last century, which involve a socialite's descent into prostitution -- seems right up Reed's aesthetic alley. But Metallica are no improvisational art-rock band; their brutality is measured out in harsh barks, and even the more melodic, slower movements are repetitive and functional. The new songs, which are harsh and ugly in the extreme lyrically, are free-flowing musically; the result sounds for all the world like two radios being turned on in the same room. Metal Machine Music was a sonic assault unlike anything before or since, but the feedback was only competing against more feedback. Here, the brutality is at cross-purposes with itself. When it's dragged out to cinematic lengths, like the 11-minute opi "Cheat On Me" and "Dragon," the result is actually painful. And I've listened to all of MMM. For fun.

The few moments where James Hetfield breaks through and takes control, like the choruses on "The View," only remind us what might have been -- there's a pretty good, unselfconscious, old-school Metallica album buried under Lou's rants, and those rants might have made a compelling libretto backed by a band that values noise over riffs -- Sonic Youth, for example, who are from roughly the same period, share his New York roots, and know how to milk the drama of the spoken word to maximum advantage. Ironically, the master of '70s shock probably picked a band that was too tame to fulfill his vision, even as he no doubt envisioned roping in a whole new set of fans. As for his new friends, they ironically wound up stuck in a jumbled mess because they needed some direction. It's just as well no one's buying the result. What would have been next? Megadeth and Leonard Cohen?

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 36. Two interesting ideas fighting each other to a very noisy standstill.
Invention: 50. It's not for nothing that spoken word experiments like "The Gift" and "The Murder Mystery" are everyone's least favorite Velvets tracks. And they only competed with themselves.
Integrity: 24. Beatallica has more.

The Loaded Question: How will the Republicans fix the economy?

2011-11-14T18:17:00.000-08:00

TV Review: "Allen Gregory"

2011-11-02T19:02:00.000-07:00

The most fascinating thing about the advance hate radiating from detractors of Fox's new animated show, Allen Gregory, is how it centers around the main characters being "unlikable." Which of course they are. This is Fox. Excuse me, FOX. Who wants to be likable? Seth MacFarlane now has three shows in the Animation Domination block, one of which features a "funny" rapist, one which features a racist redneck, and one of which, by its own admission, features an alien who cracks wise like Paul Lynde and cracks out like Andy Dick. So... really? The gay billionaire and his snooty, micromanaging son? Offensive?

All these things can be funny, when handled correctly, and usually on FOX they are -- when they occasionally falter, like Family Guy making fun of stroke victims, we understand they're erring on the side of, well, whatever a lack of caution is. They're supposed to shock us. It's Sunday night, we have to go to work in about ten hours, and a whole afternoon of football has gouged a migraine right into the middle of our head. We need some crazy people doing some crazy shit.

Allen Gregory will more than likely be rejected by FOX viewers any damn way, but not because it's too rude, God no. It's too urbane. Not for nothing did creator (and voice of the titular character) Jonah Hill premiere this (wonderfully pretentious) baby at Georgia Tech; it's clearly the network's attempt at working in its first [adult swim] cartoon, aiming for collegiates by co-opting the cool nerd who helped get them through high school. Crazy shit happens in Gregory, just like on any FOX show, but here it's, dare I say, cerebral: no endless callbacks to Facts of Life here, Dad, the jokes come in quick, low, and from the outside. For example: to break difficult news to Allen, his folks don't get him a dog or something; they tell him he won a Tony.

That difficult news: Gregory, in the show's main conceit, is an ascot-wearing little prick forced to go to public school. Standard fish-out-of-water stuff. Yet Allen has two daddies -- and as we find out, one of them is actually straight, merely drawn in to this world by Daddy's spending power. He's gay for the pay, and while the details are intriguingly vague, it's clear he's a business acquisition. Dad, it turns out, is every bit as prickly as (and strikingly similar to) [as] mainstay Jonas Venture. But while the Venture Bros. patriarch is a case study in the decline of American dominance (no, seriously), Mr. Gregory is the soul of modern American winning: he's utterly ruthless, emotionless, and shallow.

So, no you won't be inviting these guys to your party, not even Allen, who's supposed to be having life lessons when the new experience makes him crap his pants (literally), but instead uses the whole incident as an excuse to conquer the school. Clearly they don't understand who he is. In that context, Allen's horrifyingly adorable crush on his much older, much heavier, buzz-cut principal is still wacky for wacky's sake -- again more like [as] than FOX, because it doesn't even pretend to make sense -- but also an indicator of his predatory nature. She runs the place? He must have her.

What this all means is that some of us, especially those who've been watching adult cartoons for years, would rather see unlikable characters with integrity than likable ones that break character all the time. Integrity in this case referring to these assholes' ability to stay true to their particular assholishness. It's not only more honest, it's less condescending -- twentysomethings, naive as they can be, have figured out its idiots like these who run the world, but are still capable of admiring their, dare I say, panache. ("Here's what's currently happening," he tells his new teacher. "You're being difficult. And I see this whole situation going smoother if you cooperate... thanks... you're a China doll.") We want their confidence, but not their sense of entitlement.

