What I learned from American Idol tonight:

1. Apparently, it is morally wrong for a white dude with dreads to cover a song made famous by a black dude with dreads.
2. Apparently, it's perfectly okay for some horrid white teenager to turn Ben E. King's "Stand By Me" into a pile of soft poo.
3. Baba O'Reilly is apparently a power ballad.
4. The Civil Rights Movement, being in American Idol's Top Four, same dif.

I want them all to go home, and then I want to watch those homes burn down.

In other news, Neil Diamond loves his myspace friends very much!!!  <3!!!

There's a new free Nine Inch Nails record available for legal download!  My hard drive's full-to-bursting, so I made room for it by deleting the last free Nine Inch Nails record.

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The only album in the world that matters, right now, comes out on May 13^th.  Using Twelve Angry Months and the band's week-long catalogue-covering stand as an excuse, the new muxtape is something for which you've all been clamoring:  100% Local H.

It's not a best-of mix.  I erred toward poppier, lo-aggro songs.  Made sure that Michelle, Rita, and Heather all got their space.  Bob Pollard, too:  To observe mux's one track/CD rule (beyond a single conjoined pair) there's stuff pulled from demos and soundtracks and stuff.  "Congressman," hoo-boy that's old.

After the seven nights in Chicago (openers include Fig Dish (!) and the Smoking Popes' Josh Caterer), they hit the road.  Unless you hate life, you're going to see Local H (myspace) when they're in your town.  (If they're not coming to your town, life hates you.)

NYC dates include a confirmed appearance at Irving Plaza for Joey Ramone's Birthday Thang (tix) on May 19th and a May 18th Luna Lounge show that might have to be relocated (looks like tix have all been pulled offsale - c'mon, life!).

UPDATE:  The Brooklyn show has been moved to Union Pool.  No ticket info as of yet.

Rock and Roll is all about sex and drugs and the call of a comfortable couch.

There's this thing called the "Contrast Podcast" where a gaggle of music bloggers gather 'round a weekly topic and offer playlists and blather and such.  They're dragging their way through the seven deadly sins; this week's edition finally reaches sloth.

Which is the implied topic of the week every week here.

I was saddened to scan their selections and not see one of my favorite songs of all time.

Pedro the Lion - The Longer I Lay Here (mp3) (buy)

I'm a fan of form fitting function, and not only is this a lazy-sounding song - dig the solo that could barely be bothered - Bazan fearlessly embraces convenient metaphors.  "Laziness cuts me," he drawls, "Like... fine cutlery."  Well na na naaaaa, na-na naaa na-naaa na-na, to quote one enthusiastic Canuck.

But "Longer's" lovely the way laziness can be, taking time to give lines like "excellence, industry, diligence, naturally" their phonetic due.  He rhymes "ridiculous" with "lick this."  You're only going to come up with that sort of stuff after contemplating the ceiling for a good long while.

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Not Adorable Dept.:  Last night's Telepathe set-list.

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Tom Waits has named his to-be-announced-Monday summer tour after the critical reaction to whatsherface's covers album.  "Glitter and Doom," coming to a theater hopefully near me, hopefully actress-free, deets after the weekend.

While three long-promised final chapters languish in inspirational purgatory, this seemed an opportune time to regurgitate my Flickr account and do a bit of attic-cleaning.  Both to make room for the new - even with the Pool Parties and Siren TBA, recently announced schedules for this year's free shows at Summerstage, Celebrate Brooklyn, and River to River have some strong offerings (Deerhoof doing Rite of Spring!  Philip Glass doing Powaqqatsi!) - and because I had a couple choice Zap Mama pics I couldn't reasonably squeeze into the V. Weekend weekend thing.

Last summer I only got to a fraction of what I wanted to see, took my camera to a fraction of that.  Like, three shows.  In no order whatsoever:

Zap Mama (myspace), Summerstage, 8/12/07.  I'd thought this was an a cappella group.  But whatever they once might have been, ZM is now Marie Daulne's show.  And I remember the show, but not the music.

Daulne reminded me of the domineering mother in Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre.  She came out wearing a sort of military band jacket over what could have been a wedding dress.  Presence is poised, theatrical... but she was even scarier when she tried to drop her guard and went leaping about.  Stiff, rehearsed routines - there was a boys v. girls thing, a song where Daulne and her back up singers took turns seducing selected audience members - alternated with round robin jams, neither took hold for me.

