Still, the message that the year sent about quality and originality is real enough that studios are tweaking their operating strategies. Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio behind “The Social Network,” is trying to bet more heavily on new directors with quirkier sensibilities. To reboot its “Spider-Man” franchise, for instance, Sony hired Marc Webb, whose only previous film was the indie comedy “(500) Days of Summer.” The studio has also entrusted a big-screen remake of “21 Jump Street” to Phil Lord and Chris Miller, a pair whose only previous film was the animated “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”

Emphasis mine.

See? They totally get it now!  They’re going to hire quirky, novice directors to helm the umpteenth superhero movie and the umpteenth big-screen adaptation of an 80s TV show!

So it saddens me to have learned what a corrupt money-grab the modern Olympics have become. As one of my favorite sports bloggers notes, the IOC may be even more corrupt than notoriously corrupt FIFA:

The IOC’s politics are way more unpredictable and opaque than FIFA’s. The IOC has all kinds of influences and stakeholders that might not be as obvious to observers as those within FIFA. Here are some examples.

FIFA’s Confederations make for more bloc voting, which both corrupts and simplifies the process. Meaning when Jack Warner or Issa Hayatou promises their confederations’ support, they not only mean it, but can get it done too. Have no doubts that CONCACAF will vote as a block (even Mexico) in favor of the US hosting a World Cup. The IOC and any alliances/blocs within it, tend to be harder to read. It’s well known for example that FIFA chief Sepp Blatter’s powerbase consists of CONCACAF, Asia and the Persian Gulf states especially. If Blatter says he favors “X,” it’s safer to assume that thus CONCACAF, AFC, and the Gulf States will go with him. Also, look and see where FIFA Goal Program funding is going. You can almost guarantee these countries will side with Blatter. This sounds paradoxical, but FIFA is so obviously corrupt it almost makes it more transparent.

Within the IOC, it’s less clear and involves more figures “outside” the formal process.

I think Anne Marie Cox (aka the original “Wonkette”), says it best when she notes that Chicago dodged a bullet:

Critics can try to pinpoint the reason that Barack Obama’s charm offensive failed him in Copenhagen. But as a former Chicago resident and patriotic American, I’m glad the city lost the bid to host the Summer Olympics in 2016. The Olympics, while rooted in grand traditions of fair play and noble amateurism, have become a corrupted and corrupting institution. The bid to be host city is an opportunity for untrammeled graft and favor-trading; the bid for the medals themselves is increasingly a contest of bank accounts, not bodies.

It’s a sad truth. And as a true fan of sports — and of what the Olympic idea might represent — it’s one of the reasons that I frankly don’t care if the Games are in Chicago, or Rio, or Timbuktu. For my part, I’d rather watch Michael Phelps smoke a bowl than go for the gold. At least that’s honest, and not overburdened and corrupted by the greed of big corporations and small men.

When they get around to writing it, the screenwriter will use Molly Ringwald’s op-ed as a starting point:

None of the films that he made subsequently [“Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club”] had the same kind of personal feeling to me. They were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view. A darker spin can be gleaned from the words John put into the mouth of Allison in “The Breakfast Club”: “When you grow up … your heart dies.”

I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Though it does seem sadly poignant that physically, at least, John’s heart really did die. It also seems undeniably meaningful: His was a heavy heart, deeply sensitive, prone to injury — easily broken.

Most people who knew John knew that he was able to hold a grudge longer than anyone — his grudges were almost supernatural things, enduring for years, even decades. Michael suspects that he was never forgiven for turning down parts in “Pretty in Pink” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I turned down later films as well. Not because I didn’t want to work with John anymore — I loved working with him, more than anyone before or since.

. . .

Eventually, though, I felt that I needed to work with other people as well. I wanted to grow up, something I felt (rightly or wrongly) I couldn’t do while working with John. Sometimes I wonder if that was what he found so unforgivable. We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back. And, true to his word, not only were we unable to return, but he went one step further. He did away with Neverland itself.