Indeed, these characters are already so entrenched that the writers can begin letting them impact their new surroundings. Will Allen learn that public school kids will hate him for acting like a hedge-fund manager in 3rd grade, especially when they realize it's his money that's making him weird? Or will he corrupt the whole educational process with said money, which would be another nice fat topical metaphor to chew on? It'll be interesting to find out... assuming they get the chance, that is. In the end, It's not the moral watchdogs but the Wal-Martians with Stewie stickers on their SUVs who will doom Allen Gregory to nothingness, put off by the glee in which it talks down to them. The rest of us like our jerks straight up; if you prefer to be not quite so dominated by your animation, that's your lookout.

Review: Coldplay, "Mylo Xyloto"

2011-11-01T17:50:00.000-07:00

Mylo Xyloto
Coldplay
Parlophone
10.24.11

Contrary to hipster opinion, there's not always something wrong with selling out. Bands -- especially those signed to a major -- are usually expected to toil away at whatever style of music's currently popular, which is why Coldplay got huge combining the retro cool of U2's expansive, shimmering arena rock and Radiohead's piano-driven apocalytica. Unlike those bands, however, Chris Martin and Co. never had much to say, reducing those strains to an impeccably airbrushed blend, rainy day music for teens who think they're more sensitive than they are. For a solid pop band with unnecessary pretensions, selling out can be an evolutionary step. There's always the danger of playing against your strengths, of course, but Coldplay's problem has never been sincerity; it's depth.

All of which is a way of saying that Mylo Xyloto, arriving as it does after one of those is-it-a-breakup hiatuseses, isn't a step forward or backward, but rather sideways. With a canny trio of producers that feature Brian Eno alumnus Markus Dravs on one end and smart popmeister Rik Simpson (Natalie Imbruglia, Jay-Z) on the other, this atmospheric ear candy is sweeter and more intriguing than ever; it's really just the guys sped up and not so mopey, trading in their status as hipster boy-band for a shot at true pop. It's no Black Eyed Peas record. But you can listen to this one before the club.

There's a few short instrumental bridges and a concept of sorts to soften the blow (two lovers meeting in a dystopian gang of blah blah blah, you won't notice), but right from the top, this is not your older sister's Coldplay: "Hurts Like Heaven" sounds like its namesake, The Cure's "Just Like Heaven," mixed with the melodic arcs of Peter Gabriel's "Solsbury Hill." Seems they were smarter than the hipsters figured: their sellout moves sound impeccably like their the sellout moves of their arthouse. The much-lamented Rihanna duet "Princess of China" is a letdown; sounds like she phoned this one in. But forget that -- she'd kill for the limo-ready sheen of something like "Paradise" or the lite-R&B ballad "Up In Flames," both of which mange to translate Chris Martin's signature sensitive moves into up-to-the-minute Top 40 gold.

As Mylo goes on, the band is canny enough to deposit some old-school Coldplay moves, like a pop-rapper who buries the gangsta shit in the middle of the playlist: "Major Minor" harks back to the experimentation of Viva La Vida, while the acoustic "Us Against The World" feels like a rejected Parachutes outtake. But never fear: "Charlie Brown" and "Don't Let It Break Your Heart" are waiting, sufficiently anthemic but shiny and emotionally upbeat. The overall experience is like The Joshua Tree and Watch the Throne playing at the same time, without the identifiable artistic fingerprints. Those of you who got through your college entanglements with X&Y will probably recoil from that concept, but it's to Coldplay's credit that they've figured out how to mesh the most exciting sounds of both without tripping over the sentiments of either. This is where it helps to have no sentiments. Only in 2011 could the world's biggest band finally relax and allow itself to enter the mainstream.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 65. The band's still a little too intent on navel-gazing to fully sell the glitter.
Invention: 72. Making U2 sound like Radio Disney is actually pretty impressive, whether or not you think it's necessary.
Integrity: 52. It's not all that necessary.

The Loaded Question: What's your favorite TV series?

2011-10-31T19:28:00.000-07:00

What's your favorite TV series?

Who's the New Girl? Episode 113: The Black Scorpion

2011-10-28T21:58:00.000-07:00

Episode 113: The Black Scorpion (1957)

Not quite "the worst we can find," The Black Scorpion is actually somewhat above average for '50s giant monster movies. Meaning that the acting is fair, the script is decent, and the special effects range from awful to inspired (helped along by King Kong stop-motion legend Willis O'Brien). This time it's not atomic super rays but a good old volcano that awakens the giant scorpions -- that's right, there's more than one, and also some giant earthworms and spiders -- and they're attacking Mexico City, not, say, the Midwest. The script's main flaw is its delay in pulling the trigger on the budding romance between our hero, geologist Hank Scott (Richard Denning), and fiesty, impossibly beautiful ranch owner Teresa Alvarez, a character filled out quite nicely by...

Mara Corday

"...I study interesting volcanoes."

"...and you're one of them."

Santa Monica native Marilyn Joan Watts began her road to stardom on the beach at fifteen, but not because of anyone in the business; it was a kid in need of a subject for a photo contest who first discovered Mara. She eventually made her way into Earl Carroll's famous cadre of showgirls, which naturally led to Vegas; Mara could act, however, and it was on the stage that she finally found an agent. Becoming part of the Universal Studio system of developing young talent, she first entered the horror genre in 1955's Tarantula, which made her a literally hot property overnight.

Once a unused Esquire shoot of Mara was bought out by Playboy, leading to a unusual "double Playmate" month in October 1958, her place in babedom was secure. By that time, however, the studio system had been dismantled, leaving Corday adrift and stuck in genre flicks like, well, like The Black Scorpion, inexplicably dressed down and suffering from a wandering accent. She soon married actor Richard Long and left the business, but when he died in 1974, she had a brief acting renaissance thanks to being included in pics starring one of her closest friends from the contract days... Clint Eastwood.

