Oh my Talulah Gosh

There don't seem to be any Film Molecules lyrics online so I've had a go at transcribing "That Girl." Tender Trap was Amelia Fletcher's band after Heavenly and it was very brainy (cf. "Son of Dorian Gray") and grrrl-supportive and twee, but in an empowering, Sarah/K Records, girl-nerds-are-punks-too sort of way.

She would never believe what she was taught in school
All of the history and the geography
Better to read Patti Smith and Simone de Beauvoir
To know how things are

That girl, that girl has a second degree in the language of girl
That girl, that girl had a copy of Her Jazz when she was at school

She likes to play Suzi Quatro while she sits and reads
Bought it at Woolworth's for £1.50
She knows the record was made long before she was born
But it speaks to her louder than Korn

That girl, that girl knows all there is to know about record sleeve art
That girl, that girl thinks Yoko was a hero, Lennon was a tart

Her record collection separates women from men
Sometimes she lets them mingle, then breaks it up again

That girl, that girl knows all there is to now about record sleeve art
Tthat girl, that girl thinks that Travis are boring, Le Tigre are smart

How are things on the West Coast?

Paul Banks' vocals sound slightly different this time around. Flatter and more nasal. I like them but I like Pants's facsimile even more. She and I agreed it's not so much a Paul Banks impression as it is Ethel Merman coughing up Fred Schneider doing a Paul Banks impression. Worlds of croaky sprechstimme difference.

Release me

There needs to be a worldwide moratorium on the playing of Kid A in coffee shops. What was once a mere annoyance has Alberto Gonzalesed into a pandemic of unavoidable proportions. Half-caf soy macchiato slurping was not appropriately soundtracked by Yorkers singing "cut the kids in half" in 2000; it isn't today, either.

The untamed shrew

I'm waiting for the irate letters from Hüsker Dü fans asking, What about Zen Arcade?? to come rolling in, but my story on the new Mirah record is up at the Merc.

I proudly bought the NME with the nude Beth Ditto cover today. It's a grand day for punk rock, fat-positive queer feminism and not caring what other people think about you. Seriously--Germaine Greer approves. The sidebar explaining riot grrrl feels a bit forced and tossed off, as if they had to think of something to fill up column inches at the last minute and couldn't quite commit to a Dorothy Allison recommended reading list. But NME still earns innumerable pogo points for gleeful in-yr-face-and-down-yr-pants homoeroticism elsewhere in the issue. Page 18 is all I'm saying. PAGE 18. Perhaps KY Jelly adverts are to come?

Not that 120 Days needed much help to begin with.

Wolves in the winehouse

Kandia Crazy Horse nails the British soul girl vocal minstrelsy. I find myself liking Amy W. because of her unapologetic, endearing dementia but the phenomenon of Joss Stone unnerves me. It's like Mary J. Blige's voice got really thin and weak and sickly and went to live in Julia Stiles' body.

One wants to big up Allen, Winehouse, and Stone on the sisterhood empowerment tip for their brassy attitude and scathing kiss-offs to trifling men on these recordings. And it's interesting that they've emerged at a time when their male counterparts, such as Morrison — and David Gray and Chris Martin — seem to have "bitched up." Yet this gender power–reversal is sadly trumped by glaring issues of race and authenticity.

Painting pictures for the blind

Record recs!

A riot grrrl revival is tearing up the Twin Cities as we speak. Among the perpetrators are Baby Guts and Kitten Forever (above). Baby Guts see your Spiderfighter, raise you a rerecorded Pretty on the Inside that is actually listenable. Kitten Forever knit fat positivity, vitriol and Allison Wolfe-ian high irony (vocalisms, too--they end up somewhere between Bratmobile and Deep Lust). "This is a hostile takeover." Anti-nostalgia, non-capitulation. Feminist riotcore, grotty punk brilliance. Kitten Forever holler in "Keep It Up": This is what we need to do/take it back from those dudes. Laura Larson is the singer/guitarist for Baby Guts, the bassist for Kitten Forever, and yr new heroine. Kitten Forever have a cassette called "Sissy Party" and Baby Guts have the Pocketknife demo, as well as the Gasoline EP. City Pages has already caught on, so should you.

The new Mirah record could be the concept album coup of '07. It's all about entomology and uses words like "phloem" and "ecdysis" and "liquefaction" and "vociferous." The entire thing must have about 20,000 rhymed couplets in it (I lost count round about track 3). It sounds kind of like early Rasputina sometimes, being just vocal and cello and drums, though there is also accordion and oud. Rasputina have a new record coming out themselves on June 26th, which beats Mirah's release date by a week (hers is August 6th).

