I don’t do as much musicblogging as I expected to when I restarted ADDTF; I suppose that’s because I find it difficult to be pithy when talking about music. (Seriously, get me started on “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads someday. Make sure you have an hour or to kill first, though.) But the glorious synchronicity engine that is the Internet conspired to place three interesting articles in my path over the past few days, so I’m passing them on to you.

First, One Louder does one of its periodic YouTube music video roundups by gathering together a whole bunch of Cocteau Twins clips. The day before I read this post I watched the video for the Twins’ “Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops” on The Alternative, VH1 Classic’s indispensable punk-new wave-indie-altrock video show; damn, was I ever moved by the late-afternoon melancholy and England-in-the-’80s ambiance of that song and that video. I find that songs from that general era and nation fill me with nostalgia for a time and place I never experienced. Honestly, listen to (say) “West End Girls” and tell me that you aren’t suddenly in a flat in London at 4 o’clock in the morning, finishing off a bottle of something and chainsmoking as your makeup runs off. (Yes, I’m a woman in these pangs of nostalgia.) Maybe it’s from my repeated exposure to Hellraiser and the comics of Alan Moore, I don’t know. Anyway, go watch some videos and enjoy some Liz Fraser. (“Song to the Siren”‘s in there too.)

Next is a compelling piece by Willing Davidson of Slate on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and what it means to have black performers on stage in front of a black audience when their usual audience is predominantly white, and when they’ve been eclipsed in popularity in both communities by unapologetically commercial acts. I’ve thought a lot about hip hop in these terms lately. When I was in college (1996-2000), “good hip hop” was the musical lingua franca, something everyone could agree on. I wouldn’t say I listened to a lot of “conscious” hip hop at that time, to use the term preferred by Davidson, nor was I a backpacker per se, but a steady diet of the Wu Tang Clan and all its solo offshoots, Gravediggaz, Prince Paul, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Dr. Octagon, Kool Keith, the Automator, the Fugees, Lauryn Hill, the Beastie Boys, DJ Shadow, UNKLE, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Tricky, Public Enemy, Massive Attack, Outkast, Portishead, and so forth sustained me and pretty much everybody I knew; few of us felt any motivation to get any more mainstream than The Chronic, Doggystle, and Ready to Die. These days nearly all of those acts and their brethren in the conscious and backpacker schools are relegated to the dustbin of history, and critics devote column after column to Lil’ Jon. I think it’s tough to overestimate the influence that talented and commercial producers like Timbaland and Missy Elliot (brilliant), and Dre and the Neptunes (brilliant about 50% of the time), had in creating that state of affairs, but I find that I barely relate, or listen, to contemporary hip hop at all anymore. Is this just a case of “in my day we listened to real music, not this noise!“? I guess that’s possible. But the thing is, I find that I don’t care, and I also find that that is not an acceptable viewpoint to have in critics’ circles these days. After all (the theory goes), one must be interested in what is popular and therefore relevant. (You see similar arguments being made against comics readers who don’t read a lot of manga, incidentally.) My question is, what is it about hip hop (and manga, I guess) that has enabled popularity to replace quality in terms of the reason why a listener/reader/critic should or should not get into a particular work? Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, but the popularity barometer seems to come up a lot more often than you’ll see someone say “No, seriously, ‘Laffy Taffy’ is every bit as good as ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.'” And it really is endemic to hip hop fandom and criticism more than anything else–I mean, very rarely do you see any film critics of merit say “Man, quit wasting your time with Cronenberg–Michael Bay’s who the kids are into these days!” Why the condescension toward Dave Chappelle for still really, really liking the first Fugees record, then? (See this comment by Matthew “Fluxblog” Perpetua for a more forceful statement of that same sentiment.)