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Mary Weiss (myspace), Atlantic Antic, 9/30/07.

She didn't do "Leader of the Pack!"

It would have been the coolest way to close out the summer if I hadn't had a 103-degree fever.  But I wasn't going to miss the first New York performance of the lead Shangri-La in (according to her) twenty years.

Her nineteen-song set focused on her new Norton record, Dangerous Game... which is fine, but not what everyone wanted to hear.  The melodrama she wore as a teen might not fit as comfortably in middle-age, but the crowd craved the opportunity to suspend disbelief.  The six ‘Las tunes included were all great.  It's cool to know my favorite is also hers ("Out in the Streets").  "Walkin' in the Sand" was magic, just magic.  (Also included:  "Easier to Cry," "Heaven Only Knows," "Train from Kansas City," and the original L-U-V song, "Give Him a Great Big Kiss.")  But - even if it seems silly or predictable, even if your sister might have been the original singer - you gotta drag out the big hit at the end when you've been away that long.

Weiss will be doing it outside again at the Seaport on July 18th.  Play "Leader of the Pack!"

Without Magnetic Field, will the Antic have a compelling music stage this year?

(more pics)

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Superchunk (myspace), McCarren Park Pool, 6/24/07.

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Les Savy Fav (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

So that's how you upstage Tim Harrington.

The "clean energy-powered festival" Citysol hosted a day-long Brooklyn Vegan-curated line-up in Stuyvesant Cove Park, home base of show-runners Solar One.  The park's under the highway on the east side, just south of 23rd Street, and it's not a bad space.  You're right on the water and the simple staging encouraged an intimacy the forbidding concrete amphitheater further down the East River doesn't.  It was a gorgeous day and the info- part of the ‘tainment was so nonaggressive that the whole thing felt like a comfortable, casual gathering of friends featuring decent-to-awesome bands.

Les Savy Fav is one of our very best live acts.  Harrington tears every set into something applicable and inappropriate and joyous.  This fest, he decided, was an opportunity to preach ill-informed ecobabble.  Some alternative energy suggestions:  Grow smaller dinosaurs that will fit right in your gas tank, make electricity by emptying water coolers into live sockets, mine footcandles from the heavens.  "When there's no light left in the moon, we're gonna go to Mars!"  Make sure what you're wearing is organic:  "This jacket is made of dreams, and my pants are made of inertia, and my shoes are made from nuclear stuff."

"I'm not a physical scientist.  I'm a physical philosopher," he explained.

He also took time to invent a new drink, the "My Little Pony"(one part bubbles, two parts Jameson's).  And mounted a parked vehicle so that, for half a song that Saturday night, there was a half-naked screaming crazy man on top of a van under the FDR.

And for the record, Les Savy Fav bassist/Frenchkiss Records owner Syd Butler only strapped daughter (Lila? Lily?  None of our business, really..) on for a single song, and won a ten dollar bet with guitarist Seth Jabour by doing so.

(More pics.)

Also there:  AllDayBuffet, Battering Room, Brooklyn Vegan, Etsy Garden, I Read Something the Other Day, Liam the Human Being, Mr. Mammoth, My Big Mouth Strikes Again, Product Shop NYC, Purely Recreational

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O'Death (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

When I saw these guys outside again during CMJ - After the Jump hosted them at The Yard, a perfect way to detox from a week of packed-room shows - I realized just how much walls and ceilings are a part of what would seem to be a natural back-porch band.  The unamplified group howls and David Rogers-Berry's drums need surfaces off which to echo.  Here it was better, because the stage had a back; at The Yard everything seemed to drift out over the Gowanus.

Of course it helps when you howl back, and I was too busy doing so to get the stunning O'Death pics I thought I should have.  (Lori Baily's Flickr set has some nice ones, though.  Mine are here.)

They'll be headlining the Music Hall of Williamsburg on May 9^th (tix).  Other tour dates at their myspace.  See them!  Looking forward to the new record.

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Bernard Lakes (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07. 

I liked ...Are the Dark Horse.  But it's more of a winter record, and this was too nice a day for winter record stuff.  (more pics)

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Land of Talk (myspace), Citysol, 7/15/07.

Not a fan, but this was the best I'd heard them.  I think it's because the lead singer was a bit tipsy.  Every other time I've seen them she's been either stiff or otherwise uncomfortable.  (more pics)

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Tom Verlaine, Summerstage, 06/16/07.