I love how Pink Flag still sounds like it was recorded yesterday. Or maybe it's just that everything coming out these days sounds like it was recorded in 1977. Hi-hat to beat the band and leave it for dead. If you listen to "Strange" with headphones on you get one side of the riff curling into each ear individually, so it's like having a twine-covered ping pong ball bouncing around inside yr skull, left lobe to right, right lobe to left. How Elastica ever worked up the guff to quote from "Three Girl Rhumba" in "Connection" the way they did is beyond thought.

Her Noise

My Electrelane feature/interview/review is out and about and readable. I didn't allow myself to look at the other press for No Shouts while I was working on it, so once I was finished I went on a spree and eventually found this puzzling salvo in Stylus:

Electrelane are great. They can’t really play their instruments, aren’t particularly talented singers, and record almost everything in a super-minimal, naturalistic way that could best be described as sparse. I think they’re fantastic.

It surprises me that someone could listen to No Shouts and come away with this opinion (listen and form yr own here). The "they can't play but I'll condescend to like them in a patronizing, slightly ironic way" line of criticism makes me nervous, especally when its premise appears to be invalid, and even more especially when its condescendsion is directed towards women. It reminds me of the way some people still talk about the Slits and the Raincoats.

I had been looking forward to doing an Electrelane story that didn't bring up the fact that the band is made up of women--that looked forward to a future where the existence of a "girl band" was a ho-hum non-story rather than a sexist salt-lick and moldy journalistic fetish. I chose not to, because as tempting as it may be to imagine, that future is still unrealized, and until it's been safely midwived in we're going to have to continue publicly waving about our all-lady bands and labels and festivals and snack foods-based performance art collectives that make Emma Goldman sculptures out of Hostess cupcakes. An explicit, vigilant feminist politics of visibility may be exhausting, but for now I've decided it's kind of a no-brainer.

Case in emphatic point: the expansion of the Her Noise project, which lives here, to include a documentary film:

Her Noise was an exhibition which took place at South London Gallery in 2005 with satellite events at Tate Modern and Goethe-Institut, London. Her Noise gathered international artists who use sound to investigate social relations, inspire action or uncover hidden soundscapes. The exhibition included newly commissioned works by Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether, Hayley Newman, Kaffe Matthews, Christina Kubisch, Emma Hedditch and Marina Rosenfeld. A parallel ambition of the project was to investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender, and the curators set out to create a lasting resource in this area.
...
The video documents the development of Her Noise between 2001 and 2005 and features interviews with artists including Diamanda Galas, Lydia Lunch, Kim Gordon, Jutta Koether, Peaches, Marina Rosenfeld, Kembra Pfhaler, Chicks On Speed, Else Marie Pade, Kaffe Matthews, Emma Hedditch, Christina Kubisch and the show's curators, Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hilde Neset. The documentary also features excerpts from live performances held during Her Noise by Kim Gordon, Jutta Koether and Jenny Hoyston (Erase Errata), Christina Carter, Heather Leigh Murray, Ana Da Silva (The Raincoats), Spider And The Webs, Partyline, Marina Rosenfeld's 'Emotional Orchestra' at Tate Modern, and footage compiled for the 'Men in Experimental Music' video made during the development of the Her Noise project by the curators and Kim Gordon, featuring Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke.

I've only seen five minutes and already I can tell it's heaps better than that Play UK "The Punk Years: Typical Girls" rubbish.

Here slum the warm jets

Also in re: the Arctic Monkeys--Pants noticed today that the Monkeys' song "Only Ones Who Know" off of Favourite Worst Nightmare has the same opening chords as Brian Eno's "Some of Them Are Old." There are worse subconscious/accidental musical influences. Eno is a smartie with words as well as notes:

Years ago I realized that the recording studio was becoming a musical instrument. I even lectured about it, proclaiming that "by turning sound into malleable material, studios invite you to construct new worlds of sounds as painters construct worlds of form and color." I was thrilled at how people were using studios to make music that otherwise simply could not exist. Studios opened up possibilities. But now I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off.

The essay is from 1999, but it's obviously still hyper-relevant today. See also this more recent lecture from Pop!Tech.