Finally, here’s something I didn’t expect: Rich Juziak, whose FourFour blog is best known (to me, at least) for its fabulously bitchy weekly recaps of America’s Next Top Model, posted the best thing I’ve ever read about Mariah Carey. She’s an artist about whom I have no feelings to speak of, really, save pity for what the pressures of fame have done to her instrument (why doesn’t anyone notice she can’t sing anymore?) and her dignity (I once remarked that as long as she was married to Tommy Mottola she’d never take her clothes off in her videos; then came the divorce, and bang, the clip for “Honey” made my point better than I ever could). But man, this piece manages to be insightful about her, her work, and the entire music industry in any number of ways. Highly recommended.

Talk about your Must Read Blogging!

This weekend and this weekend only, Matt Zoller Seitz, the Newark Star-Ledger critic who’s been posting a killer series of Sopranos Season Six episode critiques, is hosting a horror-themed debate. His opponent is Christopher Kelly, a Fort Worth Star-Telegram critic who recently wrote a lengthy and impassioned piece praising the current cycle of torture-horror movies as not only politically resonant cultural documents, but brilliantly made films as well. Seitz, it seems, disagrees.

As you might have guessed, this is a debate I’ll be following quite closely; I suggest that if you’re at all interested in this genre, you do the same. Grab some popcorn and enjoy!

When Clive Barker talks, ADDTF listens. (No kidding.–Ed.) And in this massive interview at Barker fansite Revelations, the author-painter-producer-director-etcetera talks about a great many things: the physicality of his paintings, the status of several of his film and television projects (The Midnight Meat Train has been cast; his installment for season two of Masters of Horror is ready to roll), the page count for his “farewell to Pinhead” novel The Scarlet Gospels (3,000 or so), his current comics projects with publisher IDW, the inspiration he’s drawn from Alan Moore and Dave Sim, and the future of his all-ages fantasy series Abarat, which include a Barker-designed tarot deck and a previously unannounced fifth volume. I’m delighted, needless to say. (Link courtesy of Fearfodder.)

Critic Matt Zoller Seitz has posted his analysis of the third episode in season six of The Sopranos, and it’s as good as I’ve already come to expect.

Over on the blog for Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, there’s a post on Bob Larson, an evangelical exorcist. What made me scratch my head about the story is how quickly the term “snake-oil salesman” sprang to mind; would it have if he were a Catholic clergyman?

Speaking of tough questions, why is there a V for Vendetta novelization?

Finally, I’m having trouble getting this link to work, but the water-monster lover in me simply cannot let this go unlinked: Reports indicate that the giant 6 1/2-foot freshwater turtle of Hoan Kiem Lake in Vietnam, a creature believed to be a legend up until the last decade or so and now believed to be the last of its kind, may have been injured. As this primer on the reptile and the legend surrounding it indicates, this is a bit like finding out the Loch Ness Monster is real, alone, and ill. Best wishes for a speedy recovery, big guy. (Hat tip: Justin Aclin.)

A man wielding a shotgun killed six people at a zombie-themed rave called “Better Off Undead” before killing himself when confronted by police. Seattle authorities say this is the worst mass murder the city has seen in 23 years.

Attendees at the rave were made up to look like zombies. No motive for the killings is known beyond the word “NOW,” which the killer spray-painted three times on the sidewalk and a neighbor’s stoop while walking back to the party from his van, gun in hand.

The only thing more wonderful than the fact that someone built a nuclear bunker inside the Brooklyn Bridge is that no one seems to know who did it. It’s like “Ozymandias” for the Sputnik set.

It was a good week for news of the real-life creepy: Jason Alexander at Infocult also brings word that a flock of crows is attacking people Birds-style in England.

Speaking of The Birds, we can’t be more than a few months away from an announcement that that film is being remade, can we?

***UPDATE*** It’s already begun! (Link courtesy of Steve from The House of Irony.)

Finally, this Bloody Disgusting post about actor Michael Biehn’s involvement in the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez horror project Grind House is the first I’ve read that Rodriguez’ half of the two-for-one film will be a zombie movie. Could be interesting, could be not so much.