Salient detail: Ringwald adds that Hughes made “mixed tapes” for the cast . . . the visual of John Hughes hovering over a stereo and affixing a label to a blank cassette tape just about breaks my heart; I say that scene either goes in the first ten minutes (to convey his “eagerness”) or in the last ten minutes (to express something “yearning” about his persona) — take your pick.

President Barack Obama can’t stand to be without his “Entourage.”

Call it a guilty pleasure, or maybe it just rings familiar to him. The HBO series about an aspiring actor features a fast-talking agent named Ari, based on the real-life brother of Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

. . .

“When you hear he likes ‘Entourage,’ you have to go, ‘That figures,’” said Robert Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. “Anything Obama does is cool by definition. He’s the Internet president, he’s the BlackBerry president, and now, I suppose, he could be called the HBO president.” Obama likes “Entourage” so much he even rearranged his campaign schedule not to miss an episode.

“We would talk about ‘Entourage’ all the time,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

“A couple of times during the campaign, we would have these Sunday night calls at the same time as ‘Entourage,’” Gibbs recalled. “I remember one time I e-mailed him because the call was scheduled for the last 15 minutes of ‘Entourage’ and I said, ‘Just be late and we can just watch “Entourage” and still get on and do the call.’”

“And it worked,” Gibbs continued, laughing. “We got to see ‘Entourage.’”

Having already heard that his favorite TV show is The Wire, this confirms something we’ve long suspected about the President — he had to have caught some episodes of Entourage in there! And while I’m pretty sure he would never say “If I have a guilty TV viewing pleasure, it’s watching hapless Turtle getting really baked, spending too much time chasing down expensive pairs of sneakers and not getting laid” obviously Obama’s guilty pleasure is watching hapless Turtle getting really baked, spending too much time chasing down expensive pairs of sneakers and not getting laid.

So if you were Obama and you were the President-Elect and you could have Ari Gold’s brother as your chief of staff, wouldn’t you totally work that angle?

QED. Now let’s hug it out, bitch.

Watching that scene, you get caught up in the drama but you can’t figure out why — your heart races a little and you’re like “oh, so sad for Sandra Oh” — then it hits you — you’re feeling that way only because Ingrid Michaelson’s “Keep Breathing” is blasting in the background.

So you stop yourself — and you ask yourself A) Why the hell do I care about Grey’s Anatomy? and B) When did it become OK to simply insert a “powerful” song at a critical scene and mute the actors?

What is worse is that the song alone isn’t all that great (listen to it without watching the scene)! Instead, there’s this synergistic effect of two lesser dramatic elements . . . it’s disturbing — “His trumpet is gone” just sounds dopey without the song! — and at the end, Ellen Pompeo’s face says literally nothing.

The other example of this I can’t stand is the final sequence of the final episode of the Six Feet Under series, with the song “Breathe Me” by Sia (do I have to bother saying “spoiler alert”? OK, you’re warned). Why can’t Claire just drive off in peace without Sia invading my mental space?

The sequence is schlocky and dominated by the song — imagine without the song how dopey the Where Are They Now? stuff would seem. Without the music, you would have no clue what Claire was thinking. And people loved this ending. They are full of shit.

So yeah, TV is lazy now. Fine. I don’t care. But when this starts to penetrate the theatre world, we are really screwed:

The frequent musical interludes (the moody sounds of P. J. Harvey) only remind us of the production’s lack of authentic drama.

[Note to editor: Insert overwrought, ponderous Question-As-Statement "Does this signal the solidifying of a half-plus-half-equals-whole mentality in our very culture?" here.]

One day five years ago, Mr. Potter, who was living in Weehawken, N.J., and working as a disc jockey for weddings and parties, needed a phone number for his business. On a lark he asked if 867-5309 was available. To his surprise, it was. It seemed like a great deal for a music-oriented business — the most famous musical phone number (though you might get arguments from fans of Glenn Miller’s “PEnnsylvania 6-5000” or the Marvelettes’ “Beechwood 45789”) as his very own business signature.