The unforecasted storm

This month is the 25th anniversary of the forming of the Smiths. When you give yr rare Australian 1988 Hatful of Hollow reissue a celebratory spin, think of me. The Guardian has a couple of remembrances, an essay here and a top ten list there. Possibly the best point:

The sense of possibility that their best songs contain, the possibility that a 'simple' pop song could be as potent and as intimate, as literate and as allusive, as any other kind of great writing. You can hear that same sense of possibility in the lyrics of Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, another writer who deals in the poetry of the parochial, who paints from a quintessentially English - indeed definably northern [sic] - palette.

Having seen the Arctic Monkeys at First Ave last week* I can say that this is true. Turner is the poet laureate of blog rock and it shows in his performance posture; hands clasped behind back, eyes downcast, mouth close enough to the mic so that no syllable will be lost, he doesn't sing so much as declaim. Morrissey tossed words like belligerent, tremulous and conjugal into Smiths songs and made it look easy; Turner manages the same (balaclava, escapologist) and demonstrates a Mozzian fondness for enjambment ("This House is a Circus"). He's also a mean internal rhymer from way back: There's a circle of witches--ambitiously vicious they are/ Our attempts to remind them of reason won't get us that far ("If You Were There, Beware"). It's not quite "cemetry gates/Keats and Yeats," but it'll do.

*The Moongkeys were totes upstaged by Be Your Own Pet. Jemima Pearl flailed and thrashed and banged her head around so much she threw up. Lady must be killing her inner ear equilibrium.

People don't you know/ don't you know it's about time?

I contributed to this weekend's Mercury. It's the music issue (the biggest in the paper's history, apparently) and the theme is Rock & Jock. I changed Bette Midler to Kylie Minogue at the last second because she felt too last-generation throwback and I just couldn't bring myself to use Christina Aguilera. My Rolodex of fag hag icons is hopelessly dated. Ezra deserves credit for the queer angle, it was all his idea; that it dovetails with my plan to become the Eve K. Sedgwick of pop music crit is only a happy accident.

The best part of writing the thing was having an excuse to listen to "Get Ready For This" approximately seven times. That and falling down an early house wormhole that led me to discover the hotness of Ya Kid K. Wow. I bet a lot of people still don't know she's a woman. Call it the Mo Tucker effect. I doubt "Move This" gets played at sporting events as much as "Pump Up the Jam," but its video is especially excellent when viewed through a queer lens.

A friend, a banana and a camera

While doing research for my Electrelane story I ran across an old Power Out-era interview from when Rachel Dalley was in the band:

JF: Do you guys get fan mail? How does it make you feel?

EG: Sometimes it almost makes you want to cry. We once had a letter from this guy in Turkey and it was really sweet. He lived in an abandoned amusement park and he listened to our album while he was walking around with headphones.

MC: He was saying that all the rides came to life when he was listening to our album.

EG: And quite young teenage girls, we get a few letters from them. It's not like we have loads of letters, but when they do come, they make you feel better. To help someone get through something.

JF: Have you ever written fan mail?

EG: [To Rachel] Now you have to tell her the Robert Smith story.

RD: I didn't write to him, I turned up at his house with a banana. There was this magazine called Smash Hits and if you took a picture with a famous person holding a banana, you got a £10 voucher, so I went round his house with a friend, a banana and a camera. Caught him on his way out. He was living with his mum. We just knocked on the door and said, "Is Robert here?" He came out and chatted with us and let us take the picture.

Boys on the radio

I will be in Minneapolis all this summer writing for the Mercury and working for Minnesota Public Radio. Sanden is still a producer there and I am hoping to run into him often in elevators and stairwells and bustling around corners. I used to be in his band Baa Baa Blacksheep that is now Bla Bla Blacksheep and promises to take the Twin Cities by storm in the balmy Mpls June-August corridor. I do not even mind being the Caroline Rue/Jill Emery of this situation. Cuddlecore is where it's at in '07.

Train in vain

Not so good for listening to on trains: Love Is All; Delta 5 KRS comp/reissue; These New Puritans; The Queen Is Dead; Standing on a Beach; No Shouts, No Calls. The reigning champion of train-appropriate records is still Either/Or. The key is genre but also mood; anything jerky and aggressively up-tempo (post-punk obviously a no-no) doesn't cohere with the locomotive roll and you end up unable to enjoy either the music or the motion.

Trains really are the transportation of the future. In addition to the constant promise of Lady Vanishes-style Hitchcockian shenanigans you also get, on most trips longer than eight hours, double-decker levels with staircases, crazy-spacious bathrooms, water fountains, exciting theme cars (observation! dining! ladies' lounge!) and an entire bank of seats to yrself, since everybody else has paid triple the price to get an inner earache whilst squished into an airplane seat between a crying baby and an investment banker scream-brokering into his cell phone.