(SPOILER WARNING: Since I am incredibly sensitive to anything that could possibly be construed as a spoiler for The Sopranos, I’m going to assume you are too and warn you that you should probably NOT read this post if you haven’t already seen the first two episodes of the show’s new season.)

My bleg for substantive ongoing discussions of The Sopranos has turned up somethin’ good, much to my delight. The great Bill Sherman of Pop Culture Gadabout has directed my attention to the blog of Newark Star-Ledger writer Matt Zoller Seitz, who will be tackling the new season episode by episode. (ANOTHER SPOILER WARNING: Seitz’s post on Episode Two contains a spoiler regarding whether or not we will return to the alternate-Tony “Coma World” in future episodes, so be warned.)

Judging from the first two installments, both the posts themselves and the comment threads appended to them will yield impassioned insights into the series, which is without doubt one of the richest texts in television history, despite tedious reverse-snob claims to the contrary. Seitz makes some points with which I disagree (that the show could have-cum-should have ended after its second season; that the pacing of this season’s debut episode’s climactic sequence was botched) and many others I with which I couldn’t agree more (the distinction without a difference that is the split between dreams and Purgatory; the worth of interpreting art, and of art that requires interpretation).

So by all means, check it out. And while you’re at it, take a look at this exhaustive episode guide for The Sopranos‘ first five seasons, written by Seitz’s Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall. It’s hand both for logistical purposes and for reminding you of why you love this show so much in the first place.

Yikes:

From Turkey comes news of five inbred Kurdish siblings who walk on all fours due to a genetic condition which scientists say may replicate the movement patterns of early Man. The subject of a BBC2 documentary that aired this past Friday, the siblings are theorized by some scientists to be a case of “backward evolution.” (Hat tip: the Missus.)

Eve Tushnet has got to be one of the least-frequent comicsbloggers around (I’m also looking at you, Jim Henley), but when she does write about the medium, she writes quite well. Witness her discussion of Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev’s masterfully unsettling horror comic Daredevil: Decalogue, one of the overlooked comics pleasures (hell, treasures) of 2005.

Remake fever: Catch it! It appears that with Asian horror and ’70s indie horror all but exhausted, at least one studio is turning back to the classics. According to Bloody Disgusting, classic horror hotbed Universal has added a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon to what I imagine will be a slate of updated versions of its seminal black-and-white monster movies, a slate which already includes the Benicio Del Toro-starring revamp of The Wolf Man I mentioned the other day. Needless to say the success of these remakes is dependent on the budget and talent the studio is willing to commit, and like as not they’re simply an attempt to goose amusement-park revenues a la The Pirates of the Carribean (which I understand is pretty good) or The Haunted Mansion and The Country Bears (which I understand aren’t). Still, I feel like these stories, or perhaps more accurately these creatures, have a great deal of potential that a smart movie could easily tap into for a modern audience. King Kong did an excellent job of showing that there’s life in the “monster run amok” genre, a fact that decades of slashers and Satan and torture and rednecks and haunted appliances and dead girls with long black hair might have obscured.

Finally, in honor of The Sopranos 6.2 tonight, here’s an article by Dan Ackman at Slate about Burton Kaplan, the star stoolpigeon at the trial of “mob cops” Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa. As far as illustrations of the workaday sociopathy of the common gangster go, it’s tough to beat.

As you might have heard, The Sopranos is back on the air. Unfortunately, Slate does not appear to be conducting one of its engrossing round-table discussions of the show this time around. Since this is my favorite television series, well, ever (possible exception: Python), I’m wondering: Has anyone seen any strong reviews, critiques, discussions, what-have-yous online about this season’s first episode, especially ones that appear like they might be ongoing as the season progresses? Please email me and let me know. Thank you!

Like some nightmare amalgamation of 28 Days Later and Stephen King’s novella The Mist, Richard Fernandez’s brief, chilling look at a lethal bout of London Fog that killed thousands of Londoners in 1952 is probably just what you need to bring a taste of all-too-real horror to this otherwise lovely St. Patrick’s Day.

