the listenerd

*Film: This retrospective on “Raging Bull” from Vanity Fair is worth the read. On De Niro’s consideration of the protagonist, boxer Jake La Motta – “He was thinking about Jake’s masochism, for example—his capacity to take brutal beatings without ever being knocked down and then somehow rally and K.O. an opponent who was ahead of him on points. Scorsese likes to quote the inscription on a folk-art painting he was once given: ‘Jake La Motta fought as if he didn’t deserve to live.’”

*Question: Is this not a music blog anymore?

*Music: Ad Age takes on Lady Gaga. “Lady Gaga, with her army of nearly 2.8 million Twitter followers and more than 5.2 million Facebook fans, can move product.”

That’s a weird (though, initially impressive) stat to lead the article with, since clickthrough (I won’t even speculate on the higher-commitment engagement of BUYING) is typically very low on Twitter, even (some may say especially) for its users with 1M followers. I do, however, like it when she styles her hair to look like a telephone.

*Dolls: Speaking of Lady G, Lu Wei Kang designed a Gaga-inspired Barbie doll.

*Games: OK, there’s some nerdcore iPhone game featuring the music of MC Frontalot where you use your fingers as breakdancing legs on the screen? It is called B-Boy Beats. I’m not sure even I know what that meant. And I don’t even remember what a B-Boy is. Sometimes this blog serves mostly as a reminder of what I do not know. And that’s why I keep going.

*On language: Videogum examines the tag (word?) NSFW. Excellent prose on one of the most important topics of our time. “No, what is actually NSFW is not porno, which is ubiquitous and unavoidable. What is NSFW is the borderline-innocuous video that doesn’t overtly show any bared flesh or penetration, but somehow says something even more important about you for watching it.” Also, do not watch the videos. I didn’t.

*Words: What makes a good title for an article, an album or a work of literature? I sometimes commit some of the sins they here warn us to avoid, such as:

-The Faux Poetic but Authentically Meaningless (“Hunt the Mist Slowly”)
-The Lofty Abstraction, a.k.a. the Bad Kundera (“The Lonely Shackles of Mortality”)
-The Melodramatic Image (“Blood Dries Brown”)

If you asked me what my favorite title for a work of art was, I would tell you: “Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form.”

*Update: How are your abs doing? Mine are terrible.

*Today’s links: F.