Instead, it was something of a disaster. Almost as soon as he plugged the phone in, it began ringing off the wall.

And so it continues. Maybe it’s those Cingular commercials, but the song came out when Ronald Reagan was president. You would think the jokes would get old.

But no, he still gets about 30 calls a day: from drunks at bars, from the guy at the auto body shop in Odessa, Tex.; from Alyssa, 15, and her mom, Janice, on their way back from cheerleading practice in Morris County; from hapless collection agencies unlikely to ever get their money; from Leah, 13, in North Bergen whose friend Tyler told her to call; from bored cold callers who figure, why not?

“In the big picture of pop music, I don’t know if what I’ve created is seen as being that important or that necessary, at least not if you ask the experts,” he says. “I was tagged right after ‘Piano Man’: I was a balladeer, I didn’t write substantive music, my records were overproduced, I played too many ballads. Oh, and of course my favorite: ‘He studied piano.’ I had never realized that one of the prerequisites for being critically acclaimed was not knowing how to play your instrument. That stuff bothered me for a long time.”

Joel’s musical output from 1976 to 1982 (“Turnstiles” through “The Nylon Curtain”) was one of the most successful runs in rock history. But the records he made during that period are consistently maligned by virtually every school of rock scholarship. “Rolling Stone magazine would not say anything positive about me, and they were the tastemakers at the time,” Joel explains. “There were people from the old guard who insisted I wasn’t a real rock and roller. Well, O.K., fine — I’m not a real rock and roller. You got me.”

The reasons for that critical disdain are hard to pin down. There are no lyrics from “The Stranger” as ridiculously melodramatic as the worst lines from “Born to Run” (“Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims/And strap your hands across my engines”), nor was Joel’s public posture any less organic or more calculated than that of the Sex Pistols. But guys like Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Rotten have a default credibility that Joel will never be granted, and it’s not just because he took piano lessons. The problem is that Joel never seemed cool, even among the people who like him. He’s not cool in the conventional sense (like James Dean) or in the self-destructive sense (like Keith Richards), nor is he cool in the kitschy, campy, “he’s so uncool he’s cool” way (like Neil Diamond). He has no intrinsic coolness, and he has no extrinsic coolness. If cool were a color, it would be black — and Joel would be kind of a burnt orange. The bottom line is that it’s never cool to look like you’re trying . . . and Joel tries really, really hard.

. . .

“Movin’ Out,” Twyla Tharp’s $8 million show based on Joel’s songs, will have its official Broadway debut on Oct. 24. But it has already absorbed some of the baggage that Joel has carried for years. When the unorthodox musical opened in Chicago in late July, theater critics described it as “inane” and “cliché-ridden,” prompting major changes to the first act. And though those barbs were mostly directed at Tharp, it’s easy to see how they could strike Joel as well, even though he played virtually no role in the production. The characters in “Movin’ Out” include Brenda and Eddie (the couple from “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant”) and Tony (from the song “Movin’ Out”), all of whom have their lives thrown into chaos by the Vietnam War (illustrated by tracks like “Goodnight Saigon”). Tharp describes it as the story of the entire baby boom generation, a demographic for which Joel has often been tagged as an apologist. “He chronicled the time in which I lived,” the 61-year-old Tharp says.

But there are elements of Joel’s work that Tharp considers timeless. “There is a large component of the loner in all of Billy’s music,” she says. “It’s something, for better or worse, that has been part and parcel of the idea of the artist in the 20th century and 19th century. In our culture, the perception of the artist is that of a loner.”

Oddly, one of the loneliest songs in Joel’s entire lonely oeuvre didn’t make it into “Movin’ Out.” It’s called “Where’s the Orchestra?” and it seems particularly apropos, since it uses the theater as a metaphor for loneliness. The lyrics are one long allusion to watching an alienating, dissatisfying play (“I like the scenery/Even though I have absolutely no/Idea at all/What is being said/Despite the dialogue”), and it doesn’t take a rock critic to see it as a metaphor for the emptiness Joel himself feels. It’s also the Billy Joel song that I have always related to the most on a personal level; in fact, I sometimes tell people that they would understand me better if they listened to “Where’s the Orchestra?”