Pete Mesling at Fearfodder brings word that pretty much everyone has already heard, I’m sure: Director Eli Roth (whose movies I haven’t seen, though you wouldn’t know it to hear me go on about them) will be helming the film adaptation of Stephen King’s Cell (a book I haven’t read, thanks in large part to the vagaries of the Nassau County library system. When the website says “check shelves,” I foolishly assumed that meant it’d be there on the shelves!).

Jon Hastings at the Forager has really come back from hiatus with a vengeance lately; among his many film-related posts of late, my favorite is this one on why everything you know about acting is wrong.

Found at Bloody Disgusting: My fellow Troma alumnus James Gunn says he has no interest in writing a sequel to his remake of Dawn of the Dead, which at this point is probably my favorite zombie movie, or at least the one I’m inclined to watch most often.

Finally, I think my “werewolves are the next zombies” prediction has just found its tipping point.

Seen on Wednesday within five minutes of exiting the eastbound Queens Midtown Tunnel:

* 1 Perry Ellis billboard featuring art by Adrian Tomine

* 1 MetLife billboard featuring Snoopy and Woodstock

* 1 V for Vendetta movie billboard

* 3 X-Men: The Last Stand movie billboards

We’re gonna make it after all. Just not sure what “it” is.

One of my coworkers has a buddy who’s somehow in the running for being voted the Number One Fan of Qdoba, the Mexican food chain (it’s kinda like Baja Fresh or Chipotle or Moe’s, if you know what those are like). If he wins he and a bunch of people he knows get a lot of free food. So can you go and vote for him here, please?

I guess this is what it feels like to use my powers for good, huh?

Thanks!

Is Twin Peaks headed back to DVD? Looks like it might be… (Hat tip: Shaggy.) It is happening again.

First, good news: Two of my favorite bloggers are back! Franklin Harris, formerly of Franklin’s Findings, may now be found at his new blog Graphic Novelties, while Jon Hastings has resurrected his hiatus’d blog The Forager. Franklin’s reliably (and wrongheadedly) anti-altcomix take on the comics industry is almost entirely alien to mine, but I find it an interesting read; moreover, he’s one of the best linkbloggers in the biz. Jon, meanwhile, has some kind things to say about my thoughts on torture and extreme violence in art (which can be found here), a propos of which he teases a possible post on The Sopranos in the future. I’m looking forward to it.

Several goings-on to report on the Texas Chain Saw Massacre front. (Golly, I love horror blogging–only here do you get to write sentences like that.) Bloody Disgusting reports that a new double-disc DVD of the original film is on the way, this time from Dark Sky Films. I own the Pioneer version, and while the filmmaker commentary track (which is apparently going to be transfered here in its entirety) is fascinating, the transfer is a mess: In a misguided attempt to play up the “fairy tale” aspect of the film, various colors were superenhanced–the night scenes are blue, the sunset scenes are red, etc.–almost completely negating the dirty, no-frills snuff-film look that makes the movie so striking. I’m curious to find out how this new version looks.

Next, Stacie Ponder at Final Girl links to a short essay on the film by Doug Brunell at Film Threat, detailing his grade-school obsession with what was a movie he hadn’t even seen. You’re not gonna mistake the piece for something from the New Yorker, and it occasionally embraces ideas about horror that have never made any sense to me (things that could actually happen in real life are scarier than things that couldn’t, frex), but it really captures the gravitational pull that the idea of horror, particularly horror movies with the air of the forbidden, can have on children; it also nails a description of the effects seeing The Scariest Movie You’ve Ever Seen can have. I’ve talked about the former phenomenon here, the latter here, and Texas Chain Saw here, if you’re up for further reading.

On the new blog beat, here’s an interesting idea: Horror Haiku, Nick Braccia’s aptly named collection of horror haikus. Being something of a haiku enthusiast myself (I’ve even dabbled in genre work, as a matter of fact!), this is a site for me, that’s for sure.

