If I practiced a different religion/If I spoke my words differently/If I changed my tune to your favorite song/Would you wrap your arms around me

The Dictionary of the History of Ideas.

Scarlett Johansson, Woody Allen. [q]

Almost two years after ''Brokeback Mountain'' raked in $178 million worldwide, no major studio has greenlit a single gay film. What is keeping movies in the closet -- and what should Hollywood be learning from TV?

Five minutes of glory can be excerpted from even the most ordinary life. Such is the logic of everyman highlight reels. Given hours of aimless footage — let’s call that life itself — marketing services around the country now produce minifilms in which, to the tune of “Dream On” or “Whoomp! (There It Is),” average athletes complete every touchdown pass, execute every pancake block, turn crowds misty-eyed with adoration and generally trounce everyone around them. These impressive videos — mostly commissioned for athletes, but also for aspiring actors, dancers, musicians and other performers — have become a standard component of college applications. Their ubiquity suggests the operating assumption of American teenagers, who, having been born to camcorders and graduated to camera phones, have become the ultimate multimedia curators, fanatical archivists and tireless autobiographers. If an experience is not uploadable to MySpace, it did not happen.

By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.

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Heißer Anwärter für den Track des Jahres: Dark Soldier von Roland Appel. Habe ich gar nicht gemocht, als ich es zum ersten Mal gehört habe. Warum, ist mir inzwischen absolut schleierhaft. Die saugeilen Bläser und Streicher, der fies düstere Kirchengesgang und die wunderschöne Melodie und obendrauf gibt es dann sogar noch so etwas wie einen hysterischen Refrain, jedoch ohne Gesang. Und wie unerträglich gestört auch Changes vor sich hin schiebt. Roland Appel!

Panama City, Florida.

There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands’ as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

But the fact that the only role that people of colour can have in his movies are as sexual fantasies, sidekicks or deeply insulting cartoons suggests that, consciously or subconsciously, Anderson doesn’t think that much of real life people of colour.

Brendan Austin: Shelf Portraits.

Brad Pitt.