In the Obama Era, there is no room for Chuck Klosterman-esque rehabilitation:

I’m reluctant to pick on Billy Joel. He’s been subject to withering contempt from hipster types for so long that it no longer seems worth the time. Still, the mystery persists: How can he be so bad and yet so popular for so long? He’s still there. You can’t defend yourself with anti-B.J. shields around your brain. He still takes up the space, takes up A&R advances that would otherwise support a score of unrecognized but genuinely talented artists, singers, and songwriters, with his loathsomely insipid simulacrum of rock.

Besides, some people still take Billy seriously. Just the other day I was reading my old friend Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine blog, and Jarvis (the Billy Joel of blog theorists) was attacking the Times’ David Carr. (Talk about an uneven fight.) Carr was speculating about whether newspapers could survive if they adopted the economic model of iTunes. Attempting a snotty put-down of this idea, Jarvis let slip that he’s a Joel fan: As an example somehow of his iTunes counter-theory, he wrote: “If I can’t get Allentown, the original, I’m not likely to settle for a cover.” Only the hard-core B.J. for Jeff! (“Allentown” is a particularly shameless selection on Jarvis’ part, since it’s one of B.J.’s “concern” songs, featuring the plight of laid-off workers, and Jarvis virtually does a sack dance of self-congratulatory joy every time he reports on print-media workers getting the ax.)

Plus, there’s always the chance we’ll see another of those “career re-evaluation” essays that places like the New York Times Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section are fond of running about the Barry Manilows of the world. The kind of piece in which we’d discover that Billy’s actually “gritty,” “unfairly marginalized” by hipsters; that his work is profoundly expressive of late-20th-century alienation (“Captain Jack”); that his hackneyed, misogynist hymns to love are actually filled with sophisticated erotic angst; that his “distillations of disillusion,” to use the patois of such pieces, over the artist’s role (“Piano Man,” “The Entertainer,” “Say Goodbye to Hollywood,” etc.) are in fact “preternaturally self-conscious,” not just shallow, Holden Caulfield-esque denunciations of “phonies,” but mentionable in the same breath as works by great artists.

This must be prevented! No career re-evaluations please! No false contrarian rehabilitations! He was terrible, he is terrible, he always will be terrible. Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Joel’s famous song “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”? Please. It never was rock ‘n’ roll. Billy Joel’s music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: “Mock-Rock.”

What Ron Rosenbaum misses in all of this though is Billy Joel’s role in ushering in an era of self-consciously “classic” rock music — a Neo-Conservative sort of Segerism that looked to museum-ify rock by self-reflexively noting its “timelessness.” Joel wrote one of the great finger-wagging songs of this era: “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me,” which appeared on the album “Glass Houses” (now there’s some imagery for you) and was released in March of 1980.

Some might say that “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me,” with its be-bop piano and bombastic sax, hearkened back to a golden era of rock music. In reality, it is a pitiful example of a namby-pamby middle ground that abandoned the unrelenting conservatism of Segerism (cf. “Old Time Rock and Roll,” one of the most conservative and, frankly, un-Rock and Roll like songs ever) for a mushy I’m OK-You’re OK détente in which “next phase,” “new wave” and “dance craze” all coexist peacefully alongside the Piano Man. Joel’s conciliatory hot-funk-cool-punk-even-if-it’s-old-junk vision was pure big tent: “Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout the new sound, funny, but it’s still rock and roll to me.” Less rock than Las Vegas revue.