Because it wouldn’t be ADDTF without Clive Barker news, Pete Mesling at FearFodder brings word (courtesy of Fangoria, someplace) that Clive Barker is preparing to write the third and final Book of the Art (the previous installments being The Great and Secret Show and Everville). Clive actually told me this during my interview with him a few weeks ago, but like a good little employee I kept it to myself. Publish or perish, Collins!

Finally, the Pentagon is working on cybernetically enhanced stealth sharks. Damn you, Pentagon! Are you mad? Just when we’d finally beaten sharks into submission!

In the words of Monty Python, “Right!”

This excites me more than I can say: The Horror Channel reports that Michele Soavi’s absolutely brilliant absurdist horror film Cemetery Man is primed for DVD release this June, courtesy of horror-fan godsend Anchor Bay. Also known as Della’morte Dell’amore, this erotic, surreal, disturbing, hilarious, and deeply moving movie is one of the most singular horror-watching experiences I’ve ever had. I wrote about it extensively here. For me, this is a DVD release that’ll be tough for any other film to top this year.

While they’re strangely silent on whether its vision was motion-activated (you win, Crichton and Spielberg…for now), it appears that scientists have confirmed that the Tyrannosaurus Rex had keen senses of hearing and smell. There seems to be some dispute about whether these findings (gleaned via CT scan) indicate that the T.Rex had excellent balance as well–if it did, that would lend credence to the notion that it was a predator (as we all learned when we were in swaddling clothes) rather than a scavenger (as boring, stuffy old scientist killjoys would currently have us believe).

Bloody Disgusting brings us a pair of reasons to be wary of horror remakes (and once again, damn you, Dawn of the Dead, for being good and making it impossible for me to have a hard and fast rule against going to see the effing things at all): Wicker Man remake actress Christa Campbell reveals that the island to which Nic Cage’s character will travel is populated entirely by women, while a poster for the remake of Day of the Dead is emblazoned with the legend “FROM THE DIRECTOR OF HALLOWEEN H20.” Sigh.

Finally, god bless Bryan Alexander of Infocult for bringing my attention to an article in which scientists theorize that parallel universes aren’t parallel at all, but rather may interact–AND DESTROY ONE ANOTHER!!!! I take back everything I said about scientists a few paragraphs up. Scientists are AWESOME.

Well, maybe Zombi 2 was good for something after all–I had a wicked zombie nightmare last night, or at the very least a work-anxiety dream disguised as a zombie nightmare. My co-workers and their significant others and I were all trapped inside a big white house with tons of windows, beseiged by hungry undead. I spent the whole dream frantically trying to get people organized to close and seal windows and doors in rooms we’d forgotten about. I kept looking for the guns I’d stashed someplace but a bunch of guys who’d been at my work longer than I have took them all and were using them themselves. At one point one guy and his girlfriend were sitting with their backs to a picture window, which zombies then shattered, pulling the guy and his girlfriend outside and tearing the skin and muscle from their backs. I remember thinking even in the dream, “Well, it just goes to show you, never sit with your back to a window when zombies are attacking.”

So thank you, Zombi 2–your genuinely frightening zombies worked a lot better in my unbearably tense unsconscious drama than they did in your boring-ass movie. Though if I’m being honest, I reread a bunch of The Walking Dead yesterday too, so that probably had something to do with it as well.

Was it me, or did that movie totally stink? Forty minutes of dull all-but-zombieless opening. Four dull, one-dimensional protagonists, at least two of whom are played by people who couldn’t emote their way out of a wet paper bag. Virtually no logic behind anyone’s actions (for chrissakes, the doctor and nurse and caretaker guy are caught by surprise by their dead patients coming back to life at the end–like they’d never seen it happen before!) or reality behind anyone’s emotions (when the wife of the dude who looked like Mike Love died, within five minutes they were acting like she was a pet hamster) at all. Nude scenes so completely gratuitous they weren’t even enjoyable as nude scenes. Voodoo rituals and an angry native community completely vital to the plot yet never ever shown even once. An ending that could almost literally have been phoned in. I didn’t even like the two most famous scenes: the shark fight just made me feel bad for the shark the filmmakers must have abused to get that footage, and the splinter-in-the-eye scene was so fake-looking I was actually embarrassed for them. I have no idea why either scene garnered the reputation it has.

