Well it hapened. The thing I thought would never hapen. My mom was nice to me? Nope, she's still acting like her Tampex is stuck. I got a bra? Not yet, tho I do my special exercises every night. Dad and Megan got a divorce? I WISH! No the thing that hapened was Constantine Maroulis got voted off American Idol. I cant beleive it. It's like if Jesus was on TV every Tuesday and then Pontius Pilate suddenly came on and said "HA HA HA No Jesus you cant sing Bohemian Rhapsody anymore because I hate your beerd." And Jesus went away to his house in New Jersy and he didnt come back. And there was no Easter, and there were devils everywhere lauging and dancing. Thats what it feels like with Constantine gone. I cryed for like a hour.   My dog Howie got wet because I cryed so hard.

My cousin Morgan and me decided we're going to college at the University of New Jersy so we can live by Constantine. I am goign to major in Singing and she is going to major in Fashion Inventing. We both plan to have bras by then.

But their is good news: Thursday is is a Spanish holiday called Cinco de Mayo, and we are having a fiesta in my class! We are going to sing Spanish songs and everyone will bring a diffierent food to share. I am bringing Frito Pie. Its an authentic dish containing Fritos and hamburger with special spices. The Fritos go on top.I also got Blue Blow Pops for the class pinata. I wonder what Emma is going to bring? She speaks Spanish. She is from Puorto Rico so she probly knows tons about Cinco de Mayo. I hope she doesnt bring Frito Pie too! My dad would probaby say I got Cock Blocked! Thats what he always says when things are unfair.

So on top of Constantine being gone from American Idol, I also found out that Bo Bice does Cocaine. Now you may think I dont know what Cocaine is but I do. I took DARE last year and we learned that it is a white powder that makes you big and strong so you can cheat at football. That must be why Bo is so tall and handsome. Maybe Anthony Federov needs to get some Cocaine! Then hed be cute like Bo. Im starting to wish all the boys in my class would eat a ton of Cocaine. Then theyd all be tall like Bo and have bigger weiners. Oviously Cocaine isnt bad for you or Bo would be dead. He isnt dead. Just cute!!!

*Lindsay Lohan and her blonde tresses (that's Hollywood speak for "drugs," I think) are still weeks away from descending on Minneapolis to film A Prairie Home Companion, which should cause bar sales to skyrocket and C.J. to start foaming at the mouth. In the meantime, celebrity gawkers can check out Juliette & the Licks, featuring the Juliette Lewis, at the Triple Rock tonight.
*Speaking of people who have played mentally challenged sisters (remember Lewis in the Other Sister?), on the Hallmark Channel on Sunday night, Rosie O'Donnell plays a retarded sister with a heart of gold, plenty of bus tickets, and a closet overflowing with poorly folded shirts decorated with iron-on flower appliques. Watching Big Rosie act by simply bucking her teeth like Meredith Baxter Birney in Winnie should be funnier than the time the Queen of Nice (right) got a staph infection.
*The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens tonight, and critics are calling it delightful! uneven! and, mostly for geeks!
*Also around town: Atmosphere and P.O.S. at First Avenue; Elton John at Target Center; The Art of Zines and Graphic Novels at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and more.

Actually, Who bassist John Entwistle had two skeletons, which he supposedly used for "pranks," and they have both been put up for auction by his family (except for his 80-year-old mum, Queenie, who finds the whole business too upsetting). It's doubtful they'll get anywhere near the high bid amount paid for the blue-and-white dress worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz-- it just sold for $252,000, nearly four times what was expected. Still, the celebrity collection that might hold the most auction riches is that of Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, whose desktop microphone recently went for over $50,000. There are plans now to sell his original desk this fall; if it's a success, too, don't be surprised if they try to sell the invisible golf club he swung at the end of his monologue.

The second (and final) weekend of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival kicked off today. Last year I was lucky enough to be in attendance. This year I'm making do with the live broadcast from WWOZ. Among this weekend's highlights: Isaac Hayes, Nicholas Payton, Toots Hibbert, and Randy Newman.

Unless you have a heart made of glowing nuclear waste, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition will probably cause persistent tear ups. And if you do have a heart made of nuclear waste, or worse--diseased tear ducts that have left you with the inability to cry--the show will probably come to your home, demolish it, and leave you with a well-decorated sanitized biodome where your irritatingly dry eyes can feel moist again. A few months ago, the show built a new home for woman who was dying from cancer and wanted to leave behind a home for her three adopted children, all of whom had AIDS. And this Sunday, Ty Pennington and Co. create a house for a father who lost his eyesight in a workplace shooting.