This was billed as a Television concert, but Verlaine announced that "the band's guitarist" was in the hospital with pneumonia (Jimmy Rip filled in).  Thankfully it looks like Richard Lloyd is up and about again, so there's always hope, but for now I'll just have to settle for having seen each half of Television play "Marquee Moon" separately.

Its fluttery riff was the first thing I'd heard the previous fall when I got into CBGBs on that club's last night.  Lloyd had joined Patti Smith's band during a history-heavy set (which ultimately proved to be a warm-up for a covers album, but whatever).  There, and at a Southpaw performance where he traded licks with Cheetah Chrome as Peter Laughner's permanent replacement in the occasionally reconstituted Rocket from the Tombs, Lloyd struck me as someone who knew exactly where he should put his fingers. 

Verlaine, on the other hand, always seemed to be thinking.  Of things he could try to make happen, of how maybe this was a good time to try x, how maybe y hadn't worked out the way he'd hoped.  Thinking.

It would have been an honor to watch them playing together.

As it was, some drunken ninny near me decided "Marquee Moon" was the perfect time to strike up a conversation.  Ugh.  But he shut up for the show's real highlight, the band's first single.

Television - Little Johnny Jewel (Live in Portland 7-2-78)(mp3)

The idea of a ten-minute punk anthem is counter-intuitive.  Sometimes rules are good, sometimes they aren't.

The first time I lived in this city I didn't get to as many shows as I should have.  Some of that's because most of my time was consumed by school and work and moviegoing (which felt like it was part of school, then, too); some of that's because when I wasn't worried about being underage I was busy getting drunk; some of that's because my musical tastes were still too reliant on radio-friendly arena rock.  It's been nice, this time through, to grab at some secondhand history.  It's too easy to look down your nose at acts who've done great things at some time before this past Tuesday and toss around p'shaws about waning vitality or (ugh) relevance.  Shinynewhotnow! obsession's probably a reaction against don't-make-‘em-like-they-usedta conservatism, or a legit wariness re: nostalgia-fed cash-ins, but it's more desperate than the saddest old-rocker self-celebration.  By asserting that THISmomentourmoment is important at the expense of all others is to reinforce disposability.  Because moments pass.

Television's been assured of its place in the new indie canon, so I needn't get defensive... until that canon turns over again, right?  I was, like, four years old when Verlaine and Hell walked into CBGBs.  I would have totally gotten carded!  But humor me if I think of shows like these not as making a tourist stop at ye olde scene, taking a couple snaps, buying the shirt, but as observing the giant fat throughline of NYC culture.  As active elder-respect, not idle worship.

And yeah, the picture's not really in focus but I just wanted to be able to say all that.

The post-Chikezie team fielded on this season's American Idol does nothing for me, but come NEIL DIAMOND WEEK I couldn't not watch.  Long-time readers - well, all those have gotten frustrated and gone elsewhere.  But accidental click-arounders might know I've had a longstanding interest in Friends of Neil.

So:  Jason Castro, David Cook, Brooke White, David Archuleta, Syesha Mercado.  Friends, or phooey?

I'm surprised how much the entire Top 5 annoy me.  Castro and White started out refreshing, low-key counterpoints to the standard-issue overblown Idol archetypes.  Neither ever learned to play more than one note, though, and have been dully doing time. (When Starbucks announced it was retreating from the music biz, I was shocked those two didn't magically disappear.)  Mercado so consistently underachieves that it's hard to believe that 10,000 other women couldn't be taking her turn and doing a better job with it.  Cook, who might actually win this thing, has a good voice and some lack of complacency; he annoys because within the world of this show he's heralded as some sort of musical genius.

And David Archuleta annoys because he's Pure Evil Suck.  He is horrible music personified.  I can't wait until he's old enough to legally punch in the face.  I can't wait until he's old enough to light on fire and leave on a neighbor's porch while we ring the doorbell and run off and a crotchety old man comes out and stomps on him.  Legally.  Are those even sentences?  Maybe.  Whatever.  Jesus, that kid's annoying.

Each contestant got a chance to annoy us with two NEIL songs, tonight.  Somehow, Archuleta (who looks a little like E.T., but more like Cha-Ka) did not choose "Heartlight."  Instead he sucked the BUM-BUM-BUM out of the much-beloved/hated "Sweet Caroline," a song best saved for late Friday nights when teams of middle-aged women collectively seek refuge from loneliness and last call; and, in Idol's most panderiffic performance since Kristy Lee Yee-Ha sang "I'm Gonna Give Every Sailor in the Room a Handjob," ended "We're Coming to America" with a rousing, AT&Teetastic "Let freedom ring!"  Horrid.