I could live happily on this train for several days, or as long as the carrot stick supply held out. If I stayed on I could be in Portland by Thursday. At the moment I am scooting through the marshes of Wisconsin. Did you know Wisconsin had marshes? Neither did I. It also has some smallish mountains that, on second thought, are probably only ambitious hills. In Michigan there were wild turkeys. See America by train! It'll surprise you!

La Môme

They made an Edith Piaf movie! The lack of subtitles doesn't really matter for English speakers, since the trailer speaks the universal visual language of campy diva biopics used since time immemorial: flashbulbs, applauding crowds, poignant backstage makeup removal, onstage collapse, lonely beachscapes, and more tragic screaming than you can shake a Judy Garland at. Also: tantrums! boxing! cross-dressing! France in the 1920s and 30s sure was a swell place for cross-dressing.

Electreladies

No Shouts, No Calls is phenomenal. The whole thing, from start to finish. Intricate and chiseled and crafted with great care. Becky and I happen to be doing features on Electrelane at the same time, so we are comparing notes--she's already incubating a theory that correlates 1) expatriate identity; 2) waves/water/sailing and the oceanic feminine in pop music; and 3) the last part of The Sex Revolts. I don't have a frame yet, just breathy questions, e.g., Is Emma Gaze the best drummer ever? Was that a hi-hat or a crash cymbal? Can a harmonium have a different mood than a regular organ? No Shouts makes one ask such questions, and rewards careful, reverent listens. It is going to be a huge record in a few months, for serious.

EMP Pop Con 2007

Mairead is on a panel with Greil Marcus at this weekend's Pop Con. Her talk is triply worthy of attendance right out of the box, first because it is on Karen Dalton and therefore sidesteps the Dylan/Springsteen/over-analyzed wank-rock vortex of music crit doom; second because it promises to recoup all of the interviews Mairead did for her Bust piece on Karen that didn't make the final version (Lenny Kaye, Joanna Newsom, et al.), as well as her thoughts on the curious dilemma that is trying to memorialize someone seemingly removed from yr own time and place and personal experience; and third, because it is Mairead. Not going with her to the conference this year is going to be weird--like the part of E.T. when Elliott goes to school while E.T. stays at home, and E.T. drinks beer and does crazy stuff, and Elliott feels it, too, because of their psychic connection, and kisses the girl and saves the frogs from being dissected in science class. Save the frogs, Mairead! Save the frogs!

Some other nifty writers will be at the Pop Con, too:

Simon Reynolds,“Just 4 U London: Place and Race in British Dance Culture from Rave to Grime”

Daphne Carr, Selling Sad: How Hot Topic Made the Mall (Safe for the) Miserable”

Douglas Wolk, "The Woman in the Back: Clydie King in the Shadow of Classic Rock”

Kara Jesella & Marisa Meltzer, "From Stupid Girls to Rebel Girls: Are Girl Power Anthems Saccharine-Flavored Sisterhood or a Political Force?”

Maura Johnston, “The Season Came To An End: Freestyle Brings Loneliness To A Crowded Dance Floor”

Michaelangelo Matos, "A Matter of Trustafarians: Behind the Bob Marley Poster on the Dorm Room Wall"

The bats have left the belltower

The Illuminoids' Beck vs. Devo vs. Bauhaus has precious little Bauhaus (it's just "Undead! Undead! Undead!" tossed off at the end of the chorus and then a glimmer in the outro to finish) but it's organic enough to win the Pogo mashup seal of approval. Someone who had never heard these songs could reasonably believe this was the original version. Bauhaus are still my favorite pop music product named after an art movement. Art Brut and De Stijl finish second and third, respectively.

Bona drag

Female masculinity in hip-hop alert: as noted by Bex, "Like a Boy" is not the only recent video to include scenes of a normally high femme ladydiva sharing the screen with a digitally superimposed image of herself in boy drag. Beyoncé does it in "Upgrade You," too, though she's a bit less ferocious about it--she stops short of anything too overtly kingly and just wears baggy jeans and trainers with a white dress shirt and swept-back hair. Still, her Jay-Z impression is a thing to behold (cocked head! toothpick! lip curl!), and all the more interesting for the fact that towards the end of the video she literally transforms into him before our eyes. Whether this is more about gender fluidity or the perils of spending too much time with yr boyfriend, I dunno. Watch especially 2:33-3:25. The morph happens at about 2:99.