Fun with Meter (Part 1)

2011-10-27T16:29:00.001-07:00

Back in the early '70s, a concerned music fan apparently wrote into Rolling Stone claiming that he'd done the math, and the world was about to run out of melodies. Seems the total combination of available notes, like drink flavors at a Sonic, was finite, and based on the number of original copyrights, was about to be reached. The end of original music.

Of course, that didn't happen; music is not just random, but subjective. As a musician, I know that a song sounds completely different to me if I just play it on a different piano -- not a different make, even, just a different piano. If you don't call attention to it, you can rehash anything, especially if you don't know you're doing it. This goes for all forms of art, which is why there's only x amount of plots a movie can have. It's the variations, and the context, that matter.

I don't remember, for example, who it was that first told me about the Emily Dickinson / Madonna connection: seems most of her poems have the same meter and rhyme structure, which means you can theoretically sing almost her entire oeuvre to the tune of :"Like A Virgin." Check it out:

Because I could not stop for Death | I made it through the wilderness

He kindly stopped for me | Somehow I made it through

The carriage held but just ourselves | Didn't know how lost I was

And Immortality | Until I found you

My friends and I once discovered that you could easily turn the Guns N' Roses' ballad "Sweet Child O' Mine" into the religious standard "Amazing Grace":

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound | She's got a smile that it seems to me

That saved a wretch like me | Reminds me of childhood memories

I once was lost, but now I'm found | Where everything was as fresh as the bright blue

Was blind, but now I see | Sky...

As a New Orleans native, I myself was pleased to realize that the Big Tymers' geto-fabulous hit "Still Fly" works just fine with the lyrics from a certain legendarily stupid sitcom:

Sometimes the similarities are intentional, too. '60s songwriter Jack Hildebrand was commissioned to write a "protest song" for the Monkees, so he stole the frame of another social commentary, the Rolling Stones' "19th Nervous Breakdown":

She knows her mind all right, your Auntie Grizelda | You're the kind of person you meet at certain dismal dull affairs

She says she knows my kind, she might, maybe so | Center of a crowd, talking much too loud, running up and down the stairs

Oh yeah, she's raised you right, your Auntie Grizelda | well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years

You only know the things she wants you to know | And though you've tried, you just can't hide, your eyes are edged with tears

You look just like her, you do | You better stop

I know by looking at you | And look around

That you've been listening to your Auntie Grizelda | Here it comes...

Finally, I was pleased to find a rare double ripoff that works just fine no matter which lyrics you sing to which song:

They're Pinky and the Brain | I'm singin' in the rain

They're Pinky and the Brain | Just singin' in the rain

One is a genius | What a glorious feeling

The other's insane | I'm happy again

They're laboratory mice | I walk down the lane

Their genes have been spliced | With a happy refrain

They're dinky | I'm singin'

They're Pinky and the Brain | I'm singin' in the rain

(Singing the P&TB lyrics to the Gene Kelly melody is goofy fun, but doing it the other way around sounds just psychotic. Rain, rain, rain, doodly, rain, rain, rain, RAIN.)

The Headless Horsemen

2011-10-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

An open letter to Colts fans, from a Saints fan

Things are made worse when panic looks friendly. @jimirsay

I saw it happen. You saw it happen. That happened.

The Indianapolis Colts' 62-7 loss to the New Orleans Saints on Sunday night was one of the most spectacular flameouts of the past two decades... though trainwrecks like that happened sporadically before the NFL instituted its current policy of parity, such a complete domination hasn't been seen since, oh, the Super Bowl Shuffle.

As a lifelong NOLA fan, I should be thrilled. And some of us were. The reaction among most hardcore, lifelong Saints fans, however, was a sense of acute embarrassment. We know loss. We know sloppiness. We know about being dominated. Not that 41-10 drubbing you gave us in 2007, or that in the 55-21 pounding you gave us in 2003, though. Those were just bad losses. We don't know what that was Sunday night.

It was more or less a given, this weekend, that the Colts would be defeated by the black and gold. Their offense had been a total mess since the neck injury of QB Peyton Manning, who was signed to a five-year, $90 mil contract even though he was 35 and had already gone under the knife. That may be all over: to many football fans, it feels like he's at the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies now. So Stampede Blue pulled Kerry Collins -- who's three years older -- out of retirement, but he got a concussion in Week 3, forcing the team to go to third-stringer Curtis Painter. He's from Purdue, like Drew Brees. But the similarities grind to a halt there.

Still, that only explains the 7. How does any modern team give up a 55-point differential? The Colts were, according to the media line, only improving after six losses, shaving the point spread thinner and thinner ever week -- there'd be more losses, for sure, but they could mark out time (or, depending on who you talk to, rebuild) with dignity. Then this happened.

You all know the stats, which read like a Guinness Book of World Records all on their own. Forget Manning: the defense allowed the Saints to score on their first nine drives. Our boys didn't have to go to third down until they were up by 28. Drew is also a future Hall of Famer, but 35 of 39? Come on.

This is not to add insult to Joseph Addai injury; any fan who got on the black-and-gold bandwagon before Sean Payton showed up knows how you feel right now. Watching the home team collapse like Lindsay Lohan at a sentencing is never fun. But, man, only 20 months ago you were giving us all kinds of hell in the Super Bowl. Until 3:12 before the end, that was anyone's game.