[Speaking of phones, have you seen that ad where Meat Loaf recreates "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" - a song about negotiating your way into a girl's pants - with his son?  (Well, an actor playing his son.)  Is anyone else severely weirded out by this?  And why is Tiffany carrying a leg of lamb?  Does she plan on clubbing her incestuous husband and stepson to death and then devouring the murder weapon?  This all would never have happened were Phil Rizzuto still around.

GoPhone, the preferred handset of boys who want to fuck their dads.]

The only other interesting things about AI this week were how Brooke looked less comfortable than post-preacher Obama while singing "I'm a Believer," and how Future Paula Abdul started judging contestants' second performances before they happened.  (To move things along, the first efforts didn't get individual appraisals; the judges gave a sort of group summary from "notes" they had "taken."  This should have been Paula's chance to shine:  Instead of repeating the same bullshit praise for each person individually she could have dropped a single "You all look wonderful tonight.")

No one sang my favorite NEIL song, "Crunchy Granola Suite."  But you know Castro secretly wanted to.

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I know.  I KNOW.  Back off.

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Speaking of things crunchy and sweet, the recently activated Pitchfork.tv has decided to live up to its acronym and screen, for one week only, Film Threat staple G.G. Allin:  Hated.  I strongly suggest watching it, especially if you're at work.  Especially on your lunch break.  The scene where a naked woman urinates into G.G.'s mouth until he vomits cements this as a modern cinematic masterpiece.  Throughout the film, pretty much anything that can come out of a human body does, then gets shoved back in.  Perfect for Earth Day Week.

A couple friends of mine did crew time on the flick - easily Todd Phillips' funniest - and I hadn't seen it since its premiere (I think) at Anthology Film.  The scene at the NYU student center where Allin shoves a banana up his ass and chucks chairs at the audience was much tamer than I'd remembered.  Still, most acts these days only figuratively fling feces at their fans.

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I was going to do a big frilly post about Wanda Jackson, who rocks, but I think I'll just say that she does rock, that "Fujiyama Mama" (which you can stream at this tribute myspace) and "Hot Dog!  That Made Him Mad" and about a dozen other songs of hers are total classics, that this collection is a blast.

She's also included on the latest muxtape makeover, which is all short n' fierce early rock n' rollishness.

You fucking don't, your readers fucking don't, and, if you spend even ten seconds listening to that track it's obvious that she never fucking has, either.  This is not news, it is a joke, it's on you; shit's not viral, it's syphilitic, got yr nose.

If you're so goddamned interested in actresses who sing, start covering fucking musical theater.

Maybe it's nice to finally have a face - and yes, nyuk-nyuk, bubbies! - to associate with the steady coring of a medium that once represented a fresh opportunity for personal expression.  As the passion of legitimate word-of-mouth continues to be replaced by the echo of blindly regurgitated PR-spew, we can take solace by staring deep into the visage of Woody Allen's worst muse.

Tom Waits - Babbachichuija (mp3) (buy)

Also, I told a PR person today that fine, they could mail me a Santogold promo CD.  So fuck me, as well.

It's 2007.  An amateur photographer has hopped a forbidding iron fence to explore a dilapidated mansion.  Behind the loose corner of one room's mildewed wallpaper she spies what looks like writing.  Tugging the old stuff off, she finds a personalized message, written for her from someone in 1969:  "Sally Sparrow," she reads, right before a rock comes flying at her head, "Duck, now!"

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This geek-out is about a year overdue, which makes its timing impeccable.

When I was a kid - ages ago, a lifetime ago - I was a total freak for Doctor Who.  I was sure Saturday afternoons were invented so you could huddle in the glow of the PBS.  There, way back when, an actor called Tom Baker traipsed about through time and space in an eighteen-foot scarf, offered odd sweetmeats to strangers, saved the universe from big rubber nasties with nothing but a sonic screwdriver and some hammy acting.  I taped episodes with our first-gen, top-loading VCR.  I went to a convention or two.  My mother knitted me my own eighteen-foot scarf, because she loved me.

