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I totally agree with Michael Idov’s words on t.A.T.u. and the recent spate of critically acclaimed guilty pleasure pop music. “All the Things She Said” was a wonderful song containing, as Idov says, “at least five distinct parts, each catchier than the other.” I’m happy critics recognize this. And having utterly fallen for Kelly Clarkson during the first American Idol, I’m thrilled that she’s recorded such a universally beloved gem of trash-pop as “Since U Been Gone,” even if I don’t much care for the song itself. I look forward to hearing t.A.T.u.’s new album. May they never jump the shark.

Although Bill Cosby delivered his notorious remarks about black society in front of a largely black crowd, the ruling complaint was that he’d aired our culture’s dirty laundry in public. But could his speech have been effective in any other place? If he’d been speaking at a mid-sized black church with no reporters present, was there any chance his comments would have carried outside the room?

The charge of airing dirty laundry has been levelled many times at director Deepa Mehta, although not often as violently as with her latest film, Water. The film concerns the plight of Hindu widows in parts of India, who to this day are sometimes relegated to poverty after the deaths of their husbands, unable to work or remarry. When Mehta first tried to film Water, a group of Hindu fundamentalists trashed the set, destroying all prints. The director spent years raising the money to shoot the film again under heavy secrecy in Sri Lanka.

Now, Water is complete (trailer), and the charges of cultural treachery are circling, even among those who might agree with the moral particulars of Mehta’s message. Read the comments on this Sepia Mutiny thread, and you will find some very valid criticisms of Mehta’s message and the way she delivers it. “Mehta thus does not engage with feminist concerns around dominant conventions of beauty, colour and feminine roles; rather, she reinforces them,” one commenter quotes from a review. “The shiny patina of exotica is what saves Mehta from being recognized as the mediocrity that she is,” another commenter writes.

The root charge strongly resembles that levelled against Cosby — Mehta’s playing up the culture’s dysfunction to curry favor with an audience outside of it. But put in this light, the charges have a potency the anti-Cosby remarks didn’t to me. Suddenly I can sympathize with all those white journalists who scratched their heads at that story and wondered, “What do I do with this?”

Given that Mehta’s Fire is one of my favorite pieces of LGBT cinema, I feel like I can defend that film from within my own cultural framework. But does any part of Water belong to me?

The film describes legitimate problems in India that demonstrably persist. The film is peddling the same tired, negative images of India that foreign reporters find when they drop in sniffing for a good story. Outside the cultural framework the film represents, do we have the right to cast judgment? And on whom do we cast it?

Alan Ball’s next HBO project sounds like my new favorite thing:

Project is set in a world where vampires and humans co-exist after the development of synthetic blood. First book, “Dead Until Dark,” revolves around a waitress in rural Louisiana who meets the man of her dreams only to find out he’s a vampire with a bad reputation.

After seeing the brilliant heights Joss Whedon reached with these tropes in Buffy, I’m thrilled to see Alan Ball take it on. Via Towleroad.

Am I reading this article correctly? Did WaPo editor Len Downie actually suggest that the biggest reason the Post’s daily news coverage couldn’t be cut by a third is that there wouldn’t be enough stuff to put ads on? Read for yourself and get back to me.

The relevant sentence: “He (Downie) says (business editor Steven) Pearlstein ‘hasn’t really thought through carefully’ the impact of a one-third reduction, which would leave less room for advertising.”

If you’re one of the subscribers to the RSS feed I scraped together with Wotzwot for Romenesko’s sidebar, you might have noticed that the feed had stopped working properly. Here’s an updated version; here’s hoping it stays intact.

Engadget says iPod 6.0 will be able to show episodes of shows like “Desperate Housewives,” downloadable for $2 a pop. Insanely hot. Update: Here’s Apple’s press release.

Remember how I promised to review Fa

I didn’t know until I read this awesome list of musician bloggers that The New Yorker‘s Sasha Frere-Jones had a blog! I love his criticism.

Addendum: I love it because of incisive thoughts like this one, from his latest column —

The catchy chorus [of Fiona Apple’s song “Extraordinary Machine”] is a warning to those (her fans included) who underestimate her resilience:

Bifurcated Rivets links to the incredible Leo Burnett Web site (Flash). (Who is Leo Burnett?)

Odd taste thing with me: I love Gothic literature, but am mostly ambivalent about sci-fi*. The Handmaid’s Tale drove me nuts (in a bad way). I’m the kid who had to start “Harrison Bergeron” about five times before I made it through all five pages. I enjoyed Blade Runner and Akira and The Matrix, but none of them added any shattering revelation to my life. Dune = yawn. I know this is painful for many of my friends to hear, but for the most part, I parted ways with science fiction when Lovecraft left us.

The only reason I can offer for this is pretty crude — sci-fi often feels just too crowded with ideas for the story to work any magic on me. I find myself distractedly theorizing about the statement the fiction is making about our world, which tends to ruin my immersion in the world the fiction depicts. The stories work for me as essays, but not often as literature.

But of course, given that Joss Whedon’s my hero, I had to give Firefly a try. The show’s big sell for many fans was the way it played with the conventions of sci-fi, but of course, that didn’t work on me. What interested me was how the show played with the conventions of Whedon, treating religion, to take one example, with a completely different approach than Buffy or Angel did. Unlike his earlier shows, Firefly dealt less with allegory and much more with pure story, plot and character. It imparted the sense that Joss wasn’t driving towards one uber-climactic crowning moment, but had simply released these beloved figures into this space, as fascinated as we were with the narrative fractals their fictive lives produced.

I was sad to see it come to an end. But I was thrilled to hear Joss would be able to sink an enormous (compared to TV) amount of time and money into a two-hour masterwork.

Serenity didn’t add any shattering revelation to my life either. I didn’t expect it to; too many of its references went over my sci-fi-impoverished head. But I haven’t felt as happy to slip into the world of a film since the Lord of the Rings trilogy ended. The movie feels otherworldly in an organic way much of science fiction doesn’t. Aside from some pretty rudimentary politics, Joss seems not to be making much of a statement about our world, as much as he’s just letting this wacky new one exist on its own terms.

And at the same time, he rarely ever falls into the sci-fi trap of gleefully pointing out all the wicked-looking little gizmos and organisms he’s thought up (with the exception of the dialogue, which is beyond awesome for most of the film, but sometimes overdone). The best part about the world of Firefly is that although it feels so much like its own creation, it feels incredibly ordinary at the same time.

So that’s my plug for Serenity. I’d love to revisit this world yet again. Go buy a ticket.

*Note: I understand I’m painting a big-ass genre with a very broad brush here. There are works of inarguable science fiction to which most of this post doesn’t apply, like 2046. And folks could levy most of the same criticisms at the Gothic that I heap upon sci-fi in this post. A lot of Gothic works are pretty heavy-handed with their ideas as well. The difference for me is that the constant essay-like sense of precision that seems to characterize sci-fi just doesn’t work in the Gothic. Gothic stories are almost always way too unruly to be constrained by any high-falutin’ ideas their authors might have started out with (see, for example, Dracula). They get very, very out-of-hand in a way sci-fi stories never do, and I love that.

But of course, I live to be proven wrong. Give me some awesome, unruly sci-fi stories, and we’ll revisit all this.