No, what I want to know is, who's running the show over there?

Watching the sidelines that night, you would have thought Manning -- who we consider a hometown boy, btw -- was the intense, stern head coach, slowly boiling over from sheer frustration, while actual head coach Jim Caldwell was the stone-faced assistant. We all know that Caldwell's always been stone-faced. But he's also always been an assistant. I understand he was part of the Peyton Manning deal, as departing mastermind Tony Dungy lobbied for his former right-hand man to take over the top job. Thing is, he's only ever been on the big stage once, in college ball, and his record at Wake Forest is a nearly-as-ridiculous 26-63. He used to work with someone we couldn't get out of town fast enough, QB Jim "Chris" Everett. Also, as it turns out, not ready for prime time.

NFL coaches are a notoriously weird and wobbly bunch, defined by their quirks, all over the map personality-wise. They're not paid to be friendly and they're only somewhat accessible. Even given that, Caldwell's almost never seen talking to anyone on the sidelines, for any reason. He just seems to stand there, like the Sphinx looking out over the French army. Except the Colts fall apart like the modern French army. What's he doing out there?

I wouldn't even be disrespectful enough to ask, except that Peyton is not just revealing himself to be the MVP of all time by not suiting up, he's also looking more and more like the team's entire motivation. The whole team. Manning can't rally a defense on the field, of course, but his long drives kept them off the field. Freeney, Johnson, Muir, Bethea, and Mathis are still there from the Super Bowl lineup, and they were practically getting out of the way of our guys. Defensive coordinator Larry Coyer is likely to be out on his ass soon for giving up that sixtyburger, and he's been sticking with a scheme that was figured out long ago, but before this massacre, he was only giving up an average of 10 points a game. The team is clearly dealing with something mental, something only a leader can fix. A shame spiral it badly needs to shake itself out of.

Is owner Jim Irsay, as some speculate, hands-on enough to provide it? VC Bill Polian? It doesn't seem likely. The suits are too high up. I submit that Peyton Manning, for all intents and purposes, the guy who calls his own plays on the field and keeps the defense off it, has been the defacto head coach since Dungy left. Sure, he was on the sidelines Sunday, but when the other team goes 28-0 in the first quarter, there's not much motivating you can do. Sunday night, the "coaching staff" decided that, in the loudest domed stadium in the world, that their new, third-string QB, who wasn't familiar with -- well, with anything, should go no-huddle. Something is profoundly wrong.

Does it seem likely that Peyton would have explained that epic collapse at hafltime, when the game was already over, as a matter of details, of fixing the "little things"? Does that sound like the words of a guy who knows what's gone wrong? Also, when DB Justin Tryon wanted to start this year, you may remember he got in a shitload of trouble for tweeting this.

Who's running things?

Mind you, I don't really think Peyton had his hands on every aspect of the team when he was healthy. Yet more and more, it seems like Archie instilled a sense of noblesse oblige in Peyton and Eli over the years: when things go wrong, they don't just look upset, they look puzzled -- and worse, furious, like a child who has to stop playing football and come in for dinner. Things are not supposed to go badly when they're in the pocket. The world is supposed to co-operate. They're Mannings. Born to lead. Born to make things happen.

Perhaps for that reason, I've seen some of Colts Nation arguing that Peyton should just go ahead and replace Caldwell as coach for the rest of the season. Why not? He can't play anyway. The essence of leadership seems to have entirely disappeared from your beloved Colts, and the live shot of their coach walking away, all by himself, once again not speaking to anyone, without even an entourage -- that spoke volumes. It's not that the team's abandoned him, either. Quite the opposite.

“Honestly, I don’t think we showed up to play,’’ receiver Austin Collie said. “Our mindset could have been a whole lot better.’’

By contrast, our injured Payton, spelled with an a and sitting in the press box, didn't call any plays at all that fateful night. He had a hot dog. He hung out with Kenny Chesney. But his field general was on the field. And you can bet he pushed those guys all week.

Review: Bjork, "Biophilia"

2011-10-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

Bjork
Biophilia
One Little Indian, Polydor
10.5.11

There's an app for that. Bjork's seventh studio album proper, was preceded by months of history's geekiest album hype, so much that it threatened to overwhelm the project entirely. Designed as a somewhat interactive multimedia presentation, Biophilia had the input of everyone from Apple to David Attenborough to Nikola Tesla to National Geographic in both design and execution: there's a set of songs you can download, yes, but there's also a series of iPad apps, written essays, games, animations, live shows, and for all we know, guerilla street theater. If the Icelandic performance-art chanteuse wanted to distance herself from the pop mainstream after the Timbaland constructions on her last effort, 2007's Volta, she picked a hell of a way to do it.

Since the Balkanization of the record industry, intelligent, cultish name artists have doubled down on this kind of thing -- no longer does a performer make a covers album or a Christmas album, but rather a project with a very specific set of reference points, feeding the maw of the information age with incredibly dense projects you can really dig into. In fact, the concept of "album" has already evolved into a cloud of which it is only the center; the art now only begins as an individual vision, and then expands outward into whatever the consumer chooses to make of it. If enough people are listening, anything you say can become a meme.

This review only seeks to understand Biophilia as an album. And that's okay, because Bjork created it that way at its center, sitting at home in Reykjavik and noodling on -- that's right -- an iPad. She's Bjork, though, so that also means she had a gamelan/celeste hybrid created that she could control with a keypad, as well as "gravity harps" that create random tones out of a series of Foucault-style pendulums, wrote songs in difficult time signatures like 7/4 and 17/8, and added a gorgeous-sounding Icelandic female choir to her own amazing multi-tracked vocals.

Daunting, even for Bjorkophiles, even more so when you consider how seriously she took the project's theme: spiritual rebirth through the observation of universal phenomena. And yet, the effort sounds as natural as it needs to -- the end result of this arthouse orgy is a very gentle mix of Western and Eastern chamber music, with occasional dnb beats thrown in, and synth washes and delicate vocals for shading. A song like the opener, "Moon," stimulates more of your brain as you open up to it; like every track here, it mimics in form what its titular phenomenon does in nature, so there are repeating music cycles undulating against each other as she intones: "As if the healthiest pastime / Is being in life-threatening circumstances / And once again be reborn / All birthed and happy."

Because Bjork is as in control of her muse as she is her ever-more-formidable vocal instrument, you don't need to know all this to enjoy it. You can merely close your eyes (!) and dive into the brief, menacing interlude of "Dark Matter," for example, without knowing that it was written in gibberish simply because science doesn't know what to make of it yet. "Virus" isn't the first song to make falling in love seem like a disease, but it may be the first to make both seem like a healthy process. The single (and musical red herring) "Crystalline" sums up the album's zeitgeist perfectly in its zeal to open oneself to human emotional change the way natural cycles accept the physical kind. Biophilia is the most challenging album Bjork's made yet, not least because her subject matter forces all the songs to be taken at a slow, deliberate, methodical pace; it also means that voice, which she has more power over than ever, isn't allowed to soar to the heights it usually does. But as ear candy, it works just fine on its own, assuming you meet it halfway. Think of Biophilia as a planetarium show going on inside your soul. And wherever else in the physical world you agree to meet it.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 72. Our little ice pixie has an almost Kubrickian way of translating the universe sometimes. Like him, however, she can come off cold and dull if you don't get her vision.
Invention: 95. Through the roof. No throat singing this time, happily.
Integrity: 83. Technology is quietly sneaking performance art into the mainstream.

The Loaded Question: Celebrity Halloween Costumes

2011-10-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

And now, the meta-comic.

2011-10-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

Words That Sold Out: Irony

2011-10-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

This is the first installment of Words That Sold Out, what may or may not eventually become a series of grammar Nazi-like outbursts against words whose meaning is often misunderstood.

Proposed irony punctuation,
because nobody can recognize irony anymore.
This in itself is somewhat... you know.

Irony

: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning —called also Socratic irony

a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning
b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style of form characterized by irony
c : an ironic expression or utterance

a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruityb : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play —called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

Thank you, Webster's.

Irony comes from the Greek Eiron. The Eiron was a comedic character, not a specific one, but an archetype, like "the straight man" or "the idiot." The difference was that the Eiron only pretended to be an idiot, taking his cue from the Socratic Method. If you've read Plato, you know that the old man used to love to pretend to take the other person's side of the argument in order to switch it around and prove it was bullshit. (Although Socrates himself rarely used the word "bullshit," unless he was arrested and forced to drink poison.)

The Eiron, then, was a kind of character that emerged from that type of discourse, the character who was actually brilliant, but pretending to be stupid. He always won the argument against the other guy, the blustery asshole known as the Alazon. Think of the Eiron as the verbal Greek equivalent of the Road Runner or Bugs Bunny; he seemed to be at a big disadvantage, but reality was actually on his side.

Eventually, the term ironic came into standard English usage, referring to a truth that one set of people (the audience, in this case) knew, and that another set of people (the characters) did not. This brought forth the concept of dramatic irony. When Luke Skywalker goes to kill Darth Vader because he thinks Vader killed his father, only to find out that Vader is his father, that, my friends, is dramatic irony.

Unfortunately, over the years, the meaning's been watered down and altered due to misuse. These days, people use ironic simply to mean that things turned out differently than they wanted. This misses the whole cosmic joke of irony: it's totally meta. When it happens to you, the universe is the audience that knows the real truth. It's fate, being creative with you. And despite popular opinion, the end result doesn't have to be bad for you, just cosmically funny. It has a plot. If your boss catches you walking into a bar when you already called in sick, that's just coincidence. If you also catch him there with his gay lover and not his wife, and so he gives you the week off, that's irony. (And a sitcom episode. But I digress.)

Verbal irony has also gotten its meaning soiled in the past few years, as well, since so many people now confuse it with sarcasm. Merely saying the opposite of what you really feel is not irony unless someone doesn't know you don't mean it. If someone says "Your wife is hot," and everyone, including you, knows he's being a dick, that's sarcasm. If he says that sarcastically, and then later on you find out he's been fucking your wife, who he apparently actually found hot, welcome to Ironyland, population: you.

Irony is about a perceived truth that reveals itself to be diametrically opposite from the real truth, or true in a different way.

Unfortunately, Alanis Morissette's 1995 smash "Ironic" further muddied the waters, because it's supposed to be about irony, and yet almost none of the scenarios she presents are ironic. Here's a handy deconstruction of the lyrics:

An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
(Level of irony: low. He was 98. That's just the law of averages kicking in. Unless the old man had sold his heart meds on the street for lottery tickets. That would be irony.)