To be fair, the zombie make-up was extraordinary and the gore powerful. And the scene of the zombies literally rising from the grave was beautifully done–vivid and wrong, and therefore horrifying. But that alone, my friends, does not a good movie make. Gee willikers, what a turkey.

Jaws author Peter Benchley has died. I remember the novel very fondly: Every summer when my parents would go away on vacation they’d leave my siblings and I with my aunt and uncle in Delaware, and I’d read their copy of the novel while my little brother played the Jaws Nintendo game in the basement. I loved the sea monster; I loved the flawed grown-up characters as they lied and misbehaved, making the monster’s work all the easier; I loved the sex stuff even though I didn’t get all of it. Slate’s Bryan Curtis turns a slightly more jaundiced eye on the book, which he gently mocks for its unreconstructed pulpiness but praises for the way it constructs a singular and vivid monster out of sheer marine-biological accuracy.

Heidi MacDonald points us to this L.A. City Beat interview with Black Hole author Charles Burns. (I’ll shut up about this book when it stops being one of the four or five greatest graphic novels of all time.) Among the points of interest is a funny look at the pros and cons of placing your fiction in a relatable, recognizable period setting, in Burns’s case 1974.

Stacie Ponder at Final Girl posts some fascinating pictures of a character named Pyramid Head from the upcoming Silent Hill video-game-to-film adaptation. The character is genuinely Barkerian; this, along with those creepy girl-with-no-mouth teaser images, makes this the first video-game horror film I’m even remotely interested in seeing. (I know nothing about the game other than it’s supposed to be pretty scary.)

Brian at Giant Monster Blog sings the, uh, praises? of the Toho film King Kong Escapes, a true Saturday Afternoon Cinema classic. One word, people: MechaniKong!

Finally, given everything I’ve been talking about around here lately, Wednesday’s torturiffic installment of Lost (here’s a good summary at The Lost Blog) was certainly thematically appropriate. As an episode, though, it didn’t work for me. We already knew that Sayid is a torturer, that torture is awful and dehumanizing to all involved parties, that Hurley is nice and Sawyer is not, and that the presence of both the Others and the countdown clock are making everyone into paranoid basket-cases. All we got that was new is the most predictable possible reversal in terms of when Sayid became a torturer (one saved from genuine ridiculousness (“everything would have been fine here in the Republican Guard if it weren’t for those pesky Yankees!”) only by real life’s troubling penchant for proving our most horrifying fictions true); a new is-he-or-isn’t-he-an-Other situation, of which we’ve already had several; and some fanservice cameos and hieroglyphics. Whoop-dee-doo.

Regular readers are no doubt bored by how often this comes up, but the ramifications of the cinema of extra-legal revenge hit me every day, from a fistfight I saw break out over a person who had 12 items in a 10-or-fewer shopping line (the affronted party went on a near rampage to see justice done) to the righteous avengers who flew planes into the World Trade Center.

–David Edelstein, “The Movie Club 2005,” Slate.com

Needless to say the ruminations on brutality in art of a man willing to overlook the, how can I put this, shit-stupid obvious sources of philosophical and aesthetic inspiration for the 9/11 attackers in favor of casting blame on Dirty Harry should be taken with the contents of an entire salt mine. But my friend Matt Wiegle (of “Destructor Comes to Croc Town” fame) wrote in after my post on what brutal art says and doesn’t say to point out that Edelstein has written an essay on pop culture’s new torture vogue for his new gig as New York magazine’s film critic, and insofar as it gets right to the heart of the matter–whether such things are aimed at the audience by filmmakers who feel they know better–it’s interesting stuff, so I’m passing the link along to you.

