Chabon on Petula

Most serious comic book fans — that’s not a contradiction in terms — have read “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the novel.

More recently, Chabon has a book of essays that I have not yet read, called “Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son.” Terry Gross interviewed Chabon about the book a few months ago.

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Most serious music fans know the name of critic Ben Fong-Torres, who was portrayed in the movie “Almost Famous.” Yesterday, he commented on something Chabon said in one of his essays.

He [Chabon] recalled a visit to a doctor’s office when he was 4, in downtown Phoenix. His mother promised a restaurant lunch afterward as a reward. He heard “Downtown” over the radio in the office. “Things will be great,” Petula Clark sang, and Chabon has never forgotten. “When I hear Petula Clark on the radio now,” he wrote, “I feel this wave of something old and powerful flowing through my chest and my belly, a bodily remembering of that crucial early-childhood compound of anxiety and the promise of a treat.”

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/JAN/CiaoCiao.mp3]

There they go again

With the release of OK GO’s new Capitol album, “Of The Blue Color of the Sky,” EMI, the eminent UK music company, is telling the band their videos on YouTube — like the new one, “This Too Shall Pass” — can’t be embedded on other sites.

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In 2006, OK GO made a big splash on YouTube by dancing on treadmills for their song, “Here It Goes Again,” that I have to assume helped make money for Capitol.

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Seems to me that EMI is applying the same faulty logic that Disney used in the early days of VHS, when it refused to allow their movies to be rented, rather than sold at retail. The comparison isn’t exactly comparable, because there was money to be made in both transactions. Once again I point out that the first printed warning of the coming age of digital downloaded music was made by Stewart Brand in 1972.

Maybe EMI is thinking that banning embedding will give them time to decide what they can do to generate a revenue stream from streaming videos, like those featuring the Lily Allen, Britain’s leading bad girl of Pop music, who resides on the Beatles’ original label, Parlophone.

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Is Lily any worse than a United States Senator who posed nude for Cosmo in his buff youth, and whose wife was once in a racy music video herself? Isn’t the Brown family only slightly less shallow?

Get Olber it, mann

While I’m not happy about the surprise turn of events in this week’s special election here in Massachusetts, I think Keith Olbermann is off-base in his characterization of Scott Brown. The man may be a lightweight and a bit of a goofball, and I enjoyed making fun of Brown, but he doesn’t take the moral high ground or expect his constituents to share his religious beliefs, so in this case I think Olbermann’s rage is misplaced.

Jon Stewart took Olbermann apart last night, point by point, in his own Countdown-style special commentary.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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