It's a black fly in your Chardonnay
(Level of irony: none. Unless you became rich through providing pest control services.)

It's a death row pardon two minutes too late
(Level of irony: none. Every death row prisoner waits for a pardon. This is just bad timing. Unless you had killed your victim with a clock. That would be ironic.)

It's like rain on your wedding day
(Level of irony: none. Unless you're Axl Rose.)

It's a free ride when you've already paid
It's the good advice that you just didn't take
(Possible irony here, but more details are needed.)

Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly
He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye
He waited his whole damn life to catch that flight
And as the plane crashed down he thought
Well, isn't this nice...
(Level of irony: medium. Would have been better if Mr. Play It Safe was an airline safety spokesman or some such instead of just afraid to fly. This way, it just looks like he had a point.)

A traffic jam when you're already late
(Level of irony: none. Unless you're that guy who was supposed to bring the
pardon for the Clock Killer.)

A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break
(No irony whatsoever. The hell are you doing taking a cigarette break in a no-smoking area?)

It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife
(Level of irony: none. Nice surrealism, though. I'm picturing some Dali-esque spoon painting.)

It's meeting the man of my dreams
And then meeting his beautiful wife
(Level of irony: none. Sometimes you meet people, and they're already married. It happens. Unless the beautiful wife was the ugly girl you used to throw erasers at in school, and then we just have a Jennifer Aniston movie. And no one wants that.)

Barstool Economics

2011-10-19T17:58:00.000-07:00

Explaining the 53, the 99, and the 999

GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax plan has been getting a lot of traction lately, mainly among people who don't know what they're talking about. Call it barstool economics: the idea that one simple plan can fix everything that's wrong with the economy, plans which always appeal to "regular guys" on barstools holding forth on what's wrong with this country, because simplicity seems fair and the current tax code does not. As it turns out, they're right about the last part, but that's mainly because there are a ton of corporate loopholes in it, which, as billionaire Warren Buffett has become notorious/beloved for pointing out, means that quite a lot of wealthy folks don't pay as much as the middle class.

At the same time, those Occupy Wall Street protesters, no longer occupying just Wall Street but spread out across the country, have taken on economic inequality in the American system, which also means tax revolt. They characterize themselves as the 99 percent of us who don't share in the wealth they help create. The right has countered with their own effective strategy, dubbing themselves 53 percenters, so named because they label themselves as the 53 percent of Americans who actually pay income taxes, supposedly subsidizing the 47 percent who don't.

And so it goes. It's a political trick, developed over the past thirty years, that might as well be trademarked by the Lee Atwaters and Karl Roves of the world:

1. Scream that the other side is committing something horrible, in this case class warfare.
2. While the media looks the other way, engage in actual class warfare.
3. When the media looks back, pretend to be disgusted that both sides engage in class warfare.

The 4th step comes when Americans get worn down by the constant fighting and long for an idea, an easy to understand idea, which will clear up their confusion. And one such idea has been put forth by GOP Presidential Candidate Herman Cain: the 9-9-9 tax. It's a variation on an older sneaky conservative trick called the flat tax. And it's gaining momentum.

Here's why it's bullshit.

Americans mostly pay three kinds of taxes. The 9-9-9 plan affects all three. First:

1. The income tax. This is the rich man's tax, which it's why it's the only one you ever hear about. When the rich bitch about taxes, they're complaining about the income tax, because, as they love to point out, 47 percent of Americans don't pay it. That's because those people make less than $50,000 a year. And there's a good reason they don't pay income tax: they can't afford to. Turns out not taxing the poor is a good idea for two reasons -- because it makes them even poorer (the moral argument) and because they can't come up with it (the practical argument). Before the great crash of '08, the percentage of Americans who didn't pay income tax was actually more like 40%; it's jumped to 47 simply because the economy is that bad.

The underlying secret to understanding this is: It costs more money to be poor. It is more expensive to be poor. The man making $50K a year, even if he's lucky enough to be an individual taxpayer taking care of himself alone, will probably spend most of that fifty thousand over the course of the year. Mortgage/rent, gas, food, medical, different forms of insurance, you name it. If he's got a family to support, forget it. He gets to make maybe one or two big purchases a year, and gets to save almost nothing. And he's still lucky, because 80 percent of the people who don't pay income tax actually make even less than that -- $30,000.

Why does he catch such an awesome break? Because of the Earned Income Tax Credit. It was developed in the 1970s to, depending on whom you ask, either take money from the deserving wealthy and hand it to the lazy poor, or to give the poor an incentive to keep slaving away so that they won't rise up and murder the middle class in their beds. Either way, it is the very definition of a socialist wealth-redistribution system.

And yet, some Republicans have actually endorsed it. Conservatives like President Gerald Ford, who first signed the bill into law. Or Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and his son Dubya, all of whom raised and expanded the EITC faithfully while in office, whether or not they raised taxes elsewhere. The biggest windfall you can get under the EITC comes to you if you have 3 or more children and make $16,449 a year. That's raising three kids, feeding at least four people, and keeping a home on $1,370 a month. Lucky bastards.

Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan abolishes the income tax. It does, however, institute a "business tax" of 9 percent. Right now, your employer pays about 8 percent federal tax on you as an employee, for Social Security and Medicare. So it's not too big a change for him. Except that unlike the current system, he doesn't get to deduct the wage he pays you. And he can't raise prices if he wants to stay competitive. So that 9 percent? That comes out of your salary.