When you cross-reference Ciara and Beyoncé with this weekend's Village Voice cover on the AG subculture/community in Brooklyn (photogallery is too adorable for words), you get a far more sophisticated acknowledgement of the intersections of race and gender than the mainstream is usually willing to offer.

P.S. Re: non-draggy, jewelry-in-lipsticked-mouth, woman-as-commodity parts of "Upgrade You": I forgive and enjoy them, as I have decided they are camp and satirical. Yes. Anything that aspires to be a live-action recreation of Scrooge McDuck swimming through his safe deposit treasure room counts as satirical in my book.

Back in Albion

Homoerotic lightning rods The Libertines (the crucial ones, at least) reunited onstage tonight. Keep yr eyes peeled to NME, it'll be nothing but rapturous, swooning fanboy commentary for the next month at least.

"2007. Ladies, I think it's time to switch roles."

Five things I never imagined would happen, but somehow miraculously have happened, or are about to:

That Ciara's video for "Like a Boy" would deliver on the promise of its single to such a gob-smackingly complete extent it would feature an army of dancing near-drag kings. It's hard to believe this is real, it's so beautiful and feminist and gender-slippery, as if Ciara's been reading her Judith Butler. Aaliyah comparisons are totes deserved from here on out.




That the New York Times Magazine would run a full-page portrait of Miranda July. I still do a double-take every time I see her in a mainstream publication. It's like Huggy Bear in Newsweek--that insurmountable question of, "HOW DID THIS GET HERE?" It was awfully lame that the NYT decided the most important part of this feature was the pictures--as if all you really need to know about the six female actors and directors they interviewed can be gleaned from their headshots. There were quotes and tiny bios in the print edition, but you could barely make them out. The New York Sun has a much less fluff-dried piece on July's new show going up at The Kitchen here.

That someone would find a way to make "My Humps" even more annoying than it was. That that someone would be Alanis Morissette.

That Matthew Bourne would announce his next project is a male-male re-do of Romeo and Juliet. He's going to use the Prokofiev score rather than the Tchaikovsky one. I like the Guardian's report best, with its overtones of, Listen, buddy, you'd better really queer it up this time and not just tease us under the table! And finally, speaking of teasing under the table, I also never imagined

That Morrissey would come to a tiny theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and that said theater would be within walking distance of my house, and that I would not be in town at the time. Similarly, that Morrissey once gave an interview wearing what appeared to be a leather jacket in a room full of taxidermied birds while sitting next to an unflappable Johnny Marr decked out with a human skull and a sparkly debutante necklace. I'm not complaining about that last bit, but one wonders whether the producers had the Smiths confused with Sex Gang Children.

Mika vs. Mika Miko

Down 'n dirty title bout in five rounds. Take yr corners.

Sound
Mika: queeny divo poptimism (+400)
Mika Miko: riot grrrl's not dead (+800)

Lyrical catchphrase
Mika: Love, love me! (+100)
Mika Miko: Get excited! (+100)

Essential performance accessory
Mika: dandified jouissance (+700)
Mika Miko: telephone mic (+500)

Preferred vocal technique
Mika: falsetto (+600)
Mika Miko: shouting (+300)

Secret musical superpower
Mika: ventriloquizing Freddie Mercury (+400)
Mika Miko: ventriloquizing Carrie Brownstein's guitar (+1000)

Final Score: Mika: 2200 Mika Miko: 2700

MIKA MIKO WINS!!!

Ain't it the truth

My State of the Gossip is in this week's Portland Mercury. Mercifully, the crummy first draft did not see the light of print, thanks to an eleventh hour chat with Beth Ditto (literally--I called her at 11:00 PM, night before deadline). About 75% of the brilliant things she said couldn't be used because of word count constraints, but I think one of them is worth bringing up here. I asked whether she and Nathan and Hannah ever feel like they have to put up with the Gwen Stefani Effect, wherein the media become so fixated on a dynamic frontlady that they forget there's anybody else in the band. She said they do, to a point, but that this doesn't stop people from clinging to tired old sexist assumptions about artistry and creative control. Meaning, the press may want to take photos of Beth and dress her up, but they still go straight to Nathan when they want to talk gear or guitar tech or music history. It's assumed that as the sole dude in the band, he must be in charge--the calculating, masculine mastermind behind the emotive feminine voice--even though obviously that isn't the way they operate at all. I guess the legacy of Phil Spector is going to be with us for a long time.