Not one to be outdone (Those evil bastards are ruining my career!) Mark Burnett, the godfather of reality TV,  is shopping his new reality show, Giving Hope, to networks. The show, he says, will be about, umm, "giving  hope" to people in need, like "people in Kansas who have lost their farm and need help getting back on their feet." Hey, are you rolling your eyes? Or is that a tear I see?

Ah, glorious love. There's nothing quite so romantic as two publicists confirming the mutual attraction between their clients.

Why, when my Meemaw and Pop-Pop met back in 1919, they immediately told their respective reps to alert the public immediately! Who doesn't remember the orchestration of their first crush: the passing of notes between publicists, the late-night phone calls to the agency, the first time the two of you issued a joint statement? Le sigh!

 

Pat O'Brien: So fuckin' hot

Air America's Randi Rhodes has apologized "a thousand times" for the opening of her April 25th broadcast-- an anti-Bush bit that ended with gunshots and the geezerly curse, "Take that, ya little bastard!"-- and says she had nothing to do with it. (The network, addressing claims that it's being investigated by the Secret Service, basically says, "We're blameless because we suck." ) Judge for yourself-- the complete clip, including Rhodes' immediate, inarticulate reaction, can be found here.

Speaking of inarticulate, let's hope the rehab folks gave TV-clown Pat O'Brien some elocution lessons. Phonemail messages attributed to him have been on the radio and internet for awhile, most of them labelled "Coked 'n' horny." For five minutes, a man who sounds like O'Brien tells a woman the (very) few things he wants to do to her, and his knack for redundancy gets funnier as he goes along. (Note: Not safe for work.)

Is there any stranger hound than the New Guinea Singing Dog?

 

If the dog portraits in this week's City Pages seem a little too darling to be endured, you may appreciate the opportunity to learn a little more about a beast that would not be caught dead in a sweater, the New Guinea Singing Dog. This smallish canine, with its reddish coat, angular face, and short legs, looks rather like a fox. It is storied to be able to climb trees. It was first found in the remote highlands of New Guinea in late 1950s, and has endured a checkered fate since then.

Depending on whom you believe, the NGSD could be an undomesticated and distinct species--a kind of evolutionarily isolated proto-dog. Or the breed could be a cousin to the Australian dingo, which has been compromised in the last century or so through interbreeding with other domestic dogs. Competing dog scientists (by which I mean humans, not dogs who can operate Bunsen burners) dismiss the NGSD as being indistinguishable from the ownerless "pariah dogs" that are not uncommon throughout Southeast Asia. (Picture Canaan dogs or Basenjis circling a trash heap in Calcutta.)

One thing is beyond dispute: The "song" and vocalizations of the NGSD sound wild in every sense of the word. A little chilling, too. To hear them for yourself, and to learn more than you ever thought you'd want to know about the New Guinea Singing Dog, visit Andrew Luck-Baker's story on the BBC's Radio 4 here.  (Look for the piece in the right-hand column.)

When Paris Hilton announced her ugly split with Nicole Richie, her disciples trembled in their Mukluks. After all, Paris just isn't Paris without a second banana to prop up her tremendoid ego. Perhaps sensing this mass anxiety, Paris has named Kimberly Stewart (Rod Stewart's hard-partying, vaguely avian daughter) as her new costar on FOX's The Simple Life.

On question remains: why not Nicky? Paris's younger sister has always been a supportive friend, quietly beaming like a ceramic Virgin Mary at every Paris-centric event. Nicky never grouses to the press a la Jan Brady or attempts to upstage her sister; she even dyed her hair a plebian shade of brown lest we be distracted from Paris's gleaming drape of platinum. Nicky Hilton is the sacrificial lamb of the Spyder Club, the martyr of Body English. Has anyone actually heard her speak? Does anyone believe that her clothing designs are wildly popular in Japan?

Kimberly Stewart is undeserving of such honor. Give Nicky Hilton a chance to shine!

Sisyphus Rocks

New Jersey man injured trying to roll Bruce Springsteen up a hill

by Steve Perry

"The personal, political and spiritual merge in the new album's title song?. The narrator of "Devils & Dust" could be a soldier in Iraq or America itself."