In addition, the 9-9-9 plan also abolishes the EITC. But wait! Why would he need to take the trouble to abolish both, if they're both part of the same system already? Read on.

Now, then. If only there were some way to make these 47% deadbeats pay their fair share of the tax bill! Maybe a system where it was taken from them a little at a time, maybe every two weeks or so. We could call it...

2. The payroll tax. This is the poor man's tax. The rich don't talk about this, because they mostly don't pay it. Americans only pay this on earned income, and then only up to $107,000. After that, for all intents and purposes, nothing. This is the key. There are no deductions for this -- you earn, you pay. Up to that amount. Our $50K Average Joe pays on all of it -- he gets some of it back at tax time thanks to the EITC, which is the "no income tax" the rich complain about, but he still pays fully into Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment. Someone making $500,000 a year, on the other hand, by defintion pays on only one-fifth of his salary. A billionaire, who gets most of his money from investments, pays almost nothing.

See? The 9-9-9 plan giveth, and it taketh away. No income tax means a break for the nation's top earners, but a big increase on tax for the poor, because the EITC is gone. Now Mr. 50K has to come up with 9 percent of his salary at tax time: $4,500. And remember, he's one of the lucky ones.

Cain has made some noises about poverty clausesthat would exempt the mega poor from all this. Except, well.

Finally, there's the tax we all pay, at least on paper:

3. The sales tax. This is a tax on consumption. It is state and local, not federal, which is why there's always a city council meeting every time someone wants to raise it a penny to pay teacher's salaries or to build an airport. It's fairly straightforward -- and also more expensive for the poor, who again have to spend most of their income. If a millionaire goes completely insane and spends half a million dollars every year on himself, he still only pays half of his income on sales tax. Average 50K Joe, again, pays on almost if not all his income. And he also pays a much larger share of local and state taxes.

When you add up sales and payroll taxes, as well as excise taxes on gasoline and property taxes and the like, the bottom half of the country pays,. on average, about 25 percent of their income in taxes. (The lowest quintile -- the poorest 20 percent of us -- pay about 16%.) The 53 percenters who are supposedly footing the bill for the rest of us pay a slightly higher percent of their income in taxes: 28 percent.

The 9-9-9 plan taxes everyone at 9 percent. That's not 9 percent total. That's an additional 9 percent. Remember that gallon of gas that used to be $1.80, and then jumped up to $3.50? It's now $3.82. Enjoy.

This also might be a good time to mention how the rich often avoid paying sales taxes. There's a loophole for every product.

35% of the nation's budget is spent on Medicare, unemployment insurance, and welfare, and 36% of the nation's tax revenue comes from that demonized 47 percent making 50K or less a year. The Average Joes. And everyone pays into, and gets back, the portion of the budget reserved for Social Security. So no one is subsidizing us. We're subsidizing ourselves.

But wait. We forgot something.

4. The capital gains tax. And the estate tax. The US Census, who collects and harbors all these stats, defines "income" as "[money] received on a regular basis (exclusive of certain money receipts such as capital gains) before payments for personal income taxes, social security, union dues, medicare deductions, etc." This is the biggest, dirtiest secret about taxes: income and wealth are not always the same thing. They are for me, and probably you, and probably most everyone you've ever known, including your boss. But not for the 1 percent. Remember them? The ones those dirty hippie protesters keep whining about?

The mega-rich in this country are actually the real problem -- the 0.1 percent, if you will. They make, at bottom, $1.6 million a year, but are worth considerably more than that, and most of their wealth comes from what they've inherited and/or from the investments they make. The estate tax, which taxes inheritances, was rebranded by George W. Bush, in a spectacular display of disingenuousness, as the "death tax." Then it was gutted. The capital gains tax rate, under conservative icon Ronald Reagan, stood at -- guess what? 28 percent. That magic number. Bill Clinton reduced it to 20%, possibly as a way of offsetting the income tax hike he instituted on the highest percentile. George W. Bush reduced it to 15%. And there they've stayed.

Oh, and there are ways around these taxes, too.

The 9-9-9 plan, and I know this will shock you, does not touch capital gains, estates, or any other sort of accumulated wealth. In fact, capital gains taxes, now at a rock-bottom 15 percent, disappear entirely.

Here's what happens to taxes, for you and everyone else, under the 9-9-9 plan.

But don't worry. See, the 9-9-9 plan is only Phase 2 of the 9-9-9 plan. That's right. Phase 1 involves reducing the top individual tax rate from 39 to 25 percent. Just the top rate. Then the nines kick in, and when that's established, he chucks everything overboard in favor of -- a 30 percent sales tax for everyone. Which the rich have all sorts of ways to game. That $3.50 gallon of gas is now $4.55.

The bottom 99 percent of Americans -- you know, the smelly hippie protesters -- make 79.8% of the income in this country, and pay 78.4% of the taxes. But they arguably do 99 percent of the work. And they only control 15 percent of the wealth, while owning 95 percent of the nation's debt.

And those are just individual taxes, not corporate ones. The nation's biggest corporations pay about 9 percent taxes. When they pay at all.

And this is why they're in the streets.