And I grew out of it.  (Not the scarf.  That, I never grew into.)  The thing about Doctor Who - and if you don't know what sort of thing Who is, I'll explain in a moment - is that it was a kid's show.  Not because it was excessively stupid, or because it talked down to its audience; had it been, and done, kids wouldn't have embraced it.  But it required the sort of forgiveness and love only children can have for a fantasy.  Budgets were low, effects were unconvincing, sets were shaky; the storytelling was antiquated, pacing was glacial, plots were creaky.  Years later, when the nostalgia bug bit, I grabbed a tape and found it barely watchable.

There were some good ideas!  But you can only apologize away so much.

So when I first read in 2005 that the BBC was reviving the franchise - the title had, save a single little-seen US tv-movie, been dormant since 1989 - I got excited, then embarrassed, then disinterested all over again.  All before ever catching an episode.

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The new series takes turns at exciting, embarrassing, uninteresting. 

Doctor Who is about a humanoid alien - "The Doctor" - who travels the universe (Earth, mostly) with companions (Earthlings, mostly) in a little blue box having adventures and saving worlds and stuff.  It started - in 1963! - as a history lesson, You Are There for the kindergarten set.  But once the show discovered how much five-year-old viewers loved to be terrorized it embraced its horror/sf urges and became a UK institution.  The original show ran 26 years; seven different actors played The Doctor (a Time Lord, he doesn't die, he "regenerates" whenever an actor tires of the role - you know this was a young Dick Wolf's favorite program).  Each Doctor had his own peculiar personality, but no matter how cranky he'd get he was always on the side of right and good.  And no matter how hard-pressed, he always relied on brains over brawn.

The new version of the show - presently in its fourth season, and on its second Doctor (the tenth overall, including the tv movie) - is the vision of writer/producer Russell T. Davies.  Davies does some things extremely well.  A childhood follower of the original, he brings a fanboy's fervor.  He inherited a huge, temporally tangled wad of backstory and has avoided getting bogged down by that.  He comes up with some good ideas, teases others out well enough to make you think more's happening than there is.  No matter how awful his stuff gets - and it can get awful - he'll come up with something that will keep you watching.  (The first episode of the new season sort of blahs along until an OMFG cameo totally rattles you.)  He's good at handling character arcs.  Davies has a good sense of humor, his casting eye is ace.  And he's got a decent budget, so instead of goofy papier-mâché monsters, there are goofy CGI monsters.

Sometimes the bad outweighs the good.  His plotting sucks balls - there's never anything a good deus ex machina can't fix.  He's relentlessly melodramatic, there's nothing that can't be made better by being MADE BIGGER (this includes the score, which is often unbearable); his season finales are bombastic.  He pimps agendas - the creator of the original Queer is Folk, there's a lot more omnisexuality than you'd ever find on any US kids' program (other than Zoey 101, perhaps).  The two most unfortunate results of Davies' tendencies:  He's decided his Doctor is a godlike being - something that pretty much negates any drama; and he's remade the "companion" role as a romantic one - something that makes my inner five-year-old queasy, cuz girls have cooties.

But nevermind all that.  NEVERMIND.

The only behind-the-Who name you need to know is Steven Moffat, and the only episodes you need to see are the few he's written.  You should start with "Blink," because it is brilliant and self-contained and re-watchable.

Doctor Who episodes very rarely involve time travel.  Usually it's just an excuse to drop us off where we need to go, pick us up when we're done.  When you've got such an expansive amount of backstory hovering over your head, you do your best to not make your audience contemplate how many stepped-on butterflies you've left behind.  But "Blink" recalls one of the best old Who serials, the Douglas Adams-penned "City of Death," in that it creates a series of interlocked time-space events, and characters use fixed media to communicate between them.  In "City" it was a gaggle of duplicate Mona Lisas; here it's photos, letters, DVD Easter eggs, and the very episode you are watching.

Ultimately "Blink" is about you.  You have to watch it or people will die.

As it's tough with a plot like this to figure out what constitutes a spoiler, it's probably best you go do your duty before reading on.  Either rent it (it's on disc four) or go to the squirrelly Internet hidey-hole of your choosing and stream the thing.  We'll meet back here in forty-five minutes.

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Done?  Right, then.

"You've met my brother Larry, haven't you?  Well, you're about to."

