Not Lost

[New York Magazine's loss = Your gain!]

Hey, "Lost" fans - since you love hyper-intelligent, philosophically bent, diabolically elusive and fantastic serialized narratives so much, you probably bought Grant Morrison's "Final Crisis #1" yesterday, right?

No?

Well, if you didn't, you've missed out on the week's sub-prime opportunity to be baffled, teased and yet vaguely satisfied by a piece of storytelling. Morrison is noted by funnybook fans for his historic runs on X-Men, JLA, and Animal Man, as well as for being batshit insane. DC Comics (they publish Superman and Batman) has given him the keys to their summer "event" - a sequel, of sorts, to the company's ridiculously confusing continuity-fluxing "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and "Infinite Crisis." And if you're one of those people who finds themselves perversely thrilled by not understanding what's going on, the resulting pamphlet is an E-ticket ride.

Not for Morrison the simple pleasures offered by Marvel's "Battlestar Galactica"-aping paranoid allegory "Secret Invasion." No, "Final Crisis #1" does not feature gigantic spy satellites exploding, large groups of spandex-clad superheroes hurting each other, or a great deal of respect for last week's continuity. Instead, we get a police procedural about the death of one kind of obscure Jack Kirby character as investigated by an obscurer Kirby creation, framed by a nearly wordless, time-hopscotching flashback/forward that suggests that one of Kirby's New Gods played the role Greek mythology assigns to Prometheus. This device also implies that that the First and Last Boys on Earth (in DC's take on things) are about to get to know each other.

Morrison's single concession to the tropes of mainstream comic "events" is that one of the company's most popular characters gets murdered by a brand-new bad guy. Altogether, it's kind of a trip. No, it's not set on a desert island - but it will screw with your head.

Tracks v. Songs

Dance music fans know the drill. An oddly named act arrives from nowhere or Germany with a freshly pressed slab of peaktime and suddenly it's triggering flashbacks on dance floors and headphones around the globe. The producers release an LP full of the same snap, and now they're on otherwise rockist Top 10 lists and heralded as accessible figureheads of a movement. There's a brief pause, time enough for some composure and composition, and then the same knob-twiddling favorites start making press noise about how their new record is going to feature "proper songs." Cue heads, panicking.

Watch me watching Booka Shade not fall on their faces at Slant.

Marionette

Scarlett Johansson has a bit of a daddy complex. It's been obvious at least since she became Woody Allen's newest nubile muse, though you can make a strong argument for her Billy Murray-baiting performance in Lost in Translation as an early warning sign. Because her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, is also a curiosity of Tom Waits covers Svengalied into existence by producer David Sitek, it fits perfectly into a psychosexual reading of her body of work as being (over?) determined by her older, hipper, maler collaborators. That it features David Bowie on background vocals is just icing on the cake.

You can find the rest of the mean things I have to say about this record at Slant.

Size Queens

"It's this big."
"No, it's this big."
"Queen, your cataracts must be interfering with your depth perception. That threat don't top six inches."

In which unfounded Drudge Report speculation gives me a heart attack

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

A proposition

Hiccups are the cutest form of suffering.

Discuss.

What will Gossip Girl DO?

On the surprisingly tepid Narrow Stairs, the sensitive indie boys of Death Cab for Cutie seem to have tired somewhat of being themselves. Perhaps the thrill has gone out of providing lushly emotional soundtracks for the nation's brokenhearted? Pity, they were excellent at it. Lead singer Ben Gibbard and guitarist/producer Chris Walla used to seem more than typically attuned to the peculiar sensations associated with young love. Here, the band only glancingly employs its felicitous ability to wrest emotional significance from the most treacly of melodies and sentiment. As it turns out, they're quite a bit less adept at Can-referencing krautrock, like the meandering lead single/stalker anthem "I Will Possess Your Heart," or Eastern-inflected statements like "Pity and Fear." And they should certainly refrain from ripping off the Beach Boys, as on the drably bouncy "You Can Do Better Than Me."

More thoughts on a Slant.

(Also, re: photo. This is clearly the best album cover of the year so far, no?)

Tell us how you really feel, New York Times

Seriously though, let's all take a moment to be incredibly pleased that we do not live in Burma. The US has its issues, but they are not as life-threatening as the issues that many people worldwide face.

Keeping it bottled

Matt Yglesias has been really stellar throughout the primary process. I particularly like (and agree with) his Official Prediction about the outcomes of tonight's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana. I would further like to associate myself with the general air of barely-restrained madness his tongue-stapled-to-cheek tone implies.

Fight the Power

The final track on the Roots' latest full-length, Rising Down, is conspicuously cheerful. "Rising Up" features the '70s-funk synth pads and super-solid Tropicalia rhythm section you might expect from the first track on a Kanye West record. In the album's only nod to jazziness, it also includes a raspy hook sung by newcomer Chrisette Michele that tells a familiar story: "Yesterday I saw a b-girl crying/I walked up and asked 'What's wrong?'/She told me the radio's been playing the same song all day long." On past Roots records, this kind of lyric might have read as a typical don't-call-me-a-backpacker plaint about homogenized airwaves. Here, though, it comes across as something more. "Rising Up" is a sucker punch of sweetness and light that punctuates the most urgently malevolent modern funk record the band has assembled to date. And after 40 minutes of unrelenting doom, a lyric about repetition on the radio doesn't have to stretch too far to conjure the specter of Radio Raheem.

Who is Radio Raheem? Only Slant knows.