Review: Tori Amos, "Night of Hunters"

2011-10-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

Tori Amos
Night of Hunters
Deutsche Grammophon
9.20.11

Say what you will about Tori Amos, you cannot fuck with her iconoclasm. When her particular flavor of the month left radio's mouth some time around 1998's From The Choirgirl Hotel, she kept herself in the game the way most stars do -- through a series of theme projects. But Tori being Tori, these desperate attempts for relevance took weird, arcane forms: she spent her electronica bid on a half-live double, her covers album was done by "personas" turning male-oriented songs inside out; her road trip mixtape dealt with September 11th; her sellout move was about a beekeeper. Her Christmas album was really a winter solstice album. All of which means she wasn't that desperate.

Having more or less found a home in pop middle age with her Abnormally Attracted to Sin comeback of '09, then, you might assume Tori would settle down there. You would be wrong. Night of Hunters is a classical pop piece commissioned by Deutsche Grammophon, and while her constructs remain cumbersome, her muse has come back full circle. This is her roots album; it just so happens that the fiery redhead behind the Bosendorfer piano has her roots in Bach and Chopin. The form doesn't just suit her, it revitalizes her.

Also because she's Tori, the cultural touchstones come from all over. She's savvy enough to include those two, smart enough to reference Satie and Granados, and strange enough to indulge her love of Mussorgsky and Scarlatti. The concept gels immediately: when she works Charles-Valentin Alkan's "Song of the Madwoman on the Sea-Shore, Prelude op. 31 no. 8" into a shattering portrait of domestic violence, you realize she's on to something.

If that's even what she's doing. Because while that opening proves that Amos' second-greatest virtue -- her clear-eyed, hard-headed version of romanticism -- is still present, her love of mythology has only grown stronger over the past few years. And she isn't making any pop moves for once. The result is the most rewarding sort of experience for her fans, but also the most difficult one for outsiders to get into, a 72-minute song cycle that stays idling at the same slow, measured, brooding place while Tori goes on about a fire muse, wolf spirit guides, and The Seven Lords of Time. Average track time: 5:16.

There are a few nice touches here and there, but they're all conceptual. If you don't already know about the Book of Taliesin, you may be lost by "The Chase." And it's not like Kate Bush or Joanna Newsom ever did four -- not one but four -- duets with her 11-year-old daughter Natashya Hawley, portraying her inner child and providing some much needed levity (Dig her Jewish-grandmother delivery of the line "Reactive, but I can work with it, dollface"). Taken in small doses, anyone could be convinced that Tori Amos is making the most beautiful and daring music of her career. But like one of her trademark lyrical visionquests, Night of Hunters requires constant attention... unless you want to end up stranded in Tori's emotional landscape.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 75. Tori's personal vision remains clear, even when her methods are decidedly batty.
Invention: 82."He'll play a Beatles tune / me, more a Bach fugue / Is this such a great divide / between your world and mine? / They both can purify / and heal what was cut and bruised."
Integrity: 83. You love Tori? You want this.

The Age Of Epic

Review: Nickelback, "Here and Now"

The Loaded Question: Exploiting Occupy

How will people try to exploit the Occupy movement?

Review: The Black Keys, "El Camino"

The Loaded Question: The War on Christmas

What's the most effective way to fight back
in the "War on Christmas"?

A public apology.

The New Dead Ball Era

Review: Rihanna, "Talk That Talk"

The Loaded Question: Future Thanksgiving

What will people be giving thanks for
30 years from now?

Who's the New Girl? Episode 201: Rocketship X-M

Too Big Not to Fail

She's back, y'all, and she's Black, y'all

Review: Lou Reed and Metallica, "Lulu"

The Loaded Question: How will the Republicans fix the economy?

Which is your favorite Republican plan
to fix America's economy?

TV Review: "Allen Gregory"

Review: Coldplay, "Mylo Xyloto"

The Loaded Question: What's your favorite TV series?

Who's the New Girl? Episode 113: The Black Scorpion

Fun with Meter (Part 1)

The Headless Horsemen

Review: Bjork, "Biophilia"

The Loaded Question: Celebrity Halloween Costumes

What will celebrities be costuming as this Halloween?

And now, the meta-comic.

Words That Sold Out: Irony

Barstool Economics

Review: Tori Amos, "Night of Hunters"

The Age Of Epic

Review: Nickelback, "Here and Now"

The Loaded Question: Exploiting Occupy

How will people try to exploit the Occupy movement?

Review: The Black Keys, "El Camino"

The Loaded Question: The War on Christmas

What's the most effective way to fight back in the "War on Christmas"?

A public apology.

The New Dead Ball Era

Review: Rihanna, "Talk That Talk"

The Loaded Question: Future Thanksgiving

What will people be giving thanks for 30 years from now?

Who's the New Girl? Episode 201: Rocketship X-M

Too Big Not to Fail

She's back, y'all, and she's Black, y'all

Review: Lou Reed and Metallica, "Lulu"

The Loaded Question: How will the Republicans fix the economy?

Which is your favorite Republican plan to fix America's economy?

TV Review: "Allen Gregory"

Review: Coldplay, "Mylo Xyloto"

The Loaded Question: What's your favorite TV series?

Who's the New Girl? Episode 113: The Black Scorpion

Fun with Meter (Part 1)

The Headless Horsemen

Review: Bjork, "Biophilia"

The Loaded Question: Celebrity Halloween Costumes

What will celebrities be costuming as this Halloween?

And now, the meta-comic.

Words That Sold Out: Irony

Barstool Economics

Review: Tori Amos, "Night of Hunters"

What's the most effective way to fight back
in the "War on Christmas"?

What will people be giving thanks for
30 years from now?

Which is your favorite Republican plan
to fix America's economy?