Sally Sparrow spends 90% of the episode assembling predestined information; it's a tribute to Moffat's precise, scrambled plotting that things rarely feel expository, a tribute to his control that it's never confusing.  His heroine is both a watcher - she's a photographer, which is important, because she freezes time as a hobby - and a doer, but she's disoriented because her own life is unbroken and linear while the lives of those with whom she's sharing the story are... wibbly-wobbly.  Just after her twentysomething best friend walks into the next room, Sally's handed a forty-year-old letter from her.  A cute young detective takes her phone number and promises to call her; he does, minutes later, from his nursing home bed.  A conversation can take thirty-eight years, a lifelong romance can last as long as a cloudburst.

Also, there seem to be statues following her.

The Doctor is barely in "Blink."  His three scenes - two live, one Memorex - will show new viewers what makes the show bearable on its off-weeks:  David Tennant brings tons of enthusiasm to the role.  He can seem a bit daft, but only because his mind's run off on its own and his mouth has to follow  after.  Or vice-versa.  He talks so quickly that he's constantly self-correcting, but he's capable and knowledgeable and never condescending.  Chances are he's just the sort of person with whom you'd want to roam the galaxy.  And if not - one parody show called him "Jarvis Cocker in outer space," as if that's a bad thing - then there are only small doses here.

Since Davies has established that the Doctor knows everything and can fix anything, it's important for Moffat to keep him out of the way.  The Doctor is trapped in 1969 without his time machine; the episode is a quest to get the information he'd normally rattle off offhandedly.

Ultimately, Sally will learn most of what she needs to know by watching television.

(That footage doesn't appear this way in the episode.  In the world of "Blink," it exists as an Easter egg on seventeen specific DVDs; the Who producers apparently went on to include it as an Easter egg on the show's DVD.)

Moffat's monsters carry a genius conceit.  The Weeping Angels are "quantum-locked;" they turn to stone whenever someone looks at them, turn back when you look away.  They cannot harm, or be harmed, as long as they are being watched.  Exalting the power of the viewer is an appreciative move by any tv show, especially one with an over-involved cult fanbase.  Empowering them takes "Blink" to an entirely different level.

The plot might have some dismissible hiccups (If these things move so fast, what's with the rock?  Didn't it get dark awfully soon?  Also, the angels' method seems to leave a sort of energy imbalance.  Whatever.) and the episode gets (necessarily, probably)  too frantic at the end.  But there seems to be a major, major discrepancy in a show full of shots like these...

...shots where characters are alone in a room and not looking at the angels, but the angels are still stone.

Well, they're still stone because you're looking at them.

That's never explicitly stated .  But even when all the characters have their backs turned, the camera never catches the angels (played by people in costume, not actual statues) in motion.  Once, one changes position quickly, but only when Sally's blocked our view; we never see the movement.  At the end of the episode, when the story's resolved, there are a series of shots of random statues, and the Doctor's warning ("Blink and you're dead... Don't look away and don't blink.") is replayed, presumably for us.  It's as close as the ep gets to doing the old kids' matinee audience participation plea:  "If we all hold hands and yell really loud..."

(In addition to your viewing experience and Sally's conversation with the Easter egg, the plot is also affected when a video store clerk yells at the movie he's watching.  "Go to the police, you stupid woman!  Why does nobody ever just go to the police?"  Sally, overhearing this, goes to the police.)

You'll also want to watch because Carey Mulligan, who plays Sparrow, has STAR scrawled all over her glowing mug.  She's got huge doe eyes, a wide, expressive mouth, and a brain.  Or, at least, enough talent to make you think she's got a brain.  (According to her imdb page, she's in a new Jim Sheridan flick with Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tobey Maguire.)

I haven't seen any non-Who stuff I've loved from Moffat.  He created the original UK version of Coupling (a show then-derided as a British Friends, its narrative tinkering suggests it was more a precedent for How I Met Your Mother) and was responsible for the recent schizo update Jekyll (which, during its promising early episodes, had its titular doctor keeping track of his hairier half via video and tapes and such).

But all of his work on this series is worth your time; both his other Who episodes won Hugo awards.  In "The Girl in the Fireplace" (disc two), an automated spaceship in the far future rummages through the life of Madame de Pompadour looking for spare parts.  The two-parter "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" (disc three) might be better than "Blink," if more straightforward; the focus is on a creepy alien infection running wild during the London Blitz, but the story ultimately belongs to a young uneducated woman who looks after homeless orphans and harbors a secret.  That's the one that got me geeked out anew.

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It was gonna be pop-rocky fun, but this week's femme-fronted redo of the muxtape got touched by anguish along the way.