--Jon Pareles on Bruce Springsteen?s new album, New York Times, April 24

In myth and, happily, in fact, Bruce Springsteen has always been the guy who was--his own words--tougher than the rest, the rock star who resisted blandishments of the rock star life that ranged from the relatively trivial but offensive practice of taking corporate jingle money to the more serious peril of choking on the vapors of one?s own celebrity, personal prerogative, and boredom. He was, and is, no Elvis Presley. But what would you do if it were a fairly routine thing to get up in the morning and read the preceding sort of puffery about yourself? Could you laugh it off and go back to your job? Even if you did, would you be able to keep laughing after literary and cultural eminences like Walker Percy and Robert Coles began to join the chorus proclaiming you the bard and balm of the people, and a literary giant in rocker?s rags to boot?

Being called the future of rock & roll is one thing, heady to be sure; but for any son of the working class as smart and ambitious as Bruce Springsteen, it has to pale beside the siren call of being termed a serious literary and cultural figure. How long then before you start to be cast in stone and to think like a Serious Writer, instead of writing seriously?

The practical danger in that kind of stultifying embrace is self-satisfaction: reaching a point where it becomes hard to edit your own work anymore, easy to mistake the prosaic for the profound and to begin buying into two-dimensional, cul-de-sac notions of your job as an artist. (When you?re a national resource as well as a legend, it?s practically irresponsible not to simply let the healing waters flow--which is to say, to repeat yourself unto the point of pandering.) The last song on Devils & Dust sums up the dilemma posed by the record. "Matamoros Banks" is a lovely and superbly crafted ballad. It is also (in subject, themes, even setting) a direct re-write of the next-to-last song on his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad, where it was called "Across the Border." Except this time the protagonist dies. In fact, he?s dead when the song starts, and Springsteen then works backward in the man?s own voice to explain the lover?s journey that put him there. Very nicely done, better than the other version, but done before all the same: why again? I think the answer is that Bruce loved the lyric turn he was able to work in this version of the story.

I?m not saying "full of itself" deserves to be the last word on the record, but it belongs in the discussion. Springsteen himself (who seems entirely too ready to tell everybody what these songs mean and how they were put together--as if to withhold such insights would be, yes, irresponsible) has been saying that the songs revolve around spiritual crises, moments when his characters find themselves "in danger or at risk." This is patently true; also fatuous, since Springsteen?s best songs have always implicated "spiritual crises," questions of doubt and faith and of finding the means to persevere, behind the romantic or material ones.

I hated the record the first few times through. That was too arch. It?s not terrible. I?m coming to like parts of it. Brendan O?Brien?s production helps. Most of these songs--not just the lyrics but the vocal performances--are about 10 years old, and O?Brien does a tastefully spare job of dressing up those vocal-and-guitar demos with overdubbed guitar and drum parts. The sound of the record sparkles with clarity and immediacy; the slide guitar lines sound especially good. But as Springsteen records go, it?s very slight. Apart from the two records he released in 1992, Human Touch and Lucky Town, it harbors the fewest ambitions, or maybe just the least interesting ambitions, of any Springsteen record. Some of it--the title track, "Reno," "The Hitter," maybe one or two others--is very good, and the rest has its pleasures, but they?re mostly familiar ones.

At bottom the main subject of Devils & Dust, as best I can hear it so far, is songwriting, no less and, unfortunately, no more--the craft of it, that is, construed as a mostly formal, literary matter. How else to understand the fact that more than two-thirds of the songs here are rewrites of or variations on other songs from his past four albums? The effect of the record?s literary self-consciousness is to set Springsteen at a greater distance from his characters, who are more prone than usual to seeming like types, or factors in a mainly formal equation. The more Springsteen heaps concrete detail on the little boy in "Black Cowboys," to take the most glaring example, the more palpably the boy seems like a literary device, a means to the end of constructing a metaphor. And absent the sense of a flesh-and-blood presence in the song, it?s a pretty banal metaphor in the end.

Again, not terrible--but it?s writer?s workshop stuff. It?s precious. It?s beneath a writer of his talents. At times Devils & Dust sounds unnervingly like Bruce Springsteen, litterateur, taking a victory lap before settling in on the Mt. Rushmore of what you might call High American Folk Culture, nestled alongside Lincoln, John Steinbeck, and--I can?t make out whether the last one is Woody Guthrie or Raymond Carver, but does it matter?