CORRECTION: This post originally referenced the INXS Need You Tonight video, which was partly animatd. Clearly, A-Ha's "Take On Me" is the closer analogy. Gawker regrets the miscalibrated pop culture reference.
Bob Dylan's much-anticipated Christmas album is out. And — huzzah — it doesn't sound horrible. Still, you can't help but imagine Dylan as a drunken interloper who stumbled into choir rehearsal at a prim suburban church.
Were you aware that Bob Dylan is releasing a Christmas album next month? The story gets even stranger today. It seems Dylan has now inked a deal with the America's most troubled financial institution to help market it:
An anti-war voice has fallen silent, for Mary Travers, a founding member of Peter, Paul and Mary, was felled by cancer today. The singer, whose sullen folksy sound many of you will remember from "Blowin' in the Wind," was 72.
Here's the cover to Bob Dylan's forthcoming Christmas album. Proceeds go to charity; as Vulture notes, this lends hope the project won't be commercially corrupted and critically panned. We still wish the sleigh driver had a harmonica holder or something.
• George Michael is back in the news and, as usual, it has nothing to do with his music. The singer was arrested on Friday for driving drunk when he crashed his car into a truck. Michael, however, is insisting he was sober at the time. So maybe he's just a bad driver? [NYDN, E!]
• Is Joe Simpson trying to push the…
40 years after Woodstock, Bob Dylan was mistaken for an escaped crazy patient by Jersey 5-0, and taken into custody of the cop after he was seen rambling the Jersey streets. Oh, man, things have changed. [NYP]
Naomi Campbell turns 39 today. Actress Ginnifer Goodwin is turning 31. Billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is 81. Real estate developer Joseph Sitt is 45. Society dermatologist Lisa Airan is turning 44. Artist Ghada Amer turns 46. Former CNN anchor Bernard Shaw is 69. Alison Eastwood, the actress and daughter of…
Recently two films have shocked the world with graphic depictions of violence followed by acts of sex: Bob Dylan's Beyond Here Lies Nothing and Lars Von Trier's Antichrist. Coincidence or zeitgeist? You decide.
• CBS posted a first-quarter loss as the ad recession took its toll. [THR, NYT]
• News Corp. reported a 70 percent drop in quarterly profits. [LAT, B&C]
• Profit dropped by 46 percent at Warner Music during the same period. [PC]
• Sirius XM posted a $236 million quarterly loss and also announced that its number of…
• Carson Daly has two reasons to get wasted today: It's St. Patrick's Day, of course. Plus he and his girlfriend Siri Pinter are new parents, too. [People]
• Jon Stewart's secret weapon in his rumble with Jim Cramer last week? His brother, Larry Leibowitz, is a senior exec at NYSE Euronext. [P6]
• A judge recalled…
How to tenderize Bob Dylan's "bleak... sneering" new album, built around the song "Life is Hard?" With the title "Together Through Life" and a black-and-white, backseat gay kiss on the cover. (Click to enlarge.)
Bob Dylan's new album of outtakes, "Tell Tale Signs," has some great countrified blues numbers for coping with the coming depression. And in a seeming nod to the tough times, the folksinger streamed the album for free on NPR's website for a week ("Bob Dylan Understand The Weak Economy," said the Times). And yet when…
"i went home an began writin/a suicide note" [New Yorker, New Yorker]
[Photo Credit: Splash Pics]
Congratulations go out this morning to Paste Magazine, winners of the race to reclaim Scarlett Johansson as the precocious nubile muse we knew and loved prior to this week's grim news of her engagement to marry... never mind. What's important here are her "Five Dads" pervily cited in the magazine's new cover story —…
Artist Suze Rotolo has written a book about her four years as Bob Dylan's muse in the early Sixties. But be warned: "This is about as far from a juicy tell-all as a memoir can get: Rotolo does share some private details of the story of her romance with Dylan-the two met in 1961, when Rotolo was 17 and Dylan was 20,…
"Obama, accompanied by his wife Michelle and the couple's two young daughters, was met with a roar of acclaim as he took the stage to the strains of U2's "City of Blinding Lights." [NYO]
Lord, We thank you another year of witty paternal film criticism by the Times's A.O. Scott. When he likes movies we like, it's like he is personally validating our taste, and that feels good. Also, this is how he ended a review of Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There": "Mr. Haynes is not simply compiling golden oldies. You…