(Apologies in advance for any lack of coherence in the following post: I’m up in the middle of the night, semi-delirious from both the flu and NyQuil.)

A week or two ago, while thinking of movies like Saw and Hostel, I wondered aloud:

At what point does violence for violence’s sake cease to be a form of spectacle that reveals occulted meaning and become a sort of pornographic brutalization of the audience? Just a thought.

A few days ago Stacie Ponder found an article at the Delaware Journal asking much the same question: “Torture scenes go mainstream.” The article quotes Hostel director Eli Roth on the larger “meaning” of his film.

Some creators of torture-tinged projects say there is a message behind the madness, insisting that that they are illuminating larger themes and using torture to enrich their storytelling.

“Hostel” writer and director Eli Roth said he chose torture scenes to express his frustration over government and world affairs.

“Right now we’re at war, and then you have Hurricane Katrina, where there are people on roofs screaming for help,” said Roth. “I have this feeling that civilization could collapse, and that if you go overseas, you could get killed, that you could be in the middle of nowhere, and that someone could kill you and no one would find you. This film is also about the dark side of human nature. Everyone’s life has a price. I want the audience to feel guilty. I want them to feel sick to their stomach, but by the end they’re screaming for blood. Everyone has this evil within them.”

You’ll note that in Roth’s equation, a lot of different people (from the Bush Administration to horror-movie fans) are supposed to feel bad about themselves thanks to his movie; you’ll also note that Roth himself does not appear to be one of them. (UPDATE, in the cold light of morning: I’m still semi-incoherent so again my apologies, but am I too hard on Roth? I don’t really think so. Yes, he does say “Everyone has this evil within them” (emph. mine), but that’s as close as he comes to including himself in his opprobrium; his film seems to be squarely aimed at other, external targets, to judge from his quotes in the article.)

I found this interesting because I was already thinking about the effects of and intentions behind violence and evil in art this very afternoon when, excited for next month’s debut of the sixth season of The Sopranos, I watched the final two episodes of Season Five on DVD. I was instantly reminded of Slate’s mob-expert roundtable discussion of the series, which culminated in part in the discussion of the possible “meaning” behind Tony Soprano’s conduct. Lawyer Gerald Shargel (who famously represented John Gotti, among other Mafia clients) starts the discussion:

…once again, I see Mafia as metaphor. When Tony turns to Silvio Dante and says, “You don’t know what it’s like to be No. 1,” later telling Dr. Melfi that “all my choices were wrong,” I couldn’t help but think of Bush bursting into Iraq without an endgame, finding himself in an impossible mess. Tony knocks off his cousin Tony B.; Bush is forced to knock off George Tenet. Isn’t this the way of all failed leaders? Hubris and arrogance play rough.

Slate TV and film critic Dana Stevens concurs.

One more response to Shargel’s note: The Tony-as-Bush allegory only works up to a point because Tony’s smart and charismatic, a born leader. (Also, arguably, more morally conflicted than our president. How sad is that?)

However, New York/New Yorker/New York Times Magazine organized crime reporter Jeffrey Goldberg differs. After his suggestion that Stevens’ unfavorable comparison of Bush’s conduct in Iraq with Soprano’s conduct in the North Jersey rackets is not entirely fair is met with dismissal, he continues:

God forbid we should keep politics out of television criticism. Wait until you hear my Marxian critique of Gilmore Girls. What I was suggesting, inelegantly, was that not everything is about Iraq. Sometimes, a show about the New Jersey mob is a show about the New Jersey mob. Yes, of course, The Sopranos goes deeper, and darker, than any other drama on television (and darker, I’d argue, for argument’s sake, than even The Godfather), but I don’t see it as a ripped-from-the-headlines metaphoric commentary on whatever is bothering liberal American elites at the moment. And yes, of course, gangland dramas are always about something else as well