I swear I didn't see this coming. Here's a link to a substantial excerpt from William Shatner's cover version of "Common People." I laughed out loud.

http://www.shoutfactory.com/av/common_people.mov

The new album is called Has Been. Yes, that's Joe Jackson coming in to save Shatner's pipes at the chorus. (If you haven't yet had the pleasure, you can hear a pretty amazing Shatner version of "Rocket Man" right here, as part of the 365 Days Project, which is well worth browsing. Make sure you listen until he really gets his boogie on toward the end. Rock-it man!)

In the new category of blog posts about blogging, I thought I'd note here that I've taken comments offline temporarily. It's not that I don't want to hear from you. Since I got home from work I've had to go through and delete literally 50-80 new spam postings. I was sitting here hitting "reload" on my email to get notifications of new spam, then going in and obliterating it as fast as arrived, but that shit's for the birds.

Hopefully either the spamstorm will pass or MT-Blacklist will be updated to work with Movable Type 3.0, which I started using when my previous installation crapped out on me for no apparent reason, and I can re-enable comments soon. (I know all y'all are just dying to post comments to my weblog, so please hold yer horses.)

Speak slowly, please. I'm an NPR listener.

OK, I haven't willingly listened to NPR since I was a bookstore clerk, when I tuned in as part of a well-meaning effort to connect shoppers with "that purple book" they saw on Oprah or "that history book" they heard about on "Morning Edition." OK, there was that time in the Arizona desert where it was either "All Things Considered" or right-wing talk radio, but in general I've found NPR to be a rather arch, self-satisfied affair aimed at making aging lefties feel better about their failure to otherwise keep in touch with culture — sort of the radio equivalent of Lipton tea with lots of honey in the cup.

But I was still gobsmacked by this column by NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin criticizing NPR's music reviewers for being too hip. As evidence, he cites innocuous, well-meaning reviews of Wilco, The Magnetic Fields and Morrissey as though they were weird music-school haikus about atonality in Glenn Branca's guitar symphonies. And then he proceeds to admit that, like some NPR listeners who have written to him, he's the type of guy who doesn't know the difference between Timbaland and Justin Timberlake. In other words, he doesn't know the first fucking thing about pop music — and yet feels compelled to criticize NPR's music critics for having the temerity to assume that their listeners might, you know, have Clue One about Jeff Tweedy.

It's easy to get off on a rant, and I'll admit that I have no reason to believe that Dvorkin's elderly plaint indicates in any way the feelings of NPR management vis a vis pop-culture coverage (except inasmuch as they've placed him in a position where he's supposed to accurately reflect the needs and concerns of NPR's listeners -- or at least the ones who are inclined to sink time into sending emails and/or making phone calls complaining about pop music reviews. But he does endorse a point of view that seems to be increasingly prevalent in the mass media -- that critics aren't like "real people," that reviews are useful mainly as bland, thumbs-up/thumbs-down consumer guide entries, that "news you can use" trumps thoughtful pieces that are meant to intellectually provoke or enlighten a readership.

Has anyone else noticed how newspapers are opting, increasingly, just to pick up Ebert's syndicated reviews rather than take the time (and spend the money) to cultivate an independent, hard-working local voice? The Times' recent hiring of alt-weekly stalwart Manohla Dargis is a good thing, I think, for those of us in the New York market. But I dread the commotion that could ensue is, for instance, some editor in some office who doesn't know the difference between Wayne Wang and Wong Kar-Wai decides that he's acting in the best interests of his readership when he asks Dargis to lay off already about "the poetics of camerawork," etc.

Per Neil Tennant, writing in The Guardian, the Pet Shop Boys are scoring Potemkin. The new score will be performed live to a screening of the film in Trafalgar Square in September.

Better than another one of those Philip Glass jobs, say I.