Subbacultcha

If you're going to be in New York two weeks from Friday, you owe it to yr pet gerbil named Jayne County to check this out. They've got some really smart and crushworthy panelists lined up, plus it's free. Pogo New York correspondent Kim Germain passed along the info.

AFTER CBGB:
GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE FUTURE OF SUBCULTURE

Friday, April 13, 2007
2 PM to 7:30 PM
19 University Place, Room 102
between 8th Street and Waverly Place (NY, NY)

Scenes and styles change, but is something more fundamentally shifting in the role urban subculture plays? Is it being outmoded? This one-day event will examine these questions from the particular vantage point of how subculture altered how we think about gender, sexual, and racial dissidence.

2 PM Panel One: HISTORIES

Kandia Crazy Horse (rock journalist); Drew Daniel (musician), and Dominic Johnson (Queen Mary, University of London).
Moderator: Jose Munoz (Performance Studies, NYU)

4 PM Panel Two: FUTURES

Julie Atlas Muz (Miss Exotic World 2006); James Spooner (filmmaker/artist); and Karen Tongson (University of Southern California)
Moderator: Jason King (Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, NYU)

6 PM Post Panels: KEYNOTE
Lady Jaye and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV)

For more information, please call 212-992-9540, email gender.sexuality@nyu.edu, or visit www.nyu.edu/csgs .

Paolo on point

Sometimes comments are worth pulling up out of the offal so they don't get buried and missed. Paolo Cruz wrote in re: MCR:

What's both problematic and fascinating (in a train wreck kind of way) about My Chemical Romance's schtick is how they appropriate so many things stereo-typically asscoiated with gay/queer-oriented pop culture -- the operatics, the glam make-up, heck they've even got a cameo from drag queen icon Liza Minelli on "Mama". And yet somehow, their cult of personality allows them to repackage and market these elements in a way that's palpable [ed.: palatable?] and non-threatening for vaguely disaffected suburban guys, by subsuming them into the generalized mopiness of emo sensibilities.

They *could* have been potentially subversive, and queered the boundaries of gendered performance within the rock mainstream (well, aesthetically, at least). But instead, they may end up being remembered as the 00's equivalent of Marilyn Manson, in terms of cultural relevance.

I had no idea about "Mama" and the Liza. Did Barbra Streisand secretly do backup for "I Don't Love You" as well?

Tudor Goldmine

They just can't stop making movies about dead English monarchs! Maybe it's the post-colonial Western guilt--a conjoined disgust for and empathy with the burdens of empire-building and a desperate need to believe that once upon a time there were people even more ruthless than we are. If you're a Tudors buff (divorced, beheaded, died--divorced, beheaded, survived!) you can watch episodes 1 and 2 of the new Showtime series here. They've blurred out some nips to be able to put it on the web but you still get bedroom romping and a bloody assassination before the first ten minutes are up, plus a hilariously phallic jousting scene. Really, though, the series has about as much to do with the sixteenth century as LCD Soundsystem and plays like a sexed-up, dumbed-down West Wing in doublets and hose with everybody stalking through corridors and convening in hushed inner sancta. The men are pouty Abercrombie & Fitch models and the women have sweeping bangs and ready access to liquid foundation and eyeliner. Dialogue is sub-Sorkin--the plot being rigidly bifurcated the way it is, you get either, "The treaty also envisages the creation of pan-European institutions!" or "You violated my daughter!" and not much in between. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is just way too young and hunky to be believed. He's Henry the Eighth, he is, but watching him it's harder to recall this guy than it is Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine.

Speaking of which, have a look at this, if Wikipedia is to be believed:

Kimba Kano is a software program that integrates with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox to allow built-in searching of Wikipedia, Amazon.com, eBay, Phoebe and Google...[it is] named after a nonsense phrase stemming from a controversy over the lyrics to David Bowie's song "Velvet Goldmine," which debuted on the album Space Oddity in 1975 and released on the Rykodisc version of Ziggy Stardust in 1990 as a bonus track. The controversy is over the exact words in the song, not helped by the fact that the lyrics sheet in the album is obviously incorrect. The line is interpreted as either "I'll be your kimba kano right for you again and again" or "I'll be your king volcano right for you again and again."

Personally, I think he's singing, "be your king volcano ride/ for you again and again," but any software company that names its programs after lyrics in songs that are probably about two men giving each other blow jobs is fine by me.