(See also, the Minnesota Historical Society Soul Asylum Record Series Finding Aid)

President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday defended his choice of a popular evangelical minister to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, rejecting criticism that it slights gays.The selection of Pastor Rick Warren brought objections from gay rights advocates, who strongly supported Obama during the election campaign. The advocates are angry over Warren’s backing of a California ballot initiative banning gay marriage. That measure was approved by voters last month.

But Obama told reporters in Chicago that America needs to “come together,” even when there’s disagreement on social issues. “That dialogue is part of what my campaign is all about,” he said.

Sure, as a red-blooded blue-stater, I’m mildly offended.  I’ll even turn up my nose and give a little sniff of indignation.

[sniff]

There now.  With that out of the way, I can get back to admiring Obama’s political savvy.  With one fell stroke, he manages to reach out to a group Democrats considered unreachable only, like, five minutes ago.  He also puts the aspersions about the Good Reverend Wright behind him forever.  And the tradeoff?  Offending an interest group that pretty much has no choice but to vote Democratic.  Genius!

So it’s with that in mind that a friend of mine has started a new Facebook group — Second Christmas (you’ll probably need a Facebook account to access).

2nd Christmas is January 20th, 2009, which is also Inauguration Day for President-elect Barack Obama.

2nd Christmas was created in the spirit of renewed hope and optimism for a country, and a world, devastated by the last eight years of negligent and inept leadership.

It is our sincere hope that a positive outlook and real, progressive change will spread starting with the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama on January 20th, 2009.

To encourage the start of this renewed growth and return to a equitable and prosperous future, we suggest our own stimulus plan in the form of…2nd Christmas!

Left out of the $2.6 million commitment is SAM’s rental agreement with Washington Mutual. SAM financed its 2007 expansion in downtown Seattle by sharing space with the bank. The museum’s tax forms indicate it receives $4.6 million annually in rental fees from WaMu. SAM’s annual budget is $24 million.

SAM’s public profile on the issue is close to invisible. No one at the museum would talk about it Monday, but spokeswoman Nicole Griffith has said repeatedly the museum hopes JPMorgan Chase will honor the lease agreement.

No photos in the club enable most of the athletes to relax a little more. And autograph-seekers and fanboys are less inclined to bother them at a strip club.

(Thanks, Deadspin)

For years now, I’ve been having a running argument about the value of stretching before exercise.

I grew up with a highly regimented (and very traditional) exercise routine that invariably followed the pattern of stretching followed by either weight-lifting or aerobic workout.  Before football games, our whole team would gather on the field for a group stretch which — apart from placing us in the appropriately regimented mindset — was honestly intended to prepare us, physically, for the game.

About a decade ago now I started reading some things about stretching.  In particular, the gathering consensus was that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, stretching not only didn’t help, but could actually hurt.

It now seems like that new hypothesis is correct: there’s no value in stretching before exercise, and it’s likely that it’s counterproductive.

The bigger point here is that just because grandpa told you something was the “right way to do it”, doesn’t mean it’s actually correct.  Given the changes that have taken place in the world even over the last 10 years or so, it still blows my mind that so many people still following the edicts of their ancestors without question.

I’m looking for some signature Obama drinks.  Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• The Obama Hope: vodka, Kahlua, and a hint of tequila with cream
• The 538 Sweep: vodka, tequila, rum, gin, triple sec, and blue curacao with Coke for color
• The Bush Impeachment: grapefruit juice, vodka, and peach liqueur

What you got?

Lahde — a former hedge fund manager — announces his intention to retire from the business of managing other people’s money.  He rips into the supposedly “smart” MBAs from top schools who rode American capitalism into the ground like Slim Pickens*:

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

Having dealt with enough “stuffed shirt” MBA types myself, I can personally attest to the fact that — good as their PowerPoint skills might be — most of these people would die, starving, of exposure within a few weeks of losing their cush bourgeoisie lifestyles.  And yet these are the people we’ve entrusted to make our decisions for us!

Makes me want to retreat to a basement squat and pirate cable TV and electricity, and wait for the rest of it to blow up.

* In case you don’t get the Dr. Strangelove reference: