Breaking News from the Campaign

I'm probably the last person in the blogosphere to comment on the Presidential campaign, and the Iowa caucuses a mere thirty (approx) weeks away. Today presents the perfect opportunity. Check out this Sopranos tribute on the Hillary Clinton website--complete with an actual cast member, and mockery of Chelsea's parallel parking skills. And some surprisingly poor acting.

It's too bad this is all to announce the selection of Celine Dion's "You and I" as her official campaign song. Apparently Smashmouth's "I'm a Believer" was a strong contender; my bet is that it was scrapped to avoid the eruption of Monkeegate. It is admirable that the campaign chose a Canadian artist, throwing nationalism to the winds (currently much needed in the steamy lower 48). But the song may prove the equivalent of Dean's scream, or Muskie's tears, or being shot in a duel by Aaron Burr. Its lyrics are possibly more insipid than you'd expect, and you can listen to it three times and not recall a thing about it. Plus the right will eat the Canadian thing up like so much thin, nitrated meat product on an Egg McMuffin. I mean, if they were going foreign anyway, why not Charlotte Gainsborough, Feist, or Mika?

Mika

It's been out a few months, but I still want to say that Mika's "Grace Kelly" is the best single I've heard in a long while--definitely the best since Kelly Clarkson's "Since You've Been Gone," and probably better. I've got no quarrel with his devotion to Freddie Mercury. His voice just keeps going up, and when you think it's reached the top it goes up more. If you haven't heard it, you ought to. Try here.

Feisty

I'm not exactly sure why, but I really like this picture of Feist that appeared in the Times today. I think it's because she looks both glamorous and nerdy. Also like she's having a really good time. The article by Kelefa Sanneh is funny, too; it's all about how Feist kept trying to get the audience to sing along but they just wanted to listen to her.

I'm liking her new album more and more; when I first got it, it was somewhat eclipsed by Charlotte G.

roundtrip for the midnight train going anywhere, please

It already seems a bit late to chime in, but the last scene of the episode was brilliant. Part of it went straight for the gut, of course—flirting with the possibility of a whack, or a whack of A.J. or Meadow, or Meadow getting hit by a car, or the possibility that no one was showing because they’d all been whacked, and so on, all while being advised not to stop believing. On the other side, the scene was an exquisite exercise in high realism: diners, Journey, parallel parking—what else is there, really? In the end, the tension of finding the proper angle to parallel park was aligned with the tension of possibly being marked for murder, and that’s a pretty perfect condensation of the show’s affective tactics, and view of the psyche, as a whole.

David Chase is already denying a lot of the openings for interpretive creativity the episode seemed to leave—the main one being what I actually first thought—that Tony had been shot dead; if the show were from his p.o.v., one wouldn’t hear the gunshot, right? It’s too bad Chase is playing interpretive FBI man, but it shouldn’t stop us from getting hung up on such questions as why Meadow was so anxious about being late. . .

A good deal of the web discourse about the episode seems to be that it constituted a “giant ‘fuck you’ to the fans” because it didn’t deliver any of the endings people had been discussing and predicting for weeks. But at some point on Saturday, I realized that nothing was going to happen. I can’t believe it took me so long. Given the series’ longtime comfort with loose narrative ends, it would have been absolutely inconsistent with the tenor of the show to attempt to put forth a single event to function as closure. You didn’t like this ending? Well, in fact, any other ending would have seemed wildly anti-climactic.

As for the “fuck you,” it seems to me that the real target of that particular oath in this particular case is the drivelly local news culture that produces “stories” about TV episodes that air the evening of the newscast. The show didn’t deliver an event to serve as easy fodder for segments like this one, or for bar interviews in which people are asked if they were shocked to learn that the last five episodes were a peyote hallucination. Given the amount of news coverage the episode was getting before it aired, I’m wondering what happened afterward. . .

the sopranos' finale

was genius.

who are public intellectuals?

The other night, Jill and I were discussing the problem of public intellectuals in the US, and scrounging for names--she suggested Michael Ignatieff, I mentioned the old chestnut, Gore Vidal. Then today at the gym, it struck me: America's public intellectuals are Jeopardy contestants.